Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  Alec walked the city to get a sense of it like a policeman with a beat. Some of the streets were so steep it seemed you would fall out of them into the sea, that lay there always at the mouth of the town, fuming up into mist or sparkling up into the city so the minute particles of mica in its stone flashed back like salt thrown up by the wind off the water. Alec pined to take the red iron rail bridge over to Fife, into the country that occurred as visible echoes in places within the town, elbows of green, spurs of black rock among the heaped tall buildings of the Old Town and lying under the leggy bridges of the New Town.

  ‘What difference will it be? How are the houses not the same there as here with us where we stay? In our part of the town?’ The word she was not using was morbid, though she might have had she known of his frequent visits to churches.

  The almost fetishistic belief in action that Mairi had was the heart of her energy, her stamina; she could not gather what her son was accumulating by his wandering habits. Moreover she began to fear that he was not (no boy could) spending all this time in looking only.

  ‘Tell me where you go.’

  ‘All over up town.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Look. See.’

  ‘Who do you see?’

  ‘Mostly no one.’

  ‘Mostly. Someone?’

  Now he would have to invent suitable friends. What could be better than an old lady?

  ‘Oh, I see an old lady.’

  ‘I see. How old. My age?’ Alec was too young to hear the wife in his mother. And now he would have to find an old lady.

  ‘What is her name?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He did not, indeed.

  His mother, unwilling to accept that her son was spending hours away from home on account of motionless compilations of materials, could more readily understand it if he were up to emotional mischief, practising for his departure from her careful love. He concealed his innocence, and thus began the unravelling between his mother and himself. He was ten.

  The next day was between summer and autumn. The leaves were not yet fallen. On the branches they appeared resigned and would in a day be wistful, then gone. Their yellow was too milky to be quite dry yet.

  Alec must today find an old woman to befriend him at speed. It was a Tuesday. His mother had a half-day and she was to come to tea with his friend, whose address he had failed to write down, although he rightly knew the way there. It hurt his dignity, this pretending not to know where a place was, but he had to in the circumstances, not yet knowing if it was. He would accompany his mother to tea.

  Old women went to wash clothes, they went to kirk, and they went shopping. He might find one at the steamie, any of the many churches (could he risk an old woman not from the Church of Scotland?), and at the shops.

  What type of old woman it must be had not exercised him until he came to choose, perceiving that there was considerably more difference than you would have thought. In appearance, they were similar in essentials, of course. Hat, coat, terrific hefty handbag, painful shoes (he was after an old woman his mother would deem respectable). He’d give the steamie a miss. It was so noisy, how could he explain he needed to borrow an old woman?

  Alec walked up Drummond Place to the playground called the Wreck. So it was. The iron toys creaked in their cindery bed. Purple flowers with long pods like needles grew and sank overnight. The dogs came here to lay black dirt in the nettles and squirt hot green sideways pee at the gulping shaky stanchions of the swings. There was broken glass on the ground and a hole in the fence at waist height that had no meaning that was good. The talk among the children here was of men who offered sweeties and of the parky threatening a good beating. The one bench was misleadingly curvaceous as to its iron, but without a back. In its green paint were messages of love. The words ‘Fuck the Pope’ were written as casually as ‘Gordie for Sheila’. More personal messages described the skills of girls hereabouts in geographical terms: ‘Donna goes Russian’, ‘Donalda can French’.

  Alec sat down. The brindle dog with a stiff tail and white eyes came over to him, the blind Commander pulled along behind.

  ‘I can tell you like dogs. Yes, he’s a particularly fine bull mastiff.’ The old man spoke to the presence he felt, heated, ruffled, bothered. The dog snuffled at Alec’s grey shorts, leaving its dribble, like hot cobweb jam.

  ‘It’s his coat I chose him for,’ said the blind Commander, whose back was scattered with soft, perforated flakes of skin and several lost strands of white, whose face was growing hairs at the points most exposed to wind, where a gargoyle will first wear. ‘These markings are exceptionally fine. It’s the black on the brown I greatly admire, an effect like that of,’ he seemed to wander and he stroked the air with his right hand that held the loop of lead and his left a bird’s breadth from it, ‘of, I don’t know if you recall, but on a hen pheasant.’ He did not have a hat on, but the Commander seemed to adjust what was not there.

  It was a day whose sunshine was being withdrawn, though when Alec lolled back on the bench’s springy rusting bracket, it was faintly warm, and the iron swings sent out their heavy tang. He wondered what the Commander thought he was, how he saw him in the eyes that saw the brindle dog.

  ‘You are a boy of perhaps ten.’ For a time Alec was alarmed, but the Commander did not move except to pat his dog’s hard flat head and dejected muscular shoulders. The interestingness of old people, so different from their charm, revealed itself to Alec as it hardly ever does to children who are not themselves apparently peculiar.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘You smell, I mean no offence, like a puppy.’

  ‘I need an old lady,’ said Alec. He explained, finding it not difficult because of the swift understanding the blind Commander showed of what it was privately to want to escape and to see.

  ‘I know where we can get one, but we may have to hurry, and you must help myself and Dunvegan on to the bus.’

  The bus ride was not unpleasant, though Alec was worried about the time and had no watch. The blind Commander had a watch that was embarrassing, because it lived in his pocket and chimed and was held to him with a necklace. It was eleven-fifteen by the time the three of them reached Jenners.

  The solemnity of department stores, like that of liners and the obscurer Victorian Gothic churches, veers close to farce. If one person laughs at the absurdity of the elaboration, at the redundant ceremonial, the splendiferous equipoise of the overweight enterprise is threatened, the displays shimmer, the grandeur is revealed as mummers’ tricks. When the discrepancy between the general tone of manners and the high formality of the great department store was less, to visit such a place was a small act of celebration. It had not yet become camp. The satirical bent of the lowland Scot kept Jenners, modest before it was grand, afloat on Princes Street.

  ‘Haberdashery would be the spot,’ said the Commander. ‘We’ll leave Dunvegan with the commissionaire. We’re able to take him in, but old women are terrible for not looking where they are going.’

  Alec had admired the crusted edifice he was now entering, but he never would have gone into the place. Inside, there were layers of banisters up a great hall, all with women taking time so slowly that there was a luxury about their browsing. He saw a child, barely recognisable in clothes like those of a man doll. He was sitting on a stuffed dog the size of a table and getting his hair cut by a bendy man in striped trousers.

  ‘Violet on the hair, Archibald, today, or Bay Rum?’ asked the hair cutter, using the silver scissors to conduct his question.

  ‘No such silliness. Water alone has no shame to it,’ came a voice, and Alec noticed, sitting unyieldingly on a polar bear, a woman all bone whose rigid clothes were navy blue throughout. She rose. Such thinness might have been illness.

  ‘They will pay,’ said the fine but obscurely client old lady.

  ‘Thank you, Nannie,’ said the hair cutter.

  And in a new voice, now the child was standing, a small male of th
e governing class, no longer a wee man on a stuffed dog.

  ‘Goodbye then, sir.’

  That there were so many towns in the one had only begun to glow in Alec’s mind. Now he was learning, as though he were lifting clothes from a trunk, about other ways of life.

  Haberdashery was small things you would not remember to buy until you needed them, such as pins, scissors and ribbons. A short rotating stand dispensed cumbersome shaped pads with straightforward illustrations of how to insert them into a frock to collect sweat or make your front stick out more.

  Certainly Commander Bruce was correct. The supply of old women here was considerable.

  ‘Try tartans, Alexander.’

  Alec led the blind man to an alcove where some blindness might have soothed. Wiry women in black manhandled wide bolts of cloth from the shelves and chucked them down on to a long wooden counter, marked in inches, feet and yards along its far edge. In the ease and custom of the women Alec recognised something of his mother. The tartans were splendid, too bright, jarring, over-square. A softness was missing that he knew by instinct was part of the secret of the look of Scotland, its fractions, hints and modesties of beauty.

  ‘Do you see any old woman you like the look of?’ I asked Commander Bruce.

  It was not a question to answer with the truth. No answer was needed, however. An old woman was approaching, downy-faced and in a hat and hard shoes, with some humour in her face, though.

  ‘Is it that time yet?’ she asked the Commander. ‘Or are you the early one?’

  ‘Alexander, my sister, Miss Bruce. Muriel, this is Alexander whom I met at the Wreck.’

  ‘Is that the right name for it?’ Alec asked. He thought it was just what the kids called it.

  ‘Short for recreation,’ said Muriel Bruce, not bored or teacher-like. ‘Will you take lunch with us? We generally have our bite at lunchtime on a shopping day.’

  ‘He’d rather take tea with us, Muriel. His mother wants to meet you. For tea. That is the plan.’

  ‘In that case I must purchase some fancies with Dunvegan’s damaged biscuits. Have you our address, Alexander?’ Only a woman of poise or habitual perfect forgetfulness could display such calm.

  ‘It’s Nelson Street. Seven. The top flat. Dunvegan’s bowl is outside the front door. When do you generally arrive for tea engagements? I suggest three-thirty. We shall not be formal.’ All the while he spoke, the Commander’s hand was throbbing like a pecking chick against the spruce-and-burgundy tartan roll at the top of the gamut of stiff plaids. No one could reach the tartans, Alec realised, but they all held back from budging the blind old man with his softly beating, trembly hand.

  ‘We might just set you on the road for your bus, Alexander, before we make our own way.’

  ‘I know the town. I get about without help.’

  ‘For the company then?’ enquired Miss Bruce, since she was curious, and kind. The complicated slowness of life with the old, different again from the irritating but protective slowness of life with a parent, fully came to Alexander when, later, he found himself explaining to his mother over a cold fried egg piece, the reason for the lateness he hoped always in future to pin upon the Bruces.

  ‘So there is an old man also?’ said his mother.

  ‘Blind,’ said Alexander.

  Mairi wondered whether this was better or worse.

  ‘For eyes he has a brindle dog name of Dunvegan,’ replied Alec, trying out some ways of talking he had heard that morning.

  His mother prepared herself, as she watched her son, pink and white and black like a fruit tree in spring before hardening into leaf, take the last meal of his simpler life. Gently, she untied the first string between them.

  In Nelson Street (it was ‘in’, not ‘at’, for the flat was his first great house, apprehended as somewhere not home and, more than that, a site where things were possessed for a reason) Mairi sat on the sofa with her feet on a zebra skin. When the afternoon seemed to be about to upset her balance, she looked down at the stripes, bringing first the black stripes, then the white, forward into her eyes, moving focus precisely in alternation as a person will do to reorientate herself after a swoon.

  The room was dark, but Commander Bruce got about without harming the tottering arrangements of objects.

  ‘It has been here since we were children, almost all of it in this room, though we have added to the other rooms some things we have found.’ The oldness of the things ceased to be their only trait. Much of the stuff was so old it had returned to childhood. A cavorting ostensible ugliness led the taste of the Bruces towards the purchase of large, heavy things that had they been animals would have been buffalo, okapi, iguana, beasts disproportionate, ungainly and on further contemplation affectingly expressive of a human past without self-consciousness.

  The sugar came in an ostrich egg, halved and set on a foot of blackened silver. The room hardly shone, though it did glint, with slipping velvet, tormented horn, snapped ormolu, and colours made to be flattered by dust, to shine through grease – coral, amber, the slick internal pink of shells.

  On the top shelf of a red-and-gold set of shelves cornered like a pagoda with bells was a giraffe-coloured shell the size of a bugle. Its point was jauntily to one side, the pearly throat the conclusion of a series of angled spirals abstract as a puzzle.

  The Commander said, ‘We bought it for the story it told.’ Alec saw a speech bubble come from the mouth of the shell, a cartoon thing anyhow for its size and markings.

  ‘South seas, all that. Here he lies, you know, where he longed to be. Home is the sailor, home from the sea. Or home from Edinburgh.’ The Commander tweaked at both his trouser knees and smoothed them, making as much noise as he could with his quiet tweeds in the company that was not getting his drift. He regretted that he had lost his visitors with his words.

  Dunvegan crossed and recrossed his front paws in his sleep, as though anxious to change the subject. His black claws tapped on the floorboards. He shook his ears with a wet sound.

  ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, a fine man, a writer, was he not, Mrs Dundas, I believe you are right, was a child not far from here. The junk shops around are surprisingly full of items that he might have used as an inkwell. Or might not.’

  Neither Alec nor his mother knowing whether to agree, to laugh or to give up as one does when looking for something that does not really matter, kept quiet.

  ‘You would like to see the instructional tortoise, perhaps?’ Miss Bruce said to Alec. ‘And we ladies must leave the men. I have a question to ask your mother, in the sewing room. It concerns something most important to do with trimmings.’ Tact, irony, speech taking no account of a child, combined to confuse Mairi while she was allowing herself to be charmed, that is, manoeuvred, albeit in this case for her own good.

  The instructional tortoise was disgusting, frightening, not that clean, and never forgotten by Alec. The small purposeful animal sat, varnished in the laborious throes of taking a step, on its cretonne grass, held down by wire loops over a middle nail on each foot. From one side, though too smartly finished, like a shoe never worn, the tortoise was as you would expect, whorled shell, leathery weak pits at the entry of limbs between the domed shell and the plastron (the Commander passed on the words he had heard as a boy; they were part of the instructional tortoise). When you turned around the tight glass-and-wood case, the other side of the tortoise was its self within. The taxidermist, observing the evening-dress mimicry of nature on the first side, had exactly halved the shell and divided the comforting outer parts, leaving only the right-hand side of the tortoise clothed in shell and skin. The left-hand side was clean bone. Dry as lace-bobbins, the small bones were set in a lively, halted, recreation of a step that could not arrive. The skeletal side of the tortoise, being at least apparently frank, was more lively, when you were used to it, than the overdressed seeming right-hand side. The most painful part was the harsh division down the centre, from which fixed line the tortoise could hide nothing of its secret, w
itty, vulnerable and complicated most internal workings. It seemed rational, like a watch that might be set going, but of course it might not; the life had been explained out of it. The instructional tortoise was a curiosity, a confident attempt to reveal and to teach, more usually displayed in illustration on paper where liberties are more easily taken without pain.

  ‘It has a glass eye on the right-hand side,’ said the Commander, ‘about the size of a young pea. Remarkable. I saw it when I could see. I was younger than you are. A man came to our parents’ home to rejuvenate the stuffed animals. He was a vet, with a sideline. He supplied pelts all over the east coast and was known for his lifelike mounting. The motor car, when it came in, was at first apparently of some use to him, but it is not a clean killer.’

  Alec was in surroundings wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by incomprehensible plenty, addressed in a confusingly courtly manner by an old man who spoke in a way he had not heard before. The things to be seen in the flat were not such things as he connected with something like money; would you buy old things?

  The cold dark communal stair, a feature of the city’s palatial streets, built behind swooping façades as flats from the beginning of the New Town two hundred years before, had been a reassurance to him. There must be countless such different ways of life going on all over the town, unknown to him, unknown to one another, behind doors leading off unheated stone stairs, flight after flight.

  ‘There are many gardens, all about the town,’ said his mother, returning to the room, with Miss Bruce. Later, when he thought of his mother, trying to collect all he remembered of her before it blurred, he remembered sharply she had sung these words, in a high voice full of assurance and contentment. Beside Miss Bruce she seemed a girl.

  That was before he had his other mother, who came next.

  In Moorea, the morning sun melted the last mist, closer to the last resting place of Stevenson than to his birthplace, but heaped high in stone like it. Only a purple cloud stayed as though caught by the island’s teeth. Alec awoke from dreams of high heaped buildings, the dream he associated with Edinburgh, and heard two things.