She woke from a dream she was glad to be out of. She had been with Ray again in the old flat on the South Side. Yet nothing bad had happened in the dream. They had been drinking wine together and talking and laughing. As she lay staring at the ceiling, it was the intimacy they had been sharing that disturbed her, as if her mind were insisting that a long-past time in her life was still a part of her present, that where she was living was a more complicated place than she had thought.

She decided that what she didn’t like about dreams was that they were no respecters of the reality you thought you were inhabiting. They were so subversive. They evoked places you didn’t recognise or put you back in situations you were glad to be out of and made them so real that they became, intangibly but very vividly, a part of your life. They made you feel that the life you were living was not as solid and three-dimensional as you had been imagining.

Turning her head on the pillow, she widened her eyes and stared at the bedside clock, as if taking a compass-reading to fix her position in reality. On the fact that it was half-past ten the concrete present formed around her like a protective structure. It made her feel safe.

She sat up in bed and looked around her. Yes, this was where she lived, though occasionally she might wonder why. The recent activity of early morning re-ran itself in her head, like a catechism of the meaning of her life. Dave had been late for work again, using frequent imprecations like rocket fuel to propel him out of the house. The boys had been their usual sleep-walking selves: pausing, with one shoelace tied, to stare for minutes into the mystery of things, casually assaulting each other as they passed. Zac had delivered a diatribe against the unbelievable enormity of having no Sugar Puffs, maintaining with passion that all other cereals were just crap, while Michael, a lofty two years older, declared that he wouldn’t be accompanying a wimp to school. No wonder she had come back to bed to cuddle into her lonely sanity.

Still, she thought (as if chastising Ray for the impertinence of his reappearance), they weren’t so bad. Zac, given an unbroken supply of Sugar Puffs in his life, was one of the gentlest boys she knew. Michael was always very solicitous if he thought she was worried about something. And Dave, she supposed, was in all ways a good example to the boys.

Having gone back to bed in her bra and pants, she rose and pulled on jeans and sweater. As she did so, she changed her thought about Dave to ‘in some ways’. He always seemed to turn their bedroom into a wardrobe with furniture. Yesterday’s underpants were on the lid of the linen-basket, not inside it. A pair of trousers lay on the floor where he had dropped them. There was a tie over the door-handle, discarded socks beside the bed. Why did some men have to leave signs of themselves all over the place, like dogs peeing at every corner to mark out their territory? She slipped her shoes on.

She thought about tidying up the debris he had left. No. This was the case for the prosecution. She would leave it there and ask him to clear it up himself. She had to make a stand, put a stop to the idea that she was some kind of unpaid maidservant, there to follow them around and mop up after male untidiness, for his attitude had spread to the boys too. To confirm her resolution, she looked briefly into the boys’ rooms as well, briefly being as long as she could stand it. There were discarded clothes and plates with congealed half-eaten food on them. Each of their rooms looked like a litter bin with a bed in it.

Coming downstairs, she noticed some pairs of the boys’ shoes abandoned haphazardly in the hall. Wondering if she should leave them there as well, she was distracted by the sight of Dave’s v-neck sweater lying on the hall table. It must have been too warm to wear it. Certainly, it seemed bright outside. As she lifted the sweater, she felt its fineness and thought how fussy he was about choosing clothes. Maybe he should be as fussy about other things. He had asked her to book her own birthday dinner. Romantic, eh? This was getting too much. It had to be sorted out. Beware, my family. Many things will change. Domestic Armageddon is tonight! She was walking towards the kitchen with the sweater, thinking she might put it in the wash, when the doorbell rang. She stopped at the end of the hallway and turned towards the door.

All she could see were two dark shapes, one taller than the other, through the heavy layers of lace curtains he had persuaded her to put there after they had once been taken by the urge to make love in the hallway and she had insisted on going upstairs in case someone came to the door and saw them. The situation never repeated itself but ‘hope springs eternal’ he had said.

She waited, watching the door. Kathleen next door had told her that two Jehovah’s Witnesses had been here yesterday, a man and a woman, when she was out. Let’s be out again, she thought. Jehovah at the door she could live without. But the doorbell went again. Ah well, it’s short shrift for Jehovah.

As she went towards the door she quickly tried to push the shoes to the left side of the hall with her foot. That way, she half-thought, they wouldn’t be visible when she opened the door, especially if she didn’t open it very widely. (And with Jehovah’s Witnesses that wasn’t a bad idea). The door opened and she went instantly from reverie into a vivid present.


First, it is the dark, uniformed figures of a tall policeman and a shorter policewoman standing on her doorstep, black as crows. Their suddenness is startling, sheer presences stark against the brightness of the day. Panic takes her. Then she notices that old Tom Simpson across the street is mowing his lawn and her mind takes in the image like a talisman. This is where banality lives. Bad things happen elsewhere.

‘Yes?’ she says.

‘Mrs Howard?’ the policeman says.

‘Yes.’

‘Mrs David Howard?’

‘Well, Mrs Jane Howard. But I’m David‘s wife, yes. What’s happened?’

The man seems momentarily to have exhausted his store of language.

‘I’m WPC Marion Copeland,’ the policewoman says, almost making a smile but erasing it instantly. ‘This is PC Bryden. Could we come in?’

They become an awkward grouping in the hall as the policeman closes the door.

‘Perhaps we should sit down,’ the woman says.

‘Tell me what’s happened.’

‘I think we should sit down.’

‘For God’s sake, will you tell me what’s happened?’

‘It’s about your husband,’ the man says. ‘There’s been an accident. A car accident.’

‘We need you – ‘ the woman says.

‘But how do you know it’s him? How can you know? How can you?’

‘He had his driving licence on him,’ the man says. ‘And a letter in his pocket confirmed his address. This address.’

She senses a terrible circumstance encroaching on her home and she doesn’t know how to forbid it admittance.

‘We need you to come – ‘

‘But the children are at school.’

She isn’t saying it to them. She is saying it to herself. It is not a statement. It is a prayer, an invocation of the power of daily things to prevent anything as unforeseen as this from happening.

‘We can arrange for them to be brought home, if you want,’ the woman says.

‘No! Why would we do that?’

The silence that follows becomes a darkness into which it is too frightening to look. It is as if the day has developed tinnitus, become a ringing silence beyond which all other sound is distant and obscure. It seems important not to cry. Crying will admit a finality that cannot be allowed. But someone is crying and a strange voice is speaking somewhere.

‘Where is Dave?’

‘He’s in the hospital,’ a man’s voice says from very far away.

A woman’s face appears, strange as a gargoyle through the prism of someone’s tears.

‘He’s dead, Mrs Howard. They think it was more or less instantaneous. I’m sorry.’

‘But he just left this morning,’ another voice is saying.

‘We need you to come and identify the body.’

A woman is holding you. Her arms feel like a trap. To stay here is never to escape from what she is bringing. You have to be free of her.

‘Excuse me, please.’

Someone you no longer are said that. It is a familiar remark from yesterday. But this is a strange today.

‘Of course, Mrs Howard. We’ll wait here.’


A door has closed. They are no longer there. You are alone. You must stay here. There is the novel he is reading, open on the arm of his chair. How the sunlight hits the pages. He is enjoying it. He still has to finish it. You haven’t booked the birthday dinner yet. A lawn is still being mowed. How could this be happening if a lawn is being mowed? Around you the furniture seems cluttered, a jumble sale of charms. Surely they still work.

But is this still where you thought you lived? You must make this place again where you thought you lived. Touch the sideboard, feel its familiarity. Walk up and down here. The carpet feels familiar. You can smell his body in the fabric you are holding. He is still here. He can’t be gone. Things are still as they were.

But how can they be, when you are crouched against a wall? This isn’t where you live. You aren’t who you thought you were. This is all you are, a woman crouched rocking on her haunches. Trying to measure infinity in inches.

Strange voices are talking beyond a door. They are waiting for you. They don’t know that they mustn’t come in. The door mustn’t open. Rocking goes still. Silence means you are not.

Don’t listen. If they cannot be heard, it cannot happen. Someone is knocking at a door. They do not know that you aren’t here. They are elsewhere. They can’t come in.

You must stay here, silent and still, or elsewhere becomes final. Let them knock.

You must stay here.


Creaking on the hinges he hadn’t oiled, the door opened slowly.

‘Mrs Howard? Are you there?’





Copyright © 2012, William McIlvanney. All rights reserved.
Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.
 

The sails of the dhows waved on the horizon, a lazy flotilla of canvas shark-fins. Kate shielded her eyes to gaze at them, the boats conjuring scenes from the fantasy novels of her youth. She had to remind herself that these were mere fishing boats, not the advance guard of some tentacled warrior species. But here, with the cool surf nosing at her feet and the sky yawning blue, she felt dreamy and liquid, her imagination uncurling from the trap Glasgow had made for it. No bus of xeroxed minds scanning the Metro. No gloomy meetings at which the main word intoned was ‘cuts’, before – like necromancy – they’d come to pass. No clutched coffee-time huddled over the jobs section of the paper. That morning she’d been given a lemon-grass massage by a teenage girl whose ebony fingers had pressed and kneaded out those hard Scottish knots. The girl had complained about her boyfriend’s infidelity. ‘You should leave him,’ Kate had mumbled from the end of a long corridor, through which ambient music flowed like coconut milk.

        Kate headed along the beach, tugging a linen shawl over shoulders already pinkened by sun. The sand glowed a Zanzibarian yellow. Waves hissed. Endless, sweet hours of nothing stretched before her. She’d packed big novels that needed time, space and a hammock to absorb – Gravity’s Rainbow, Anna Karenina – but so far she’d lifted only a guide book which made exotic promises on each page: ‘One of Africa’s best known and most enticing destinations.’; ‘Tropical languor’; ‘Miles and miles of white sands lapped by warm, translucent waters’. Just reading it made her the sort of dizzy teenagers feel when first in love.

        Further up the beach, a black man in an LA Lakers vest was chatting to a white couple wearing shades and sun hats. The couple were nodding, while the black man smiled, his fingertips pressed earnestly together. A birdsong of laughter flashed across the sand. So the locals were friendly to tourists. Of course they were. Kate reprimanded herself for fearing otherwise, then pitied those back home and their litany of excuses for not coming: Rochelle, who wasn’t prepared to blow the severance pay; Harriet, struggling with her mortgage; Gerda, who’d shocked Kate by worrying openly about kidnappings, rapings, torture – ‘They don’t like white people in Africa, Kate. Haven’t you seen the news?’

        The man in the LA Lakers vest was approaching her. Kate had a point to prove to Gerda.

        ‘How you doing today?’ the man smiled, his limbs easy, his gait relaxed.

        ‘Wonderful!’ Kate beamed back, ‘What a beautiful country you have.’

        ‘Thank you. But sometimes we forget. Every day the sun. Every day the sea.’ He mock-rolled his eyes. ‘We need you to remind us.’

        ‘Happy to do so.’

        ‘Where you come from? England?’

        ‘Scotland,’ Kate replied.

        ‘Scotland is part of England?’

        ‘Both part of Britain,’ Kate said, ‘But maybe not for long.’ The man’s eyebrows twitched with confusion. She sensed a long, potentially boring treatise on the constitutional make-up of the United Kingdom unroll before them, its tributary strands on Scottish independence and the vital distinction between ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ snaking infinitely away. ‘Anyway,’ Kate said, ‘You don’t want to hear about that.’

        She was right. He didn’t.

        ‘In Zanzibar we want you to relax. Be happy! We have everything you need. We have beach, we have spice, dolphin, seafood—’

        ‘Yum,’ said Kate.

        ‘We have tortoise. Very big!’ At this he pretended to plod on all fours, making a thoughtful, pinched face. Kate laughed and he straightened up, then pressed his fingers together the way she’d seen him do when talking to the couple. ‘How long you stay for?’

        ‘Here in Nungwi for four days,’ she said, ‘then down to Kendwa, over to Tanzania on safari, and finishing off in Stone Town.’

        The man nodded slowly as though taking in each point on the itinerary, then said, ‘You want scuba-dive? Snorkel?’

        ‘Um,’ Kate said, ‘Maybe. I hadn’t thought about—’

        He went into his pocket and took out a card. ‘Me and brother, we run boat, take you out to sea. Coral reefs, dolphins. Ocean beauty. You like. Very good price.’

        She took the card. A phone number was handwritten on it next to a name she couldn’t make out.

        ‘You stay here? In this hotel?’ He pointed towards the compound, its sunloungers, swimming pool and massage benches walled off from the beach.

        ‘Yes,’ she said uncertainly.

        ‘I look for you. Tomorrow morning. Afternoon? Take you snorkel on boat. Very good price.’

        ‘I’ll, uh, I’ll have to think about that.’

        ‘Okay,’ he said, and glanced towards a man and woman ambling down the beach, ‘I look for you.’

        Kate put the card in her bag and watched him head towards the couple, hands open. ‘Hey!’ he greeted them, ‘Where you from?’

        The husband shook his head and didn’t break his stride, the wife mumbling, ‘Sorry, we don’t want to snorkel.’ The man wasted no further time, his head revolving, spotting another target further up the sand.

        ‘Unbelievable,’ the husband muttered.

            Kate looked along the surf to see another black man –dreadlocks, Manchester United shirt – setting a course towards her with purpose. She changed direction and walked inland, but he bent his path to meet her, grinning and extending a braceleted arm. ‘Hey, beautiful lady. How long you stay?’

Kate blew air and waved her hat across her face, the shadow of the canopy easing her hot skin. She sipped at the mango juice and spread toes into the cool sand. Six separate men had just tried to sell her snorkelling tours on one mile of shore. She’d chatted to the first three, politely taking their cards and saying that she’d let them know. By the fourth she was lying about which hotel she was in. By the fifth she was saying that her flight was later that day. She hadn’t even stopped for the sixth, instead waved him away and headed towards the sanctuary of a beach restaurant. The hawker had muttered something at her back and she’d flushed with guilt but carried on walking.

        ‘Restaurant’ was perhaps overstating things. It was three fold-down tables with straw canopies, a chalkboard menu, and a bar with two stools. Its major selling point was that when hawkers approached, the owner would growl at them in Kiswahili and they’d troop moodily away. He bowed his head to Kate and she gave him the thumbs up.

        ‘They are not even from Zanzibar,’ he grunted, ‘They come from Tanzania. Leeches.’

        ‘Oh,’ she said.

        He handed her a menu then left, and as soon as she looked at the menu she realised she was ravenous. Octopus, kingfish, sea bream, rock cod, grey mullet, shark, squid, tuna, sailfish. Herbs, spices, stews, curries. She wanted all of it. When the owner came back to take her order, glancing warily around for hawkers, she asked how fresh the food was.

        He snorted. ‘Very fresh. Caught this morning. You not see dhow?’

        ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘You don’t get the fish from a shop?’

        He shook his head, baffled at such a bizarre, foreign concept. ‘Ocean is there. Reach in! Take!’

        ‘Of course,’ she said and dipped her head, embarrassed, before ordering the kingfish in coconut milk with rice and plantain. The owner smiled, gentlemanly, then retreated with a final stab of his pen on the pad.

        Kate was able to enjoy the beach again, undisturbed at last: the silver line of the horizon, the turquoise waters, the drowsy spell of the dhow, the pearly waves. It was only when her eyes caught the hawkers patrolling back and forth, targeting tourists, that grit entered the idyll. They met up every so often, forming strategies, exchanging successes and failures, before detaching and trying again. She wouldn’t let this irritate her. After all, she was the intruder here. She was the one who’d been picked up in an air-conditioned car at the airport and driven through shanty towns, full of houses with straw doors and roofs of corrugated tin, where children carried litres of water down dirt tracks.

        Piled gloriously on the back of one of these villages: the Nungwi complex. A five-star network of hotels and leisure facilities, teeming with Westerners, which separated the townspeople from their own beach. The hotel gates had opened to her as though it were preordained from birth, uniformed Zanzibarians bowing as she’d entered. For a second, the regality of it appealed to her and she’d almost given an imperial roll of the hand.

        Fuck you, global recession.

        The kingfish, when it arrived, was just about the most beautiful thing Kate had ever tasted. Spicy and moist, tender and flavourful, it made the Michelin-starred chefs of Oban – a place which declared itself ‘the seafood capital of Scotland’ – seem like toddlers mixing ketchup with cereal.  

        ‘You like?’ the owner said, as ecstasy spread across her face with each forkful.

        ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Gorgeous.’

        He smiled. ‘That is good. You come back here any day. I cook for you.’

        ‘I certainly will,’ she trilled, and there was a moment of hesitation when he stood over Kate’s table awkwardly before she said, ‘Uh, would you like to join me?’

        ‘Thank you, that is most kind,’ he said, bowing again. ‘My name is Mustapha.’

        ‘Kate,’ she said, and when they shook hands she blushed slightly beneath his gaze.

        Once he’d sat there was a new directness about him, as though he’d been holding back from the moment she’d stepped in. ‘I am always interested in where tourist come from, why they are in Zanzibar. This is how I learn about the world. Tell me.’

        ‘Well,’ she said, leaning back from the intensity of his gaze, ‘I’m from Scotland.’

        ‘Scotland!’ he said, clapping hands together, ‘That is in Ireland, yes?’

        ‘No, it’s part of Britain. But it’s … it might not.’ She sighed. ‘It’s complicated.’

        ‘You is here alone, Kate?’

        She opened her mouth then closed it, scanning his intentions. But his face was earnest, with no obvious flirtation hovering in his eyes.

        ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I needed to get away. Things in Britain are very bad, very gloomy. Bad politics. Bad economy.’

        ‘Is dictator in Britain?’

        ‘Ha,’ she laughed, ‘Not quite. Almost! Anyway, I’ve just been made redundant.’

        He creased his face.

        ‘Unemployed. I have lost my job.’

        ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I am sorry.’

        ‘Well, I’m not exactly the only one. The British government are cutting the public sector. So I decided to just, y’know, take off somewhere while I still have the money to do it. I might never be able to afford this again.’ He was listening, but she felt an urge to sound less prosaic, more interested in his culture. ‘And I’ve always wanted to visit Zanzibar, because it sounds so exotic and strange, and so …’

        ‘Is beautiful place,’ he smiled, ‘We are very lucky for you to choose us.’

        ‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘the pleasure is all mine. But now that I’m here …’

        ‘Yes?’

        ‘I feel a bit guilty. As though I’ve floated in like this rich Westerner, even though I’m not. I mean, look at how wonderful this place is, and you have tourists crawling all over it. It doesn’t belong to the people anymore.’

        He folded his arms and stared at her, but she couldn’t work out if it was in judgement or sympathy, and she squirmed a little. ‘Then why you come?’

        She shrugged. ‘You can’t swim in the sea in Scotland.’

        ‘Exactly. We need tourist in Zanzibar. You bring money.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together then laid his hand on her wrist in a brief plea.

        ‘Yes,’ she said, swallowing, ‘but then I see all the poverty in the villages and I just feel—’

        The owner raised a finger, his expression falling.

        ‘Zanzibar has not poverty. Ethiopia, Ghana, Sudan, Malawi, very poor, yes. But not Zanzibar. We have tourist. We are island. We have clean water, lots of seafood, jobs, hotels, spices. Trade.’

        My god, thought Kate, he thinks these are decent living standards? She considered imparting her view of the shanty towns, of the crumbling roads, of the chaotic airport where she’d had to pay a bribe to receive her luggage. Not even the lowest-paid people in Europe live like this. But she wondered if he might find it insulting, and held her tongue.

        ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘Sorry.’      

         ‘Why you come alone, Kate?’

        She glanced up sharply to find his head cocked and a curiosity boring its way in. The loneliness must’ve been shining from her.

        ‘I, uh,’ she found herself saying, babbling, her hands working at a cardboard beer mat, ‘I don’t know where my life is going. Everything feels so uncertain now. So … unsolid. Britain’s becoming a terrible place. All our selfishness and greed has started to eat us.’

        He was nodding, leaning forwards on the table.

        ‘I don’t know when it was that money just took over. But God, Mustapha, things feel so desperate back home. Everyone’s depressed. Everyone’s empty.’ She gestured out to the sea, to the swaying dhows, to the shimmering waves, to its infinite calm. ‘Whereas here …’

        Mustapha ruminated upon this. ‘I understand.’

        ‘I suppose you’ve had greater troubles than ours, yes?’

        He raised an eyebrow and took a deep breath. Then he said, ‘In 1964 we have revolution in Zanzibar. Overthrow British and Arab rulers. Very violent. Twelve thousand people killed.’

        ‘My god.’

        He gave a regretful shrug, which suggested more than it stated. ‘Ruler now is son of first President of independent Zanzibar. Elections not free. Police brutal. So much corruption. Did they not stop your car from airport?’

        ‘Yes,’ said Kate, remembering her driver slowing at a checkpoint and the police peering in. They’d conversed in Kiswahili and the officer had examined her there in the backseat, before waving them on.

        ‘Is okay for tourist because tourist bring money, but we Zanzibarians have to pay police at checkpoint. Checkpoint there for no other reason. You no pay, they arrest.’

        The waves rolled and hissed in the distance. Mustapha was staring at the table, a growl emerging in his voice.

        ‘After 2000 election we demonstrate. Twenty six protestors killed by police. No one has protested since then.’

        He looked up at her, his face still, almost challenging.

        ‘That’s terrible,’ she said quietly, ‘I had no idea.’

        He turned his head and stared out to sea, seeming to disappear somewhere inside himself. ‘But when I was small boy here? Every day we play on beach. Every day we swim in sea. We catch fish. We laugh. We sail on dhow.’

        He lapsed into silence. She reached forward and took his hand, squeezing it. He glanced up at her, attempting to smile, before he blew out air and withdrew his hand. Then he reached into his pocket.

        ‘That remind me of something.’

        ‘Yes?’

        Mustapha unfolded a piece of paper and spread it out on the table: pictures of a dhow set against a vivid orange sunset, of blue and yellow fish, of pink and mauve coral reefs. He tapped at the leaflet with his forefinger and grinned at Kate.

        ‘My cousin run snorkelling tour. Very good price. You like?’



Copyright © 2012, Alan Bissett. All rights reserved.
Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

Why are we leaving in such unreadiness?

- Your name was last.

Is it too late to call?  Is there still time to confess?

- The moment's passed.

If the weather is stormy, should we go nonetheless?

 - None forecast.

Where are our dogs and our horses? Can you guess?

- Slain. Shot. Gassed.

How will we know when we reach our new address?

- Heed the blast.

How do we look in our fine new leaving-dress?

- Alone. Aghast. 

Where are we going, so light and riderless? 

- Nowhere. Fast

When the tour buses halted at the cotton fields beyond Samarkand it was Ramil who was always first to break off working.

            Like exotic migrant birds, tourists from Britain, America, Germany, Japan and elsewhere would swoop, flocking and chaffering, along the roadside. Often Ramil took the chance to light a cigarette and observe from a distance. No one was interested in him anyway. It was the women they wanted to see: those who still wore the traditional vibrant Uzbek dress, the dark-eyed young girls, and the older folk with their array of gold-filled front teeth.   

            Most of the tourists would have read up on the history and culture of Uzbekistan and absorbed the information provided by the more diligent tour guides. These foreign visitors didn’t consider themselves tourists – in their view tourists went off to holiday resorts for a fortnight in the sun. They were “travellers” he’d heard them say, and they especially wanted to visit the land of the Great Silk Road to follow in the footsteps of famous explorers, such as Marco Polo, who’d made this journey before them.

            Ramil, wearing his designer logo T-shirt and jeans, wasn’t worth a photograph to show back home. As usual, this group ignored him. He didn’t care. It gave him the opportunity to approach the tractor drivers. Ramil finished his cigarette, picked up his almost empty cotton-collecting sack and, walking past the old man who swept up the leavings of the workers, he went to the end of the row where one of drivers stood beside the weighing machine. The western cigarettes Ramil’s affluent father bought for him were visible inside the sack as he handed it over. Moments later he returned to the field with his sack empty of cigarettes but bulging with cotton – a respectable amount, so that he wouldn’t lose face when it came to weighing-in time.

            In this country it was all about losing face or rather not losing face. But it was ridiculous that he should be here picking cotton like a field hand for a miserable wage. His family claimed they could trace ancestry to the mighty Timur, the warrior known as Tamerlane, who’d crushed the Golden Horde and tried to forge a nation from diverse tribes. And his parents were wealthy. They didn’t need to hap up their belongings and sit at crossroads with their children, waiting for the harvest hirers to look them over before deciding whether to employ them. Yet his father insisted that now Ramil was at university his son must take part in the harvest, as lots of students did, and live for six weeks in basic shared accommodation to help pick cotton.

            ‘Cotton is vital for our economy,’ his father said. ‘It provides clothes and paper and soap and cattle feed and a host of other uses. The world needs cotton. It’s Uzbekistan’s “white gold” and the work of those who went before you is why you’re able to attend university. Young people have always helped with the harvest. It’s part of your heritage, an obligation. You must go.’  

With a roar of its engine and trailing a plume of exhaust fumes the bus left and the workers drifted back. Ramil inclined his head to the attractive girl he’d noticed earlier. A university student like himself, yet she was completely at ease in this environment. He gave her a small salute and she smiled and waved. Ah… his mood lifted. Although, he thought her as naïve as the rest, who never accepted money for photographs, and were just happy to see their faces on the digital cameras or to take a break to practise their English. He watched her join the women chatting about the tourists and the countries they came from.

             By evening Ramil was exhausted. His city living hadn’t prepared him for the sheer hard work. The prickly spines of the bolls that held the cotton fibre tore at his fingers and sweat stains were spoiling his expensive T-shirt. The rest of the workers didn’t seem to mind so much. Together on the seating mattresses beside the low tables spread with coloured cloth and laden with plates of pilaff and baskets full of round golden bread they began to tell stories. 

            He managed to manoeuvre himself next to the girl while the tales of Hodja Nasreddin, part sage, part trickster, were exchanged. It didn’t matter that everyone knew these riddles and jokes from childhood. Their re-telling was like a family gathering where a familiar anecdote is anticipated with glee and laughter. Someone who’d lived in the Americas commented that similar stories existed there. After each telling people would unravel the story and discuss possible meanings and new interpretations.

            Darkness came and the lamps were lit. A woman looked up at the stars blazing in the cold bright sky and spoke of the past, and of the famous scientist Ulugbek, grandson of the fierce conqueror Emperor Timur. Ulugbek didn’t wish to be a warrior and became instead an astronomer. He built an observatory and accurately calculated the days of the year. He had knowledge of the planets at a time when Europe believed that a sailing ship might fall off the western end of the Atlantic Ocean.

            Ramil had a sudden memory of his father taking him outside on a night much like this and naming the constellations. He’d been quite young and complained that he could not properly see, so his father had hoisted him up onto his shoulders. 

            Tea was poured into little bowls and distributed around the tables and then an old man spoke up, saying: ‘I know a tale, but it would chill the bones of those who hear it.’

            They begged him to continue. The old man drank some tea before he began,    

            ‘My story is of two men, a father and son, who ran a large roadside inn, a caravanserai, in the Kyzyl Kum desert. Their caravanserai was an important stopping place as there was no other water source available for enormous distances on every side. Caravans of rich merchants laden with silks and spices, carpets, jewels, perfume and furs passed that way. They stopped at this caravanserai where the father and his son fed and watered the travellers, camels and horses, and provided overnight accommodation for all.

            ‘It was not unusual for traders to go missing along the Great Silk Road, and in that area they frequently did. But since time began humans have always vanished in the desert. They are prey for brigands and robbers, and also, who knows what spirits lie out there to trap the unwary? Djinns move through the desert, raising sandstorms in seconds and covering tracks. Thus travellers lose their way.’   

            Several of the listeners vouched that this was true. Had they not witnessed with their own eyes trailing streams of light and felt a wind arising on a calm day to stir the sand? 

            ‘Sometimes whole caravans disappeared, swallowed up by the desert. And all that could be done was to hope that they died in grace,’ the old man cupped his hands to his face, ‘and commend their souls to God.’

            In agreement, those at the table followed suit.  

            ‘One day,’ the old man went on, ‘there was a fault with the water supply. The well, which was a short distance from the main building of the caravanserai, began to give off a bad smell. The water in the adjoining bathhouse ran murky and foul.

            'The locals sent word to the government and, as any disruption to such important trade would affected their income, the government immediately dispatched officials and soldiers to investigate. Beside the well the soldiers dug down to try to locate the water table and the source of the spring. Far beneath the desert sands they broke through a layer of rock and into a vast underground cavern.

            ‘Inside the cavern they found,’ the old man paused to take a sip of his tea and wipe his mouth with his scarf. ‘Inside this underground cave,’ he continued, ‘was a…. bear. A huge, blind, bear, and….,’ the old man looked around at his audience, ‘strewn everywhere were hundreds of bones. Human bones. The remains of many, many people. Men, women and children.’ 

            Everyone gasped. The girl beside Ramil shivered and he, quite naturally, moved closer to comfort her.

            ‘The soldiers killed the bear and descended into the cavern. Holding aloft flaming torches they ventured deeper and found a tunnel leading to thecaravanserai. At the end of the tunnel a shaft led straight up to a trapdoor in the floor of one of the cellars of the caravanserai.

            ‘The two men, father and son, who ran the caravanserai had been stealing from the travellers. While the travellers slept they took away their horses and camels to a secret place to sell later. Then they stripped their guests of their clothes and valuables and flung them down the shaft to the bear that they kept in the cavern below.’

            There were cries of horror at this vile outrage against traditional hospitality. Someone asked, ‘Were the people still alive when they were thrown into the cavern?’

            The old man shrugged his shoulders. ‘That I do not know. In any case the men were arrested and held to await trial.’

            ‘It’s an offence not only to the travellers, but to all of us, that anyone should do such a thing to a guest,’ said someone else. ‘I hope these men didn’t escape.’

            ‘Indeed not,’ replied the old man. ‘Here now is the end of the story, 

            ‘The local people decided they didn’t trust government justice. They suspected the father and son might be let off by offering to tell where the treasure was hidden or, at best, be executed swiftly. They wanted a most dreadful punishment for this most dreadful crime so they decided to mete out their own.’

            ‘What did they do?’ the girl whispered.

            ‘A mob broke into the place where the men were being held. They tied ropes around each man’s arms and legs separately and then tied the arm and leg of each man to individual horses. The horses were placed to face in opposite directions.’

            An older woman nodded. ‘A punishment handed out by the Emperor Timur himself to lawbreakers.’

            ‘Hot peppers were stuffed up the nostrils of the horses and they were whipped and lashed to make them gallop away furiously to all points of the compass. And thus the father and son were torn apart.’

            The girl shuddered.

            Ramil drew nearer and she leaned in against him. He raised his eyes and met those of the old man: flat, almond-shaped, with the wisdom of centuries. It was the same man he’d passed on his way to bribe the tractor driver to fill his cotton sack. Ramil’s heart flickered and he could not hold his gaze.

            ‘Such a brutal punishment, such a violent end,’ said one hearer.

            ‘But they betrayed their own people,’ said another. 

            Who are my people? Ramil thought. In Uzbekistan live descendants of not only Uzbeks, but also Tartars, Mongols, Chinese, Russians, and more.

            ‘Who are my people?’

            There was a silence and Ramil realised he’d asked the question aloud. 

            The women and men around the tables looked at him and then towards the old man, the storyteller, for an answer.

            ‘Close your eyes,’ the old man instructed them.

            They did as he said.  

            ‘If you listen you can hear the breath of another beside you. Your neighbour. And then you may hear their neighbour, and so on, and so on. The more you listen, the more you will hear. If you listen carefully enough you will hear the whole world breathing.

            ‘Those whom you hear breathing,’ he declared, ‘those are your people.’

            There were exclamations of approval and delight. Ramil was silent.

            The woman who’d talked about the stars said, ‘It was also a great betrayal of the son by the father.’

            ‘How so?’ came the question. 

            ‘A father should teach his son to be honest and respect his fellow man.’

            Ramil thought of his own father. Holding him high above his head. He must have been only six or seven, feet planted on his father’s shoulders. His father’s hands holding his legs firmly so that he could see the stars.

            ‘Come onto my shoulders, my son,’ his father had said. ‘I will raise you up that you may wonder at the glory of the universe and marvel at our place in it.’

            The old man spoke slowly. ‘If your parents teach you well, then you should not shame them.’ 

            ‘And the betrayal of one’s country,’ added the girl, ‘that too is shameful.’

            ‘Yes, that is a terrible thing to do,’ the old man agreed. ‘To betray one’s country and one’s people. For, if one betrays one’s people, one betrays one’s self.’ He sighed. ‘How does a person live who betrays himself?’

Early next morning Ramil slid his arm from under the shoulder of the girl. She moved in her sleep and smiled. He waited until she was quiet and then left her side. He reckoned that if he moved fast and worked hard enough he could pick enough cotton to compensate for the amount he had cheated to obtain. At the door he lifted an empty cotton sack. Then Ramil went out to the fields to help gather in the harvest.   

Copyright © 2011, Theresa Breslin. All rights reserved.

Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

My grandmother was the thinnest woman I ever knew. Her ankles stuck like reeds from the dark, weighted pools of her shoes. Her wrists, busy and snappable and determined, drowned in their sleeves. Her clothes always billowed, hitched up and cinched in with string and extra stitches.

She might actually have fit in my suitcase, if we’d had time.

She was so light and so quick, when I was little I thought the wind might pick her up and take her, but it never did, and just by being there, just by existing, she made a place safe.

I thought so anyway. For a long time that’s what I thought.

We spent our days together. Her spidery, gaunt hands taught me how to make bread, how to hold a chicken so it hangs from your grip, dazed and expectant, how to steam the stamp from a letter and use it again, how to plant anything and make it grow.

I can see her now. I step in from the sun through her shadowed doorway, her house the only still thing in a tornado, the only thing that’s stayed the same. There’s the low tick of a clock, and the family portraits, the smell of something stewing, the shabby old lace tablecloth she made before she married, used and re-used, the dark quiet. And outside in the yard, there she is, shooing the chickens, planting marigolds while the war rains down around her.

When the men came, she tried not to let them in. The first one struck at her as she spoke and she flew like a feather in the air, slowed down almost, drifting, and then all of a sudden landing in the corner with her legs bent under her and her hands up to meet the wall.

I’d never seen my grandmother fall before.

They swarmed through the house like locusts. It shrank around them, up-ended, stripped dry. They trampled on soil, and paper faces and broken glass.

“They’re not here,” she said from her corner, like they were looking for my parents in the cups and books, in the split and bleeding cushions.

“They’re not here,” she said again, louder, her teeth framed in blood, her tongue thickened with it.

The wrong kind of blood, apparently. The wrong breed.

All I did was scream.

My grandmother reminds me of that now. She sits at her window with her sewing and she looks at me over her glasses.

“The noise you made,” she says, shaking her head, her mouth stuck with pins. “Like cats.”

“Sorry, Nana,” I tell her, and she smiles, and the pins glint.

It was her money that paid for us to leave. She counted it out, the notes falling from her hands so we had to bend and scrabble for them in the dust. More money than I had ever seen, hidden in her shoes, stitched into the fabric of her clothes, buried in her garden. She wouldn’t come with us. She laughed and shook her head when I asked her. She turned her back to me before I had finished waving.

It is dark in the hut at night.

Not dark like when we came here, pindrop-quiet in the back of the lorry, scared to breathe. It was so airless then, and so utterly, solidly black that after a while I began to wonder if there was such a thing as light, or if I’d only dreamt it. Not dark like it was then, because nothing is, but dark so you can’t see your hand in front of your face, so you can’t see what it’s doing.

It is too noisy to sleep. I don’t know how they all do it. The wind sprints at us across the flat of the fields and tries to climb in through all the gaps and slits and spaces at once, complaining if it doesn’t, howling with the effort of going round.

My father snores, the cavern of his throat collapsed, his breathing loud and liquid. I think this is what he has yearned for all day long, this oblivion.

My father drinks to forget. He drinks because there is no longer a good reason to have a steady hand. Because we ran away and left his mother at home and, unlike me, he cannot see her. Because we ran away to this. How do you shave with a rusted up razor and five families queuing to use the same tap? How do you maintain your standards? How does a Professor find better work than picking potatoes? My father drinks because the life he had is over.

Who can blame him?

My mother is quiet when she sleeps, but before she sleeps she prays. Not so I can hear the words she offers up to God (whose fault it is, I say, that we are here) but just so I can hear the soft plump and click of her speaking, the movements her mouth makes while she gives thanks for whatever it is we are left with. The sound of her is pretty, I listen for it in the dark, but sometimes I think my mother is a fool.

It is not until everyone else is asleep, and my mother is quiet, and my father is snoring, and I am left with only the wind for company, that I fumble for the suitcase hidden under my bed and open it.

Out she climbs, my grandmother, with the sun on her sunken, appled skin, and her chickens swaggering after her, and her breadstick limbs.

She brings me the things I asked for.

A jar of light.

The light from home, that splices instantly into planes of sun and shade; the light that warms your skin, first thing and all day; the light that bathes all it touches in clean gold.

I’ve remembered this light and longed for it. Here, the light is weak and grey and falls flat and uniform and there is no heat in it. It is like the pause before sunrise, but sunrise never comes. It is a constant waiting.

My grandmother opens the jar for me, smiling, and the air fills with hot gold and the red of the dust in her yard, and a sharp marigold orange. This black hut seethes with colour. For a moment I see the true green of my blanket, my arms a living brown, the veins beneath the skin bright blue. Like striking a match, until she puts the lid back, so as not to waste it, or wake the others. It snaps out, and is dark again, with the wind screaming, and just a faint glow to see things by.

My book of plants.

The book we made together, my grandmother and I, fat with seeds and pressed flowers and my slow, painstaking handwriting, her deft drawings of leaves. The book that contains her whole garden, all its secrets, and the things I know are true because she told me. It’s heavier than I remember when she gives it to me, thick and powdery with damp, the binding come loose, creased and muddied by the boots of soldiers. Our book garden crouches beneath my fingers, poised, impatient to begin. I turn the pages and they sigh and crump like moths’ wings, beating against my hands.

How to take a cutting from a rose and make a new one. How to marry two trees. How to grow tomatoes with skins like water. How to entice bees. How to make medicines from every flower. How to store a seed so even after generations of quiet dryness, it will grow.

While I am reading our garden, I hear it, her red and silver radio.

From the shelf in my grandmother’s kitchen, with a broken handle and a dial that leaps and crackles when it turns. She holds it to my ear, its song scratched and faint, with a buzz like constant applause, like a standing ovation. I clap too at the rare sound of it, my mother tongue, so nonchalant, so everyday. And beneath it, I hear the growl of traffic and car horns, a chorus of birds and dogs and voices, of clattering wheels and hurrying feet, the sounds of home.

My mother shifts and turns in her sleep and I look up and then the purring starts, the honeyed rumble of our cat, stretching in the suitcase like a yogi, blinking, peering out. Not ours, not really, just a tom who liked to stroll in the yard and threaten the chickens, who showed up unannounced at the kitchen window, or curled up on a chair for the afternoon. I hold my hand out to him and he considers it before he gives me his ears to stroke, the weight of his skull pushed firm into my palm, that purr still rolling, that pleasured thrum. I didn’t think to ask for him but he came anyway. He stalks the length of my legs, turning, testing the bed for comfort before he curls into my lap, warm and fur-soft and alive.

My grandmother reaches to stroke him and I ask her,

“Anything from Julia?”

She looks away and shakes her head, the lines at her mouth like stitches, sewing it shut.

“Did you give her my letters?”

She nods. Of course she did.

I hand her the latest one, written in my tiniest scrawl on an opened, flattened paper bag.

“Dearest Julia,” it begins, like all the others. “I hope you are well.”

I am sure she is not.

I think of my best friend, left behind without me. She is on the street where I last saw her, still waving, unable to move because I have frozen her there in time. That way, I am hoping no harm will come to her.

Who am I kidding?

My grandmother stows my letter in the suitcase and I stroke the sleeping cat and we don’t talk about Julia as the sky outside starts to lift. The crows on the fields shout down the wind and as beds creak and people shift and wake, she packs the other things too, the jar of light, our garden book, her radio. The cat gets up and climbs in at her gesture. We say goodbye.

It is morning again.

And I am elsewhere, wherever that might be.

Copyright © 2011, Jenny Valentine. All rights reserved.
Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

Ice lies in a thin slick across the bay, but he’s in the water anyway. The boy always is. Just like his grandmother.

            It might as well be the other side of the earth: her side of it. A late and overcast day in monochrome, showing only white, and spikes of grass and tree, and the hills drawn in charcoal streaks with scribbles of gully in between. Not so much snow, now.

            The world’s only colour lies in the beam of the Land Rover headlights – sick yellow of winter grass, a few dull pink yards of road. I switch off the engine and the lights too. Creak the door open into silence, and walk down to the shore, tightening my scarf round my neck. Cold burns my throat when I call to him.

            ‘Culley. Time to come home now.’

            I wait, used to it now, the tight slow thump of my heart as I wait for him to not-come-back. One day he’ll be gone. One day, like his mother.

            Not today.

            He hauls himself from the water, nostrils flaring open, cropped hair stiff with salt against his long skull, bits of ice still glittering in it. He towels his scalp with one hand, pulls on jeans with the other, tugging denim over damp skin.

            He smiles at me. ‘Grandpappy.’

            ‘Culley. Your father is worried. It’s late.’

            He looks at the sky, surprised. ‘I was just coming.’

            Like a boy hauled from the slides in the play park, he’s sheepish, apologetic, a little resentful.

            The relief chokes my throat, so to pass the embarrassing moment I bend to retrieve his jumper from the black rocks, and hand it to him. Unhurried, he pulls it over his head; big as it is, it stretches across his overdeveloped shoulders. He smiles at me again, his dark hair stiff with salt and frost but already drying.

            ‘I’ll take you back,’ I say.

            ‘Thanks. I’m sorry. It’s hard to know the time.’ He scratches his scalp nervously, and the frost-light makes the slight membrane between his fingers look thinner than ever.

            He’s a gentle boy. He doesn’t like to cause hurt, regrets it when he so often does. I don’t worry for him. Not much.

            I keep the rifle in the Land Rover, but I know I won’t need it.

His grandmother looked much the same, first time I saw her. Half-naked, that is, not gentle. In that climate I thought she was mad, with nothing but a silky-fur blanket clasped round her like a cloak.

            I’d gone to watch the penguins because I had some time off, and watching the penguins was a hobby for me, not work like it was for Mal. He watched penguins and fur seals and sometimes leopard seals, when there were any, when there was ice in the bay. They didn’t come in the warmer weather. He watched them and counted them and made records, and because those were the days before the internet, he sent data back home on the Inmarsat. I helped him, when I wasn’t fixing things. He loved his job, and I loved mine. You had to, or you wouldn’t be out on this lonely outcrop of a godforsaken island.  

            The unexpected woman sat on a rock, watching the penguins too, and they seemed more nervous of her than of me, but I wasn’t watching emperors any more. I laid my binoculars down because I didn’t need them; she was that close.

            When they say blood runs cold it’s a cliché, but there’s no other way to describe it. She wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d thought Mal and I were alone at this end of the island, and I thought for a ridiculous moment she’d missed her cruise ship and been left behind. Except that people off the cruise ships didn’t dress like that – half-naked under a silky-fur wrap.

            She turned her head and looked at me.

            ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

            My gut had tightened with the fear of madness. It was well below zero but her pale skin didn’t prickle with gooseflesh and she didn’t shiver, not once. Her hair was sleek and black and wet, and for a crazy moment I thought she must have been in the water. But that wasn’t possible. Not in her skin.

            ‘I’m fine,’ she smiled, ‘I’m grand. Hello yourself.’

            To step away from a near-naked woman, and one so beautiful: that would have been the mad thing. And when Malcolm found out, as he certainly would the next time we got garrulous with homesickness and rum, he’d never let me forget it.

            So I took a step closer instead, and saw that her hair wasn’t black at all but an odd iron-grey, with a hint of what might have been dappling. And though she was so tall and straight and slender, and her face was a long reptilian oval – which isn’t to say it wasn’t beautiful – her shoulders looked disproportionately powerful. She smelt of the sea: of grease-ice and salt and tussac grass, and quite possibly penguin-shit. I fell in love.

            I said, ‘You’ll have to come back to the base. You’ll have to come back with me.’

I’m a practical man. I’m not a scientist like Mal but an engineer. I fix things. I fix plumbing and generators and wireless masts and chemical toilets, when they need fixing. So I’m practical, and I’m rational, but where I come from they do have the seal stories. I thought the superstitions and the myths and the legends all came from the same place I did. It never occurred to me there could be others. I didn’t know there’d be an equivalence, a balance in the round globe, a mirror image of the north, if you like, which was the south.

            I thought they made the seal stories because common seals look so human: gentle and intelligent and empathetic. But those seals of the south don’t look human. Or if they do, it’s another kind of human altogether.

            I should have thought. But I didn’t think. I didn’t think at all in the months, turning into years, when Elin was mine.

Mal counted the leopard seals and studied them, and he loved them and respected them, but he feared them properly too. He stayed out of the water when the ice was in the bay, and he stayed away from the land’s edge when the penguins flocked like a black-and-white buffet. He didn’t want to be mistaken for one, he said, laughing.

            Elin liked Mal. She laughed when he laughed, but I was never jealous. It never occurred to me that she’d be unfaithful; she was too possessive, too passionate for that. She didn’t want to go back, she said, to the small fishing settlement on the other side of the island. She liked scientists, that’s why she’d come. She liked engineers too, and me best of all.

            She got pregnant, of course. I hadn’t exactly thought to stock up on supplies that might prevent that. I wanted her to leave the island then, to come with me on the red-hulled supply ship when it next called. She refused.

            Unnervingly, she refused any help at all. The pregnancy couldn’t have been as long as it seemed; I must have lost count of the months. She was restless and discontented, and liked to be alone, and one day she didn’t come back for all my searching and screaming, or Mal’s. She simply reappeared the next day with her infant.

            She smiled, her dappled hair plastered to her head, but the dampness wasn’t sweat, because when I kissed it and kissed it, holding onto her fiercely, it smelt of seawater, and ice, and penguin-shit, and blood.

            I loved our baby so ferociously, fear settled into me and wouldn’t leave. Children change things. Not outwardly, though; not for a while. I was too embarrassed to confide my suspicions to Mal, and I didn’t want to argue with Elin, so as usual we’d sit in the evenings, all three of us – four, with our quiet, ravenous daughter – and we drank rum and talked and laughed and spoke about the fur seals and the supply ship and the weather coming in across the razor-edged hills.

            Elin got along great with Mal, but nobody stays on the base forever; nobody, it seemed, except her. And now me, and our child. Mal’s replacement, when he chose to leave, was a spiky little man called Thewlis. I didn’t especially want a replacement for Mal, but then the base didn’t belong to me or the others who came through. The base wasn’t Elin’s. A replacement for Mal had to come to count the penguins and the fur seals, to record them and measure them and send the data back.

            Thewlis respected the leopard seals as much as Mal did. He’d get out of the water if there was one there with him. They weren’t aggressive, only curious, but you never knew. You never knew, and you could only remember Shackleton’s wild stories, and take account of anecdote and an earlier, less scientific age.

            Thewlis understood a lot less about children than about sub-Antarctic fauna, but that was hardly his fault. He simply couldn’t understand us keeping Sylvie in the wilderness. We beggared his belief, he said, when he got to know us better. It was mad, bringing up a child here. And soon she’d be of an age for school, and the nearest school was two islands away, and then what were we planning to do?

            I hadn’t planned anything, but I didn’t like to admit that because I’d sound downright gormless.

            Thewlis didn’t like or understand Sylvie, but that didn’t stop him worrying about her. She needed proper paediatric care and a decent education. He wanted us to take her away.

            That’s not quite true. I was useful; I knew the base and its innards. He wanted Elin to take Sylvie away.

            It’s not right, he’d say, stroking his little beard, all concerned. It’s no environment for a youngster.

            Elin said that Sylvie ruined the environment for him; that was his trouble.

            ‘I think it’s only right,’ he told me quietly, one evening after he finally browbeat me into agreement, the evening before the red-hulled ship was due to dock again and take us north to civilisation and nursery school and paediatricians. ‘The older she gets, the more she’ll need to be away from here.’

            I knew he wanted the bleak beauty of the place to be child-free, but I also knew he was right. So I drank too much, and Elin stormed out in a temper, pulling her fur wrap around her winter clothes and slamming the door. She must have expected to be very cold. Indeed, she was gone all night and between alcohol and anxiety I didn’t sleep at all. I turned over and stared into the dark and worried till the palest streak of dawn let me get up.

            Stiff and bleary, I opened the blind. There was ice in the bay.

            I saw Thewlis close to the base; he’d only just set out on his rounds of the ragged shoreline. He glanced up at me, waved. I waved back, and thought about the glitch with the generator and how I could fix that one last thing before I left.

I sighed and blinked hard at my headache, and that’s why I didn’t quite see the lunging shadow. If I saw it at all it was a blur on the edge of my vision, like a fleeting, flaring cataract.

            I heard his hoarse howl, and then I was running, grabbing my boots on, not bothering with my anorak. I hoped Thewlis could keep his hold on the frayed edge of the ice, because he wouldn’t live if he went in the water, not when something had pulled him there like a striking snake.

            I thought I ran fast, but by the time I reached the brink of the land, scattering offended penguins, there was nothing on the ice but a smear of blood.

            We found Thewlis later that day: me, two fishers, and my own replacement plus the supply ship’s crew after it docked. We hunted for hours, and I thought we might not see him again at all. One of the fishers from the little town brought a pistol; it was too late for that, but I didn’t say so.

When we found his sodden corpse, Thewlis was barely touched; I thought he might even be alive, till we rolled him over and saw his skull, crushed by a single bite.

            When we told Sylvie she ran sobbing in shock to her mother, who stood soberly at the base door and wrapped the girl in her arms and kissed her dappled hair.

Later, the two of us argued so badly that the others left us alone to it, going outside to try to smoke in air that was minus ten and falling.

            ‘It was a leopard seal,’ I yelled at Elin. ‘I’m not changing our plans. We’ll still take Sylvie when the ship leaves. It’s dangerous here.’

            ‘It isn’t dangerous for her,’ she spat. ‘Thewlis antagonised it. He must have.’

            ‘You’re being selfish,’ I shouted. ‘Because you don’t want to leave.’

            ‘And neither does she. And she never will.’

            And of course she flew out again, slamming the door so hard it bounced. I rolled my eyes. Her rage was too much of a habit for me to care. Instead of caring I drank more, and laughed with the crew and the new engineer and the men from the settlement, and drank even more. Sylvie played quietly in the corner of the room with her plastic Sea Life animals, and looked morosely, but only occasionally, towards the door.

            I drank beyond the point of not caring, to a state of suddenly caring very desperately. I was drunk and maudlin and angry, so when I stood up fast, I knocked over the chair.

            I blinked, and stared at the abandoned Sea Life set. ‘Where’s Sylvie?’

Sylvie wasn’t far away. I saw her in the light of stars and ice: ice in the bay, ice on the edge of land and life. The child was laughing, dangling her bare feet into freezing water, leaning down to the sleek raptor head raised above the greasy slick of ice.

            ‘No,’ I screamed. ‘No.’

            It bared dinosaur teeth as ancient as death. Sylvie hesitated, looked back at me, then at the seal. I was drowning its growls with my furious frightened yells, and I was outpacing the men behind me. I’d scared her. Sylvie began to cry.

            ‘Daddy,’ she wailed.

As I hurtled towards her I saw that blurred shadow lunge again, and the seal had her leg.

            And I had her arm, but only just. I looked at the seal and I knew it would tear her in half sooner than let her go. It glared hatred, my daughter’s blood on its teeth, and suddenly I wasn’t drunk any more. I wasn’t drunk when I yelled ‘Shoot it! Shoot it!’ and the man running up behind me fired a shot into the sleek reptilian head.

            But my vision was blurred all the same, and my eyes stung with awful grief, and the head was sliding under the surface, wolf-eyes turning dull, full of hatred, then full of nothing but death, and then lost in the deep cold water, trailing a single tendril of blood.

I took Sylvie home. I didn’t love the island any more. My daughter had health checks and hospital treatment and an education, but she walked with a limp ever after, a limp and a faraway sadness. She limped down the aisle on her wedding day, and she limped to the boy Culley’s baptism, and I daresay she limped the day she went to the sea at last and didn’t come back.

            On that day and many days after, Culley’s father howled with grief, so I got him drunk and patted his shoulder, but I knew I shouldn’t cry myself because, after all, I’d cheated the sea of her for long enough.

            And I did have Sylvie’s son, because she was better than her mother. She was just selfish enough to go to the sea, but not quite selfish enough to take the boy with her.

            Still I worry. I go down to the bay that’s a mirror reflection of one in the far south, and I shiver in the darkness and count seconds, and wait for Culley to not-come-back.

            And sometimes him not-coming-back isn’t the worst thing I imagine, when he smiles at me and his canines gleam in moonlight, and his hug is so strong and fierce it could drag me under.

            I keep the rifle in the Land Rover.

It’s not as if I’ll need it.

Copyright © 2011, Gillian Philip. All rights reserved.
Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

Being dead is not at all like I imagined when I was a kid. I imagined the dead would be pale and quiet, and that if they walked at all, they’d walk like zombies, in shuffling slippers, and if they talked at all, they’d whisper and have gravelly rasping voices like the voice of what’s his face in Oliver, the guy that teaches them all to steal. It’s gone. Not the Artful Dodger and not Bill Sykes, but... never mind. It’s not the end of the world forgetting bits and pieces, but when I was alive I was a mine of information. People used to say that to me: Martha, you’re a mine of information. Much sought after, me, for the pub quiz! And now that I’m dead, I’m still being headhunted which is kind of funny. People come to me to ask loaded questions. Things like: how long will it be before I disintegrate? How long before I start to smell really bad? How long before I get to contact my family?  I tell it like it is; I say, you’re already disintegrated, mate, and you are a bit whiffy, darling, and you don’t get to contact your family, but they can get in touch with you, if they make a little effort, sweetheart. (We dead do have a weakness for those terms of endearment.) What we’ve got in this Elsewhere is not mind, body and spirit, but double spirit and a bit of mind. The body’s gone; some people arrived with bits missing anyway, or bits that were supposed to be revamped that never quite worked like the original. You can’t really beat the original leg or kidney, it’s got to be said.

             You go to Limbo first and then you come on here, to Elsewhere. It’s quite a classy joint because there’s an air of sophistication to the place. In Limbo, there’s a scrabbling, squabbling thing going on: people complaining, saying it’s not fair, why me, I wasn’t ready, I was robbed, I was snatched away, I was in my prime... and a whole load of other clichés. In Limbo, everything you hear you’ve heard before. I felt myself getting impatient. I said to a newly-arrived one day, ‘Look, you’re dead, get over yourself.’ which might seem a bit harsh, but once we both turned up in Elsewhere, she came up to me and said ‘Thanks.’ Thanks! ‘That was the best piece of advice anyone’s ever given me.’ It was lovely, that. Such a simple thing – thanks. We dead thrive on thanks; it keeps the spirit elevated.

            What we’ve all got in common here is that no one really deserves to die and all of us have died in different ways. I’ll tell you how I died when I’ve got to know you better. We’re like prisoners in that respect; we don’t just blurt out intimate details about our death in the first ten minutes. We wait; we take our time to tell our sad tales. (Few of us claim to have had a good death –what an oxymoron that!– though some are heartened at having had the chance to say goodbye.) Everyone has a unique story in some ways because all deaths are unique, at least to the one that died. But in other ways, every death resembles another and many common factors are involved: the heart stops beating, the blood stops pumping, the lungs stop taking in air, the skin stops breathing... These things unite us all. But we’ve a lot else in common too because I’m telling you: death is a great leveller. Don’t matter if you were rich or if you were poor, if you were black or white, if you were clever or stupid, once you end up in Elsewhere you are all DEAD. There’s more equality here than I could ever have dreamed of! It’s quite touching! And another strange thing: there’s a better quality of conversation because nobody, NOBODY, is interested in material things. The reason we aren’t interested in material things is because we aren’t material. I’m not trying to be smart, just telling it like it is. But beyond that, we’ve become a whole lot more philosophical now that we are dead. We weigh things up differently and things that used to matter a lot – a new pair of trainers, a new mobile phone, an iPad, BlackBerry, Xbox, detox, botox, Sky box, highlights in the hair, extensions to the house – are all meaningless here. In fact, we look back at our former selves and wonder how we could ever have cared about these things. It’s fascinating how grotesque the whole of the twentieth century becomes from the pure and clean vantage point of the dead. Our old obsessions are not so much shaming, because we have no shame, as puzzling. Most peculiar: did we really care about THAT? 

            The other thing that’s been VERY interesting is that those that were celebrities when alive aren’t famous dead. I remember a pop star turning up one day, and expecting us all to be dead impressed and thinking that somehow there would be an RIP room or something; that you’d be able to sign up for a kind of deluxe death; use your former fame to get the real VIP treatment. I went over and spoke to her. I said quietly, we have none of that here. There is no special treatment. We are all the same. We are all just dead people. If she had had eyes, they would have widened. But she didn’t have eyes. Her spirit shuffled and blew and shrugged, and eventually settled. And she too came later, and thanked me, and said that nobody had ever talked to her like that in her life. And I said to her, quick as a dead person – because that’s another fallacy: the dead aren’t slow, they are fast – I said to her ‘That’s another lovely thing about being dead. There’s no bullshit. Nobody tells lies to you like they lied to us living.’ I felt the warm air of her accord.  

            So much is different here to what I imagined. I thought I would do nothing with my time except look down. I always visualised death: high in the sky, all the better to see my loved ones down below and clock what they were up to, perhaps a bit frustrated that I could no longer communicate directly with them. But in actual fact, I’m too busy with stuff going on here, I’m needed in other ways, so I only get to check in with my live friends every so often, once in a blue moon. (And we do get blue moons here; they’re extraordinarily beautiful.) In any case, the dead need me more than the living. My whole family’s expanded. It’s weird but I’ve seen that family’s got nothing to do with genes and blood and DNA: it’s got to do with feeling and pluck and loyalty. The old nuclear family is such a small and selfish unit really, compared to what we’ve got going on here. Seriously – the dead are so much more well-connected. And we’ve got the time to see how it works: it is not six degrees of separation; when you are dead – two degrees, max.  It takes seconds to trace one person to another, to connect them; and of course, here, we discover links to people that were hidden from us in life. Yesterday, a mother and daughter met for the first time. The mother had given the daughter up for adoption when she was seventeen. It was quite touching, but also sobering, because although they greeted each other and were clearly pleased, their spirits bobbing a bit, they didn’t really see it as the be-all and end-all, because all the being and seeing had ended. A new thing had begun; they were just as interested in meeting others that weren’t related. To put it simply: when you’ve no longer got any blood, how interested in blood can you be? You get my drift? It’s amazing! Everything shifts and changes perspective here in Elsewhere.

            I know – of course I do – that it’s perhaps a bit odd being an enthusiast for death. It might even seem like a contradiction in terms: an enthusiastic dead person, hello? Or, it might seem disingenuous, or worse, some kind of con-trick. But it is none of those. It’s not like I’m attempting to persuade any of the living to come on over to my place. Not at all! Nor am I trying to do a kind of hard sell for death. That would be pointless since you all must know, even those in denial, that death will surely come for you one day. No, but what I am trying to do, and I will admit to this, is change our image. We must be the most maligned, the most trashed, the most disadvantaged group ever. People say ill-informed and stereotypical things about us every day, ad nausea, ad infinitum. We get to hear! We’re not deaf, us dead.  We are not resting. We are not at peace. We have not fallen asleep. We are not silent. We are not ghosts, or ghouls, or full of envy for the living. We are neither vengeful nor maladjusted. We are not bitter or twisted. We did not lose our fight or our battle. Actually, it might surprise you to know that we are, much to our own surprise, having a whale of a time. We’ve met up with so many old friends, and quickly made new ones, and we’ve participated in rigorous and scintillating conversations. We haven’t had to shop, to cook, to wash a dish, to worry about what to eat, what to wear, where to go, what to say, or to clock in or out for ages. We haven’t had to be afraid of love. We’re a disparate bunch; we’ve all got different ways of dealing with being dead, but on the whole I think we are a lot more likeable than the living. You see the dead have no ambition. What a relief that is! The dead have no competitions. The dead don’t really care what you think except what you think about being dead. We care about that because it’s hurtful that so many people get us wrong so much of the time. And it is not only hurtful, it’s irritating.

            Let me tell you a single story. Let me take one recent story and let it stand for all of us. And if this story gets through to you, I promise you that you will see all of us differently, all of us who roam the rugged, peaty hills and glens of Elsewhere. A girl arrived in Limbo, dead on arrival, like we all do and did, when the moon was full in the sky and the stars were closely making their constellations – here we call them consolations, because the stars console. She had been killed by a hit and run driver and she was ten years old. When someone arrives in Limbo, we in Elsewhere get sent updates; especially if they think somebody will need extra help here. Two days after Genevieve arrived, her mother followed. She’d been a single mum of a single daughter and she just wanted to be with Genevieve. At first Genevieve was a little stand-offish with her mother. But then the two of them got on famously and made many extra friends, became here in Elsewhere part of our huge family. Genevieve’s mum who is called Jane, ‘just plain Jane,’ she said when she arrived, is one of the most generous spirits I’ve ever met.

            It reminded me, because I confess that it often escapes my mind, of myself. There are cycles and cycles when I just don’t think about how I got here. It’s not what is important anymore. My life was important, and now my death-life is important, but the day I died I would always rather forget. Some time after Jane arrived we had a long conversation. Jane said that she had always thought that if anything happened to her daughter she wouldn’t be able to survive. So the taking of her own life wasn’t something she agonised over; it was automatic, it was quick, it was a relief. It wasn’t so automatic for me, I told her. I was ill for a long time. I tried often and didn’t succeed. I kept being brought back to life, and every time I was brought back I resented it. I felt useless. I said to myself, back then, you can’t even succeed in killing yourself. You can’t even get that right. I wasn’t crying for help. I really didn’t want to be saved and then saved again. ‘You must have wanted to be saved,’ Jane said. ‘You must have or you wouldn’t have been. It’s that simple.’ I went to argue with her when I had a flash of realisation. I had wanted to live; and then all of a sudden I had wanted to die. I knew that the people I left behind might think all sorts about me: that I was selfish, a coward, a shirker of responsibility, monstrous, atheist. But I was somebody who, on the night I took my life, could really not stand a second longer. I was as down as I could ever have been.  

            So imagine my surprise when I came here and literally transformed overnight! I went from somebody who suffered from depression to an optimist. I changed from somebody who didn’t enjoy thinking to a real thinker. It’s true to say that I am so much happier dead than alive. And the other weird thing is that the people who are like me and Jane are amongst the happiest here in Elsewhere and the quickest to adjust, quicker than the ones that have been killed on the spot, and happier even than the ones who have had long and protracted illnesses.

            Amongst the maligned dead, those of us who have committed suicide are perhaps the most maligned. The thing I’ve noticed we all have in common is that we wish we had managed to leave without leaving behind so much guilt. The guilt of the living can weigh heavily on us dead, until we find ways to shake it off, like birds shaking off their many feathers. Which is to say that we don’t; we realise we need our feathers in order to fly. Like I said before, the thinking of the dead is quite complicated; we happily turn double negatives into positives.

            Today, I took a look in on my daughter; she was nineteen when I took my life. She is now forty-five. I saw her in bed with another woman and she laughed my old laugh and looked the happiest I’d seen her look in years. I made something happen in her room and I saw her look surprised and as if she was looking for me, as I’ve seen her do so often over the years when I’ve managed to leave the odd little gift of a red robin or a heron or a whole icicle inside a window, or a goose feather, or a double rainbow, or some lovely lavish early light on a field of corn rigs – I saw her hesitate and then smile, a wide smile like the one I had with my mouth, and at last, I felt complete. I realised then, too, that I’d been kidding myself on a bit. I’d underestimated the ties that I still had to the living. I’d gone dead independent. But I realised today that the strongest and most lovely feeling to be had amongst the Elsewhere spirits is a sense of being here and there, inside and outside, in the world and in the ether world, simultaneously. To feel like you can take part, but that you don’t have to, to enjoy the lovely whoosh of crossing the border when you check in on old relatives living relatively well, is one of the finest feelings you can get here. And given we are all, like I said, mind and spirit and no body, these feelings are the equivalent of an excellent meal for us, some jellied eels, pie and mash or mince and potatoes, depending on what you loved and what you remember of what you loved back in the days long gone by.

             I will tell you what this place looks like so you have no need of terror. We have such a strong sense of colour, we dead: the magnificence of light, the breath-taking glorious pink sunsets, the sweet comfort of the dark, the fragile soft dawn. There’s so much to appreciate and enjoy. And strangely, even the feeling of missing a beloved has something quite kind about it because we dead know the truth: we are loved more than the living! Our faults are forgotten and we are elevated in our death. Even neighbours, when asked about us, if we have been murdered, say lovely things. Even when we’ve been a bit of a pain, they’ll say, ‘He was a really nice guy, kept himself to himself.’ Or ‘We used to see her taking her kids to school; she always had a hello for everybody.’ But, of course, flattery gets the dead nowhere! We are not asking for much really, except that the living should broaden their minds, should think as positively about the state we are in as they do about individual qualities we might once have had. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt here in Elsewhere it is that money matters not one jot and that life and death have more in common than you might think. I could go on. I could go on and on. That’s one difference, I guess. The dead can go on and on and on. At some point the living have to stop. 

Copyright © 2010, Jackie Kay. All rights reserved.

Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

            In the small cluster of islands that lie between North Uist and Harris is one, just 500 metres at its widest point, less than three times that in length. As far as anyone has found out, there was never a Gaelic name for the island; when Victorian tourists began to explore the area, it was given, unofficially, the only name it’s ever had – Elsewhere. Elsewhere is shaped like an exclamation mark; a narrow isthmus connects the dot at the bottom to the bulk of the island, the permanent population of which is one. The crofter who lives there used to rent an old croft house to holidaymakers, outward bound groups and the like, but not any more. In August 1995 a teenage boy went missing while on a holiday for underprivileged city children. No one has stayed on the island since. This is a fictionalised account of what happened that summer.

            Nick shooes the teenagers into the kitchen. Naomi finishes up with Aonghas, the apparently ancient crofter who’s rented the old croft house for a song. The charity they work for has a tight budget and it’s cost a fortune to get the eight of them to the island; a cheap house was just what they needed.

            Aonghas, while not exactly the epitome of warmth, is a reasonable enough man to deal with, and the rent, though small, is probably enough of an incentive to him to make visitors feel welcome and comfortable, though the place is far from luxurious, a fact not lost on the kids.

            The six of them, the three girls, the three boys, stand staring at the floor rather than each other. It’s late, they’re tired. The girls are playing with a couple of cats that seem to come with the house. The boys sit at the large kitchen table, their bags still around them on the floor.

            Nick looks at the children, not for the first time wondering if his work is as valuable as he likes to think it is. He and Naomi have both been at the charity for five years, long enough for the zeal to start waning, though certainly not long enough for them to have become embittered.

            But trips like this, that take forever to organise, to bring just six young people all the way from London to this remote place, and…for what? He knows what it says on the charity’s mission statement, and if provoked would get angry defending the work they did, but really, would it ‘fundamentally change’ the lives of the kids to spend a week on a remote Scottish island? Would it ‘empower’ them? Would it ‘develop’ them? Or would it just bore them to death?

            As Naomi joins them, she shuts the door behind her with a sigh.

            ‘I’m bushed. Tea?’

            Niall, as usual, is the first to talk.

            ‘Maybe it’s like the kangaroo,’ he says, in that quick, clipped way he has. The oldest of the boys, fourteen, yet probably the least mature. His life is lived through books and films, and any understanding he has of the serious things in life is derived from these.

            Becca is not too tired to enjoy one of Niall’s escapades.

            ‘The kangaroo?’ she laughs, leaving the cats.

            ‘Yes,’ Niall explains. ‘The island. It doesn’t have a name, that’s what Nick said, isn’t it, Nick? Not a Gaelic name, just Elsewhere, which is a pretty stupid name for any place, but maybe it’s like the kangaroo. You know, when white people settled in Australia and they saw this big thing bouncing about, like a bunny, but twenty times as big, and they asked a local, you know, an aborigine, and said, “what’s that?” and the aborigine said, “kangaroo”, which just means “I don’t know”.’

            Becca laughs again.

            ‘That’s not true.’

            ‘It is,’ Niall says, not at all offended. ‘Nick, that’s true isn’t it? So maybe it’s the same here. Maybe someone came to the mainland near here and said, “What’s that place called?” and the local said “Oh, that’s not here. That’s just somewhere else. Elsewhere.” ’

            Nick smiles.

            ‘An interesting theory,’ he says. No one else looks interested. ‘But do you know what is true? The island doesn’t appear on many maps.’

            Dylan and even quiet little Robbie look up now.

            ‘Are you going to tell us a spooky story?’ smiles Naomi. ‘Maybe tomorrow night, when we’re not so tired.’

            Nick holds up a hand, shrugs.

            ‘No ghost story. It’s true. There was some old fuss about this place. Private land, some ancestors of Aonghas’ maybe, went to a lot of trouble to stop the old Ordnance Survey from surveying. Said it was modern nonsense, they could see one end of the island from the other, so why did they need to draw it?’

            ‘I don’t see what cats are for.’

            Niall again. No one is surprised by this kind of thing now, not after three days from London to get here in a small minibus and a boat from the mainland.

            ‘What’s that, Niall?’

            ‘Dogs I get,’ he says. ‘I can see the point of dogs. You can have a conversation with a dog.’

            ‘You could have a conversation with a wall,’ says Becca.

            ‘Yes, well, possibly I could, but I would prefer to talk to a wall than to a cat. They just sit there, looking at you. Then they want food. You feed them. You wait a few hours, during which they look at you again. Or sleep. I mean, what’s the point?’

            Ruby, the cool girl, shakes her head.

            ‘You are seriously weird, Niall.’

            ‘Hey,’ says Nick, warningly, but Niall, as usual, either doesn’t hear or doesn’t care.

            ‘I mean, look at that one.’

            He nods at the black cat, which had hopped up onto the shelf above the range, where it sat, glaring at them.

            ‘I mean, that is, at best, one very sulky beast and, at worst, some cohort of the devil!’

            ‘What’s a cohort?’ asks Dylan.

            ‘Associate. Business partner. Partner in crime. Friend. Chum.’ says Nick. ‘That kind of thing.’

            ‘So why can’t you just say friend, Niall?’ asks Dylan.

            ‘Not as much fun to say that. Cohort is more fun. Cohort. Try it.’

            Dylan does.

            ‘Cohort,’ he says, thoughtfully. He smiles. ‘Yeah you’re right. Cohort. Cohort. Cohort, cohort, cohort.’

            Then they’re all saying it, even Ruby, and Nick and Naomi exchange a weary but happy glance, and send them all to unpack.

            After food, the boys one by one slope off to bed, then the girls decide to go at the same time, and Nick and Naomi sit by the open fire, trying to get the coal to burn a bit better.

            ‘I think this might be all right,’ Nick says.

            ‘Wait till day three before you say that. No TV, no video games. Half of them don’t read. The island is smaller than most shopping centres, and with much less to do unless you like sheep. And as you well know these are all kids with serious problems.’

            ‘Is it actually August here, by the way? It’s freezing.’ He pokes the fire again. ‘I know they have problems, but we’ve coped with worse. Remember Portugal?’

            There’s a slight pause, and Nick realises she might be thinking about what else happened in Portugal, besides them empowering some really mixed-up kids. Or rather, what almost happened between them.

            ‘Okay, so let’s just say that my jury is out. Let’s see how tomorrow goes. This is going to stretch even our amazing skills.’

            ‘We’ll break them in gently,’ Nick says. ‘Route march round the perimeter of the island, build a fort from sheep’s droppings before lunch. So forth.’

            ‘Deal,’ said Naomi, smiling. ‘But take it easy on them, yes? I’m not sure how much of an outdoors man Niall is, for example.’

            Nick feigns outrage.

            ‘What are you suggesting?’

            ‘Well, what I’m suggesting,’ Naomi says, ‘is that the boy is completely gay. He just doesn’t know it yet.’

            ‘How very inclusive of you. Just because he is precise and tidy and funny and…’

            ‘It’s not a criticism to say he’s gay,’ Naomi says. ‘You’re the one with the issues if you think it’s a criticism.’

            ‘You win. What about the others? Would you like to stereotype them too, while you’re about it?’

            ‘Fine. Ruby, cool chick. Missing her boyfriend. Very serious thing at fourteen you know. Clary, hippy parents. Bet you anything. Becca, arty parents. Too bright for her own good.’

            ‘That’s a really…’

            ‘I mean it. I know the type. Niall, well, you have my views. Dylan, funny, the joker, but I think he’s pretty practical too. Did you see how he helped with the bags? I didn’t even have to ask and there he was. Robbie, well, Robbie… Robbie’s a bit harder. He’s so quiet. I mean SO quiet.’

            Nick is suddenly thoughtful. Quiet.

            ‘Well, given the levels of abuse he’s had, maybe that’s hardly surprising. If we can even get a smile out of him, I’ll call this week a success.’

            ‘Agreed. They’re the usual odd bunch, aren’t they? Proving once again that dysfunctionality comes in all shapes and sizes. You’d be hard pressed to guess there was anything wrong with Becca, for example. Three suicide attempts at thirteen. That’s pretty hardcore.’

            The two of them fall silent.

            The fire dies. They are cold and they move closer to each other. Nick puts an arm round Naomi.

            ‘It’s not that cold,’ she says.

            He takes his arm away again, and they turn in.

            The following day is bright, sunny, and warm.

            The eight stand outside the croft house, staring open-mouthed at the endless sea in front of them.

            ‘We are but a speck,’ says Niall, very quietly, after a very long time.

            No one disagrees. They all understand him for once. The island, their island for the week, is just a sliver of earth floating in a universe of water.

            ‘Is that Shakespeare, Niall?’ asks Naomi.

            The boy grins.

            ‘Glad you think so. Pure Niall Marshall.’

            They stand a while longer.

            ‘Right,’ says Nick, eventually, but brightly. ‘Let’s explore.’

            They do, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

            Niall hangs out with the ‘grown-ups’, as he likes to call Nick and Naomi. Dylan and Robbie and Becca come along next. Ruby and Clary are the most reluctant, dragging along at the back, though not unhappily. They are talking about boys, and by boys they do not mean Niall or Dylan or Robbie.

            They spend an hour or two on the shoreline, not doing very much, not feeling the need to do very much, and just before they decide to head for home, they see the dot of the exclamation mark, at the far south of the island. A narrow strip of shingle is all that connects the dot to the ‘mainland’ and it’s easy to see that the shingle would disappear during any half-decent storm.

            ‘Wow,’ says Dylan, ‘look at that.’

            He points up onto the hill of the dot, where he’s seen what no one else has yet, an ancient circle of stones, long craggy fingers pointing at the sky.

            ‘Can we go there?’ he asks Nick.

            Nick nods.

            ‘Absolutely. After lunch. Come on.’

            They return to the dot, crossing the narrow shingle isthmus in single file, and spend a long time walking round the eight stones, peering at them, touching them, leaning against them, hiding behind them.

            It’s about half an hour before Clary, of all people, says, ‘You know, this would be a really cool place to camp. The night. Nick, you did say we could camp out one night.’

            ‘I said maybe we could. We have no tents. It would have to be a still night.’

            ‘But we could have a big campfire and cook food on it and bring our sleeping bags.’

            Clary’s enthusiasm for camping is surprising and infectious.

            Everyone agrees it sounds fun, even Ruby.

            As they make their way back to the house, Naomi winks at Nick.

            ‘See. Hippy parents. That’s another fiver you owe me.’

            Nick points out they hadn’t actually made a bet.

            ‘Well, I bet you a fiver they don’t all last the night.’

            ‘What, you think we’re actually going to do it?’

            ‘Sure. Why not? We should encourage any initiative, right?’

            Nick smiles.

            ‘Fair enough. The first still night, then.’

            A still night does not come to begin with.

            There are two nights that are anything but calm. On the first, Becca wakes up the whole house with a screaming fit in the small hours.

            She will talk to no one, explain nothing, and in the end Naomi sits with her downstairs on the sofa till she finally falls asleep as the sun starts to edge over the mountains away on the mainland.

            The next night, Dylan is violently sick; it turns out he’s allergic to red pepper, and just forgot to tell anyone. The soup was tomato and peppers.

            So, on the fourth night after their arrival, they venture down to the dot. They have spent all day preparing. There are no trees on the island, but they’ve found a pile of smashed-up pallets in a shed that they can use as firewood for a campfire. Nick, Dylan, Robbie and Becca have spent all afternoon carrying the wood down, in four or five trips. Naomi, Clary, Ruby and Niall have been making food that will be easy to cook on the campfire: potatoes in tinfoil, sausages and beans.

            ‘That’s what I like about camp cooking,’ says Niall, ‘no vegetables.’

            Naomi wonders exactly how much camping he’s ever done. She knows about his life, his problems. How he can pretend to be so breezy about things brings a lump to her throat. But then, that’s often what these kids are like. The desire to live eventually breaks through the hard stuff. Sometimes.

            Now, they make their way down to the stone circle, carrying their sleeping bags.

            The sun is starting to dip into the sea; it’s a perfectly calm and still evening.

            They stand for a moment, before Nick announces that they should get the fire going. They do. It’s easy – the wood is old and has been sitting in the shed behind the house for who knows how long.

            Soon they are toasting their toes, eating from tins, waiting for the potatoes to be done.

            It’s Niall who says, ‘Eight.’

            ‘What now?’ laughs Becca.

            ‘Eight stones! Eight of us. One each. That’s good, because we don’t have to squabble.’

            ‘Squabble?’

            ‘Well, supposing there were nine of us. We’d have to play musical chairs.’

            ‘Let’s all choose a stone,’ says Clary.

            When the potatoes are ready, they all get one and take it back to their chosen stone.

            ‘Who do you suppose made this place?’ asks Robbie, so quietly that no one can believe he has spoken. No one answers, because no one knows.

            The night deepens, and though it is still, it gets cold. The fire flickers.

            Nick wanders over to it and stirs it, throwing some more old pallet wood on.

            He returns, not to his stone, but to Naomi’s. He sits down beside her. The kids are chatting, quietly, all seeming quite calm.

            ‘I think I might win that fiver,’ says Nick.

            Naomi laughs gently and they sit staring at the flames for a long time.

            ‘Is it cold enough?’ says Nick, faintly.

            Naomi understands.

            ‘Almost,’ she says, slyly. ‘Al-most.’

            They whisper to each other, heedless of other whispering, whispering in the water, a short stone’s throw from where they huddle.

            ‘I think it is going to be all right,’ says Naomi. ‘You were right.’

            Nick smiles in the darkness.

            Suddenly, like a dream descending, it is quiet.

            No one speaks.

            Becca shrieks. Just once, and then is still. Everyone looks at her to see what is wrong; her eyes are wide and she is pointing at Niall, or rather, just over his shoulder.

            Her lips move, but no sound comes out.

            Every eye turns to where she is pointing, all except Niall, who is frozen, infected by the fear on Becca’s face.

            What the others see is another face, but it is not human, not exactly. In the darkness, the half-light of the fire, they can see a face that appears to hover just behind Niall. The skin of the face is dark blue, and glistens in the light. It is wet, as if it has slipped up and out of the ocean just behind them, and crawled to the circle. Its head is bald, its shoulders are naked, the rest of it is lost in shadow.

            The skin is blue, the eyes are black, just empty black pits.

            ‘Niall,’ hisses Nick. ‘Don’t move.’

            Niall raises his hand too, points at Nick.

            ‘There’s one behind you, too.’

            And then they realise that there is one of the strange faces just behind each of them. The faces are expressionless, unreadable. They show neither hostility nor anger, fear nor kindness.

            Blue skin, black eyes.

            And then they slip away into the darkness, and it is only after they have retreated that Becca starts to scream.

            ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ shouts Nick, running to her, ‘they’ve gone. Whatever they were, they’ve gone.’

            But Becca has seen what no one else has.

            ‘But so has Robbie. Robbie’s gone. He’s gone. They’ve taken him.’

            All eyes turn to the stone where little quiet Robbie had sat, eating his potato.

            They search for hours in the dark, and the next day too when daylight comes, until the police arrive.

            They do not find him.

            His empty sleeping bag lies on the ground, a mundane memorial for a troubled boy.

 Copyright © 2010 Marcus Sedgwick. All rights reserved.

Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

Around Cape Horn the wind howls cold; the glaciers meet the sea.
A captain came with button box to bid for natives three.

He named the man York Minster; Fuegia Basket was the maid.
The boy was Jemmy Button, which is how his price was paid.

York Minster was a moody man, Fuegia small and shy,
And sixteen-year-old Jemmy had a twinkle in his eye.

"You shall not paint your faces red or grease your copper skins,
Use porpoise jaws to comb your hair or shells to shave your chins.

You shall not feed on penguin meat, on dolphins or on seals
But you shall eat boiled mutton and say grace before your meals.

In England you shall spend a year, and then sail home again
To turn your savage brothers into Christian gentlemen."

He took them back to England and he carried out his plan.
They learnt that God made Adam and that manners makyth man.

Fuegia Basket learnt to sew; she mended York's cravats
And stitched the shiny buttons on to Jemmy Button’s spats.

And when the year was over and they sailed again to sea
The ship was full of gravy-boats and tablecloths and tea.

At last they reached their homeland and they rowed their boats upstream.
The native gathered round to gaze at figures from a dream.

But Jemmy's sisters scattered when they saw him in his spats.
His brothers circled him like dogs and stared at him like cats.

He spoke to them in English but they did not understand,
And Jemmy could no longer speak the language of his land.

The crew put up three wigwams and they dug three garden plots,
Then sailed away and left them with their china chamberpots.

The natives went for Jemmy and they trampled on his beans.
York Minster and Fuegia Basket stole his soup tureens.

When next the captain called he found young Jemmy Button thin.
His hair was coarse, his eyes were dim, he wore an otter skin.

"Come back, young Jemmy Button, come and sail across the sea.
Oh leave the howling glaciers and come back home with me."

"Oh no," says Jemmy Button, "I shall never leave Cape Horn,
But stay and hunt for otters in the land where I was born."

Copyright © 2010, Julia Donaldson. All rights reserved.
Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

            Julia sounded almost hysterical when she called. She often sounded hyper though; you couldn’t rely on it as an indicator of her mood. I pretended to shuffle my non-existent plans for the day so I could meet her for lunch. Maybe she’d found me some voice-over work, or an audition. If nothing else, it meant I’d get a decent meal.

            I didn’t have enough money in my purse to buy a drink, so I waited for Julia outside the restaurant. She was twenty minutes late when she stepped from her car wearing a suit of yellow shot silk that clung to her artificially tautened arse as though her body had been vacuum packed. Some of her clients must be bringing in good money. We air kissed and she led the way in.

            As we waited to be seated, I found her staring at me intently.

            ‘What?’ I asked, assuming her scrutiny implied some sort of fault. ‘Did I smudge my eyeliner?’

            She laughed. ‘Of course not darling. Just reacquainting myself with your lovely face.’

            We spent the time before our oysters arrived discussing the parlous state of the performing arts: in other words, why I wasn’t getting more parts. The subject should have made Julia frown at the very least – it certainly depressed the hell out of me – but she dismissed it airily. She gave the impression of having some terrific secret that she could barely contain, but when I asked her directly, she just said, ‘Let’s eat first.’

            It was the best – and the biggest – meal I’d had for weeks. When the coffee came Julia pushed it to one side and folded her hands on the table in front of her as though she was about to pray.

            ‘I want you to promise you’ll hear me out before you say anything, and that you’ll take some time to think it through properly, whatever your initial response is.’

            It was a pretty weird speech, even for Julia, and I was immediately suspicious, thinking of porn and other sordid possibilities.

            ‘OK,’ I said cautiously.

            ‘It’s an amazing opportunity.’

            I took a sip of coffee, watched her watching my face.

            ‘Marilyn,’ she said.

            The coffee spilled a little as I set the cup down.

            ‘Marilyn?’ I must have looked incredulous.

            ‘You do know what I’m talking about?’

            Of course I knew. Everyone knew. Marilyn. An icon: the coveted body, the gorgeous face, the magnetic presence. Cameras focused on her alone. Anyone who shared a stage or screen with her ran the risk of becoming no more than a sentient garnish.

            Until the drugs caught up with her suddenly and unexpectedly (though everyone knew she did them) and devastated her brain; finished her, mid-film.

            Since then, they’d been looking for the next person to step in, take over, play the part. Play both parts: Marilyn and the role. Meanwhile the current Marilyn lay in some clinic, pierced by tubes, wrapped in sterile air, quiescent. Waiting to pass on her identity. Waiting to pass on her face.

            ‘You’re joking.’

            I didn’t realise I’d spoken, but the words vibrated in the air.

            Julia smiled. ‘I knew you’d say that, darling. Just listen and think, that’s all I ask.

            'You’re a blank canvas; exactly what’s needed. Your own face isn’t well-known to the public – after all, most of what you do is small theatre stuff.’

            She puckered her mouth in distaste until it looked like a cat’s backside. No pretence from dear Julia that artistic integrity was more important than money.

            'But I don’t even look like her.’

            She fiddled with her untouched coffee. ‘I ran a check on the physical specs they’re after, and your bone structure is a ninety three percent match. You sound like her anyway, and voice training would emphasise the likeness.

            ‘Think of it darling, think of the future you’d have…’

            ‘I’m not doing it.’

            Julia held up her hand. ‘I’m not listening to you just now. Go home and sleep on it. This is a chance in a million. I’ve got clients who would kill, literally kill, to be Marilyn. Think of the money, the adulation…’

            ‘You’re thinking of the money, aren’t you?’

            Her face closed down, and I knew I’d gone too far.

            ‘Of course I am,’ she said crisply. ‘I’m your agent; that’s what I do. I find you parts, they pay you, I take my percentage. That’s how it works. Occasionally.’

            I tried to look contrite. ‘I’m sorry Julia. I’m just… the idea is a shock, that’s all.’

            The smile returned. She’d bought it. At least I could still act.

            ‘I understand. Don’t say any more about it now. Go home, think things through properly and I’ll call you tomorrow.’ She looked at me intently. ‘You’d be mad to let this chance slip through your fingers. I’ll set up a preliminary meeting as soon as I get the go ahead from you.’

            I nodded. ‘OK. I’ll think about it.’

            When I got home I levered my feet out of their elegant shoes, peeled off the smart clothes and, dressed like a slob, took off my makeup. My face in the mirror suddenly looked as though it belonged to a stranger. I gazed at it, trying to see beneath the surface to the ninety three percent congruence that Julia claimed. It wasn’t easy to believe it was true.

            But if it was, what then? What if I chose to extinguish myself, and wear Marilyn’s face instead of my own?

            There would be wealth, and fame. How did I feel about that? I’d never expected to be famous; not properly famous. Truly, all I had ever hoped for was recognition, a much lower-key concept. I’d never considered true stardom as anything more than a fantasy.

            Wealth, on the other hand, was something I craved. I’d never, since I was old enough to count it, spent a week free from worry about money; partly my own fault of course – I’d hardly chosen a career noted for its financial security. I hungered not to have to calculate before I dared to buy. I wanted to surrender to whim, drown in luxury. Here was my chance. As Scarlett O’Hara said, I’ll never go hungry again.

            I wouldn’t make the mistakes the others had made. I wouldn’t succumb to drugs or self-loathing. I could survive as the Living Goddess. I could play the part indefinitely. With stem cells and hormones and God knew whatever else they used, I could be Marilyn for decades if I wanted to.

            It couldn’t hurt to let Julia set up a preliminary meeting. I wouldn’t be committing myself to anything. I’d listen to what they had to say, then decide.

            I called Julia first thing. She didn’t attempt to hide her relief.

            ‘Well done, darling. I knew you’d see this for the fantastic opportunity it is once you’d had time to think, though I was worried yesterday that you might be a tiny bit squeamish about the whole idea.

            ‘I’ll get right on to Marilyn’s people. Don’t go out until I call back, OK?’

            Twenty minutes later she phoned again. ‘We’re meeting them at three this afternoon. They’re losing money every day the shoot’s delayed, so they want to get things moving as fast as possible. I’ll pick you up at two. Put your hair up so they can see your face properly.’

            The phone went dead before I had a chance to reply.

            At exactly two Julia’s car howled to a halt outside my building and roared off again as soon as I had both legs inside. She was never on time. Never. Until now.

            ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’ll do the talking, you concentrate on looking like Marilyn.’

            ‘But I don’t,’ I protested.

            ‘You do on the inside,’ she countered. ‘Remember the importance of bone structure. Anyway, just imagine you’re her and it will radiate from you.’ She made what was presumably a radiating-Marilyn gesture and, in spite of myself, I laughed.

            Marilyn’s face gazed at me from every wall, larger than life; luminous, pearly, impossibly glamorous. The whole idea seemed ridiculous beneath her multiplied smiles. How could I possibly become Her?

            A secretary walked us through to a conference room, and I tried to imagine myself into Marilyn. For once, Julia stood aside and let me enter a room first.

            Three women, two men, their eyes focused, as though drawn by invisible magnets, on my face. I paused just inside the door and let them look, turned my face one way, then another.

            One of the women remembered her manners and got to her feet.

            ‘Please, sit down. I’m Charlotte Aungier,’ she said. We settled ourselves. ‘My colleagues and I have the task of finding the new Marilyn. We have to strike a balance between speed and care, as I’m sure you’ll understand.

            ‘The documentation that Julia has sent looks promising and the voice tapes are most encouraging.’

            ‘It’s something that people have commented on all my life,’ I said in my best Marilyn voice. ‘It gets me voice-over work, but it puts casting agents off sometimes: too distracting, they say.’

            She nodded, never taking her eyes off my face.

            This is what it would be like, all the time.

            ‘We’d like to take some shots of you now. Measurements and so on, get exact comparisons.’ I nodded. ‘Roger will take you along to the studio.’

            The older of the two men rose and held the door for me. He left me with a couple of techs in a studio and returned half an hour later, after they’d taken what felt like several hundred measurements and photographs.

            As he escorted me back, I paused in front of a photograph in which Marilyn had apparently been caught off guard, glancing back over her right shoulder, a slight frown on her face, mesmerising.

            ‘You must know her quite well,’ I said to Roger.

            ‘I’ve met her often, naturally.’

            ‘What’s she really like?’

            He gestured to the walls. ‘What you see here.’

            ‘But what’s she like as a person? When she isn’t in front of the camera?’

            He looked puzzled. ‘I’m not sure what you mean. She’s always Marilyn. There is nothing else.’

            When we got back to the conference room, it was clear that Julia had concluded her side of the meeting to her satisfaction. She beamed at me as I came back in.

            ‘All right darling?’

            ‘Fine.’

            Charlotte Aungier said, ‘I think this has been a very positive meeting. We’ll have the tests we’ve just run analysed and be in touch with you within twenty four hours. Let me say, off the record, that I have the highest hopes that this is going to work out.’

            Julia drove me home at what was, for her, a moderate speed. Perhaps she was looking after her assets now that I had suddenly gained worth.

            ‘My God, darling, that was marvellous. I just know they’re going to go for you. God, isn’t life incredible.’

            As for me, it was beginning to sink in properly that this was really happening. I was elated, terrified, caught up in dreams of what my future could be.

            I barely slept that night, and went to the gym first thing to run myself properly awake. By the time I finished, I’d reached a decision. When I got back, the answerphone light was blinking.

            ‘It’s Julia. Call me.’

            I didn’t even have to go through her secretary. She must have been perched by the phone, waiting.

            ‘They want you, darling. You’ve got it!’ She warbled on happily, but none of what she said penetrated my brain. I waited for a pause in the monologue.

            ‘Julia, tell them I want to see her.’

            ‘What?’

            ‘I want to see Marilyn before I decide.’

            ‘But darling, that’s not really a…’

            ‘I won’t do it otherwise.’

            Julia sighed. ‘OK. I’ll call you when it’s arranged.’

            Everyone tried to persuade me not to go but, for once in my too compliant life, opposition only increased my determination.

            It was Charlotte Aungier who took me, that afternoon, to the discreet clinic in the suburbs where Marilyn waited.

            It wasn’t such a shock to see her; I’d seen film of people in that state before. There was a tube down her throat and her eyelids were taped shut. Her hair lay flat and dead on the pillow around her. Wires led to the pads of the heart monitor, rising and falling gently with each artificial breath, and liquid flowed from a plastic pack along a snake of tubing and into a vein in her arm. I suppose I looked at her for ten minutes before I touched her. Her skin was warm and smooth and I noticed for the first time what beautiful hands she had – her own, of course.

            Charlotte stood, obviously uncomfortable, near the door.

            ‘I can’t remember,’ I said. ‘How long did she do it?’

            ‘Almost five years,’ she replied. Her voice sounded strained, and I guessed she didn’t like any reminder that she bore some of the responsibility for the ruin we were looking at.

            ‘And she was… what… the third?’

            ‘The fourth.’ Charlotte moved uneasily towards the window.

            And I could be the fifth.

            ‘What was her name before?’

            ‘Hilary Tyler. Her boyfriend nominated her. She was a nobody, really. She’d won a couple of beauty pageants, had a few small parts, but she wasn’t really prepared for the fame.’

            She had come to stand beside me, and now gave me what was meant to be a reassuring smile. ‘That’s where you have a huge advantage. You’re already a proper actress. You know exactly what you’re getting into.’

            Maybe, after all, she was right. Unexpectedly, I felt more at ease about the whole thing now I’d seen her lying there.

            ‘We’ll send Julia the full contract for you to look at with your lawyers first thing tomorrow.’

            ‘Fine. I’m sure there won’t be any problems with it.’

            The relief was visible on Charlotte’s face when I said that. It was clear she’d expected the visit to Marilyn to send me into a spin.

            I asked my final question as we crawled back through rush-hour traffic. ‘I’m curious. What will happen to her after the… reconstruction?’

            She frowned. ‘I’ve no idea. I suppose they just switch everything off. There’s no point afterwards.’

            ‘No, I suppose not.’

            As I got out of the car, Charlotte leaned out of her window and said, ‘You’re going to be a great Marilyn. One of the best.’

            I kept thinking about her hands. All through that final night, I saw them over and over again. Those beautiful hands, now owned by Marilyn. I found a channel showing one of her recent films, recorded it, and watched it repeatedly, looking for shots that showed them.

            This would be my reality if I went ahead. I would cease to have any point, except to be a simulacrum of Marilyn. No one would care about my hands.

            It was such a long night, with no one to share it but the ghosts of women I didn’t know.

            And she was… what… the third?

            The fourth.

            And I would be the fifth.

            Julia beamed at me, a champagne glass in one hand. Although Charlotte Aungier was perfectly groomed and made up, the strain of the past weeks showed in the thin skin around her eyes.

            I finished painting the last nail and looked at my hands. I wanted them to be perfect, like the rest of me.

            There was a knock at the door.

            ‘That’s it,’ said Charlotte. ‘Ready?’

            There was silence as we walked on stage in semi-darkness, then the lights came up and the shouting began.

            ‘Marilyn!’

            ‘Marilyn – over here!’

            ‘This way, Marilyn!’

            A thousand flashbulbs went off at once.

            I held my hand, my beautiful hand, in front of Marilyn’s face to shield our eyes from the glare, parted her lips in that iconic smile and gave a little wave.

            I am Marilyn, your Goddess. Worship me.

            ‘Put your hand down, darling,’ Julia whispered. ‘They want to see your face. No one’s interested in your hands.’

Copyright © 2010, Gill Arbuthnott. All rights reserved.
Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

Imelda Brown stood on the platform, wondering what the hell was going on. She had just stepped off a train, which was confusing, as she had no memory of stepping on one.

            Behind her, other passengers disembarked. They milled around on the platform, eyeing each other suspiciously, all looking just as bewildered as Imelda felt. A bright blue, cloudless sky hung overhead. This was also causing Imelda concern. Last time she’d checked it had been snowing, and it had been cold, and it had been dark.

            A man, grey hair and wrinkles, grabbed her by her coat sleeve. Instinctively, Imelda yanked her arm away, but the man barely seemed to notice.

            ‘W-where am I?’ he asked, his voice cracking. ‘Where is this?’

            Imelda glanced around. A large, impressive building, all sandstone pillars and tall, arched windows, boxed them in on three sides.

            There appeared to be just one platform – the one they were standing on.  The word “ARRIVALS” was printed on a billboard hung above the tracks. She couldn’t see a sign for departures, and there was nothing to reveal the station’s name.

            ‘No idea,’ Imelda admitted.

            ‘I can’t find Dorothy,’ the man fretted. ‘I can’t find my Dotty. Have you seen her?’

            Imelda shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

            Wringing his hands, the man turned and stumbled through the crowd, calling out Dotty’s name.

            For the first time, Imelda looked properly at her fellow passengers. There were a hundred or more of them, all looking lost. Most of those she could see appeared to be in their late sixties or older, but there were a few forty-somethings in the mix, too. No one her age, though. Not even close.

            A few people were talking, but from their body language it was clear none of them was listening to what the others were saying. Some of the older ones were crying. Some of the younger ones too. Imelda shook her head. Crying never got anyone anywhere.

            A loud musical note rang out, silencing the rising hysteria before it could fully build. Imelda looked in the direction of the sound. A uniformed man stood farther along the platform, blowing into a battered old trumpet.

            The note lasted for several seconds. When it had finished, the man brought the instrument down sharply to his side and cast his gaze across the now silent occupants of the platform.

            His uniform was a navy blue coat over a matching waistcoat and trousers. Brass buttons, polished to a brilliant sheen, stood out against the dark material. On his head was a cap with an official-looking badge sewn to the front of it. Imelda was too far away to read what the badge said, but she guessed it was something to do with the railway. He wasn’t police anyway. She could tell one of them a mile off.

            The man noisily cleared his throat, patted down his thick moustache, and began to speak.

            ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am the Station Master,’ he said in a voice that did nothing to set Imelda at ease. It was an officious, self-important voice. She’d heard plenty like it before, and hated every one. ‘In a calm, orderly fashion you will all follow me. Stay close together, no wandering off.’

            ‘What’s going on?’ called someone from the crowd. ‘Where are we?’

            ‘All in good time,’ replied the Station Master. He performed a stiff about-turn and began marching in the direction of a door marked “EXIT”. ‘Now come along,’ he ordered. ‘I can’t be standing around here all day.’

            A low muttering spread through the crowd.  Slowly, though, everyone began to follow the Station Master towards the door. Imelda hung back, waiting until most of the throng had passed through the exit before following.

            She heard the first cry of shock just as she reached the door. She tried to retreat, but the people behind her kept pushing forward, carrying her on through.

            ‘Get off,’ she snapped. ‘Stop pushing.’

            More yells and screams from up ahead drowned her out. She stumbled through the doorway, her eyes frantically scanning for another exit, for some way to escape whatever was happening to her fellow passengers.

            It was only as she was shoved in amongst the shouts and the squeals that she realised they were cries of delight, not fear. Dozens – in fact hundreds – of people stood just beyond a row of polished chrome turnstiles. Men and women of every age and race huddled together, grinning and cheering excitedly as the passengers entered from the platform.

            ‘Mum?’ squawked a middle-aged woman on the other side of the turnstiles.

            An old woman at Imelda’s side turned her head sharply at the sound of her daughter’s voice. ‘B-Becca?’ she gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth and tears sprang to her eyes. Imelda moved aside to let her pass, but the Station Master stepped into her path, hand raised.

            ‘Not yet,’ he said, stopping the woman in her tracks. He gave his moustache another pat and adjusted his hat before continuing. ‘This is Station Sixty-Two. Beyond the gates you will find people waiting for you. Some of them you may know, many of them you will not. Those you do not know will have signs. If you see your name on a sign, go to that person and they will take care of you until you are in a position to take care of yourself.’

            The Station Master carried on talking, but Imelda had stopped listening. She was scanning the waiting crowd, searching for a face she recognised, but finding none.

            About a quarter of those waiting clutched home-made signs. Silently, she read off the names. Ameena Ahmed. Maggie Cooper. Yan-Yan Chow. There were others, many others. But no Imelda Brown.

            ‘Right then,’ barked the Station Master, finally stepping aside. ‘On your way, the lot of you.’

            Like crashing waves, large sections of the crowd surged forward. They called and gestured to those waiting for them, falling over one another as they fought their way through the turnstiles.

            Imelda watched them. She watched the hugging, the kissing, the handshaking. She heard the chatter and the laughter and the tears. And she wished, for a moment, that she were part of it.

            But she wasn’t. And that was that.

            Less than twenty passengers remained on her side of the turnstiles. One by one they spotted their names. One by one they approached those holding ‘their’ sign. Polite smiles and introductions were exchanged. Questions were asked, and answers given, but Imelda was too far away to hear.

            In dribs and drabs the passengers and their new-found companions filed away. Imelda stood her ground, watching them until there was no-one left but her.

            ‘OK,’ she muttered, although she wasn’t quite sure why. She blew out her cheeks and shook her head. ‘OK.’

            ‘Why are you still here?’ demanded the Station Master. Imelda jumped. She’d forgotten he was even there.

            ‘Um... Hi. I don’t know where—’

            The man jabbed a thumb in the direction of a desk, way against the far wall. ‘Unclaimed Girls,’ he snapped.

            Imelda blinked. ‘What?’

            ‘You deaf? Unclaimed Girls. Go,’ he said. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Now.’

            Imelda felt her fists clench. The temptation to punch the Station Master right in his scowling face was great, but she knew that hitting someone in uniform was never a good idea. Not from the front, anyway.

            Biting her lip, she pushed through the closest turnstile. The station building was as impressive inside as it was outside – a vast, cathedral-like construction with enormous pillars stretching all the way up to the high, domed ceiling. The thud of her boots on the polished floor echoed around the now-empty station as she made her way over to the desk. It was a flimsy, flat-packed bit of furniture, stained with coffee rings and blue biro – an obvious afterthought among the grandeur of the station.

            A pudgy, red-haired woman slumped behind the desk, a cigarette hanging from her bottom lip. As Imelda approached, a blob of ash fell from the end of the woman’s cigarette and vanished into her impressive cleavage. She seemed neither to notice norcare.

            ‘Yes?’ the woman asked.

            ‘Hi,’ Imelda began. ‘Is this... Unclaimed Girls?’

            The woman took the cigarette from her mouth, blew a smoke ring, then inhaled it back up through her nose. She tapped a small wooden sign on the desktop. ‘That’s what it says.’

            Imelda’s eye twitched. ‘So it does.’ She watched the woman take another long draw of the cigarette. ‘Those things’ll kill you. You know that?’

            The woman’s expression didn’t change. ‘Funny,’ she said, after a long pause. ‘Now, what do you want?’

            Imelda leaned over the desk. ‘Answers,’ she said. ‘Like where I am. And how I got here.’ She picked up the “UNCLAIMED GIRLS” sign. ‘And what this means.’

            A sheet of paper was slid across the desk towards her. Imelda glanced down at it. ‘What’s this?’

            ‘Registration document B7784,’ the woman said, stubbing out one cigarette and lighting another. ‘Fill it in.’

            Imelda scanned the document. It was a questionnaire. Name. Date of birth. Marital status. The usual. The fourth question jumped out at her though.  She had to read it three times before she was satisfied she’d read it correctly.

            ‘What does this one mean?’ she asked, tapping the page.

            The woman didn’t look down. ‘Pretty self-explanatory, I’d have thought.’

            ‘Aye, but... Is it a joke?’

            ‘Do I look like I’m laughing?’

            Imelda turned back to the paper. She read the question again. It was simple enough. Just three words. She read them once more, out loud this time.

            ‘Cause of Death?’

            Across the desk, the woman gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’ll make it easy. How old are you?’

            ‘What?’ Imelda said, dragging her eyes away from the page. ‘Fifteen.’

            ‘Too young for Ratched’s, too old for Nessie’s,’ the woman muttered. ‘Teeth.’

            Imelda frowned. ‘Teeth?’

            ‘Teeth. Show me.’ The woman chomped the air a few times to demonstrate.

            Caught off guard, Imelda pulled a grimace, showing her teeth and gums.

            ‘Seen worse, but Hawthorne won’t take you.’

            A commotion behind her made Imelda turn around. People were filing into the station. They hurried over to the turnstiles and stood there, waiting impatiently for the platform door to open.

            ‘I haven’t got time for this,’ the woman sighed. She pushed aside an overflowing ashtray, revealing a small intercom built into the desk top. There was a loud buzz as she pressed a button. ‘We’ll go with Windsome. You’re about the right age.’

            ‘Right age for what?’ Imelda asked.

            ‘Hello?’ said a woman’s voice over the intercom. ‘Miss Windsome speaking.’

            ‘Yeah, hello, Miss Windsome. It’s Jane at the desk. We’ve got one for you.’

            ‘Really? Thank you, Jane,’ trilled the voice. ‘I shall be right with you.’

            Click. Jane released the intercom button and leaned back in her chair. ‘She’ll be right with you. Take a seat.’

            ‘Who’ll be right with me?’ Imelda demanded. ‘What’s going on?’

            ‘Take a seat,’ Jane repeated.

            Imelda slammed her hands down on the desk. ‘If you don’t tell me what the hell’s going on, I swear I’m going to make you eat that cigarette.’

            ‘Hello, dear,’ called a voice from right behind her. Imelda turned and found herself face to face with a grey-haired woman in an enormous brute of a dress. It was shiny and satiny, all puffed out from the waist like a giant lampshade. A flowery bonnet completed the look.

            ‘Jesus,’ Imelda muttered, looking the woman up and down. ‘I didn’t realise it was fancy dress.’

            ‘I’m Miss Windsome,’ the woman said, ignoring the jibe. ‘Headmistress of Miss Windsome’s School for Unclaimed Girls. I suspect you have many questions.’

            ‘Aye,’ Imelda said. ‘Starting with where am I?’

            ‘Dead. I’m afraid you’re dead,’ Miss Windsome smiled apologetically. ‘Sorry.’

            Imelda didn’t bother to argue. There was no reason to. Somehow, she knew the woman was telling the truth.

            ‘I’m... I’m...’

            A bubble rose up in her stomach. It was in her throat before she knew it, threatening to emerge as a scream of panic, but she swallowed it back down and gave herself a shake. Panic was pointless, and she’d learned long ago that nobody came when she screamed.

            It was over. Her life was over. She’d just have to accept that and move on.

            ‘Dead. Right.’ She jabbed a thumb in Jane’s direction. ‘I’m guessing by the look on her coupon that I’m not in Heaven.’

            ‘I heard that.’

            Miss Windsome shook her head. ‘No, not Heaven, but not... not the other place, either. It turned out we were a bit off the mark on those fronts. There’s only here.’

            ‘The railway station?’

            ‘The City.’

            Imelda looked to the station’s main doors. ‘A city?’

            ‘The City,’ Miss Windsome corrected. ‘The City of the Dead.’ She gave a polite cough. ‘How did you...? If you don’t mind me asking?’ She paused, composing herself. ‘What’s the last thing you remember?’

            ‘Cold,’ Imelda said, quietly. She remembered the frost biting at her fingers and toes, the icy kiss of the concrete step beneath her, the uncontrollable shakes as the snow came down and down and down, covering her like a shroud. ‘I... I was cold. Lying in the snow.’

            ‘You were lying in the snow? Outside? Why?’

            ‘There was nowhere else to go.’

            ‘Why on earth didn’t you go home?’

            Imelda saw her breath cloud in front of her face, felt wetness trickle down her cheek. She moved quickly, wiping the tear with the back of her hand. But she didn’t move quickly enough.

            ‘Oh!’ said Miss Windsome, her voice cracking. ‘Oh, you poor dear.’

            Imelda turned on her. ‘Don’t say that,’ she growled. ‘Don’t call me that!’

            ‘Oh, but you are,’ Miss Windsome insisted. ‘It’s terrible, you poor dear.’

            ‘Quit it. I’m not a poor dear. I’m not a poor anything, alright? When are you people going to get that through your thick skulls?’

            Miss Windsome blinked. ‘You people?’

            ‘Do-gooders,’ Imelda snapped. ‘Busybodies. Social workers. Whatever. You’re all the same. It’s all “poor dear, must be so hungry” and “poor dear, must be so scared” and “poor dear, isn’t it terrible?”.Talking about me like I’m just a thing to be pitied.’

            She took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. When she spoke again, some of the harshness had left her voice. ‘I don’t want pity.’

            Miss Windsome nodded. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But outside this station, beyond those doors, walks everyone who has ever died. Victorians. Romans. Aztecs. Modern-agers, like you. Everyone.’

            ‘Everyone? That’d be hundreds of billions of people.’

            ‘Well,’ said Miss Windsome, smoothing the front of her dress, ‘I wouldn’t know about that. But I do know that at my school you would be kept safe from the many dangers out there on those streets.’

            She stepped closer. ‘You would be fed. You would be educated. You would be given something to replace those awful clothes.’

            Imelda looked down at what she was wearing. Her heavy boots and dark, dirty denim were a stark contrast to the headmistress’s outfit. ‘What’s wrong with my clothes?’

            Behind her desk, Jane snorted out a laugh, then lit another cigarette.

            ‘There are other girls, too,’ Miss Windsome continued, ‘your age. Friends, perhaps.’

            ‘I can survive on my own,’ Imelda said.

            The headmistress gestured around them. ‘Perhaps not the best choice of word, given the circumstances?’

            Imelda didn’t answer. She could hear sounds now from outside. Car engines. Voices. City sounds.

            Miss Windsome reached out and smiled warmly. Imelda looked at the offered hand and felt her own twitch in response. Her eyes met those of the headmistress. ‘I could really get that stuff?’ she asked. ‘That stuff you said?’

            Miss Windsome nodded. ‘Food, clothes, education, companionship. It would all be yours.’ She gave a slight shrug of her shoulders. ‘I’ll be honest, you’re not what we’d usually look for in a Windsome Girl, but we could make an exception.’

            Imelda’s hand went limp.

            ‘Why would you do that?’

            ‘Well... given the circumstances.’

            ‘What circumstances?’

            ‘You know,’ began Miss Windsome, ‘with you being...’

            Imelda said the words for her, but the frosty edge had left her voice. ‘A poor dear. Right.’

            ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

            Imelda shrugged. ‘Yes, you did.’

            She turned away from the headmistress and looked towards the main door. There was a city out there.

            ‘I’m dead,’ she said. ‘I’m really dead.’

            Miss Windsome nodded. ‘Yes you are. We have counsellors to help you come to terms with that.’

            ‘Forget it,’ Imelda said. She looked through the windows at the brilliant blue sky. It looked nicer than snow, any day. Warmer, too. ‘I think I already have.’

            A city. Not hers, maybe, but a city all the same. She took a step towards the door.

            ‘What are you doing?’ Miss Windsome gasped. ‘It’s dangerous out there. There are... there are... Vikings!’

            Imelda paused. ‘Vikings? What, like actual proper Vikings?’

            ‘Yes! Real Vikings!’

            ‘Cool.’

            Miss Windsome shook her head. ‘No! They’re dangerous. The whole city is dangerous. A girl couldn’t possibly cope on her own!’

            Imelda smiled. Her first real smile in as far back as she could remember. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘I’m dead. What’s the worst that can happen?’

            Feeling more alive than she ever had, Imelda Brown ran across the station, past the waiting crowds, and hauled open the door. The warmth of the sun prickled her skin as she slipped into the hustle and bustle of the City of the Dead.

            Still unclaimed.

Copyright © 2010, Barry Hutchison. All rights reserved.
Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

At ten in the morning I leave my front door behind me.

Have I got my key?

What a foolish woman you are, Billie D.

The door always shuts with the same sound.

Sometimes I think my house despises me.

The mocking dust settles on all the things I hold dear

And the windows never look shiny and clear.

My windows do not twinkle at me they only sneer.

I walk tactfully down the hard grey road

Being aware of the life that is heaving beneath the paving stones.

Stones are like bones they lie without soft flesh.

I rather hope that when it all bursts out from underground

I will not be around.

There will be life in such excess

That my dry brittle mind will be embarrassed by the blood filled fruitfulness.

At the baker’s I buy bread.

Man does not live by bread alone

Is what my mother always said

But it can go a long way towards preventing starvation and emaciation.

I am particularly fond of toast and jam.

When you live on your own

There is a good deal of comfort to be found in jam.

Once a great nephew came

And we had toast and tea.

Strawberry jam for him and raspberry for me.

It is still only seventeen minutes past ten.

Perhaps if I walk slowly to the papershop and back

It will take thirteen minutes more.

Time sits sullenly in the trees.

I count as I walk.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

The papershop is filled with fluttering words.

Side by side

Children are jittering.

Sometimes I think they don’t see me at all.

Am I really Billie D

Or just a dusty shadow on the wall?

My head is not used to all the chattering

And rattles. A woman smiles at me.

I cannot reach the smile inside my head

And so she moves away.

My name is Stanley Baldwin.

I am quite used to people laughing if you wish to laugh.

My father told me that my mother had a lovely sense of humour which I failed to inherit.

I was born late into the night

And my mother said, “Call him Stanley” and then laughed and died.

Personally I have never seen the joke.

There was a hatstand in the office where I worked.

The only other hatstand was in the office of the manager

So you can see I was a man of some importance.

Even so there was no further need for my services.

This is something I fail to understand.

Mr George had green lino and no hatstand but his services were still required.

This is a fact I do not comprehend.

I shall place my hat firmly upon my head and go to read The Times.

The quality of editing is no longer what it was

And so I do not subscribe myself.

I read the paper in the library.

I could wish that the corners were a little less thumbed.

There are cracks in the paving stones.

I do not understand why they are not filled.

Walking every day as I do one has time to observe these things.

I do not keep a car.

On occasion Mr George has offered me a lift

But I have, in every instance, declined.

Walking, I told him, one has time to observe.

I am a young person of style

I sit behind the library desk and smile

You may admire my smile when the clock strikes half past ten.

We open then.

Wet or dry the first in is the old lady

And what I say is people like that should be put away.

She’s one of the ones that comes in every day

Like the other batty one, the old man.

How beautiful are my long red nails and my fingers white

Elegantly I check the books from morning to night

And watch from under my long mascaraed lashes to see what is going on.

I’m very quick to notice if a book has gone.

There must be something in the weather.

When I tossed back my black shining hair I saw the two old things sitting together

Or at least there was no empty chair in between.

There is no copy of The Times to be seen

Although I am sure I put it out.

Well I never. I do declare without a doubt

The grubby old thing has invited him to tea

And if my delicate ear-studded hearing did not deceive me

I heard the old man agree.

Oh Billie D whatever have you done?

There is a man coming to tea at a quarter to four

And there is dust and you have never spoken to him before.

“Would you like a cup of tea with me?”

How could I have said the words

Inside my head were the frantic featherings of caged birds

Did he agree?

Oh yes he did he did he did oh should I buy more bread?

Oh we will have toast and jam and a buttered bun

And we will talk while we drink our tea.

There is a great deal that can be said.

This is a day not like other days

Although I still do not understand why there was not a copy of The Times.

I have been asked out to tea at a quarter to four.

If Mr George should offer me a lift

It might be that I will take a little ride.

It will be pleasant to see what there is to see. 

It would make a pleasant line of conversation

When we are talking over tea.

Oh Billie D

I have heard the church clock strike half past three

Oh whatever shall I do!

I have been glancing out of the window since half past two

And I have already sliced the bread.

He will be here at a quarter to four

And there is nothing but a hollow in my head.

I have already sliced the bread.

I put my hat firmly upon my head

At precisely half past three.

It will not take me long to reach the road in question.

There is a man walking down the road and he is coming here to my door

There has never been anyone here before

Except my great nephew. The one who came to tea.

I have put the kettle on.

He is knocking at the door.

There is jam in a little glass jar.

I have dropped a cup.

There are little pieces of pink china all over the floor

My hands will not pick them up.

He is knocking once more.

When will he go away?

Now I come to look

There is only jam enough for one.

I will walk slowly home

And on the way I will observe the appalling state of the roads.

I shall refuse any offer of a lift.

I will return home

And hang my hat upon the hatstand at the entrance of my room.

How the young lady with style would smile

If she could see Billie D where she sits

Picking a copy of The Times into very little bits.

Copyright © 2010, Vivian French. All rights reserved.

Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

            In a certain city in Florida, in the bars, there are young women sitting on high stools, and if an older man is interested in one of them, he asks the bartender to send over a cigar, and, accepting the cigar, the chosen woman also accepts drinks and a few hours of companionship.

            Bolun could not remember who had told him this. He himself had not set foot in that country. In the restaurant or the karaoke bar or the spa or wherever he had heard the story, the men and women in Florida sounded as though they lived in an old-fashioned fairy tale, innocent in their roguishness and mischief.

            Once in a while Bolun imagined himself the man in that fairy tale, taking his time caressing every young woman’s face with his eyes. At the end of the night he might, or might not, make a move—the young women had their whole lives ahead of them. To match their patience and confidence, he too needed to be an unhurried person.

            But that calmness he could only have in his imagination. The young women in the places he frequented with his business connections—misses they were called—were uniformly well-trained, and they left little space for his fairy tale. They always seemed to know what he needed; sometimes they had much more to offer than he was willing to accept.

            His own wife, whom he had married twenty-seven years ago but had known all his life—their cribs had been next to each other when they had started the Little Sunflower Nursery—he no longer loved. She was not in a position to protest about that, as he had set up her boutique shop specializing in high-end stationery imported from Japan, and he had shown magnanimity when he had discovered her affair with her chauffeur. Sometimes she said that it was not healthy for a man at his age to be out drinking every night, masking, with wifely concerns, her unhappiness with the marriage. He had no other choice, he replied, sparing her his belief that he maintained his lifestyle so that their daughter, for whom he had secured a job of writing restaurant reviews for a leading fashion magazine in Beijing, would not have to make a living like the young women he patronized.

            “Only a man who understands love can come up with this genius idea.” Such were the compliments paid to Bolun by his subordinates when, to advertize a new development he and his partner had built on the southern end of the sprawling metropolis, he proposed a carousel riding contest. One lucky couple—they had to be young and struggling to find a place to live in Beijing—who could beat all rivals to ride for the longest time on a carousel would take home, or rather would make a home of, a two-bedroom apartment.  

            Anything he proposed would be called a genius idea, Bolun knew, but this time he did love his own proposal. Very soon the contest and its logo, “Love and Persistence Win” were printed in major newspapers. He imagined the clichés, which he especially loved: the maudlin love songs from the loudspeakers, the colorful lights lit up at night, the ups and downs of the young contestants, each couple sharing a wooden horse or a camel and burying whatever differences or disagreements they had in their relationship for the dream of having an unaffordable apartment. Bolun himself had worked all sorts of low jobs at their age. Not in every dynasty, or every country, could a man have made it as he had done, but of this he knew not to brag, as he had done nothing special. He was born at the right time and in the right place, and had recognized and acted upon a certain vague call to wealth when it was barely noticeable to most people. Take that, sometimes when he was drunk he thought of the men in the Floridian bar; now whose fairy tale was better written?

            The contest began on the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar—a day associated with a love story from folklore, which had been recently revived for commercial reasons and was called the Chinese Valentine’s Day. Before the first spin of the carousels there had been much publicity generated: the amusement park which hosted the contest had installed new carousels in addition to the five they had already; hundreds of young couples camped overnight in line to register for the contest; the eruptions of arguments and shedding of tears by those whom the amusement park could not accommodate were reported in the newspapers. All went as planned.

            Among the excitement and chaos, one girl’s story caught Bolun’s attention. A recent graduate from university and a new arrival in the city, she broke up with her boyfriend of three years when he had refused to make himself “a clown to amuse some rich men’s nonsense”, as the newspaper quoted him. She advertized on her blog for a new boyfriend with the stamina and determination to win an apartment with her, and even that became a contest of itself: her well-publicized first dates with her candidates fanned the PR fire for the contest.

            Bolun wanted the young woman to win. She was not the prettiest, and the boy she had chosen was not the most handsome, but Bolun loved her face, where youthful dreams had died before their time and signs of suffering from a life she was too young to understand had not yet set in. He could have given her, through the PR company, a small amount of money for more presentable clothes in front of the TV crews and photographers, but that, on his part, would be a pre-emptive move of impatience.

            The contest, in the end, was one of those fairy tales that went slightly wrong. For days, the carousels spun from morning till midnight, with three ten-minute breaks built in for the contestants to rest; every day more couples dropped out with paled faces but there were the persistent ones, who had to be peeled off the wooden animals with a guarantee they could resume the next day. On the seventh day, it was apparent that the eight couples left would only drop out when death interfered. The company quoted health and humanitarian concerns to end the contest without deciding a winner. It had gathered enough coverage, in any case, and each of the eight couples would get a check for twenty thousand yuan as their prize—a decent move on the company’s part, as the combined total was the price of an apartment on their list. 

            Bolun often thought about the girl who had not won the apartment—sometimes as a father, though a father would be more heartbroken than he himself felt; sometimes as an older man would have thought of the young women on their high stools. Had they been living in one of those old-fashioned fairy tales, he would have seen to it that a cigar, a drink, a small offering be passed to her, but they were not in Florida, where palm trees clamored with their long, finger-like leaves; they were in a city called Beijing where, as a young man, he had planted young trees that later, as a real estate developer, he had ordered to be removed.

Copyright © 2010, Yiyun Li. All rights reserved.
Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

My husband's brother picks us up in the car bought for him by his mother in Toronto. We are going first to the outskirts of the city, to a Soviet-style housing scheme. My brother-in-law wants to show us his home. Before we start to climb the four flights of unlit stairs he removes the window-wipers from his car. One cannot be too careful. They will steal anything round here. And who can blame them when they have so little? My husband warns me to stay in close to the wall. The handrail is missing in places. A skylight provides only a little illumination on the top landing. When we reach it my eye is drawn to a jagged hole in the wall. My brother-in-law shrugs. There was a shooting last weekend. He thinks his neighbours could be drug-runners.

His wife is waiting to receive us. We present our gifts. Small, decorated tins of tea, packets of women's tights, various other items of clothing, bars of soap, pairs of Clarks real leather shoes for the grandchildren, a couple of ghetto-blasters. All excellent articles for bartering. My husband's suitcase is empty now. We can leave that with them too.

They show us their two-roomed apartment and tell us how they shared the bedroom with her father for many years until he died, while their two daughters slept in the living room. They have no hot water. They live frugally, on the state pension, and have no savings. He was an anaesthetist at the children's hospital before he retired; she was a doctor, a specialist in radiography. They could have earned more driving tractors.

After we have drunk our tea we set out. We are going on an expedition into the country. We travel slowly. The roads are full of potholes. There are few cars and no buses. In the fields tractors rust, but it is summer and the gentle rolling countryside looks benign and beautiful. The birch trees are in full shimmering leaf, reminding us of our beautiful Speyside. The hedgerows are speckled with flowers of many colours. The people love nature. They revere it. When the family came to meet our train from Leningrad their arms were full of flowers.

At midday we pull up in front of a collective farm. My sister-in-law consults with me in poor German. Neither of us speaks the other's language but we manage. I open my bag and she selects a tin of tea. We wait on the sunny roadway while she disappears round the back of a large wooden building. When she returns she is smiling. We can have lunch! We have not seen any restaurants since we left the city.

We are seated at a long wooden trestle table. The farm workers are already eating, dipping their chunks of bread into bowls of thick stew. They seem not to be unduly curious about the new arrivals. My sister-in-law insists on serving us. We are treasured visitors from the luxurious west and we cannot be expected to queue up with farm workers for our lunch.

After we have eaten and before we travel further we must visit the facilities. My sister-in-law apologises profusely before we reach them. They can be smelt on approach, reminding me of campsites in rural France where we spent summers with the children in years past. I used to hose down the latrines before I let the children set foot in them. Here, there are no hoses. When I come out I wipe my shoes on the grass. My sister-in-law apologises again. I tell her not to worry, it is not a problem.

We travel on.

Our destination is no more than sixty or so kilometres from the city but, on arrival, we feel as if we have travelled a long way. We come first to a small town. Some of its old houses are wooden and badly in need of repair, though still occupied. The whole country is in need of repair.

The house stands three kilometres outside the town. The childhood house of my husband, designed by his father, who, until the Second World War, was City Architect of the capital. After the first Soviet invasion he was denounced as an Enemy of the People, like anyone in a position of authority or who owned land. He was forced to go into hiding. My sister-in-law's father, a farmer, was exiled to Siberia. In 1944 my father-in-law took the decision to flee the country, taking with him his wife and four children. They became refugees, blown across Europe, like leaves in the wind, hither and thither, until they made landfall in Canada four years later. The eldest son, who is with us today, was unable to escape and ended up a prisoner on the island of Sakhalin.

I stand at the gate and look at the house, a beautiful, imposing building of yellowish stone, with a semicircular balcony and a colonnaded portico beneath. The garden is overgrown, which distresses my sister-in-law, who loves to grow flowers and vegetables. During the occupation the house was commandeered and given over to six families. There are only three there now, one on each floor. My brother-in-law does not know the inhabitants of the basement and ground floor but he is acquainted with the elderly husband and wife on the first floor. The husband taught mathematics at the local high school while his wife was a dentist. They have remained there throughout.

They welcome us warmly. He takes my husband into another room and shows him a chair. He says that he thinks my father-in-law designed it and would my husband like to have it? He is a little embarrassed. My husband takes the chair but later gives it to his brother. We go into their father's studio. It is crammed with furniture from various rooms in the house and reminds me of an auction sale room. In the dining room murals by one of the country's leading artists grace the walls.     

We go into the sitting room and are offered coffee, along with birch juice and dandelion wine, both home-made, and ginger biscuits. As we raise our glasses to wish each other good health my husband murmurs to me that these were his mother's sherry glasses. They are delicate and finely made. I feel a shiver up my spine but when I look sideways at my husband I see that he is calmly sipping his wine. They have endured much more than the loss of sherry glasses in their lives.

After we leave the house we visit the churchyard, where grandparents have been buried. It is a real country churchyard, with simple headstones and flowers growing around the graves.

We drive back to the city in the early evening. The western sun mellows the countryside, turning the birch leaves to golden. The birds are in full-throated song. Before my brother-in-law drops us off at our hotel we stop at the Freedom Monument. A newly-wed couple has also stopped. They get out of their car and lay a wreath of flowers at the foot of the monument under the stony gaze of two armed Russian soldiers. The people are becoming bolder. There is a whiff of revolution in the air.

Our hotel is a soulless, newly-built high-rise, but adequate, and the toilets flush. We take the lift to the eleventh floor, gliding smoothly past the second, where it never stops. On that floor the blinds are permanently drawn, behind which men and women perform their secret service activities. When we emerge from the lift we pass the two women seated at a desk who stare impassively through us and we through them. Our return has been noted. We go into our room. We do not speak of our day in the country, of our lunchtime visit to the collective farm, or the house where my husband lived as a child. We have been warned. Remember, one cannot be too careful. There are bugs everywhere. My brother-in-law will only speak of his experiences on Sakhalin out in the air, away from walls.

That was 1989.

The hotel has since been modernised, westernised, and the windows on the second floor are no longer blinded. The city is alive with restaurants, slick cocktail bars and tourists who are free to come and go as they please.

My brother-in-law lies in the country churchyard; his widow lives in a city apartment. After the revolution the family claimed back the house and my brother-in-law and his wife lived there for some years, enjoying the garden and the peace of the countryside. The lodgers remained in the basement and on the first floor. It was desperately cold in winter. Heating was inadequate. Pieces dropped off the balcony rail. The roof needed renewing. The family could not afford to renovate the house. It has now been sold, along with the valued murals and most of its contents, to a property speculator. I cannot help wondering if the sherry glasses were included in the price.

Copyright © 2010, Joan Lingard. All rights reserved.

Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

The Obit Expert offers a service: he will write your obituary, the short story section of the newspaper. "What if you die tomorrow?" he asks the rich, the powerful. "Do you really want some hack on a deadline to assemble lies or unflattering facts about your life?" He will, therefore, sit with you, interview your family and friends, and pull together a 500-word obituary that can immediately be emailed to the papers on your departure; an obituary that is not a hagiography but which outlines the high points of your life, your achievements, and the family you wish to be associated with. "After all," the Obit Expert argues, "you spend so much time polishing your image when you're alive, hiring public relations experts, taking care of your grooming, being careful in the interviews you give to bring out your best. Shouldn’t you pay even more attention to this most important article that will be written about you? The one that will summarize your entire life? That will be, literally, the final statement on you?"

The Obit Expert's initial clientele consists of corporate heads, prominent artists, politicians, activists. But then he finds out even the little people are conscious of how they want to be remembered. Shoe salesmen, bus conductors, insurance clerks also want to arrange their obituaries. "It may not appear in the New York Times," says a wine merchant, "but the Wine Trades Gazette will doubtless run a short notice, and I just wanna make sure they get the facts right. I don't want them speaking to my ex-wife."

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Working on these private commissions, the Obit Expert has acquired a keen appreciation for gossip. All these people walking around the streets of the great city, secretful. Our attempt at getting at the secret life is gossip, he is convinced. Gossiping about a person is the greatest favor we can do them, because it shortens the distance between the lived life and the projected one; gossip is the bridge between us and our secrets; gossip helps to see a person whole. Oh what a relief for the person to realize that everyone suspects, and his secret is public.

In addition to running your obituary in the newspaper (and assuring good placement, and often your picture in the paper), the Obit Expert will keep a list of all your friends, family, business contacts and acquaintances, and immediately upon your demise mail in tasteful stationery the obituary to all of them, so that they know how to remember you.

These same friends, family, business contacts and acquaintances will be periodically interviewed and briefed by the Obit Expert so they know what to say if someone other than the Obit Expert calls them after your death. So he will ring up college friends, old lovers, and the neighbors and grade school teachers of your childhood, and bring them up to date on your accomplishments, your many laudable volunteer activities. He will also listen carefully as they tell him what they might have, had he been a newspaper reporter calling to get quotes for an obituary at that very moment. Sometimes, in fact, he pretends to be just that, to get the truth. After listening carefully, if there is anything to be corrected, any misperception, any lapse in recollection, the Obit Expert will refresh the acquaintance's memory. "You say that you remember Mr. H. as an average student," he will tell your high school principal. "But, in fact, my analysis shows that he was consistently in the top one-fourth of the class where grades were concerned; he participated in numerous extra-curricular activities including track and the Young Pioneers’ Club; and he was voted Secretary of his senior class. Perhaps you have overlooked these facts? After all, it's been thirty years..." Or to an ex-wife, "I understand your feelings about Mr. H. after he left you for a younger woman. But consider that he was under immense stress from the failure of his business, and that he was on the road for nine days out of ten, and it is in the nature of the human animal to crave companionship."

If that does not work in persuading your ex-wife to revise her comments about you, the Obit Expert will try something a bit more forceful: "And, after all, it could not be said that your marriage at the time was on an even keel, even before the second Mrs. H. came into the picture, could it? Were there not certain tensions arising from ... your lack of ... shall we say, responsiveness in the conjugal arena? Did not months go by during which you failed to share your husband's bed?" If your ex-wife then screams abuse or hangs up the phone, the ever-patient Obit Expert will call again or send a letter by certified mail. "Should you repeat these unfair and unwarranted attacks on my client when called upon by the newspapers after his death, I, acting in my capacity as the jealous guardian of his posthumous reputation, will sue you for slander to the full extent of damages permitted by law. Furthermore, I am in possession of certain material facts about your own record in the marriage, which has been far from spotless. Would your children like to hear about the time Mr. H. opened the door of the maid's room to find you there with the servant in a position which left no mistake about the precise nature of your relationship? This may sound like a threat but, Mrs. H., I assure you that you have nothing to fear if you keep in mind only the truth about Mr. H. – that he was an ever-considerate husband, a fine father and provider, whom you met one magical evening at the Newport cotillion, and spent twenty-five happy years with until, through no fault of either spouse, you decided to part ways. I urge you to erase all negative thoughts from your mind, Mrs. H. – they will only cause you great harm in your remaining years."

One day the Obit Expert was approached by a graying man. He came up to his office in the Financial District, opened the door, and stood there some time, indecisive. The Obit Expert looked at him across his desk. He assumed that the natural hesitation rose from the fact that the man had come here to ask for help with his obituary and, now that he was actually doing it, was actually here in this space, he was thinking: this is about death. I am going to die soon.

But it was not so.

"I want help in writing another man's obituary," the gray-haired man said. "I've heard that you have connections with the newspapers, you can get obituaries placed."

"A friend? A family member who's passed away? My condolences."

"Not a friend!" the Old Man almost shouted. Then, calmer, he said, "He was not a friend of mine."

The Old Man explained. The man who had passed away was a colleague, indeed a good friend from school days. They were both mathematicians. They had gone to high school, college, and graduate school together. Theirs was a friendship built on a shared wonder at the poetry of numbers. Walking around the silent streets of American university towns all night, sitting in cramped faculty offices and basements in graduate student ghettoes, they had discussed theorems and proofs like other men discuss women and politics.

It came time to submit a dissertation, and the Old Man withdrew into his office for six months, not seeing anybody, not his advisor, not his students, not even his friend. The Old Man had been working on a groundbreaking explanation for why certain irregular numbers, called the Planar-Mundt sequence, flipped polarities when they approached extreme Φ. The paper had no practical application whatever, but it was a highly sought intellectual prize. Finally, in great excitement, he asked his colleague to come over to his attic office one night. All through that night, he demonstrated his proof, the entirely unexpected ways in which he had hit upon it, and the multiple new directions it opened up in the field. After his discovery, said the mathematician to his colleague, he felt just a little nearer to God.

The next week his colleague submitted the paper under his own name to the leading mathematical journal; it was promptly accepted, he was given the prize for best dissertation, and a full professorship at Berkeley before he had left graduate school. The Old Man could do nothing to prove that the work was his; he had been working on it in secret, and nothing he had done in the field before had led up to this. He could not now submit his own work for his dissertation because he would be accused of plagiarism. He left graduate school without finishing, and drifted for a few years, finding work as a dishwasher, a junior high school teacher, and a crossing guard. He never married – he never had enough of an income to support a family. For fifty-five years he had brooded, through the silent watches of the night, on where his life could have been – he kept up with his colleague's progress as he went from honor to honor.

The Professor leisurely went through three wives, all of them young and beautiful graduate students; he jetted from conference to conference around the world, which paid for an immense library of rare books. And now he was on the verge of a painless death, lying in a room in his own house, surrounded by children and grandchildren. He had only a week left, said the doctors. All his colleagues applauded his heroism in the face of certain death. He did not wish to be kept alive artificially. "Let me die in peace, as I have lived in peace," he was quoted in the paper as saying.

"So," said the Obit Expert, after the Old Man had finished. "You want me to set the record straight."

"I want you to do more than that," said the Old Man, leaning forward in his chair with new light in his phlegmy eyes. "I want you to twist things, I want you to make him look like the worst monster on earth. Make up things – bad things. I want him to be remembered in such a way that his children change their last name."

This was a new one for the Obit Expert. He thought about it, and was excited by the challenge: to take a man's life and, by means of certain suggestions, by looking at the same basic facts in a new light and by convincing others to do the same, make a positive into a negative, or vice versa. Take philanthropy: you give me a man who has donated a vast fortune to the American Cancer Society. Is this surely not a sign of guilt, a vain attempt at atonement, by a man who has made that fortune in the cigarette business, killing many times more people than his bequest will save? Or is it a heroic gesture from a pioneering industrialist at the very end of his life, a modern-day Carnegie who accumulated a vast pile through sometimes questionable means only so that he could give it all away to the poor; a kind of trustee of the people's wealth, wisely accumulating and administering it for the good of the multitude?

And, not for the first time, the Obit Expert thought of himself as a shaper of memories of the future, of memories yet to be born of facts that lay like unformed clay, waiting to be shaped by the artful hands of recollection.

The Obit Expert accepted the Old Man's assignment, and set to work gathering and cataloging facts about the Professor's life. He did not have much time – the death was days away. He gathered all that had been written by or about the Professor, and it was considerable. He spoke to his colleagues, his friends. Then he interviewed his two ex-wives, posing as a newspaper reporter (and indeed, there were other journalists out researching his life for favorable articles that were daily being written about the dying laureate – out researching, even, in case the worst should happen, an obituary, the replacement of which with his own version would in itself require the Obit Expert’s utmost effort). One evening the Obit Expert looked at all the piles of paper, all the computer records, all the interview tapes in front of him on his desk. It would be most difficult.

The Professor seemed to have led a singularly blameless existence – even his ex-wives spoke well of him, understanding that his towering genius needed more than one partner for its inspiration. He had helped younger mathematicians win fellowships, teaching positions. His children remembered him as a loving, if sometimes distracted, father. And his fellow mathematicians, all save the Old Man, spoke of him in terms reserved for the likes of Euler and Ramanujan – "the most significant mathematical mind of the last half-century" and "a thoroughly original approach which will change topography forever". Princeton was waiting to rename its Mathematics faculty after him. And not one of them – not his peers, not one of those that survived of his mentors, not his students – alleged or even suggested that he had ever taken credit for work not his own.

The Obit Expert knew that there was only one man remaining on earth that could provide him with the information needed to destroy the Professor's reputation.

It wasn't very difficult to get into the house. The suburb in which the Professor lived had no fear of the adjacent city. The Obit Expert simply climbed into the Professor's ground floor bedroom through the half-open window. A solitary nurse was asleep on a chair, holding in her lap a newspaper with her horoscope.

The Obit Expert stood in front of the Professor and said the Old Man's name.

Slowly, the Professor's eyes opened.

The Obit Expert said the Old Man's name again.

The Professor was smiling now. "Is it time to go?" he asked the Obit Expert. "It must be time to go, because you've come, you who I've been waiting for all these years."

And the Obit Expert held the Professor's hand as he went.

Copyright © 2010, Suketu Mehta. All rights reserved.

Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

Stories? The importance of books? Don’t get me started. The harder life gets, the more the need to escape. Stories offer a way out, an alternative world-view, an elsewhere that is not here and not now. Just like a drug.

Read enough of them and you’ll put up with a lifetime of hell because deep down you’ll be convinced that it’ll all end happily ever after. Or you’ll spend your life in the company of frogs because, thanks to stories, you’ll believe that hidden under that amphibian skin is the beating heart of a true prince. Or you’ll buy into the myth that if you’re good and truthful and kind, when you die you’ll go to heaven.

Oh, please. The only truth is that nobody gets out alive. Nobody.

I wasn’t always like this. Back then, Air used to complain that Mac and I would believe anything as long as it came from a book. But now Air’s dead, and Mac – well, Mac is elsewhere. He’s so very elsewhere, nobody can reach him.

It all began, as so much did back then, with a book. To understand, you’d have to go back in time to primary school, to primary five, when Mac arrived halfway through the winter term. He was the new boy, parachuted into a class struggling with maths, English and rolling strike action that was threatening to close the school indefinitely. Mac appeared in our midst, all freckles and sticky-out joints; red-haired, bespectacled and, at first sight, one of those children sporting a sign that read ‘born victim’. The Neanderthals in our class lit up at the sight of fresh meat but, to our surprise, within a few days of his arrival, Mac had everyone eating out of his hand. Mac, we all agreed, had the gift of the gab. Mordantly funny and utterly self-deprecating, everyone wanted Mac to be their friend. However, to my astonishment, Mac singled me out for the role of sole keeper-of-secrets and brother in arms. Within days we were inseparable, spending every spare moment in each other’s company, sharing our deepest, secret thoughts, hopes and fears until one of us only had to think about something before the other gave it voice.

In an age before mobiles and laptops, books were our common ground. I’d always had my nose firmly buried in some story or other, and in Mac I found myself not only mirrored but magnified tenfold. Where I read, Mac devoured. I absorbed and quoted from what I discovered between the pages, but Mac ate, breathed, lived and became the stories. For Mac, the border between reality and fiction didn’t exist. Or to put it another way, from the moment he could read, he’d had his head halfway down the rabbit-hole listening for the ticking of a tardy rabbit’s watch. For Mac, every stand of trees was a Wild Wood, every wardrobe offered passage into another world and, if he overturned enough boulders, one day he’d be sure to find a Psammead.

As we moved from primary to high school, Mac’s belief in the world of the imagination barely changed. Externally, adolescence was wreaking its usual havoc; spots, gangly limbs and crashing silences interspersed with the honks, squeaks and vocal uncertainties of puberty. But internally, Mac remained utterly true to his essential ‘Mac-ness’. He was old-young, wise beyond his years and, despite being the weediest boy in our year, he attracted a disproportionate share of adoring and adorable young women. Playing Wendy to his Peter, Air attached herself to Mac and thus became part of my life too.

Like musketeers, we drew strength from our threesome. Air was tough, sassy and streetwise. She tolerated Mac’s and my love of fiction, but preferred hers in the form of newspapers.
‘You’re havering,’ she’d mutter, faced with one of Mac’s more outlandish fantasies.
‘Get a grip, guys,’ she’d insist when Mac and I scared ourselves witless with some horror story we’d ramped up to fever pitch by our over-taxed imaginations. But in the end, all her common sense failed to save her. Air was undone by friendship; loyalty proved to be a more lethal weak spot for fortune’s arrows than any ancient Greek’s dodgy heel.

I said it began with a book, but in truth it began with Mac’s big sister Mhairi. As we went into second year at high school, Mhairi had been about to do her final year in medicine at Glasgow University. There was an incident with a drunken driver on Great Western Road. Mhairi, cycling back from the library with her panniers crammed full of textbooks, didn’t stand a chance. Death had been instantaneous.

On such tragic happenstances, entire lives spin out of orbit. Coming back to school a week after the funeral, Mac was visibly altered. We gathered round him, Air and I, trying to heal him with kindness, but we couldn’t reach him. Months went by, the year turned, but Mac still failed to show any signs of recovery.
I suspect the accidental nature of his sister’s death preyed on his mind; the ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’ keeping him awake and angrily grieving. He refused to talk about it. His eyes were permanently red-rimmed and, if a stick insect could be said to have lost weight, Mac looked physically diminished.

‘Can’t even escape into a book right now,’ he confessed. ‘It’s too much effort and, besides, none of the characters seem to make sense any more. Their hopes and dreams are just ... pointless. I find myself losing interest round page fifty...’
‘Try short stories,’ Air suggested. ‘Most of them aren’t any longer than fifty pages.’
‘I loathe short stories,’ Mac said. ‘Not even sure we’ve got any at home.’
But he did. The next week he was telling us what an amazing writer H.G. Wells was. The week after that, there was a light in his eyes that I hadn’t seen since the accident. After the first anniversary of Mhairi’s death, Air and I began to think the worst was over. And thus, we picked up the weft of our friendship and carried on, Mac’s sister buried, his grief apparently absorbed and our whole bright future ahead of us. Or so we thought.

Winter came in hard and fast that year, the jobless total crossed the three million mark, oil prices went through the roof, the stock market plummeted and a mood of bleak hopelessness seemed to engulf the nation. Mac, Air and I drew closer together, trying to keep the shadows at bay. We reasoned that this was an adult mess not of our making and, being teenagers, we tuned it out, turned up the volume of our music and assumed that if our parents’ generation hadn’t totally destroyed the planet by the time we inherited it, we’d soon sort it all out.

That night, we were holed up in Mac’s bedroom, but it could just as easily have been mine, or Air’s. Even now, I still find myself wondering if we might have prevented what happened. It’s as if by changing one simple thing, Mac and Air’s story could have had a different ending. However, in this story, Air was reading the newspaper out loud, while I riffled through Mac’s collection of vinyl and Mac did headstands against the bedroom door.
‘The more I read of this crap, the less I want to grow up,’ Air said, crumpling the paper into a ball and hurling it into a corner of the room. Mac, toes tapping out a rhythm on the door, ignored her completely and whistled tunelessly under his breath.
‘Don’t you think? Mac? Mac?’ Air persisted.
‘I do think,’ Mac said, eyes still closed. ‘Actually, I think a lot. I spend a lot of time upside down as well. It improves the flow of blood to my brain and therefore sharpens my ability to think, or so Mhairi says.’
Air’s head spun round and she locked eyes with me. ‘Says?’ she mouthed, with an imperceptible jerk of her head in Mac’s direction. Her expression at this point was mildly perplexed. Later it was to become confused, aghast and ultimately, blank. But for now, she was bemused. As was I. Perhaps ‘Mhairi says’ was only a slip of the tense. Perhaps Mac had meant to say, ‘Mhairi said’ or ‘Mhairi used to say’. A slip, I decided, just as Mac’s eyes opened and he curled up and dropped his feet to the floor, accidentally knocking half a mug of lukewarm coffee across Air and I before turning himself right way up.
‘Actually,’ he continued, as we mopped up the spillage, ‘I’ve been thinking a lot recently,’ and something in his eyes made me think – WHOAH, hang on – but then he was off, verbally sprinting miles ahead, each sentence tumbling out in a chaotic jumble of pseudo-science, hippy mystical shite and a slew of freaky syntactical connections that left my head spinning. Beside me, Air’s head shook rapidly from side to side in a palsy of denial.
‘Wait. Wait. Aw, come on, Mac. You know that’s not poss – just calm it, would you?’ she begged. But Mac, now started, proved to be unstoppable.
‘I know. You think I’m crazy, but you don’t know, you can’t know till you’ve tried it. It’s ... incredible. Mhairi knows, she’ll convince you. Mock all you like but once you see it … I’m telling you, it works. IT WORKS!’

It?

‘It’ being, for want of a better term, a time machine. That’s time machine as in a device that allows the user to wilfully flout the laws of physics and enter the realm of pure science fiction. This had to be a joke. Mac was winding us up, big-time. Actually, as a wind-up, it was too good. Mac was too convincingly mad. In truth, he was scaring the living daylights out of me and, judging by Air’s expression, she wasn’t far behind. Enough, already. I tried for levity, and failed.
‘Mac, for God’s sake. You can barely make your own bed. Toast is a task too far. How the hell d’you expect us to believe you could possibly make a time machine?’
No answer, just a glittering smile and a shrug. Across from me, Air dug her fingers into her hair and hung on for dear life as if her head was threatening to blow off.
‘Aw, come on. Mac ... pal ... I know Mhairi’s death blew you apart, but this is crazy. Mhairi is dead. She isn’t ... You can’t ...’
‘She’s not dead,’ Mac insisted. ‘At least, not in the past, she’s not. Don’t you see? I can go back. I can be with her before the accident. I can talk to her. Ask her stuff. She showed me how to make it work. Look, I’ll prove it to you. Come with me. I’ll show you.’ He grabbed Air’s arm, his face twisted with effort, desperately searching for the words that would make us believe him. ‘You can help. I want to find out what comes next. In the future. To see if we can make things better.’

With hindsight, that was the point at which I should have found Mac’s parents and begged them to get help for their rapidly unravelling son. But that would have meant telling Mac that what he was describing was impossible and that we thought he was losing it. How could we, his friends, be the ones to destroy the entire fragile, tottering edifice he’d constructed to cope with the grief of losing his sister? One of the most terrifying aspects of that night was the extent to which Mac had somehow, without our noticing it, become completely reliant on fantasy. He must’ve spent months building an internal Mac-logic to explain how such an impossibility could work. Many years later, I learned that psychologists have a phrase for this – cognitive dissonance. It is, in essence, doing something with one half of your mind while you force the other half to look away. It is a splitting of one’s person that, depending on the depth of the schism, can become a permanent feature.

As we followed Mac downstairs, with him babbling maniacally about time tourism and the wonders of the future ahead, I felt hollowed-out by fear but still hoped that somehow, miraculously, he was telling the truth. Then we were outside, Air and I still coffee-stained and damply shivering in the chill wind. We followed Mac down the path, past abandoned flower-beds, and into the garden shed.

Before Mhairi’s death, Mac’s Dad had made some attempt at keeping the garden in check, but the subsequent fifteen months of neglect had taken their toll. Mac flung the door wide to reveal rakes and hoes rusting on their hooks. Seeds spilled out of rotting packets and bird shit speckled the floor. In a corner, shrouded by hessian sacks, lay Mac’s invention. If further evidence was needed of Mac’s slipping grasp on reality, the jumbled mess in front of us was proof positive that our friend was ill and had been for some time. I saw a car seat complete with seat belt, a vintage vacuum cleaner, a dry-cleaner’s bag draped over a standard lamp and a clock radio gaffer taped to the top of a computer monitor. And all around, a fankle of jump leads, cables and extension leads, all wired, taped and spliced together with no regard for compatibility or purpose.

Air turned aside, hiding her face from view, and I avoided making eye contact with Mac but, by then, he was so intent on demonstrating the effectiveness of his machine that I doubt he noticed.
‘I know, I know,’ he muttered, flicking switches and, to my horror, plugging something into a wall socket. ‘Doesn’t look like much, but just you wait till we get this baby up and running, then you’ll see...’

Oh, I saw all right. I saw something I’ll never forget, no matter how hard I try. Mac slid into the car seat, solemnly belted himself in, pulled the plastic dry-cleaner’s bag over his head and fired up the vacuum cleaner. What the hell he thought he was doing I have no idea but, as the plastic instantly moulded itself to his face, Air leapt forwards yelling, ‘NO! NO! Idiot – you’ll suffoc-’
There was a blue flash, Air gave a sort of surprised half-cough, half-grunt, and then she flew backwards and crashed to the floor. She landed on one of Mac’s tangles of wiring and, what with her recent dousing in cold coffee and the time I took to realise that she was actually being electrocuted and wasn’t simply kicking the floor in pain and fury, she was well and truly dead.

Let’s skip ahead several chapters to where Mac sits on his bed by the window. There’s not much of a view, but he stares out at the courtyard where fellow travellers walk aimlessly, round and round and back and forth, smoking as if their lives depended on it. At first, I wasn’t allowed to see him for fear I’d remind him of the night I lost them both. Then things relaxed a bit, and I’d cycle up after school on Fridays and make my way to the ward to see my friend. After Mac’s parents died I became his sole visitor, apart from the odd aunt or social worker who’d grown attached to him over the years. So many years, now.

Air is firmly fixed in time; forever thirteen – a child compared to Mac’s and my middle-age. We’re the adults now, and according to the news we’re still making a mess of everything. But here, Mac has the advantage. Grey and balding, Mac can time travel at will. He calls up Mhairi and Air and, judging by Mac’s roars of laughter, they all appear to have a great time together. He doesn’t need a time machine to go back any more. In a rare moment of clarity after some cock-up with his medication, he told me he’d downloaded a time travel app straight onto his internal hard drive which allowed him to move freely through time and space.

Which is, all things considered, just as well. Look closely and you’ll see that Mac’s bed has long restraining straps sewn onto the mattress. The windows in his room don’t open. Occasionally, when Mhairi and Air whoop it up a bit too much, Mac ends up face-down on the floor with the duty doctor giving him an extra shot of something to bring poor Mac slamming straight back into the present, time travel apps notwithstanding.

The truth is that Mac’s story will not end with a happy ever after. Although I cannot see them, I know that Mac believes Mhairi and Air are beside his bed. They watch and wait, Mhairi’s arm round the younger girl’s shoulders, comforting her, telling her some lie or other that she read, all those years ago, in one of the books she used to carry home from the university library.
‘Once they find the correct medication, my brother will be able to lead a normal life.’
Poor Mhairi; her books say this, so it must be true.
Air leans down and pats Mac’s arm and whispers, ‘And when you die, you’ll go to heaven.’
She is dead, so you’d imagine she’d know better than to spout this nonsense, but billions of books agree so it must be true. They removed the bible from Mac’s room after he tried to eat it, page by page, but I imagine he could still recite whole chunks if he so desired. He doesn’t, thankfully. Instead, he looks out of the window, at the walking lost, at the stranded time travellers smoking in the courtyard, at the dust motes caught in sunlight, at a moth struggling to free itself from a long-abandoned web.



Copyright © 2010 Debi Gliori. All rights reserved.
Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.
 

14^th July 1965.

As I sailed into Arnefjord this morning, I was looking all around me, marvelling at the towering mountains, at the still dark waters, at the welcoming escort of porpoises, at the chattering oyster-catchers, and I could not understand for the life of me why the Vikings ever left this land. 
        It was beautiful beyond belief.  Why would you ever leave this paradise of a place, to face the heaving grey of the Norwegian Sea, and a voyage into the unknown, when you had all this outside your door?
        The little village at the end of the fjord looked at first too good to be true – a cluster of clapboard houses gathered around the quay, most painted ox-blood red.  On top of the hill beyond them stood a simple wooden church with an elegant pencil-sharp spire, and a well-tended graveyard, surrounded by a white picket fence.  There seemed to be flowers on almost every grave.  A stocky little Viking pony grazed the meadow below.
        The fishing boat tied up at the quay had clearly seen better days.  Now that I was closer, I noticed that the village too wasn’t as well kept as I had first thought.  In places the paint was peeling off the houses.  There were tiles missing from the rooftops, and a few of the windows were boarded up.  It wasn’t abandoned, but the whole place looked tired, and sad somehow. 

As I came in on the motor there was something about the village that began to make me feel uncomfortable.  There was no one to be seen, not a soul.  Only the horse.  No smoke rose from the chimneys.  There was no washing hanging out.  No one was fishing from the shoreline, no children played in the street or around the houses. 
        I hailed the boat, hoping someone might be on board to tell me where I could tie up.  There was no reply.  So I tied up on the quay anyway and jumped out.  I was looking for a café, somewhere I could get a drink, or even a hot meal.  And I needed a shop too.  I was low on water, and I had no beer left on board, and no coffee.
        I found a place almost immediately that looked as if it might be the village stores.  I peered through the window.  Tables and chairs were set out.  There was a bar to one side, and across the room I could see a small shop, the shelves stacked with tins.  Things were looking up, I thought.  But I couldn’t see anyone inside.  I tried the door, and to my surprise it opened.
        I’d never seen anything like it.  This was shop, café, nightclub, post office, all in one.  There was a Wurlitzer juke box in the corner, and then to one side, opposite the bar, the post office and shop.  And there was a piano right next to the post office counter, with sheet music open on the top – Beethoven Sonatas. 
        I called out, but still no one emerged.  So I went outside again and walked down the village street, up the hill towards the church, stopping on the way to stroke the horse.  I asked him if he was alone here, but he clearly thought that this was a stupid question and wandered off, whisking his tail as he went. 

The church door was open, so I went in and sat down, breathing in the peace of the place, and trying at the same time to suppress the thought that this might be some kind of ghost village.  It was absurd, I knew it was, but I could feel the fear rising inside me. 
        That was when the bell rang loud, right above my head, from the spire.  Twelve times.  My heart pounded in my ears.  As the last echoes died away I could hear the sound of a man coughing and muttering to himself.  It seemed to come from high up in the gallery behind me.  I turned.
        We stood looking at one another, not speaking for some time.  I had the impression he was as surprised to see me as I was to see him.  He made his way down the stairs, and came slowly up the aisle towards me.
        He had strange eyes this man, unusually light, like his hair.  He might have been fifty or sixty, but weathered, like the village was.
        “Looking at you,” he began, “I would say you might be English.”<
        “You’d be right.” I told him.
        “Thought so,” he said, nodding.  Then he went on, “I ring the bell every day at noon.  I always have.  It’s to call them back.  They will come one day.  You will see, they will come.”
        I didn’t like to ask who he was talking about.  My first thought was that perhaps he was a little mad.
        “You need some place to stay, young man?  I have twelve houses you can choose from.  You need to pray?  I have a church.  You need something to eat, something to drink?  I have that too.  Yes, you’re looking a little pale.  I can tell you need a drink.  Come.”

Outside the church he stopped to shake my hand and to introduce himself as Ragnar Erikson.  As we walked down the hill he told me who lived in each of the houses we passed – a cousin here, an aunt there – and who grew the best vegetables in the village, and who was the best pianist.  He spoke as if they were still there, and this was all very strange because it was quite obvious to me by now that no one at all was living in any of these houses.  Then I saw he was leading me back to where I’d been before, into the bar-cum-post office-cum-village stores.
        “You want some music on the Wurlitzer?” he asked me.  “Help yourself, whatever you like, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, ‘Sloop John B’, ‘Rock Around the Clock’.  You choose.  It’s free, no coins needed.”
        I chose ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, while he went behind the bar and poured me a beer. 
        “I don’t get many people coming here these days,” he said, “and there’s only me living here now, so I don’t keep much in the bar or the shop.  But I caught a small salmon today.  We shall have that for supper, and a little schnapps.  You will stay for supper, won’t you?  You must forgive me – I talk a lot, to myself mostly, so when I have someone else to talk to, I make up for lost talking time.  You’re the first person I’ve had in here for a month at least.” 
        I didn’t know what to say.  Too much was contradictory and strange.  I longed to ask him why the place looked so empty and if there were people really living in those houses.  And who was he ringing the church bell for?  Nothing made any sense.  But I couldn’t bring myself to ask.  Instead, I made polite conversation. 
        “You speak good English,” I told him.
        “This is because Father and I, we went a lot to Shetland in the old days.  So we had to speak English.  We were always going over there.”
        “In that fishing boat down by the quay?” I asked him.
        “It is not a fishing boat,” he said.  “It is a supply boat.  I carry supplies to the villages up and down the fjords.  There is no road, you see; everything has to come by boat, the post as well.  So I am the postman too.” 
        After a couple of beers he took me outside and back down to the quayside to show me his boat.  Once on board, I could see it was the kind of boat that no storm could sink.  It was made not for speed but for endurance, built to bob up and down like a cork and just keep going.  The boat suited the man, I thought.  We stood together in the wheelhouse, and I knew he wanted to talk.
        “My family,” he said, “we had two boats, this one and one other just the same.  Father made one, I made the other.  This is the old boat, my father’s boat.  He made it with his own hands before I was born, and we took it over to Shetland, like the Vikings did before us.  But we were not on a raid like they were.  It was during the wartime, when the Germans were occupying Norway.
        “We were taking refugees across the Norwegian Sea to Shetland, often twenty of them at a time, hidden down below.  Sometimes they were Jews escaping from the Nazis.  Sometimes it was airmen who had been shot down, commandos we had been hiding, secret agents too.  Fifteen times we went there and back and they didn’t catch us.  Lucky, we were very lucky.  This is a lucky boat.  The other one, the one I built, was not so lucky. ”
        Ragnar Erikson wasn’t the kind of man you could question or interrupt, but I was wondering all through our supper of herring and salmon, in the warmth of his kitchen that evening, what he had meant about the other boat.  And I still hadn’t dared to broach the subject that puzzled me most: why there seemed to be no one else living in the village.  When he fell silent I felt he wanted to be lost in his thoughts, and so the right moment never came. But after supper by the fire, he began to question me closely about why I had come sailing to Norway, about what I was doing with my life.  He was easy to talk to because he seemed genuinely interested.  So I found myself telling him everything: how at thirty-one I had found myself alone in the world, that my mother had died when I was a child, and just a couple of months ago my father had too.  I was a schoolteacher, but not at all sure I wanted to go on being one.
        “But why did you come here?” he asked me. “Why Norway?”
        So I told him how, when I was a boy, I had been obsessed by the Vikings; I’d loved the epic stories of Beowulf and Grendel; I’d even learned to read the runes.  It had become a lifelong ambition of mine to come to Norway one day.  But arriving here in this particular fjord had been an accident – I was just looking for a good sheltered place to tie up for the night.
        “I’m glad you came,” he said after a while.  “As I said, no one comes here much these days.  But they will, they will.”
        “Who will?” I asked him, without thinking, and at once regretted it for I could see he was frowning at me, looking at me quite hard suddenly, and I feared I might have offended him. 
        “Whoever it is, they will be my family and my friends, that’s all I know,” he said.  “They will live in the houses, where they all once lived, where their souls still live.”
        I could hear from the tone of his voice that there was more to tell and that he might tell it, if I was patient and did not press him.  So I kept quiet, and waited.  I’m so pleased I did.  When at last he began again he told me the whole story, about the empty village, about the other boat, the boat he talked about as if it had been cursed.
        “I think perhaps you would like to know why I’m all alone in this place?” he said, looking directly at me.  It felt as if he was having to screw up all his courage before he could go on.
        “I should have gone to the wedding myself,” he said, “with everyone else in the village, but I did not want to.  It was only in Flam, down the fjord just north of here, not that far.  The thing was, that ever since I was a little boy, the bride had been my sweetheart, the love of my life, but I was always too timid to tell her.  I looked for her every time I went to Flam to collect supplies, met her whenever I could, went swimming with her, picking berries, mountain climbing, but I never told her how I felt.  Now she was marrying someone else.  I didn’t want to be there, that’s all.  So my father skippered my boat that day instead of me.  There were fourteen people in the boat – everyone from the village except for me and two very old spinster sisters.  They did everything together, those two.  One of them was too sick to go, so the other insisted on staying behind to look after her.  I watched the boat going off into the morning mists.  I never saw it again, nor anyone on board.
        “To this day, no one really knows what happened.  But we do know that early in the evening, after the wedding was over, there was a rock-slide, a huge avalanche which swept down the mountainside into the fjord, and set up a great tidal wave.  People from miles around heard it and saw it.  No one saw the boat go down, but that’s what must have happened.
        “For a few years the two old sisters and I kept the village going.  When they died, within days of one another, I buried them in the churchyard.  Then I was alone.  To start with, very often, I thought of leaving, but someone had to tend the graves, had to ring the church bell, so I stayed.  I fished, I kept a few sheep in those days.  I had my horse.  I learned how to be alone.
        “I discovered there is one thing you have to do when you are alone, and that is to keep busy.  So every day I work on the houses, opening windows in the summers to air rooms, lighting fires in the winters to warm them through, painting windows and doors, fixing where I can, just keeping them ready for the day they return.  There’s always something. I know it’s looking more and more untidy as the years go by, but I do my best.  I have to.  They’re all living here still, all my family and friends.  I can feel them all about me.  They’re waiting, and I’m waiting, for the others to come and join them.”
        “I don’t understand,” I told him.
        “No, young man,” he said, laughing a little.  “I’m not off my head, not quite.  I know the dead cannot come back.  But I do know their spirits live on, and I do know that one day, if I do not leave, if I keep ringing the bell, if I keep the houses dry, then people will find this place, will come and live here.  In the villages nearby, they are still frightened of the place.  They think it is cursed somehow.  But they are wrong about that.  It was the boat that was cursed, I tell them, not the village.  Anyway, they do not come.  Most of them are so frightened, they won’t even come to visit me.  They say it is a dying village and will soon be a dead village.  But it is not, and it will not be, not so long as I stay.  One day people will come and then the village will be alive once more.  I know this for sure.” 

**

Ragnar Erikson offered me a bed in his house that night, but I said I was fine in the boat.  I am ashamed to admit it but after hearing his story I just didn’t want to stay there any longer. It was too easy to believe that the place – paradise that it looked – might be cursed.  He did not try to persuade me.  I am sure he knew instinctively what I was feeling.  I told him that I had to be up early in the morning, thinking I might not see him again.  But he said he would be sure to see me off.  And he was as good as his word.  He was down on the quay at first light.  We shook hands warmly, friends for less than a day, but I felt, because he had told me his story, that in a way we were friends for life.  He told me to come back one day and see him again if ever I was passing. Although I said I would, I knew how unlikely it would be.  But, through all the things that have happened to me since, I never forgot the saga of Ragnar Erikson. It was a story that I liked to tell often to my family, to my friends.

    1^st August 2010.  Midnight.

Today I came back to Arnefjord.  It has been over forty years and I’ve often dreamed about it, wondering what happened to Ragnar Erikson and his dying village.  This time I have brought my family, my grandchildren too, because however often I tell them the story, they never quite seem to believe it.  
        I had my binoculars out at the mouth of the little fjord and saw the village at once.  It was just as it had been.  Even the boat was there at the quay, with no one on it, so far as I could see.  There was no smoke rising from the chimneys; when we tied up, no one came to see us.  I walked up towards the village shop, the grandchildren running off into the village, happy to be ashore, skipping about like goats, finding their land legs again. 
        Then, as I walked up towards the church, I saw a mother coming towards me with a pushchair.  
        “Do you live here?” I asked her.
        “Yes,” she said, and pointed out her house, “over there.”
        My granddaughter came running up to me.
        “I knew it, Grandpa,” she cried, “I always knew it was just a story.  Of course there are people living here.  I’ve seen lots and lots of them.”
        And she was right.  There was a toy tractor outside the back door of a newly painted house, and I could hear the sound of shrieking children coming from further away down by the seashore.
        “What story does she mean?” the mother asked me.
        So I told her how I’d come here over forty years before and had met Ragnar Erikson, and how he was the only one living here then. 
        “Old Ragnar,” she said, smiling.  “He’s up in the churchyard now.”
        She must have seen the look on my face. “No, no,” she said, “I don’t mean that. He’s not dead.  He’s doing the flowers.  We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.  Ragnar saved this village, Ragnar and the road.”
        “The road?” I asked.
        Fifteen years ago they built a road to the village, and suddenly it was a place people could come to and live in.  But there would have been no village if Ragnar hadn’t stayed, we all know that.  There are sixteen of us living here – six families.  He’s old now and does not hear so well, but he is strong enough to walk up the hill to ring the bell.  It was the bell that brought us back, he says. And he still likes to go on ringing it every day.  Habit, he says.”
        I went up the hill with my granddaughter, who ran on ahead of me up the steps and into the church.  When she came out there was an old man with her, and he was holding her hand.    
        “She has told me who you are,” he said.  “But I would have recognised you anyway.  I knew you would come back, you know.  You must have heard me ringing.  If I remember rightly, you liked ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ on the Wurlitzer.  And you liked a beer.  Do you remember?”
        “I remember,” I said.  “I remember everything.” 

 Copyright © 2010 Michael Morpurgo. All rights reserved.

Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

            Provincetown is a small town on a sand-bar in Massachusetts. On one side is the harbor, on the other side the dunes and the ocean. Thoreau wrote that it was “a filmy sliver of land lying flat on the ocean, a mere reflection of a sand-bar on the haze above.” It hasn’t changed much in 150 years, geographically. The Pilgrims have come and gone (pretty quickly—they wintered in Provincetown and went on to Plymouth). The Portuguese fishermen and their families have been in town since whaling ended more than a century ago and fishing began and they are there still, although the fishing isn’t great anymore. (You can whale-watch, however, or hire someone to take you fishing for a day and catch bluefish and striped bass, while watching out for the pleasure of seals and the annoyance of drunks in motorboats.) The painters and poets and novelists came and stayed, from Robert Motherwell and Norman Mailer to people who post their rhyming poems in the back of the pizza parlor or paint on cardboard because they can’t afford canvas. Gay artists came with their straight siblings, and once the artists and their shifty, sexy ways cleared a path, gay accountants, gay plumbers, gay businessmen, gay schoolteachers, gay waiters and gay electricians began arriving. They, too, have stayed. And the handsome, muscular guys, all dressed like oversized toddlers, and the swaggering butches, and the two moms and two dads with two kids, and the boa-wearing queens, and the sulky teenagers all flood Commercial Street, moving like a motley wave around the German tourists and the straight families from Idaho, all of whom want their picture taken with the Cher lookalike on a scooter.

You can’t buy a basic pair of pants or a plain button-down shirt in P-town. But you can buy:

Really good oysters. (You can even just get a bucket and drive over to the Wellfleet flats and dig your own.)

A huge, wall-covering oil painting of a man with enormous green eyes, done by a local artist, inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae.

A hammock woven in rainbow colors.

Custom-made stained glass in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright or Andy Warhol.

A Japanese teapot made into a vase.

Caramel cheesecake saltwater taffy.

An antique cabinet from the Gansu Province of China, circa 1850.

Lemon grass bath salts.

A superb one-hour massage with a transgendered body-builder.

Cranberry-walnut fudge.

A diamond-studded vibrator.

Blueberry-banana gelato and a blue striped sundress to go with it.

A straw fedora with a black and red grosgrain ribbon. (Men will look dashing; women, insouciant.)

A La Vie Boheme t-shirt. (Also one that says Your Gaydar Should Be Going Off Right…Now.)

An elaborately pretty (or suitably manly) henna tattoo that will last two weeks and make the middle-aged feel that life has not entirely passed them by.

Home-made brownies, $1 apiece, sold by the two little girls on the corner, in front of their house.

            When I was growing up, my parents took me on exactly three vacations. The first was to my Uncle Izzy’s chicken farm in New Jersey. I got bitten by a chicken and had to carry warm, dampish eggs to the kitchen. After making scrambled eggs, my aunt stepped a few yards behind the house and killed a chicken for dinner. She wore her blood-spattered apron all day. The second holiday, we went to a cottage on the Jersey shore. It had no indoor plumbing, no air-conditioning and no window screens. I got a rash that lasted for weeks. The third time, we went to Puerto Rico; I was 13, my sister was 18, and on the first day we disappeared for 8 hours to go joyriding with a pair of good-looking thugs. When we got back, the Puerto Rican State Police surrounded us and then we went home. That was it for family vacations.

            I was determined to give my children the holidays I didn’t have (funky charm, social diversity, bookstores and toilets) and I was determined not to be one of those miserable brood-bound souls shlepping whiny children to places they didn’t want to go, ending with a dropped ice cream cone for them and a drinking problem for me.

            Provincetown is our place; heaven for them, and heaven for me. We drive up narrow Route 6 and there are the dunes and sky, undulating elegantly on our right. It doesn’t look like what it is—the slow, destructive process of erosion. It looks like the world before people tarted it up. On our left are the small seashore cabins, which we’re happy not to stay in. They’re close to the dunes but have Route 6 passing right in front of, and behind, them. We pull into town and head east. We can stop at the supermarket at which everyone (drag queens, famous designers, tattoo artists, Provincetown’s mayor) shops and, amid the grandmothers in outrageous t-shirts and adopted Chinese toddlers and visiting European teenagers dressed for St. Tropez, we buy vacation food. Lucky Charms cereal and peanut butter. This for the gluten-free, that for the lactose-intolerant. Diet Coke and blueberries for everyone. An inflatable raft it will take an hour to blow up.

            From time to time we have stayed in Provincetown’s inns (from the oddly ornate, full of damask and brocade, to the bravely threadbare with mismatched pillowcases and broken dressers) but when the guys we loved sold The Commons to open a hotel in Florida, and the tiny blue attic bedroom was no longer available for my youngest daughter, we moved on to renting a house.

            The beach on the bay side spreads out toward the long arm and fist of Provincetown, the true land’s end, and south towards the more polite and tidy Wellfleet. (No tawdry shops with giant sunglasses, bejeweled flip-flops and hair clips shaped like naked women.) You can walk out nearly a half mile at low tide, and we do. My daughters do the water tricks they have been performing in the bay for twenty years—handstands and cartwheels—and they do them for their niece who, at two, is fascinated but wary. We all walk down Commercial Street for pizza and ice cream at Spiritus. We go to Tom’s Used Books (but only four at a time—it’s not very big). We all return to the beach, hour after perfect hour. A Brazilian couple, darkly tanned and glittery in their tiny white suits, walk their tiny white bichon past us and then retreat to their muslin tent. The two older ladies bring their complete kit for the afternoon—iced tea, two crystal glasses and a tray of lemon squares. A family of three blond parents and four brown children fly a pair of kites.  An old man in a sarong and a pith helmet comes by with his metal detector. The sun sets like a wide red hibiscus over the water and all of those people stop and watch it blossom and drop.

            “Hallelujah,” the old man says.

                                                            ***

Copyright © 2010, Amy Bloom. All rights reserved.

Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

            Elsewhere. For me the word had a magic ring right from the start, like the beginning of a fairy tale. Once Upon a Time…  Far, Far Away...  Long, Long Ago... Elsewhere…

            It chimed in, too, with where I longed to be at almost every moment of every day throughout my childhood. Stuck at my desk in school, I yearned to be done with the dull repetition of French verbs and tireless strictures of teachers. I wanted to be home.

At home, constantly interrupted in my reading by demands to carry laundry upstairs, put my shoes neatly in the cupboard or take my turn with the washing-up, I longed to stroll back under that cool brick archway that signalled the divide between chaotic family life and all those quiet bursts of concentration over pens and workbooks.

            Things didn’t change when I went off to university. It was a two hour journey home – long enough for the family you’d left to be ignored if you were happy where you were, but not too far to keep you from snatching up a bag and leaving your hall of residence on a whim if you were homesick. I went home often. But within minutes one of my parents would be nagging me to take my coat off the back of that chair and hang it on a hook, remarking (none too kindly) on what I was wearing, or reading me something from the newspaper I was just learning to despise.

And I’d start lying. ‘I can’t stay more than one night. I have a seminar at two tomorrow.’

            Restless, my mother called me. And maybe she was right, for I am tense by nature, gnawing my fingernails until they bleed. But if it was simple restlessness then surely I would have taken much better to a married life which led to two years here and one year there, six months in this place followed by a year in that. After the seven years so many fairy tales tell us we have to wait for what we want, I jumped ship, wanting to be back where there is frost and fog and gales, and snow that comes as a surprise rather than as a settled fact of life.

            So I suspect my craving to be elsewhere was something different: the sneaking, if irrational, belief that somewhere else my real true life was waiting for me – maybe in London, where I’d go to concerts every night, have lunch with my publishers, see every film; perhaps in a windswept cottage on the coast where I’d be so alone I could write longer, better books; perhaps in Seville or Paris.

            Then one day, turning on the radio to hear the news, I caught the very last words of some presenter blandly wrapping up the programme before. ‘So there we have it. As the old proverb goes, “Here is everywhere and everywhere is here.” Thanks to my guests…’

            What drivel, I remember thinking. The sort of empty, double-ended, sub-Maharishi tosh that you might take for wisdom only if you were stoned out of your skull. I couldn’t even track down the proverb. (Sayings like Seneca the Younger’s “He who is everywhere is nowhere” kept popping up, but that’s quite different.) For all I know, someone misread the script, or I misheard.  But still that little trail of words had put a thumbprint on my life and I began to notice the sort of small exchanges my partner and I had been having for years.

             ‘Have I been to Sienna?’ I’d ask.

            ‘Yes. Yes, you have. With me.’

            ‘I don’t remember.’

            ‘There was a bat in the room.’

            ‘Oh, yes. Well, have I been to Cagliari?’

            ‘Yes. For a festival. Only last year.’

            ‘I thought that was in Sardinia.’

            ‘It was.’

            If you don’t know where you have been, what is the point?

Then even the future started getting blurry. People would ask if I could come to supper, or give a talk. ‘I’m not quite sure. I think I’m somewhere at the end of this month.’

            ‘Oh? Somewhere nice?’

            And I could barely answer, because I hadn’t bothered to decide. All that I’d noticed was a rising sense of irritation at the sight of the thick black line I’d drawn across those days on the work calendar.

            Then one day, proofreading a fresh edition of my first novel for adults, I came across a line I’d written over twenty years before. My hideously scarred and sexually sadistic university teacher remarks in The Killjoy of his quiet life: ‘The more closely each of my days mirrors the one before, the more contented I am.’

            Could I be turning into one of my own murderous characters? But Ian Laidlaw had been middle-aged, so maybe the burgeoning attraction of keeping life more settled was to do with that, in the same way that, as you get older, it is easier to see the point of all things quiet and still: paintings and sculptures; silence. Yet everyone else my age seemed to be cantering around the globe with even more enthusiasm than before, and even the real oldies seemed to do nothing but rush from one end of the world to the other.

No, it was definitely me. And as the days went by I realised that the haunting snippet from the radio had eaten into my soul and changed me. Now, like the staid character in Philip Larkin’s Poetry of Departures, who feels the elemental thrill we all do when he hears the words,

            He chucked up everything

            And just cleared off,

but then dismisses the idea, my choice was made. The craving to be somewhere else had all but died.

And I was grateful for it – and still am, especially valuing the second half of this peculiar notion that changed my life: the part that says ‘everywhere is here’. I’ve found that I’ve stopped trying to make the most of time spent in strange cities, forever hurrying off to see that art gallery before it closes, or squeezing in a visit to those ruins before my talk. I’ve learned the art of treating every hotel bedroom as if it were truly mine, and getting on with things I’ve always preferred doing anyway – writing in bed or reading for hours in the bath.

            From time to time, of course, I’ve stopped to wonder if all I’ve done is grown more dull and idle, and given up on some of the richness that’s out there in life. But I don’t think that can be true because the magic of the word ‘elsewhere’ has travelled with me through this change of habit. It still gleams like a celestial city on a hill, unspoiled and unreached.

The only reason I’m no longer restless is that I now know I can take ‘elsewhere’ along with me.

Copyright © 2010, Anne Fine. All rights reserved.

Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.