The Honey That Came From The Sea
A Collection Of Short Stories
By Sheena Blackhall
The
Honey that came from the Sea
A Collection of Short Stories
Copyright: S. Blackhall 2012
The cover of The Honey that came from
the Sea
is a copy of The Sleeping Gypsy, painted by Henri
Rousseau.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Sheena Blackhall except for the use of brief quotations in a book review
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Acknowledgements
The cover of The Honey that came from the Sea is a copy of The Sleeping Gypsy, painted by Henri Rousseau. The story The Honey that Came from the Sea has been broadcast twice on BBC radio. Some of the stories have appeared in Original Prints Volumes 1,2, & 3 (Polygon) and in the following:
1989: Three’s Company: Keith Murray
Publications
1989: Northern Lights (Collins Educational): ISBN
0044481276
1991: Reets (Short stories) Keith Murray Publications
ISBN 870978 331
1992: A Hint o Granite (Short stories) Hammerfield
Publishing
1995: A Kenspeckle Creel (Short stories) Hammerfield
Publishing
1998: The Bonsai Grower (Short stories) GKB Enterprises
ISBN
095-2655-42-X
2002: The Fower Quarters (Short
Stories) GKB Enterprises ISBN
095 2655446 2
For more information on other publications by Sheena Blackhall, visit http://sheenablackhall.blogspot.com or the on-line catalogue of the National Library of Scotland http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/online/index/html.
A further eBook by Blackhall, The Chimaera Institute (A collection of urban myths) can be found online at: smashwords.com
The Honey that came from the Sea is a selection of short stories, drawn from collections of prose by the poet Sheena Blackhall. Best known for her Scots writing, in this instance her work in English is presented, with a smattering of Scots dialogue. The Jam Jar is based on personal experience. Aberdeen in the summer of 1964 was a city under siege, in the grip of a major typhoid epidemic. Blackhall was one of the 469 quarantined cases. The epidemic was studied in depth during Aberdeen University’s International Conference in 1999 into the role of science & medicine in shaping food policy.
The Very Special Child draws on her time as an infertility patient of Professor Arnold Klopper, Professor of Reproductive Endocrinology at the University of Aberdeen, who retired in 1987. He was one of the foremost reproductive endocrinologists of his time, who specialised in the foetal placental unit, discovering much about the role of oestrogens in human pregnancy. No dog featured in the actual birth.
Some of the tales have an educational setting. Blackhall began her teaching career in the suburb of Easterhouse in Glasgow, where teachers were so scarce that pupils often had ‘half-day’ classes, and one class could comprise over 40 pupils. Huge aggressive stray dogs from the housing scheme often roamed the playground, and poverty was endemic.
The tales here deal with the mysteries of life, religion, ageing, birth and sex . There is humour here, mystery and intrigue, from Maharajahs to Shortbread, and always the often dark dynamics of human relationships.
The Honey that came from the Sea
A light shower of rain had drawn the strong smell of trampled grass sharply into the air. Children trickled between amusement arcades, that rose, incongruous as Moslem minarets, on the village green. Garish wooden horses impaled on sugar-stick stands whirled round giggling youngsters, whilst Madame Zsa Zsa, renowned palmist of international repute, slouched against the steps of her caravan, her tight cheap blouse struggling to contain the cups of oriental delights which attracted the gaze of beardless boys and red-faced stockmen alike. Men with an eye for beasts admired substantial women. Nearby, housed in a boy scout tent of prim khaki, was "The Smallest Circus on Earth”, its carnival fanfare, blaring on a tinny record player, swamped out by skirls from the crowd, as a caber in the Games ring thudded over in perfect style. Admission to “The Smallest Circus on Earth" was 30p.
"Pye us in, ma," chimed two voices, a practised whine.
Their long-suffering parent foresaw, clearer than any palmist, that 60p was a cheap price to pay for ten minutes' peace. She counted the money into a young gypsy s hand, and lit up a cigarette.
"Aren't you coming in too, missis?” he chirped. Libbie Cruickshank glanced into the tent. A handful of bored rodents, ridiculously dressed in Mickey Mouse attire, lounged on Lilliputian swings, or ricocheted round plastic spirals like demented Catherine wheels, depending on their humour, or excitability. ‘I'm waitin' for their da,” she said, tersely.
This was not strictly true. Every year, with the fatality of lemmings, the Cruickshank family left their suburban home to visit the Inverithie Games. For George Cruickshank, it was the binge of the year, a time to huddle tipsily under the marquee tent with kith and kin, drinking deeply of cheap hot whisky from cracked plastic cups and raking over the ashes of old comrades, old courtships.
For Libbie Cruickshank, her outlines billowing with third child, very much enceinte, it was a pilgrimage to purgatory. It was virtually impossible to keep the children together - they careered skittishly unbiddable from one delight to the next. There were blubbering goldfish in bowls, exotic bearded women, the air a-scream with music, the day filled with flying legs in topsy-turvy milkshake tumbling machines, adrift in the magic of Games Day that hit the community with the force of a flood. Spend, spend, spend; cattlemen and crofters, simpering shopgirls, soldiers, and swaggering teenagers submitting like sheep to the Big Fleece. For once, Scots thrift was given the thumbs down; frippery and flotsam, ephemeral as candy floss whored away their hard-earned pounds in a spree where somehow the tawdriness didn't matter. George Cruickshank, paying London prices for adulterated whisky, would raise not one bleat of complaint, till next day. By then, the Games would be only a sour memory in his mouth.
"The Smallest Circus on Earth” had been a good investment. Ten minutes had come and gone, and the wee buggers were still inside. Libbie indulged in the luxury of a second cigarette, the smoke curled lazily into the sky, Why couldn’t her children be content to sit at the ringside watching the real Games? Dougal Ban would be competing this year in the heavy events. Dougal, head keeper now on the lnverithie Estates. Dougal, who'd been such a wimp as a boy. God, it was laughable! Libbie closed her eyes and the Games dissolved around her, like mist. In its place, was a sweet-running burn by a fir wood, and a cluster of woven branches propped up on resinous tree roots, that had been the gang hut.
Dougal Ban would be wearing his kilt and tweed jacket today. Then, he'd been dressed like the other boys, in black shiny leather, à la Elvis Presley, his dark hair combed into a lacquered quiff. The gang had used the hut as a secret den, for smoking, and for the first fumbling lessons in love play. Libbie, gauche and gawky, with no steady beau, had somehow been paired off with Dougal. They had crawled into the darkness of tangled fir like reluctant moles, Dougal, all bravado, but sickly white beneath his acne, Libbie following, a mask of cheap make-up plastered over her insecurity, steeling herself to meet his advances. They had stared at each other, mutually terrified.
"Ye dinna really want a kiss?” Dougal had asked, hopefully.
"I'm no’ bothered,” she'd replied, secretly relieved. They'd stayed together just long enough to make it seem as though something had actually happened, before emerging to a gang chorus of wolf whistles.
"Did ye get up tae ten?” asked Neil Rannoch, the gang leader.
Libbie affected a blush.
"We got up tae eight,” lied Dougal manfully. And then, Libbie really could have kissed him, for saving face. Experience in such matters was calculated by Neil Rannoch on a points system. One was a straightforward no-hands-deviating kiss, two was a love bite, but no one but Rannoch had ever scored the magical ten, though they only had his word he had ever done it at all, with the village daftie at that, an older woman, soft in the head, who was known as the local bicycle.
Libbie opened her eyes, jarred back to the present by a howl from the crowd. Dougal had won a place with the winners. She frowned in recognition at the couple coming towards her. The man was swarthy, with the brown eyes and thick hair of the hill-bred folk. His wife, a townswoman, was pallid with peroxide tinted perm. Libbie felt a dull flush rise unsolicited from throat to temples. It was Rannoch, now a successful builder, with a sharp city suit and a paunch. She swallowed hard, recalling a Games night in the distant past when, suffused with drink, they had both reached the number ten. Crimson with embarrassment, she ducked into the tent.
“Thirty pence, missus!” snapped the gypsy. She fumbled in her purse for the money. The children were poking a white guinea pig. It was either incredibly dead or incredibly tired. Games Day was a goldfish bowl, she reflected. A horrible, horrible goldfish bowl where past and present swam round together, forever bumping into each other. Not that that worried George. He'd enjoyed the reputation of being a ladies’ man, the old double standard. For women, though, morality affected the stance of Australia. It wilfully stood on its head. The Rannochs had seen her hurried retreat. "Honest, Mary, I widna touch yon Libbie. She wis jist a bit on the side. Lang ago. A wee hoor."
Libbie's temper flared. For two pins she'd clout Neil Rannoch till his ear dirled. She drew hard on her cigarette. Let it rest. Let it rest. Under currents of old liaisons, like dangerous water, lipped round every Games. In the teen-times of courtship, many couples formed back-of-the-dyke ties that fizzled out like moor-fires when they settled into matrimony with “Mr Right", that figment of Godfrey Winn-type imaginings. There had been George's fling with Mysie Craib, before she had married the butcher from Dunbrae. Libbie was certain that the butcher from Dunbrae added 10p to her bill every time she shopped at his premises because of it.
Rannoch and his wife were drifting across to the ringside, a dark eddy drawn back into the stream of blood-ties that ran through the veins of the hill-folk, and pulled them like salmon back to their birthplace in this once-yearly Celtic bonanza. The dancers’ prizes had been given out. The pipes were droning to a dull deflation. Thank God, it was over for another year. “Money for the chippie, mam? We could eat a horse!” Looking into her children's gluttinous faces, Libbie could well believe it. With a sigh of resignation, she picked her way fastidiously over squashed beer cans, the day’s debauchery dribbling into the turf. George was leaning over the bar, his shirt a fresco of spilled beer and spots of John Begg. He had reached that stage of Scots inebriation bordering on Bannockburn — cocky, bellicose, and almost legless. Simpering at his side, the spectre at the feast, was Mysie Craib, gazing fondly at him with a look of one who has known him over long, and over well. Libbie shrugged philosophically. Count to ten, she thought, count to ten . . .
Jean Mathers liked to visit her Uncle John. Every family had its black sheep, and Uncle John was as black an old ram as anyone could wish for - his skeleton did not rattle in the cupboard of kinship - it rumbled like Vesuvius. He lived quite on the other side of town, where paint peeled off anonymous doors, and there wasn't a cranny that wasn't a garbage accumulator. Her father disliked driving through this quarter of the city - on the rare occasions when he did so, his fists tightened perceptibly on the wheel, and he sneaked anxious looks down crumbling alleyways, as if expecting the full force of a vandals’ vendetta to single him out for destruction. He rarely mentioned Uncle John, and when he did, it was with a sigh, as if discussing an Angel fallen from grace.
Uncle John, on the other hand, was only too proud of the ties of kindred. He never missed a funeral, turning up faithfully with the hearse, smiling winsomely at the rows of tut-tutting fur coats and mothballed bowlers sitting in censorious respectability around him.
”Anither ane awa," Uncle John would say, with genuine regret. "Ah weel - he/she had a guid innins.”
Furtively, over her hymn book, Jean would examine him with a delicious shudder of disapproval. He always reminded her of Al Capone. His fashion sense had stopped, like a broken clock, in the Thirties, and he wore gangster-style pinstripe suits of nigger brown, set off by grimy shirts, his long black hair curled over the collar as lank and greasy as a mechanic’s work rag. What had been a handsome mouth had deteriorated into a nightmare of broken stumps and offensive gums, but it was inevitably set in a smile.
His children were a Fagin’s litter. They were never free of trouble - a criminal element, from a criminal area, engaging in petty crime as happily as other children seek out conkers or collect eggs. Except that their conkers were lead pipes, and their eggs the confectionery kind, courtesy of Woolworth's. She asked one of them, once, if fear of discovery did not deter them. “We just greet, an’ promise nae tae dae it again. Greetin's a gran’ wye tae get ye aff.” Sometimes the phone would ring, and her father would mutter darkly into the mouthpiece, "It's on page eight o’ the papers - three paragraphs, nae less! He should think black burnin’ shame on himsel, bringing’ his bairns up tae that." For of course, crime never paid - the cousins were always caught, were eternally awaiting Her Majesty’s pleasure, "pending background reports" . They were so handsome, too, in a gypsy way, but with a frightening catalogue of sins filed against them. The eldest boy had knifed a rival in a jealous row over a girlfriend; his sister, less flamboyant, had been charged with causing various affrays of a trivial and distressing nature, all the result of a fiery temper, unbridled. But mostly the dreary paragraphs in the papers referred to small time thieving, at which they were exceedingly active, but very inept.
One day, word came of a different calibre of misery. Uncle John's wife, Aggie, had left him - run off with one of her son's pals. Jean expected to hear the usual diatribe of disapproval, but quite the reverse. Everyone thought it would be the making of him. Auntie Aggie had never been a favourite with Jean’s folk She wore too tight sweaters, heavy mascara, and her husky voice spoke of lurid nights and too many full-strength Capstan cigarettes. She invariably smelt like a female reservoir of John Begg whisky. Yet Jean could imagine her in her courting days, looking like a sultry doll, before child-bearing and poverty had made a cosmetic midden out of her.
"Naething o' the kin’,” snapped Mrs Mathers, shattering the little illusion. "Aggie wis aye a trollop. She picked yer Uncle John up at a bus stop ae nicht. She's bin the damnation o’ the puir man - he's better aff withoot her.” The family rallied round its skeleton, albeit reluctantly. A food parcel arrived from the country - a pink, trussed hen, goosepimpled, stark, and headless, laid in the depths of a cardboard box, jostled by turnips and other culinary delights. He would not be allowed to starve at any rate.
There remained the vexed matter of who should deliver it, and the lot fell upon the Mathers family. They drove through the sparkling lights of the city, an aurora borealis of neon, past acres of granite gentility, which gradually gave way to danker, darker houses, seedy patchworks of concrete and corrugated iron. At last, below on the right, like a black pariah, lay the squalor of homes that was her uncle's ghetto abode, repository of the town's unwanted citizens. The warm putt-putts of the engine died as the ignition key was switched off. Her father’s fingers drummed nervously on the steering wheel.
“Up ye go wi’ the parcel, lassie, an’ be quick aboot it. An’ gie ma regards tae yer uncle." This last was said with no great enthusiasm.
John stayed at the top of a crumbling stone stairway, an eyrie ringed by spittle and dog excreta - the very walls of the lobby were smeared with filth. As she walked up the gloomy stairs, she felt a surge of compassion for her uncle - his pathetic pride in his family - his struggle to bring them up decently, and not one of them worth a tinker’s cuss. At the top step she halted, and struck a match. It sputtered and went out, but a second one held the flame. She held it high, peering at the door. It was bare of everything, except a broken handle, and four names, scrawled in illiterate handwriting; she could just make out ”Mathers" underneath. She knocked imperiously, and waited. A squinting, grey-haired woman, balding and red-faced, answered the door. Giving her no time to protest, Jean shoved past bearing the parcel into the parlour. Uncle John was at his evening meal - a slimy collation of chips, spread over an old newspaper. The other occupants of the room, all strange to her, took note of her well-cut clothes and clean appearance, and went on the offensive, assuming her to be an official of some description and therefore a threat. The girl experienced a moment of fear, till her uncle's familiar nasal twang set them at ease.
”Staun’ back - yon’s Davie’s lassie - an’ wi' a wee parcel for her Uncle John!” There were tears of gratitude in his eyes. "Yon’s handsome o’ them - richt handsome. Aye - we aye stuck thegither, the Mathers. Bluid's thicker nor watter. They niver forget their wee Johnny." Jean smiled, absentmindedly looking down to the street below. The car engine had started up again. The visit was over.
The Honey That Came From The Sea
Every arching neck in the humid, human circle was craned upward; every gape-mouthed boy was trembling-tight with watching; every lip-sticky, sweet-sucking girl was abrink with thrill; and every, but every eye was fixed with morbid intensity on the tiny, puce-coloured tights of Dolores, the high-wire walker, precariously picking a line 200 feet in the air. Hannibal, the wrinkled old Jumbo, slumped like a sack of gigantic oats by a star-spangled drum, trumpeted up a gigantic roar, flapping his cabbage-leaf ears with the force of a blacksmith’s bellows. The crowd sighed, a prodded sea anemone, aquiver with delighted alarm, as the little tightrope walker stumbled, losing her concentration, stumbled and wobbled over the dizzying drop.
Would it happen tonight? Would it happen tonight? Would the circus star tumble out of her heavenly certainty and smash into a thousand atoms in the arena dust? How horrible, how dreadful, how splendiferous if she did! The anticipation sent shivers of pleasure rippling through one and all.
The puce-coloured tights with their sparkling of spangles, however, steadied beneath the balancing, outstretched arms, that tilted and swayed, swayed and tilted and settled, like an experienced glider, like the crossed spars of a puppeteer’s doll. Had the enthralled spectators been nearer, they might have seen the face of Dolores the tightrope walker turn pale as a pierrot clown beneath the mask of her heavy stage make up and the dove-grey satin leotard that clung to her small breasts rise and fall as rapidly as a captive, fluttering bird in a cage.
An expert seamstress, threading a needle of excitement, she was fully alert now. The one near-fatal slip had tautened her caution. The remainder of the act proceeded without further mishap. When she curled one leg, coy as a comma, round the thick rope, and tossed her plumed head till the feathers bounced on a pillow of air; when she slithered lithe as an eel down the rope and kicked it carelessly aside, and bowed her head, as if fencing with death was nothing, the audience rose, rank by rank. Their applause was a burst of exploding fireworks. Off the high wire the circus girl was quite ungainly; clumsy, even. She walked like a ploughboy, on the balls of her feet. The applause dribbled down to a halt as she clumped off on satin pumps, leaving the animal smells of the tent to Barnet, the seal master, cracking his menagerie to yelps of ecstatic approval.
Saunders the tumbler was waiting for her as usual in her cream-coloured caravan, the clouds of his fat cigar curling aromatically round her home, a summer nimbus. It was good to relax in the company of a friend, and Saunders was an unobtrusive man. His claims on Dolores’ time were slight but pleasant. For, in common with many circus people, the high-wire artist did not care to be tied down or rooted in any way. The shiftless, transitory gypsy life was a fine one, meeting each town afresh, leaving it, before the quality of wonder and exploration had turned sour.
Saunders had half an hour to kill before his turn to enter the arena. He watched the tightrope walker with gentle amusement as she removed successive layers of cosmetic chicanery; like another level of spurious grandeur and make-believe. Right down to the bottom rung, to the pastry-pallid cheeks that struck an off-colour note beside the bruised, red, gash of the small, fat lips. Right down to the face, not of Dolores the circus performer, but of Miss Amelia Sotherby-Bates of Whinneyfold, East Worthing, daughter of Jeremy Sotherby-Bates. M.P. for Worthing West, and his wife Mabel-Ann, who was terribly fond of babies and terribly fond of good causes, as an M.P.’s wife should be, in Worthing, Watford, or Gjinokastër for that matter. But neither Jeremy Sotherby-Bates, nor Mabel-Ann, had been terribly fond of Amelia, who was supremely indifferent to babies, and cared for good causes not a straw.
She had dismayed her parents by a succession of anti-social activities; had refused to shake hands with sweaty, effusive matrons at church bazaars; had absolutely and categorically dug in her heels and resisted all attempts to cram her dumpy personage into an amenable package of simpering civility at any of her mother’s fund-raising functions. In short, Miss Amelia Sotherby-Bates had been a troublesome pain-in-the-ass from the word go, to the World, to Worthing, to everyone, from the day her umbilical cord had knotted itself round her navel. When, therefore, she ran off with a visiting circus, the Sotherby-Bateses had shown an understandable lack of interest in retrieving their disagreeable offspring. They had stitched up the rent in the family fabric caused by the bête-noire’s removal ma neat piece of invisible sewing, as if Amelia Sotherby-Bates had never existed, which suited Dolores the tightrope walker down to a Z.
Saunders the tumbler handed her over a last wipe of powder-remover and watched her grimace as the final skin of greasepaint was smeared off.
“That was a close-run thing, tonight, Dolores,” he said. The girl shrugged, pouted. She disliked her Amelia face, its plain, pallid contours, its hollow, staring eyes, the crimson slash of its mouth. Under the gold plumes her hair was lank and shapeless. She bent down wearily, unrolling the puce-coloured tights in their glitter of spangles, revealing goose-pimpled legs where the blue veins showed too clearly her tiredness. The satin pumps were replaced by two worn leather sandals. Not one of the audience, seeing her slumped before the mirror in her little caravan, would have given her a glance, let alone a cheer. She was as plain, as uninteresting, as mutton.
“We could go for a drink somewhere. It’s a lovely night,” said Saunders, though he already knew what her answer would be. He felt it too, when his act was over, that sense of emptiness. Offstage neither had anything left to give. They merely crumpled in on themselves. It was that way with many performers.
The girl felt very shaken. The close brush with catastrophe had affected her more than she cared to admit, even to Saunders. The circus was camped on a stance within five minutes’ walk of the sea.
“Not tonight, Saunders,” she replied, feeling suddenly rather old. “I think I’d like to stroll a while, on the beach before turning in.”
The tumbler nodded, understanding, and walked along a little of the road with her. He stopped, however, at the periphery of the circus area. He never felt completely easy out of the circus boundaries. Across the parched rough grass between the circus and the beach the sea glistened, making the beach shimmer like a ring of Saturn, all fawn and curving, through waves of warmth. Beyond it, the sea lapped and rocked, curiously static, a listener knocking at a door.
“It’s very open, the sea,” said Saunders the tumbler, quizzically.
“Very open,” Amelia agreed. But already she had left him.
At first, the experience of traversing sand, flat and aimless, not tense and tentative as on the high wire, was interesting. Gradually, however, the newness wore off and the circus girl felt lost and useless. Her toe kicked a piece of debris, a broken compass, as if North, South, East or West made any difference to the timeless, directionless, fathomless, surge of the ocean! What navigated the navigator?
After an hour of aimless walking, Amelia lay down on the beach. The sand was soft, warm, neutral, tingling. It was a mingling of thousands of different particles - you couldn’t call it a beach, you couldn’t lump those tiny fragments of peach-bright flakes together. Each was separate, each sifted through her fingers like seconds in an hour-glass dripping, dripping, running,, running back . . . She felt like a child again, and began to cover herself up, playing a game with the sand, the vanishing game, covering herself up . . .
When she was dead and buried, when she was buried and dead, would anyone know that Amelia Sotherby-Bates had once run off with a circus to walk the high-wire twice nightly? Indeed, did it matter at all if anyone knew, or if anyone cared? The sea was flat as a mill pond, calm. It seemed to have swallowed the sky. The horizon had quite disappeared.
But not entirely. There was some movement, a stirring of water. Something was drifting into the shore, something conical, something peculiar. Something was coming out of the sea. That something was floating directly towards Amelia. The tightrope walker flung off the light covering of sand, rose up and walked down to the water’s edge to meet it. She waded into the sea, not noticing its depth, nor its unusual purity, nor the way it hugged and wrapped her around in icy, welcoming waves. The something was clear enough to see, to reach out for, to examine.
The something was a large, gold dish, the size of a town dock-face, and on it, was heaped an anthill, oozing with honey.
“A bee makes honey,” thought Amelia Sotherby-Bates, more struck by this thought than by the sight of the gold dish with its cargo of ants sitting lightly on top of the sea.
How busy the ants were! What a miracle of engineering their homes, so dose, so close! Yet they never seemed to collide, so industrious, so engrossed in their work, it tired her out to watch them! And the faster they worked, the sweeter grew their honey. Brown and gold. and everywhere it flowed, from secret inner springs.
“Why are you all so busy?” Amelia asked.
“No time to talk, no time to talk,” cried myriad voices. “We have no time for one, in the hill of the ants. Here, each one works for the whole. Thus is our honey sweet. We pool our labours. We have no time for one.”
Amelia Sotherby-Bates looked back to the empty beach, looked back across and over the parched, rough grass, to the tinsel minarets of the circus tent where twice-nightly, in puce-coloured tights, Dolores the high-wire walker trod a thin line of glory. She could almost hear the human circle below, willing her feet to fall - the animal baying of their calls, a ring of wolfish teeth..
The smell of the honey was sweet, overpoweringly so. The smallest of steps it was, onto the golden plate, yet the longest, most daring step of her whole life, as she entered the hill of ants . . .
Next morning, the circus found it was lacking a high-wire artist but someone would always be found to fill the breach, someone hungry for glory, willing to pay the price. And whether the huddle of clothes on the beach belonged to Amelia Sotherby-Bates or Dolores, the tightrope girl, was anyone’s guess, though Saunders the tumbler certainly thought he knew.
With a cluck of exasperation, John Hartwell glanced at his watch, his fingers clenched round the wheel like an anchored limpet, resigned to the incoming tide. He viewed ‘days out’ en famille, with the stoical fatalism of King Canute. “Is she coming with us on this picnic or isn’t she?” he demanded, in a voice of dejected martyrdom. It was glorious hill-walking weather, but as his wife Mavis never tired of telling him, “a family man has his obligations”. His wife, Mavis, propelled her angular frame across his lap, squeezing her lips into ridiculous pouts, like an infant gorilla attempting to suckle, wrenching his driving mirror round to afford her a better view of her favourite landscape, her face. She smeared the lipstick on, thickly, but artistically.
“There,” she crowed, with a satisfied beam to the mirror. “Ready to greet the world.”
“I said, is she coming on this picnic or not?” her husband repeated, with rising irritation.
“I wish you were more ASSERTIVE, John,” complained Mavis Hartwell, leaning heavily across his chest to roll down the window, almost rearranging his ribs in the process. She cocked her head out from the car, and screeched like a parakeet, in her high, falsetto voice, unnerving a nearby sparrow into startled flight, “Pammie ... oh Pammie ... Daddy’s waiting, dear.”
Five further minutes elapsed, before the fruit of his loins, his daughter Pammie, clumped up the path with the grace of an ambulating bear. Pam Hartwell was 12 years old, a plump, pimply girl struggling into womanhood like a fat maggot, incongruously emerging from a butterfly’s chrysalis. The passenger door banged sullenly, as the child condescended to join them.
They had barely left the driveway, before Mavis breathed on the ashes of last night’s row, continuing it, as the road rose like an escalator from town, to suburbs, to country.
“You were very rude to the Pinkerton-Smythes, last night”
“I was nothing of the kind.”
“You were so. Harry is very sensitive about his accent. You deliberately aped him. It’s like being married to a bloody talking chameleon. He thought you were sending him up.”
“Harry’s a loud-mouthed bore, and his son’s a sadistic beast.”
“There you go again, labelling people. Labels stick, you know. Harry’s son’s just a very ... a very ... forceful personality.”
‘The cat noticed that, Mavis, when he almost twisted its ears off:’
As the road thinned down, past forks of lanes which traversed the ground like the matted roots of a giant potato plant, they passed a solitary Friesian heifer, with large, mournful eyes, munching soulfully on a tuft of clover. It looked remarkably like Mrs Pinkerton-Smythe, John Hartwell reflected.
“What’s that, Mavis?” he asked, in passing.
“A bloody cow of course, whatever next!” fumed Mavis. John smiled. He was glad they agreed on something. He glanced in his driving mirror, aware that Pammie was unusually quiet. He winced. The child was excavating the cavity of her left nostril with the rapt perseverance of a gold-digger. Of all the millions of sperm seeds which had in the course of time, swum between him and Mavis, why on earth had that particular one taken root? Had he fished her from a net in the ocean, he would assuredly have flung her back. Nature was most unfair. He hummed a merry tune, as he visualised the unfortunate Pammie, being hoisted from the cradle of the deep, and himself pouring her back again, with a resounding splash, like a grotesque dolphin.
“You’re very jocose, suddenly,” Mavis said, suspiciously.
“Being with you, dear. And it’s a lovely day, of course,” he added hurriedly, in case she noticed the light sarcasm. As they turned the next corner, they were confronted by a picturesque ruined mill, straight out of a Constable picture, complete with mill pond, at the edge of a lush meadow, which gave way to undulating ground, rising to a fir-clad, heathery mountain.
“Here’ll do. As good a place as any,” his wife announced, in her Duke of Wellington tone. Her husband braked, and parked the car, like an obedient poodle.
Mavis and Pammie proceeded to clamber out, littering the area with all the necessary paraphernalia for ‘a nice day out’ ... radio, collapsible chairs in white plastic, flasks of coffee, mounds of rolls, and batches of cheese biscuits, perspiring heavily in the sun. John observed the pair of them dismally, from the relative safety of his newspaper. Mavis hadn’t a bad bottom, he reflected, for her age. Mavis, like the famed battery, was ever-ready, in all things conjugal. It was her only plus point, in John’s eyes. Had they been married in the Middle Eastern way, she would have been almost tolerable, reduced to concubine status. It would be nice, he mused, to keep her in a harem, like a dessert on a tray, to have for afters. But not for a full course meal ... Living with Mavis was like being trapped within the pages of ‘The Woman’s Weekly’.
Pammie, meanwhile, had plumped her solid haunches down on a seat, and was already devouring the first instalment of delicacies like a ravening wolf. John Hartwell sighed. Why couldn’t children be disposable, or exchangeable, like an ill-fitting suit? What was wrong with labels? You read the label on a tin of peas, on a supermarket shelf, before you ever took it home, otherwise you could be eating ANYTHING! The Woman’s Weekly wouldn’t know the answer to that one, now would it, he thought, triumphantly!
Mavis patted a neatly erected plastic seat beside her, and beckoned him over with an amiable smile. Mavis was invariably amiable, when she had succeeded in twisting the day round, like a very determined weathercock, to her own will. Suddenly, John felt much like a precarious balloon, which has just been cornered by an amorous hedgehog.
“The egg sandwiches are a real treat,” remarked Mavis, through a mouthful of yolk and albumen. “You must try one, you honestly must.”
“I think I’ll have a walk, first,” her husband replied, “maybe find a bit of white heather, for the garden ...“
Mavis shrugged. “Please yourself. Pammie and me’ll soak up the sun, here. No need to rush back on OUR account. You’ll miss that lovely programme on the radio, though, that nice disc-jockey, Terry what’s-his-name ...“
Before Terry-what's-his-name could further erode John Hartwell’s good humour, he had already skirted the car, and had reached the far side of the mill pond. Out of sight, and earshot, of his family, he paused, gazing deeply into the pond, a still, calm mirror of static contentment. With the perfection of a Vermeer, the pond depicted the images of sky, cloud and tree, in immaculate outline and form. It amused him to see himself superimposed on this watery masterpiece, with its Van Gogh firey sun, and vast Hobbema skies. Eagerly now, he turned away, walking with firm, hungry strides, determined not to waste a moment of the day, till he entered the wide, green meadow. Sinking down to the ground, his heartbeat was one with the grass.
How timeless it was! How utterly, unspeakably beautiful, how peacefully untroubled! Above, and beside, and around him, gradually, gradually, the tiny sounds of high summer arose in an innocent, mellow ecstasy, the muffled chirp of the cricket, the laden humming of the scent-seeking bee, the cry of curlew and lapwing, ringing crystal clear in tall oceans of sky, like a call to Matins. And rustling, rustling, rustling, a green stream lapping, went the grass, as he buried his nose and hands and senses into the tastes and touch of its rippling country! For the first time that day, he ceased to be conscious of his own physical boundaries, that perimeter of self that he guarded so jealously when with people. The container of flesh that holds the self, separate, seemed to be spilling like a cup, but happily so. It seemed to John that the rustling grass and the red swish of his blood were one, that his heartbeat, pressing warmly into the earth, had slowed almost to a standstill. Almost had gone underground. He wanted this moment to go on and on, this non-being, this all-being, this re-entry of Eden, of physical abandonment.
His body, however, began to rebel, stiffen, and demand a change of position. Reluctantly, he stood up, shook himself, and walked on through the meadow, up into the spare, sharp mountain air, with its banks of close-cropped heath, its first year’s growth, alter last year’s burning. He enjoyed eating up the miles with an easy stride. He enjoyed the resilient way that the heather leapt back from his tread, unharmed by his passing. And then, he reached a small fir wood, just beneath the summit.
Here, he unconsciously held himself very erect, very aware of his manhood. The natural nobility of fir was highly infectious, it stood to attention, precise and orderly, very military, he thought, in demeanour. He began a slow march through its territory, its twilit, no-man’s zone. It was almost a relief to break from its dim, golden light into the last stretch of road leading to the summit, stoney, and windswept, and bare.
He was discomfited to find another climber had beaten him to it. He cursed under his breath. He had hoped to be alone, at the top. The man’s presence was an intrusion, a disappointment, somehow a spoiling. His steps slowed, as he approached the cairn of stones, with the climber perched on its peak, like a resident eagle.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it!” the climber announced. Instantly, all John’s feelers retreated from the mountain, and centred on the speaker addressing him. Instinctively, he felt, with the force of a seen radar chart, the pattern of the stranger’s character. Bluff, hearty, middle-class. Right. Right. Like a true navigator, John negotiated the reefs of conversation perfectly, so perfectly in fact that the two were soon deep in chatter, like a pair of stockbrokers who had known each other for years, relaxing over a gin in their local pub.
“What a pleasant sort of a chap,” thought the climber, as John waved him a cheerful goodbye, beginning the long descent to the mill, with its still, flat pond. But the meeting had ruined John’s day, in a queer way, something had gone out of it, like the sun obscured by a cloud. The fir wood no longer seemed noble and manly. Now, on the downward journey, it tore and scratched at his face, as if in a strange, unaccountable sense, he had somehow betrayed it.
The meadow rustled and rustled as before. But now it seemed that its one soft tongue were many, and all of them whispering in accusation, as he trampled down its weak, green stems. His family, his car, were within easy walking distance now. He would be almost glad to see them. Even Pammie, with her sullen, heavy jowls, would be preferable to the growing unease, mushrooming inside him, like a glass-walled chalice, dissolving, losing its contours, losing its bearings, losing its ... He stopped, his throat tightening, in a gasp of dismay. He had reached the mill pond.
Looking into it, he could see the sky, the clouds, and the trees. But of John Hartwell himself, not a single trace was visible.
The day duly sister in Casualty flicked through the file of last night’s admissions. It had been a quiet night. Two crash victims kept in for observation, three burn injuries, four straightforward fractures, Jeannie McFaddyn taken in for small attention to cuts and bruises during a drunken harbour affray, and the boy waiting to be discharged in the end cubicle.
The sister shook her head, and grinned, as she thumbed through Jeannie’s notes. Jeannie was incorrigible ... a regular ... a vagrant. Really, she should have been sent home hours ago, except that Jeannie had no home to be sent to. She slept rough, the old reprobate, and last night had been exceptionally cold. Jeannie, though. was always grateful for any kindness or care she got, despite her unsavoury appearance and lifestyle. Meeting Jeannie for the first time was like biting into a walnut, and tasting honey ... she made you feel appreciated.
When she leafed through the boy’s notes, however, the sister frowned. It was very hard to be the Good Samaritan with cases like him. In the course of a year, she’d dealt with hundreds of the same ... foul-mouthed, arrogant louts, who didn’t deserve the services of dedicated nursing. Drunk, difficult, dangerous delinquents, that’s what they were.
He’d seemed such a fine boy too, when she’d peeped into his room, when coming on duty. He’d still been asleep, only newly identified, a youth with sleek, fair hair, clean limbed, peacefully resting, a boy just nudging manhood, quite angelic with dark eyelashes, and a curving, delicate mouth that was almost girlish, until he opened it to speak! The doctor had been shocked by the language that boy used, and it took a great deal to shock HIM.
Fortunately, the boy’s mother had been tracked down, to come and collect him, and complete the relevant particulars. Name: John Webster. Age: 14. Parents:
Separated. Boy, in mother’s custody.
The ward sister removed the plastic bracelet from John’s arm, and handed it to his mother, briskly.
“He won’t require this now. He’s lucky he didn’t die. He deserved to, drinking that amount at his age.”
Annie Webster could feel the shadow of the sister’s disapproval, covering both of them, Johnny and herself. She took the bracelet, glancing at the details. ‘Unknown male’ they read. ‘A&E Ward. 4/3/85. 9.30pm.’ So THAT was when he’d been admitted to hospital! She had thought him sitting at the pictures, then, watching the new American movie all the teenagers were raving about. Annie had known he was too young to watch an X certificate film, only 14, but a big boy for his age, and so determined. Besides, it wore her down, arguing with him. It was hard enough coping with the younger kids, without keeping Johnny in order. You’d have thought he’d have been a bit of help to her, by his age, a big boy like him. All that worry, the police coming and going, the neighbours watching them. She knew what they thought. A broken home. “Where was he….”
“Found?” asked the sister, anticipating the question.
“Dead drunk, in a back alley. The rest ran off.”
John smiled, cheekily, at the sister. He thinks it’s all a game, thought Annie. A stupid kid’s game, like pinching sweets from the corner shop. Her son thrust his jaw out, assuming a hard air of bravado.
“Fucking pigs’ll be round again,” he observed, as if announcing a small win on the pools, eight score draws in the delinquency stakes.
“AND the social worker,” his mother added. ‘She’ll have something to say about all this”
“If there’s nothing else,” interrupted the sister dryly, “Could you please take him home? We need the beds, for genuine illness.”
Nothing else? Nothing ELSE? What had the sister been expecting, thought Annie. A full scale blood bath? A verbal assault? A tide of hysterical recriminations? Well, sorry to disappoint her, but she, Annie Webster, didn’t hold with scenes, with washing your dirty linen in public. Anyway, she couldn’t quite take it all in, almost as through it was happening to someone else. She half expected someone to tap heron the shoulder ... “Sorry, lady, but could you step aside? We’re making a TV documentary on teenage drinking problems. You’re blocking camera four ...“
The kids were at school, when the social worker called. She was a very good social worker, Annie reflected. Not married, of course, no family of her own. Working with so many problem cases would probably put her off. Some folk didn’t give social workers the time of day, called them interfering, worse then the Gestapo, trying to take your kids off you. But not Annie. She wanted to understand, wanted to be told where she’d gone wrong, why Johnny had gone wrong. And it was nice to have someone to talk to, apart from the kids. Not many folk bothered with a single parent, living on her own.
The girl was very young, and very earnest. She always carried a bag bulging with files. Sometimes, Annie offered her coffee. The girl accepted the coffee, but rarely drank it.
“He’s hanging around with a bad crowd, Mrs Webster. You should find out what company he keeps, outside the home, be asking him, taking an interest. Maybe even encourage him to take friends home, where you can keep an eye on them. Better than hanging around street corners, up to all sorts of bother. Johnny needs to feel you care enough to pry. Stand up to him, tell him what’s what.” Mrs Webster nodded. It was all true, of course. The best way. But did she REALLY want to include his friends inside her tiny circle of life? She’d seen them, scuffing around the waste land, beneath the high rise flats that stank of dog pish, that were a scribble of graffiti, the girls cheap in their flash makeup, wearing their sex on their sleeve, the boys truculent in a group, dressed in the standard uniform of trainers, jeans and flapping shirts.
Sensible people crossed the road and walked quickly past them... Annie, too. He wasn’t her Johnny then, he belonged to the gang, against which the ties of motherhood, of family, were powerless.
“There’s no greater pressure on a young boy like Johnny,” the educational psychologist told her, “than obeying the code of his peer group.”
Besides, Annie kept a nice home, a tidy home. She didn’t WANT his friends inside it, upsetting things, swearing, spoiling everything, rotten apples bruising the younger kids ... She picked up a photograph of Johnny, and sighed. He was such a handsome boy, could have been anything, given the right chance, a different roll of the dice . . .
The social worker had said her piece, and rose to leave. Sometimes, she despaired of helping the Webster family. Mrs Webster was so ... ineffectual, so insular, shutting the world out, and Johnny too, in her way. A boy like that needed a firm hand, needed to feel ... wanted, warts and all.
“I’ll let myself out,” she said. The latch shut, with a click. It was the click that reminded Annie of the tin of Royal shortbread. A beautiful tin, it was. Her father had kept it in his shed. A red and green tin, with a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie on the lid. Father kept lots of things in the Royal shortbread tin, shiny brass buttons, nails, screws, staples. hinges and hooks. It sat on a shelf, between the pea-green watering can and the chipped wooden carpentry box, splendid, in its Stewart tartan. Father had been hanging a picture for Annie one day in her bedroom, she recalled. He knew she liked pretty things.
“Be a love and fetch me a hook, from the shortbread tin,” he told her.. And Annie ran out to the shed, and prised off the lid with fumbling, excited fingers. It came off suddenly, with a click. She’d dipped her hand in, fishing for the picture hook, then, her fist had recoiled, as she gave a small scream. An earwig had crawled out of the tin, and trickled darkly over his skin, a hideous brown earwig, hard, fork-tailed, demonic, repulsive. She’d slammed the lid down hurriedly, stomach fluttering with fright. It didn’t do to poke around in tins, even pretty ones. Best kept shut, best left alone, with their unpredictable contents sealed within. Tins, and people, both . . .
Mother called it sadistic, catching bumble bees in a jam jar. After all, they led a harmless existence; fat, fur-coated beings, bumbling from one flower to the next with their parcels of pollen tucked to their sides, like wealthy, jobless wives of city financiers, filling their days with shopping. They weren’t bad tempered or excitable, did not waspishly dive-bomb your ears like territorial bees, those garden workaholics who think of life as a gigantic honey factory and everything else as unnecessary and useless.
Wasps were perfect vipers when caught, or cornered. They’d ricochet off the sides of the jam jars like Kamikaze pilots, their yellow eyes two pinpricks of stinging malice, like showers of venomous hailstones. Enjoying their outrage, I would shake their indignation to fury, and when I tired of that diversion, drop the jar and run like Hell in the other direction, while the incensed hordes poured out, doubtless to impale the first passer-by with stinging wrath. Bees were less amiable than bumbles, but more so than wasps. When trapped, they were quite disorientated, were not obsessively vengeful, and when unleashed, generally zig-zagged off like confused, drunken seamen staggering round an unfamiliar port. By far the easiest to catch was a nice, plump, dozy bumble. It would splutter with pompous surprise at first, and veer erratically, like a weighty helicopter, but soon accepted captivity as a fait accompli and sank stoically down into a tamed lethargy, the perfect prisoner.
The summer of 1964 was a bees’ idyll. Hot and unusually sultry, the sun made a glorious siesta out of every noon for the people of Aberdeen; you wanted to waddle barefoot on the warm pavements, behind the pigeons, where the tar hissed in molten patches, or go where the fancy took you, like inquisitive seagulls - but nothing too strenuous, not in that sweltering heat. The searchlight of sunbeams glanced off granite mica, blinding you with unaccustomed brilliance. The gardens were buzzful of industry, the worker bees toppling over themselves to harvest their pollen, petals fingered by busy antennae, the sweetest roses, the nectar of daisy and buttercup, gleaned in a hum of industry.
I was sixteen, that awkward, argumentative age, when I thought I knew everything, but everything, and everyone over the age of thirty was an old fogey. Bee catching had long since ceased to intrigue; most girls of my age were stalking boys, though stalking bees was a great deal simpler, and much less troublesome. The jam jar contained your bee only as long as the game amused you. When it ceased to be interesting, the bee and yourself parted company with no hard feelings.
It was a strange contrast, to see the gardens in my street to full of insect life, and the pavements so bare of the human variety. My street was quite old fashioned, like a page from a Dickens novel; cobbles and graceful gas light incongruously stuck into a twentieth-century album. Normally, with its gulls, its granite, its gas lamps, and its elegant Episcopalian church, it wasn’t a street to shun. That summer, however, it was as if an invisible drawbridge had been raised, keeping trade and commerce along the causeway to a minimum. And all because of a bug, so tiny it was invisible to the naked eye, a scrap of minuscule contagion, called typhoid.
I wish, in the interests of historical accuracy, I could describe the taste of this unwelcome visitor to Aberdeen, which lost the city a fortune in cancelled holidays and panic departures. Unfortunately, I cannot. It tasted of soft cardboard, as masticated corned beef generally tastes, when pulped together with tired, green lettuce. An exotic complaint such as typhoid should have samba’d into Aberdeen on a calypso-colourful banana boat, or rumba’d along the Aberdonian airways on a whiff of Bacardi. Instead, it slunk in, skulking inside a ship-load of tinned corned beef, prepacked plague, courtesy of our South American cousins.
As the city simmered in subtropical heat, banner headlines, local and national, proclaimed EPIDEMIC in alarmist print. I assumed that foreign diseases would hunt down, first of all, foreigners, then, presumably, the underfed and disadvantaged, neither of which category I belonged to. It came as some surprise, therefore, to awake one morning to a dawn chorus of the Peoples’ Republic of Beeland, in full cry, pelting their tiny bodies (or so it seemed) against my window pane. The weather, too, had gone haywire, veering from volcanically broiling to chilling as a corpse’s ceilidh. My mother, noticing nothing amiss in either the weather of the behaviour of the indigenous insect population, immediately phoned the doctor. He came at once, a brisk, no-nonsense, dapper little man, who’d been a Jap prisoner of war. No stranger to the wiles of typhoid, he’d mixed medicine in coconuts in the tropical camp to counteract its effects. As he imparted this information, it seemed as though his stethoscope was sprouting antennae, a buzzing in my head mushroomed to atomic proportions ... “Delirious” the doctor remarked. “Send for an ambulance.”
A herring gull flapped me a welcome at the hospital, in medical orderly white, then, unkindly, jabbed a needle into my bum, and knocked me unconscious for several hours. When I came round, the buzzing in my head continued, unabated. I shook my left ear, hard, over the pillow, but nothing, not even a mosquito, fell out. Everywhere I looked in the ward, in accordance with the isolation, quarantine regulations of the city’s official Fever hospital, there were glass windows, locked. Had I not known better, it uncannily resembled a square, marmalade jam jar. For the first time, I experienced a kind of panic, a fear of incarceration that was claustrophobic in its intensity, an awful, confined, crushing sense of restraint. I wanted out, and I wanted out straight away.
Other patients, well enough to walk, crawled around each other like drugged locusts, eyes swollen with sleepless nights, strangers forced together by disease. At nights, the moan and sob of the sick, delirious women rose and fell in the ward like an eery wind in a dark tunnel, the tight-locked windows yielding neither the sun nor rain.
There was a girl of my own age in the ward, small-waisted, black-haired, with huge, protruding eyes and thin, emaciated arms, who lay, it seemed, in a bed of flowers (so profuse were the floral tributes sent by her loved one). She remarked on my flowerlessness, asking if I, too, had a boyfriend. I lied, and professed to have dozens, explaining away their non-arrival by the fact that they were all seamen (a fair lie, for a seaport city) saying that one was half-way up the Congo on a tramp steamer, and the other was first mate of a whaler. For one ghastly moment, it occurred to me that whalers went out with Moby Dick ... but the girl (though wanly pretty) was not overly bright, and accepted the lie quite readily.
As the weeks passed, the lid of the hospital jam jar slid back a little, allowing the brief privilege of a convalescent walk, the nurses leading the patients shakily out on to the felt strip of grass which separated our ward from the mortuary, uncomfortably close. We resembled a convoy of daddy longlegs, easily bowled over by gusts of wind, tottering around like human scarecrows in our make-shift bedclothes. Because of the pressure on beds, we had been allocated the male diabetic ward, and took the air in men’s pyjamas, held together with hospital safety pins.
Directly against hospital regulations, husbands and wives from different wards occasionally met up during exercise time. Weakened by illness, these reunions could be most affecting to witness, so the staff turned a blind eye to them, as long as the favour wasn’t abused, and all were present when the doctors made their rounds. Having no husband, child, mother, father or elderly grandparent similarly incarcerated in the hospital compound, I nevertheless developed a wander-lust too; a desire for an area of people less quiet, seclusion; of aloneness and just-me-ness, filling a green space.
There, behind a kitchen shed, I found it, a goodish walk from the ward, facing the sea, and squatted down for five minutes luxurious solitude. The briny, bracing North Sea air was pure nectar after the stuffy disinfected stench of the ward. I closed my eyes in ecstasy, to savour it. I closed my eyes in ecstasy, and fell asleep. When I awoke, the sky was cloudy, the wind was cold and the sun had disconcertingly removed itself. I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was set for trouble, like a skipper, anticipating a squall. I started to walk, fast, then faster, then run.
They were waiting for me, lined up outside the mortuary, a swarm of angry, swearing, waspish women, shaking their fists in rage. I’d missed the doctors’ rounds. For a time, there was talk of the special exercise privileges being suspended. I was ‘sent to Coventry’, and I daresay I deserved it. I think it was then that the full realisation of where I was finally hit me. I couldn’t. I COULDN’T get out. THERE WAS ABSOLUTELY NO ESCAPE. The ward was a crucible of spite, where rivalry, gossip and pettiness simmered and spilled over, dangerously high in temperature. So I sank to the bottom of the jar, fascinated and tormented by the glass, an institutionalised bumble, lost and broken, and very, very alone.
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