The Taxidermist in The White Review

The Studio in The Literateur

Sheepskin in The White Review

A story

…

They were to spend the afternoon picking the last of the apples. Together. He was late and she was sat on a chair in the kitchen, waiting. Outside, a searing blue sky, warm for autumn, perfect for picking. Not that she’d have noticed, sat in the kitchen, where the walls, thick, and the windows, low, preserved a year-round cool. Shifting on the chair she rose, along a dark corridor, up the carpeted stairs to their bedroom. There, with a quick glance appreciating the neatness: the bed made, creaseless, pulled across with a moss-green quilt; to his side an old French carafe of water, Paul Masson repeating around the base, that, a glass, a pen and paper, and a gardening manual; to hers, a recent novel, bent open. She reached to close it, neaten it, before deciding she approved, it lent a nuance of bohemia to the somewhat mismatched room, the novel did, open, spine bent. Yes, she approved. On top of the chest of drawers a selection of paperbacks pressed in between a pair of ceramic bookends. His pyjamas were laid out on his pillow and his slippers peeping from under the bed. She drew her finger along the top of the chest of drawers frowning at the sticky layer of dust, altered the angle of the wedding photo, made a mental note to bring up a duster for the chest of drawers, the bookends, the wedding photo. More ornamental than practical they were inevitably gathering dust. From the chest of drawers she took a wool-mohair blend round-necked cardigan, mustard coloured with gold buttons. Pulling it over her bare shoulders. Sat on a chair in the kitchen, waiting.

It was the method that made her falter. That, or the worry of getting it wrong. The willow apple basket, the ladder, the wheelbarrow? The varieties to pick, those to discard. Those with bruises, wormholes, eaten by wasps or the blackbirds. A mammoth task. And then, climbing the tree… No. Apple-picking was a job for two, she reassured herself. But the waiting was pulling at her nerves, unable to do anything else, for… for this afternoon they were going to pick the rest of the apples. Shifting again on the chair, she pushed her hair back behind her ears, exasperated, she half got up. Half-got-up, half-resolute she would do it herself. But, what if I get it wrong? and sat down again. She conjured up the images she had been playing all day: him up the tree, shaking it, her in laughter, ducking to avoid the apples pelting, pulling wide her petticoats, catching apples in her skirts… Mid-reverie she started. Jarring through the air the tune of an ice-cream van, the jingle, since a child more eerie than enticing. Playing its way through the village. For who? she wondered, shivered. Shivered, kneading the wool cardigan over her forearms, drawing it over her front, losing its bulk, she noticed, her body. Like age creeping in and sketching of her a spindly spinster, she felt, drawing it over her front, her stomach light and baggy beneath the camisole, light, like she hadn’t eaten. Had she eaten? she wondered a moment. She’d certainly made him breakfast: poached kipper, half a roasted tomato, small cafetière of coffee, rye toast, slice of lemon, dish of butter. She glanced over to the jug she used to poach the kipper, still upside-down on the draining board, confirming any doubts. A hundred things I could be doing, she thought, unable to do any of them. She wasn’t a spinster, but it was now near an hour since he’d said he’d be back. Won’t he call? With an anxious intake of breath she fixed her eyes on the telephone, watching it dissolve beneath her pleading gaze, willing it to ring. Even as a child she hadn’t been very adept at climbing trees. Long minutes, and pale, she realised she was holding her breath. With a heavy exhale she released. Don’t be so silly, she said out loud with a little laugh. And rose to check the answerphone, again.

That morning the boy had called round. Bare-armed she was clearing the table after his breakfast. The boy had knocked on the door. Very tall, peering in, it was a moment before she could place him. He had in his hand an invitation to his art project, a sort of installation, temporary, or had he said temporal? on the marshes. He had grown, was a pile of gawky shoulders whittled down to long matchstick legs, in skinny tracksuit trousers, grey and pulled up above, tight around above his white ankles, the knuckles blatant, indecent. She was immediately conscious of her own bare arms, the skin was slipping from them, sagging, as she raised them to reach the coffee, and he near made her blush. Near blush as he gave her the invitation, as if to one of the arty few. She was one of few, he had said, talking with such intimacy, but in a tone more akin to recital, monotone, and his gaze hooked to the edge of the table. There she was blushing and he wasn’t even looking at her. Otherwise, he had an interview, he had said. Curator work in a museum in London, not a name she knew. She could picture him in interview just as he was then: keeping his cool, his eyes focussed on an unmoving spot, neatly placing his words together, loading them with conviction, neatly rounding them off. Don’t catch me out, praying. Admiration it seemed, offered in words lacking any tone of admiration or flattery, of anything. But could she, just, at the back of his throat, at the front of his words, hear a slight stuttering of self? Something fluttering, uncontained. Such enthusiasm he said (without enthusiasm) for the landscape here, her own work. (A petty part-time stint gone on too long in educational arts at the local primaries. A means of filling time). Of course she wasn’t his type. His type was as pale, hollowcheeked as he himself, darkrimmed eyes, chainsmoking, edgy comments falling from her mouth like ash off her fag. Country-ruddy wasn’t him at all, and, she was way too old. But, didn’t, well these things happened, didn’t they?

In his stance she recalled the child, and an envy of motherhood struck her with pangs so visceral that she had to lean against the table, look down, catch herself. She remembered him really young, quarrelsome, thrown out of school, childrebel, despaired of, parents couldn’t keep a hand on him, angry, violent, lashing out in class, at other kids, swearing before the rest had learnt their times-tables. Seeing this child in the boy, the man before her, she felt a desire to push up against him. The boy, now adult, stating his convictions as to art and life… to push up against him! The father had gone and everyone had blamed the mother, spoilt the kid, an artist too, they blamed liberal-thinking, throwing doses of moral judgement at her back, comparing their own far-superior schools of thought as to child-rearing, a good smack never did a child any harm, they agreed. She’d bring him into school on the back of a motorbike, they whispered like sin, her in leathers. Punk, they’d call her some days. She painted landscapes, abstract, in ludicrous colours. Hippy, others. But hers were catchier than the bucolic, aquarelle tendency along the coast line.

There he was, the boy. Stood there qualifying each statement as if in fear of offending or being misunderstood, drawing parentheses into his sentences to better explain. A whole drama of self expression before her. But, again she remarked, there wasn’t a breath of feeling in it. Did she intimidate him? Or, was he aware of the way he was considered by those that had known him then, and trying too hard to set it to rights? He had these long fingers, white and near elegant catching round the coffee mug, knuckling too, like his ankle up against the chairleg.
She put him out of her mind.

Oh! Catching her breath, there he was. Abruptly silly, she prepared to greet her husband, to pretend she had been doing something, like she was ready. Fool, she realised, still in a skirt and her suede pumps. Fool, and hopped upstairs to pull on some old jeans and boots.

There he was. Hauling feed sacks out of the boot of the car. Staunch, sunken. Of course. This was the man for whom she made breakfast every day. Just, a bit older than the figure of her daydreams. She was vaguely dismayed by this lack of correlation, as though she had forgotten they were no longer just in their twenties, just meeting. Age had etched its mark upon him, as it had her, but a shared life, change so slow, so natural, such a play over the course of time, had made this blemishing unremarkable.

He turned to her. ‘I stopped to pick up apples from Simon on the way back.’

Simon, she thought. Of course.
The image of Simon, portly, was reassuring. And now, she didn’t care. She fell into the warmth, the delight of his arrival and in a voice of girlhood, said, ‘Why don’t you reverse your car, back to the shed, you won’t have to carry them so far. How was your day?’ Anticipating the break-down of the day’s activities, continuity as necessary as the made bed, as the kipper.
‘No, no, they’re not heavy.’
In cords and boots and although his belly was round and more-than-evident over the top of his trousers he still held something of, something gallant. Close, he smiled and she forgot. Not forsaken.

‘Less apples this year’.

‘Less apples this year’, she repeated.

‘A cold winter we’d have hoped for more.’

He had a way of playing the words in his mouth before releasing them. Letting each sit on his tongue. Letting it round, find its shape, shape its whole in his mouth before it was uttered. A mere moment but it offered weight to his words. Weight, she thought, and reflection. Some might have thought him slow.

He stopped and looked at her.
With slow words drawing up the ritual sequence of the days events, he looked at her. Wearing a mustard yellow cardigan, sort of fluffy, perky gold buttons and unsuited to the weather, unsuited to the job. A hole on the sleeve, barely large enough to reveal any arm below, but the hole fixated him. His mouth and his eyes seemed to form round the hole. His eyes played around the hole, reading into it something it didn’t mean, reading shabby, reading careless, reading resignation. ‘You have a hole in your jumper’, he said aloud, interrupting the ritual. You have a hole in your jumper. The statement stood shock-still in the air, surprising them both. For, she always had holes in her jumpers.

Then.
‘Let me get the rest of the apples from the car. We have written labels…we have put the labels inside the bags. It is important not to mix up the varieties. So, each bag has a label in it’, he explained. ‘I’ll… go to the car.’

She was accustomed to his way of stretching out his sentences, his scant words being placed one by one in the air. She had a habit, a little game, of watching. She listened after. She watched his words, full, falling her way like clods of earth, following them with her eyes, each a clod thrown heavily, steadily to the ground. ‘Then I’ve got to get on, dear, back to Simon’s. He needs a hand, you know. Loads more apples to pick up, I just wanted to drop these off.’ Behind his words, shaping their sense amongst the stones in the gravel, she saw the boy pushing shut the door of his house. He had on a coat, inappropriate for the weather, she thought. It accentuated his shape, hanging down from his shoulders, it made him big. Ankles still peeking between hemline and shoes. Perhaps it was the gaunt slouch, the artist thing. She had once thought herself an artist. Now when she thought about it, she qualified it with the word “unrealised”, or, on less-forgiving days “failed”. Would she one day remove the thought itself. Forget it? She watched him, not glancing her way as she prepared herself for his glance, disappear towards the village. ‘I couldn’t refuse him, with the kids, and Janine so close to bursting…’ The word stunned her. It rushed back up at her and smacked her in the face. Bursting?

‘Bursting? What sort of word is that to describe… a pregnant woman? A woman darling, not a fruit, not a balloon!’ And in the same shout she began to realise that he was not going to spend the afternoon picking apples with her. He was telling her something quite else. In the same shout she felt her day crumble, her delight shrivel into disappointment. ‘Sorry?’ He queried her anger with his sedate voice. Janine, skinny Janine, plump to bursting, the comparison with herself was unavoidable. Narrow-hipped, pallid Janine about to have a fourth child, while she…once so pink and fleshy. ‘A real chore I know, but I can’t let them down.’ He was telling her something and she couldn’t follow, for it was quite the antithesis of the afternoon she had been rehearsing in her head. Her upset was a child’s. ‘They’re so good to us.’ His eyes watching her and her building up a wall of pride in his gaze, holding back the tantrum welling up. ‘Let me just get these into the shed.’

He had been leaning on the door of the shed as he spoke. He pushed himself upright and strode to the car. She steadied herself, reminded herself how good all her friends said she looked, how they envied her shrinking size. They all seemed to be going the other way through middle age, filling out, plumping, rounding, rosy-ing. She spun out his story before her, allowing doubt to seep in along the edges. She didn’t believe Simon had asked him. Simon. Ask for a hand? No. He had offered, she was sure, rather spend an afternoon in the ripeness of a young family, than… The idea was too painful to shape.

He had returned to the work at hand, repeating, ‘Now, we mustn’t mix these, so between Simon and I, we have labelled them. There’s a piece of paper in each bag, each with the variety written on it. There are the Ida Reds, Jonas, there Greensleeves, there Russets, there the cookers, Spartans, Coxs…’ Dipping in and out of the bags. ‘They’ll be ok left in the sacks for a couple of days if the weather doesn’t warm up. But if they are left any longer you’ll have to lay them out on trays or tables, palettes are good. I wouldn’t bother wrapping them in newspaper, just check through them for bruising, rot. Give Simon a ring to organise the juicing. In the meantime, lay them out on the tables, not touching, chuck out any of the bad ones. Yup, palettes are best, the air can circulate. Do the same with ours. Not touching. Make sure you keep the varieties separate. And the labels. Of course the flavour of the juice will change accordingly, the Russets get sweet off the tree, but you shouldn’t leave them too long or the juice starts to taste musty. Want the freshness of the Jonas and the Greensleeves to come through.’

Holding herself steady inside the shed, she felt him pelting words at her like apples, and she couldn’t hear them. Resolving just to stand still, steady, wait till it was over, then ask him. She watched him rummage in a bag with a torn-off piece of paper in it on which was written Spartans. She watched him take a thick purple-skinned apple, like a large round plum, watched it held in his hardcrafted hand. She braced herself, readied her body as if he were to pelt her with it, with the sack of them. Instead, he rubbed it on his cords.

‘But,’
Yet this time the words lining up on her tongue were foreign to her mouth. She couldn’t find them, she stalled. She looked into a gulf before her into which she had to put words. ‘But, we were to pick the apples,’ she tried, ‘together’. A whisper.

‘What?’

Braced, shirking his response, she asked, ‘Are… are you going to pick the apples with me?’

‘Well darling you can pick them yourself, can’t you? It’s such a lovely afternoon, take the apple basket…’

She imagined apples being thrown at her from all sides, bruising into her body. Resigned to her tragedy, she let them knock her to the ground. Falling, a childhood image came to her: a girl being pelted with stones, with shoes, with unripe apples, by the boys. A line from a storybook: It’s what they do here, when they’re in love with anyone they throw things at them. She looked up to him and smiled, sadly. He brought the apple to his mouth and bit into it, and if she had the strength she would have taken one too. Memories of Spartans, those early days, the flesh white, and clean and sweet, and scented like melons. He stood the sacks in the far corner, his back to her, then turned and made ready to leave the shed. Her afternoon again toppled before her and this time released a flurry of words from her mouth.

‘The boy called round’, at first giddily, sounding it out like a retort in her head.

‘What boy?’

‘You know. The neighbour’s boy, he’s back home, doing some art or something.’

He seemed to miss the point, but stayed, stood in the dark of the shed, facing her. She wasn’t quite sure what the point was either, but it was important. Important that she told him that, about the boy. And then, that the bedroom needed dusting, that they were low on kippers, that no, no one had rung today, no. She picked up more words, more shapes, and sounded them out in a chatter, part reassuring herself, part preventing his departure. She had thought of putting some potatoes in the oven for supper, for when they had finished picking, but now, would he be back for supper? And it was actually much warmer outside than she had thought, perhaps a salad instead, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, had she seen a tin of anchovies sitting around? And surely it was the wrong time of the year for ice-cream anyway, whatever the weather, because she’d heard the ice-cream van in the village, she just wondered, who would be buying ice-cream when it was nearly November? And, should they get the neighbour round sometime, such an age since they’d had anyone for dinner, and she couldn’t be earning much with her painting, and having to support the boy too, and when was the last time they’d really talked, beyond a cordial passing hello. As for him and her. Them. Us. When was the last time we’d really talked? she wondered. As she spoke his departure presented itself in softer light, she found herself sending her best wishes to Janine, suggesting he take them a loaf of yesterday’s bread, and why not, some jam too. Finally she part persuaded herself he was quite right. Of course he should go to Simon’s. She wasn’t sure she’d manage the apples, but perhaps they could do it together the following weekend? As her words gave way to thoughts he moved out of the shed. She followed. He closed it behind them, and stamped through the gravel to the car, with a cheerio. She turned her eyes from the departing car, towards the village, wondered whether the boy would return soon. Perhaps it was a sort of school girl crush, hers. The glint in his eye.

A BOY NAMED TIGGER

This, a tale of a boy named Tigger.  “Tigger” they called him.  Whether after that leaping, lurking tiger creature of the hundred-acre-wood.   Whether because these were the first, the only syllables stumbled over by his unuttering mouth.  Whether… I know not.  Sullen they would have called him.  Silent, isolated, too.  Strange, surely.  Solitary.  They wouldn’t have known of the crowding, calamitous worlds he inhabited: storybook worlds of spirits and souls, goblins and ghouls, of towers, piling staircases and drawbridges, fleets of ships, eagleflocks, islands and mountains.  Sad they said.  They didn’t know…  Nor did I, at first.

A-tapping at the door.  One morning, baking breakfast, my fingers stuck thick in hunks of dough.  A-rapping at the door.  Scrape the gloopy dough from these hardworn fingers that I might answer.  At the door, a-tapping, a-rapping: a boy.  A boy with a tag around his neck.  A boy with a luggage label.  A boy with a message.

MY NAME IS TIGGER
I CAN WORK

That’s how I knew his name.  Speak boy, what’s your tale?  But he doesn’t speak, never spoke.  Where’s your tongue boy?  Smiling and shaking and smiling more.  An imp smile, a pair of imp eyes, smiling too.  Perhaps there was no tongue hinged between the jaws of this luggage-tagged guttersnipe.   Let’s see your hands. Splayed before me his two hands.  Good hands.  Not soft, petal pink, boy hands.  Working hands, gnarling with muscle and knuckle calluses, cracked, solid hands.  Old hands for a kid.  Child eyes, rose cheeks, ravaged hands.  A worker.

Can you:

Sand and splice?  Wax and varnish?  Sew and fold?  Cleat and tack?  Bung and bail?  Uphaul-downhaul-mainsheet-gaff? 

Another smile.  A nod.  Yes.

So, I took him in.  Had no thought of whence he had come, where he would go.  But I was building a boat.  He must have seen the sign.

C. CHANTY

BOATBUILDER

Well kid, Tigger-kid, Tig.  I’m building a boat.   Give me a hand?  Board and lodging plus a dollar a week.  Fortnight trial.  What-d’you-say?  Spot of breakfast?

I put before him a bowl of porridge, orange-pink Papaya and Walnuts to pick at.  A pot of Tangerine Marmalade, made last year from the sunburnt oranges.  For that’s the landscape here:  Papaya trees, summer fronds high as the house, in season the fruit bursting to the ground, the black pips a belly cure.  Mash them up with oats and cinnamon, hill-goat yoghurt, will quieten any stomach, set you regular.  Tangerines, a winter fruit, bitter till the last day, but the birds won’t eat them.  And ‘midst that all:  Walnuts, that homeland tree, growing here in the exotics, it’s bark pale-grey, like elephant-skin.  The Tigger-boy ate on.  Bread in… bread out of the oven.  The boy so intent on eating didn’t hear my talk.  I raised my voice.  Not eaten a while boy?  Like the porridge?  My recipe, Pinhead Oatmeal, imported from Ireland, that ancestral land.  Head down he ate.  Only when I placed the bread on the table his eyes rose and flickered and fluttered.  Slice of bread boy?  Again a nod.

That’s where it began for me.  Boy on my doorstep willing to work.  Tigger-child breaking-fast with the hunger of a gannet.  Gannet-gullet, gannet-gut.  That first day.

OLD MOLLY

My, he could work.  That tiger-boy, of spindly bones.  Straight after breakfast I set him to.  Unsure at first I introduced him to Ol’ Mol’.  Molly my love, my life, first lady-sea-boat ever I built.  Is she seaworthy? I said. What reckon Tig-boy?  Ready her for sea.   First fair wind o’ the season we’ll set her afloat.  It was a test of sorts.  See how the boy works.  See what he knows.  Old Molly is stoic and sturdy as the saltiest seadog.  Been sat in the shed a season.  Hurricanes blowing and old-molly-my-dear quiet in her boathome.  Simply in need of sealing, sinking, floating again.  That, and a clean, her belly winter-home to dust and cobwebs, spiders and woodlice, sometimes mice.

Shaved and shaped that husk of boat, I did.  Carvel-planked, cotton-caulked, gaff rig.  Oak.  Sitka.  Cedar.  Teak.  Twelve foot Dingy.  Oak keel, Sitka planking, Cedar gunwale, Teak top.   Made her up.  Gave her a backbone, some ribs.  Planked and sealed her.  Laid a floor.  Fit in a mast.  Shaped a gaff.  Cut and sewed and seamed a sail.  I made her up.  My first lady.  Made her up myself, with zest and will and above all love.  Oh, and a tiny touch of soul.  Barely twice your age chap, I built this boat.   And she sailed among the best of them.  My first lady, and my last.  Ol’ Mol’.

The boy knew, he saw she was old and loved, and seaworthy as her first day afloat.  He cleaned her first, ran the spiders from their homes, picked their bundled eggs from the wooden nooks.  Laid them, gentle-boy-hands, outside, that the spiders might hatch still and chase the bugs that eat the garden-grown-greens and nature’s game continue.  Dusted and washed and rubbed her dry.  Repolished, recaulked and repainted.  He was one week doing dawn-to-dusk, and worked quiet, his forehead furrowed in concentration.  And when he was done, Ol’ Mol’ was prettiest ever I saw her.  Rekindled my love seeing the aged sealady as she first was.

Boy, you worked mighty, I said.  Mighty boy, that’s mighty work.  First fair wind, I say, we’ll set her afloat, see how she sails.  Seven days you’ve been working lad.  Working and eating the cupboard bare.  But I say, well done!  Your trial’s over, you have done better than ever I hoped.  A dollar I owe you.

Then I saw that boy glow.  His gaze turned again outward from the boat, from the work and from his boy worlds.  He glowed and held out his hand that I might place two fifty cent bits in it.

And, this evening, how-about-a-story?  Some time off.  Have you learnt to read, child?  Know a fellow called Hemingway?  Hem-ing-way.  All prose and pride and preposterous pretensions.  But he wrote one humble book.  A book about a boy and a boat, a man and a Merlin.  A book about the sea.  And if we weren’t so fortunate to have ready trade and cupboards of winter supplies, this could be a tale about us, Tig-child.  A boy and a boat, an old man and a fish.  Will it yet tell our tale?  What is it, boy?   Your eyes are gaping and blinking.  What are you saying?  Not yet do I understand your silent speech.  Books, boy.  You read?  You like books?

Seems I’ve fished something bigger than I first thought.  Seems the kid is smarter than his tongueless mouth gives to think.  Work he can.  Worldly too.  Dollars he likes.  Praise as well.  Yet, I saw something else in his eyes just now.  Sets me talking to him, telling him…

Before I built boats I worked with books.  I was a libraryman.  What’s that look?  Not told you.  No.  You don’t speak, thought you didn’t read.  Before I became a solitary soul, I was the social sort.  Those days I worked with books and boated for joy.  Now I work with boats, and the odd day I stop, I pick up a book.  What?  Not seen the books?  No.  Not a book in the house.

Well, look you, step outside.  Now, skin your eyes, stretch your gaze one hundred paces yonder.  To the Papaya plantation.  See?  See that hulking lumbering ruin.  North side.  Plant covered.  Ivy clad.  Honeysuckle, Clematis, Wisteria-bound.  Bound by Bindweed, Beanstalks, every trailing winding, roping plant, wrapping round the tower, binding it together.  That’s the Library, Tig.

Care to venture over?

THE LIBRARY

As we stumbled over, old and young, I told him my tale.  Not all of it.  It’s a long and rambling tale and would fast bore a kid were I to tell it start to finish.

This silent chap never answers back, he swallows my words deep in him.  I like talking to him.  But I wonder what he does with the words filling him up.   Like a sponge will he saturate, like a bucket overflow?  I told the child of my coming to this vast place.  Oversea.  From a tiny, tidy Irish landscape, of, I still see it, round green sheepshorn hills, earthen tracks, rockwalls, whitewashed cottages, smoke from burning peat flecking the skies.  From there, where my eyes and feet knew every crevice, every shape and stumble in the hills and roads and rivers.  From that land where people still sang and stood in the bars over beer reciting poems and dreaming of dragons and republics… to here, where bare’ a person lived, and those that did, well, they had the English words, but not the books, not the tales, not the songs and lores.

I didn’t bring the religion.  What’s one God over another, or none at all?  But I brought the words.  My own religion, I suppose. I didn’t know it then.  Of course, I did know it too, been reciting John 1 since a child.  In the beginning was the word.  Know that one, boy?  A fine piece.  And the Word was God.  I was a wandering, dreaming boy with a love of books and a love of words.  The people liked the books I brought, they liked the stories. Here, they were a new people.  We Irish were new too.  I knew what that meant – newness.  It meant to write and speak in a new language.  Lost was the language of the land, the words whittled of the woods, the syllables shaped of the husks and tusks of the landscape.  The new language was a tongue of elsewhere, of others.  It’s to do with being colonised.  But that’s talk for another day.

The people came to read my books.  So I brought more. I would go inland to forage any I could.  But the only stories that reached these parts were of the Wild West and of Indians.  I wanted the real tales, the earthy, arty tales of my people.  I set up a correspondence with a bookseller in Dublin city, had monthly parcels of books shipped over.

Imagine. Not only the Irish books, but the Europeans, the Americans.  From tales of pagan yore and ye olde poetry, through flowery tomes and fantastical novels, to modernist dystopias and minimalist new releases.  The people here, they could understand the stuff.  Better than ever we could.  It was as if they began to understand their own language.  They were hungering, losing their God, losing their soul, ebbing away.  They needed a beyond, an elsewhere.  Books gave them that.  They learnt to dream again.  They learnt to believe again.  They read like never I had seen anyone read.  They read for the stories, yes.  But they also read for the sounds in their mouths.  Out loud ticking the syllables through their throats, against their teeth, widening their jaws to pronounce the most banal of words, vowels sitting soft on their tongues…

We met on Sundays.  Sat in a circle the morning on the earth, or in the kitchen when the weather was wild.  Read to one another.  They played the sounds through their throats again and again.  And we laughed.  And maybe it was love.  A sort of love.  Dare I say it, people flocked.   Moved closer, built stilted houses from driftwood or planks hauled off wrecked boats, fringed the roofs with palms.  The town grew.  The number of books grew.  I built a tower to store the books.  Had some fellows help.  We brought stone from far away.  Built the tower tall as we could, winding and shelved.  Shelves built like boats, steambent to wrap up along the inside of the tower.  And I started to loan out the books. Maybe I got greedy.  Dollar a loan.  Things changed, then.  The people stopped believing.  That’s yet another story.

In the end I was forced to shut the books away.  I closed the library.  Put a lock on the door and locked it with a key.  Sat alone beside it one last long day and wished and wished and wished every plant would bind it, grow tall all over it, wrap it in their green.  Lose it.  Lock it in.  No one was to enter.  The people left.  Quick as they’d drifted in, they drifted away.  Those that remained took up fishing.  I built boats.  Alone once more.   And the tower stood, a monument to books, to stories.  A monument to how they changed the people here.  For better.  And then for worse.  All of us.  Now I am careful with the key.  Sometimes myself I read.  The plants did bind the tower.  But not to lock it, simply so as to hold it together, that it might never fall.  And, strangest thing: they never grew over the door.  The lock never rusted.  The library never really closed.

Here we are: The Library.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

The lock was hard to turn.  But it did and the boy and I pushed in.  How long was it since I had last ventured inside?  The first gaze was stifling as dust rose in the air.  But light shone down from the gaping globe at the ceiling and fell, spreading like sun’s rays to the floor, revealing the shelves still wrapping around the interior walls, the ladders still standing, still reaching to the highest levels, and the books.  The books looked, they looked well.  As if preserved in this towering cavern wound with plants.

I turned to the boy, he was spluttering and stuttering beside me.  What was it?  The dust? A sort of asthma?  I looked in his face.  In his eyes there were tears, but he was smiling and he looked to me and edged to near the shelves. Of course, I said. Go, look.  Go to H.  A B C D E F G H.  There.  Up towards the middle, northern curve.  You can climb.  H-eming-way.  Slim volume:  The Old Man and the Sea.

And I thought, for the very first time I thought:  Who is this boy?  Whence does he come?  How old is he? Does he like to read?

That evening, to the last of the season’s light, I read The Old Man and the Sea, start to finish.  I perched on the edge of a ladder, the boy crouched at my feet listening.  Man and boy, each entranced.  I wondered again whether there was more to this choice of book.  Were we alike, that man and me, that boy and this?

Right Tig.  A bite to eat then time for bed.   I’ve a plan for you, locktongued ragamuffin.  You’re in luck fellow.  And first, I say, we’ll toast you.  A bottle of my bittersweet Tangerine Wine.  Follow me.

In near darkness we forayed back across the winddried land to the house, and first to the coldstore to dig out one of the brews.  Tangerine seemed to have sunk into the cobweb black depths at the back of the store, so we settled for Dandelion.  Gold hued, sharp, dry, diuretic, a Winter cure-all, a Summer detox.  Dashed some eggs in the oven, rolled out some flatbreads, to eat with yogurt, Chives, Ramsons, Jack-by-the-hedge, Sorrel, my shaded backdoor herbs.  While the eggs baked we sat on the doorstep, the boy and I.  We toasted his work with Dandelion wine.  We toasted the last sun, pink, was the fair weather coming? We toasted the first star, and we toasted my plan.

It seems, o-boy-o, you were brought here by fortune.  Fortune’s boy turned up a-tapping at my door.  I’ve seen you work, seen you’re skilled.  I’m not asking whence you came, nor who you are.  To me you’re Tigger, brought on a wave of fortune.  You haven’t a tongue, seems.  That’s fine by me.  Types like yours are special types.  A gift, or gifted.  Should ha’ seen that, you came wrapped like a parcel on my doorstep.  You’ve shown your mettle.  You’re good with wood.  You’re strong.  And, you’re humble, boy.  Now Tig-kid, I’ve a plan for you.

Seems to me you like a book, a story.  Makes me wonder…  Those silent dreamworlds inside you me think, maybe they’re books you read, or maybe they’re stories you tell yourself.   Sad I am that library I built is shut.  What are books that can’t be read, they’re like tales that can’t be told.  I think you know about that, child.  I’ve gone too far in, and now I’m too far out.  But you.  Take the key.  Wear it round your neck, like you turned up, luggage-tagged at my door.  Dust, clean, polish the library.  Go through the books for woodworm and lice, chase out the spiders, beetles and crabs.  Repair the ladders, mend the shelves.  Paint, polish, sand and caulk.  The skylight is a porthole, took her off a shoreblown wreck, give her a clean.  Let in the light!

I hadn’t seen his face but I felt by his stillness that he would, and that he understood.

Take your time over it Tig-boy.  When it’s ready we can decide if we open it to others. Now let’s eat those eggs and to bed.

TIGGER

The winds whirled round the house last night.  I felt it swing.  I felt it spin.  The old man says the fair season is coming.  In his strange tongues I hear him rhythm: The fair season is coming and with that forage and fruit.  The fair season, forage and fruit.  Fair season and forage.  Fair season and fruit.  He talks like a song and sometimes I don’t hear the words, only the sounds.  Sometimes he is blowing a flute in my head.  Sometimes he is knocking on the keys of a piano in my head.  I feel the house swing, and spin, and I think:  old man, all this talk of fair weather to come, do you notice the weather now?  Barrelling through the yard, round and round the house.  Every morning out the door it’s a new land, windshaped.  Maybe he’s protected from the weather, maybe he doesn’t feel it.  The house swinging and spinning, I think of the library.  Stonetower.  The only stone building ever I see.  There’s no stone here.  Sand and dust and salt.  I smell the salt off the sea.  We never go to the sea.  All these strange plants he gets growing.  Never see them either.  Barren land, all these stinking green herbs.  Maybe they’re protected from the weather too.  A tower wound with Wisteria, a plant from novels.  And at my neck, the key.

THE TOWER

Oy Tig-kid, where you been?  Breakfast on the table, no sign in the house.  Been out already to the tower?  Ah.  Good on you, kid.  Now get that porridge into you or you’ll waste away.

Paid him a dollar a week.  He was fed, had a bed.  His work meticulous, A to Zed.  Shelf by shelf, author by author.  Left him to, most the time. Too much for me. Sometimes I spotted a book crammed in his pocket.  But most seems, if he read, he read there.  Wasn’t long before his bedclothes disappeared from the room.  Saw he was sleeping in the tower.  Shoved over a few books, curled up on a shelf.  Not a fear of falling.  Liked the height.  That Tigger boy is a Monkey boy.  He fixed the wooden ladders, gave them a sand and a varnish.  He made some of rope ladders.  Old warps, bound and spliced.  Colourful cobwebs stretching between the shelves.   He sleeps on a different shelf each night.  He’s a sea kid.  Not a tiger-child, a seafarer I’d wager.  I’ll show that kid to weave a hammock.  If he doesn’t know already.  Save him sleeping on the shelves.

Burnt-shell lime he whitewashed the walls.  Laid decking on the sand floor.  Left the plants binding the library, but found the other portholes, at different heights in the tower, cleared them of greenery.  Let in the light.  Say he’d been at it no more than a month.  Already made of the library the finest ship ever I’d seen.

When the weather comes I’ll take him to the shore.

TIGGER

The shelf of H. Aitch.  Aitch for the old man and the sea, the old man and me.  I am spider.  I weave webs between the walls.  I walk along these webs from shelf to shelf.  It’s like the old man said, some books are stories, other books are sounds.  Sometimes I read the noisy ones and I feel sound urging on my tongue.  Syllables skittering at my throat.  That’s why I read alone.  Nobody hears my sounds.  I live in the tower of stone.  It is my shell.  I am a snail and I curl into these spiralling shelves.  When the wind blows the tower does not spin.  It is still.  The plants are its cloak.  It is a wizard in a cloak and I am in the wizard’s belly. When I read, I am.  I am many.  I am the old man.  And I am the boy.  And I am the fish.  And I am the sea.  Sometimes I am a stone, and when I am a stone I am also a wall and when a wall, a tower.  And sometimes I am a tower, and when I am a tower, I am a city.  When I am a stone, I am shingle, I am a beach, I am a storm defence.  I am sea and sky.  I am sames and opposites.  Nobody knows I am everything and everyone.  I don’t tell.  For them I am a boy.  For me I am them.  Sometimes the old man knows.  He says I’m not a tiger.  I am.  He says I’m a monkey.  I am.

PRIMROSES

Tig-kid! Lost in thought?  He of always-pricked-up-ears?  Didn’t hear me enter?  What-oh Tig?  Come down a moment from your polishing and shining and alphabeticising.  Come away a moment from your dream kingdoms.  So Tig, I sense a change in the weather.  A lull.  A loll.  A something warmer breezing through.  What say you? Do you feel it?  A shimmer of sunlight.  Come.  The first shimmer of spring.  To pick Primroses, the very first roses.  A special spot, at the feet of the Papaya.  They open their petals and close them before the Papaya is in thick leaf.  With it we shall make wine, that medicinal brew, and, on the first day of picking, we shall eat them sugar-battered.

Today boy-o is a celebratory day!

He took my hand.  That lost and found Tigger-child.  True, was indeed the first sunshimmer, springshimmer.  On reaching the plantation, Primroses were peeking, pricking through at the Papaya feet.  Clearings were rife, ripe with this auspicious homeflower.  Seeds, shipped over once upon a time, and nurtured and wished and wished and wished upon, that they might grow here too.

When our baskets, pockets, hands were overflowing with flowerheads we walked home.  As we walked I felt a change in the boy.

That evening with wrinkled fingers I showed the boy to weave a hammock. Take boatropes, any.  Those coiled on themselves on the workshop shelves.  Tie them to make them long.  Strings that are uphauls, downhauls, kicking straps, ties.  Secure them first and then with many fingers weave and knot many strings to shape a bed.  First widening, widening, like a belly, boatbelly, whalebelly, then tightening, tightening to secure the far end.  The mass of strings will make a bed. Had him scrunched on a terribly tall stool in the kitchen weaving.  Boy woven in boatropes.  Boy entwined in his work.  Boy lost again to his boyworlds.

While he worked I prepared the Primroses.  A glass each of last season’s last Primrose Wine.  And a detailed commentary, that he too might one day sugar the first flowers.

So Tigger, of splendid name and too few words.  Listen while you weave, that the sacred art of sugaring Primrose petals might be your art too.

But here, an instant, I started.  I heard myself and thought, a mere instant:  was I making of this mute child an apprentice?  A son?  Passing on my skills, my words.  That I might leave this world and this tonguetied fellow continue my way?  But I left the thought there, wary of it.

Primroses are sunflowers, they are beckoned by the warming of the earth and the waking of the first sun. Their golden faces, their five petals, are solar images, suns rays.  The recipe is as follows:

1)    Beat the white of an egg to a cloud. 

2)    With this skyfroth paint the sunyellow petals.  These sunlit heads are delicate, the white of the egg must not burden but embrace them, as clouds embrace the sun, a spring day. 

3)    For this use a paintbrush.  Goathair, first moult, gathered on a stick.  Thus. 

4)    Or, on occasions, a quill plucked from a spring-returning swallow. Bird lighter than air, whose arrival, in my western clime, signifies the start of the season. 

5)    Still wet from the eggfroth, dip the flower in sugar that the white takes the sweetness like a cloud does a silverlining.

6)    These, the sunflowers bedecked in their silverlined clouds.  Lay them on a tray and place again in the last sunshine.  So that the heat and air dries them crisp, and makes of them the most startling and precious floral sweets.  As I am now doing.

7)    By next morn’, blessed by a warm night, the sweetened sunjewels are ready.

SHIPPING FORECAST

Before sending you to your booktower to bed.  A feeling tomorrow’s set to be a long day.  I think we can catch the midnight shipping forecast.  It’s a sort of tradition I have, when spring arrives.

Dear old radio hummed and whirred and span to Longwave.  Just in time, just the same atonal voice.  Oh music, oh poetry!

The shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency//There are warnings of gales in Biscay, FitzRoy//The general synopsis at midnight//Low southeast Ireland 1003 moving slowly east losing its identity by midnight tonight/Low west Fitzroy 1010 expected northeast France 999 by same time/New low expected German Bight 996 by that time//The area forecasts for the next 24 hours//Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne/Northerly 4 or 5/Slight or moderate/Rain or showers/Moderate or good//Fisher/Southerly or southwesterly 4 or 5, becoming cyclonic 5 to 7/Slight or moderate/Rain or thundery showers/Moderate or good, occasionally poor//Humber/Cyclonic 5 or 6, becoming northwesterly 4 or 5/Slight or moderate/Rain or showers/Moderate or good//Thames, Dover, Wight/Southwesterly 5 to 7, veering northwesterly 4 or 5/Moderate, occasionally rough at first/Showers, becoming thundery/Moderate or good, occasionally poor//Biscay/West or southwest, 5 to 7. Moderate or rough/Rain then thundery showers/Good, occasionally poor//FitzRoy/Variable 4 in north at first, otherwise westerly or southwesterly 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8 in southeast. Moderate or rough. Rain then showers. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.//Irish Sea/Cyclonic in southeast until later, otherwise northeasterly backing northwesterly, 4 or 5/Occasionlly rough in south/Rain or showers/Moderate or good, occasionally poor//Shannon/Cyclonic in south at first, otherwise northerly 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later/Moderate/Rain or showers/Moderate or good//

Listening the boy sank inside himself, his eyes misty, gazeless.  Strange child, I smiled.  Perhaps he hears the music in this forecast much as I do.  Perhaps it is poetry for him too.  Perhaps it’s that Primrose Wine!  Now, enough, to bed for us both.

FIRST ROSE

He slept that night on his handwoven hammock strung from the bookshelves.  First sleep on first homemade hammock.  At dawn, a glance of sun, I called him up and to the boatshed.

Hup! Up boy, up!  This is the boat I’ve been building while I had you restore the library.  Sterling job you’ve done, might I say, and quite the finest library e’er espied.  While you worked your little manhands at that literary obra maestra.  I put my fumbling fingers to what will likely be their last work.  Here, under this draped cloth, she lies.  Sixteen footer.  Sixteen foot, small currach.  One man boat, will take two.  Light, that one alone might carry her.  Plank-built, skin-covered.  Might look a simple piece, but these are quite the stablest, sturdiest rowboats.  They’ll take you through seas roaring with waves.  Have to learn to handle them.  Isn’t easy, mind.  No keel, they seem to swing and wobble with the swell.  But, back home they’d cross the sea with sheep and pigs aboard, firewood kept dry out to the islands and back.  No bother explaining it all, it’s a boat you learn to master by feel.

This boat is your boat.   Didn’t know that when I was building her.  Nor why I was building her.  But yesterday picking Primroses it came to me. The boat will be for the boy, I thought.  And with it came a name. The boat will be called “First Rose”.  Now kid, as she is your boat, you must take a brush… Here, a swallow quill, very apt, and christen her with her name: FIRST ROSE.

The boat named.  With that, both giddy, we pocketed the Primrose sweets, crisp in the warm morning air.  We walked out, nibbling on our way, to the shore.  To the sea.

THE SHORE

We walked out.  Tigger-child and I.  Northeast.  Seaward.  Past the tower we walked, through the Papaya plantation, the sky crosshatched with first leaf fronds, scattering shards of sunlight over our heads and hands, over the Primroses between our feet, sun scattering over the first springfloor leafshapes.

On reaching the far side of the plantation, I noticed the seaward Papayas in fuller bloom.

To my mind boy, those shrunken corollas hung ‘twixt Papaya leaf…seems to me child that they are flowerbuds, budding of flowers, and what giveth flowers?  Flowers give fruit.  This gives hope for a fruitful season, a season of plentiful fruit.

Away from the corollas I swung my eyes seaward.  When had I last looked out so?  First the horizon stretching, opening our gaze, and above, slumping along the stretch of the horizon… Oh dread.  A fret hanging.  Billowing like grey smoke, from the horizon I could see it rising – weather.

Darn it.  A fret.  See it?  That which looks like smoke, blackened, dreaded, of tyres burning or similar ghastly sort, is a fret.  We’ve walked out now, best keep on.  Darn forecast.  Can’t be blamed however.  Weather in Ireland is often different to our own.  Must let you know, these frets can sudden fall upon you.  Cling, clasp around your ankles, wreath around your neck, shorten your breath.  Like the fog once in the hills at home.  Sink in mist and there is no seeing your own feet.  Be warned boy.  Weather can be frightful terrifying on these shores.  That said.  On occasion, on better occasions, sun burns it off, wind blows the fret elsewhere.  On these occasions the fret falls, fails becomes light pleasant whisps floating from your fingers and you can look again on the sea.

We walked on.  The landscape was bare, treeless beyond the plantation.  Changed and yet never changed.  We walked upon large flat grey stones, warming with the new season.  Low level plants, there were a few.  Cactus.  Semper vivum.  Stone Crop.  We walked further and the stones shrunk and plants struck up between them, SeaHolly, Thrift, Marron grass…I blessed each leaf for returning with the season, as I too was returning.  The mild saltiness of the air was suddenly exacerbated in a seablown blast. Seasalt, full in our breath, our bellies.  Our nostrils charged with the ever closer sea air.  And I looked to Tigger.

Tig-child!  Your eyes are bulbous like frogs or geckos, your nostrils snarling.  But, I think, you are happy?  Aye?  You, as I, we are part sea-creatures.  Sea-mammals, we thrive on sea air.  Mudlarks, Sandlarks we are.  We walk and pluck and peck of the sand and the shore.  But, I am tiring.  Why?  Never has this journey felt so far.  Always whisked to the shore by joy, anticipation, what be.  Not so today.  I am content.  But weary.  I see you bristling, quivering as if awakening.  Were I of mystic ilk I might imagine you were about to speak… But I, I am no longer fit for this trip.  Once only I shall take you.  Thenceforth Tig-child you shall take yourself.  You and the FIRST ROSE. The first visit to the shore in season is a ritual, a rite. Much like these Primrose sweets sticking in my pocket.  The first visit foresees the year ahead, gives guidance as to the coming seasons…

Before us barely distinguishable the sky, the sea, the shore, greys and blacks muddling.

This child: the shore!

And this: the sea!

This haze unlifting is bearer of many omens.  In it I read an end.  An end writes a beginning.  Was same haze in which I failed to read my downfall.  But since, the seasons have continued bringing with them beginnings.  And now you boy.  A beginning.  See.  See: the sea.  Still and black.  Rare ’tis that the sea be so still.  But this too is writing out the next months.  Still equates stagnancy.  Stagnancy oft’ before a Storm.  Shadow is sometimes shelter, othertimes darker forces. Wind presupposes change…but when the wind changes hold not a frown for it will freeze and stick to your face thereafter.  Smile with the wind.  Smile with change.  Sun, if it shows, is the most auspicious of signs.  But I must sit.  Find myself a seat, a boulder and sit on it.  I must watch this sea so still.  Watch the fret, does it lift or fall?  Watch for birds.  Watch for wind or sun.  Watch for change.

TIGGER

I can slip off my sandals and scuttle like shorecrabs over the shores.  The seawaves are flat but I see them rolling in sideways, crabways, patterned along the shore.  I am a crab.  I scuttle sideways with the seawaves.  At the sea the stones get smaller and smaller until just at the point where the sea froths on the shore, the stones are sand.  I am a boy and I scrunch my toes in the wet sand.  I am a boy and I feel I can scream and screech and shriek and squeal and sing.  I am a boy and I pick along the edges of the seaswell until I find a shell.  It is a singing shell.  A shell I hold to my ear, and it sings like sometimes the old man sings.  He sings like the sea and like a shell.  I hear him when he is working and it is whirling foaming song like the sea.  And it is whirling foaming song like my voice, carried on my blood seeping through my fingers, seeping to my toes.  Blood-carried-voice ebbing and foaming and whirling in my body held.  Like the voice held in this shell.  But if you listen very carefully, hold it very close to your ear; you can hear the shell’s voice.  Can you hear mine if you listen this carefully, this close?  Has this shell half my voice?  I shall take this shell with me and rub it and rub it and it will release my whole voice and I shall catch it and swallow it and then I shall speak.  I am Aladdin.

Cormorant!

Gannet!

Far off I hear the old man croak from his stone seat.  He is sat on a stone, seaman, seabeard.  Cocooned, wrapped in the air, the air is waving, wrapping around him.  Crowning him with smoky seafret.  He is Neptune, Poseidon.  Seaking and merman.  His voice is slow and solid like soft stones thrown in to the flat air.  He is naming the birds.  But his voice is going quiet.  This air is gentle and soft.  This air doesn’t throw sounds like sharp pebbles, like the wild winter winds.  It holds them, fat and flat and then they plop, soft.  It holds sounds, and it holds me.  In this still thick air I too am cocooned.  He keeps telling me about the birds but his voice is disappearing.  Then I see them.  I see the birds coming.  Cormorant first.  Old black hag.  Old black lady of the sea, he says.  The cormorants fly and they make the air move and they make the sea move, and then they settle, on what is a large black rock, suddenly appearing.  They stop there and peg out their wings to dry.  There is still a moment.

Then the gannets come.  In pairs.  The gannets are huge and white with black wingtips.  And I can no longer hear the man and I do not know if he is talking, for the gannets with their long wings, are beating the air and beating the sea.  In pairs flying, beating.  The air and the sea are bursting with Gannet sound, pair after pair after pair, hundreds, thousands of big gannet pairs.  And my head is beating and beating and I feel the air pulling at my hands and the sea writhing at my feet, pulling and dragging.  My eyes are pushed open by the air but I cannot see any longer and my ears are thudding and I am gasping and I must be sobbing but then something much bigger happens:  I can feel the air pulling, pulling at the songshell tight in my hands.  My voice shell.  It pulls and pulls and wrenches it from my hands and then my eyes open and I see the shell fall and crack on the gurgling sea.  It cracks, splits open and from it bursts a sound, a screeching sound from the shell rising lifting to the air to fill all the air and I feel my blood and my body cracking open bursting forth like the shell and I feel sound in me rising, and I scream.

HOMEWARD

Not a scream, child. ‘Twas a song.  Beautiful, raucous like the weather.  Then you dropped to the ground and the sea withdrew and the weather withdrew.   You fell asleep.  I’ve been a while waking you!  You sang.  Perhaps you took my voice, cracking it now is.  But I needn’t talk more.  Nor you.  You needn’t say anything.  You needn’t tell me your story.  But you have a voice.  Perhaps one day you will tell another, tell others.

Let us walk home.  I shall lie down then.  For, seems, a last time.  Tomorrow you will put me in the ground.  You will decide whether to stay.  Take on my house, land, the tower.  Or whether you will go onward.  Or perhaps board First Rose and take to the seas.  Is of no vital import.  Enough said.

Now, dear Tigger-child, homeward!

…

A story written for a friend called Theo.  Inspiration for the characters was drawn from that highly inspirational novel, The Bone People by Keri Hulme.

This piece of fiction appeared in The White Review, November 2011

…

The first I noticed was your thumbnails, large, round and flat, like two plates. They were marked with yellowed ridges and covered in grime where they met the cracked tips of your thumbs. I couldn’t help looking. Perhaps I had sensed it already, in a mere handshake that morning. Perhaps that handshake had convinced me to stay and watch you skin the sheep that afternoon?

Not the stench of the two-day-dead ewe, the scuds of wool fallen to the air like a dandelion clock, nor the skin slow peeling back, revealing, not blood-lust…

I was so taken by your grimy thumbnails. And, I was crouching so close in that lost field one afternoon. We had hauled the ewe out of a pit. Found dead the previous dawn, her eyes gone, pecked out by the crows. The ewe, one of three Frieslandto start up a dairy herd, had been brought on to the island a week before; no one could get near her, not time enough even to give her a name. Some thought: she may have starved herself or she sure perished of thirst, seemingly terrified since her arrival, shuddering at the hill edge against a stone wall. The farmers think otherwise: redwater, blackleg they mumble like proverbs or curses.

She was already well swollen, her legs shooting out like on plastic models of farm animals. Rigor mortis sets in almost immediately. We had hauled her out of a pit with a blue rope around her shockstuck legs. A newly-dug pit crammed with bits to bury: a pram frame, rusted so. (And, we had always planned to repair it.) Oil barrels: two; rusty too. I forget what else. I remember that the pit was not as deep as I had expected.

Nor had I expected you to reach for some latex gloves, to stretch the opaque white rubber over your hands, your grimy nails, to then pass me a pair. And a knife.

Dead two days! a neighbouring farmer had laughed. The sheep were only there a week, and on the third day he had come round, bringing his ram to cover them: a lame, runt-of-the-litter sort of ram, with a snub bulldog nose and tail and a sloping backside. Not much go on him, one bad leg, but still a hold on his manhood. He’ll cover them yet, reliable I call him. Not like some of those other fellows on this island. Nor some of the fillies for that matter… A lame ram, and a mouthful of filth to go with.

She’s been dead two days. If she was still warm I’d have it done in five minutes. You take it across the chest, sharp through the udder, and you thump your fist right through. It’d slip out like out a woolly jumper. He was laughing. They are often laughing. Sure, you won’t get a fleece out of that one, the wool starts to fall as soon as they’re cold, what are you wanting it for?

I was merely there to watch your thumbnails, but you handed me a knife, and had me hacking across the belly like I would a fish. (Remembering how I did a fish. A trout, and not having noticed, her eggs lay still in her gross belly, red swollen lengths of trout roe under my knife.) The knife was blunt. The skin wouldn’t fall. I pierced the flesh in places, feared the great swelling would pop, pour all over, near gave up. You kept on.

A grey day. So calm that the stench of the sheep swarmed in foul clouds around us, our knives tearing gashes in the close air.

Not a limp calm, on which one leans collapsing through the air so flimsy it is hard to stay upright. No. A thick calm. A thick, slow calm in which a cloud sat above the Big Hill at dawn will descend so slowly that only as night falls will it begin to shroud the hill. Still, so dense that walking one has to physically push through it. Speaking, the voice ricochets over the air, like a stone skittering across a still sea. But we are not speaking.

We are in the grass crouching, kneeling, crawling with our knives over this ungiving sheep. And the kids run up and gape or try pulling one another away and cry a bit: It stinks I’ve had enough Let’s go Look Wait a second. They are silently challenging one another to surrender. One boy, pale, his tee shirt pulled up over his mouth and nose, shrinking behind another’s shoulder, his eyes caught in the slow manoeuvres of the operation, and his body turned away, home. And a horse being lunged nearby starts at the stink, shying, and the two more ewes and the lame ram still atop the hill, and probably still shuddering back against the stone wall at the hill edge.

There is a membrane, white, cobwebbing between the skin and the flesh. A sort of caul. I was cutting the underside, you up the chest to the neck and around the knees, but it was not loosening. We hauled her onto her other side so you could continue around her neck, continue the strange collar you were picking. I continued along the belly, my blunt slice from the chest towards the udder. The udder was stinking, sour, a lilac-stained blue. A flaccid piece of flesh flopping to the floor. Lilac-stained blue, with a curded yellowing milkmass on her teats. Eventually my latex fingers felt a loosening pushing through the membrane, in around the deep belly the skin had started to go, and it was somehow easier on her right side. For an instant that stretch of membrane had held the mystery. It was the secretive plane where the sheep was no longer dead ewe, not yet mutton. Beneath the skin, sheepform shrinks to meatform. And the membrane, that silken slip of soul, had dissolved in our touch.

You have joined me on the belly, your knife is sharper and you are ahead, at the udder. I see, suddenly your knife carving through the udder, flapping it open to form a butterfly.

…

The day of the sheep market at Maam Cross, a ram had been on the boat coming in. The head tossing, it dragged its puffed-up new owner on a long rope around its horns. Its wool was clumped, yellow, with grease at the roots. Two hundred quid from Maam Cross. Most of the men go off the island for the market. Often they won’t come back in for days, sometimes weeks, particularly in winter their absence drags on long. Blaming a bad swell, they remain in their boots and jackets sat on that long bench, hunched, as if waiting, their glasses lining up along the lean breakfast table at Molloy’s. Weatherbound and waiting for nothing. Gnarling words between their teeth they are hammering out a scornful commentary that can only be spoken away from the island’s limits. Leaning their backs against the wall. Blaming the weather. In Molloy’s or one of the other reputed houses that seem to stand for this purpose only. Better under drink ashore than at sea.

There was another younger fellow on the boat eager to handle the ram. Pulling the jaw apart, peering in. What age’d you give him? Then, with his thumbs along the back, feeling the flesh lain under the wool. Tha’s a big fella for two hundred, like, you hope he’ll do the job, got a bit of go on him. But I’m now thinking they’re better calm. Across the rump a handgrip testing, squeezing. He’ll certain do the job, but you hope he’s not too skitty, a great hind, but not worth two hundred for the eating. Nor for much else, mind. Ay, but he’ll do the job. A thick hand measuring over the backside. A firm, testing, teasing grip. A grope. Rubbing up the thighs as if to warm me up. Working up between the legs. Gentler fellow, a bit gentler. I watched him, handling the ram like he once had me.

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It is autumn, and although the seasons here slip unnoticed one to the next, a burnishing has happened. Where this field used to stare out west over a green wave-shaped hillock marking the edge of the land, it is now an ochrous basin from which the sky looms.

The skin is coming away easier now. We have just to pull it back, the wool falling into our hands. I hold the legs out to the side to give you a better grip to pull against. At times it catches, but is loosed with a sharp nick of the knife. With one last pull at the neck it releases and we are holding the sheep’s skin between our four gloved hands, separate to the body, lain aside. The skin removed, our ewe so resembles the odd mutton carcass seen hanging in markets, or in the back of cold lorries. Lying intact, the marbled reds and purples cross-hatched with sinews, a model for anatomy class. The skin itself is lumped with meat, and with fat. You tell me that maggots will hatch and eat these remains, leaving it bare.

We dragged the carcass back to the pit – the ewe with her comic stiffjaw smile and pecked-out eyes. Only a pantomime ruff of wool remained, frilling around the head. That, a stub of tail and four white socks, one with green patches, becoming like those on a cricketer’s whites.

You dropped the weight of the skin into my hands, running off a list of instructions. Then you strode away. Reaching the far end of the field you glanced back and waved a jovial latex hand. I could just make you out removing the gloves, before leaping the gate and taking the late road southwards to the harbour.

Leaving me in this lost field one afternoon. And I had merely come to watch your thumbnails, crouching so close. I was so taken by your grimy thumbnails. On instructions, I rooted through the shed to find some two inch nails and a four by four board to stretch the skin on.

A low western sun is churning the landscape yellow, a wind picking up, and I am crouching in this field with a hammer nailing a sheepskin onto a four by four piece of ply, stretching it tight like a canvas.

The sea had lost all its colour, it wasn’t blue at all, it looked like a torrent of mud. It was making a hellish noise, really angry, and the children cowered.

I am still struck by my first reading of Véronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea: a steaming Sunday afternoon in a London backyard, breath barely drawn, eyes, edged with tears, clutching to the stark narrative.  Peirene Press’ adage is somewhat thus: “Two-hour books to be devoured in a single-sitting: Literary cinema for those fatigued by film.” (TLS) and Beside the Sea is exemplary.  One reads it in one breath, unwavering.  It is a tragedy.  Indeed it near’ obeys the three unities of Greek tragedy: time, place and plot. It is grim and yet so terribly beautiful that it stands also as a flawless work of art.

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Beside The Sea will be performed by Lisa Dwan in the Southbank Centre in March 2012.  I had the opportunity to see her dramatic reading of the monologue last July at Shorelines, Literature Festival of the Sea.  Her rendition of the novella was so apt, so terrible, as the French might put it, to mean both terrible and beautiful, that I am delighted to see it will be performed again.

Below: An abbreviated version of my original response.

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Petite, elfin, with a beautiful mouth stretching to smile on meeting, Lisa Dwan comes from county Athlone in the depths of Ireland.  The mouth is not immaterial, nor is her background:  Lisa is best known in the UK for her role in Samuel Beckett’s monologue, Not I, in which a disembodied Mouth, lit-up eight-foot above stage-level, performs an angst ridden monologue, a logorrhoea, an internal scream.

Although Bord de Mer was written and published as a novella, Olmi, dramatist and actress, has apparently also construed it as a dramatic monologue.  Written in the first person, present-tense the text gives itself fluently to theatre.  Lisa first performed Olmi/Hunter’s text, an abridged version of the novella, at the English launch of Beside the Sea, at the French Institute in 2010.  Tonight, sat on a chair beneath a spotlight, barely glancing at the sheets of paper in her hands, Lisa’s voice embodies this harrowing female character for a second time.

One cannot overestimate the heartstopping prowess of Lisa’a handling of the monologue, which commences with the mother’s words: We took the bus, the last bus of the evening, so no one would see us.   Directly launching the spectator into the intimate directness of one woman’s terror before the world and before the responsibility that comes with motherhood.  As Lisa performs, the parallel with Not I becomes evident – When they were both asleep it was hard for me.  The talking started all of its own in my head, I hate that, thinking is a nasty piece of work.  Recalling the buzzing suffered by Mouth:  …yes…all the time the buzzing…so called…in the ears… though actually not in the ears at all…in the skull… dull roar in the skull…  Lisa wowed for her performance of Not I in under ten minutes at the Southbank centre, and yet it is not so much the speed that wows but the capturing of an expression, of a consciousness, in the mere mumblings of a mouth.  Likewise tonight Lisa stuns.  Sat on a chair she becomes, through her reading alone – such is the art of theatre – that mother, those two boys, in that brown hotel room.  Beckett is cited as saying of Mouth: I knew that woman in Ireland.  I knew who she was – not ‘she’ specifically, one single woman, but there were so many of those old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, besides the hedgerows.  So, we recognise the figure on stage, as much in peripheral figures of society as in our own core.

A brief pause, before the reading flits to the final passages:

I decided to start with the the little’un first.

The mother smothers her two boys with the hotel pillows. Despite the dramatic intensity, heightened by Lisa’s rendition, the narrative is so tight, so engaged with the mother’s seeming detachment during the infanticide, that only with the poignant final paragraph does the act hit home:

I had two dead children. And them?  What did they have? 

I looked at them and I saw.  I saw something I’d never thought of, something I’d never imagined ever: Kevin’s face was turned towards the wall, and Stan’s towards the window.  They had their backs to each other.  They weren’t together, no, each had gone his separate way.  They weren’t joined together in death, they’d lost each other there.

And I screamed.

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Read my full response to Beside The Sea: Salon and Dramatic Reading here.

Read what The Guardian wrote about it here.

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Beside The Sea – Southbank Centre -7^th-8^th March 2012.

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Beside the Sea, Veronique Olmi
Translated by Adriana Hunter
Published by Peirene Press, London 2010.
ISBN: 978-0-9562840-2-0

Places are built of the stones that structure them, of the people that populate them.  Of the latter, there are some whose presence is so integral that they render the whole coherent. On visiting old haunts it reassures us and revivifies place to come across these figures: they are a testimony at once to time passing and to the continuity of place. George Whitman was one of these. He stood as one of the stones of Shakespeare And Company Bookshop

I first met him eight years ago. I was, I remember, daunted, petitioning somewhere-to-sleep on the back of a rumour; naïve, dreadlocked, likely barefooted… Then, a later occasion, another memory: George careering down the stairs, hammer in the hand, as I again begged a pillow to rest my head, a shout: “Are you published?!” Pasted on the bookshop walls a sign reads: Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise. And so, on these and many, many other occasions I was given a home. I remember too: during a particularly highbrow Shakespeare & Company Literary Festival, George sat with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, bookseller, publisher, of City Lights Books, on the bench outside Shakespeares sharing a bottle of wine. Humble then, who would have known, amidst the glamour of contemporary literati, that these were the real stars, the real literary figures, the visionaries.

One comes fast to understand that one’s individual relationship to person or place inscribes itself in that of a wider history, in a collective memory. George Whitman ran Shakespeare & Co. for 61 years. The scope of his presence is wide as the length of those years. So, pilgrims have marched from all over to visit the famed bookshop, to stay even, or work there. Where Shakespeare & Co. is the inn, George Whitman was the innkeeper. The bookshop: humble as an inn, dusty too and unchanged. An inn, but also a shrine. A structure standing in memoriam. To Shakespeare? Perhaps to Shakespeare, father of literature; or to the original Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop set up in the VIème by Sylvia Beach, where Ulysses was first published. Perhaps then in memorial to Shakespeare, to Sylvia Beach, to Ulysses, or to all the authors housed in the shelves of the bookshop, to the Beat Generation behind glass, or the Lost Generation with their own section. Perhaps too, to all the wanderers, writers and dreamers that have slept between those books, the tumbleweeds, as those that stay are known, blown in from the world over; or to those angels in disguise, the pilgrims that have walked through the doors.

So it was we took the aged red Peugeot 106 on surely its first overseas voyage to Paris Vème, and to Shakespeare & Co. And the trip, overnight from Norfolk, had all the traits of a pilgrimage. The modern pilgrimage, of course, occurs in petroleum-fuelled transport, depends on the whims of P&O ferries, and, minus staff and sandals, has to cope with bad traffic on the Périphérique. We were guided then, overcity and underground, by angels? to the Cimetière du Père Lachaise.

In the city of Paris, a great space has been carved to house the dead. With its own streets, tree-lined avenues and stumbling alleyways; with structures strutting high and low, some tended, others dilapidated; with its views over and above the city to the North; and where, to the South it sinks below the city’s heights to look out on shopfronts, traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, Père Lachaise is worthy of the term city. City, or citadel, walled shadow city within the city. A city in negative. So, after the service held in La Coupole, we walked, thronged behind the coffin through those shadowstreets.

The service was beautiful, quiet, original. The French drone of the Maître de Cérémonie lifted by readings and testimonies in English. Perhaps most harrowing of all was the joyful singing of You Are My Sunshine to end the ceremony. Prior to the inhumation – and, isn’t the French word, now quixotic, wonderful – a reading of Yeats’ poem: Sailing to Byzantium. Beneath winter-grey Paris skies, amidst grey tombs, on grey cobbles, a girl with red hair read:

…
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
…

The cemetery, the tomb, stands as a memorial in it simplest form, and Père Lachaise is already a heaving centre of pilgrimage. It is home to hefty literary types: Proust, Perec, Molière, and Paul Éluard, Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde. Pilgrimage is the act of inscribing oneself in archetype and ritual by re-enacting motions enacted over years. Walking a way others have walked, one is treading a path other soles trod, a road moulded by other feet, other dreams. The path becomes the measure, the sculpture, the shape in relief form of the pilgrimage. Self dissolves, singularity melds with unity.

George responded to his daughter Sylvia’s complaint, young, of being an only child – but, you have brothers and sisters all over the world. So she does. Those at the funeral were from many countries and spoke as many languages. Was it Georges Bataille who came up with the notion of une communauté de ceux qui n’ont pas de Communauté? So, George Whitman set up a place for this community-of-those-without-community, a home for exiles, wanderers, for dreamers, writers and existential orphans. Where better to do so, than in a bookstore in Paris? For, is not Paris the city of exiles? Is not literature the territory par excellence of exile? So, George, Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter, knew well.

George Whitman is remembered as a maverick, a bohemian, an eccentric. As the soul of independent bookshops. As a visionary. But, most of all, as father, friend and host. His hospitality shaped the inimitable quality of Shakespeare And Company.

Same immense, and unconditional, hospitality was showed to us by all at Shakespeare & Co. on our trip prior to Christmas to mourn, remember and celebrate George Whitman. This welcome read as a prayer: that in a world where the maverick, the bohemian, the eccentric feels ever threatened by extinction, George Whitman’s extraordinary and enlightened vision forge onward, shouldered by his daughter Sylvia and the other angels guided to those doors.

In Memoriam George Whitman – 12 december 1913-14 December 2011

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Thank you to all at Shakespeare And Company.

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Badaude has done a lovely illustration in memory of George Whitman, which can be found here.