The Stillman

by Tom McCulloch

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘And that is why you must listen to what I tell you about your mother.’ She was animated now, leaning across the table. ‘You must have the hope that your mother was different to the person in your head. Believing that is too much, I know. What if I do never see Floriano again? His father can tell him anything he wants, Floriano might hate me like you hate your mother. But there is always a story, a reason. You must have the hope that when you know the story you can begin to understand. It is my hope that Floriano will forgive me.’

  We spoke little on the way back. Adelina kissed me on the cheek and closed her bedroom door. I lay on my bed, wide awake. I wanted to knock on her door, tell her she had nothing to be forgiven for. Instead I went out onto the veranda and found Brunhilda sitting in the dark.

  ‘Be careful with Adelina. She is a dreamer. She falls in love very easily.’

  I sat down beside her and lit a cigarette. She squeezed my hand as she left me alone. I thought of my mother’s belongings, the stepping stones through her life that I’d dug up and packed away. That old, old feeling, there it was again, like being a spectator in my own life.

  Six

  Adelina’s here. No more safe memory, compromised in the re-telling. She’s an actually existing presence.

  I mean, sure, why wouldn’t she have made her fuckin way here?

  Makes perfect sense.

  What’s the old Zen mind-bender, if a tree falls when no-one’s around does it make a sound? Well if I refuse to admit something’s happening then maybe it actually isn’t. I knew Adelina was vinales2004, of course I did. But now she’s here I have to admit I knew. Deluded? Maybe. Thing is, if I’d admitted it before then I would’ve had to consider the bigger issue.

  The ‘why’.

  It’s swelled into a giant neon question mark. I mean, if you’re one for fevered speculation then here’s the Big Kahuna, Las Vegas brash, in your face like a stripper’s g-string. So why? There’s something else here, beyond my mother’s journal, something I’m missing.

  Just lie for now. Lie in bed. Shadows and milky light. My wife’s an indistinct lump. She could be anyone. I want to be her, anyone but me, anyone other than this sleepless freak.

  I pity insomniacs. JC once had a tenement in Edinburgh. Third floor in a narrow street. In the flat across the street, directly opposite, the curtains were always open. Day or night you could look right in. Once I got up at about 3am for a drink of water. In the opposite flat an old man was sitting in a wheelchair, his kitchen lit bright as day. I turned off the light and stared at him. He didn’t move and I felt so sorry for him. But after a while I realised that it wasn’t him who didn’t want to be noticed. No, he was ready to cross the distance.

  Details. They’re so much more immediate by night. Less manageable. Like the moonlight sharping in at 80 degrees to a point on the floor beside my wife’s dressing table that I can’t see. I want to sit up but the slicing light-beam is somehow a worry. As if it’s challenging me, asking if I really want to see what it’s illuminating on the floor. I draw my foot back under the duvet before the sudden tentacle grabs it, the first reveal of the monster.

  Shadows, all these shadows, I wait for the moon to shift round and obliterate them one by one.

  My wife whimpers. Her foot touches my shin and I move my leg away. She used to tell me her dreams. First thing in the morning she’d roll over, momentarily bemused, unable to figure out if I belonged to dream or reality. You would not believe . . . More often than not I wouldn’t, her dreams genuinely bizarre, a smorgasbord of ponderings for the chin-stroking shrink. She took a genuine pleasure in telling me but not anymore. Not that she’s stopped dreaming, those little moans, twitches, aren’t they the signals of REM sleep? She just stopped telling me and I can’t remember when. To mention it would bring attention to something irrevocably lost. But sometimes I still want to know. I want to know her dreams.

  She must have her own secrets. And the bigger the secret the deeper the dreams. When I came back from Cuba I dreamed of Adelina every night. She wasn’t ready to let me go, nor me her. In time the dreams came less often, a slow fade to monochrome and then empty space.

  We couldn’t reach each other, too much time had passed. In the reflection of here the memory of there became more and more absurd. Like an aberration. And aberrations should be quietly jettisoned unless you’re deliberately looking for madness. Ok, I haven’t let go of the memories completely. But long nights of the soul? That aint me. I locked it down, moved on.

  Adelina.

  Jim.

  My name repeated three times as I hurried down the town hall steps. She grabbed my arm but I pulled away. That insistence in her voice. JC turned to look at her but said nothing.

  By the time we reached the car-park she’d stopped calling my name and was just standing there, silently watching us load up the gear. Then a last, sudden lunge as I got into the Volvo. We left her alone in the empty car-park, briefly illuminated in the headlight sweep. That look on her face, like disappointment anticipated. She looked so cold, so cold and out of place. As she can only ever be in this setting, my setting, which will never know a molten sun.

  The journey home lapsed into silence once JC realised his stream of questions weren’t going to be answered. I lost myself in the engine’s hum, the black furrows of the snowy road. Now and then JC looked across. But he knows me, he knows I’ll eventually spill my guts.

  I stared up at the house as the Volvo fish-tailed back down the road. The bedroom light was on and my wife probably drunk, sour whisky on her breath as mine. The thought of our putrid breath mingling appalled me, the ongoing stench of decay. I turned away, walked across the bridge past the Dark Grains Plant and up the track that runs alongside the top warehouses.

  Night closed like a hand on my throat. Each step might bring asphyxiation closer but I’d keep on walking, barely alive come sickly morning, the morning that never relents. When I felt sleep coming on the third time I fell into a drift I realised how drunk I was. A voice said I could die there, another said so what.

  Stan was asleep in his seat in the Stillhouse rest area. An Andy McNab thriller lay opened on his chest and his mouth hung open. A little bit of drool had dripped onto the collar of his boiler suit. I held the guard rail tight as I took the stairs to the level below. The Stillhouse buzzed, heat rising as I moved along the gantry that ran the length of the spirit stills.

  My favourite spot is beside number two. It’s almost halfway along the Stillhouse and someone would have to come out of their way to find me there. I moved round the still so I was out of sight of anyone looking along the gantry and sat with my back against the warm copper. As the heat began to seep into me I drowsed to the caramel smell, the fizzzz and swissssshh of the boiling spirit. I’ve always been able to feel it, see it, bubbling in the dark, rising as steam through the long neck, cooling in the condenser, liquid again. Nothing but truth here, the spirit agitated but untroubled, following the way defined since the barley was sown.

  Coppered heat, still warming me as I lie here hours later. My wife whimpers again. Lately she’s taken to bringing a teddy bear to bed. I feel its furry little body pressing against my right arm and want to grab it and fling it across the room. I doubt even that would wake her. She didn’t even twitch when I stumbled around getting undressed, not even when I turned the light on. Suddenly I want to embrace her but almost immediately the feeling is replaced with unease.

  Adelina.

  That searching look as she repeated my name, as the headlights swung. So be it, there’s no hiding place for the truest spirit. I’ll stow myself away in my own cold warehouse, face my own four walls. Adelina, those moments and places, they hang like jewels in this freezing dark, so close I could reach out and touch them. Her face hasn’t changed. Perhaps that’s the essential problem, facing up to what can never be altered. So let the head sink into the pillow, the fists unclench. I’ve got no choice, I can’t hold them back. Not the faces, I can handl
e the faces, Adelina’s and all the others. It’s something else. Even as I try to force it away I know it’s pointless. The bars of shadow on the bedroom walls shift with the moon, like a clock, silently measuring the time slipping past. I turn on my side and pull the duvet up round my head. Still I hear the ticking shadows. I let the questions flood over me.

  * * *

  Havana, Cuba, 12/4/1999

  The first time John Tannehill looked at me is the one time in my life I wished I was invisible. It was a Friday night and there were five of us in Milne’s Bar, the drink flowing. In all that noise and smoky bluster I could feel someone’s eyes on me. I ignored it for a while but eventually looked around. I saw him straightaway. He was standing at the bar, talking to his companion but never taking his eyes off me.

  I was a bit unnerved. He could have been a magus reaching into my deepest core or just another bar-room lech, eyeing me up. When I found the strength to hold his gaze we could have been the only two people left in the world. It was exquisite but intolerable at the same time. After a moment I wanted to just disappear, evaporate. I wanted us to forget we had ever seen each other but knew he would be forever imprinted on my memory. Then he was walking towards me. My heart, it was beating so hard, a feeling of panic rising in my throat. I had no idea what he was going to do but couldn’t wait to find out. He stood at the table until a confused silence had fallen. Then he picked up my almost full pint of 80 shilling and drained it in one.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked.

  My friends exploded in laughter. I just stared at him in mute shock. ‘An American,’ was all I could think, a drawling accent like a matinee idol.

  I melted there and then. The French call it ‘le coup de foudre’ and I hope you have experienced it in your life, I truly do. We are told that it is a chimera, of course. We are told that only silly little girls believe in love at first sight. But maybe we never fully lose sight of the twelve year-old inside of us, desperate for the fairy tale to be true and the prince to sweep us off our feet. I do not think it is purely a female longing either. We may express, rationalise, it in different ways (after all a man should be a manly man in a man’s world, should he not!) but I believe it is a universal desire, to be suddenly and utterly lost in love.

  The sailor-poet I told you about who gave me a copy of ‘On the Road’? That was John. He was a second assistant engineer in the American merchant marine. He had a rucksack full of books and journals and said he had written his best poems while watching the ‘full moon dance with Shiva on the quicksilver sea.’ He really did talk like that and truly was a dreamer, the most genuinely honest man I have ever met. I would learn that unshakeable integrity can often leave you in a very lonely place, but for a long time I didn’t notice, let alone care.

  He was docked in Leith for five days. Then on to Marseille and Singapore. I told your father I was taking a few days off to visit my parents and John and I took the train to Aviemore, the Cairngorms.

  We all have defining moments, book-ends of existence. When I watch the last fade of the Cuban light those three days still spool in front of me, as vivid as the original. When the weather cleared we took long walks. I remember Lochan Uiane, spellbound emerald against the dark moor, Cairngorm perfectly reflected in the iron-flat waters of Loch Morlich. ‘You could stare for hours and be unable to distinguish the true mountain from the reflection,’ John said. ‘But in the end it doesn’t matter at all. In fact, that’s the whole damn point.’ Then he was running across the browny sand, whooping, pulling off his clothes and diving into the freezing water.

  I had never met anyone like him. All those moments growing up, those people with their approximations of me, of themselves, that pressing dissatisfaction I felt with your father, it all evaporated when I was with John.

  On Cairngorm plateau we read our poems under candy-floss clouds, the blue you get when the universe smiles. Never once did he patronise me, not like the defenders of the poetic faith back in Edinburgh. I could have loved John for that alone. That night he wrote his first poem for me, ‘This Night’. I keep it in the copy of ‘The Dhammapada’ that he handed over the morning he shipped out for Singapore.

  Under moon’s razor glow

  I see all of you

  clear as the pine’s silhouette

  ambiguous as the charcoal peak.

  Those words have never left me, for better or for worse. I close my eyes and watch them scroll, sometimes with sweeping calligraphic whorls, sometimes with Helvetica-type functionality. It depends on what I have emptied from the bottle, seething anger at John for not being here, for writing words that meant forever when forever was a lie, or dumb forgiveness.

  I’d walk harder

  if I trusted my step

  dream harder if I remembered the last.

  John’s uncertainty is my burden. I remember the dream, you see, I have never stopped remembering. And it will ever be mine alone, which is why I will quote no more from a poem you could never understand.

  Morven was cautious. She told me not to fall too hard. I thought she was being cynical because of her own failures, or that she was jealous. Who listens when they are in love?

  I thought it so thrillingly cosmopolitan when I watched John inject a syrette of morphine in the Cairngorm Hotel. ‘Military supplies from the Korean War,’ he said, a habit he had picked up when he was working the harbour barges in New York City. Love may be the drug, but when you put it up against heroin there is only one winner.

  Not that I understood that then. What I did understand was the deepest sadness I had ever felt when I watched The Montana steam out of Leith docks that rainy April morning. He would send a telegram to let me know when he would be back in the UK. I waved until the smirr swallowed him. Never once did he take his eyes off me.

  My depression lasted months. I couldn’t write, I could barely function. The head of the typing pool hauled me up for unsatisfactory work. ‘I can always let it go,’ he offered, and I let him put his hand up my skirt. What did it matter anymore? Your father was very concerned, he always was such a sweet, caring man. He took some time off and we spent a few uneventful days on the island of Mull.

  Direction, he kept repeating, I just needed direction, I was clearly pining for some kind of purpose. You, James, you would be my purpose.

  I wouldn’t say you were an ugly baby, but you’d have won no prizes. My apologies if that sounds blunt, but it is true. You must have noticed that everyone talks so much rubbish about their babies, how beautiful they are. Let’s face it, they look like grubs. Or frogs. That’s what you looked like, a little jaundiced frog. They had to give you a hell of belt on the arse to bring you round.

  Then they handed you over. My child. You may as well have been an alien for all that I could relate to this new creature or understand how I was to communicate. I just didn’t know what to do and handed you back almost immediately. I can still see the nurse’s look of utter contempt, as if I wasn’t fit to be a mother. But Morven agreed with me, she appeared at the hospital reeking of booze, took one look at you and said, ‘ugly little spud’. In fact, she called you Spud for years. ‘How’s our little Maris Piper,’ she’d say.

  Is this inappropriate? Should I paint myself in a more forgiving light? But if this journal has been about anything it has been about sincerity. In any case, it doesn’t take pervy old Freud to tell you that the roots of my alienation from you were fixed from those first moments. As soon as you were born I realised that I would always resent you, your needs that would constrict and then consume me. I have long suspected that post-natal depression is a disease of grief, the death of individuality that comes with childbirth.

  I am not offering any excuses so I will not do you the affront of apologising.

  Anyway, you could never convince me that you would have wanted a mother like me, who tried but not very hard, who took an interest but not much. Edward would more than make up for my absence. I was in awe of how he adapted to parenthood, as if he had trained for
a lifetime to step into the role. Catholicism underpinned it all, the creation of life as the highest form of worship. You should be deeply grateful to your father, he alone was of exponentially more value to your upbringing than he and I combined. Sometimes the sum of the parts is less, not more.

  I wonder if the handwritten pages were scanned into pdfs by my mother. Or perhaps Adelina physically cut out the pages and made them into these neat, bite-sized pieces. Did she read the words carefully before deciding where to end each excerpt? Best dramatic effect and all that. It’s obvious that my mother neatly copied out a rougher draft, there’s not one spelling error or word scored out. There must have been edits and changes of content but I’m not going to see any of that, just this cleaned-up director’s cut. I think that’s what disgusts me more than anything, the effort she made to make her story as accessible as possible.

  And then she didn’t send it.

  Helen’s Journal 6 arrived at ten to one last night. It means that as soon as JC and I left Adelina in the car-park she must have gone back immediately to wherever she’s staying and sent it.

  My mother and Adelina.

  They’re both here.

  Again they crowded my dreams. Again they melted away, like snow slipping down the window. If I was hoping for respite I should have known better than to boot up the laptop. I’ve become their prisoner. There was a time I would have told my wife everything. We would have figured it out. That’s what married couples are supposed to do. Not now though, not a chance.

  I re-read the attachment, pushing back the claustrophobia. I blame the snow, when the world’s reduced to a blank the imagination gets fevered, starts adding the detail and colour that the landscape hasn’t provided for weeks. I’ve never known snow like this. No-one even talks about it anymore, it’s become a malign ever-presence. I don’t want to see it again or feel it on my face. It’s enough with the curtains closed, knowing it’s still there, still pressing.