Almost Insentient, Almost Divine Read online

  Maybe I should have been a Punch and Judy professor. Do you remember the little shows I used to do for you and Charlie, with those finger puppets? I did do those didn’t I—that’s not a false memory is it? I did play with you both when you were young and we had fun, didn’t we, inventing new places and silly characters? Wasn’t there one called “Silly Billy”, little Charlie had trouble pronouncing it—didn’t he say, Sheelybeely, instead? And didn’t you, one year, wake us up on Christmas morning with a sock puppet who was looking around the house for other presents. I asked how he could see without any eyes and you said, “It’s not a he; it’s a she. And she doesn’t need eyes, she sees with her skin—like God, or like Baggy.”

  Am I reading too much into it all, or not enough? You like books, and are a lot cleverer than either me, or your Mother. I hope you can make more of it than I have. Don’t leave it too long to think back to the things that Baggy might have shown you—and to work on unravelling that “Shallabalah”. After all these years the closest I have got to understanding the real meaning of that word—its slippage, its diasporic travels across countries, centuries, societies; its exchanges between lips, teeth, swazzles and the like—is “shibboleth.”

  I’ll close here, Sarah, my beautiful girl, and wish you all the love, health and happiness I always wanted for you. By the time you read this—whether I’ve found the secret or not, whether all the words have fallen into place or into useless rubble—my baggy will have come back for me.

  Myself/Thyself

  “ ‘S muladach mi ‘s mi air m’ aineoil, …

  ‘S èisleineach mi sa chuan rainich.”

  —from a Gaelic song

  The bird broke the snow plucking the young hare from the mouth of its burrow—a line of blood trailed across the white shroud of the hillside. Moments later a man approached, crunching through the thick, cold dunes. The bird circled twice about him, swooping in again, the sun behind it; its wings spread a moment, dappled grey, brown and black, and it settled on a thick leather gloved arm that the man held out, a chunk of mangled meat gripped in his forefingers. As the bird tore at this with its sharp beak he knelt to the dead hare, eviscerated it with a couple of slices of a stubby knife, and flopped it into a stained knapsack. The whole scene had taken a minute or so, and had been enacted a thousand times before, by other hands, with other birds, upon other hares.

  After a moment or two he stood and surveyed the hill, looking around for any sign of the strange bluish light that had brought him here—for he had not intended to hunt this morning, and certainly not so high on the hills that were so deep in snow. As he searched for signs of what the unusual light might have been he looked back towards the sea and noticed a storm beginning to form. He started the climb down from the hillside, towards the magnificent castle, Dunrobin, that he had been lucky enough to call home for nearly a decade now. From up here it looked like a toy; some odd corruption of a French Chateau, with many turrets and spires, a stone as white as the snow itself, and immaculate gardens that stretched out right to the edge of the cliff. It reminded him of pictures he’d seen in travelling exhibitions of great majestic European castles, of kings and queens and stories of fairies and goblins. There was something rather childish and silly about it, even with all its grandeur—or maybe because of it. It seemed out of place, and rather alien, tucked away on the edge of the Sutherland coast, as though a giant child had cast it aside in favour of other playthings.

  However unusual the place was, and however estranged his masters were from the life of the local Scots, he was grateful to have finally found work that he was passionate for. His years in Birmingham at a tannery had left him little time to devote to his real love, the training and rearing of his birds. Here—at the patronage of the Duke, who was rarely present at the castle, and even when he was would rarely call upon his services to walk out and hunt (the game here being less grand than the African variety the Duke had developed a lust for from his time fighting the Boers)—he had time to devote himself fully to his craft. He had three birds now; Lucy, the peregrine, his most promising bird in years, and Toby—a juvenile dusky hawk that he hoped would replace Lucy as his main hunting bird when the time was right. The third was a barn owl—Florence—that he had found with a damaged wing following an attack by a pair of nesting sparrowhawks; he rarely hunted with her now, only the occasional nocturnal trip.

  The castle grounds were perfect training for the birds; despite their ornateness they could easily be strung with training feeds and lures, and the surrounding woods allowed good cover and vantage for them as they swept across the structured hedges and pathways of the gardens. Indeed the woods were his favoured places to walk as he prepared the birds for the evening—there were few places more tranquil and contemplative than the open floors of a Scottish wood, he thought.

  There was only one thing he did not like in the woods—the “Museum”, as it was called. It was a small building just outside the walls of the castle grounds, dominating the pathway heading North. It had been built, originally, as a summer house, but without extensive clearance of nearby trees could never have offered much warmth, or even a view of the sea. The 3rd Duke had extended it and used it as a trophy house for the gruesome souvenirs of the sport that his son had recently come to adore.

  He had only been inside once, at his master’s invitation; accompanied by him as he proudly explained the trophies therein—stuffed animals from every continent; great glass cabinets filled with birds and animals posed for eternity in crude landscapes that gestured only faintly at their true habitat. He found the place the most terrible building he had ever been in; a charnel house of macabre obsession. At least his world was a true encounter with the brutal fluidity of life, the endless exchange of blood and sinew in never ending pursuit of life—death, out there, was the only giver of life and to have swapped its relentless mutability for this exhibition of feather, fur and dust was, to him, an abomination.

  About the only items in the Museum that interested him were some stones, carved with odd symbols, that spoke to him about history, and the land, in ways he found difficult to articulate. The Duke had said they were etched by the ancient Picts and that they had yet to be deciphered, although a professor from Edinburgh university had expressed some interest and the Duke was hopeful that he might be able to sell the collection at some point—in the interests of science, naturally. That the stones might have been moved from their sacred ground was bad enough, but to have them begin a journey from institution to institution to be decoded and demystified, seemed almost as terrible as the deathly frozen faces staring out from the cabinets.

  He never returned to the Museum, but wandered the woods surrounding it almost every evening, keeping his distance from the unwholesome building, as though it were some blight upon the ground. It was emerging from the Northern edge of those woods that he had first seen the light—some two years before, one April evening at dusk. Since then he had seen it only twice again, on a bright November morning, when he initially thought it a reflection of binoculars, or the refracted light from a discarded bottle. Then again, in late December, high on the hill, where he had gone hunting for the hare as a premise for finding the wondrous light.

  Something in its starlight twinkle had captivated him and he’d begun to yearn—even hunger—for it. He watched the hills every morning for a year. The light did not return. And yet, at the point that he was about to put it behind him as an hallucination or trick of the light, it appeared, just after dawn on a snowy day in early December.

  It took him only ten minutes to reach it, going at an almost run, with Lucy circling and swooping about him, as he neared it.

  The closer he got he began to hear words, becoming gradually more distinct against the harsh wind. The words were unclear, but it was certainly a voice. His ears—so tuned now to hear the slightest of sounds, especially when the birds had gone astray and could only be followed by the gentle tinkling of the bells on their jesses—strained to capture what it was say
ing as his eyes remained focused on the oddly shimmering blue light.

  He felt his heart pounding with desperation as he willed the light not to vanish. His breath raged as it fought the cold air to carry him to his goal.

  Then the voice called out, loudly, “mi-fhein”, and a moment later responded with an enchanting melodic tone, “thu-fhein”.

  He was bewitched.

  Lucy screeched and whirled around him, but he could not hear her now. Only the whisper of “mi-fhein”, and the sing-song answer of “thu-fhein”.

  He began to mutter along with the voice, as the silvery-blue light sparkled and danced about him, and his final weary steps through the snow brought him to it, with arms outstretched as though to greet a returning lover. A shadowy shape within the light seemed to beckon with what might have been an arm, “mi-fhein, thu-fhein.” And, enraptured, he stepped into the hill, and as the light blinked out of existence, his desperate falcon, Lucy, flew after him.

  In an instant soil filled the shallow hole where the light had been, and the grasses knitted themselves together, as though the ground itself was healing an ancient scar.

  *

  George Mills had seen the man three times now. The first time had been last Michaelmas term, the week before the holidays began. He had spotted a bright light—a sort of silvery-blue—out on the terrace overlooking the sea (the place where the headmaster, Dr Crake, liked to talk over things when you had done something wrong). It had been like the kind of light George imagined happened when stars where born, and from out of it there had walked a man—a strange man, wrapped up tight against the aching cold, in leather trousers and a padded jacket, with a long black cape and tall black boots. He had a low-slung brown bag that knocked against his right leg as he strode along the pathway between the parterres. On his right arm there sat an eagle, or similar bird, it was difficult to tell with the brightness of the light. He was purposeful and George felt as though the figure had come to speak just with him. A moment later though the vision was gone and George considered it simply that—a vision.

  But now, almost a year later, he had seen it again. In late November there had been a sudden snowstorm and that night, while all the boys struggled to sleep against the wailing winds, George had sat at the window by his bed and watched as the majestic garden was hidden beneath a layer of snow, the waves raging and soaring in the distance so that they too were as white as the land. Then the light erupted again, amplified by the blanket of whiteness that surrounded it, and the figure, with his bird, appeared, striding faster, almost running, down the path to the castle. It had almost reached the first set of stairs that began the long climb up the terraces from the gardens but vanished again as suddenly as before.

  For two weeks since then George had held a vigil at the window to see if the man returned. Sleep always took him, at some point in the early hours of the morning, when he could not fight his eyes closing anymore, however much he tried.

  Then, on the last night of term, just as all the boys had been warned—by a very red-face Mr Slade (their year tutor)—for the “very last time!” that their pillow fighting and hijinks had to stop or they’d all be for a week’s detention on their return in January, George saw the light again. The other boys were all busy telling ghost stories together, in whispered tones, so George pretended to be asleep to focus on the light. Either Tom Whittaker, who had the bunk above him, was also asleep or he hadn’t noticed it—which would be strange because it was very bright.

  The man stepped from the strange blueness and, as he had before, made hurriedly over to the steps up to the castle. This time he didn’t disappear when he got to them, but neither did he make any attempt to go up them. Instead he raised his arm, pointing directly at George, as the bird flew about him in ever faster circles. The man said something. George could hear it as though spoken by someone beside him, and he spun around to check that there was nobody there. No, the dormitory was dark and the boys were all either asleep, or busy with their stories. The words whirled around him like a whispering breeze, “You are sad, in a lonely place.”

  And then, as before, the figure vanished, but the words continued to reverberate in his head and sleep refused to come.

  The next day was one of the busiest in the school year, as cars came to collect pupils, sometimes driven by their parents who would greet them enthusiastically—much to the boy’s embarrassment. Sometimes they were driven by a chauffeur who would load the trunk, and other belongings, as the boy sat in the back of the vehicle, enjoying the first moments of a luxurious few weeks away from the austerity of school.

  Like many of the boys who lived quite far away, George had to catch the train home and so his belongings were loaded onto a coach that had been hired to take them down to the station in Golspie, and then on to Inverness and beyond. After the goodbyes in Inverness, he was finally alone and welcomed some peace and quiet to think about what had happened the night before. He sat in the carriage, idly tracing the passing scenery in the condensation on the window glass, as the heathery hills gave way to grassy lowlands, and the jagged interruption of villages, towns and cities began to accumulate. A lady on the seat opposite him kept looking over, eyeing him with a strange mixture of curiosity and admonition—as though she wished both to care for, and scold, him.

  “You are sad, in a lonely place,” George muttered.

  “Pardon?” said the woman, abruptly.

  “Oh, nothing,” he said. “I was just… well, just… remembering something.”

  “I see,” she replied, followed by silence.

  George started humming a carol.

  “It’s lovely countryside,” she said, in a voice as soothing and quaintly Southern as his mother’s. “Are you going home from school?”

  “Yes, Miss,” he replied, “for Christmas.”

  “That’s very nice,” she said. “I’m sure your parents will be looking forward to seeing you very much.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” George said, rather doubtfully. His father always seemed to find him an interruption, even at the weekends, when he didn’t have to go into London to sell people bits of paper that promised to pay them money when they died (a job that George found as morbid as he did perplexing—for what need did you have for money when you were dead, after all!). And mother left most things to Mrs Green, who cooked and cleaned the house, and looked after George while she went into Oxford to meet up with her friends. He knew his return would elicit the usual day or so of jubilant reunion followed by growing frustration until he was on the train back to Dunrobin in early January.

  “Of course they will,” the lady said. “Christmas is a magical time, for children especially, with children, particularly!”

  George wasn’t sure if the lady had children of her own; there was something spinsterly about her that suggested she didn’t.

  “I suppose so…” George repeated, his thoughts beginning to drift back to the scene in the castle gardens and the image of the man pointing and mouthing words at him.

  “I’m sure you like to wonder what you will be getting for Christmas,” the lady continued.

  “No, not really,” George said, distantly. “I think I know what it will be anyway.”

  “Well now,” she said, excitedly. “What do you think your present might be?”

  “It will be new cars for my Scalextric track, that I got last Christmas,” he said, flatly.

  “That’s wonderful,” she said, her enthusiasm oddly excessive. “I bet they’ll go very fast. You’ll have an absolutely champion time with them.”

  There was a long silence. Then George turned to her and said, very seriously, “I, see things that happened before… people that once lived.”

  After a long silence, during which the lady seemed to be considering carefully how she might react; she just shook her head and frowned, “Oh, that’s silly now… that’s very silly indeed.”

  “I don’t mean that—I don’t mean ghosts,” he said, quickly, hoping to be able to talk to someone
, however briefly, to help understand what had happened. “I mean people that were meant to be dead, but that aren’t. Or maybe they are and they want me to help them to find out how to go away. I don’t know… I don’t really know, but it’s just that I see them anyway… well, him—I see him, and his bird…”

  As he listened to himself he knew how very silly it all sounded, very silly indeed.

  The lady held up her book and he turned back to the window. She got off the train at Birmingham without another word.

  The Christmas holidays were always a lonely time for George. He wandered around the family’s five-bedroomed house, on the outskirts of an Oxfordshire village, looking for things to amuse himself with. Books sufficed to while away some hours, and give him a sense of some other place, and imagined company, but what he really longed for was the company of his friends and the fierce Highland countryside, and the odd symmetry of the school grounds; the wildness of the woods leading to the curious Museum and, of course, the oddities therein. But, most of all, he longed to lay at night and see the light, and the figure, and to know what those words it had spoken really meant, and—what he wanted more than anything in the world—was to meet the man, and his bird.

  On Christmas day he was as keen and over-excited as all the other children around the country must have been, but by late morning it was wearing off. He looked at his Scalextric and watched the bright new blue and red cars whizzing around the track. They were a Sunbeam Tiger and a Triumph TR4, from a catalogue that had come out a couple of years previously (George had been hoping for the Ford Mirage and a Ferrari P4 from this year’s series), but he wasn’t ungrateful. His father seemed more keen on them than he did anyway, or perhaps he was just feeling obliged to spend time with George. He shouldn’t do, George thought, he was used to it now, and besides, all he wanted to do was think about the light, and the man, and the bird.