becoming part of their eternity.
Yet the time their nets plucked down an angel,
eyes lusted for luminosity of skin,
while they dreamed one night they’d lie beside her
and possess the circle of her halo, the lift and tilt of wings.
The instant that they glimpsed her,
their gaze flashed wide to see
promises obscured by grey skies,
all heaven’s graceful symmetry…
2
It was not Gabriel or Raphael,
but it now transpires
a vision of the future
when Beaufighter, Wellington, Sunderland
were brought low by cloud or fire
from their place in the Heavens,
and these lost souls expired
in Soay, Conachair, Gleann Mhor;
both wing-tip and cockpit
trapped within the mire
of peat, heather and bogland
until the last ember died out
and their funeral pyre
showed neither flame or smoke-plume rising,
with the loud cries of the seabirds
calling higher and higher,
scolding each plane’s loud intrusion
like some drunk, discordant choir.
3
Alston, Day, Spencer, Stewart –
among those toppling on that island
from greater heights
than ever cragsmen stumbled
from the top of Mullach Mor
or Conachair.
Engines pulsing through the air,
they were brought low on wings of fire
or the billowing silk of parachute
to perish among seabirds looting
the pockets of their uniforms
in pursuit of blood and flesh.
So let us pray the tight mesh
of angel-wings
came quiet and quick upon them,
wrapping souls to grant protection
from the gluttony of beaks,
gathering their weak spirits
to the dizzy limits bright guardians occupy,
somewhere beyond the edges of our senses,
a haven even seabirds will never raid with their wings
or learn to spot or spy.
Exile 1 / Fògarraich 1
Terrors of Exile
So much made them frightened:
loud rumours, rattling sound of trains;
fabled leaps from pavement-edges;
the scale of land’s immensity clouded and fogged by rain;
the distance storms could journey;
relentless regularity of mail;
bills tumbling through a letter-flap;
both sober men and drunkards’ tales;
absence of tides and currents;
the alien stretch of fertile fields;
uncrumpled daily newspapers;
fingers gesticulating at their heels;
the dips and waves of fashion;
walls men shored up against wind;
towns that preachers told them
had been colonised by sin;
earth scooped out in distant graveyards;
that final breath alone;
smoke billowing from a kitchen-stove
in some other place than home.
Vanishing
The day will come when familiar language will desert you,
edging out the doorway like that boat which once left shore,
departing without wake from bow or stern,
and when it fades from mouth, there will be no return;
no chance to find again the shibboleths stored
within its vocabulary; no opportunity to sift through
all that has been left behind. Instead, its words will stand
like some empty house no one ever enters,
its door resting on a hinge, wood turned bleached and rotten,
a memorial for a vacancy; these sounds you’ve long forgotten
concealed like earth snow has hidden over winter,
no footsteps marking out the spot where that boat last touched land.
The Road to Lochaline
The road-signs leading to Lochaline
are the strangest drivers have ever seen.
A stag held aloft by antlers, flying.
Narrowing of lines, like a skein
of geese. And, of course, the warning signs
that show men tumbling as they climbed
out of Gleann Dubh or Glais Bheinn,
half-blinded
by the tears these settlers shed
for the land they’d left behind.
Ardtornish
There were heights they had not been conscious of before,
till working near the road that roped towards Strontian and Ardgour,
they glimpsed that building with its baronial towers
between the snarling boughs of trees,
and they longed for the power to be
perched up there in its windows, free
to circle round its tables, spend long hours
not toiling in this forest, but starting instead to believe
their new lives could wing upwards
and flit through these closed doors to nest below
slate roof-tops, find a way to break and go
from the cage they’d discovered they’d been locked in,
gaining a pittance for their labours,
small smatterings of grain
those who lived in turrets doled out for them to peck
and called a living wage.
Adjusting
Their voices washed around their new words
trying to soften syllables and consonants
and learn to think of them as home,
drumming ‘Claggan’ deep in their skulls,
bringing ‘Uillin’ close to elbow,
making sure that each dark ledge of ‘Beinn na h-Uamh’ was known.
A hard task to begin with,
like footfalls slipping through the boughs and branches
that lined Lochaline with the mystery of trees
or the squalls that walled and blurred horizons,
allowing them to think they were
still back on the island,
unconscious of their ignorance,
surrounded by its seas.
Tales of Alexander
/ Sgeulachdan Alasdair
1
After his retirement, Alexander showed signs of how his early years on the island had affected him. He would spend days at the town’s infill site, seeing gulls skirl above debris. Sometimes, he’d watch a DVD of Hitchcock’s The Birds, smiling as wings smashed windows and windscreens, terrifying school-children with their swoop.
‘The day is coming,’ he’d say.
But what horrified his wife most was the morning she opened the freezer. Seabirds, wrapped in plastic, were stacked upon its shelves. Icy beaks and heads glittered. Frozen feathers sparkled.
‘Best to be prepared,’ he explained.
2
One afternoon he began to hear the singing. Its every note was clear and vivid, entering his consciousness so powerfully that there were moments when he was unable to hear anything of the routines of life that occurred around him – the babble of these daytime TV programmes that his wife insisted on watching, the flushing of the toilet, the constant thrum of the cars driving past his home. For all that he had not heard its rhythms for years, he recalled instantly why its sound was so familiar; the words and music bringing him back to the island kirk he had attended as a boy, listening once again to the psalms that had swirled and echoed in its walls. He could see once more the heights of Oiseaval, Mullach Mor, Conachair as he heard it, remembering, too, the words that were on his lips at that time.
‘Mo shuilean togam suas a chum
Nam beann bho thig mo neart
‘I to the hills will lift mine eyes
From whe
nce doth come my aid…’
Surrounded by these voices, he began to sing, drawing out the line of the psalm the way he remembered the old precentor had done as he brought together the congregation in the praise and worship of God. Its rhythms rippled through his senses; its ‘water music’ flooding the confines of his sitting room. Soon, the sofa began to retreat from view; the TV in the corner disappeared. New noises began to invade his songs, ones that he remembered from the island. He introduced small twirls and grace-notes stolen from the throats and beaks of fulmars and gulls into the music; the notes of wrens and blackbirds, the surge of the sea. He mingled all these different noises in his constant rendering of the psalm. It became part of an endless sermon, longer even than the ones those people had experienced as they sat in their pews in that small kirk on the island.
Throughout all this, he ignored the protests of his wife, the complaints of his next-door neighbours who had heard his voice through the walls of their semi-detached home, the stares of passers-by who glanced through the window of his home, even the police when they came to his door.
Only the singing mattered to him now.
Only the singing mattered…
3
He often became nostalgic for silence, especially the kind that affected the islanders in the hours after a storm had passed.
They would mouth words to each other after all its fury and rage had stilled, conscious that they had been deafened by the tumultuous level of noise and uproar they had experienced.
‘Are you all right?’ they might ask.
‘Yes… Yes…’ another would nod, and then lips would open and close soundlessly, seeking to express their concern about what they had gone through. ‘A fierce one that,’ they could whisper, ‘the worst one so far this year.’
‘Oh, I don’t know… There was that one last March.’
‘Aye, aye… That was powerful too.’
And then they would move noiselessly for the next few hours through their homes, performing tasks that involved the clicking of a loom or clashing of pans, aware that until the deafness wore off, their clamour would not affect anyone else in the house – nobody would be disturbed by their noise.
The storm seemed to affect even the clamour of the birds. They neither squawked nor sang for hours after it passed over. Instead, they would remain silent, deprived of their cries and voices or, perhaps, conscious that as long as the effects of the wind continued, there was little point in even attempting to communicate with one another. No other bird would be able to hear them, plagued by the same temporary deafness that affected the men and women in their midst.
Alexander rejoiced in the silence that occurred at these times. This was especially the case while there was a sermon in the kirk following a storm. He could sit in the pews and watch the preacher brandish his arms and pound the edge of the pulpit, conscious that no word about the proximity of Hell or the likelihood of damnation was ever going to resound in the loops and whorls of his ears. There were other moments too when his mother would be warning him about going near the cliffs and crags. He would watch her lips blur, but feel fit to ignore the message booming from them.
In later life, he would try to duplicate the silence that had once surrounded him on the island. When his wife complained about his behaviour or the noise of the traffic became too much, he might lie in the bath and allow their words to wash around him. Water, too, would surround him; the bubbles – like the foam of an ocean wave – filling his ears and turning him deaf. He would look down at his body and imagine he was back where his young life had started; the tangle of his crotch becoming Village Bay; an ankle transformed into a crag or skerry; the slope of his leg resembling the Cambir; the baldness of his knee-cap becoming the high crest of Conachair…
4
Elizabeth could never forgive her husband for the way their son, Alexander Junior, reacted to the presence of eggs.
His fear of them was apparent even when he walked down a supermarket aisle. He would shield himself when he saw yellow cartons labelled with the words ‘Cheery Eggs’; recoil when he came across grey boxes with the brand-name ‘Nicelay’ scrolled on top.
‘It’s all your father’s fault,’ she would say, ‘He’s responsible for this.’
She remembered how it had happened. Her husband used to spend much of his weekends looking for crops of seabird eggs that clustered around the small harbour near where they lived. He would take them home in shopping bags, boiling them up in a small pan and setting them out before his children on the kitchen table.
‘They’re all free range,’ he’d grin, ‘None of that rubbish battery stuff.’
Both Neil and Flora had been content with all this. They could tolerate the slightly salty taste of the eggs these expeditions produced for their breakfast; the odd fleck of blood they sometimes found within the yolk, signs of an embryonic fledgling about to take shape. It was, however, unfortunate that it was neither of these children who discovered the membrane of a fulmar chick inside an egg-shell. Instead, it was their young brother, Alexander. He turned over the beginnings of that bird with his spoon, glimpsing shadows of tiny wings, a beak, a feather in its unfinished form. A moment or two later and he was sick, vomiting over the kitchen floor.
‘You would never have got off with that back on the island,’ his father declared. ‘There would have been no end to the teasing you suffered.’
After that, however, he tried his best to persuade Alexander Junior to enjoy the taste of these eggs. He mixed them occasionally with eggs bought from the supermarket, bringing them to the house in cartons marked with the words ‘Joyful Yokes’, ‘Happy Lay’ and ‘Goodyellas’. Sometimes he would mix chicken-eggs, duck-eggs and seabird-eggs in the most amazing recipes; ‘fulmar pancakes’; ‘seagull quiche’; ‘tern omelette’; ‘scrambled black-headed gull eggs’. At other times, he would play little jokes and jests on the young boy, removing the top of the egg and putting it carefully back in place, watching as Alexander Junior swung his spoon, scalping an empty piece of shell, watching it scuttle over the floor…
On one occasion Alexander Senior filled the empty shell with fulmar oil he had squeezed carefully from the throat of a bird on a cliff-edge. At its centre, there was a burning wick he had lit a short time before. He had placed the egg, warm and luminous, on the kitchen table, grinning as his son lifted up the spoon once again, breaking it open to see the strange light flickering within.
‘They used to play that trick all the time on the island,’ he chuckled. ‘It gave us such a warm glow it stayed with us for days.’
5
Alexander was largely okay in public until they unveiled a statue of a seabird in the town square. The moment he saw it, he took off his shoes and socks, clambering up sandstone to try and wrench it off its plinth, wrestling sculpted wings, chipping away with the edge of his hand at its feet. When he failed to do this, his fists drummed against its head, screaming with disappointment.
‘It isn’t real!’ he shouted, ‘It isn’t real!’
The following day, he was found sitting on the concrete model of an upturned boat that was found in the middle of one of the town’s main roundabouts. He was babbling about the island he had left years before, mentioning the sheep that had grazed around the doors and cleits, the waves a short distance away, the seabirds that had whirled and squawked around his head.
‘I want to go back there…’ he declared, ‘I want to go home.’
6
In the pocket of his wife’s dressing gown, Alexander found a note Elizabeth had clearly written in a hurry one morning.
‘As a child, Alexander grew up in a remote, isolated island where – according to himself – he spent many happy, carefree days. They were times he relived again and again in long, interminable conversations where he often spoke about the virtues and benefits of eating seabird eggs and feasting on their flesh. There was, for instance, the time he held a visiting politician spellbound by the rhapsodies he went into one wet Saturday af
ternoon during an election campaign, describing the delights of plunging his fingers into a sack of fulmar feathers and then letting them fall like giant snowflakes on his face. Needless to say, that particular politician has never attempted to win his family’s votes since that time. Instead, he has sent his opponents in the direction of Alexander’s home, telling them that some of their most fervent supporters lived there.
In his later life, this form of behaviour became more and more of a trial to his wife, Elizabeth. She bore the full brunt of his increasingly eccentric monologues and antics; his two children having, on medical advice, flown from their perch many years before.
In order to obtain a well-merited break from all his ramblings, Elizabeth decided to organise a long overdue visit to Ireland, the land where her distant relatives hailed from. During their time there, they visited the many natural and man-made attractions found in that country. These included the Giant’s Causeway, Mountains of Mourne, Ulster History and both Shankill and Falls Road; the last two locations were, she decided, both havens of peace compared with all she had put up with over the last decade or two.
Her visit culminated with a visit to the Cliffs of Moher in the far west of Ireland. In scale and size, these heights rivalled those found on the island Alexander had left many years before. Once again, he spoke lyrically about their wonders, speaking this time to an American tourist who wore a dark suit, dark glasses and carried – not unusually in that part of the world – a fiddle case in his hand. While he was listening to Alexander’s monologue, he suddenly and inexplicably removed a Thompson submachine gun (m3a1 version) and let loose a round or two of spontaneous, sudden gunfire in the direction of the speaker, killing him outright and depositing him over the edge of the cliff. It is said that a pair of gannets passing the scene dipped their wings in respect of the passing of one of their most respected former hunters.
The Guga Stone Page 4