Ness

by Robert Macfarlane

  Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood

  * * *

  NESS

  Contents

  Prologue

  I: In the Green Chapel

  II: In the Green Chapel

  He

  III: In the Green Chapel

  She

  IV: In the Green Chapel

  They

  V: In the Green Chapel

  As

  VI: In the Green Chapel

  About the Authors

  Robert Macfarlane is the author of The Lost Words (with Jackie Morris), The Old Ways and Underland, among other books.

  Stanley Donwood is an artist and the author of Slowly Downward and Household Worms. His next books are There Will Be No Quiet and Bad Island.

  AWRE/6/79

  QV06 79 76D/00

  WE-177A

  Look – five forms moving fast through the forests to Ness.

  Look – here it comes, its bones are plastic, it builds itself from pallet slat & bottle-top, rises from sift, is lashed & trussed with fishing line. It is drift: it has cuttlefish nails & sea-poppy horns, it breathes in rain & it breathes out rust.

  Look – here he comes, his bones are willow & he sings in birds. He rises in marsh, slips forwards by ripple & shiver. Between his tree-ribs birds flutter, then swoop ahead to settle, sing, quiver. His head is a raven’s, his eyes are wrens’ nests. By day from his throat fly finch & fire-crest & in anger he speaks only in swifts.

  Look – here she comes, her skin is lichen & her flesh is moss & her bones are fungi, she breathes in spores & she moves by hyphae. She is a rock-breaker, a tree-speaker, a place-shaper, a world-maker.

  Look – here they come, their eyes are hagstones & their words are shingle. They rise on the shore, rock-cored, flint beings, scattering chert to signal their passage, sending stones through time to foretell their seeings.

  Look – here as comes, who exists only as likeness, moves as mist & also as metal, cannot be grasped or forced, is the strongest & strangest & youngest & oldest of all the five, slipping through trees, past houses, rolled by the wind at years each minute – rolled by the wind as if through time & in it.

  it, he, she, they, as

  All five know where they must go &

  with what they must grapple &

  where they must go is to the Green Chapel

  Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness.

  Ness speaks. Ness speaks gull, speaks wave, speaks bracken & lapwing, speaks bullet, ruin, gale, deception.

  Ness speaks pagoda, transmission, reception, Ness speaks pure mercury, utmost secret, swift current, rapid-fire.

  Listen again. Listen back. Listen to the pasts of Ness. Listen inland to the long-gone wood, which rings with the cries of wildcat & brock, heorte & hind, doe & bocke, hare & fox, wild fowle with his flocke, patrich, pheasant hen & pheasant cock, with green & wild stub & stock.

  Listen to the wrench of the door in the Centrifuge Dome. Listen to the rise of the still encroaching ocean. Listen to the silence of the merman who would not talk, e’en when tortured & hung up by his feete. Listen to the rumoured motion of the rumoured bodies on the rumoured shore.

  Shut up & listen, though, will you? Really listen. What the fuck is that, coming from the Green Chapel?

  In the Green Chapel

  I

  The Armourer says:

  Who will describe the Chapel’s design and position?

  ‘I,’ says The Engineer.

  ‘Ten tall thin crosses on the west wall, and ten on the east.

  Five on the north – and the south wall is open.

  Its status as a building of worship is unmistakable, so too the nature of its god.

  Its roof is ferro-concrete and strikingly vaulted.

  Its pillars are ferro-concrete and devoid of fluting.

  Its architecture is a perfect marriage of function and form.

  It lies close to the Centrifuge, close to the Armoury,

  And its ruination is controlled.’

  The Armourer says:

  Who will describe the Chapel’s ornament and flourish?

  ‘I,’ says The Botanist, looking thoughtfully around.

  ‘Elder and bracken thrive on its outer walls.

  Shingle fills the nave and the transept.

  Gulls have built nests in our control panels, whose doors hang open, whose springs loll, whose dials tilt.

  Its lichens and its mosses are fascinatingly many, though I will not detain you with their Linnaeans now.’

  The Armourer says:

  Do not. Tell me instead: is the Chapel fit for our purpose?

  ‘It is,’ says The Botanist.

  The Armourer says:

  Who will number the congregation?

  ‘I,’ says The Ornithologist, stepping forwards and bowing to The Armourer before speaking.

  ‘Our congregation numbers the gulls, the black-backs, who have travelled so very far to be here with us today.

  Our congregation numbers the ghosts of those who worked here to make today possible, including the indentured Chinese labourers who kept grasshoppers in jars to remind them of home, and the German POWs who raised their voices in song.

  Our congregation numbers the curlew and the brown hare, the fishermen, sailors and lighthouse keepers, the water deer, the foxes and the swaying valerian …’

  The Armourer cuts across The Ornithologist, says:

  Enough of your pieties. Who will take the service in the Chapel?

  ‘I will,’ says The Physicist, stepping forwards in his greatcoat, though curiously his feet make no noise on the shingle that increasingly fills the nave and the transept.

  ‘I intend in the service to speak only in equations, for they are the purest of utterances and they address only the world of matter, and they have no correlate or purchase in the sphere of politics and yet they possess a vast and calculable power to alter the world we inhabit.’

  The Armourer says:

  Physicists have long flattered themselves thus, and I see you continue the tradition. Nevertheless I thank you all for your work and preparation. We are ready to bring in the bomb to complete its trajectory.

  The Engineer and The Physicist go into the narthex and wheel out of it a long green gurney, on which is laid a toothpaste-white finned missile a little longer than a man. WE-177A – for this is the missile’s name – is banded twice round with yellow and once round with red.

  The Armourer says:

  Let us sing ‘The Firing Song’.

  They all begin to sing in a cracked chorus, and then further voices that do not seem to possess corresponding bodies join in with them:

  ‘Oh happy band of pilgrims, look upward to the skies

  Where such a light affliction shall win so great a prize!

  Song of the bomb, the arming song, the firing song …’

  It

  It is Drift. Drift nears Ness. Drift is a world-shaper. Drift makes itself up as it goes along.

  Drift loves lists. Drift is tide, gravity, storm, waves, wind, gyre & coastal aspect, among other things. Drift also acknowledges its debts to the plastics & fishing industries, & to the global capital flows that determine prevailing trade currents. Drift looks drastically disorganized to the untrained eye but is in fact a micro-manager of obsessive-compulsive tidiness. Drift’s favourite holiday destination is two tiny cove-beaches on the English south coast, one of which gathers right-handed gloves in its jetsam & the other of which gathers left-handed gloves in its jetsam.

  Drift is consistently underestimated by those who encounter it. Drift is frequently seen as lacking any clear direction in life. Drift’s school reports repeatedly drew attention to its lack of commitment, its inability to settle on a single course of action. Weary careers advisers submitted Drift to the usual psy
chometric aptitude tests, which remarkably did not recommend that Drift become either a prison warden or a zookeeper, but nevertheless failed to conclude that Drift had a single clear path in life. Afloat on the job market, however, Drift began quietly to impress in its various workplaces with its skills of improvisational spontaneity, untiring gathering, its devotion to habitat creation & its ecumenical readiness to admit all-comers to its care.

  Drift is highly discriminatory but wholly without prejudice.

  Drift relishes equally the company of sea-coal, Lego Star Wars figures, barnacles & gull feathers. Drift is fully reconciled to the unattached life. Drift has been known to unite shoes with long-lost partners & more generally to matchmake wholly unlikely relationships, but also to be the cause of unnumbered break-ups. Drift speaks an unpretentious tongue, a mongrel patois pâté of this-&-that, bodged into anyoldcreole.

  When you’re with Drift, time does really strange things. Drift is one of those friends who make sequence shiver, lay out odd things side by side, fully disassemble the normal for a while. Today with Drift is pre-Cambrian, today with Drift is Anthropocene.

  Drift doesn’t really do time, though – Drift more does space.

  Drift is always becoming. Drift has unbounded potential. Drift is unimaginably vast & if you had to describe Drift you would need a new kind of map & a new kind of language. The only end to Drift would be the end of the oceans, which in turn would be the end of the planet – & no one really wants that.

  When you’re with Drift, space does really strange things. Drift is a hermit crab taking an Avon face-cream tub as its shell on a Pacific atoll. Drift is four hundred & thirty-four rusted steel fishing globe-floats in a single bay on a south-westerly island of the Lofoten archipelago. Drift is the wood out of which humans were first carved. Drift dislikes being made to represent anything, because Drift disapproves strongly of symbolism, allegory & indeed all systems of fungibility which devalue the glittering particularity of all that Drift makes. Drift is matter plus motion & that is the end of it.

  Listening to Drift is one of the most beautiful sounds in the world, as beautiful as listening to your child breathe in the darkness.

  Drift is an avocet skull writhing with maggots. Drift is a Colgate-Palmolive Teeth-Whitening Toothpaste tube, no top. Drift is a seal corpse with a zither-rig jaw & off-planet fur. Drift is kelp & bladderwrack. Drift is long-line hooks & seine net. Drift is jerrycan & doll’s head, & Drift is a beached sperm whale, sheer-sided as a battleship, downwind of which you cannot stand, leaking red into the rocks, watching the world grey out through one tiny upwards eye.

  Drift happens to you rather than you to Drift.

  Right now, Drift is approaching Ness from the sea by all directions & Drift is coming in piece by piece, gathering on the upslope of the storm-beach, quietly assembling itself to either side of the Green Chapel without them noticing. The laboratories will be Drift soon – & Ness too, owing to nothing but the fate of things.

  In the Green Chapel

  II

  The Armourer says:

  Who will retell how we came to this historic moment, this momentous place?

  ‘I will,’ says The Physicist. ‘It went something like this –

  You near Ness from far inland: first you hit pine, then you hit sand, then the sky goes grey from the glare of the sea.

  Ness is a place to improvise. Ness is its own realm with its own rules. Don’t look. Don’t tell. Don’t understand. Don’t ever remember. Wait at the quay, load up the boat, then Charon ferries you over to the island of secrets. Two flints on your eyes for the journey, cold on the lids, keeping sight in so you couldn’t find your way back.

  Out there then. Lonely, flat, old. East wind like a knife. Spartan, cold. Eerie for its absence of feature. The seabirds cry, the spit moves in the storm like a creature.

  We weren’t much more than children. Quick minds gathered from all over the land, brought to this cold marsh, this locked-in place that shifts in its sleep, in our sleep. Sign the Act, don’t talk about what you do, not even to each other.

  For what we do is perfect the physics of death.

  We test for lethality and we test for vulnerability.

  We shock-test, stress-test, shake-test, temperature-test.

  We crash casings into concrete.

  We spin detonators in the Centrifuge.

  We heat initiator charges.

  We store weapons in the Armoury.

  In the Green Chapel we simulate all that our bombs will face when the end times come.

  We seek to maximize injuries incompatible with life.

  How did we keep it all quiet, out there on the untrue island? Oh – with half-truths and full falsehoods. We bred speculation, suppressed revelation, formed and dispersed a thick mist of lie in which we ourselves wandered. And we came to love our bombs, our seven dwarfs with their Disney names:

  Blue Danube

  Blue Streak

  Big Bertha

  Brown Bunny

  Blue Peacock

  Blue Hare

  Yellow Sun

  (with its helical fins giving a beautiful spin to its fall).

  And who could forget WE-177A – an ice-white stork-dropped messenger from heaven, with such a bright future ahead of it?

  Oh – we sowed our signals and we reaped the air. We eavesdropped on Plesetsk by loop, Algiers by back-scatter; we tracked the flights of planes, the arcs of missiles, the paths of ships, the movements of trains.

  But we also picked up what wasn’t uttered. For this was the problem: the fissile sign, the answerless answer. How to sift the message from the clutter?’

  The Armourer says:

  That was well told. Very well told. Physicist, I thank you.

  Now it is time to continue ‘The Firing Song’.

  Hollow voices rise in half-harmony:

  ‘Oh happy band of pilgrims, drift upward to the skies

  Where such a light affliction shall win so great a prize!

  Song of the bomb, the drifting song, the firing song.

  Shingle shelters bunker, bunker shelters blast,

  Dark drifts down, night rises fast.

  Song of the bomb, the arming song, the firing song.’

  The Physicist glances across at The Engineer and tilts his head quizzically.

  For The Physicist notices that one of The Engineer’s pupils has become oddly mobile, that it seems to be drifting rapidly back and forth across the confines of its iris. The Engineer looks back, smiles unconcernedly, lost in the words of ‘The Firing Song’.

  The Physicist notices that The Engineer’s other pupil is standing out slightly from his eyeball, like a buried plug of old grey metal.

  The Physicist notices something else that he finds hard to scale or to understand. A pale green light has filled the Chapel except that this light seems only scantly to occupy the open air or to shine on the outer surfaces of the Chapel; rather it emanates somehow from within every solid object organic and inorganic now contained in the Chapel, including The Physicist himself, and somehow to condense on the inside of every visible surface, leaving only a trace radiance beyond that border, and even as The Physicist is trying to represent this phenomenon to himself in language he is simultaneously, furiously trying to reject the possibility of the phenomenon’s existence within the realm of the real as he comprehends it.

  He

  He nears Ness. He moves through the marshes much as mud might. You couldn’t call it walking; this march matches no known gait. He pours himself forwards; pours, sets, melts & pours again, in a skipping looping flow, learnt part from otter & part from water.

  Willow weaves in him, weaves him in: roots & leafs & writhes, making & remaking his body’s bones with ceaseless invention &, it must be said, a certain degree of arch self-consciousness: four-boned plaited shins; a thirty-ribbed sternum within which wood-cage shifts a throng of birds whose song can be heard for miles in every direction –

  Wrens’ notes sharp as needles sew
ing thread.

  Blackbirds chinking like pennies on glass.

  Kew-kew scold of buzzards, clack of skua,

  The godwit’s call which is red-gold,

  & ever the jag & haggle of the gulls.

  So he pours himself noisily onwards through the woods & through the marshes & along the beach to Ness. The Green Chapel can be seen now & his birds are becoming excited. Their songs now are no longer transparent single notes but bright lines looping silver through the air, lacing & flowing & webbing together above the Green Chapel. The willow in his chest – in his legs, in his hips – is weaving & unweaving faster & faster in anticipation.

  From within him he can hear Oven-Bird & Hay-Jack, Mavis & Coddy-Moddy, Magareen, Fulfer & the Rain-Bird, all singing the high notes – the oversong.

  From within him he can hear Butcher Bird & Blood Olf & his swifts (the bird which revels in the storm & is born of the hurricane, the bird which goes by several names & those are Deviling, Shriek-Devil, Howler & Screech-Owl; right in their darkness for what’s gone on here) all singing the low notes – the undersong.

  His two wrens fly from their nests in his raven-head sockets, to perch unseen on the upper edge of the Green Chapel, in the vaultings, bobbing & flicking & looking down with their bead-black eyes into what is happening in the transept below.

  Above the Green Chapel his swifts are building & building in number, cutting the sky into screaming black sections with their wings.

  In the Green Chapel

  III

  ‘Can you hear something?’ asks The Ornithologist of no one in particular.

  The Armourer says:

  Let the catechism commence. Who holds the Strike Enable Facility keys for the operational round?

  ‘I do,’ says The Engineer, holding up a pair of white plastic plugs and a cylindrical barrel key, tagged with a blue disc on which is marked by hand the number 75215.