The Girl on the Ferryboat

by Angus Peter Campbell

  My brother and I measured the stream that ran down beside the house. We climbed the small hill to where it began, trickling out of a little hole in the rock and then if you paced it out it was two thousand and twenty-five yards to the sea. The older we got the shorter the distance became. And by the time I left it was only one thousand seven hundred and twenty yards from that first trickle to where the river first met the ocean. Though that too was difficult to define, for it all depended on the tides.

  There was a place in Australia we loved. Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie, because they sounded so much like the Gaelic ‘cailleach a’ mùn air cùl gàrraidh’, which means ‘an old woman pissing behind a garden wall’. We would forever ask the teacher to tell us about these places so that we could sit there giggling while he innocently went on about them. The ruins of life. Where a previous generation danced in their tackety boots and where an earlier schoolmaster from Birmingham had come and taught cricket and football to my grandparents. He made the foolish mistake of playing the boys against the girls in the first every cricket match, which the boys lost, so the game was never again played.

  How locked into time we are, as if nothing happened except that which happened to us. What we heard and saw and felt. As if these little Iron Age people had never stared at the crescent moon rising over the hill and as if there wasn’t a time when there were different maps or no maps or pointers or schools and all the girls slaved from morning till night and all the boys went off to war. There’s Easabhal which never had that name until the Vikings came. All those beautiful maps have fallen off the walls, and I can hardly name anything right around here any more. And to know that there will be a time when no one will be left alive who will have known Alasdair or Katell or who will have walked these fields with me. A time when all will be future.

  Mrs MacIsaac would always call you in as you walked past and give you black treacly tea and there in the smoky darkness make you eat white buttered bread covered with cats’ hairs. I always took a small bite from the edge and stuffed the rest into my pockets and flung it over the wall on my way back home. They have all gone, all these old people with their copper kettles and stoves and patterned plates and dressers, and the tinkers and horses too, and that up-and-down nasal way of speaking, replaced by the marvellous new democracy of digital freedom. Already it is that eternal story that begins once upon a time.

  And there’s the church. I enter. The holy water font still to the right, and I dip my finger and index finger in and make the sign of the cross. I kneel in the pew at the back and hear the great Latin choral singing from upstairs – Tantum Ergo Sacramentum, Veneremur cernui and the old priest bows down at the front, saying In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen, and I find myself saying Introibi et altare Dei. Ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam, before the vernacular takes hold, An ainm an Athar ‘s a’ Mhic ‘s an Spioraid Naoimh. Amen.

  They breathed in here instead of out, constantly inhaling heaven, rather than expelling earth.

  12

  FLYING WAS BEAUTIFUL. She’d almost forgotten the rush of relief when the plane finally broke through the clouds on the ascent and then smoothed out, giving you that childish view of the cotton clouds floating below. In the gaps she could see Larkin’s England, packed like squares of wheat and then the quick view of the channel before the sharp descent to the Charles de Gaulle. Who was once a soldier and leader but was now an airport. Then later how green the south of France was and how blue the Mediterranean and how red Africa. She’d almost forgotten that first rush of African heat too when you descended from the plane straight into the oven.

  She was met by two officers from UNICEF who took her to the hotel where she met up with the other workers and volunteers. She’d almost forgotten that too – that first burst of excitement in meeting new people and the occasional comforting surprise of teaming up once again with an old colleague from some other project years ago.

  ‘Helen!’ said Anna. ‘Goodness – don’t you look wonderful!’ Anna from Helsinki who’d worked with her some ten years previously in the Falklands. They embraced. That first night they all had a meal together, rediscovering all the old hopes and fears and anxieties. How one day it would all be unnecessary; how they needed better protection the further they moved inland; the hope that the ongoing peace talks would reach some kind of resolution; and always the concern for the innocents they were there to serve. The women and children.

  And little personal stories too. Anna told about her new-born niece who had immediately been taken out by her Saami mother and baptised into the snow.

  ‘A wonderful purification. I now do it myself every morning: go out and immerse myself in the snow. At home, of course. Not much chance of doing that out here!’ The sun burned down on them all. And Helen told them all about the old Gaelic proverb which says ‘S e deireadh gach cogath sìth’ – ‘The end of every war is peace. And since that’s always the case, it makes you wonder why they bother with it in the first place!’

  Five thousand had already died that year in the war which had come to some sort of end with an uneasy ceasefire three months previously. Anna and Helen and Irene and Johan and Vincent were all to work together up in the north, helping out the nuns and doctors at the St Vincent de Paul Hospital who were treating the burn victims.

  The journey to the hospital was a long, forty-eight-hour ride in a Land Rover across rough tracks. They all initially felt sick from the inoculation jabs they’d received but by the morning of the second day all were in good spirits. How unique the desert environment really was: once you left the gorgeous beaches near Mogadishu and moved north you realised very quickly how utterly dependent on the environment everyone was. The power of water, of green things, those little oases in the desert which sustained life and gave hope and raised strength. Like little winter cèilidhs which sustained you all the way through till springtime.

  And the sweetness of fruit under the burning sun. How the mangoes seemed to liquify your entire body, and then that constant need for water as you moved further and further north. How a slice of orange from the cold bag in the back of the Land Rover or a segment of pineapple sustained you forever. And then how suddenly darkness came and how astonishingly cold it was so quickly after the long burning day. Stars would emerge and lights would twinkle in the dark blue sky and you remembered with anguish how gorgeous the world was and how fantastic it was to be alive, and what it felt like to say ‘Look – there’s Venus!’ and then watch as your friend Anna gazed up and tried to see exactly what you were seeing.

  The hospital itself was a simple old building which had managed to survive the ravages of war, though not without damage. It was run by locals with some expatriate specialist help and dealt as best it could with illnesses as well as with conflict-related injuries. They treated cholera on a weekly basis when doctors came from Mogadishu itself, and on a daily basis with everything from malnutrition to limb loss. Somehow, music had veined itself into the running of the hospital, and a number of former patients would sit in any shaded corner playing little instruments which literally oxygenated the air. You could almost see patients improve every time they passed Abuukar playing his oud or old Mahad beating his little drum.

  You never forget how to heal. You listen, and love with your eyes and then take them into the antiseptic room and clean the wounds. Little licks with the pinhead brush, and the dab of liquid antiseptic and the plaster which always reassures the patient that someone cares, that another human being is concerned and will do her best so that you might possibly live. Helen always knew that the greatest care was in the actual physical touch, as you gave the anti-cholera drug or cleaned the shrapnel wound or helped the woman as she gave birth. Valuable as all her environmental work was, this was really where her heart lay: in this care work, learned over a lifetime of experience. It was her mother in the orchard, her Dad with his little red melodeon. It was Bella Campbell that time she came visiting and treated seven-year-old Helen for a badly grazed knee. Bell
a lifted her up and carried her down to the river where she washed the wound in the cold running water and then dabbed the area with buadhalan buidhe – ragwort – gathered from the side of the stream.

  Bella was full of wondrous natural cures – how you should rub a seilcheag – a slug – on a cold blister to cure it, and chew cairt shleamhna – tormentil – for a sore lip. For a simple headache Bella would boil the leaves of Lus nan Laogh – Buckbean – and make you drink that water first thing in the morning. She even had a cure for constipation, which was to take fresh sea tangle, cut it in pieces and give to the patient to chew and swallow. She knew of course – but didn’t practice – some of the more outlandish methods, though she delighted in telling young Helen about them. For stomach ache, for example, if a patient was in real desperation you could put a rope round his feet and hang him by the heels from the rafters.

  ‘But you must repeat it at reasonable intervals,’ she would then say, ‘for that will undo the knot in his guts.’ And on several occasions she showed Helen and her Mum how to make an emergency bandage. ‘You skin an eel in long strips and wrap it round the strain or sprain as a bandage with the fat side in. The eel fat soothes, and the skin, being elastic, will not bind too tightly. Best,’ she always added, ‘if you get the patient to stand for an hour or so in the stream beforehand, for the cold will ease the swelling.’ Helen knew full well that the local people here would also have their wonderful ancient cures, though she was never given the time to find out.

  There was no mobile signal from the hospital except that once every few weeks one of the younger local doctors from Mogadishu would come north with medicines and take with him a sort of home made satellite dish which gave a signal for a while on his own phone. It was from that contraption that Helen managed to contact me on that final May evening. Along with all the others, Helen had no chance as soon as the line went dead. It had all, I suppose, just been a matter of time. The political or religious explanations just made it all the more senseless. All of them were gunned down in a matter of minutes for no reason except the old reason: that they were symbols of the enemy.

  I heard the initial news by mobile right there in heaven, at the peat bog. I just listened to the quiet voice of the man from the Foreign Office who had been delegated the job of phoning me. He asked me if I wanted the body brought home and I said I didn’t know. He expressed his sorrow and said that I could phone him back any time day or night when I’d had time to deal with the news. He said that some had already chosen for their loved ones to be buried there, in the nunnery’s small cemetery. I thanked him and switched the phone off.

  I lay down in the bog in the dry curve between the two rocks where sheep sheltered in the winter, staring up into the cloudless sky broken only by the white vapour of a jet moving silently to the north-west. Grief holds no boundaries. The underground streams ran beneath my back: they eventually emerged about a mile west, where the white water cascaded over the cliffs. Barriers are useless. The tears flowed down my cheeks for all the loveliness that was extinguished. Everything was finished, even though a butterly – the common blue – suddenly hovered beside me like a child, before vanishing.

  None of this was supposed to have happened. The plan really had been to find the old boat and maybe restore it and sail it back down to Mull sometime with Helen. Except I hadn’t told her. Had kept it secret, even from myself. The secrecy broke me. This great big bloody secrecy, as if life was a mystery to be hidden rather than a wonder and a revelation. I didn’t know the woman: didn’t know her at all, really. She was still a dream when it came down to it. A stranger who had crossed my path, and I a stranger who had crossed hers: two mature people who had shared a few things and had excluded nearly all that really mattered.

  Maybe it had just been a matter of time: had we had more time, what we would or could have achieved, together. Had we actually met that first time round, how different things might have been. The world we would have painted. Had we really loved each other, we would never have separated.

  I didn’t even have her picture except on my phone. I switched it back on, but the power had gone.

  I’d had enough of ashes. I asked her. Would she prefer to be buried in Africa or in Mull? She hesitated and replied that love was all, and that she should be buried in the place she loved. I too then hesitated. Does love have a geography? An environment. I looked around me, at this place I loved. I had never loved anything or anyone more than I loved this place. Not Margherita or Marion or Helen or Juliana or anyone else in the whole world, except this mysterious place which had framed my childhood.

  ‘I shall bury you here,’ I said, ‘alongside myself and all that I have carried.’

  Life was all. Was everything. I cycled down through my home village and found a roadside phone box which still worked and phoned the man at the Foreign Office and told him that Helen should be brought home. He promised it would be done, though of course it would take a few days, but the RAF had already been informed about others and things were being put into place.

  I asked her whether I too should return but she told me to stay. Or at least the wind or the waves or the tide or the rocks did, for it began to rain and with it the whole island became a place of mist and loss. Stay, she said. But go back to the hotel first. Rest. Think and pray about me. Make up a votive offering if need be, if it helps. Shout if needs be. Or whisper. It may be that the voice is not in the wind or in the earthquake or in the fire but in the stillness.

  So I cycled back to the hotel through the pouring rain. Past the pitch where I later became Jimmy Greaves. The hotel bath was old-fashioned and the water took ages to run to heat through the pipes, but eventually bubbled through.

  I made a boat out of the soap and stuck a toothpick in it for a mast and sailed it beneath the bridge of my legs. No matter which way I pushed, it always drifted upwards towards my chest where it would come to rest. I called it An Leumadair Gorm – the Blue Dolphin – and sailed it backwards and forwards in the great tide of the bath until it melted into soft lather. I would go the following morning.

  It rained all night. One of those wild early summer storms which come so suddenly and with such ferocity, and then dissipate equally as quickly, leaving no lasting damage. All sound and fury signifying nothing. In the morning, everything shone bright and wet after the long night’s rain. This was it.

  I cycled west again, past all of yesterday’s memories, towards the summer where Big Roderick and I had built the boat. I arrived at the place where Donald ought to have come from Woodstock, but didn’t, and looked towards where we would have been, on the slight incline of the hill just above the bay. I so much wanted Alasdair and Kate to be there waiting, not for me but for him.

  On the left hand side of the track was the roadside shrine to the Virgin. As was the custom, I came off my bicycle and made the sign of the cross as I passed the shrine.

  I then remounted and slowly ascended the hill which would finally take me down into the bay. I paused at the top for a moment and then freewheeled it to the bottom, the wind accelerating into my face. I parked the bike by the cattle grid which signalled the start of the village and walked over the small hill which led to the bay where we’d launched The Blue Dolphin that other summer’s day.

  It is empty and quiet. Nothing can be seen or heard except for the oystercatchers darting about the edge of the sand. How blue the sea is, and how clean. Cerulean. You feel it could rinse the world. It is the morning of the seventh day.

  I scramble over the rocks to where she’d been anchored. The tide is out and the rocks are covered in seaweed.

  I stumble on something, and there it is: the old rope still there, tied to the peaked rock. I go down on my knees and feel the rope, which is still strong and thick. I put one hand in front of the other and trace its path out beyond the rocks towards the sand. Halfway into the sand the rope changes and becomes a chain. My heart leaps. Hah! The anchor chain. So – after all these years, the anchor chain is still here, firm in
the sand. I keep my hand on the link-chain until it begins to disappear into the sand. I pull and it moves a fraction, but that’s it: I know from experience that the anchor itself is buried deep in the sand now, covered by almost half a century’s silt. Not even one of Fearchar’s giants could move it now. A digger or a JCB might, but the sacrilege would destroy all of history.

  I go on my knees in the sand and kiss the anchor chain. I can see the ruins of Alasdair and Katell’s old cottage in the distance, halfway up the hill. I can see the byre too where we’d left the boat all these years ago. I need to walk there: the bicycle needs to be abandoned. Gingerly across the cattle grid, sidestepping, then down past the old stone wall and up by the stream. An old cartwheel lies abandoned there. Grass has grown on the walls of the old mill.

  The house itself is in not too bad a shape, though totally uninhabited for years. There are no doors or windows, though somehow the roof is still on and the hearth and parts of the internal walls can still be seen. That’s where Katell baked the scones, and that’s where she served out the pastries and the galletes and over there is where they slept, beneath the south facing window. And this is where the fire was, where all the great stories were told and of course that’s where the table would have been where the cheese was sliced and the pickle served and the ham placed on the best plates.

  I move out towards the byre, which seems much more secure that the house itself. The roof is still on and the old stone wall is all intact and the single small window at the north end still whole and unbroken. The door is still also there and barred across with a wooden stanchion as it always was by Alasdair. It is as if he fixed it up yesterday and went for a wee holiday. It’s jammed tight and I can’t move it and I don’t want to break it so I go to the tiny window to see if I can peer through. It is all dusty and murky and I can’t see a thing though the old single pane of glass. I stand back. Maybe like that other crippled man I need to get up on to the roof and be lowered through a hole.