Marram

by Leonie Charlton

  ‘Lovely stone,’ I said, patting the seat as the man approached.

  He paused, planting the walking spike.

  ‘Aye, my father had to sit on that one over there.’ He nodded behind us. ‘He liked to rest up here, but that stone wasn’t very comfortable so I brought this one down.’

  ‘How did you move it?’

  ‘With my wee digger.’

  We watched him walk off. He was so broad that the spike rested on a plateau of shoulder. He was all bone, no flesh to spare, no coat either.

  Before the path dropped to the car park we came to more rocks, great hewn slabs of granite arranged on top of each other. I struggled to imagine how a ‘wee digger’ would lift them. Like Stone Age Man this man had secrets too. The stone facing me had AD carved into it in letters a foot high. I touched the rock nearest me, a granite block with seams of quartz tipping over the edge. Around the other side two M’s were carved into it. It rested on two perpendicular slabs with grooves channelling down at a 45° angle. Shuna and I discussed whether these rocks might have been part of a pier at one time, and these indentations were for the ropes to run along. I pulled the bead purse from my pocket and chose a small quartz lozenge with a spiral twist carved around it. I rested it at the lip of one of the grooves, knowing that when I let go it would roll into the darkness between the two carved M’s. U for underneath, spells MUM, I thought to myself.

  Down near the car park were a group of men with fat-legged tripods. I asked the nearest one what they were doing.

  ‘Birdwatching,’ he said, with a German accent.

  ‘Seen anything exciting?’

  ‘No, a disappointing day,’ he said, his words heavy. We carried on and met another man walking towards us. He had a beaming smile and was balancing a tripod on his shoulder. Another shoulder, another passion. He told us he was running a birdwatching tour, that the group were his clients. I asked him what the small ducks I’d seen on Druidibheag Loch last night might have been.

  ‘Probably Tufted Duck.’ I was happy to have a name. He was happy to share.

  We drove away past a single Clydesdale-type horse, big-boned and rangy as the tree-planting man back there. We passed boulder fields and Red Stags, deep granite-time meshing with antlers-in-velvet time. I passed Shuna an apple and bit into my own.

  Billy McPhee was on the phone when we drove into his yard. He moved towards us, his voice carrying clearly.

  ‘So, I’ve talked to Angus McPhee’s nephew, Ian Campbell. He knows where the initials are on the shore. So, that’s Shuna and Beady just got back now. I’ll take them down, we’ll head off there now. Okay, ma ha. Talk later.’

  He looked delighted as he put his phone back in his pocket. ‘Right then, did you get the gist of that? So that’s the plan, let’s go, let’s go.’

  John Campbell pulled on a padded checked shirt as he stepped out of the house. He was a big man with a kind strong-browed face. He stepped familiarly into guide mode. This clearly wasn’t the first time he’d been asked to show people the rocks.

  ‘The shore was our playground when we were children,’ he explained, opening a gate next to a farm shed. ‘That house,’ he pointed to a dilapidated thatched cottage on our left, ‘that’s where Angus McPhee was brought up.’ He tapped the wall on his right. ‘But he was born here, in the long house that was knocked down to build this shed. Right here he was born.’

  We walked towards the thatched cottage. Two chimneys were still upright, bare roof rafters bridged brokenly between them with clods of peat-brown thatch slumping across. A heavy rope fell from beside each of the two windows and ran along the ground beneath the doorway, like a sad but not unwelcoming smile. I walked around to the gable end where the rope hung at thatch height and got out my bead purse for the second time that day. I chose a ceramic bead, robin’s egg blue, with an iridescent sheen. As I threaded the bead onto its silk and wove it through the rope, I could hear the others chatting.

  ‘He’d weave when we brought him back for the weekends from Uist House,’ Ian said. ‘I’d collect him grass.’

  ‘Marram?’ asked Shuna.

  ‘No, any grass, like from the side of the road. He did talk, you know. They say he didn’t, but he’d always talk to people who were over his shoulder. People we couldn’t see. He’d have a right good laugh with them.’

  I thought of Chrys Salt’s poem The Burning about Angus McPhee: ‘I am not mad’/he says/inside his head/‘Madness is only longing’/turned inward like a thorn.

  I finished tying off the bead remembering Paul’s voice shouting at Mum, You’re fucking mad. Him telling her she had to see a psychotherapist or he’d leave her. She went in the end, got appointments on the NHS, and for a long time visited her ‘trick cyclist’ weekly at The Crichton in Dumfries. I never thought Mum was mad, but a thorn of longing turned inward makes sense to me. Her longing to be loved, to be celebrated, to be seen, to be creative, above all to be free. I wondered if she was soothed by those hundreds, no thousands, of hours threading beads, knotting silk thread between pearls, taking time and care to create beautiful things. Her fingers and her imagination showing the delicacy and the burn of her heart, thorn or no thorn.

  Ian’s face broke into a wide smile as he bent down to walk through the low doorway.

  ‘I was brought up in this house, my three brothers and my sister in this room, and my parents in the closet, here in the kitchen. We had a flat black stove, what a difference that made, and the electric of course. When we got that it changed everything. I remember feeding coins into the meter up there.’ He pointed to a fuse and meter still on the wall. Beside me, fat electrical cables ran up from a light switch, the old kind, like a breast, I thought, its nipple angled downwards to the broken floor.

  ‘Angus McPhee’s grandfather built this to last. The beams were bought in, but the rest of the wood was collected from the shore.’

  We followed him out of the cottage and down to the sea. The tide was out, perfect timing. ‘It’s somewhere hereabouts,’ he said, walking carefully across the slippery slabs of rock.

  ‘Ah, here.’ He cupped seawater in his palms from a rock pool and splashed it over the black stone. Immediately letters glistened in sharp relief, AMP, strong evenly spaced initials carved by the steady hand of a man as yet unbroken by war. A square was engraved around it, a framed glimpse into a moment seventy-seven years before. On a slab nearby the initials of another Iochdar man, Angus Bowie, carved in 1914, who hadn’t come home from the First World War. His initials had been there for over a hundred years. All those tides, in and out. Tears slipped down my cheeks.

  ‘Here are my own initials,’ Ian said, walking on, ‘and my daughters’.’ Theirs are all here somewhere too.’ He chuckled. I stepped slowly over the rocks amongst the initials carved by generations. Tiny sproutings of Bladderwrack, mustard gold against the black rock, glistened where they found footholds in the engravings. All around, Limpets were holding fast. On an impulse I pushed one with my thumb, as hard as I could. It didn’t budge.

  DAY EIGHT

  Iochdar to Balivanich, Benbecula

  Two Redshanks bobbed their heads on the dyke and spun the space between them with alerting calls. Today was a different kind of day, the mist had lifted and suddenly we saw what had been hidden behind a bank of cloud for the past two days. Standing in Billy’s field, halters in hand, three duns rose out of the marshland. They seemed to quiver in the early sunshine and drew our eyes towards a stone circle beyond. The Redshanks’ calls balanced centuries, millennia, on each press of notes. In Gaelic folklore the Redshank, a wading bird equally happy in water and on land, is seen as being able to travel between worlds. This world and the afterlife.

  Leaning my back against the dyke I looked over towards the stone circle and wondered if Mum had come to this place during one of her visits. Whether, if she were alive now, we’d be able to go for a coffee, visit stone circles, hang out. Whether I would be able to smile, not wince, every time she called me ‘darling’, not
flinch when she touched me. Whether I’d be able to simply love her and spend time with her. But I think I knew I was spinning a fantasy. Yes, I would be able to simply love her now, but that was because I was different, and one of the main reasons for that was her death. It had changed me in so many ways. If she was still alive, I just wouldn’t be this exact same person wrapped in the Redshanks’ song and feeling the sun glance over my hot tears. Why had it been so painful for us? Why had our relationship been a whetstone for us to sharpen claws and swords on?

  I felt something smooth under my right hand. An upturned wine glass was slotted between the stones. Would whoever put it there come back one sun-spilt evening, turn it the right way up and fill it with chilled white wine. If I was staying another night, I might have done that. My Uncle Kevin once said to me, ‘I loved Kathryn, Kathryn loved me. She was my sister. But she was a dreadful mother.’ I could toast to my dreadful mother, and to my dreadful daughterly self, to the two of us behaving dreadfully, and to the two of us doing our absolute dreadful best.

  Seven months after being on South Uist, and almost seven years to the day after Mum died, I saw Gyoto Tibetan monks performing with piper Griogair Laurie in Ballachulish Hall. Griogair opened the evening with a pipe lament which he’d learned from a sound recording of Callum Johnson, a bodach from Barra. It was about the Redshank, Griogair explained to us, and the only title he had for it was ‘pee lil lee io’, which is onomatopoeic of its song.

  The pipes always make me think of Mum. She loved them, and that night in Ballachulish the hairs had stood up on the back of my neck as Griogair invoked the song of the Redshank. He brought to life with his music that liminal space between worlds, and set us up perfectly for the chanting of the Gyoto Tibetan monks. That evening I heard, for the first time, what musicologists call ‘angel music’, the note an octave and a third higher than their chanting that is created by harmonising. The Tibetans say that this ‘angel music’ is a frequency range which enables their deities and ancestors to be present, and the transmission of their teachings. They say it can help us connect with the true thread of our existence, to what gives our lives its meaning and where we can experience our full potential.

  Driving home that night from Balachulish I felt every cell in my body full of love and life and music. I felt a strong sense of still being on a journey with Mum, that our relationship was alive and ongoing, and remembered a vivid moment in my childhood. We were living in Anglesey so I must have been six or seven years old and excited to be one of the angels in the school nativity play. Mum sat at the sewing machine, her red hair hanging over her wrists as she repositioned material under the needle. She was making ivory satin wings for me, but it turned out we were all to be the same, us angels, that we were to wear off-white nylon shifts. What most stuck in my memory, and made me saddest of all on the way back from Ballachulish that night, was remembering the relief I’d felt. Relief that I would be like the other children, that I wouldn’t stand out. I can remember Mum’s disdain of the teachers, no bloody imagination. She had always been amazing like that, wanting me to shine. It wasn’t her fault that I’d wanted to hide. The world is your oyster, she’d say to me when I was older, or, another favourite of hers, life isn’t a dress rehearsal. I’d respond with tight-mouthed sceptisim, but she’d been right. Life isn’t a dress rehearsal. Bring on those wings.

  Everything was shimmering as we set off that May morning from Billy’s croft. The Irises were a dense yellow and the roofs of the barns slanted their deep ox-blood hue. Soon we would be crossing the tidal flats between South Uist and Benbecula. The sun was shining and the tide was going out. ‘Cast with care’ said a sign, warning fishermen about the overhead electricity wires.

  ‘The girls from Barra,’ Billy said, his face full of sorrow. ‘They’ve confirmed that one is dead, and the other one is in hospital in a critical condition.’ We’d stopped at his workplace, Hebridean Jewellery, for a goodbye coffee. The ponies were tied up outside. The cafe was filled with sunlight. John, the previous owner of Hebridean Jewellery, came in to fill his Tupperware. ‘Best coffee on the island,’ he told us proudly. His eyes were the same green as the aventurine earrings I’d seen in the shop. I’d been thinking about buying them but after the Barra news it didn’t feel right. I left with the memory of John’s eyes instead.

  Outside, while we untied the ponies, Billy pointed out our route to us.

  ‘You need to listen carefully. I’ve been asking about, and this is the route you need to take over the sand.’ We took detailed note of the landmarks, the lines we needed to take across the sand, the tidal channels to avoid.

  ‘It’s much more complicated than it used to be, the causeway has affected the tidal patterns.’

  The well-rested ponies had an enthusiastic swing in their steps as we rode across the expanse of wet sand sown with Worm casts. We were heading north using the tiny green-topped island of Heisteamuil, and the township of Lionacleit, as landmarks. A single wind turbine flashed brightly on the Benbecula shore. In the distance Eabhal bit a shapely chunk out of the sky over North Uist. The ponies’ hooves started sinking as we rode along the edge of a deep scoop of tidal channel where the sand was laid down in tiny hillocks and marbled in black. It was as if volcanic ash had scattered over this world of sand hills. I got off Ross, struck by the patterns in the sand and wanting to look more closely. My feet sank unnervingly but stopped after an inch or two. Ross shifted his weight on the glutinous surface. I took the bead purse out of my pocket and chose a flat ceramic bead, about the size of a ten-pence piece. It was turquoise with five splashes of that flag-iris yellow. I chose another bead, the same yellow, but with a petroleum-swirl running through it, and laid them both down on the inky sand, knowing that very soon they would be lifted by the sea. I wondered where the currents would take them, how far these bright beads would shift with each tide. Imagining them separating, making their own way, their different shapes and weights influencing their separate paths. I got back on Ross and rode away, listening to each squelch and drag of the hooves. I turned in the saddle, our footprints had already smoothed themselves out, not a trace of the four of us left.

  The sand got wetter and the ponies were sinking in more at each step. Ross stopped and swept the ground ahead with his muzzle, inhaling deeply. He was right, we’d drifted off course. We took our bearings and got back onto the route Billy had pointed out, crossing a deep tidal channel before stepping with relieved smiles onto dry sand on the other side. We looked back to where we had come from, shielding our eyes against the sun. The far shore looked a long way away. A little further round the coast we set up the stove, put the kettle on and celebrated crossing the South Ford with a cup of Earl Grey. The four of us were still, happy to soak up sunshine and the liquid song of Skylarks.

  Continuing north with a warm southerly wind on our backs, we sometimes had to ride through croft land where we were careful to stick to the edges of the fields. Twite trilled beyond sturdy fences and well-hung gates. We’d entered a whole new land: no binder twine or wooden palettes or bed-ends here. Galvanised steel gates were all hung to within a millimetre of perfection. Disconcerted by this sudden change, I found myself missing the makeshift spirit of South Uist and Barra. Even the Marram Grass seemed more efficient here, its roots binding the sand more firmly, the inward-furl of its leaves tighter. The beaches were empty and swept smooth by the wind, pristine surfaces marked only by the occasional well-rounded pebble. Needing to leave a bead on that scene of perfection, I chose a green jade one, small and round and polished. Placing it in the smooth concavity of one of Ross’s hoof prints, I knew again that both would soon be taken by the tide, that disarray was never too far away.

  It must have been five o’clock when we rode into Balivanich. Its Gaelic name Baile A’Mhanaich means ‘town of the monks’ after the monastery built there in the sixth century. It was a busy town, the main centre for North and South Uist, with an airport, hospital and a military base. As we rode past the airport I recog
nised the people in a car coming towards us, Fergus and his mum Dorothy. Fergus was at school with my daughter in Plockton, studying traditional music. I waved. There was a moment of recognition as they drove past, looking as if they were in a hurry. They lived on Grimsay and we would be heading their way the next day so hopefully we’d catch up then. The passing car was a reminder that we’d taken time out of our lives to do this journey, and that we were travelling at a very different pace. I felt a pang of guilt at the indulgence of it, felt a familiar wash of shame. This is your thing, Beady, don’t feel bad, just don’t go there. I knew how precious it was, this time travelling with ponies. That it was an opportunity to feel fully alive, to catch the thread of my life and let it run lightly through my fingertips, to feel its pull. So, smile at the car going by. Let it go, Beady.

  We passed a group of men in army uniform who waved at us cheerily, the smell of frying chips teased from an open window and soon we saw the signs for ‘Uist Community Riding School’. Happy, healthy horses grazed in paddocks and raised their heads in greeting. We were both looking forward to meeting the manager, Sue. She pulled into the yard shortly after we arrived, jumped out of her 4x4 and came towards us with a full uncomplicated smile. She showed us around and then shot off to ‘cut some grass’, just one of her many jobs. How she managed to run a riding centre as well as everything else she did was a mystery. She put it down to having a fantastic team of volunteers and enthusiastic children. Later on, over a cup of tea, she told us that she’d first come to Uist when working as a lorry driver and had fallen in love with the place. As a child her family would box the ponies from their home in Devon up to Glen Feshie in Perthshire every summer. Her father had loved Scotland and had passed that passion on to Sue.