Foxes, Gannets, and Burial Grounds

In which I go home

I am on a research trip. I am writing a particularly knotty manuscript. I say I am writing it whereas I have mostly spent parts of the last three years researching and living it, and now I try to write it, it eludes me most of the time. I know that every time something doesn’t work it’s because I’m avoiding saying what I don’t want to say. The knotty nature of this manuscript, combined with the knotty nature of reality makes it difficult to write. I have reminded myself that the back of the proof of Ava Anna Ada describes it as attuned to the knotty nature of reality, but sometimes unknotting reality sufficiently to write about it is the difficult part.

Two years ago, on the night of the summer solstice, my father died in a hospital bed in Bloemfontein, 5,799 miles away from London. Earlier that evening, I sat in my garden, burning things - I say things in an attempt to make this nonspecific, in what I am working on, I have had to name the things, and I have had to work out why I was burning things, and also why for a year after that, I set fire to many things - before going inside and dreaming of a fox - a fox I either befriended or that was stealing my food. I still cannot remember the dream as accurately as I would like to and because of this, I have puzzled over the fox and why it came to me at the same moment as, in a near vertical line north to south on the map, my father clawed at his oxygen mask. In the depths of a difficult winter when London was beset by grey for days at a time, I knew I had to spend this year’s solstice home in Scotland, back where my grandmother’s family came from. Four days ago I travelled by train, boat and bus to a remote peninsula on the west coast of Scotland.

Here, the village lies at the bottom of a hill, Bute just over the water. The big house sits back from the road, cradled by woodland. I know stories about this house and those woods. My grandmother telling me about days spent playing in the trees, mornings swimming to Bute and back, her father rowing alongside her to keep her safe. My grandfather told me about carrying a coffin up the hill, worrying it would slip, up precarious steps to the family burial ground high above the village. I came here with my mother once, she was newly heartbroken and I was 12, learning to be a moody teenager. I remember the water, and the boredom. There was, is, nothing to do here. I sometimes feel in the city I am easily entertained by the endless parade of things to do. I worry about this. I feel like a child, high on sugar, sucking on culture, hoping for absolution. I think we found the graveyard then, although that memory has become worn by revisiting it too often. I think we found it, I think the gate was locked; I came here this time to find it again, and I think also because I hoped that in patching the past back together in a rough approximation of what was, I might tether myself more firmly to the present after losing my mother.

Yesterday, I climbed the steep hill out the village, as the houses narrow so does the road, making it a precarious walk. I ignored the gathering clouds and the thickening air. A large truck pulling logs overtook me as the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. Trees obscured the view until I climbed higher, the peninsula coming into full view, the sky lowering, slanting sunlight picking out the riot of greens, so many shades of pine and bracken, moss and fern; the scent of the newly damp earth, rain by now pounding itself on the hood of my flimsy anorak, everything so fully alive as I looked for the dead. I got to the top of the hill, and had not found the path leading to them. I began to walk back towards the village, the truck that had pulled logs earlier, passing me on the way back down. A cyclist struggled with the incline, his wheels zigzagging across the road. I knew the graves were further down the hill and I’d missed the path and I was not giving up, I was not returning to the house until I’d found them, I was soaked by then, my wide jeans flapping against my calves, it was wet but it was warm, cracks of thunder in the distance, and then, to my left, a path, worn stone steps almost hidden by the moss eating its way over them, I had found, not them, but at least the way there, and then I was along the path, tree roots pulling at my feet, I saw the rusting iron railings, the yews forming an arch, the heavy gate would not move, I lifted it, realising too late it had lost one of its hinges, I walked through the arch, branches touching my face, later I will discover midges have bitten me all along my hairline, and I am in the burial plot then, one wall covered by plaques to my grandmother’s siblings, to Fergus, to Kenneth, to Sheila, to her father, Arthur, her mother, Dorothy, stones for Aja, for Samuel, a recent grave for her youngest brother, Alan. They are all there. Men who in life travelled the world, returning to pace up and down the sitting room, gifting me money from other countries, its currency of value for the exotic more than anything else, all memorialised here. The rain eases, across the peninsula the clouds break. They are all here. My grandmother is not. A small stone on the perimeter wall, I bend to it, painted with a robin, I pick it up, turn it over, for Annie.x inscribed on the back, and dates, corresponding to someone I did not know was dead. This is what happens, when your family is wounded by schisms, there are things you do not find out at the time. I am there amongst the dead and I find I am suddenly weak, weak from all of it; all of it is the last two years, is writing and living and the endless piecework of life, all of it is the effort of trying to articulate any of it, all of it is that they were alive and this place was alive with them and now they are not and all that remains is this, this rectangle of land, overgrown now, and a gate with a lost hinge and one day, I will be here too. Outside, a cairn. I walk to find a stone for it, return and place it on the top, for Louise, I say, not caring if a stray walker hears me talking to myself. The thunder by this time presents a very real threat. The irony of this is not lost on me as I leave the trees as quickly as I can, find my way down the hill, stopping to buy a bottle of wine and then shelter in the local heritage centre, a single room lined with old photographs and full of stories donated by people long dead, of a time, long gone, when the village thrived and the steamer connected this outpost to Glasgow. I become confused, forget when I am as often happens when I’m in the past, more conduit than flesh.

Evening, I sit on the wide kitchen window sill watching the sea, one fleck of white separates itself from the waves, as if a crest has risen from the sea. Soon, the sky is thick with them, they are not waves, but birds, rising in the air, clear now of the pressure from earlier. The rise higher and higher, surf on the thermals, before positioning themselves carefully, diving down to hit the water, the splashes audible through the open window. I watch as one by one they all fall. I have seen birds fall from the sky before, but not like this. One winter, when we lived on a farm, I walked the children home through frozen fields as over the next field, pheasants flew, a barrage of shots and they fell, pirouetting in some violently choreographed dance. I said to my son I thought it beautiful, he said only from this field, in the next, it would not be the same. He was five, and right. If the gannet hits the water the wrong way, they’ll break their necks. I watch them rise to the surface of the water, they all get it right.

It is peaceful here. The kind of peace I have been craving. The kind of peace that would usually have me chewing through my own arm in an attempt to escape it. After this, I will continue to unknot the knots. Maybe I’ll even be able to write some of it. Lately, I have been doubting my own sentences and ability to construct them. Maybe instead I’ll walk up the hill again, lift the gate, sit for a while with the dead.