Sightlines

by Kathleen Jamie

  * * *

  The end of her rib rested on a cushion of foam so it wouldn’t be damaged. ‘Do not touch the animals’! Sometimes our species beggars belief.

  I scooshed some more ammonia onto mine, sponged it off again. All across the hall, the crowd of whales waited their turn for treatment, huge and otherworldly. Not otherworldly. Actually, of this world, as they had been for a very long time, long before we appeared.

  I turned the rib in my hands, stroked it with the sponge. Shame and shame.

  ‘How clean does it have to be, Marielle?’

  All unwitting, I’d asked the conservator’s question of questions. She just smiled.

  MOON

  Only a barbarian mind

  could fail to see the flower,

  only an animal mind

  could fail to dream a moon

  —BASHO

  HIGH OVER THE TOWN’S PITCHED ROOFS and chimneys: the full moon. By now her pewtery, equivalising light would be falling on the whole night-bound world. I leaned out of the attic window; through binoculars the moon was stunning, filling my field of vision. There’s a line from a poem by Elizabeth Bishop: ‘He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties’. To think of all those moon songs, all that poetry; centuries’ worth of idle dreamers and parted lovers, gazing at the full moon, before aeroplanes, satellites, text messaging.

  That evening we’d received two phone calls and a text message. One call was from my father, reading out a note from the newspaper; another from friends inviting us to their house, where they had a telescope. We were all reminding each other of the imminent eclipse. Not only would the night be dark—it was March—but it promised to be clear.

  Because my own children had friends staying over, we declined the invitation, and instead urged the children to come and look through the window and see what was happening. The two boys were leaping around the living room making whooping noises, but the two girls, my daughter and her friend, were snuggled close together on the sofa, playing with Nintendos. Each girl gazed at her own silvery screen. ‘Come and see the moon,’ I said. ‘Later,’ they said. I went back upstairs alone.

  * * *

  When the shadow first began to creep onto the moon’s face, it was translucent, like black silk. Its leading edge was convex. As it moved very slowly up onto the shining face of the moon it emphasised, rather than obscured, the texture of her surface; under the shadow, the lunar seas and craters were, if anything, more clearly etched than before. I watched through the open windows, alternating between the binoculars and my own eye. I had to kneel, to get the angle right. If you looked long enough, you could actually see the shadow move. At least, it appeared that way—as though the shadow was moving, not the moon. I suppose that was an illusion. The room behind me was dark, with no electric lights on. From downstairs, the children’s voices; they were quite happy to be staying up late, ignored by adults. The leading edge of the shadow was green.

  There was something unnerving about the movement of this shadow or, rather, about the passivity of the moon. She couldn’t wipe or shake away the encroaching shadow. She had no option but to accept what was befalling her. Of course, that’s a fine example of the pathetic fallacy. A moon can neither accept nor decline. Here was the earth’s shadow and she had to enter into it, inevitably; the moon is only a rock. But, as when a friend goes into labour, or a crisis, or has to undergo some procedure, it’s concerning. I was watching the moon with growing unease, and meanwhile thinking that I ought to go downstairs and fetch the children to look at this grand lunar event, and then usher them into bed. But I didn’t. More time passed, half an hour or so. Of course time passed. As the shadow crept onward, upward, smooring the moon’s light as it went, I half understood that what I was watching was time, at least by my simple understanding of it. What is time to us mortals, if not the succession of nights and days, months and years, and what is that if not the collusion of sun and earth and moon? In watching the shadow cover the moon, I was watching time pass. When the moon’s lower two-thirds were in shadow, the upper third, as yet free, seemed to shine extra brightly in response.

  The windows overlook the back gardens, then the land rises into a low hill, so there are few intruding lights in that direction. The hill was quite dark now against the night sky, and the curve of its brow was almost exactly the same arc as the shadow on the moon. I didn’t know why the shadow creeping over the moon should be curved, rather than straight, but presumed it was to do with the curvature of the earth. I love that phrase ‘the curvature of the earth’—it denotes a fabled thing, visible, they say, from the crow’s nest of a ship. Whatever the reason, it pleased me to think that from my own house, with the children messing about downstairs, where the telly was switched on but ignored and the dog lay curled in his basket, I could appreciate the curvature of the earth. Indeed, could appreciate the earth as an astronaut would, as a heavenly body. Mostly, if I think of it at all, it’s as an indigene, a participant in its general daily melee.

  Of course I’d seen the Apollo 11 pictures of the blue planet suspended in space, but they made Earth look homely. However, this shadow arching across the moon’s bright face, right now in front of my eyes, was dark, stately and solemn. The moon does us great service, metaphorically and literally, and this is part of it—occasionally she allows us to appreciate the shadow cast by our own planet. She shows us that the earth, for all the cacophony of life on its surface, is firstly an object, bigger than we are, magisterial enough to cast a shadow thousands and thousands of miles into space. The earth-shadow, a long and empty cone, falls on nothing, until every few months the moon swims into its ken.

  By now the moon’s lower right side, the westward side, had taken on a reddish blush, like the blush on the skin of a fruit. As the moon moved farther into the earth’s shadow, this red blush deepened in colour. I kept watching, shifting from one window to the other. It was as though the moon was ripening, quickly, as plums do. By its shadow, the earth had been revealed as massive and mineral, but the lifeless moon, on entering into that shadow, was changing colour. It looked as though it was becoming less barren, more like a living thing. Further, because the reddish coloration of the moon’s lower side deepened as it curved away out of sight, it showed that the moon was a sphere. No longer a silver plate hung in the sky, the moon was turning into a bruised ball. The moon was a sphere. It sounds obvious, but I had just never seen it before.

  The reddish blush intensified. I couldn’t leave it now.

  At its top, the moon’s glow was reduced to a desperate sliver. As it darkened and reddened in this way, it looked as though the moon was undergoing some Ovidian metamorphosis, ceasing to be mineral and becoming vegetable, or more, farther, pushing on through vegetable into animal. It looked as though the moon was becoming a body, as though she were one of those gods who want to stop looking down on us all, and instead participate, at least for a while; who want to taste the mutability of earthly existence.

  Now the whole of the moon was painted with coppery reds, weal-reds. They were mammalian colours, the shades of an incarnation, colours liable to pain. Isn’t this what great paintings tell us? That to take the form of flesh, the form of a body, is difficult, vulnerable, and yet—perhaps because of that—sweetly enviable. Here was the moon becoming fruit, or flesh; she looked like the one fruit in a vanitas painting, the one soft globe among the peaches and pomegranates which is already beginning to darken toward decay.

  A dog barked, a quarter of a mile way. A few geese were passing, calling as they went. Did the moon’s transformation discomfit them? Could they notice, with their animal minds? Would I have noticed myself, come to that, being so caught up in the general melee, had my dad not called and the neighbour not called, had the friend not sent his text message. The earth, a fizzing ball of telephony and messaging bringing this news: look out tonight, we’ll see our own shadow falling on the face of the moon. I called the kids, and this time they all came bundling up into the dark att
ic, all wanting to look through the binoculars. The children’s dark heads bobbed and ducked as they took turns to look at the red moon, and the boys explained to each other loudly what was happening. ‘Cool!’ they said. ‘Brilliant!’

  Then a smirr of cloud drifted across. Cloud is not like shadow: it passes like a silly thing, without the shadow’s cold deliberation. Under the drift of cloud the remaining moonlight and the colours were abolished and the moon was a disc beaten into the sky like a rivet, horrible and annulled. Then the cloud passed.

  * * *

  That was six weeks ago. Since then I’ve given the moon no more than a glance. Tonight, though, I’m looking at the moon again, this time from the cabin of an aeroplane. Mine is a window seat, right over the wing. The plane is travelling above a field of cloud which ripples softly all the way to the eastern horizon, and there, above the rippling sea of cloud, the moon hangs as though from a peg.

  We’ve been airborne for about ninety minutes, so I’d guess we’re somewhere over Canada, the Bay of Fundy maybe, already swinging east for the dart across the Atlantic, toward the dawn. I’m travelling with a friend who’s scared of flying; during takeoff he clutched my hand and only let go, mumbling an apology, when the plane levelled off. He’s still scared, and just wishes it to be over. I want to tell him that, like the lights of New York City that blazed below us for ages, livid and thrilling, taking off in a 747 is the business—truly the modern sublime. We should be terrified, or awestruck, but he’s in no mind to listen to my philosophising. It’s the woman next to him who fixed a sleep-mask over her eyes, even before the plane began to taxi, or the man across the aisle who read his paper, or purported to, as the plane banked over the city—they’re the ones who should be ashamed. ‘At least you know you’re alive,’ I tell my friend, but he just gives me a wild look in return.

  Now drinks have been served, the cabin lights are dimmed, the little video monitors above our heads are showing Casino Royale, but I can’t concentrate on that. I’d sooner cup my hands round my eyes and look out the window. The plane’s wing is pointing directly toward the yellow moon, although the moon seems to hang at a lower altitude than the wing-tip. I say ‘seems to’, because, as with the moving shadow of the eclipse, I don’t know what is actual and what is illusory, or if this matters. I realise that sometimes I call the moon ‘it’, sometimes ‘she’—both are apposite, and this doesn’t matter, either.

  Tonight she is in her first quarter, at the edge of the night sky, golden and opulent as a honeycomb. The night we travel through is flooded with her light. I watch her, but because she’s screened by cloud from the world below I feel I’ve intruded on a privacy. During the eclipse, she’d seemed briefly to be taking on the colours of a body, but now she’s restored to herself, bright and mineral again. We’re the embodied ones, the ones of woman born, and what do we do but throw ourselves round the world in aeroplanes, railing against the constraints of earthly existence, of gravity, finitude, distance, dark.

  In a minute I’ll offer to swap seats with my friend so he can observe the moon’s vast properties, and be calmed. Her light gilds the leading edge of the plane’s wing. The engines drone steadily. The wing-lights beat like a heart.

  THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT ST KILDA

  1.

  A GOOD FEW YEARS AGO NOW, when the children were small and the world had shrunk to the here and now, I was taken with the notion to go to St Kilda. Cliff-ridden and bird-wreathed—and totally unlikely, on the whole. There were days back then when even the post office seemed an unwinnable shore.

  But that was the point. I’d been kneeling on the carpet, putting Lego away and wondering: which was the closest place one could go that was remote? Where an adventure could unfold—just enough to keep one’s wits sharp, enough to let one taste an untamed grandeur, yet be back in a few days because, you know, of the children? I mean, everyone wants to escape their own lives sometimes, don’t they?

  As I say, that was some years ago now. A time when everything had become immediate and small: small people and toy cities built of wooden blocks. Toy boats sailing the living-room floor.

  It was arranged. As a fortieth birthday present I would go to St Kilda, and be gone a week. I’d go west of the Hebrides, way over the horizon, and my husband would look after the kids.

  * * *

  The St Kilda story is like a modem myth and, like a myth, I can’t remember when I first heard it. Possibly in primary school. One afternoon we were shown a film. Barefoot, bearded men, and women cowled in shawls, and innumerable seabirds filled the screen. There were dreadful cliffs that the men lowered themselves down, to take birds’ eggs and the birds themselves. We learned that the islands lay forty miles west of Lewis and Harris, out in the ocean, which was too far for much contact or communication, in those days. Nonetheless, people had lived out there for a thousand years or more. They grew a few crops and kept a strange kind of wild sheep, and they ate seabirds, and seabirds’ eggs. They made shoes out of gannets and medicine out of fulmar oil; they stitched their clothes with feathers.

  But their way of life broke on the wheel of the modern world. The nineteenth century brought steamships, and Victorian tourists from the industrial cities, already enamoured of ‘remoteness’. The young ones’ heads were turned; they couldn’t get the things they’d learned to want, they began to emigrate, until it all became impossible, and in 1930 the few remaining St Kildans asked to be evacuated. Their peat fires were extinguished and their islands left to the birds. That’s what we learned. Eventually, the islands were handed over to the National Trust for Scotland, who now have the uneasy task of ‘managing’ the fabled island, and preserving it, as more and more people want to see it for themselves.

  * * *

  It was thrilling to be aboard a yacht for the first time, to feel the swoop of the sea and stand on the spray deck in the wind. Aside from the skipper, Donald Wilkie, we were five paying passengers thrown together for the trip, and we included two elderly Germans, a couple who, it became apparent, were perfectly fixated on St Kilda. How the reputation of St Kilda had reached north-­central Europe I never found out, but suspect it followed the highway of romance laid down by Ossian and Walter Scott. The German couple were candid about it—the man was ill, and wanted to experience wild, abandoned St Kilda and all its birds, before it was too late.

  But the sea was dark and gurly. The first night we anchored at the low-lying Monach Islands, where the boat fretted in the wind. The radio brought forecast after forecast of deteriorating weather. At last Donald leaned over the chart-desk and said, ‘I don’t think we can go.’

  ‘Because of the wind?’

  ‘It’s backing east and rising. You heard. You don’t want to be at St Kilda in an east wind. No, we can’t go.’

  The boat rocked. Soon he would move to another, safer anchorage. The conversation was in English. Slow translations were made.

  ‘We don’t go to St Kilda?’ exclaimed the German woman.

  Donald shook his head.

  ‘But we must go!’

  Again there was a pause, a tense one this time.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said to me. We were sitting down in the yacht’s saloon, around a table. Above, the wind in the shrouds rose to a shriek.

  ‘I just live down the road,’ I said. ‘I can come again. Anyway, you’re the skipper.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m the boss.’ He laughed.

  At the end of the week, as though Donald felt he had let us down, he said, ‘We couldn’t have gone, you know.’

  ‘It’s alright,’ I replied.

  ‘Sailors dread an east wind in Village Bay. It can cut off your escape, even drive you onshore . . . but some of them are fixated on it. A fantasy!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The people who charter my yacht! St Kilda! Oh, they’ve read the maps, studied all the books, know the place better than I do—and I’ve been going there twenty years.’

  ‘You mean, people who’ve never been there?’ />
  ‘It’s like the Holy Grail. The edge of the world. That’s what they come looking for. It’s what they’ve heard about and nothing else will do.’

  That’s what I’d wanted myself. Sea-cliffs and abandonment. The last adventure. But I kept quiet. We were anchored in the most beautiful cliff-backed bay. The boat turned softy as the tide ebbed. Above the darkling cliff shone a single star.

  But, actually, it must be pretty wild and remote out there, I thought, if we didn’t even catch sight of the place, if the wind and weather kept us firmly away.

  ‘There was a time when you could rely on the weather in May,’ said Donald, as though he’d read my mind. ‘But you can’t now.’

  But it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good. Had we headed straight out of harbour, reached St Kilda and spent our time there, I’d never have known the places Donald revealed to us instead. We had adventures enough, landing in the dinghy in a swell. There were plenty other wild shores to explore. And people—because nowhere is truly wild or abandoned, we met a few shepherds and fishermen. I could let the soft local accent fall on my ears.

  What became of the elderly Germans I don’t know, except that they went home disappointed. I headed home, too, determined to know more about the places that lay almost on my doorstep.

  I’d been on the desert islands, my husband had been at home with the infants. He was the one who looked ravaged, like Robinson Crusoe.

  2.

  A COUPLE OF YEARS LATER and a lad driving home from his job at a fish farm kindly went out of his way to deliver me to Berneray’s tiny harbour where the Annag waited, under its tall mast, as before. I’d hitched from the ferry terminal, it was already late in the Hebridean evening. This time we were just three—skipper Donald, and his colleague Iain, who was to act as mate.