by Andrew Greig
She lifts her face to the sun, feels the warmth at her throat, the half-conscious fumble of her fingers at that button, the warm roughness of the page under her thumb as she turns it and drowns that dead woman’s voice.
Descendants of these passionate, cunning, desperate men known as the Border reivers, would include two American presidents (Nixon, Johnson), the best known evangelist (Graham) and poet (Eliot) and astronaut (Armstrong) of the twentieth century. It is worth taking a moment to study the physiognomy of any of the above and compare it with the portraits of the notorious, charming and ingenious Johnny Armstrong, any of the sleek predatory Elliots, the bloody charismatic Wat Grahame, the duplicitous jowly Nixons. More than the set of a brow, pendulous ear-lobes, a fearless stare or pale long-fingered hands, seem to be inherited down the generations.
The Border reivers were no ordinary bandits or tragic remnants of the dispossessed and war-torn. These were the ungovernable who in many ways thrived on the shifting loyalties and dangers of their age. Bold, passionate, cunning and creative, they exploited the tensions of the Border, that interface between two related but very different realms, and made it their own for three centuries. And in many ways it suited the two countries to have this buffer zone – a place where even map-makers refused to enter.
These were the people that gave the world blackmail or black rent – money paid on a regular basis so that one’s cattle and house and person would be left alone. In other words, the protection racket. And from the reivers getting together and riding out to, in the phrase, shake loose the Border, we get the word gang (from the Scots, to go).
Though Walter Scott and others considerably romanticised them, the reivers did have codes of honour (along with a tradition of treachery, ambush, back-stabbing, rape and abduction). They wrote and gave rise to much haunting poetry. They were peculiarly classless, unlike say the samurai – an avenging reiver could be equally a lord, a small farmer, mercenary soldier, miller or outlaw. On market day in a prosperous town, a Warden of the Marches might meet and play cards with two leading reivers, discuss politics, the price of cattle, the news from the continent and the latest weaponry – each knowing well that the next night all three could be engaged against each other in a deadly struggle among the secret ways of the debatable lands. And the women were by no means helpless pawns (e.g. the implacable Jean Carey, arsonist extraordinaire, or the supposedly beautiful and tender-hearted Liza Hume, who killed three prisoners in cold blood while avenging her equally bloody brother. See Appendix: Violent Femmes).
She smiles and nods as she comes to the end of the page, at ease for once. Surely this is what she came here for, days like this and a good read, history held comfortably at a distance. Things are looking up. Today she can keep the voices in their place, enjoying them without being carried off. She can feel the stirring in the earth, in her core and in the birds and beasts on the go all around, feel the stirring but behave herself. She feels real and ready now to turn the next page.
A call from down the valley. Two figures are walking up across the grazing from Ballantyne’s. A man and a woman, stumbling arm in arm, a dog sticking close by them. The man waves, he shouts something that could be her name. She hears the woman’s voice, high-pitched, accented, sees her face turn to his.
It could be Sim and Jinny come visiting, happy and in love in a world next door to this one. It could be young David and his Jo and his hound called Hawk.
She waves, picks up the book again and with her head back against the wall in the warm light she waits.
*
For the first time you realise just how complex and incomplete this story is, even more than the ballad – which is itself terse and corrupt. More than ever you ponder the central implausibility: how does a woman kill a fully grown man by daylight in the open air? In those days hand-held guns were huge, impossible to conceal, and in any case there is no sign of one in any of the plates. A knife then. Here and there a blade flickers – in the young man’s belt or in a kitchen scene. Still you’re not convinced. How would she find him defenceless? Could she really kill him with one blow?
Motifs from the earlier plates are here again, for it’s a story of constant foreshadowing. Here is the splayed, falling figure. Now that, you think, is much more possible. Already you can think of two deaths by falling, there may be more to come.
I leaned protectively over the plates so she couldn’t see them properly, not sure about this.
Think of them as a Borders Willow Pattern, Jo, I said. It’s a story of lovers, adultery, betrayal and death – the archetypal drama. Plus a bit of Spook.
David said these came down your family, she said. Wow!
Yes, you could say they’re family history. Mine and his.
I’m sorry, she said. I don’t follow.
She’s winding you up, Jo, David muttered as he poured the coffees. It’s nothing to do with us.
She peered past my shoulder at the first plate. She leaned closer, she leaned against me and this time I let her look.
These plates, it’s a see-what-you-want-to-see thing, right?
I looked at her wee sharp squared-off chin, her thin white wrists. This woman has never harmed me, never could. I looked into her eyes and smiled.
Something like that. I took the second Lovers’ Plate from the bottom of the stack and placed it on top. Have a quick peek, I said.
Her eyes were quick, I’ll say that. A vole, I decided as the flush rose in her throat. A little alert vole scurrying between predators. I glanced at David but he was too busy fingering my clasp, opening and closing the catch, frowning. Pair wee brave timorous beastie with her red-rimmed glasses and clever brain and sweet pale hair short on her blushing neck.
I put my hand on her thin shoulder and felt the hause-bane lift.
Wowee, she said. These are pretty horny! Like, very sexual.
I glanced at the many images of lovers there, all manner of sexuality in every known mood.
See what you wanted to see?
I guess, she said. Someone should do a paper on these. It’s some kind of archaic gender karma, right?
I smiled and lifted the plates away. Her trusting blue eyes, darker yet more pallid than his, followed me as I stretched to put them on the top shelf beyond her reach.
Trouble is you also sometimes see what you don’t want to, I said. You’ll stay for some lunch?
She turned and glanced at David hunched over the table flicking the catch on my clasp. Her flush was sinking but restlessness was in her hands and tiny hips.
That would be neat.
Come back another time and I’ll maybe show you them properly.
Her glance ran to me and scurried away very quickly with a little nibble between its paws. I knew then how it could be, if I so desired.
What you must do here isn’t what you thought.
Go away, go away, little voice. But still my heart softened. It must have been the warmth outside, spring and all that. Out on the grass, Hawk rested his head on his paws and gnawed the bone I’d set aside. He’d be less trouble from now on.
Hey, what’s this?
He’d pulled out the carrier bag where I’d put the broken bits of the third plate. He crouched over it, fussing and clucking.
I broke one, I said. Dropped it. My own fault.
That’s such a shame, Marnie. You must be really upset.
I shrugged. Well, yes.
He sounded so natural and sorry I couldn’t take offence, even as he started fingering around in the bag, turning over the pieces.
It’s a right shame, he said. They’re beautiful if somewhat grim. I mean – his blue eyes flicked to me, twin blue darts across the kitchen table – this could be our families’ story, right?
With her watching I said, Not really. I mean, it’s an old story and everything comes back in time. As Jinny would say.
My words went out in the sunlit kitchen and were preserved in the silence that wrapped around them, like a card sealed in plastic. For a moment
none of us said anything. The untouched blue mug of coffee at the head of the table seemed to tremble tinily and glowed more blue. Spook. I felt its power everywhere focused on us.
He coughed, she laughed like I’d said something clever.
You mean the Eternal Recurrence, she said.
I don’t mean anything, I said and was surprised to hear my voice sound normal if pressed flat. I just open my mouth sometimes, I said.
You must do something with these, Marnie. David prodded the shards, still looking upset. You could bury them out in the garden where she was in that photo. Or set the bits in plaster, or stick them back together again. Not just leave them in a bag.
For his unforced concern and his imagination and his thick wind-thatched yellow hair, I could have loved him. He acted as a decent loving young man, even if he’d linked himself to a woman who had problems with her own body. He just didn’t know his true nature yet.
I tried to close myself up again but he looked and grinned at me guilelessly.
You’ll think of something, he said.
I put my hand on his shoulder as I leaned over to take back the bag.
I’ll work on it, I said, and cursed my voice’s tremble. I could never cope with unaffected kindness. Fancy going out for a walk with Hawk after lunch – maybe into the woods and across the bridge and home that way?
The voices in the wind come in whatever language you need, like the voice in a headset guide. It could be Silver Latin, or Norse, or the lost language of the Picts – but as you are not so fluent in those you will not hear them save in a fleeting murmur below the rattle of leaves or in the burble at the bottom end of the river sound. Like infra-red and ultra-violet they are in the air but outwith your range. So you are left with degrees of English – and Scots, the remnants of that speech of both sides of the Border once known confusingly as Inglis.
We are back with our faithful voyeur, the lovers’ shadow, jailer, protector. Glimpse him skulking in the bushes at the side of one scene, padding low behind the wall in another.
So I hunkered down ahint the dyke, took out my piece and ate while I waited on. I was thinking more of the fine wee hobgoblin I’d put aside on my work-bench when David and his Jo called in that morn – an eldritch crittur half-sprung from an old sheepshank bone with his whang erect. A private collector’s piece, that one. In time I’d give him ruby eyes. I like working in bone – it’s free and comes to hand everywhere. From bone I make beasties real and imagined, so small so vivid so illdeedie that folk hold their breath.
But a fine morn and warm. The first laverock up, and horned peewits tilting black-white as they jouked by the drove road. Even the craws caaking over the high beech by the heuch sounded melodious, sweet in their wersh way. I had nothing to worry about here. I’d watched the lass rise from the dyke and greet love’s young dream and all seemed right and easy, even when she led them indoors.
I was half-dreaming in the sun, hearing their laughter from the cottage and minding the times when Elliot and Fiona would call on Jinny. As her belly grew, Patrick was aye away working for money for the bairn to be, at the tree planting or behind the bar in the village then staying late and sozzled when the doors were closed. But there were no shenanigans going on, I was sure of that. Elliot never visited alone but always dogged along one pace behind Fiona, looking pale about the gills and breathing shallow for all his smiling.
That was the good time, with me now living in the big house. For all I walked mostly on my tod, I was happy with that. The loons of the village were nothing to me and after a few run-ins they let me be. Queer Tat they cried me. Also langheid or langneb. The rest of the time I was with Elliot, learning the estate. He worked hard on it then, spending on the farms, improving the fishing and the shooting, rebuilding dykes and hammering in fence posts like a man trying to drive himself deeper into the earth.
I watched and I learned, never happier than at his shoulder or steadying the stakes for him as he bashed them down. He was a power in those days, stripped to the waist and swinging the big hammer and the posts dirling in my hand when they hit bedrock. Or sitting nearhand while he did the accounts and explained the living in the estate, which wasn’t grand but enough. Enough to raise a family and get by, Tat, he’d say, and what more can we ask, eh?
No answer to that but the one that lay unspoken atween us.
I was finishing my sandwich and thinking it was time to get back to my goblin when I heard the door open, then their voices. I thought they were saying fareweel but the laughter and crack began to fade. I stuck my head above the dyke and saw the three of them and the dog walking away down the track to the woods about the Liddie Burn. Marnie was in the middle between Davy and his Jo, a bounce to her step and her arms waving. She put fingers to her mouth, the whistle came back to me, high and shrill, then the hound ran on ahead and disappeared into the trees like it had been skelped.
I louped the dyke and sneuk into the cottage. I stood in that kitchen where Jinny used to make me tea and scones and when her belly grew round I’d help her out with any heavy work. We never spoke of what I’d seen pass between her and Elliot, but it lay accepted between us, more a brig than a dyke. She kent the kind of laddie I was just as I kent what she’d done.
The used bowls and knives, spoons and mugs were still on the table. Three places but on the fourth side of the table was a bright blue mug still brimful of coffee.
Man, I just gawked. The signals I was getting were all mixed. What should have felt wrong was right. The room seemed to approve of this morn’s wee gathering. I felt Jinny was all for it, had I set store by such imaginings. But what should have been right, the laughter and Marnie’s raised spirits and the hound leaving Davy, felt all wrong and agley.
I ran out the door and lifted my binocs, picked them up just as they ducked and entered the wood. Marnie up front. Then Davy. Then the blonde lassie Jo. And then – no, it was impossible – for one moment I glimpsed a long dress and wink of white feet that went into the mirk below the trees and was gone.
I ran after them with a tremmling in my gut, though the day was blithe and bonnie enough for anyone.
*
I’ve not been silent all this while. I have been walking and talking with Jo above all. Also Annie, Tat, some semi-friends in the village. Even with my father when he comes downstairs and tries to talk though his eyes look somewhere else, somewhere not in any room I’m in. I try to pray first thing and last, and I still believe my Maker and my Friend is listening. Trouble is, when it counts I’m not speaking. My lips move, I smile at Jo, words come out of my mouth but I remain dumb.
This morning I got off my stubborn knees, looked out at the bright day, and knew my heart was beating the big drum because we were going to call on Marnie.
I cannot talk for fear of what I’d say.
She led us through the tunnel of trees, ducking under piny branches, her strong dark head disappearing in the gloom and Hawk barking faint. Jo behind her, chattering all the time, faint flickering fair hair standing up like a bog-brush. I should have been pleased the two of them seemed to click after some preliminary sparring. Jo’s eyes were bright, Marnie was sardonic but kindly for her. And I felt shut out and sulky like a child whose best pal has a new best pal as I followed them towards the fall at the heart of the heuch.
*
I was closing in ahint them as the branches began to drip. Had to jouk aside as the Marnie woman stopped sudden afore the brig and looked back my way. Her head didn’t budge but I doubt she couldn’t spy me in the mirk. Then she waved young Davy on.
She stood aside by the first plank, put her hand on the fiancée’s arm, bent and said something in her lug and the two heads bobbed a bittie. Davy stopped with one foot on the brig and glowered at them. He hesitated, looking ahead at the plume falling grey-white through the gloom, the roar and stramash of the waters wheeching under the hanging brig. I dinna blame him. I haven’t muckle imagination but I’ve never liked the place. Even when Elliot took me there, or sta
nding by Jinny while she laughed and chucked twigs out into the flood, even then I couldn’t settle to it.
David walked slowly out onto the bridge, hand over hand on the rail. Then Marnie gave Jo a wee push, and the lassie pushed her back then cut in ahead of her with a bounce onto the bridge. I was too far away. There was nothing I could do to stop it even had I kent what it was.
I did what I aye do. I keeked out through the branches and waited.
*
Marnie glanced at me over Jo’s head as we stopped in the middle of the bridge, raised her heavy straight dark eyebrows like a hawk’s wings before it drops. She knew how the place made me feel. Tiny rainbows lined up and shook on my lashes as I tried to breathe slow and deep. I wasn’t prepared to walk off the bridge and leave the two of them plotting together.
So I winked back and got a wee hint of a grin before she looked away. Her near-black hair clung at her neck. I saw the side of her cheekbone, the twitch of her strong mouth so different from Jo’s pale clever lips. One woman’s non-existent hips and tiny arse had always aroused tenderness in me, the desire to be very gentle, for Jo was afraid of male force as she was afraid of many things. And still she fought her corner, pushy and determined in her way, and how I admired that courage. And next to her, Marnie’s more solid curve in jeans, at once more male and more female. More potent. She had virr, Tat would have said. Smeddum. She walked like no other woman, that loping mannish slouch. Head up, challenging all comers to take her on or leave her alone.