gum haze; mist; fine film of moisture or condensation
haar cold mist
halgh spume; mist; sea spray
ime condensation; rising vapour
Neptune’s uouue fog
ramfeezle obfuscation
reik column of cloud
rouk sea fog; mist with the appearance of smoke emanating from the earth
scowman gloomy appearance or haze
shokk mist; drizzle
stim haze; mist; film on glass
—Grigor McWatt, 1952, The Fascaray Compendium
20 September 2014
Agnes has asked to stay up late. Tormented by guilt over my absences, mental as well as physical, I agree. She’s set up her telescope at her bedroom window and insists on talking me through the constellations.
“The really brilliant thing, see, is that in Scotland, in this part of Scotland anyway, they’ve got the darkest skies in the whole of Europe. Super clear. No light pollution. No cities. No traffic. No malls. No nothing.”
“Mmm. Brilliant!” I say, without conviction.
I put my eye to the lens and feign excitement at the wobbling flashes of light skidding across the boundless dark. Agnes studies her star chart and points.
“So that one, the one with the long handle, is the Plough. It’s spelled like ‘plowg-huh’ but you say ‘plow.’ And that one, two stars up from the handle…”
She is her father’s daughter in so many ways. When I first met Marco, I was taken by his random enthusiasms and weird passions—for 1930s comic books, bread-making, open-source software, tabletop ball games, English Romanticism, Czech pre-war advertising art, the Nordic harmonium repertoire, British radio comedy of the 1950s and astrophysics. He plays the spoons—that I ever found his hobo drum solos appealing now amazes me—and he knows everything there is to know about the ecology of plant epiphytes, the common and Latin names of wild flowers, English music-hall theatre and Bauhaus textile design. I suppose, for a while, I was just another of his random enthusiasms and weird passions. He made me laugh and lifted me up through my spells of what I guess was Morbus Fascariensis. It worked for a while.
One long night at a dinner with some of his sillier summer stock friends, after two hours of his stoned exposition on the subject of The Goon Show, I had my Titania moment; I stirred from sleep to find my handsome, clever, creative beau was a dim, braying ass.
His effusiveness, his fads and his odd, unnecessary expertise began to drive me crazy.
“Doesn’t anything depress you?” I shouted at him one morning, after hearing him whistle—“My Old Man Said Follow the Van”—in the bathroom. The fact that I recognised the tune made me even angrier. His useless knowledge was, after years of proximity, taking up valuable houseroom in my brain. It was like secondary smoking; exposure to this stuff, his stuff, was diminishing me.
We had argued through the previous night and now he was gazing in the mirror, his jaw a Santa’s beard of shaving foam, pursing his lips and whistling. Whistling!—the mating call of the optimistic numbskull.
He looked hurt.
“Our relationship depresses me,” he volunteered finally.
Now we were getting somewhere.
He wiped his face and left the apartment. Possibly to pursue his latest enthusiasm—yoga.
I watched him go, his broad back in the faded green T-shirt with its contour map of sweat patches, the sandals, the low-slung cargo shorts. Shorts, for chrissakes. Where were we living? The beach? How old did he think he was? Now I even found his shorts offensive.
“And then in the south, which is that way—Mom? Are you listening?—in the south, when it’s really dark, if you’re really lucky, you can see the Milky Way.”
“Mmm…”
Odd to think that I foresook my puer aeternus for his younger brother. His figurative younger brother, that is. Marco doesn’t have a younger brother. But if he ever required one and held auditions, Pascal would have been called back for a second interview. Younger brother, not twin. Pascal was a slender faun to Marco’s chunky satyr, taciturn rather than effusive but with soulful eyes and the same dark hair, more plentiful in Pascal’s case. The boy was talented, played slide guitar with an art-school band with a cult reputation in Williamsburg, and sang like an angel: an angel with a repeat prescription for antidepressants and what seemed to be a daily marijuana habit.
What did I care, or even notice at the start of our affair, if he’d barely read a book in his life, possessed no discernible sense of humour, spoke in banal epithets derived from some self-help huckster—about life forces, energies and spiritual connections—and his body of knowledge amounted to a few interesting chord shapes on the guitar and a degree of digital dexterity, plus a sketchy appreciation of indie fashion and an instinct for cool?
As I began to grasp the extent of Pascal’s shallowness, I persuaded myself that it was a good thing, that he was an enfant sauvage, and that his unencumbered intellect was a restful sanctuary, a white-walled Zen temple offering welcome refuge from the clamorous cosmopolis of Marco’s mind. The key to this self-persuasion was the sex, which was terrific—at the beginning. Added to the thrill of novelty, after years of fidelity, was the fieriest spice, the habanero chilli of revenge. The yoga teacher may have been usefully flexible but she was my age, if not older. I knew Marco, too, and three months into his affair with his yoga teacher, he began to show signs of disenchantment. I doubted whether he and Karmic Kate, a martyr to her food allergies, would be having as much fun in the sack as I was with my beautiful, smooth-skinned, limber, rock princeling. Pascal’s surprisingly luxurious sublet—a white-glove luxury condo in a converted printworks in Tribeca with triple-aspect windows, ambient lighting, chef’s kitchen (unused) and an assemblage of low, pale furniture—seemed a perfect stage set for an affair. What did I know? What does anyone know?
“And if you’re real lucky you can see this thing where the sky kind of dances with coloured lights. It’s called the aura boralis.”
“Aurora borealis. Northern Lights,” I say. That much I know. From Marco, of course.
An Tobar
Calasay
Fascaray
14 July 1964
Bonniest of lassies,
Despair I cannot thole. We will certainly meet soon for a quaich or two in the old haunt. I am caught up here with my duties—Roy has asked me to write an extra column this week for the Pibroch. Donald is sick—this younger generation, yourself included, seems to lack the robustness of my own—and I cannot leave the laddie to take care of the menagerie. Caesar, Luath’s successor, is arthritic himself now and has to be coaxed into a walk, Bluebell the coo has mastitis, and Darnley and Mary the otters are, I fear, reverting to a feral state. But dinnae fash yersel. I’ll be back in Rose Street soon enough.
Aye, Grigor
27c Jamaica Street
Edinburgh
18 July 1964
Oh, Grigor. “Soon enough” is never soon enough for me.
Your Lilias
27 September 2014
The weekend. Specifically, Agnes’s weekend. I owe her. The wind is brisk and we’re walking straight into it as we set off for our hike from the trail head by Dubh Lochan. I can barely hear Agnes’s chatter—about school, about who said what and did which to whom—and my McWatt Walk pamphlet is almost wrenched from my hand by a sudden gust.
The weather is too wild for the picnic—English muffins with smoked salmon—I’ve optimistically brought in a backpack and, when the rain breaks, we seek shelter in one of the Slochd caves, marked on the Ordnance Survey map as Uamh a’ Chlàrsair Chaillte, which the pamphlet tells us is the site of “a famous supernatural occurrence.” I curb my sneer. Folklore sells. This is Agnes’s day, I remind myself: I am leaving my work behind and doing something with my daughter. Whatever she wants. Does it make me a bad mother that I secretly rejoiced when, rather than asking to go see some Disney movie at the cinema on the mainland or spend the day in Auchwinnie’s no
isy, over-chlorinated pool, she asked to go for a walk? Here?
Ailsa McAllister had told her about the cave and this bad mother rejoiced again when she saw it was part of the McWatt Walk itinerary. I’ve been meaning to check it out. Either the Heritage Centre and Museum does something with this strand of the story—produces a “Spirit Sightings” wall map, or some such nonsense aimed at the gullible Balnasaig tendency, as well as a better brochure, maps and nature trails for Sunday strollers and serious hikers—or we scrap it.
Our picnic is finished and packed away but, sitting on my waterproof, spread over a boulder in the gloom of the cave as the rain batters down outside, we’re not ready to leave. I sense Agnes is disappointed. But she soon rallies.
“Tell me the story again,” she asks.
I take out the damp pamphlet and, using my flashlight, read it out once more.
“ ‘Uamh a’ Chlàrsair Chaillte, the Cave of the Disappearing Harpist, is said to be the site of an incident that took place there three hundred years ago. The harpist, playing a lament and finding the weather suddenly inclement,’ ” (when, I wonder, is it ever clement?) “ ‘took shelter with his dog in this deep cleft in the rock. Still plucking away at his harp he wandered further into the labryinth of caves and was never seen again.’ ” His dog, though, was said to have emerged a week later from a hollow at the mouth of the Cannioch all the way round the coast to the west. “ ‘The animal’s eyes were wide with fear, he was whimpering, and every hair had been singed from his body. It is said that if you stand by the blowhole near Doonmara cliffs, you can hear the lament of the lost harpist drifting up from the chambered caves below.’ ”
My daughter’s teeth chatter in the moist chill of the cave; perfect conditions for incubating a chest infection.
“Suppose it was true,” she says. “That the harper got lost. Who saw him go into the cave? He was alone with his dog. Did he go into the store or something and say ‘I’m just going to shelter in that cave’? And suppose he really did disappear. Couldn’t he have just, like, drowned or something? And the dog could have got lost too and maybe missed his master and…”
She would love to be terrified by the story, just as she’d like to believe in fairies but, like her parents, she’s a hard-boiled rationalist. (The “Mystic Yoga” was an aberration in more ways than one, Marco assured me when he ditched Kate and came running back to me. Too bad I was otherwise occupied at the time.)
“I bet the dog wasn’t really burned. Just frightened and hungry,” she adds. “His fur might have fallen out because he hadn’t eaten anything for days.”
She’s a born sceptic, scorns tooth fairies and despises Easter Bunnies but, in a mutual conspiracy, we’re both holding out for Santa Claus. I’m not sure who’s indulging whom here. Our last Christmas—our last Christmas as a family—was, on the surface, an ur-Noel, as faithful a version of the twinkling midwinter ritual as any merry family feast orchestrated by Charles Dickens. Agnes was our sweet, heartbreakingly appreciative Tiny Tim, wishing “God bless us every one.” Marco did his best, and so did I. Agnes, opening her stocking with exorbitant glee, declared: “It wouldn’t be Christmas without Santa.”
As we wait for the squall of rain outside to pass, she walks deeper into the cave’s gloom. I switch on my flashlight again and follow her through a narrow passageway. She crouches in what looks like a grotto, sifting cautiously through the charred remains of a bonfire. She’s also a born collector, whose indiscriminate urge to acquire worthless artefacts might, I sometimes worry, be an early sign of compulsive hoarding. Here, again, she is her father’s daughter. Marco pays $200 a month for a storage unit in Long Island City to house his pinball machines (the Star Trek and Addams Family models), boxes of VHS cassettes, 78 rpm records by Paul Robeson, Sophie Tucker and Whispering Jack Smith, his father’s collection of German beer steins and an array of chrome mid-century kitchen equipment. As a professional archivist and curator, I should be receptive to the impulse. Instead, I’m impatient with personal clutter, equating it with chronic sentimentality; forgivable in a child, perhaps, but in an adult an obvious case for cognitive behavioural therapy.
“Mom?”
In her cupped hands, Agnes holds a small piece of blackened driftwood.
“Can I take it home? Please?”
Her little face is radiant with delight and, though custom and practice should tell her otherwise, she expects me to share her pleasure in this filthy object.
“It’s like a kind of fish,” she says. “There are its eyes and those lumpy bits are its fins.”
I overcompensate—her collection, unlike Marco’s, has not yet reached critical mass—and I lean in, shining the flashlight on her cupped hands. The shard of wood is about two inches long, notched, with a single hole at one end.
“Wow! Interesting!” I dissemble. “Well, okay. As long as you wash your hands properly when you get in—Look! They’re black!—and keep this thing well away from the kitchen.”
“Promise!” she says. “I’ll put it with my shells in the window.”
Her teeth are chattering again. It’s time to go.
I ask her suddenly: “Do you miss Brooklyn?”
She pauses, weighing up her reply. Agnes doesn’t give glib answers.
“No,” she says finally. “I don’t miss Brooklyn…But I wish we still lived there.”
The rain has stopped and in our dark corridor of rock the sun unfurls a path of light at our feet. We walk back along it to the cave’s mouth and, shielding our eyes from the glare, step into the sparkling landscape.
I ask Agnes what she wants to do now.
“I know, Mom! Let’s go to the blowhole at Doonmara and listen out for the harper!”
Brek, Brek, Brek
Brek, brek, brek
On yer cauld grey stanes, och Sea!
An Ah wud that ma gab cuid mooth
The thochts that ris up in me.
Och, braw for the fisher’s laddie
That he heuchs wi his sister at spiel!
Och, braw for the sailor loon,
That he sings in his scowe as weel.
An the byous ships gang on
Tae their hyne aneath the brae;
But och for the pap o a vainisht haun,
An the soond o a vyce that’s awa.
Brek, brek, brek
At the fit o thy cleuch, O Sea:
But the neshie mense o a day that is deid,
Will niver come back tae me.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1948*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
Fascaray’s vernacular domestic architecture is disappearing. Modern plumbing has yet to arrive—although it was the Scots who invented the flush toilet, it is taking an unconscionably long time for the people of Scotland to benefit from the contrivance. The taigh beag, little house—a dry toilet, or cludgie, in a lean-to shed—is an innovation considered by some islanders to be showy to the point of pretentiousness. But the windowless taigh dubh—with a corner pen for cattle, built on a slope so their keech, manure, slides out through a drainage channel—is now an endangered species.
The natives of Fascaray generally no longer share their blackhouses with their animals though one bodach in Killiebrae, Wullie Maclean, brings in his heifer and keeps her behind a partition in his front room when she’s about to calve, and a cailleach in Doonmara, Peigi MacEwan, once the island howdie, or midwife, still allows her hens to roost inside above her head on the rafters. “They’re company,” she explains.
Most lairds are too tight-fisted to shell out the cash to lift their tenants from picturesque medieval poverty (picturesque, as long as you are standing some distance, and upwind, from the hovels) to tidier 1950s penury. So the islanders do it themselves, with varying degrees of success and, understandably, little consideration for aesthetics or tradition. Aesthetics and tradition come at
a price few here can afford. In the “improved” blackhouses there are now glazed windows, though some crofters use cheaper polythene sheeting rather than glass; earthen floors have been concreted over; “box bed” mattresses on frames have mostly replaced pallets of straw on the floor; and the turf roofs are gradually disappearing under sheets of rusting corrugated iron.
But some things will never change. There is still the peat fire—though now in a hearth at one end of the house discharging its smoke up a brick lum—there is the dresser, where the humble household crockery is displayed with pride, its patterns and glazes flickering in the light of the fire, and the seise bench against the wall where the visitor sits, tea and scone—a strupag—or whisky in hand, and listens, enthralled, to the stories of the house.
“Fàilte. Tighinn ann. Come you in…” is the invitation, unvarying and irresistible, from the island’s oldest residents. Their stories told aig cois an teine, round the peat fire, are often of the supernatural—of kelpie waterhorses, of presentiments of storms and shipwrecks and terrifying apparitions of the inconsolable dead, of the omnipresent sidhe fairies, mostly benign, though with an inclination to mischief. No older Fascaradian goes for a walk in the woods without spotting the fairy rings—circles of stones, wild flowers, or mushrooms, or indentations in the soil—that prove the wee folk are busy and numerous in these parts.
Superstitions are commonplace, particularly in relation to fishing. A red-headed child encountered by a fisherman on his way to his boat spells disaster and the story goes that in Lusnaharra, the ginger-haired McKinnon children, all seven of them, are asked to stay indoors—“ben the hoose”—when the men go out to fish. The devil, Auld Nick, also known as Black Donald of the Whids, or lies, is a regular visitor to the island and his maidservants, the witches, are ill-favoured spinsters or widows.
One old fisherman, Tearlach MacDonald of Killiebrae, told me that his father Lachlan had seen the local witch’s black cat sneaking out of his chicken coop and had hurled a rock at it. Lachie was a good shot and hit the miscreant smack on the head. It crumpled to the ground with a piercing yowl then gathered itself up and slunk back across the field to his mistress’s mean croft. The next day the witch, an unmarried woman of sour disposition, was seen around the clachan with a bandage on her head and a black eye.
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