A PLACE BEFORE THE FLOOD

Dark was walking his dog along the cliff path

when the dog sheared off in a plunging of fur and

loud barking. He shouted to the dog, but the dog

had a seagull in his sights. The man was angry.

He was trying to concentrate on the problem in

his mind: his Sunday sermon for Pentecost.

Suddenly the dog disappeared, and he heard it

yelping in the distance. He sensed that

something was wrong, and ran along the

headland, his boots crushing the stone.

The dog had fallen over the cliff onto a ledge

about twenty feet down. It was whining piteously,

and holding up its paw, The man looked; there

seemed to be no way down, but to fall. He

couldn't climb down, and he couldn't pull the dog

up.

He told the dog to stay - it could hardly do

anything else, but the command gave the chaos

a kind of order. It told the dog that his master was

still in charge. It helped the man to believe he

was still in charge.

'Stay!' he shouted. 'Lie down!' Whimpering a

little, with its hurt foot, the dog did as he was told,

and the man began to walk quickly back to the

Manse to fetch a rope.

There was no one about at home. His wife was

out. His son was at school. The cook was

sleeping before the Bishop came to dinner. He

was glad there was no need to explain, no need

to get exasperated. A problem shared was a

problem doubled, he thought. People tried to

help, but all they did was interfere. Better to keep

trouble contained, like a mad dog. Then he

remembered his dog, and pushed aside other,

more difficult thoughts. They were his thoughts.

He wouldn't tell anyone, ever. He would keep his

secret to himself.

He found the rope in the cart-shed. He slung it

over his shoulder. He threw a heavy metal spike

and a mallet into a sack, and took a pony

harness to lift the dog. Then he went back,

keeping his mind resolutely on the task ahead,

and refusing the fraying at the edges that had

become so common a mental state for him. He

often felt that his mind was unravelling. Only by

the greatest discipline could he find for himself

the easy peace he used to take for granted.

Peace of mind - he would give anything to find it

again. Now he worked for it, the way he worked

his body by boxing.

The man walked briskly, trying not to tread on the

poppies that grew out of every crack with a bit of

soil in it. He could never get them to grow in his

garden, but here they grew on nothing. He might

use that for his sermon ...

Pentecost. He loved the story of the Grail coming

to the Court of King Arthur at the Feast of

Pentecost. He loved it, and it made him sad,

because that day every knight had pledged to

find the Grail again, and most lost their way, and

even the best were destroyed. The Court was

broken. Civilisation was ruined. And why? For a

dream-vision that had no use in the world of

men.

The story pressed in on him.

He reached the cliff face and looked down for his

dog. There he was, nose between his paws,

every hair a dejection. The man called to him,

and the dog suddenly raised his head, eyes full

of hope. The man was his god. The man wished

that he too could lie and wait so patiently for

salvation. 'But it will never come,' he said out

loud, and then fearful of what he had said he

began to bang the iron spike two-thirds of its

length into the ground.

When he was sure it would take his weight, he

carefully tied the rope into a reef knot, hung the

horse gear across his body, and began to abseil

down the cliff onto the ledge. He looked sadly at

his scuffed boots; they were new last week and

he had been breaking them in. His wife would

scold him for the expense and risk. Life was

nothing but expense and risk, he thought, with

some dim hope of comfort, though it was the

comfort he stressed to his flock, only himself he

kept up late at night, with other thoughts.

He swung onto the ledge and patted the dog

roughly and examined the injured foot. No blood,

most probably a sprain, and he bound it tight,

while his dog watched him with deep brown

eyes.

'Come on, Tristan. Let's get you home.'

Suddenly he noticed that the wall of the cliff had

a long narrow opening in it, and the edges of the

opening seemed shiny, with malachite perhaps,

or iron ore, polished by the salty winds. The man

stepped forward, running his fingers over the

bumpy edges, then he pushed himself half inside

the gap, and what he saw confounded him.

The wall of the cave was made entirely of fossils.

He traced out ferns and seahorses. He found the

curled-up imprint of small unknown creatures.

Suddenly everything was very still; he felt that he

had disturbed some presence, arrived at a

moment not for him.

He looked round nervously. There was no one

there, of course, but as his hands slid over the

shiny brittle surface, he couldn't help pausing. He

looked at the dark sea-stained wall, but how

could the sea have reached here? Not since the

Flood. He knew the earth was 4,000 years old,

according to the Bible.

He pressed the tips of his fingers into the tight

curl of the fossils, feeling them like the inside of

an ear, or the inside of ... no, he wouldn't think

about that. He pulled his mind away, but still his

fingers moved over the raised soft edges of this

mosaic of shapes. He put his fingers to his

mouth, tasted sea and salt. He tasted the tang of

time.

Then, for no reason at all, he felt lonely.

Dark took out his penknife and chipped away at

part of the wall. He dug out an ancient seahorse,

put it in his pocket, and went back to his dog.

'Steady, Tristan,' he said, securing the dog in the

harness. When the dog was firm, he attached the

rope to the D-ring in the middle of the gear, and

quickly pulled himself back up the cliff. Then he

lay down flat on his stomach, and began to haul

up his dog, until he could grab it by the scruff of

the neck. And help it scrabble over the edge.

They were both panting and exhausted and the

man had forgotten water.

He rolled over onto his back, watching the clouds

speeding over the sky, and fingering the

seahorse in his pocket. He would send it to the

Archaeological Society, and tell them about his

find. But as he made this plan, he realised that

he wanted to keep the seahorse. More than

anything, he wanted to keep it, and so to the

great surprise of his dog he let himself down the

rope again, and gouged out another piece of

eloquent rock. They were like the tablets of stone

given to Moses in the desert. They were God's

history and the world's. They were his inviolable

law; the creation of the world, saved in stone.

When he got home he felt better, lighter, and he

enjoyed his dinner with the Bishop, and later, in

his study, he wrapped up the second fossil and

sent it by the stable boy to the Archaeological

Society. He tied a cardboard parcel label to it,

with the date and place of the find.

Salts had never known anything like it. Within

two weeks, scores of palaeontologists were

boarding at The Rock and Pit, spilling over into

the spare rooms of spinster aunts, sleeping

makeshift on camp beds at the Manse, and

drawing lots for a bad night in a tent on the cliff

edge.

Darwin himself came to examine the cave. He

admitted to being embarrassed by the lack of

fossil evidence to support some of his theories.

Opponents of his Origin of Species wanted to

know why some species seemed not to have

evolved at all. Where was the so-called 'fossilladder'?

'The Cambrian era is very unsatisfactory,' he told

his colleagues.

The cave seemed to suggest all kinds of new

possibilities. It was stocked like a larder with

trilobites, ammonites, wavy-shelled oysters,

brachiopods, brittle stars on long stalks, and

although it seemed that all of these things could

only have been deposited there by some terrible

flood of the Noah-kind, the man with the

seahorse in his pocket was unhappy.

He spent a lot of time listening to the excited

voices talking about the beginning of the world.

He had always believed in a stable-state system,

made by God, and left alone afterwards. That

things might be endlessly moving and shifting

was not his wish. He didn't want a broken world.

He wanted something splendid and glorious and

constant.

Darwin tried to console him. 'It is not less

wonderful or beautiful or grand, this world you

blame on me. Only, it is less comfortable.'

Dark shrugged. Why would God make a world so

imperfect that it must be continually righting

itself?

It made him feel seasick. He made himself feel

seasick, listing violently from one side to another,

knowing that the fight in him was all about

keeping control, when his hands were bloodless

with gripping so tight.

If the movement in him was like the movement in

the world, then how would he ever steady

himself? There had to be a stable point

somewhere. He had always clung to the

unchanging nature of God, and the solid

reliability of God's creation. Now he was faced

with a maverick God who had made a world for

the fun of seeing how it might develop. Had he

made Man in the same way?

Perhaps there was no God at all. He laughed out

loud. Perhaps, as he had always suspected, he

felt lonely because he was alone.

He remembered his fingers in the hollow spirals

of the fossils. He remembered his fingers in her

body. No, he must not remember that, not ever.

He clenched his fists.

God or no God, there seemed to be nothing to

hold onto.

He felt the seahorse in his pocket.

He got it out, turned it over and over. He thought

of the poor male seahorse carrying his babies in

his pouch before the rising water had fastened

him to the rock forever.

Fastened to the rock. He liked that hymn. Will

your anchor hold in the storms of life? He sang it

to himself: We have an anchor that keeps the

soul steadfast and sure while the billows roll.

Fastened to the rock which cannot move,

grounded firm and deep in the Saviour's love.

Fastened to the rock. And he thought of

Prometheus, chained to his rock for stealing fire

from the gods. Prometheus, whose day-time

torment was to suffer his liver torn out by an

eagle, and whose nighttime torment was to feel it

grow back again, the skin as new and delicate as

a child's.

Fastened to the rock. That was the town crest

here at Salts; a sea village, a fishing village,

where every wife and sailor had to believe that

the unpredictable waves could be calmed by a

dependable god.

Suppose the unpredictable wave was God?

The man had taken off his boots and folded his

clothes neatly on top of them. He was naked and

he wanted to walk slowly out to sea and never

come back. There was only one thing he would

take with him, and that was the seahorse. They

would both swim back through time, to a place

before the flood.

It was our last day as ourselves.

I had woken early to cook the bacon. While it

was sizzling, I took Pew his mug of Full Strength

Samson, singing to him as I went, Will your

anchor hold in the storms of life?

'Pew! Pew!'

But he was already up and away, and he had

taken Dogjim with him.

I looked for him all over the lighthouse, and then I

saw that the mackerel boat had gone, and the

sea chest. He must have been polishing the

brass first thing, because the Brasso and the

cloths were still out, and the place gleamed, and

smelled of hard work.

I ran upstairs to the light, where we kept our

telescope, to identify the ships that didn't radio in.

I thought I might see Pew in his boat, far out at

sea. There was nobody there. The sea was

empty.

It was 7 o'clock in the morning and at noon they

were coming for the light. Best to leave it now, as

I had always known it, and fasten it in memory,

where it couldn't be destroyed. Why would I want

to see them dismantling the equipment and

roping off our quarters? I started to pack my own

things, though there were not many, and then, in

the kitchen, I saw the tin box.

I knew that Pew had left it for me, because he

had put a silver coin on the top. He couldn't see

to read or write, but he knew things by their

shapes. My shape was a silver coin.

Pew had kept loose tea and loose tobacco in this

chest. The tea and tobacco were still there, in

paper bags, and underneath the bags were

bundles of notes, Pew's life savings, it seemed.

Underneath those were older coins, sovereigns

and guineas and silver sixpences, and green

threepenny bits. As well as the money, there was

an old-fashioned spyglass that folded into a

leather case, and a number of leather-bound

books.

I took them out. Two first editions: Charles

Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859, and The

Strange Case ofDr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886.

The other books were the notebooks and letters

that had belonged to Babel Dark.

One set of neat bound leather books was written

in tiny handwriting and illustrated with ink

drawings of flowers and fossils - Dark's diary of

his life in Salts.

Wrapped in paper was a scuffed leather folder,

with BD embossed in one corner. I undid the

brown ribbon, and an untidy pile of papers

scattered over my feet. The writing was big and

uncertain. There were drawings of himself,

always with the eyes scored out, and there were

watercolours on cartridge paper of a beautiful

woman, always half-turned.

I wanted to read everything, but there was no

time left for me here.

Well then, this past would have to be dragged

into the future, because the present had buckled

under me, like a badly made chair.

The wind-once-a-week clock was still ticking, but

I had to go now.

I unfolded a map of Bristol that had belonged to

Josiah Dark in 1828. It was rum-stained where

he had used it as a mat. On the waterfront was

an inn called Ends Meet.

Perhaps Pew had gone there.

A place before the Flood.

Was there ever such a place? The Bible story is

simple; God destroyed the wicked world and only

Noah and his family were saved. After forty days

and forty nights the ark came to rest on Mount

Ararat, and as the flood waters began to subside,

it stayed there.

Imagine it; evidence of an impossible moment.

Marooned like a memory point above time. The

thing couldn't have happened, but it did - look,

there's the ship, absurd, grandiloquent, part

miracle, part madness.

It's better if I think of my life like that - part

miracle, part madness. It's better if I accept that I

can't control any of the things that matter. My life

is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are

no arrivals, no destinations; there are only

sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat,

another tide.

Tell me a story, Silver.

What story?

The story of what happened next.

That depends.

On what?

On how I tell it.

NEW PLANET

This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is,

love is just outside it, looking for a way to break

in.

We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling

like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the

rights of the universe. Being important, being

nothing, being caught in lives of our own making

that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again,

wondering why the past comes with us,

wondering how to talk about the past at all.

There's a booth in Grand Central Station where

you can go and record your life. You talk. It

tapes. It's the modern-day confessional - no

priest, just your voice in the silence. What you

were, digitally saved for the future.

Forty minutes is yours.

So what would you say in those forty minutes -

what would be your death-bed decisions? What

of your life will sink under the waves, and what

will be like the lighthouse, calling you home?

We're told not to privilege one story above

another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe

that's true, maybe all stories are worth hearing,

but not all stories are worth telling.

When I look back across the span of water I call

my life, I can see me there in the lighthouse with

Pew, or in The Rock and Pit, or on a cliff edge

finding fossils that turned out to be other lives.

My life. His life. Pew. Babel Dark. All of us bound

together, tidal, moon-drawn, past, present and

future in the break of a wave.

There I am, edging along the rim of growing up,

then the wind came and blew me away, and it

was too late to shout for Pew, because he had

been blown away too. I would have to grow up

on my own.

And I did, and the stories I want to tell you will

light up part of my life, and leave the rest in

darkness. You don't need to know everything.

There is no everything. The stories themselves

make the meaning.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie.

There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up

moments, and the rest is dark.

When you look closely, the twenty-four hour day

is framed into a moment; the still-life of the jerky

amphetamine world. That woman - a pieta.

Those men, rough angels with an unknown

message. The children holding hands, spanning

time. And in every still-life, there is a story, the

story that tells you everything you need to know.

There it is; the light across the water. Your story.

Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it

has to be heard. In the endless babble of

narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story

waits to be heard.

Some people say that the best stories have no

words. They weren't brought up to

Lighthousekeeping. It is true that words drop

away, and that the important things are often left

unsaid. The important things are learned in

faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The

true things are too big or too small, or in any

case always the wrong size to fit the template

called language.

I know that. But I know something else too,

because I was brought up to Lighthousekeeping.

Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the

relief of silence. And then, very quietly, as quiet

as light, meaning returns. Words are the part of

silence that can be spoken.

Dodging lorries the size of batdeships, I found

that the waterside tavern Ends Meet had been

replaced by something called The Holiday Inn. In

Pew's stories, any ordinary seaman always

asked for a hammock, that being half the price of

a bed, but there were no hammocks to be had at

The Holiday Inn, so reluctandy I agreed to a

single room and a single bed.

When I enquired about Pew, the receptionist told

me they had no guest by the name of Mr Pew,

but that an unusual man - that was her word,

unusual, had arrived with a small dog and asked

for a room. She had been unable to

accommodate him, a) because the hotel had no

facilities for animals, and b) because doubloons

were no longer legal tender in the Eurozone.

'Where did he go?' I asked, eager and excited.

She did not know, but I felt sure he would come

back for me one day.

I decided to follow Miss Pinch's advice and get a

job. I would keep Pew's money until he needed

it.

The next morning, scrubbed and dressed, I stood

in front of the mirror in my room and wondered

whether or not to wear my oilskin coat. It was

yellow and oversized. And while I had never

thought about it at all in the lighthouse, somehow

The Holiday Inn was making me self-conscious.

Bristol was supposed to be a sea-faring town,

according to Pew, but yesterday I had been the

only person in the shopping mall wearing a

yellow oilskin.

I put on an extra jersey instead.

At the library, I presented myself, eager and

willing, but the librarian told me that I had no

experience and no degree.

'Can't I just put the books on the shelf for you?'

'That is not what we do.'

I looked round. The shelves were full of books.

'Well, it's what someone has to do. I'll do it for

you.'

'There are no employment opportunities

available at the present time.'

ʻI don't want an employment opportunity' (I

remembered what Miss Pinch said about not

being too ambitious for a Female). 'I just want a

job.'

'I am afraid that won't be possible. But you may

join the library if books interest you.'

'Yes, they do very much, thank you, I will.'

'Here is the form. We'll need a permanent

address, utility bill, and a signed photo.'

'What, like a film star?'

'Someone who has known you for two years

must sign the photo.'

'I suppose Miss Pinch might do it ...' (I was

beginning to wonder if this librarian was related

to Miss Pinch.)

'Where do you live?'

'The Holiday Inn.'

'That is not a permanent address.'

'No, I've only just arrived here from Scotland.'

'Were you a member of the library there?'

'There was no library. We had a van came round

once every three months but it only stocked Mills

& Boon, True Crime, Ornithology, Second World

War, Local History, which we all knew anyway

because there's not that much of it, and tinned

fruit. It was a bit of a grocer's too.'

'Have you proof of your address in Scotland?'

'Everyone knows it. It's the lighthouse at Cape

Wrath. Straight up the coast and you can't miss

it.'

'Your family are lighthousekeepers, are they?'

'No, my mother's dead, I never had a father, and

Pew brought me up in the lighthouse.'

'Then, Mr Pew perhaps - he could write a letter

on your behalf.'

'He's blind and I don't know where he is.'

'Take this form and return it in person to me

when you have completed it.'

'Can't I join now?'

'No.'

'Can I have a job just on Saturdays?'

'No.'

'Well, I'll just come in every day and read the

books then.'

And that is what I did.

The Holiday Inn was delighted to let me keep my

small windowless room in return for a night-shift

serving chips and peas to guests too tired to

sleep. When I finished work at 5 o'clock in the

morning, I slept until 11 am, and then went

straight to the Public Library Reading Room.

My difficulty was that as I was not able to borrow

books, I never got to the end of a story before

another person took the book out on loan. I was

so worried about this that I began to buy myself

shiny silver notebooks with laminated covers, like

astronaut gear. I copied the stories out as fast as

I could, but all I had so far were endless

beginnings.

I had been reading Death in Venice, and the

library was closing, so with the utmost reluctance

I gave it back at the desk, and told them I would

be in on the stroke of nine, first thing in the

morning.

I was so tormented that someone might borrow

the book before me that in the early hours of the

morning I stopped serving chips and peas to the

desperate, tore off my apron, and ran to the

library steps like a pilgrim seeking a miracle at a

shrine.

I was not the only person there.

An old drunk was crouched in a corner with a

light-up model of the Eiffel Tower wired to a

battery. He told me he had been happy in Paris,

but he couldn't remember if it was Texas or

France.

'We've all been happy once, haven't we? But why

aren't we happy now? Can you tell me that?'

I couldn't.

'Y'see him there?' he said, waving vodkerishly at

a swaying figure on the street. 'He goes

everywhere with a dog's jacket, he does. He's

just waiting for the right dog.'

'I've got a dog. His name's Dogjim. He lives up in

Scodand in a lighthouse.' (That had been true for

most of his life though it wasn't true now.)

'Is he a Scottie dog, is he?'

'No, but he lives in Scotland.'

'Then he should be a Scottie dog - that's another

thing that's wrong with life. Everything in life is

wrong.'

'That's what Miss Pinch says. She says life is a

torment descending into nightfall.'

'Is she a single lady?'

'Oh yes. Since she was born.'

'What's her corner?'

I don't understand.'

'Where does she sit at night? I sit here. Where

does she sit?'

'A place called Salts, in Scotland. She lives on

Railing Row.'

'I might try and get up there for the summer.'

'That's the best time. In the warm.'

'What wouldn't you give to be warm? That's why I

have this light-up model y'know. It warms my

hands. D'y'want to warm your hands? What's a

young girl like you out here for anyhow?'

'I'm waiting for the library to open.'

'You what?'

'There's a book I want to borrow - oh, it's a long

story.'

(But a very short book.)

When the double doors opened, I presented

myself at the desk, and asked for the book, only

to discover that the librarian herself had taken it

home the previous night, and this morning she

had called in sick.

'Can you tell me what's the matter with her? How

sick? Sick like tummy upset or a bad cold, or is it

compassionate leave for a year?'

Her colleague regretted that she couldn't say -

actually she couldn't care less - just went back to

alphabetising a row of Sea Stories.

My stomach lurching, I left the library, and

wandered about like a thing possessed. Then I

found the book in a bookshop, but after I had

readjust one more page, the assistant came over

and told me I had to buy it or leave it.

I had promised myself that I would not buy

anything, except the food I needed, until I

discovered the whereabouts of Pew. So I said to

the assistant, T can't afford to buy it and I can't

bear to leave it. But I love it.'

She was unmoved. We live in a world of buy it or

leave it. Love does not signify.

Two days later, I was walking through the town,

when I saw the librarian in Starbucks. She was

sitting in the window reading Death in Venice.

Imagine how I felt ... I stood outside the window,

watching her, and she kept glancing out with a

faraway look, seeing only the Lido, with her nose

against the heavy, plague-scented air.

A man with a dog must have thought I was a

beggar, because he suddenly gave me a quid,

and I went in and bought an espresso, and sat

really close to her, just behind her, so that I could

read the page. She must have thought I was a bit

strange - I understand that because some people

are a bit strange - I've met them in the hotel - but

suddenly she snapped the book shut, like

breaking a promise, and walked out.

I followed her.

She went to the hairdresser's, Woolworth's, the

chiropractic clinic, the pet shop, the video store,

and finally back home. I lurked around until she

settled down with a dish of microwave rigatoni

pomadori, and Death in Venice.

It was agony.

At last she fell asleep, and the book slipped from

her hand onto the floor.

There it was, inches away. If only I could lift up

the window and drag it towards me. The book

was half-closed where it lay on the blue carpet. I

tried to coax it with magnetic powers. I said,

'Come on, this way!'

The book didn't move. I tried lifting the window,

but it was locked. I felt like Lancelot outside the

Chapel of the Grail - but I've never finished that

story either.

Days passed. I kept an eye on her until she got

better. I did more than that; I pushed aspirins

through the letterbox. I would have donated to

the blood bank if it had been a help, but she got

better, with or without me, and the day came

when I followed her back to the library.

She took the book inside, checked it, and went to

deal with a customer. I grabbed the book from

the white plastic wheelie cart they use to trolley

the books back to the shelves. Just as I was

heading for the Reading Room, an assistant with

a moustache - she was a woman but she had a

moustache, which is usually a bad sign - this

assistant pulled the book from my hands, and

said it was reserved for a customer.

'I'm a customer,' I said

'Name?' she said, as though it were a crime.

'I'm not on your list.'

'Then you will have to wait until the book is

returned again,' she said, with evident

satisfaction, and that's the thing about some

librarians - they love telling you a book is out of

print, borrowed, lost, or not even written yet.

I have a list of titles that I leave at the desk,

because they are bound to be written some day,

and it's best to be ahead of the queue.

That evening I followed the librarian home,

because I had got used to following her home,

and habit is hard to break. She went in, as usual,

and when she came back out to sit in the garden,

she was carrying her Own Copy of Death In

Venice. All I had to do was to wait for the phone

to ring, which it did, and then I ran across the

front lawn, and grabbed the book.

Suddenly I heard her screaming into the phone,

'There's an intruder - yes, it's the same one - get

the police!'

I rushed to help her, but she wouldn't stop

screaming, so I searched all over the house, and

I couldn't find anybody, which is what I told the

police when they arrived. They took no notice,

just arrested me, because she said I was the

intruder - when all I had wanted was to borrow

her book.

After that, things got tougher, because the police

discovered that as I had no mother or father, I

didn't officially exist. I asked them to telephone

Miss Pinch, but she claimed never to have heard

of such a person as myself.

The police had me interviewed by a nice man

who turned out to be a psychiatrist for Young

Offenders, although I hadn't offended anyone

except for the librarian and Miss Pinch. I

explained about Death in Venice, and the

problems I had had joining the library, and the

psychiatrist nodded and suggested I come in

once a week for observation, like I was a new

planet.

Which, in a way, I was.

Dark was looking at the moon.

If the earth's history was fossil-written, why not

the universe? The moon, bone-white, bleached

of life, was the relic of a solar system once

planeted with Earths.

He thought the whole of the sky must have been

alive once, and some stupidity or carelessness

had brought it to this burnt-out, warmless place.

When he was a boy he used to imagine the sky

as the sea and the stars as ships lit up at the

mast. At night, when the sea was black, and the

sky was black, the stars ploughed the surface of

the water, furrowing it like a ship's keel. He had

amused himself by lobbing stones at the star's

reflections, hitting them and bursting them,

watching them steady and return.

Now the sky was a dead sea, and the stars and

the planets were memory-points, like Darwin's

fossils. There were archives of catastrophe and

mistake. Dark wished that there was nothing

there at all; no evidence, no way of knowing.

What Darwin called knowledge and progress,

Dark understood as a baleful diary; a book that

had been better left unread. There was so much

in life that had been better left unread.

It is good to wander along the sea-coast, when

formed of moderately hard rocks, and watch the

process of degradation. The tides, in most cases,

reach the cliffs for only a short time twice a day,

and the waves eat into them only when they are

charged with sand or pebbles; for there is reason

to believe that pure water can effect little or

nothing in wearing away a rock. At last, the base

of the cliff is undermined, huge fragments fall

down, and these remaining fixed, have to be

worn away, atom by atom, until reduced in size,

until they can be rolled about the waves, and

then are more quickly ground into pebbles, sand

or mud.

Dark put the book aside. He had read it so many

times, and seen in himself all the marks of

gradual erosion. Well, perhaps he would be

found later, unrecognisable but for his teeth -

yes, his stubborn jaw would be the last thing to

go. Words, all words, scattered by the waves.

I sometimes think of myself, up at Am Parbh.

The Turning Point, knowing I was going to leave.

Going to leave, would have to leave, subtle

changes in inflection, denoting different states of

mind, but with the same end in view, except that

there is no end, and when it is in view, it is

always a sighted ship that will never come to

shore.

Still, the ship must be sighted, we must pack for

the sailing. We have to believe in our control, in

our future. But when the future does come it

comes like the McCloud, fully equipped with the

latest technology and a new crew, but with the

old McCloud riding inside.

The fossil record is always there, whether or not

you discover it. The brittle ghosts of the past.

Memory is not like the surface of the water -

either troubled or still.

Memory is layered. What you were was another

life, but the evidence is somewhere in the rock -

your trilobites and ammonites, your struggling

life-forms, just when you thought you could stand

upright.

Years ago in Railings Row, on two kitchen chairs

pushed together, under Miss Pinch's One Duck

Eiderdown, I cried for a world that could be

stable and sure. I didn't want to start again. I was

too small and too tired.

Pew taught me that nothing is gone, that

everything can be recovered, not as it was, but in

its changing form.

'Nothing keeps the same form forever, child, not

even Pew.'

Before he wrote On the Origin of Species,

Darwin spent five years as a naturalist, aboard

HMS Beagle. In nature, he found not past,

present and future as we recognise them, but an

evolutionary process of change - energy never

trapped for too long - life always becoming.

When Pew and I were spun out of the lighthouse

like beams and sparks, I wanted everything to

continue as it had. I wanted something solid and

trustworthy. Twice-flung - first from my mother,

and then Pew - I looked for a safe landing and

soon made the mistake of finding one.

But the only thing to do was to tell the story

again.

Tell me a story, Silver. What story?

The story of the talking bird.

That was later, much later, when I had landed

and grown up.

It's still your story. Yes.

TALKING BIRD

Two facts about Silver: It reflects 95% of its own

light. It is one of the few precious metals that can

be safely eaten in small quantities.

I had gone to Capri, because I feel better

surrounded by water.

As I was winding down one of the whitewashed

alleys on the hillside overlooking the Grotto

Azzurro, I heard someone calling my name -

'Bongiorno, Silver!'

In the window of a small apartment was a big

cage, and in the big cage was a beady beaky

bird.

I know it was a coincidence - even though Jung

says there is no such thing, I know it wasn't

magic - just a trained voice-box with feathers, but

it matched a moment in me that was waiting for

someone to call my name. Names are still

magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren and Warren

are magic to somebody somewhere. In the fairy

stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your

name, I can call your name, and when I call your

name, you'll come to me.

So the bird called, 'Bongiorno, Silver!' and I stood

and looked at him for a long time, until the

woman inside thought I was a thief or a madman,

and banged on the window with a litde statue of

the Madonna.

I motioned for her to come outside, and I asked

her if I could buy the bird.

'No no no!' she said, 'Quell'uccello e mia

vita!' ('That bird is my life!')

'What, your whole life?'

'Si si si! Mio marito e morte, mio figlio sta

nell'esercito e ho soltano un rene.' ('My husband

is dead, my son is in the army, I have only one

kidney.')

This was not looking good for either of us. She

clutched the Madonna.

'Se non fosse per quell'uccello e il mio

abbonamento alia National Geographic

Magazine non avrei niente.' ('And without that

bird and my subscription to National Geographic

Magazine, I would have nothing.')

'Nothing?'

'Niente! Rien! Zilch!'

She slammed the door and put the statue of the

Madonna in the birdcage in the window.

Wingless and grounded, I slunk off for an

espresso.

Such a beautiful island - blue, cream, pink,

orange. But I was colour-blind that day. I wanted

that bird.

That night, I crept back to the apartment and

looked in through the window. The woman was

lolling asleep in the chair watching Batman

dubbed into Italian.

I walked round to her door and tried the handle. It

was open! I let myself in and crept forward into

the little room full of hand-crocheted lace and

plastic flowers. The bird regarded me - 'Pretty

boy! Pretty boy!' Who cares about gender at a

time like this?

On tiptoe, ridiculous and serious, I went to the

cage, unlatched the wire door, and seized the

bird. He jumped onto my finger quite happily, but

the woman was stirring, and then the bird began

to sing something dreadful about going back to

Sorrento.

Quick as a dart, I slid a lace doily over his beak,

and slipped out of the room and into the alley.

I was a thief. I had stolen the bird.

For six months I lived nervously on my part of the

island, refusing to go home because I couldn't

put the bird in quarantine. My partner came out

to visit me and asked me why I wouldn't come

home. I said I couldn't come home - it was a

question of the bird.

'Your business is failing and your relationship is

failing - forget the bird.'

Forget the bird! I might as well try and forget

myself. And that was the problem of course - I

had forgotten myself, long since, long before the

bird, and I wanted, in a messy, maddening way,

to go on forgetting myself and yet, to find myself

too. When the bird said my name it was as

though I had just heard it, not for the first time,

but after a long time, like somebody coming out

of a drugged dream.

'Bongiorno, Silver!' Every day the bird reminded

me of my name, which is to say, who I am.

I wish I could be clearer. I wish I could say, 'My

life had no light. My life was eating me alive.' I

wish I could say, 'I was having a mental

breakdown, so I stole a bird.' Strictly speaking

that would be true, and it is why the police let me

go, instead of charging me with the theft of a

much-beloved macaw. The Italian doctor put me

on Prozac and sent me for a series of

appointments at the Tavistock Clinic in London.

The woman whose bird it had been, and was

again, felt sorry for me; after all, she might have

lost a parrot but she was not cuckoo. She gave

me a pile of old National Geographic magazines

to read in the loony bin, which is where the nice

man at the pizza place told her I would be

spending the rest of my life.

The rest of my life. I have never rested, always

run, run so fast that the sun can't make a

shadow. Well, here I am - mid-way, lost in a dark

wood - this selva oscura, without a torch, a

guide, or even a bird.

The psychiatrist was a gentle, intelligent man

with very clean fingernails. He asked me why I

had not sought help sooner.

'I don't need help - not this kind anyway. I can

dress myself, make toast, make love, make

money, make sense.'

'Why did you steal the bird?'

ʻI love the stories of Talking Birds, especially

Siegfried, who is led out of the forest and into the

treasure by the Woodbird. Siegfried is stupid

enough to listen to birds, and I thought that the

peck, peck, pecking at the pane of my life might

mean that I should listen too.'

'You thought the bird was talking to you?'

'Yes, I know the bird was talking to me.'

'Was there no human being you could have

talked to instead?'

'I wasn't talking to the bird. The bird was talking

to me.'

There was a long pause. There are some things

that shouldn't be said in company. See above.

I tried to put right the damage.

I went to a therapist once, and she gave me a

copy of a book called The Web Not Woven.

Frankly, I would rather listen to the bird.'

Now I had made things much worse for myself.

'Would you like another bird?'

'It wasn't any old bird; it was a bird that knew my

name.'

The doctor leaned back in his chair. 'Do you keep

a diary?'

'I have a collection of silver notebooks.'

'Are they consistent?'

'Yes. I buy them from the same department

store.'

ʻI mean, do you keep one record of your life, or

several? Do you feel you have more than one life

perhaps?'

'Of course I do. It would be impossible to tell one

single story.'

'Perhaps you should try.'

'A beginning, a middle, and an end?'

'Something like that - yes.'

I thought of Babel Dark and his neat brown

notebooks, and his wild torn folder. I thought of

Pew tearing stories out of light.

'Do you know the story of Jekyll and Hyde?'

'Of course.'

'Well then - to avoid either extreme, it is

necessary to find all the lives in between.'

The seahorse was in his pocket.

Dark was walking along the beach.

The moon was new, and laid on her back, as

though she had been blown over by the wind that

gusted the sand round his boots.

He looked out towards Cape Wrath, and thought

he saw the figure of Pew in the glass of the light.

The waves were fierce and rapid. There was

going to be a storm.

1878. His fiftieth birthday.

When Robert Louis Stevenson had asked if he

might visit him, Dark had been pleased. They

would go to the lighthouse, and then Dark would

show him the famous fossil cave. He knew that

Stevenson was fascinated by Darwin's theories

of evolution. He had no idea that Stevenson had

a particular purpose to his visit.

The men had sat on either side of the fire talking.

They had both drunk a good deal of wine, and

Stevenson was flushed and animated. Did not

Dark think that all men had atavistic qualities?

Parts of themselves that lay like undeveloped

negatives? Shadow selves, unpictured but

present?

Dark felt his breathing shorten. His heart was

beating. What did Stevenson mean?

'A man might be two men,' said Stevenson, 'and

not know it, or he might discover it and find that

he had to act on it. And those two men would be

of very different kinds. One upright and loyal, the

other, perhaps not much better than an ape.'

'I do not accept that men were once apes,' said

Dark.

'But you accept that all men have ancestors.

What's to say that somewhere in your blood

there isn't a long-gone fiend that only lacks a

body?'

'In my blood?'

'Or mine. Any one of us. When we talk about a

man acting out of character, what are we

honestly saying? Aren't we saying that there

must be more to the man than we choose to

know, or indeed more than he chooses to know

about himself?'

'Are we so utterly lacking in self-knowledge, do

you think?'

'I wouldn't put it like that, Dark; a man may know

himself, but he prides himself on his character,

his integrity - the word says it all - integrity - we

use it to mean virtue, but it means wholeness

too, and which of us is that?'

'We are all whole, I hope.'

'Do you wilfully misunderstand me, I wonder?'

'What do you mean by that?' said Dark, and his

mouth was dry and Stevenson noticed how he

played with his watch chain like a rosary.

'Shall I be frank?'

'Please do.'

'I was in Bristol ...'

'I see.'

'And I met a sailor by the name of - '

'Price,' said Dark.

He got up and went to look out of the window,

and when he turned back into his study, full of

well-worn and familiar things, he felt like a

stranger in his own life.

'I will tell you then,' he said.

He was talking, telling the whole story from

beginning to end, but he heard his voice far off,

like a man in another room. He was overhearing

himself. It was himself he was talking to. Himself

he needed to tell.

If I had not seen her again that day in London,

perhaps my life would have been very different. I

waited a month for our next meeting and I

thought of nothing else that month. As soon as

we were together, she turned round and asked

me to unhook her dress. There were twenty

hooks; I remember counting them.

She stepped out of her dress and uncoiled her

hair and kissed me. She was so free with her

body. Her body, her freedom. I was afraid of how

she made me feel. You say we are not one, you

say truly there are two of us. Yes, there were two

of us, but we were one. As for myself, I am

splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass

from a church window long since shattered. I find

pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself

handling them. The reds and greens of her body

are the colours of my love for her, the coloured

parts of me, not the thick heavy glass of the rest.

I am a glass man, but there is no light in me that

can shine across the sea. I shall lead no one

home, save no lives, not even my own.

She came here once. Not to this house, but to

the lighthouse. That makes it bearable for me to

go on living here. Every day I walk the way we

walked, and I try and pick out her imprint. She

trailed her hands along the sea wall. She sat by a

rock with her back to the wind. She made this

bleak place bountiful. Some of her is in the wind,

is in the poppies, is in the dive of the gulls. I find

her when I look, even though I will never see her

again.

I find her in the lighthouse and its long flashes

over the water, I found her in the cave -

miraculous, impossible, but she was there, the

curve of her caught up in the living rock. When I

put my hand in the gap, it's her I feel; her salty

smoothness, her sharp edges, her turnings and

openings, her memory.

Darwin said something to me once for which I

was grateful. I had been trying to forget, trying to

stop my mind reaching for a place where it can

never home. He knew my agitation, though he

did not know its cause, and he took me up to Am

Parbh - the Turning Point, and with his hand on

my shoulder, he said, 'Nothing can be forgotten.

Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one

vast memory system. Look back and you will find

the beginnings of the world.'

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of

Species, and Richard Wagner completed his

opera Tristan and Isolde. Both are about the

beginnings of the world.

Darwin - objective, scientific, empirical,

quantifiable.

Wagner - subjective, poetic, intuitive, mysterious.

In Tristan the world shrinks to a boat, a bed, a

lantern, a love-potion, a wound. The world is

contained within a word - Isolde.

The Romantic solipsism that nothing exists but

the two of us, could not be farther from the

multiplicity and variety of Darwin's theory of the

natural world. Here, the world and everything in it

forms and is re-formed, tirelessly and

unceasingly. Nature's vitality is amoral and

unsentimental; the weak die, the strong survive.

Tristan, weak and wounded, should have died.

Love healed him. Love is not part of natural

selection.

Where did love begin? What human being looked

at another and saw in their face the forests and

the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary,

dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that

you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what

you did, picked them because I love you?

In the fossil record of our existence, there is no

trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's

crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones

of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts.

Their last meal is sometimes preserved in peat or

in ice, but their thoughts and feelings are gone.

Darwin overturned a stable-state system of

creation and completion. His new world was flux,

change, trial and error, maverick shifts, chance,

fateful experiments, and lottery odds against

success. But earth had turned out to be the blue

ball with the winning number. Bobbing alone in a

sea of space, earth was the lucky number.

Darwin and his fellow scientists still had no idea

how old earth and her life forms might be, but

they knew they were unimaginably older than

Biblical time, which dated the earth at 4,000

years. Now, time had to be understood

mathematically. It could no longer be imagined

as a series of lifetimes, reeled off like a

genealogy from the Book of Genesis. The

distances were immense.

And yet, the human body is still the measure of

all things. This is the scale we know best. This

ridiculous six feet belts the globe and everything

in it. We talk about feet, hands, spans, because

that is what we know. We know the world by and

through our bodies. This is our lab; we can't

experiment without it.

It is our home too. The only home we really

possess. Home is where the heart is ...

The simple image is complex. My heart is a

muscle with four valves. It beats 101,000 times a

day, it pumps eight pints of blood around my

body. Science can bypass it, but I can't. I say I

give it to you, but I never do.

Don't I? In the fossil record of my past, there is

evidence that the heart has been removed more

than once. The patient survived.

Broken limbs, drilled skulls, but no sign of the

heart. Dig deeper, and there'll be a story, layered

by time, but true as now.

Tell me a story, Silver.

What story?

The story of Tristan and Isolde.

SOME WOUNDS

Some wounds never heal.

The second time the sword went in, I aimed it at

the place of the first.

I am weak there - the place where I had been

found out before. My weakness was skinned

over by your love.

I knew when you healed me that the wound

would open again. I knew it like destiny, and at

the same time, I knew it as choice.

The love-potion? I never drank it. Did you?

Our story is so simple. I went to bring you back

for someone else, and won you for myself.

Magic, they all said later, and it was, but not the

kind that can be brewed.

We were in Ireland. Was there ever a country so

damp? I had to wring out my mind to think

clearly. I was a morning mist of confusion.

You had a lover. I killed him. It was war and your

man was on the losing side. As I killed him, he

fatally wounded me; that is, he gave me the

wound that only love could repair. Love lost, and

the wound would be as bloody as ever. As bloody

as now, bed-soaked and jagged.

I didn't care about dying. But you took me in out

of pity because you didn't know my name. I told

you it was Tantrist, and as Tantrist you loved me.

'What if I was Tristan?' I asked you one day, and

I watched you grow pale, and take a dagger. You

had every right to kill me. I turned my throat to

you, Adam's apple twitching slightly, but before I

closed my eyes, I smiled.

When I opened them again, you had put down

the dagger and you were holding my hand. I felt

like a little child, not a hero, not a warrior, not a

lover, only a boy in a big bed, the day turning

round him, dreamy and slow.

The room was high and blue. Cobalt blue. There

was an orange fire. Your eyes were green. Lost

in the colours of our love I never forgot them, and

now, lying here, where the sheets are brown with

my blood, it is blue and orange and green I

remember. A little boy in a big bed.

Where are you?

We said nothing. You sat beside me. You were

the strong one. I couldn't stand up. Holding my

hand, and stroking it gently with your ringer and

thumb, you touched in me another world. Until

then, through wounds and wreck, I had been

sure of myself. I was Tristan. Now, my name

gone backwards, I went backwards myself,

unravelling into strands of feeling. This stranded

man.

When it was time for me to sail back to Cornwall,

you came out and stood on a narrow rock, and

we watched each other so far that only we two

knew what was rock or boat or human.

The sea was empty. The sky was shut.

Then King Marke sent me to fetch you to be his

wife. You said you wanted to kill me.

Again I opened my body to you. Again you

dropped the blade.

When your servant brought the drink I knew you

intended to poison me. Under the cliffs of

Cornwall, the King in his boat ready to meet us, I

drank the water, because that's what it was. Your

servant had given me water. You drank too, and

fell to the floor, and I went to catch you and hold

you as the men dropped anchor and the ship

lurched. You were in my arms for the first time,

and you said my name, 'Tristan.'

I answered you: 'Isolde.'

Isolde. The world became a word.

We lived for the night. The torch in your window

was my signal. When it was lit, I stayed away.

When you extinguished it, I came to you - secret

doors, dark corridors, forbidden stairs, brushing

aside fear and propriety like cobwebs. I was

inside you. You contained me. Together, in bed,

we could sleep, we could dream, and if we heard

your servant's mournful cry, we called it a bird or

a dog. I never wanted to wake. I had no use for

the day. The light was a lie. Only here, the sun

killed, and time's hands bound, were we free.

Imprisoned in each other, we were free.

When my friend Melot set the trap, I think I knew

it. I turned to death full face, as I had turned to

love with my whole body. I would let death enter

me as you had entered me. You had crept along

my blood vessels through the wound, and the

blood that circulates returns to the heart. You

circulated me, you made me blush like a girl in

the hoop of your hands. You were in my arteries

and my lymph, you were the colour just under my

skin, and if I cut myself, it was you I bled. Red

Isolde, alive on my fingers, and always the force

of blood pushing you back to my heart.

In the fight when Marke found us, I fought at the

door until you escaped. Then I faced Melot at

last, my friend, my trusted friend, and I held my

sword at him, red with blood. As he lifted his

sword against me, I threw mine down and ran his

through my body, at the bottom of my ribs. The

skin, still shy of healing, opened at once.

When I woke, I was here, in my own castle,

across the sea, carried and guarded by my

servant. He told me he had sent for you, yes

surely there was a sail? I could see it swift as

love. He climbed into the watchtower, but there

was no sail.

I put my hand into the bloody gap at the bottom

of my ribs. Her name drips through my fingers:

Isolde. Where are you?

Tristan, I didn't drink it either. There was no lovepotion,

only love. It was you I drank.

Tristan, wake up. Don't die of the wound. Divide

the night with me, and die together in the

morning.

His eye is pale, his breathing is still. When I first

saw him, he was still and pale, and I kissed him

into life, though he never knew that was the art I

used.

Tristan, the world was made so that we could find

each other in it. Already the world is fading,

returning to the sea. My pulse ebbs with yours.

Death frees us from the torment of parting. I

cannot part with you. I am you.

The world is nothing. Love formed it.

The world vanishes without trace.

What is left is love.

The pot of Full Strength Samson was finished.

Dark and Pew wer

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 750