Winter Tales

by Kenneth Steven

  He went forward and looked at his reflection in the water. The dark accentuated the deep lines of his face; he was shocked by what he saw. The surface rippled with a cast of wind and his face was broken.

  He crouched there until he lost all track of time. He did what the teachers in his Helsinki schools had punished him for – he daydreamed. But when he emerged from that inner world he saw himself with sudden clarity; as if with a scientist’s sharp eye he stood beside himself, watching himself. He’d become part of nature, had gone back to nature. A beetle with a brown sheen crawled over the scuffed leather of his shoes. The frayed sunlight wove patterns on his left hand, flickered his cheek. And in his mind’s eye he saw with sudden overwhelming clarity the flat in the city, silent and left behind.

  *

  He dreamed one night of the finding of a red gem, large as a cherry, its chambers glowing like a living heart. The most beautiful thing there was.

  But then they came with machinery to dig away the forests and the mountains themselves, and he knew in the dream that it was in the hope of finding other stones. The landscape was changed beyond all recognition but they found nothing. There had been just one single gem.

  He lay awake in the early morning, lying on his back in the pale hours before dawn. He lay and thought about how at times a dream could seem more real than waking. And he wondered too what it meant, what workings of his mind had come together to make this. For he had thought of no gem the day before, of no machinery or destruction. He did not know and he carried the fragments of it the whole day, lest he should understand.

  *

  There came a day he did not know what day it was. But then he realized he hadn’t thought about days for far longer. If he couldn’t remember today then he couldn’t remember yesterday, nor the day before. He wanted to feel glad, like a child in summer who doesn’t need to think about bells and uniforms and homework. He wanted to feel glad, yet in truth he knew he first felt fear. It was akin to sensing suddenly that you’ve swum far further than you imagined from the shore, that you’re out of your depth. For a moment he felt afraid.

  He left the cabin and took the path to the lake. He needed its sanctuary. It was a holding point, a certainty, in a landscape that bewildered and bewitched with its endless unchanging. It was a landscape impossible to learn, remember.

  He came to the lake and there was a swan on its surface. He dropped involuntarily to his knees, became as low as he could in the grass and heather and dwarf birch. The swan was completely white. It might have been carved from ice; the only dark its eye. He realized it was rendered whiter by the deep black of the water, and he wondered just how white it would have seemed had he seen it against snow, had this been the middle of winter. Would it have been the snow that seemed white and not it at all?

  He moved closer, almost noiselessly. The swan dipped the curl of its neck and its bill touched the water. Utter white against utter dark. It turned and began gliding towards him, close to where he’d crouched a few feet from the bank. It seemed to him the swan saw him, held his gaze and steered closer and closer. There was no fear there, neither was there curiosity. It was as though he had become part of that place, had crouched into it and his feet taken root.

  He realized too he had no idea how long he’d crouched there watching. He’d lost all sense of time. And then he remembered how he’d woken that morning, afraid because he couldn’t remember the name of the day – and all his fear flowed away. It was as he thought of it now that the fear left him and he felt liberated. He was freed into the joy of something else.

  *

  It was the coming of the wind that brought the sounds. He realized there had been no wind before then, nothing at all. The days hung still; each blade and leaf and stem held its breath, as though waiting and listening, like him.

  One night he lay watching the stars. Nothing had moved all day; the trees sculpted from silence. The lake a single piece of black glass, untouched and unbroken. By the side of the path a fur of insects danced in stillness, a pillar of things in their own intricate tangling. For a moment he’d wanted to bring his bare hand into them, to know if they would brush against him or change their dance. But he didn’t.

  He lay and watched the stars. He could have walked through the night; it never went more than grey. The edges of the trees were there; the rims of the hills. But he didn’t. He wanted to lie and listen to the stars. They flickered and fired on the grey cloth of the sky, and he thought how the dead ones drew him most – the ghosts of stars that were no more. They were the memories of stars and he was watching how once they were, and it made him wonder – as many times before – if it might be possible to travel until you could look back and see the earth as once it was.

  He watched the crackling remnants of the stars until he thought they were like bonfires; like lonely bonfires in the sky, untended and desperately far from one another. He was pulled down into sleep and he walked that landscape, the vast distance between bonfires.

  But he woke when he heard the wind – long, slow casts about the cabin. The wind was unhurried; a great, slow searching. He heard too the dried and empty fragments of heather, the tiny pieces of dwarf birch, gathered and carried in the wind’s hands. He got up, naked, in the early morning nothingness of the day, and watched and listened.

  He stood there and in front of the window, underneath it, were all the sheets he’d brought to fill, bare and blank after however many days of being, of listening. And at that moment the wind blew, fierce and real, and broke the membrane that had lain for ten years over his hearing, and the sounds came, the notes came. And he scrambled for a pencil as they poured out of the grey gusts that early morning; he knelt naked, shivering and mad, as they came and he caught them at last.

  There was a flickering of things before his eyes: the swan on the lake, the trees, the dream of the red gem, the light on the cottage windows, the seaplane and the white curl out of the sky. He found what they were themselves but he fought for what joined them and made them one. It was the little turning points of sound that he sought and he lay there, listening, straining to hear, until he caught them, one after another. He stayed there until the last one was found. He was freezing cold on the cabin floor and the pages lay scattered about him, in pieces. They were fragments that had come at random, but they were all there, waiting. The notes had come.

  A Christmas Child

  It was a clear, frost-sharp night in the middle of November. Rachel had banked the fire; the thick smell of mutton soup filled the house. Perhaps it was that that had cheered Angus; he had had no luck with the fishing, came home dispirited and worried after five days at sea. And because he had had no luck, neither had anyone in the village. This was the worst time in the year; this was the hardest of it.

  On such days Angus had to break driftwood, even when it left splinters in his hands. He needed the crisp snap of wood from the store; it was good to come in with a bundle in his arms and afterwards see the curl of orange flames in the grate. Now it was peat that lay dark at the back of the fire; his eyes dreamed in the wreaths of smoke.

  There was a soft knock at the door. Who at this hour? When he opened, he could just see the shadow of the figure outside.

  ‘We’re going down to the point tonight, to try our luck with bringing in a ship. Will you come?’

  He heard the pause between the first and second sentences. He heard his heart too, racing far harder than usual. Not only because of the lack of fish that day.

  ‘I’ve told you before, Donald John, I’ll have nothing to do with it. Do you and your boys not listen? I’ll have no part in your business.’

  The shadow moved in the doorway but did not turn away. ‘Then you’ll have no part in the shares either.’

  Not a threat, a statement. One man left; the other closed his door. He said not a word to Rachel. They went to bed an hour later, heard nothing of the calls and deliberations out on the road at mid
night. There was a soft fall of hail about one; afterwards there was not a thing to be seen or heard. The cries had been drowned; the lanterns had disappeared. There was just the endless sea, combing the rocks, boom after long boom.

  The following day was beautiful. There wasn’t a breath of wind. The low sun hung white in the skies and the last rowans trembled on a bough on the tree at the road end. Angus left before first light; crept out of bed and padded down the stairs, his satchel over his left shoulder. He was going into town for this and that, though there was precious little to spend. Rachel heard the soft thud of the door, then turned and slept once more.

  *

  She was washing clothes in the house when the knock came, urgent. She called that she would come in a moment; she carried the steaming pot of water to the stone flags, sighing. She wanted the clothes to be done by the time Angus came back.

  She opened the door as the shadow of a girl fled. A call faded on her lips. There was a boy on the doorstep; a boy with brown eyes like hazelnuts and tight dark curls. She bent down at once beside him and she was still taller than the little soul. His eyes searched her, wide and unblinking.

  ‘And where did you come from?’ she breathed. ‘Where in the world did you come from?’

  It had been the best haul in many years. When Angus came back through the village they were still dividing out sacks and boxes. There was the scent of rich tobacco in the air. Robert and Cam were roaring with laughter at something; as Robert’s face turned at Angus’ approach the smile died on his face. It changed slowly, became at last a sourness, a sneer. The faces said nothing as he passed, yet they said everything.

  He did not go into the house then, but carried on instead to the shore. It was high tide. The vessel was out on the rocks; a small thing of dark boards and ropes, crumpled and useless. All at once he remembered a boy in school who had once taken a huge spider between his fingers and crushed it. He had smiled and looked around him, hoping the others would see, approve. Angus felt now as he had then; he felt no different.

  He went as far as he could in the direction of the wreck. The tide was fierce; he was not fool enough to venture further. And there among the dark boards he saw one single white hand. It did not even cross his mind for a moment that the hand belonged to a living soul; the sea was like ice and this was mid-November. All he did was to pull away the cap from his head and close his eyes, mutter some words he would have been too shy to speak aloud in front of Rachel, and turn away to the house.

  As soon as he came inside, she took his hand and led him upstairs, one finger pressed to her lips. The boy slept, more like a doll than a child, so quiet it was hard to know he breathed. She told Angus in a single flutter of words how he had come to the house.

  ‘I understand,’ he said, understanding indeed.

  Over the next weeks he seemed to do nothing but work. The days were fine – bitterly cold but beautiful. A few flakes of snow came to the island hills, made them look like the wing of a bird. The snow lay in the heather, would lie there for the whole winter.

  He mended the roof of the house, his hands raw and cut with the cold. The salt from the sea was in that wind. All day he worked, until the sun went down like a ball of snow in the west.

  Jacob came out to look up at him. Rachel held his hand, and the brown eyes looked up at him – both pairs of eyes looked up at him. Angus tried to think of something to say but he could think of nothing. He smiled too and it hurt to smile; even that hurt. They had called him Jacob after her grandfather.

  One day he was down again at the shore and he found a sea urchin. It was no bigger than his thumbnail. He carried it home as he might have carried a fledgling fallen from the nest.

  ‘Close your eyes, Jacob,’ he whispered. He opened the little hand and laid the shell on it. ‘Happy Christmas,’ he said, and kissed the nut-brown smoothness of his forehead.

  Later that day he knew there was something that had to be done.

  ‘I want you to come with me,’ he said to Rachel. ‘I want both of you to come with me.’

  They wrapped up warm against the wind and went out and closed the door behind them. It was still beautiful; the skies a winter blue, the white waves chasing in over the rocks. They went up to the village, up towards the happy laughter of the village street and a man with a squeezebox. Four of the girls were dancing; the men were laughing. They walked through the village street and the music fell away to nothing, the heads hung down, the eyes looked away. Donald John was turning back into his house. Angus carried the child in his arms; he held Rachel’s hand as he walked.

  He stopped and smiled and gently put the child down in front of him.

  ‘Donald John,’ he said softly, ‘you gave us a share after all.’

  Out

  It was the Friday afternoon when Ranald punched his brother. Angus had made a comment about Kirsty, who had been Ranald’s sweetheart for almost a year now, and it was not the kind of comment any man would have wanted to hear about the girl he loved. Ranald’s punch had split his brother’s nose there in the barn that evening; he didn’t stay to see what damage had been done, he simply turned on his heel and walked down into the field, his hand still sore from the blow.

  It so happened that one of the old men was going out with the lobster pots and would drop into Mallaig on the way back. Ranald asked if he could join him for the ride and Donald Gorrie didn’t even nod his reply. He looked up towards the Sgurr of Eigg and they were off. Without asking or being told, Ranald dropped lobster pots as they went; there was nothing to talk about so they said nothing, and Donald Gorrie kept his eye on the water, thinking about his sister in hospital and the eggs he had to pick up from the croft before he went to bed that night.

  *

  Ranald jumped off in Mallaig and his hand still hurt. The only thing alive in Mallaig was an articulated lorry with its engine chugging, the men loading up lobsters and crabs for tables in the south of Spain. Ranald asked the driver if he could have a lift and the man, who had a face like a living walnut, thought about it a long time. In the end he said yes as though he had taken a decision of immense magnitude, and half an hour later they roared away into the June night.

  It was beautiful and Ranald wished he could have told the driver the names for islands and the stories of infamous fishing trips. He told them again to himself as the sky went a deep blue and the stars filled it like brine. The last thing he remembered before he drifted off to sleep was that his hand still hurt. It was like guilt except he felt none, and his sleep was easy and untroubled.

  He left the articulated lorry when they reached Finisterre. The driver had given him some long story in Spanish which Ranald had guessed was all about how his boss would fire him for having a passenger and that it would be best for him to get off now. Ranald had bought him a beer in Nantes with some cents he had kept in the back pocket of his jeans for almost two years. He clapped the driver on the shoulder and thanked him, and went off into Finisterre.

  *

  The ship that he found in port bound for South America was involved in some kind of wicked business. He knew that as soon as he went on board. There was a smell about the vessel, literally and proverbially speaking. They didn’t care where he came from nor where he wanted to go; a very camp man called Alberto showed him the containers that had to be stacked and weighed. He would be paid in dollars and he’d have to share a cabin with three others. Ranald said yes to everything.

  He had been on the sea before, fishing out of Peterhead when he was seventeen. He had earned so much money he could hardly walk to the bus when he came ashore, his wallet was that heavy. He hadn’t been sick once, though he’d felt queer early one morning after a full breakfast on the way back to port.

  The sea got to him now on the fifth day out, but it was as much the ship as the sea. There was the smell below deck you never got away from, and the cabin stank of that and sweat and something else. He was sick and
it was bile that came up in the end. He had a raging thirst and there was no one to ask to bring him water. He couldn’t stop thinking about Kirsty, missing her and wishing he had never left. He tried to sleep and he couldn’t, and the relentless sea went down and up and down.

  *

  When he woke in the night two of the men were playing a game of chess. His mouth was cracked and sore; it hurt even to open it. In his mind they were playing their game with the devil. If they won, everything would be all right, but if they didn’t Ranald would be thrown into the sea. And then he sank into a shallow sleep where he seemed to be arguing with the devil, but it was all about weights and measures, and what could be bought and sold. Later he woke and knew that he had to drink; his body told him that if he didn’t he would die. Somehow he got up, as though in a dream, with moonlight swaying through the cabin, and he found his way to the toilet where he was sick until there was nothing left. Then he drank and drank and washed his face, and when he looked in the mirror he saw his brother’s eyes looking back at him. But he felt better and he slept until the following day.

  He had no idea where he was when he landed except that he was somewhere in Brazil. The girl he spoke to in the shop told him the name in such a beautiful voice that for a moment he forgot Kirsty and wanted to ask her to take him home, to let him lie down and eat fruit and laugh again. But he didn’t because he couldn’t; it wasn’t possible to do things like that, and he just smiled at her green eyes and went out to the pavement in the brilliant sunlight that somehow was brighter than anything he’d seen before.

  How he got a ride with a man who sold hammers and spare parts for motorbikes he never really worked out. But it was enough to be heading towards the capital with the windows open and the wind in his face, listening to happy music the driver sang to all the way there. The man bought him a beer at a roadside café, and Ranald told him that if he ever made it as far as his island he would have all the lobsters he wanted and a girl called Katie Ann. The man laughed and put his arm round Ranald’s shoulder, and after the beer Ranald really meant it – he hoped the man would land up on his island one day! He left his mobile number on an old serviette and they drove on, into the night.