by David Park
A text comes through on my phone. It’s from Rosemary and says, ‘Tom, nothing broken. Being kept in overnight as precaution but getting home in the morning. Hope you and Luke get home safely. Once again a big thanks. Have a good Christmas, Rosemary.’ I tell her I’m pleased for her and wish her well but not where I am. I can’t tell anyone where I am because it’s not where I’m supposed to be and I can’t explain the reason if anyone asks.
When I get out of the car I feel a stiffness in my legs and back as I put on my coat and zip the collar up high against the coldness that suddenly floods around me. I search for my gloves but can’t find where I’ve left them. A young couple are coming down from the monument with two young children scampering ahead of them and kicking flurries of snow with their wellingtons. A smoke of breath is on all their lips and as we pass we wish each other a Merry Christmas like we’re characters in a Dickens story.
My own two boys – the pride once felt in those words echoing back down the years – and they’re young and brimming full of excitement at camping in Tollymore Forest, so much that they scamper and skip as if their bodies can’t be contained in the confines of a normal walk and we know we have to tire them out if any of us are to have a chance of getting a sleep during the coming night. So we bring them along the river and through the forest and they’re throwing stones into the white rush of water and clambering down to look for fish in the shadows below the grey slabs of rock on the other bank. Words of caution on their parents’ lips, but smiles too, and their excitement is infectious so we also feel free and part of me wants to show off to them, to let them see that I too can share in something of what races through them. The very best phase, when that shared excitement is still possible and new experience is there to be embraced and nothing needs to be forced and it’s as if you’re looking at the world for the first time. Seeing it as a child.
As the family starts to unload their stuff into the boot of the car the two boys kick snow at each other while their parents coax them to stand still long enough for them to unzip their coats. My own children have spotted a tiny fish and urge us to follow them down to the gravelly edge of the water, but we can’t see it at first, even though they’re pointing and shouting, because our eyes aren’t sharp and wide like theirs and because the shadows mottle the surface. Suddenly their voices have the exasperation of the parent whose child can’t see what they can and then we do and they’re so pleased as if they’ve revealed something of the world’s magic to us. As if they’ve taught us how to see. Then we put our hands under their arms and pretend to swing them out over the water to catch the fish so that they’re squealing with pretend fear and our bodies are linked like they’ll never be again. Swinging out over the water. Held safe.
I watch the car drive away, its throaty exhaust a momentary dark spume against the white. The air is cold against my face and pinches my ears but for a few seconds of memory I feel the sun slanting through the trees and skimming a swathe of light across the surface of the water where in its reflections trembles a welter of tiny insects. A dragonfly. Another small fish. A piece of branch like a little boat carried downstream. We’ll pitch our tent here and live inside the moment so there’s no need to be swept along by time. I know you like it here and yes we can learn how to fish and build fires. So let’s stay safe in this moment and let nothing ever take us away from it.
Here are stepping stones that ford the river set at regular intervals and between which the water courses and tumbles to the white-frothed level below. A challenge that has to be taken up but the stones are regular and broad, solid underfoot, so it’s not difficult enough and then you’re offering each other challenges and it begins with hopping on one leg and despite your parents’ warnings you’re determined to show your bravery and, even when Lorna tells you to stop, Daniel says he’s going to cross it with his eyes closed and although I’m telling him not to be stupid and that he’ll fall he simply strides across with perfectly measured steps and we don’t know whether to be cross or applaud. When Luke who feels outshone goes to emulate his brother’s feat we both grab hold of him and forbid it. Lorna presses him tightly into her and we all stare at the seemingly unstoppable flow of the water.
Night walks through the city. Young people sparked by a sense of excitement in the Cathedral Quarter with the girls’ heels struggling on the cobbled streets. The city flows here like the river below it. Who can tell where it will take us? Searching every face but looking for what? A chance encounter? For my son? For something else for which I do not have a name? Bars and restaurants extend an invitation with the light arcing from their windows and doorways but it feels as if something prevents me from ever entering. Groups spill outside to drink under the strings of outdoor lights, the young people dressed as if the night isn’t cold. As I get closer to the Angel my hands are shaking and I don’t know why. Is every son destined to become his father? Are these shaking hands his afterlife in me? Sometimes in a mirror, when I catch myself by chance, I think it’s his face giving back my reflection and it’s into him that time bears me ever closer. At the end I wanted to hoop him with my arms, not out of love, but to hold him so tightly that his tremble I felt passing into me would be stilled and the world fall back into balance. And I do not want my son ever to be me and, despite whatever’s happening inside, never let him see my body tremble and if he can do it let him hold me only in love. Let him be better than his father, with a surer grasp of happiness.
The paths to the monument have disappeared under the snow but I follow where others have walked and as I head up to it through the trees whose branches look as if they have fossilised into a white coral its wings seem to suddenly reach out over my head although I am still at a distance. Despite the vastness of its scale the body that is angled towards my approach is wholly human in its muscled leg, the swell of its buttock, the tilt of its head but it’s the ribbed wings that press their immensity on the landscape, the sky, what you feel inside. This is something I have to do but right now my hands are shaking too badly to take the photograph. I don’t have much time and the light is ebbing. I want to hear the sound of my family’s voices but I can’t ring them without them knowing that I’ve stopped on my journey. Another promise that they’ll think I’ve broken.
Sometimes I can’t help thinking that the night we smoked the bats out of their hidden place and sent them skittering and frantic into the dark was the moment that I disturbed some natural order, set in motion everything that has ever happened in my life. But I tell myself that it’s a weakness to look for something to blame, a weakness in me that no pill is ever going to cure. And if I am to tell myself the truth I no longer believe that any order exists and if it ever did it’s broken and no matter how hard we try we’ll never be able to put it together again. A quickening of shame too as I remember the times I’ve let myself think of going under but as I look up at the Angel I know it’s not my body I now want to put into the pure white grave of snow but the bad things I’ve done, the mistakes I’ve made, the flaws that seeded themselves in me and which I let grow. Each word that was spoken. That’s what I want to bury in this place that feels as sacred as anywhere I’ve ever stood.
The temperature is dropping. Young men and women sleeping in the city’s crevices. Let shelter be found for them. Let those who come stop on their journey at a shop doorway where a young woman died. See too a bare room with two mattresses.
Sleeping bags for bedclothes. An empty wardrobe. I look at my hands with their blunt fingers that hold this camera and remember Stieglitz’s portraits of O’Keeffe’s hands – in all of them the hands are alive, expressive, beautiful. Your hands when I first held you and wondered how life could be replicated and reduced to such perfection, thinking that they had been freshly sculpted from wet clay. My own son’s hands, the physical embodiment of the life I helped bring into the world. Nothing has ever matched the strength of that awareness. Not in the album of photographs. Not in the giving back to the earth.
I try desperately to
arrange happy memories from childhood around your head but they can’t fasten to you and fall away. I’m clutching for something to hold on to. To stop myself from falling. I think of you on the rope bridge walking across that chasm of space and air and how you had no fear, how you never had any fear, and I hope above all that in those final moments you closed your eyes and were spared its touch as you set out across. A vapour trail sears itself into the sky. The planes are flying again and although the snow will slip away in time I want it to stay long enough so that we shut ourselves in over this holiday and hold each other safe. I think of the fire that Lorna has lit and the lights outside our house and draw enough strength from these images to steady my hands and take the photograph of the Angel. I want its scale, its strength, the span of its wings, want to carry the image wherever I go in the future. And I’ve decided I’m going to show the photographs I shot on those nights and perhaps they’ll be my final offering to you if you’ll only accept them and know that each of those steps was taken with love.
There’s something I need to do now that I’ve not been able to do even though I’ve tried so many times before. I’ve carried it with me every day, every single day and known it’s there, thought about it so much that it’s become a part of this person I’ve become. But I’ve never looked, not once, because if I did it might be what brings everything tumbling down and even now in the solitude of this place I search for some way out of what must be done, ask that this thing might be taken from me. The colour is draining from the sky but there are still broken patches of blue and I stand looking at them and listening to the sound of the traffic, hoping to hear a voice that might guide me. The Angel that came to visit Joseph told him not to be afraid because what was conceived was of the Holy Spirit and I tell myself I must quell my fear and do this thing. That it was conceived in a father’s love. So I take my camera and find the file that’s well hidden and open the picture I took of my dead son. My last photograph of my son. I force myself to look at it, try to think of some prayer to say, but no words come and then I press delete and let him go.
I drop to my knees and try to stop myself being sick by scooping a handful of snow and pressing it against my mouth. If anyone were to come now and see me it would look as if I was bowing to the Angel, supplicating myself to the magnitude that stands before me. My father’s tremble has burrowed inside me, shivering every part of my being. I retch but nothing comes and only through the exercise of sheer willpower do I manage to stop myself from yielding to the snow’s whispered invitation to sleep.
Then I hear Lorna’s voice all those years ago telling me to look at my son with my eye and as I lift my face that’s what I try to do. With my eye. Only with my eye. A boy crossing stepping stones, his own eyes closed. A boy almost knocking me over in his haste to enter the living room on Christmas morning. His badly wrapped presents for his mother and father – a pair of woollen gloves for me, perfume for Lorna. The music that once came from his room. Telling me with a smile on his face that he’d just met a girl who said that when Bob Marley sang that everything was going to be all right she believed him. Really believed him. The boy catching a wave on his bodyboard, his smiling face raised to us as he races towards the shore on its breaking crest. That day we were in the car and we sat looking at the sea with the chips in their wrapping, our fingers salted and warm. Crossing the bridge when I alone felt the fear. Three paintings he did of the old man – the old man that one day I shall be, with a life that exists only in memories. The secret hidden places in the city where I once sought shelter and through which now he might walk once more with his father if he allows me to show them to the world.
I look up at the Angel that offers shelter under its wings but I know there is another photograph I want to take so I try to breathe myself into a greater calm then slowly get up from the snow. I walk back the way I’ve come, return to the car and because it seems to bristle with impatience tell it that it will only have to wait a few more minutes. A few more minutes before I make the final leg of my journey and find my son. Then I lift Lilly’s wigwam from the boot and walk back up between the trees and, when I’m halfway there, there is a sudden silent blur of movement through the air and it’s a white-faced owl coming straight over my head and in a blink it’s gone but its after-image forms almost immediately, forming as if from some negative to be stored in the darkroom of memory. Printed with filaments from this fading sun.
And I could tell myself as I set a child’s wigwam on the crest of the hill under the wings that I’ve done it to show scale or to bring some token of my family to this holy place for a blessing but as I open and safely anchor it, look at its painted ponies, the moons and stars, I can’t explain it in words. So as I walk down the slope and take the photograph it reveals itself only as a mystery but now I think its mystery is all that’s left.
Everything is done now so let me shelter under these wings as I touch the Angel’s feet, sense its foundations, the concrete piles that anchor it to the earth, the wings that don’t flutter no matter how strong the wind and which somehow point to the future. Then I do something I’ve never done since childhood and say a prayer, a secret prayer, because I’ve finally found the words. When it’s finished and with the sun dropping ever lower I know that I have to go, that I have to journey on and bring my son home – the son to whom I’m bringing no wisdom but instead some chocolate from an old woman he’ll never meet, the music that he likes and all the remedies and charms his mother has garnered to make him well. I’m coming now, Luke, and if God does really keep score, let him record that I’m going to continue my journey until I finally get to hear the voice that has brought me safely here, say, You have reached your destination. The world is growing colder. I start to lift the wigwam but then something tells me I have to leave it, that this is where it belongs, and I hope that Lilly will somehow come to understand, understand that her father left it here for the homeless, for every soul in need of shelter and, as the sun finally sets over this snow-covered world, for every fellow traveller, lost like him in a strange land.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
You can listen to some of the music referenced on Tom’s journey here: http://spoti.fi/2AmKBk0
In a creative collaboration with the author, the award-winning photographer Sonya Whitefield has created a personal response to Travelling in a Strange Land that combines image and text. You can view these photographs at www.sonyawhitefield.com
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First published in Great Britain 2018
Copyright © David Park, 2018
David Park has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Extract from Bill Brandt © Bill Brandt Archive.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-9278-7; EBOOK: 978-1-4088-9276-3
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