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A PLACE BEFORE THE FLOODDark 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: 733
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