Weakness kept me chained. The horror of the tunnel burst again and again. Its roaring crash and splinter brought panic attacks clawing my sinews. Escape, escape, it screamed. I’d cast wildly round the bedroom, gripping the frame of the bed and sweating profusely. Only when her eyes looked down at me, blue and intense, would each attack pass away. Shining with inner laughter they smiled, and I would sleep, as though rocking in a warm sea.
The sundial re-appeared each day, a yellow slash on my bedcover. Its spring light drove a reviving spirit. After one fierce bout of the recurrent trauma, never mind limb and lung, I knew a mental recovery to be just as urgent. I needed to deal firmly with my revulsion for city smells whether stale air or recycled water. No more tranquilizers. Confidence, self discipline, I needed to regain control of my thoughts, quell these ridiculous manias. Action was needed now, the action I’d determined upon weeks ago.
Restless beyond endurance, beyond the rational, I threw sheets aside. Damn medication, a breath of the ocean, salt air would cleanse burnt lungs, the power of the sun would give me back strength. I knew it, I knew it. I rose.
Cash, clothes, I needed both. Ask the nurse to help? No, she might be implicated in my disappearance, lose her job. The wardrobe, check the wardrobe. Why? I crossed to it unsteadily. Staring me in the face, clothes on hangers; not the grey suit and smart meeting tie I’d worn, that would be impossible; no, a check shirt, Harris tweed jacket, flannels, socks, heavy brogues. Incredulous, who the mischief? At the bottom of the wardrobe, a leather portmanteau!
No sight of my briefcase. Some person could be privy to its contents, deliberately or otherwise. That wouldn’t stop me. It had gone, with any luck in smithereens. Putting the portmanteau on the bed, I opened it gingerly. Shaving kit, more clothes. I snapped it shut, sat a moment. None of it mine.
Morning round had been and gone, “What the hell,” I was being recklessly driven by the voice hammering in my head, “Get out of here, boy, out, get out!” Pants, shirt, trousers, socks, I fell back on the bed to pull them on, “Boy, boy, am I weak.” Struggling to dress, I grunted with pain as I bent.
“Good God, this lot fits me.” Whose? Hollow cheeks and lantern-jaw watched from a mirror over the sink. I touched the face with a skinny hand, noted the actions, not a man I recognised, surely I was alive? I attempted a grin, it’s me O.K.
Tweed jacket, an amazing fit. Hurriedly, automatically my hand went to the inside pocket. A blood stained wallet.I stared at it in disbelief. “Mine. How in the name of creation did it get into this outfit?” Fumbling through each pouch, cash, bank cards, “of course it’s mine.”
In disbelief I checked the contents again. A small card slipped onto the floor. I picked it up. Just a handwritten phone number. No time to think that one out.
Visitors thronged the passage, chattering, clutching grapes and flowers. None ever opened my door. Joining the stream was easy. Corridors, lifts, more corridors with pictures. Past reception. Front door, don’t look back. I was outside, goodbye hospital, and thank you.
I leant against a taxi rank pillar. A coughing fit overtook me, “You OK, guv?” The cab driver took my elbow, “Yes thanks, I’ll be fine in a moment,” and after a pause, “Euston station, please.” Why in the world should I pick Euston?
The cabbie helped me to a seat in the station.
Amongst the throng of everyday city life I sat thinking.
A small card, hand written phone number, I turned it over.
Blank.
CHAPTER SIX
Semi-detached
Clack-arty, clack, clack-arty, clack, it hammered through an aching head, a drumbeat pounding from Euston to Glasgow, rolling into bends, roaring through stations, the route of ‘The Royal Scot’ since days of glowing firebox and the hiss of steam. Silver tracks and clattering points, the train swaying in lively tempo. Hurrying north, driven by some wild urge, it might be a ridiculous whim but there was no denying my shiver of expectation. Ten years cooped in a physics lab testing theories, exploring new concepts, here was the same nerve jangling sensation I experienced when my research stood on the edge of fresh insight.
Perhaps I’d venture to some hazardous retreat, elemental and remote which could ignite a spark of imagination, lift my mind beyond mundane thoughts into a torrid zone of inspired dimensions where ideas emerge or equations present themselves. Unravel the enigma of ‘Dark Energy’, prove it the force driving the expansion of the universe. Deduce the nature of ‘Dark Matter’, invisible, yet thought to be the overwhelming mass of this universe. Research which occupied past work haunted my brain, torturing me with ideas just out of reach. I was far from well.
Was this headlong stampede northwards the trick of a fevered mind, the first symptoms of insanity, maybe schizophrenia, had I lost contact with reality? The injury to my head in the explosion might explain the violent swings of a mind in the grip of disjointed thinking which I found impossible to stem. Abruptly a fresh mental turmoil erupted as I began to consider the widespread indifference and gross ignorance that could be driving our species towards extinction when the potential evolution of intelligence might set the waves of imagination on a journey through the orifice of singularity towards a comprehension of infinity?
I heard myself lecturing the carriage, “An age of enlightenment awaits us, knowledge yet untapped. Ninety-six percent of this universe remains virgin to our understanding. All that we are, all the stuff that constitutes everything we touch, all we experience as reality, all we see about us as though it were totality, is a mere four per cent of a supreme mystery. Let me tell you….”
I became aware of standing and shouting. The woman beside me got up in some alarm, snatched her case off the rack and moved down the compartment. In mortifying embarrassment I sank back on my seat. Hands sweating and twitching, I looked out of the carriage window. The need for treatment was becoming obvious. Could a practical life help me recover?
We rattled through mundane countryside. Copse and hedgerow dovetailed into bow fronted homes, red brick and mowed lawns. Their uniformity fed into factory gates surrounded by bumper to bumper car parks. Skylines puffed away. Brickworks’ chimneys, slender and elegant, hour glass energy towers topped with steam carried away in twisting spirals on a blustery day.
Streets followed the contours of forgotten valleys. End on houses formed serrated rows of tiled roofs and castellated chimney pots, each tiny back garden proudly walled from its neighbour. Ariel forests gave viewers access to the disappearing jungles, or maybe the ritual of sexy soaps and violence. Squeezed between graffiti and washing lines I spotted the odd decrepit residence; pillared doorways, shading beech, the remnants of an unassailable feudal divide. As we banked through industrial estates, gigantic multinational signs presided over factory parking lots and used car dumps. Sickly trees waved plastic bags. Pub signs, potting sheds and greenhouses, a conglomeration of human bolt holes, temporary shelters before the onslaught of compulsory identification and draconian measures are brought to control the anarchy which will engulf these same streets as the fallout from a growing wealth gap.
City overspill and rolling countryside, the conurbations of modern housing stretched their tentacles into fields trimmed white with hawthorn blossom. Here and there red tiled farmsteads evoked an era of squire and lady, fox covets and hunting horn, whilst squat farm cottages with perhaps a dry lavatory down the garden caught the mellowness of a rural culture with Morris Dancing beside the duck pond. Spacious undulating countryside, its hollows of leafy lane and thatched roofed village suggested more the stockbroker hideaway rather than any rural deprivation. On a rise of ground a dark oaken glade, pagan in its seclusion, skirted the tower of a Norman church Square and solid the bastion of a cherished age, the hands of its gold faced clock stood at twelve, slow or maybe stopped?
The rail tracks climbed into the Lake District, grassy fells and grey homesteads clinging to primitive hillsides. Stone dykes wound over the skyline, hand built monuments to bygone skill and the hardiness of a people. National
Park territory, few cattle, but plenty of bed and breakfast signs, a rural culture providing scenic amenity. Out on a ridge windmills facing a day of heavy showers and a blustering wind turned their energy to offsetting the activities of an expanding species. Ten billion humans set to require the resources of two planets? The sun hid behind clouds of stupidity.
Rain drove across the carriage windows in diagonal streaks. Crewe, Preston, Carlisle had passed my window. Soon we’d be crossing the Solway Firth. Utterly weary as I was, I raised my head and watched intently the last of Jerusalem’s green and pleasant land. Louring cloud brought gloom to the flat expanse of the last miles of England. The steel struts of a bridge carried the train over mud flats and a tidal creek. Showers of angled desolation appeared slate grey and bone cutting. Was this the miserable crossing which divided two cultures?
Its empty dejection became the echo of my mother’s mother, the sadness of her voice. Looking out I remembered. I heard her talking to a child at knee; a soft voice, distant in its telling of the Jacobite’s retreat to the Highlands. I saw stumbling men who came home to death by Redcoat bayonet, the sacrifice of a people to the aspirations of royal vanity. “Well boy, back through Carlisle came the Highlanders, ragged and hungry, cheering and victorious they’d been, just months before, loyal to the fatal Bonnie Prince Charlie.” The old grandmother paused with a sigh of reflection, “Now they wanted only hill and high ground, the sanctuary of wild places with its winter snow and hidden pride. We didn’t ever recover from the slaughter on Drumossie Moor,”
She never stooped to calling the defeat of her people, the Battle of Culloden. That was the name the English put on it, she said and speaking as though it were yesterday, she put a hand on my head, “My great, great grandfather’s elder brother fell on the field, east wind and sleet in his face, a musket ball through the chest, so they told. And fat, gloating Cumberland standing on a high stone at the back, waving and cheering. The Butcher they called him. The younger brother of that dead relation and some of the boys from the Ross-shire crofts took to the hill, hunted down like foxes, den to den.”
It was my childhood lesson in lingering Highland bitterness, “A friend from Wester Ross had a fishing boat and put that relation ashore in the Outer Hebrides. Over the side at night and swim. It was on a lonely island, I don’t remember the name. Anyway, the people hid and fed him. They took a great risk. They could have been shot too, a gunboat was cruising and stopping and searching every boat they came upon. Plenty that were shot out of hand.”
Oblivious of train and surroundings, I remembered so clearly her long silence and the childhood tension of awaiting a stories ending. Eventually she whispered, “Well, a’bhalaich, that man was your great, great, great, grandfather.” How little it meant to me then, how precious now.
I’d viewed the plodding tameness of feudal class divisions and its reverential bowing to superiors; how different from the voices which sprang into a sudden craving. Words came flowing, song and poetry, long forgotten lines arose in my head, ‘Scots wha hae, Sound the Pibroch,’ great songs, melodies that wept tears in the lost tides of defeat, bold words that waved the banners of victory, and sang the tunes of glory.
My father came strongly to me; ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ that,’ the line he stressed in a poem he loved. I heard him again, playing the piano, the songs of Old Scotia, he called them, melodies that lived in haunting times, stirring times, the poetry of a nation with the undying emotions of love, battle, and sacrifice in its soul. Out of lament for the old ways I learnt at granny’s knee, there came a lift in my heart.
Exaltation sang to the vaulted generations of awaiting spirits. Scotland. For the first time in my life, I was in Scotland. And beating a pulse in my head, my father’s deep voice;
‘From the lone shieling of the misty island,
Mountains divide us, and the wastes of seas,
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.’
My eyes filled with the tears of joy and sadness.
Nobody in the compartment looked up from their magazines. Crossing the border- no more than crossing a street. Apart from that humiliating outburst of shouting, I had not spoken to anybody, nor anybody to me. The seat beside me remained vacant, Maybe my hollow, wet cough sounded like T.B. or cancer? Not that I wanted company, conversations raged in my head.
Crossing the border, I felt conscious of the stirrings of an ethnic divide.
Where was I going, and why?
The rail line twisted amongst soft and rounded contours. Border hills, grass to their tops and dotted like daisies with sheep. Sheep! I’d never before seen so many ranging the open hills, subject to wind, weather and a shepherd’s skill. The empathy between a man with his working foot on the hill and the animals which daily depended on its pasture occurred to me.
Out of the shadows of evening light the burns overflowed, white and creamy from gullies cut by ten thousand storms. Here was I, a scientist grappling with the calculations of the sub-atomic particles which govern existence and there on a passing hillside a system dealing with a purpose, tangible and simple. A distant flock of sheep appeared as an undulating white canopy flowing down the hill. I spotted a striding man and with a stab of pleasure I caught sight of two dogs.
An image of busy city millions superimposed itself, the trap of civilisation hurtled into my picture. Taxis, tube trains and forced body contact became the cannibalistic screaming of rats fighting in a cage. How to heal with this erratic mind racing, stop these bouts of recurring horror? I wrung my hands and groaned aloud, aware passengers were glancing at me. Gradually my thoughts steadied, became lucid as hills gave way to ploughed land and fields of dairy cattle. On the horizon I glimpsed the skyscraper tenements of Glasgow and again I was assailed by this morbid dread of confinement.
Access to land as the basic requirement of survival was denied to countless by force, yet to millions of western consumers it was discounted by choice and certainly had no bearing on their daily activities. Perhaps I was being too simplistic in believing the sun and soil to be the fundamental requirements if civilization began to crack. What else counted in a final reckoning?
From fields and hillsides to high rise flats my I saw the land in a totally different context. No longer just a weekend playground, I wanted land sufficient to live on, to live by, to care for, be part of its cycles with the intimacy of belonging; hold my head high with the pride and satisfaction of working in harness with its natural forces. I needed the solace of the elements, and happiness.
Ideas and inspiration churned with the fury of a riptide. My head throbbed, bursting to be released from a body weak and sick, be able to stride like the shepherd I’d watched on that Border hillside. I must find health, land, and independence.
Why in the world had I traveled north, any direction, but north? Yet I felt drawn as if by a magnet, a helpless compass needle swinging true. Some force seemed in control of this diabolically stupid breakout. Barely fit to walk fifty yards without a coughing fit, I groaned aloud. Was I ditching a field of research which might break the stranglehold of Einstein’s lordly equation? Fool, you fool! What madness drove me?
A phone sat on the bedside table of a Glasgow Hotel.
For the first time since ‘escaping’ from the hospital, an incident I preferred to regard as leaving of my own accord, I stared at the card with a handwritten phone number. Never mind clothes, money, how or why had it all happened? Somebody must have slipped this card into my wallet. The number meant nothing to me.
I lifted the receiver. Should I dial? It could be a ridiculous folly.
“This is reception, how can I help you, Sir?” I relayed the number to a thick Scottish accent, “It’s ringing for you now, Sir.”
It rang and rang, would I put down the receiver?
“Hello, hello,” a mellow voice answered, relaxed, no practiced, ‘How may I help you?’. I waited, until eventually, “I’m in the bar just now, han
g on.” I heard him speak to someone, but not in English. The clink of a glass followed by, “That’s for yourself, Iain,” then back to me, “Who’s calling please?”
“Is that the, the, er, er,” Taken aback to hear the strains of energetic fiddle playing, I faltered. Should I hang up? After all, I hadn’t the least idea whom I might be contacting. Lively music, laughter and voices, my hand stopped in mid-air.
“It’s the Castleton Hotel you’ve got,” the man had raised his voice above conversations which were certainly not in English. The strains of an accordion joined the fiddler. “Sorry about the noise. Are you hearing me.?”
“Yes, I’m hearing you. Er mm,” I cleared my throat, “is there any possibility of accommodation please. Have you a single room, I, er, maybe tomorrow?” This is ridiculous, tomorrow? I was in Glasgow, could be speaking to John o’Groats or Lands End. The code said it must be somewhere in U.K. “By the way,” I tried to sound casual, “where exactly are you?”
“Well now, you’ve reached the Isle of Halasay. If you’re coming over, just jump on the ferry from Oban. There’s plenty room here, no problem. In case you’re late, what name is it?”
The situation was gaining a compelling momentum, but did I want to give away any details? The implied threat at the Goldberg meeting concerned me. All too vividly I was aware of the case of scientist whose assessment perhaps didn’t fit the conclusion desired by his political masters, who as a prominent advisor to the Government on the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was found dead and some doctors were questioning the suicide verdict. Given the highly suspicious convenience of the hospital arrangements, clothes, wallet and cash but no briefcase, was I being set up? In spells of rational thought I’d planned to remain incognito and disappear.
I hesitated. John Smith sounded foolish. The background noise settled the matter and my name fitted the music. I plunged on, “This is, er, Hector MacKenzie.”
Sun Dance Page 4