Memory and Straw

by Memory

  He took me – whether deliberately or by accident – via the old manse where the Reverend Alexander MacKenzie had lived. Where, sometime later, I found his notes, perfectly preserved in a wooden box in the byre.

  I always made coffee for him and one morning as I set down the tray he said, ‘Gav, sit here beside me. Get yourself a cup too.’

  Beethoven’s Opus 133 was on the radio.

  ‘Never trust a man in tartan trousers,’ Grampa said to me. ‘Too ostentatious. The only ones to trust are those who are unsure of anything. I’m leaving you this house and everything in it. But live your own life, not mine. Take care of it all.’

  Afterwards, I understood what he meant.

  In those last days, Grampa gave me traces, like the watermarks on old letters. I spent time with him. Sat beside him and listened to him and talked with him. He wanted me there. For whenever I’d move to go away he’d say, ‘Stay, Gav, just stay for another wee while.’

  And I did, and began to use the word ‘wee’ myself when I saw any small thing.

  And he might ask, ‘What’s doing, Gav?’

  And I might say, ‘Och, nothing much Grampa,’ and he’d smile.

  Or I might say, ‘I’ve just come back from the cricket, Grampa.’

  And he’d ask what the score was, and because it didn’t matter, I’d say, ‘The West Indies were bowled out for 240 and England are already 150 for 1.’ And he’d ask what the best shot was and I’d say the bowling was better, and that Leadbetter had taken five wickets in two overs just after tea and he’d say, ‘There are times, Gavin, when no fact should be neglected as insignificant. Did I ever tell you about the time Lord Berkshire took me to see Don Bradman play at Headingly. He scored 212 that day. He was magnificent. And afterwards we had ice-creams, I remember that. Lord Berkshire and I sat in the car eating the ice-creams while Fred drove us south. Did you know Fred?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘No – I didn’t know Fred.’ And he would tell me who Fred was.

  And his mother would enter the conversation, and his half-brother John, and what mattered was the softness of his voice and his laughter as he told some disjointed story from a fragmented memory. What really mattered is that all these people were actually there as he talked about them. He didn’t just talk about them, he talked with them and to them.

  ‘Mother,’ he’d say, ‘do you think I could get a glass of water?’ And I would at that moment go and fetch him a glass of water and he’d take it and thank me and drink it and relax and then begin some other thread about a horse, or the finest field of turnips that he’d ever planted… or would, when Rachel came back from the shops.

  ‘Who was that lady we met on the bus earlier?’ he would ask. ‘She was so kind, she spoke so well.’

  And I’d be tempted to say, ‘I don’t know.’ But I learned to say, ‘I’m not sure. Did you know her?’

  And of course he did, she was a retired teacher who lived up the hill. His comments about people were always decorous and respectful. ‘And believe in Jesus,’ he said to me. ‘It’s all that really matters.’

  Dad and Aunt Miriam came home for the funeral. We buried Grampa beside Rachel at St Alban’s, where hawthorn and rowan trees adorn the churchyard. Two rowan trees are intertwined and the hawthorn branches embrace in pairs. It is the communion of the saints. I go to High Mass there every Sunday to worship God.

  I stayed on at Grampa and Granma’s house for a good while. The only proviso in the will was that I would catalogue and archive the gardening and other estate materials he had gathered over the previous sixty years. It was a delight to do so.

  I began with the garden notebooks, which were filled with grace. Cuttings of the loveliest species of plants carefully marked and labelled in all the greenhouses, with exquisite hand-written notes about their scientific and aesthetic properties. The loveliest things were Grampa’s numerous side notes, which revealed a mind more interested in connections than in classifications. Beside Lonicera, for example, he wrote ‘Leid is a temporary fireplace on which to set a pot’; and beside Galanthus, ‘Every being quietens and stiffens when a foreboding of evil reaches him.’

  What really interested my grandfather was how things grow. Why these yellow petals are yellow, not green or brown. Working with hybrids taught him how fluid and liminal everything is – that just as easily, with a cell movement here and an adjustment there, it could be red or blue or orange or some other colour for which we have no vocabulary. He, like me, was interested in margins. When does a flower placed next to a flower become an arrangement? When does a tree become a wood, a wood a forest?

  It was in his notebooks that I picked up a lot of this lore, stuff which signalled alternative ways of interpreting things.

  The glow reflected from a buttercup when placed under your chin means that you will get married young.

  If you have a hazel-stick in your hand when out walking at night you are in no danger from ghosts.

  ‘When we were little boys’, wrote Grampa, ‘if we came upon a droning-beetle on the road, we would catch it and say to each other to throw it on high to see how the weather would be the next day, chanting “Droning-beetle, droning-beetle, will tomorrow be fine?” If it came down on its back, next day would be fine. If its back was upwards, next day would be wet.’

  Grampa noted where one thing became another: one morning the roses would be bare, that afternoon they’d suddenly bud. One evening the fields would be empty, in the morning little green shoots appeared. He was marking the boundaries between evolution and creation.

  He was a deft hand at making scarecrows. Wonderful scary ones. I remember pretending to be a scarecrow. I stood still, then moved an eyelid and a finger, then a hand and a leg, then let out a shriek which scattered all the birds into the air. Once Grampa planted the seeds, the job was to ensure things grew. To weed and water and fertilise, to guard from wind and rain and predators. Life had to be protected.

  ‘Just stand there and flap your arms,’ Grampa would say to me as he moved slowly about the fields doing the real work.

  He was quite fond of ‘X marks the spot’. All the farm maps are crossed with his danger marks. Mostly at the margins, at the edges of the fields where walls could crumble, or a gate could be left open, or where some animal could leap the dyke and trample through the seed.

  It was clear from his notes that, despite the fact that he worked for Lord Berkshire, who owned thousands of acres of land, what Grampa really believed in was crop sharing and common ownership. He hated the ancient enclosures as if they’d happened yesterday.

  ‘When every field was open, no-one would steal because they would just be stealing from themselves. Same with houses. The only point of stealing is to get what you don’t have. The Garden of Eden had no walls.’ For him, the enclosures were a sin. ‘You should always be able to walk into someone’s garden and take a nap,’ he said.

  Among his farm notes I came across a cutting from The Times about conserving the New Forest against housing developments. In the margin he’d written: ‘These trees grew moment by moment across the centuries.’

  What Grampa was saying was that Genesis is now. Every moment is the first moment. And nothing is dead, because at any moment you can create it anew. I learned from him that you can’t tell someone you love them just the once: you have to tell them all the time.

  It was raining heavily the day I left the house. As I was about to turn the key in the lock I realised my mistake. The past mattered more to me than the present. I’d taken enormous time and trouble to get to know Calum and Elizabeth and John and Mary and Anna and Magnus and Rachel, while ignoring the living. Emma.

  ‘You prefer death to life,’ I heard her say, ‘because the past is safe. You can arrange and order it to your liking. Whereas I’m disorganised, changeable, human. You only love with your mind, not your heart. Like a robot. You’ve only ever heard the notes, not the music.’

  I turned right and walked through the orchard down by the barn. Over the stil
e and across the meadow where the ponies used to graze. I was heading for Paddock’s Hill, where I’d stood all those years ago mapping the compass. I deliberately kept the view hidden as I climbed, seeing only the grass beneath my feet as I ascended.

  At the top I paused, closing my eyes. I raised my right hand and pointed. I was right. North. I turned a quarter. The church-steeple was still there, and the bells pealing through the rain. East. Another quarter. The windmill still there, now turning again after being restored. South. And another turn, to where the river ran, past the newly-built homes on either side. West. Music is not imagined but discovered. I stood and sang at the top of my voice to all four quarters of the compass as the rain poured down on England’s green and pleasant land.

  16

  I RENTED GRAMPA and Granma’s house out and returned to New York. It was really my house now, though I found that too hard to confess. It was to admit the finality of things: that all those years were gone. A local agency in Oxford dealt with the tenants and collected the rent so that I didn’t have to see the property that had meant so much now inhabited by strangers. They were only passing through anyway.

  Emma and I rented an apartment in Manhattan. 103rd Street. Later we bought the holiday place in Martha’s Vineyard when the patent for the software our company developed for the early mask-bots was sold to the Chinese. It was either that or pay the profit in tax to the government, and who wouldn’t choose a beautiful clapperboard house by the sea in those circumstances? It was our weekend escape: Enrique and the scallops, Jamie and the beach-chairs.

  Artificial Intelligence was relatively new to all of us, though the most wisdom came from the old eccentrics from the ’60s who’d once been hippies, but still nurtured the dream that technology was a friend, not an enemy. The best of them was Joe Hill, one of the original founders of the Santa Fe commune, who had pioneered off-grid living way back then and had developed an elementary form of Wi-Fi long before the term was invented.

  In some ways the communications system he pioneered was just a logical extension of the rattling tin can.

  ‘Basically I was inspired by the old comics,’ he told me. ‘Remember? You’d tie two empty tins together with a string, then one of you would crouch behind a rock while the other called into the tin. The sound was supposed to travel through the tin along the string. But it never did. It travelled through the air. So a bunch of us did airwave experiments. Shouting across the valleys to one another. And you know what? It all had to do with pitch and tone. The extremities worked, but nothing else. Singing was best. If you stood on top of the ridge and sang soprano you could only be heard down at the bottom of the ravine, whereas if you sang contralto it was the other way round – the guy sitting down in the ravine would not hear a sound, but every single note could be heard from the top of the ravine. It was as if high went low and low went high and I figured it was a bit like charging a car battery except in reverse – positive to negative and negative to positive. So from there we developed this inter-valley communication system based purely on pitch travelling through the air.’

  He’d laugh. That hearty free and easy laugh of someone who believes that the worse has already happened and things can only get better.

  ‘It meant there was a great demand for the guys and girls who could sing low or high. The sopranos and the contraltos. The countertenors and the basses. And you know what? You’d think the fattest would have the deepest voices, but they didn’t. Invariably the thinnest travellers who came to the commune had the lowest voices and the highest voice projector we ever had was Big Bill Buffalo, thirty stone and growing who could sing like an angel at a regular pitch of 2,800 Hertz. They could hear him in California from Mexico.’

  It was hard to tell what age Joe Hill was.

  ‘Cannabis gave me eternal youth,’ he joked, though he was now strictly teetotal, vegetarian and hadn’t smoked a joint for decades.

  ‘It kills you in the end,’ he said. ‘So you might as well stay clean and forever young.’

  He was the lead apostle of transhumanism. Convinced that the emerging machine-being would usher in the millenial kingdom, giving us immortality though a postbiological future. The sort of heretic every young company needs. Someone who literally thought out of the box as a default position. Our young bosses were smart enough to realise that project managers and technicians and accountants and computing experts were essential for the business, but that the creative sparks could be provided by off-the-wall individuals who lived on the margins of orthodox thought. So there was a clear boardroom policy to occasionally balance the normal operative appointments with a wholly unexpected one – someone who had no formal technological or computer-orientated training, but who had crossed the desert or mountains to arrive at our base. All these appointments were under Joe Hill’s jurisdiction, and the ones in his camp literally did their work under canvas, without the aid of any technology. All they produced were ideas.

  I envied them. I’d been hired by the company basically because of my banking background. They needed someone who could do creative accounting, and once I returned from England I sent them my CV which contained the magic words Oxford, London Stock Exchange and Wall Street. And I was hired. Not merely on the strength of my CV. I hasten to add – the actual job interview itself was also practical. It was held in the gymnasium of a local hotel and once the verbal interview was over, I was asked to exercise on all the different weights and lifting and running machines and then I was given twenty minutes to design, on paper, a prototype robot who could do all the exercises more efficiently that the instructor who had demonstrated the equipment to me. I was so startled by the task that I retreated to some TV images I’d seen and designed a cross between Superwoman and Batman. Afterwards they confessed they gave me the job because it was clear that I couldn’t think for myself and would do the simple operative jobs I was supposed to do.

  The job was to turn Joe Hill’s team ideas into reality. Every first Monday morning of each month we’d be called into his tent to sit cross-legged facing him as he streamed his latest revelations to us. Each of us would then take one of his ideas and try to develop it into some form of working digital reality over the next four weeks.

  The ideas were terrific.Taking natural water and turning it into blood plasma for our robots by simply mixing it with sugar and natural juice: ‘Folk always like to see what looks like real blood pumping through the veins when being served by a machine.’ The same for other bodily functions. My colleague Linda was working on developing sweat glands, John-Pierre on urine and excrement substitutes, while Son-Lee spent all her time working on the complex breath patterns which different activities generated. I envied her greatly, for it was fascinating work, and accompanied her as often as I could on her research expeditions. Down to the docks to record the different breath registers the dockers used as they climbed ladders, descended into the hold, hauled boxes, cursed, swore and laughed. She spent inordinate times in the gym recording the different breath patterns the different genders and ages had as they ran, rowed, pumped weights and so on.

  ‘The important thing,’ Joe said to me ‘are the faces. Old people want to see features that are familiar. The eyes, nose, ears, mouth – these things are easy. What we need is to fill in the spaces between, etch them with history. With life.’

  ‘I’m not God,’ I told him, but he merely said, ‘Leave him out of it.’

  So I spent time studying faces. My own. Emma’s. The sharp contours of her cheeks, the dimple on the left side. The way she tilted her head back a fraction whenever she was anxious. I had a terrific time at the MOMA, where a special exhibition of Da Vinci’s drawing were on display at the time. Every line of his was sparkling with life. I spent days and nights travelling the subway studying people’s faces, discovering that light and shade made all the difference. A traveller standing on the platform reading a book would suddenly look different once inside the carriage where the artificial light was harsher. I realised that not a single face
was fixed. Its life has to do with angle, light, perspective. The time of day or night. Joy or stress, the health or illness they were experiencing.

  The design department I worked in was headed up by Hiroaki Nagano who was the best in the business. He balanced wonderful technical skills with a keen social conscience, always emphasising that the face masks we were creating were there to serve and not to rule. I was two years under his stewardship and learned everything there was to learn about machine emotional intelligence. We basically worked on algorithm-driven APIs using facial detection and semantic analysis to develop emotion recognition in our bots. The purpose was to develop highly sophisticated computer-generated human-like faces which were wired to instantly recognise and then replicate and develop the emotions human beings displayed or hid when exposed to different things.

  Hiroaki and I specialised in the lucrative old-age market, so we would pay a demographically measured cross-section of the population to come into our facility where we would film them watching a whole range of events, from live country-and-western singing to television car adverts. Emotive analytics is based on charting human emotion into seven main categories: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, contempt and disgust. Within those seven categories we developed other strata, for human beings are far more nuanced than those broad categories would suggest. We’d show a short film of an older lady, for example, whose only companion was her much loved dog. The dog became ill and died, and it was fascinating recording the emotions displayed by the cross-section of people we filmed watching the film. Interestingly, younger females showed more distress, while the algorithmic pattern of older women showed more fear than sadness. The dog food company who had funded that particular line of research found it really useful: they could concentrate on the daily health values of their dog food on the younger people, whilst emphasising canine longevity for the older women.