And the Land Lay Still (23 page)

You heard another story about stones once, or did you read it? Memory was a confusing place of mist and time. This story was much older than yours, but you liked it, you felt it. It became you. Became in the sense of suited. Or maybe in the sense of became. Maybe it was the same story but on a different scale. Long ago back in the mist there was a giant. He was building a house in the mountains. He went down to the shore with a creel and collected a number of rocks for his house, and placed them in the creel. When it was full he swung it up on to his great back, but the weight was too much and the bottom of the creel broke and the stones fell into the sea as he swung it round, and that was how the Hebrides were formed.

Things fell into place. You might not have anything to eat on you, you might be hungry or wet or cold or tired or all of these things, but they were states of being, they weren’t responsibilities. And the states of being passed, one into another, and it amazed you to find that that was what they did. You wore out your boots and a farmer gave you his old ones. You needed a new coat and somebody in a cold, grey village found you one. These were gifts, not debts. Gifts were acceptable. You were hungry and there was a field of potatoes only waiting for a fire to bake them in, or a trout lying under
the bank of a burn waiting for your hand, or a squad of pheasants walking down the road, almost into your arms they would come, daft creatures too bonnie to know what the rock in your hand was for, or a hedgerow full of wild white raspberries to gorge yourself on. Redcurrants like gleaming jewels, fat blaeberries staining your fingers with their dark blood. Or you worked for a few days on a farm or some remote place where they needed some extra help, and sometimes there was money but usually there wasn’t, but always there was food and a place to wash and a place to sleep, though never a bed even if it was offered, you were far beyond beds by then. And food to take with you when you went on your way. Things fell into place.

You travelled light. Three pairs of socks, a change of underwear, a couple of shirts, a big jumper and a coat. Sometimes a bit more if you picked up some good items, sometimes less. The important thing was keeping your clothes and yourself as clean as you could. Some of the other men on the road were so dirty you got the stench of them even before you saw them. They’d lost all sense of themselves, they’d no dignity left. Washing and drying your clothes was hard in the winter. You offered to work in exchange for a washing and if the offer was rejected you went elsewhere or fell back on your own resources, making use of the shelters you found to hang things for days at a time. You used a particular territory for a few weeks, stashing things away till you needed them. There were endless possibilities of places to rest, places to wait, places to store, if you only took the trouble and time to look.

And you had all the time in the world now you didn’t have anything else. If you had nowhere to be you could be anywhere. Soap in a tin. A razor and a whetstone. A billycan. Your needs were pared down to the minimum. You didn’t have to ask for much, and your preference was to ask for nothing.

You went out into the world to leave the world behind. You went out into the open to find the places where you could be invisible and silent.

Silence. That was the best thing of all. Words were something else you didn’t need, written or spoken or heard. You talked if talk was necessary, letting the words go with care, the way you might release a butterfly or a pebble from your hand; but mostly you listened, picking up news of things that no longer concerned you then forgetting them, offering an opinion if it was sought but more and more you had less and less to offer. You were in retreat, like a monk, not like a soldier. Like a monk. You preferred to listen. You listened to birds, to beasts, to water. You chinked the stones together,
listening for their meaning. You learned the meaning of changes in the wind, the meaning of dogs when they barked or did not bark. Dogs loved you. Once, a man in Argyll near the end of a summer – the heat was still in the days but it was beginning to fade – could not believe how his collie, that would go like a mad thing for anybody that trespassed on his turf, rubbed and slumped against your legs and yearned to be clapped, and whined like a bairn when you stopped. I never saw that, the man said. Never saw the like o that wi that dug. That’s a strange power ye have on ye. And he didn’t like it, it was like a threat to him somehow, and he shook his head and said he had no work for you and so you left, and did the dog not try to follow till its master roared and it slunk back like a beaten thing, to forget your passing and to snarl and snap at the next stranger? And you turned your face to the road and went on.

Things fell into place. Down the road a mile or two you came on a gypsy camp set among trees by a burn, and the same thing happened, the dogs came out to bite you and they ended up licking your hand and competing for your attention. The men observed this and invited you in, the women made you sit and they fed you and gave you tea in a tin mug and offered you tobacco and you took the tea, and you stayed with them, listening to their stories and their songs and watching the dirty-faced barefoot bairns at play and there was no meaning in any of it. It stirred a memory in you but you did not look into that, and after a day or two you went on.

But before you left you counted the bairns, there were seven of them, and you reached into your pocket and brought out seven stones and put one into each outstretched hand. And two of them looked at what you had given and threw them away, and one put the pebble in his mouth and spat it out, and three collected more stones and began a game with them, and one, the smallest, watched you sullenly from under her black brows and clutched the stone in her fist and went away with it to some place on her own. And you were happy at what they had all done, together and separately, and most of all you were happy at the thought of the lassie who hid the stone away, though you didn’t know why. But her face came back to you for many days after that, as you walked on into the autumn of the year.

PART TWO

On a Saturday evening in the summer of 1950 Don Lennie walked into the Blackthorn Inn in Wharryburn at eight o’clock, as usual, and Jack Gordon was there at the bar, as usual: tanned, thin as flex, in light flannels, neatly pressed jacket and clean white shirt, with a pint of light ale in his hand. He nodded curtly and raised the pint to his mouth. Don ordered the same for himself. Their friendship – you could call it that – was based on a set of tacit understandings, one of which was that Jack’s need for independence prohibited the buying of rounds. He didn’t want to be in debt to anybody else, not ever, not even for twenty minutes. Don accepted this, as he accepted almost everything about Jack, including his dislike of being touched. They never shook hands at the start or end of an evening, for example. How Jack’s wife coped – with the touching, or the not touching – was anybody’s guess. Maybe he was different with her, but Don doubted it. Still, he’d been through a lot, Jack Gordon. You couldn’t blame him for having a few, what was the word, peccadilloes.

Straight up, without even a hello, Jack said, ‘Do you know one of the things that kept me going? Imagining this. I’d picture myself in a pub with a beer and I’d drink it inch by inch and lick the foam off my top lip.’ He enunciated very clearly, consonants clicking and popping with precision.

Don had heard this story before, or a version of it. He said, ‘I bet ye did, Jack.’

‘I’d imagine I’d had a weekend in the hills, Glen Coe or somewhere, just as I used to in the old days, and this was me with a pint of Scottish beer after, waiting for the bus from Fort William.’

Don lifted his own glass. ‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘The old days,’ he said, and drank to them.

‘And I usually thought of it being winter,’ Jack went on. ‘Snow on the tops, but the sky clear, the air dry and fresh. Sunny even. But cold. I tried to imagine feeling cold. Pretty difficult.’

‘Aye, it would be,’ Don said.

‘I’ve been thinking about this all week. What home meant.’

Don nodded. When Jack said he’d been thinking about something all week he probably meant it. Seven days, every waking moment. They both worked in the town of Drumkirk, three miles down the road. Jack worked in the sales and dispatch department of an engineering firm that made small parts for industrial machinery – some kind of overseeing role that involved checking other men’s work and a lot of form-filling – and Don reckoned you could probably go all day doing that and have your mind on something else. Not where he was, in Byres Brothers Haulage. He did what he’d done before the war and during it and what he’d probably do till he stopped working – servicing and repairing trucks and lorries. An office job like Jack’s was one thing, but at Byres Brothers you had to concentrate or something would jump up and bite you. Burn you, crush you, slice your fingers off.

‘It was home that kept me going really. Scotland. I dreamed about it, and when I woke up I thought about it. I tried to remember everything I could down to the finest detail. Mountains I’d climbed, rivers I’d fished, towns I’d visited. I thought of walks I’d done and I did them again.’

He paused, and Don wondered how Jack had had the time and the money before the war to do all that. That was one difference between them, money. Not that Jack was rich but he came from people who went away on holidays, trips to the Highlands, that kind of thing. It gave you a different perspective. Don had been in Egypt and Italy but he’d never been as far as Dumfries or Aberdeen.

‘I imagined a map of the country,’ Jack said, ‘and I filled it with all the counties, just like on the real map, in the right colours. Yellow for Perthshire, green for Inverness-shire, pink for Argyll. I’d list every major town, every football club, every football ground. Dates of kings and queens, battles. I could do all that while I was working. Clearing the undergrowth, digging, levelling the ground. It was like being in a kind of dream. You could almost dream yourself out of the pain and the heat and the hunger. Almost. We were like machines by that stage, we hardly knew we were real.’

Jack spoke very distinctly, but quietly too. The other customers couldn’t hear him. They wouldn’t want to. It was Saturday night, the war was five years over, they were trying to move on from it or
already had. But Don, standing next to him, could hear every word. Jack might almost have been speaking to himself but he wasn’t, he needed a listener. Not just anyone, but Don. For some reason he could say these things in his presence, things otherwise too rotten to be exhumed.

Don had read that other survivors from Japanese camps were bonded together because of the experience; there was a sympathy, an understanding between them that nobody else could share. But Jack was alone. He had a sister over the way at Slaemill, but Don didn’t get the impression they were close. Jack wasn’t close to anyone, maybe not even his wife – but anyway you couldn’t talk to a woman about the war, not the really deep, bad stuff, you couldn’t inflict it on her. So if Jack was going to open up to anybody, it would be to Don, over a couple of pints in the Blackthorn Inn on a Saturday night.

They caught the same bus every morning into Drumkirk. From exchanges they’d had at the bus stop, over weeks, months, years, Don had gradually come to know Jack, or some of him, grabbing morsels of information that he built into a kind of shape. Jack didn’t really volunteer intelligence about himself, it slid out of him bit by bit, reluctantly, painfully, as if he were boaking up wee sharp slivers of metal. And most of it was about the years between 1941 and 1945, when he’d been in the world but also absent from it. He didn’t say much about his life before or since the war: everything turned on what had happened to him in those years. And yet that very period was sometimes out of bounds, a space you trod gingerly round the edges of.

Ach well, everybody had places that were off-limits to others. Don had. Jack didn’t venture there, didn’t know about them. What he knew was that Don had also been a soldier, and that connected them. Don had had a very different war but he understood what it was like to come close to death, to survive.

They didn’t talk on the bus, they sat in separate seats and Don dozed while Jack didn’t. If Don opened his eyes Jack would be staring intently out of the window, as if he were trying to spot a rare bird. Don’s stop came first. He’d to be at his work for eight o’clock sharp. Jack had further to go but he didn’t start till half past the hour. When Don got on in the evening to come home there Jack
would be again, with his steady, watchful gaze, as if he’d been travelling all day scanning the countryside instead of writing out dispatch sheets. They’d say a few words then, maybe. Don had the impression that Jack was assessing him. When the bus reached their village of Wharryburn they’d walk in the same direction for a hundred yards before Don turned off into his street and Jack carried on up the brae. ‘Goodnight,’ Jack would say. ‘See ye the morn’s morn,’ Don would say. That was their routine. It was enough for two men to say that they knew each other.

Then one Saturday morning, as Don was going past Jack’s seat to get off, Jack said, ‘Fancy a pint in the Blackthorn tonight?’ and Don, not really having time to think about it, said, ‘Aye, all right,’ and Jack said, ‘Eight o’clock, then,’ as if there were no other time he could envisage being there, and that was how their weekly sessions had started.

Don felt he’d earned a drink or two after five and a half days at his work and an afternoon tending the garden. He’d have a thick slice of bread and jam and a cup of tea when he got home on a Saturday, then he’d be out there, digging or planting or weeding, wet or dry, hot or cold, it didn’t matter. At first Liz had been put out that he didn’t want his dinner when he came in, surely it was what a man needed, but he said if he ate a full meal he’d just want to sleep all afternoon. She fed wee Billy at the back of five while Don cleaned himself up, then he’d sit down at six for his tea. Liz cooked them a lamb chop each, with potatoes and a vegetable, followed by bread and margarine and plenty of tea. The chops were the highlight of the weekly menu. Afterwards Don would wash the dishes, read the paper while Liz put Billy to bed, then leave her listening to the Light Programme with a detective novel in her lap, and stroll down to the Blackthorn. A pint or two. He reckoned he deserved them.