The Girl on the Ferryboat

by Angus Peter Campbell

  And of course she’s right – they’re everywhere, from

  St Petersburg to Glasgow. ‘And anyway,’ she said, ‘you’re not really Alexander at all. But Alasdair. In the same way I’m not really Helen but Eilidh.’

  Again the marvel of being two things at once. A Gaelic name and an English name. Helen on one side of the fire,

  I on the other. The wood burning in the fire and disappearing. Chet Baker, long dead, singing softly into our ceilidh. The two languages we half-contained, half-remembered, half-forgotten. How could I tell her that I loved her. Which, like God, cannot exist without evidence.

  The little people lived underground. They caroused there, to put it simply. Danced and played music and enjoyed themselves. Lived life to the full. When you see the sandy hollows on the machair that’s when you really begin to believe in them. How sheltered the dunes were, protected by wave after wave of grass even in the bitterest north wind. There you could dance. You heard the music first – faint and distant, and as you approached, if the light was good, you could see the little figures playing in the reeds. A door opened and when you entered the lights all shone and the wine vats were overflowing and a little old man with a long white beard beckoned you in to sit right by him up near the fire. A piper played and all the young women in their green and silver gowns danced on the tips of their toes before being lifted high by the young men who then swept in like a fire, raising them up towards the ceiling and whirling them about the hall. The table was laden with the best of food and drink – sitheann (venison) and butter and green apples and porridge kail and wine in gold goblets and milk in frothing churns – and the feast was endless, day after day, night after night. When you needed to rest one of the young maidens led you through the mirrored hall to the draped rooms where a golden light shone on you as you fell asleep and when you woke the young harpist would be sitting in the corner of your room playing the òran maidne, the dawn chorus.

  If you were fortunate you were trapped there for a hundred years and emerged still young while the whole world had died. Some took that as a curse, grieving for what had gone, like Rip Van Winkle in that other culture mourning for what had gone, confused by what remained. Others, like my old neighbour Iain Dhòmhnaill Sheumais, eased into the new dispensation, gently reminding anyone who cared to listen that Borodino hadn’t been as bad as Tolstoy had made out and that the real tragedy was the terrible loss of the MacLeans at the Battle of Inverkeithing. And when you left them they always gave you butter on an ember, porridge kail in a creel, and paper shoes, and sent you away with a big gun bullet on a road of glass till you found yourself sitting right there at home.

  Helen smiled. I placed some more logs on the fire and put the kettle on. It had very little to do with coincidences and everthing to do with possibilities. Or at least with hopes and dreams. That one day poverty and toil would cease and life would be all singing and dancing. That one day the earth would open and the dead would rise and that when you went back all was changed, changed utterly. That Donald would return through the smirr, that Margherita would be standing there statuesque in the evening light, that Big Roderick would stay sober forever.

  I poured the coffee. It was one of those damned pots which always leaked no matter how carefully you poured. And I suppose that’s when I realised that lives, like stories, were made up out of errors and faults. Coincidences dressed up as fate, hopes and fears dressed up as fairies and fauns. For to live otherwise was to die, to allow the coffee to drip on to the floor, the logs on the stove to go cold, our love to wither.

  ‘Did your mum do the same?’ I asked.

  ‘The same what?’

  ‘This,’ I said, sipping the poured coffee from the saucer.

  ‘No,’ said Helen. ‘My mum never drank coffee. Always tea. But yes, she sometimes sipped from a saucer.’

  She went over to the biscuit cupboard and brought out a packet of Digestives.

  ‘And always – always – dipped her digestive into her tea. Like this.’

  It was, likely, a turning point. Where the domestic became normal, significant.

  ‘And what about toast?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said.

  So I went over to the cutlery cupboard and fetched out the longtailed fork and stuck it into a piece of bread and knelt by the fire, holding the loaf towards the flames.

  ‘Too near,’ Helen said. ‘Far too near. You need to take it back an inch or so.’

  Which I did.

  ‘My hand’s getting burnt,’ I complained.

  ‘Cry baby,’ she said.

  So I altered hands, toasting first this side of the bread, then the other.

  It tasted wonderful with the butter melting into the grooves.

  ‘And what about the flames then?’ she asked.

  ‘The flames?’

  ‘Aye. The flames. Didn’t they predict the future where you came from?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, they did here.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And,’ she said, going on her knees beside me in front of the fire, ‘the flames predict…’

  She looked into the fire and I followed her gaze. The log flames were sparkling blue. Elm wood.

  ‘The flames predict,’ she said, ‘that the future is golden. The ashes that fall down are memory and the smoke that rises is reason. One has given heat, the other light.’

  We sat on the floor by the fire, not touching, and told stories. I told her about the fox and the wren and the smith and the fairies and the Barra widow’s son and she told me that once upon a time there was a hen that had flown up and perched on an oak tree for the night and when night came she dreamed that unless she got to Dovrefjell the world would come to an end. So that very minute she jumped down and set out on her way and when she had walked a little bit she met a cockerel. ‘Good day, Cocky-Locky,’ said the hen.

  ‘Good day, Henny-Penny,’ said the cockerel. ‘Where are you going this early in the morning?’

  ‘Oh, I’m going to the Dovrefjell that the world might not come to an end,’ said the hen, and ‘Who told you that?’ asked the cockerel.

  ‘Oh, I sat in the oak and dreamt it last night,’ said the hen, so ‘I’ll go with you,’ said the cockerel.

  And of course they walked on for a bit and then they met a duck, Ducky-Lucky, and a goose, Goosey-Poosey, and fox, Foxey-Cocksy who was too smart to be taken in by this dream.

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said the Fox. ‘The world won’t come to an end if you don’t get there. No! Come home with me instead to my earth, which is far better, for it’s warm and jolly there.’

  And, well, Henny-Penny and Cocky-Locky and Ducky-Lucky and Goosey-Poosey went off with Foxy-Cocksy to his earth and when they went in the fox laid on lots of fuel so that they all got very sleepy. The duck and the goose settled themselves into a corner but the cockerel and the hen flew up on a post. So when the goose and the duck were well asleep the fox took the goose and laid him on the embers and roasted him. The hen smelt the strong roast meat and sprung up to a higher peg and said, half-asleep, ‘Faugh, what a nasty smell! What a nasty smell!’ ‘Oh stuff,’ said the fox, ‘it’s only the smoke driven down the chimney; go to sleep again, and hold your tongue.’

  So the hen went off to sleep again. Now the fox had hardly got the goose well down his throat before he did the same with the duck. He took and laid him on the embers and roasted him for a dainty bit. Then the hen woke up again, and sprung up to a higher peg still. ‘Faugh, what a nasty smell! What a nasty smell!’ she said again, and then she got her eyes open and came to see how the fox had eaten both the goose and the duck, so she flew up to the highest peg of all and perched there and peeped up through the chimney.

  ‘O my; just see what a lovely lot of geese are flying yonder,’ she said to the fox, and out ran Reynard to fetch himself another fat roast. But while he was gone, the hen woke up the cockerel and told him how it had gone with Goosey-Poosey and Ducky-Lucky; and so Cocky-Locky and Henn
y-Penny flew out through the chimney and if they hadn’t got to Dovrefjell, it surely would have been all over with the world.

  As it was not surely all over with us yet, on our own way to Dovrefjell. The commonest theme was not that things worked out but the ways in which things were solved – a magic mirror here, a comb there, an apple flung over the shoulder, a wisp of straw which allowed you to travel in an instant to the other side of the earth. It was always ingenuity, never strength. A fortuitous turn in the road, a dream shared by Henny-Penny, a lie told about a lovely lot of non-existent flying geese, a meeting with a photographer in the twilight, a passing on the stairs. I wasn’t even going to have lunch that day, but a colleague persuaded me and the next thing I found myself standing in the refectory queue next to Marion.

  We hardly touched, though occasionally as if to emphasise a point Helen would stroke the palm of my hand. Looking back on it now I’m aware of how non-sexual that evening was, yet electrified with expectation. I don’t know whether that had to with age, though I suspect that had we been younger we would have forsaken sweetness for passion. And she was beautiful that evening in the firelight, the changing colours of the flames casting all kinds of wonderful shapes and contours on to her face and body. The way her cheekbones were framed best in the red, and how the last embers of each fire softened everything. And she said I too looked fine, stoking the stove.

  We sang little songs to each other. Be kind to your web-footed friend, for the duck might be somebody’s mother who lives all alone in a swamp where it’s always cold and damp. You may think that’s the end of the song; so it is, but I’ll sing you another – I’ll sing you the same one again, only this time a little higher… and off we’d go again, this time in a slightly higher pitch, until we eventually crumbled in fits of laughter like little children as the inevitable happened when we failed to reach the highest note of all which was beyond reach of anyone in the whole world when you came to think of it.

  ‘What’s the longest word you know?’ she asked and of course I cheated and invented a long Gaelic word agusnuairabhamiannanIlebhaCatrionacuideriumhoro and then tried Mississippi and disestablishmentarianism and even resorted to supercaleygoballisticcelticareatrocious which was the best ever newspaper headline the morning after Inverness Caley Thistle had beaten the mighty Glasgow Celtic in the Scottish Cup, but we finally settled on Helen’s word from childhood, tikitikitembonosarembocharibaribuchipipperripembo, which according to her was the name of a little Japanese boy in a story her mother used to tell her.

  ‘Round and round the rugged rock the radical rascal ran’ I tried, and she rattled it off with ease and gave me a variation which I struggled with for a while, ‘round the rapid roundabout rolls the ripe and ready round brown prune’, making it slightly more difficult for me by insisting that I then do it in a broad Scots accent, roond the raipid roondaboot rolls the raip and raidy roond broon proon. She said she should sit. And so she sat. And of course we always got the s and the h all mixed up, with the inevitable childish outcome.

  Later on we got more serious. Mull, she said, was a microcosm. As in ecology, here was where you could see the future. I disagreed, of course, saying that human communities, being much more unpredictable and variable were not subject to the laws of science, but she just laughed at me saying that

  human society was as predictable as a hive of bees or a colony of ants. ‘Change one thing and everything changes. And the changes become irreversable. This was once a Gaelic speaking island. Not any more. Once the hive is destroyed, the bees die.’

  I wanted to argue otherwise of course: that there were hundreds of examples of reversal all over the world, from Hebrew to Catalan, but I knew these were straws in the wind. Science always heralded cosmology. Nothing will come of nothing. ‘Though something might lead to something?’ I suggested. The last log of wood was still burning in the fire. ‘Of course’ she said. ‘Where there’s a flame there’s a fire.’

  My room was up in the attic: coombed and with v-lining and warmed now by the grate fire that we’d lit down below. I lay there, snug as the proverbial bug in the rug, thinking of young Alasdair, my grandfather, lying in a similar room almost a century before and racing with Nurmi. The touch which gave life to everything: stones which some mason had once hewn, the corrugated roof under which a family had sheltered, Helen moving about downstairs.

  I switched off the bedside lamp and let the natural night light from outside illuminate the room. I tried to listen to rain running down the eaves, but there was none. In such a room as this the three of us had slept: myself and my two brothers. Everything lasted moments. The next thing nothing was there.

  Things were scraping. A thin drizzle was now falling. I thought I heard some jazz, but the sound of a dog barking interrupted the music. A voice called. I recognised the voice: it was that man who’d given us the lift. Lachlan. So. I was in Mull. I went over to the small window and saw Helen leaving with Lachlan, whose collie dog jumped into the car first. They drove off.

  I washed, dressed in the silk shirt and smock and old moleskin trousers I’d found in the chest, and went downstairs.

  ‘Gone out with Lachlan on the boat,’ the note read. ‘Back this afternoon. Make yourself at home. H.’

  No x. Always a good sign. It presumed nothing, demanded nothing. Things needed sorted, so I too left a note.

  ‘Gone back to the mainland to return car. Then on to Paris to fix things up. Back soon.’

  And I left my mobile number, just in case. I phoned Murdo the Taxi who took me to the ferry and by lunchtime was driving south.

  I decided to take the peninsular road down through Kilmartin to Kintyre where I could catch the small Claonaig ferry on to Arran and from there the Brodick ferry to Ayrshire. I spent the night in Ardrossan where the ferry berthed, drove the car to York the next morning and by evening was back in our empty apartment by the Jardin.

  I tried to phone Doctor Jacques, but there was no answer. He’d be away on his annual holiday up to the Nordic countries. ‘Such a change of air from here,’ he would say. ‘Renews me for the rest of the whole year.’

  I touched things, but they had no life. The flowers we’d left in the vase had obviously withered and though I went out to the corner shop to buy some more, the new ones still sat lifeless in the jar.

  I played the piano for a while, and braced myself to enter our bedroom where she’d died. I felt nothing, except for a great emptiness as if nothing had ever happened. It wasn’t an absence or a sense of loss, of something not being there, but of a vacancy in the air: a waiting for something rather than its departure.

  I’d read that the first thing crash pilots do is to immediately return to the cockpit, so I opened the dressing room doors and put her blouses in order and stroked the collar of the fur coat which had become so un-PC as to be unwearable. Her diary was still opened by her bed, and I closed it.

  The phone rang. Helen asked me how I was and I said ‘Fine.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Very good. Lachlan brought some fresh trout. They were lovely.’

  She didn’t ask if I planned to return to Scotland, and

  I didn’t say, because I didn’t know. After the call, I sat on the edge of the bed. The afternoon light streamed through the window – in this late summer time it filled the void between the two buildings opposite for about two hours, though in winter the sun never rose high enough to cast any light. The mionagadain danced in the air. I smiled. The word had come back to me just like that – a long forgotten thing that I’d never even thought about for years. The word for the atoms seen in a ray of sunlight coming into a house: mionagadain.

  I tried to grab them, as I always did when I was young, and still failed. There was a secret to it though, my friend Angus had said. If you closed your eyes really tight and counted slowly to ninety-nine with both hands open and then suddenly shut the right one, you’d grab a handful of them before they got away.

  So I started counti
ng, my hands open as if in prayer. One two three four. The gap between each number had to be exactly the same, Angus had said. I got it wrong. I began again. One two three four. Still the beat was too quick. Too irregular.

  ‘It has to be like this,’ Angy said. ‘One – breathe – two – breathe – three – breathe – four…’ but of course when I got to the double figures I tripped up like a child and the rhythm went, and as any child knows, without rhythm the magic doesn’t work.

  I stood instead and walked through the atoms towards the window.

  How beautiful Paris was in the late afternoon light. Someone was indeed playing jazz here: Stan Getz with that unmistakeable Indiana. Had I no feeling? My mind on childish atoms with my late wife newly scattered on the bare North Yorkshire Moors. Should my mind not be there, with her, or here in the rooms which we’d inhabited these past few years? Inhabited! Ha! Had the word betrayed me? Instead, I was elsewhere: always back in those days. And the miracle of Helen. No – perhaps more, just the miracle of meeting Helen. Of whom I knew so little. Was she too a figment of the imagination? One without flesh and blood, as if that really meant anything. One without substance, as if that in itself really meant anything either.

  For weren’t we all? That child I was. Once was, I was going to say, but I paused. Hesitated. Am. The child that I am. That child who imagined he had a whole world in front of him. In which he would sail the seven seas, row the Atlantic single-handed, write a song greater than Kubla Khan, marry and have children and be a mirror image of his people. Or at least a mirror image of the best of his people. Those who’d fought valiantly at Inverkeithing, who hadn’t turned back at Culloden, who had emigrated with the best of them, establishing the prairie fields of Canada and the sheep stocks of Patagonia. And here he was, that child, now an old man with thin hair and anaemic hands, looking out over Paris on an autumn afternoon. Ha! No one writes to the colonel.

  By the time I turned back into the room the decision was taken. I phoned the lawyer and instructed her to oversee the selling of the apartment and the disposal of the furniture. Goods and chattels as they used to be called. I would leave with as little as possible, though that would still be far more than any of my ancestors ever had: Alasdair Mòr who’d emigrated to Australia with only a Bible in his pocket, and Caorstaidh Sheumais who bundled all her seven children on an empty cart and headed for Glasgow. They were all wearing National Health spectacles and whenever anyone asked if they’d seen the family, Lachie Mòr would say ‘Last I saw was a cartload of spectacles heading south’.