Greendeed
Strellitz leaves his car down by the pier, where he can hear the recurring prolonged slosh of the waves against the breakwater wall only a few yards away. It’s very early in the day, and as the place is deserted, he goes over to the ancient latrine built into the thick concrete wall to have a much-needed piss.
Looking down, he sees the sea surge up the latrine’s keester and back down again with a great roar. The wind whooshes through the concrete windows as he pees. He keeps an eye on the Fraserburgh skyline a couple of miles along the coast, while carefully watching out for retrograde urinary splashup. Shaking his stroup as dry as circumstances would permit, Strellitz notices with a wry smile how the old Stasi tattoo has faded with the passing years.
Across the turf, he opens the door of the old net-store without being observed. The re-cycled railway carriage feels snug and secure, full of nostalgic smells of tarry rope and old wood, fish-scales and engine oil. He pushes past a fishing-net someone’s hung from the roof to dry, then after a rapid glance through the periscope to make sure nobody’s approaching, Strellitz leans against a partly stripped-down engine bolted to a sturdy bench over by the shed’s seaward wall. The whole assembly moves effortlessly on the runners, and when the hatch-cover drops, he clambers down a long gang-ladder to the floor thirty feet below. Pulling on a rope, Strellitz replaces both hatch-cover and engine-bench. The cavern is vast, extending to the east under the harbour, and to the north-west all the way under the old meal-mill.
A familiar smell of oil and paint, then the throb of slow-revolving power emanating from a green-painted generator in the centre of the space, flanked by a six-metre long lathe and milling machine.
2000 years still to go, smiles Strellitz, briefly casting an eye over ex-Holy Emperor St.Tony in his frosty glass-fronted KryptocryoFolder3.1. Nearby stands the metal sea-chest containing the saint’s books, girly magazines and personal effects, along with a lorry-sized container full of clothes, food concentrates, expensive wines and medicines.
There’s a clattering sound as the cave-ravens register Strellitz’s approach with beady blinking eyeing-up and muted caws. They stay where they are on the railing surrounding the wide screen of the bird / dolphin tracking & control console, looking at him. I haven’t time to talk, he thinks. I need to have a word with Greendeed.
At this stage it would be counterproductive to wonder where Greendeed’s quantum singularity is, although, Strellitz remembers, relevant local time was 1938 in the causation reticulum, whatever that means in the grand scheme of things.
Strellitz goes over to the QUASI machine, which resembles a long wooden chest of drawers, taking up much of the south wall of the cavern. Each of the drawers measures only about a hand’s breadth across, but the depth inside is another matter. Strellitz finds the drawer he wants, carefully adjusts the large vernier chronodial, and pulls gently on the knob. A fluttering as though a thousand skylarks had sprung out of the slim aperture, then a veil of cobalt violet streams across his eyeballs. The sensation of a muttered conversation too low or too quiet to make out the language, never mind the sense, but sharp, ejaculatory, emphatic. Cobalt violet cools to blue, and he has a distinct feeling of actual physical cold behind his forehead. The vision clarifies, and an elderly man can be seen, in his bee suit, puffing his smoke-bellows at the bees raging round him in the sunshine.
“Paulie,” whispers Strellitz. “Can you hear me?”
“Eh?” Greendeed looks up sharply, perturbed.
Strellitz tries again. “I was wondering about the Greek lady, Barbara Kana. She was the wife of the laird, Thomas Gordon, who fought in the war of independence against the Turks in the 1820’s. They came back to live in Cairness House just up the road. One of the books in your collection has her name on it, and I’d like to find the next one in that series. Do you happen to know where it is?”
But Greendeed was fading, still looking around angrily, then abruptly resuming his work at the hive, the smoke spurting and swirling. The singularity was contracting, smoky darkness squeezing the vision into nothingness until it closed with a noise like a quiet cough.
Strellitz replaced the drawer. On an impulse, he spun the dial again, pulled open an adjacent drawer, and
The mystery of the Tailor Shop Automata
Trailing through Maitland’s in Fraserburgh behind his mother, Memus44 became fascinated by one of the tailor’s dummies, a lanky girl with knee-length skirt and woolly jumper. He looked back just in time to see the figure watching him, and was sure it winked at him. “Mum…”, said Memus44. But she was already hauling him through the swing-door and down the rainy street to where Greendeed was waiting in his old Austin.
Strellitz gives one more spin of the dial.
Scintilla
It is early. Steely light brings a cool hard gleam to the high tide lapping at the wrack-covered sand. Ari Noble gets out of his old car on the turf at the pier’s root, where he can hear the recurring long wash of the North Sea against the breakwater wall. He closes the car-door carefully, but it still sounds like an intrusion.
Ari crosses the grass to the ancient urinal built into the thick wall, and standing looking down in the middle concrete-slabbed stall, he watches the green water surge up the latrine’s vertiginous keester and back down again with a great roar, while a freezing wind rushes through the pillbox-style windows.
Unlocking the railway carriage door, Ari gathers up his old net, whose original colour has long since faded from green to pale gray. The store feels like a refuge, with its nostalgic smells of creosote and engine oil. The net is not quite dry, but with some difficulty he stuffs it into a big canvas bag.
Ever the outsider, Ari keeps his boat tied up in the old section of the harbour. Few people go there now, other than the brave village boys who like to swim in the harbour waters in summer, jumping from the crumbling cement steps into the freezing sea. Every year, winter storms spill yet more rubble from the pier’s core, so now whole sections of the concrete surface are cracked and tilting.
Slinging the heavy bag over his shoulder, Ari walks carefully round to where his nineteen-foot Zulu is moored, her sail lashed securely round the mast. Along the curve of the pier-edge on either side of the mooring, ancient busby-shaped iron bollards stand like sentinels, each one covered with a thick coat of flaky rust.
By the time Ari has everything ready and steers the boat through the harbour mouth, the sun is shining. He stops the engine and hoists the sail, heading out eastward.
Looking to port: clear water with the ultramarine blue-green of depth. To starboard, the same. No visible sign of fish, and no birds diving. Then, a solitary raven overhead. The bird turns, scanning the water, and as Ari looks up, its eye flashes in the sunshine.
The North Sea’s waves today are slow and glassy, with a linear ripple passing down the clear trailing edges of each chilly wave.
He shoots the net over the starboard side.
Transparency of the water is relative, like multiple sheets of window-glass in a stack, becoming darker and greener, more magical too. Ari knows that at a distance below his boat equivalent to just a dozen paces on dry land, the light would be dim and the pressure intolerable. Still further down, the stones and wrack resting on a layer of fine sand present an ever-present danger to his net.
From two miles off shore, the village can be seen clearly in the morning light. Ari is daydreaming, but part of his mind is aware of the weather on the horizon, alert for the sudden squall that can spell disaster.
A flight of little birds comes into view. Swooping past him, they hold their formation. Seven, plus one. Ari realises with a shock that they are in the shape of the Great Bear constellation, the pointer for the North Star used by seafarers in the northern hemisphere for thousands of years.
The boat is drifting very slowly, since there’s no longer any wind, and the sea has become extraordinarily calm. Ari’s thoughts are becoming as glassy as the sea, and he feels the air cool and whispering with each intake of breath.
He remembers a scene from childhood: grandmother Maria is saying, “Listen to the swans, Aristo. Catch the sound of their wings!”
Slowly, as though in a trance-like state, almost unwillingly, Ari turns his gaze upwards again to the northern sky. A feeling of complete dislocation from reality now sweeps over him, for a group of large birds is approaching, long-necked, with massive wingspan, making the creaking noise of swan-flight.
His grandmother’s voice comes back to him: “The sound, Aristo. Catch the sound!” He counts the birds: the number is significant.
There is more to the swan-sound than can readily be perceived without effort. Within the creaky assemblage of turbulent squeaky vortices he can make out the quiet rushing of smooth laminar airflow over feathers, and the strophic precision of each wing-stroke now becomes apparent.
The swans pass over the boat, their reflections flashing from the surface. Ari feels a peculiar cold sensation travelling upwards behind his eye-sockets. There must be some strong meaning in this, he is thinking. The swan-sound is a key. But what is being unlocked?
He is flying; straight up like a bird in flight, Ari sees the cold North Sea shrink and angle beneath him as he heads south over Europe, time unreeling until finally he’s back with his family in a small village on the Peloponnesian coast, north of Monemvassia.
Chania’s pale gold sand in the summer heat. A few flat droplets of dark oil-spill are never far away on the water’s surface. He sees himself as a child, running full-tilt over the boulders at low tide, reading the rough stones like a story-book as they flow under his feet, while his grandmother watches, dumb with fright.
A jerk on the rope transmits itself to the boat, which judders and weaves, slowing as the hawser pulls out a few coils from the small winch amidships.
Ari leaps into action, releases the brake on the winch a notch or two, brings the boat round with an oar and pulls the lever gently to draw in the net. Hoping for fish, he sees a glint below the surface, but the net is much too heavy. The wind has dropped, and although the sun shines brightly, there is something very strange about the world.
At first Ari can’t believe what he sees.
A dark golden hand heaves into sight and breaks the surface, dripping and rippling through the water. He gazes dumbly for a long moment, then the winch brings up a life-size female figure beautifully made in bronze. Ari takes a boathook to lift the bottom end of the net close to the gunwale. Even with the aid of the winch, it takes an almost superhuman effort to get the heavy object aboard, somehow managing not to capsize. His mind is swirling like oil in choppy bilgewater.
The fisherman is wrestling with a deep sense of disbelief, but while the Zulu drifts in the waves, he carefully disentangles the statue from the net’s braided cords.
Exhausted and panting, Ari leans back against the mast, sea-water dripping from his jacket. Fortunately his iPhone has escaped a soaking.
“Aristo!”
Ari stares at his mobile in astonishment, realising he hasn’t yet pressed the green button. And nobody here ever uses the vocative form of his Greek name; even his wife calls him Harry.
Ari Noble looks up to see the statue glaring at him.
“Yiayia? Maria?” he gasps, while his mobile clatters to the floor planking.
“My name is Scintilla!” she cries in a hoarse, brazen voice.
Ari is struggling to understand not only the archaic sound of her Greek, but the Ionian dialect with its unexpected vowels and unusual constructions, when she suddenly grasps his arm, and with inhuman strength thrusts him right over the side of the Zulu. Again that rasping metallic voice: “You have to die, Aristo!”
Ari is flailing in the water, desperately trying to get away.
“It is your fate, decided long ago. The Pythian priestess at Delphi proclaimed this. It has been a long time, but I have caught up with you. This much you may know: when I was raised from the wreck by your great-grandfather and his sponge-diving friends at Antikythera, they threw me back into the sea, and abducted my two sisters, automata like me. Yes, we were made in the workshop of Hero, in Alexandria. Hero had studied all the books of Archimedes. And he wanted that little machine of his! My sisters, Glykopyrrola and Propophola and I had only just managed to track it down. Since that robbery and abduction, I have been walking, walking. Waiting to catch up with all the sons and grandsons of those foolish men.”
Ari is spluttering as the bronze hand brings him up to the surface.
“You walked? Not across the sea bed?”
Splash: Down he goes again.
Up one more time: Splutter.
“From Greece? And you know my name?”
“Those are my instructions from the oracle. Aren’t these the fabled Tin Islands? Are we not among Hyperboreans? But my mechanisms need no rest. Certainly there were helpful dolphins from time to time. Remarkably often, in fact.”
Scintilla plunges the drowning man back under the surface with a merciless look, her copper-coloured irises glittering in the sunshine. Ari dimly hears her shout, “Kiri sute gomen!”, but can make nothing Greek of it in his few remaining moments of consciousness.
Darkness closes over Ari’s eyes and he becomes flaccid in the toils of the wine-dark sea. Exhaustion has him, and he knows within a very few seconds he will have to take that final breath which will destroy everything he’d ever hoped to achieve.
Suddenly the metal hand tightens its grip even further, the pain bringing consciousness back to Ari’s hypoxic brain. He opens his mouth wide and takes an enormous breath, bracing himself for a final convulsion.
Air!
Scintilla lands him on the boat’s floor with a negligent thump, as though she’d caught a large but not very appetising fish.
Still gasping for breath but recovering slightly, Ari’s vision clears sufficiently for him to see the bronze automaton hunched over his iPhone with obvious enthusiasm.
“Nice, very nice, Aristo!” she croaks, looking up reluctantly.
Ari is shaking, but concentrates very hard. “W- what? Oh, you’ve found my pictures of Delphi? We - we were there on holiday many years ago….. Electronics – do you know about that?”
“Mm, I see a ruined place that is a little like the sacred site. Moving images, well well. But this is wonderful – these tiny screws on the back – excellent! How did you make these? Hero would be interested. You really have to meet him! Hmm, Photonics actually. Quartz crystals, all that. For the tunnelling of the quanta, sea water is not no worrying matter.”
Under the stress of events, Ari is rapidly remembering his Greek vocabulary and syntax. Double negatives are perfectly OK, he recalls.
“S – Scintilla? Is that your name? Look… I need to catch some fish, my family is hungry. I must go home, perhaps you would like to eat with us?”
Scintilla laughs. “Ari, you foolish man, I have no need of food!
“But look. When I take you to Alexandria, I will send to Delphi to intercede for your life. Or perhaps there is a different interpretation of the oracle concerning you. For it does happen. And you are a powerful philosopher, are you not?”
She stretches over the gunwale and paddles one hand in the sea. Ari fancies he can hear a low hum, and the water round her wrist is rippling energetically. Almost immediately a large shoal of mackerel surfaces near the boat, and Ari shoots his badly rumpled net overboard. Soon he has a boxful of fish, flipping and slapping.
Strellitz is already at the mooring when they enter the harbour. He catches the rope, and makes it fast to a rusty bollard.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne had pitched up next to Liddel & Scott’s massive Shorter Greek Thesaurus; Lancelot Hogben’s Mathematics for the Million and Dangerous Thoughts were resting near the Dalai Lama’s Tantra in Tibet: the Writings of Tsong Ka Pa; travel books on Rome, Umbria and the Peloponnese jostled uncertainly with treatises on gardening, logic and the Calculus along with a Catalogue of Tools & Materials from Rudolf Dick. On an upper shelf a dozen ancient medical text-books, in some cases dating back to 1963, were sprinkled at random among the shelves, as though they’d been consulted on some diagnostic occasion long ago and subsequently been put back any old how.
Lafcadio Hearn and Piero della Francesca rubbed shoulders incongruously with Frank Auerbach and The Scottish Colourists, who in turn seemed amicable neighbours of Raphael, Degas, Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Leonardo, and Gombrich’s various books on art history and illusion found themselves next door to Sacconi’s ‘The ”Secrets” of Stradivari’, where they seemed content enough. Stephen Spender was entirely at home with a 19th century family bible on one side of him and a slim monograph with illustrations of The Brancacci Chapel in Italian on the other, but then a book by David Hockney was seen keeping company with an enormous study of Vermeer. A first edition of An Outline of Fractures was next door to A Handbook of Shingon Esoteric Buddhism; a well-worn leather-bound copy of Milton’s Works nestled cosily beside The Tao of Sex; the BBC’s Italiano dal Vivo in vicino Italo Calvino: Cities. Then came Teach Yourself Hindi, close to The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, Lockhart’s Anatomy of the Human Body and Japanese Joinery, John Nunn’s Respiratory Physiology, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, The Greek Dialects in the original 1875 edition by C. D. Buck, Menno van der Veen’s Modern High End Valve Amplifiers, a series of books in Italian on painted marble statues, Etruscan gold jewellery and Russian icon painting, then the current Screwfix Catalogue, some old copies of The Journal of Consciousness Studies and those few numbers of a collection of The British Journal of Anaesthesia which had so far escaped being recycled into Memus44’s paper-making project.
Oil and watercolour paintings filled what little space remained on the walls, together with a large series of seemingly unrelated notes, sketches and drawings pinned randomly here and there.
Shaman
“‘On the third day they took me into the forest and left me, while the vision-inducing effects of the endurance poison gradually diminished. I sat in a small clearing, watching the evening light dim and listening to the sounds of the birds and the leaves high up in the trees where they could catch the wind. As it grew dark I heard the soft pad and crackle of the approaching jaguar and could sense her breathing. I was sitting with my back against the rosewood tree we hold sacred, looking out into the gloomy ever-moving world of vague shapes. Just as I began to smell the beast, she too caught my scent and the crackling and soft breathy sounds stopped. Then, a low growl. A rush, an impact, everything picks me up and the whole world with it, the forest itself is shaking violently. I can feel my bones crack and splinter, the close fierce pitiless proximity of the cat, and as the pain fades, a deep affection suddenly sweeps over me for an animal – for someone - for whom I am only food. At this moment the jaguar is the whole world for me. It is time to die in this new world which has been re-defined in a way I could never have imagined.
“‘I do not know why I lived through that night, nor do I know how I live to this day. My left arm is withered and useless, yet the boys do not mock me. My hair is wild, but the women look away in respectful silence. For my mind and voice are clear. The wind blows through my vision, my knowledge penetrates the mountains and caves and rivers. I dream of how it was that night with her, the black jaguar with the soft pelt, and I run my fingers along the old scars. The loss of an arm seems a small thing, by comparison.’”
Jazz
HMS Campbeltown was a fine-looking Type 22 frigate, powered by four Rolls Royce aircraft engines, each one inside its own horizontal steel wardrobe, the enclosure being intended to restrain the bits if anything happened to break, as the Chief Engineer put it.
They were welcomed aboard the ship at Aberdeen by Captain Thomas, an impossibly handsome man of about thirty-five, with a silver telescope under one arm, in accordance with Royal Naval tradition. Young sailors, some female, stood around gamely, chatting politely as they’d obviously been instructed. While the guests were attending to a substantial provision of horses’ necks, G&T and white wine, the order came through to weigh anchor immediately and set a course up the north-east coast to Fraserburgh.
Captain Thomas had last seen Scintilla in Siena a year or so before, where she was working as a tour guide. He hadn’t forgotten her intriguing manner of talking away airily and passionately, forever damning Florentines individually and collectively, all the time letting her hair and scent blow into his face as they all stood in a little group gazing over a low wall towards the ancient town. Deliberately provocative, he thought at the time, not minding it at all, trying to make out her dark eyes with their copper-coloured irises behind the shades.
The captain and Scintilla were the first couple on the dance floor, and the Lab-Raiders were swinging with a vengeance. Stabs of piano chords from Strellitz outlining the harmony, Bogindollo’s bass in minimalist mode underscoring the changes, Curare Jim Justinhaugh on tenor sax. Memus44 on guitar was skimming long fast runs, plummy emphatic notes with an elegant, non-legato sound.
Ex-Holy Emperor St. Tony, standing in for their regular drummer, was looking a little puzzled. He’d responded well to Strellitz’ one-to-one identity-reprogramming therapy, though, and tonight the Holy Tony was playing an Ethiopian bell-bunch with quasi-religious fervour, praising the Lord with three hundred little bells and other tiny clappers strung on a good thick bush of bog myrtle.
As soon as the Lab-Raiders stopped for a break, Memus44 made a signal, and led the way down the ladder to where Ari Noble was waiting in the Zulu. They were nearly at the shore, half-way along the bay between Sandhaven and Fraserburgh, when they heard the Campbeltown’s engines starting.
China, Russia or North Korea? Even Memus44 had no theories to offer, as they watched the ship disappear into the gathering darkness.
In the meal-mill’s negotiating suite, Memus44 sinks his final draught of Chasse Spleen. There seems to be a crescendo of the tinnitus which has plagued him for the last ten years. He slides unconscious to the dusty floor.
Strellitz and the others carry him over to the old Stasi guillotine. After careful positioning, Strellitz presses the stainless-steel catch, and the guillotine blade smacks down. With a sombre expression, he reaches up to turn off the video camera, then with a slight grin at the others, raises the blade from its position an eighth of an inch from Memus44’s neck.
“Right, chaps,” said Strellitz, “let’s get busy”.
Four cannulae, one to each carotid artery, one to each internal jugular vein. The bypass machine started to pump, and they gently lifted Memus44 and slid the inflatable bath underneath his unconscious body. Having placed a large-bore cannula in a vein in Memus44’s forearm, Curare Jim Justinhaugh injected a judicious amount of alfentanyl, some propofol with a little ketamine, followed by pancuronium to minimise shivering and facilitate intubation. He ventilated the paralysed Memus44’s lungs for a few minutes using a gas mixture from his miniature Boyle’s machine, smoothly inserted a Mackintosh laryngoscope and visualised the glottis by lifting the tongue and epiglottis forwards. A soft cuffed endotracheal tube was inserted past Memus44’s vocal cords into his trachea. A thin catheter went accurately into his left radial artery.
Once everything was secure, the rubber bath was inflated and cold water piped in, along with bagfuls of slushy ice brought in by Scintilla from the kitchen. In return, Justinhaugh handed her a sample of arterial blood, which she took over to a mini-lab analysis machine, pausing to squirt a drop or two on the termination documents and death certificate.
After an hour, Memus44’s core temperature hit 20 degrees Centigrade, his heart having arrested some time before.
Zooming like a labrador
down from the stratosphere
just above the old Sandhaven pier
I can see the spires of the starlit city
out beyond the breakers
But
Finally a doppler-shifted dolphin spies me
takes me in tow and phew it was cold’n’wet
but still it was friendly so we flaked out on smoked kippers
yom it was luvverly mmm have you ever been pebbled on a beach out beyond Aberdour pellucid waters breaking lift you as you lounge like a youngster
in the briny unsurprising sand maybe but blimey it gets in surprising places finally the flook pond when the tide is turning and the sand is drifting up between your toes you try not to hit with a flook stabber as you lunge missed again the fishy flounces off curls his peripheral periphery making much of turboturbulence and creating particulate obstacles to visualisation
Copyright © Donnie Ross 2010
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