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bobzopa · 2 years

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CURSUM PERFICIO

CURSUM PERFICIO:

Dawn served only to backlight intricate patterns on the inside of the car’s windows where the dead of night had turned breath to frost, leaving behind snapshots of silver devils in white cloaks dancing in the dark to a silent band of demons.

Coughing hurt; jarring a rib cage that for hours had been digging into the handbrake while he drifted in and out of sleep. He had dreamed; of white lines, oncoming headlights and, for some reason, putrid rooms of peeling wallpaper and rotten wood, wherein a long-dead schoolteacher who smelled of lily of the valley and lavender praised his composition and apologised for having to break his hands.

Hauling himself painfully into a sitting position, he reached down to pull a small lever that brought the back of the seat up to meet him. The engine whinnied for several seconds before catching; he turned on the fan to clear the windscreen, flexing calf muscles and restoring circulation to his feet while he searched pockets for cigarettes.

The low morning sun looked broken; dissected by a cutlass of cloud that made it appear as if the bottom half no longer joined up precisely to the top. And it bled, beetroot cold over the frigid knob of Quinag and skeletal Ardvreck Castle, staining the tops of eager rills riding on a brisk westerly across Loch Assynt.

Earliest memory… disjointed… tin bath in front of a log fire; Mother collecting water in a metal bucket from a pump near a horse-trough… a scalded foot, blistered…. The day the sky turned green….

The fuel gauge showed less than a quarter full, he left the engine running and climbed out into a world tasting of wild things; cold, rapacious and bellicose, it squared up to him, challenging, intimidating; questioning his fitness to become part of this place.

He inhaled the cold along with the cigarette smoke. He should have been hungry, but he wasn’t, nor did he feel inclined to drink. The pristine waters of the Loch just metres away induced nothing in him but admiration for their clarity and timelessness. It had been here all along, waiting, expecting him; even before he knew of it.

A thousand kilometres away, a grey dog and a grey woman would be waking. One of them would sense an empty space, ponder on it for a second then conclude, ‘It is what it is’ before allowing thoughts to turn inward where wayward recollections trapped in tangled ganglia puzzled over the meaning of clouds.

‘This must be beautiful in the summer.’

He spoke to himself in his father’s tones. The sun had climbed a little, yellowing; reeds danced at the water’s edge where shallows tickled rough sand and small stones.

‘Today, then!’ He brought to mind the date and said it out loud.

He wished he felt hungry; hungry for anything - food, sex, music, a game of chess...

‘I can do something - or I can do nothing,’ he announced, his voice a creaking door.

Doing nothing would be ultimately more painful and would demand more self-control… more will power - more than he had, probably, and so he would end up doing... something. He deflated, ‘Better to do something then, isn’t it?’

A playground; puddles after a shower, the smell of wet nettles, fluffy white clouds hovering over the sea, chalked hopscotch squares, Rosie-May Nugent’s bright red sandals and the rude intrusion of a teacher’s whistle calling them into line for the ordered march back into corridors of cabbage, sweat and primary colours.

‘Do your writing,

take your time,

make your letters sit on the line!’

Small islands with tall trees sat out in the waters of the Loch. Some of the trees were clearly dead; skeletons… how long had they been gone? No more seeds, no leaves, home to nothing now but the ghosts of birds and grubs; defiantly clinging to the past, refusing to fall into the waiting arms of Mother Earth to be recycled.

He had first seen this place on the cover of a People’s Friend magazine in his Mother’s room at the complex and felt some kind of instant attachment. It was only a sketch, but it mattered, somehow… stark and remote. The contours of those hills meant something to him. Had he belonged here in a past life? Or was it a premonition?

Or both?

Mother had needed a magnifying glass to read her magazine, dry macular degeneration. He wished he had offered to read the stories to her, she might have liked that. He wished he hadn’t made her cry when he was young. She had been proud of him - and the prouder she had become the more ashamed he had been.

He sat on a stone, shrinking himself to make a smaller target for the wind. Some of the rills far out on the Loch were whitecaps now. Rills… Rhyl. There had been rills in Rhyl. He had lived near Rhyl once, in the North Wales his father called home.

The interior of the bus was thick with eye-stinging cigarette smoke. Across the aisle sat a woman with wobbling white tripe in her shopping bag, she smiled without warmth at his attention. The bus stopped, and two teddy boys got on, Woodbines hanging, Hollywood-style from their mouths; indolent and intimidating, they added to the cloud. Mother gripped his hand and looked away as they swaggered up the aisle.

He knelt and trailed fingers in the shallows of the Loch’s edge, raising them to his lips, baptising them, tasting frost in the virgin water.

‘Are you here Sue?’ He called into the wind, his voice echoless and flat.

His sister had spoken to him at a séance. Of course, she could be here, time and distance are as nothing to those who… She would know he was here; she was watching. She had said she was watching over him. She would know… why he was here. She answered with a question.

‘Are you sure?’

Her voice… her laugh….

‘Yes’

‘… Only it’s not as if you can change your mind, y’know?’

‘No, I know.

He had practised until the guitar strings felt like the bars of an electric fire against his raw fingers. ‘Raspberry Ash’ - lead, rhythm, bass, drums and keyboards; he had bleached his hair ghost-white. Night was a world of tortured feedback from slave-driven amplifiers; ringing ears, nosebleeds; screaming into the sweltering abyss beyond the lights, searching for someone to love the unlovable…

An eagle circled, kite-like, black against the cyan. The wind had faded to intermittent gusts, like mischievous spirits tugging at his coat, whispering in his ear and taunting him.

‘Bet you won’t…’

‘I will!’

And for the first time he realised he truly meant it; and with the realisation came absolution. Nothing… nothing at all mattered any more.

He would never have a stroke or a heart attack. The pain in his shoulders and hip would get no worse; he would not go blind, or deaf, or have feet amputated. There would be no accident to hurt him - and he would never hurt anyone.

They shall grow not old…’

‘I own nothing!’ He shouted up to the eagle.

A rough and oaken yoke fell from his shoulders. He thought of walking back to the car, taking out the keys and throwing them far into the Loch, but... it was no longer his car - they were not his keys - anymore. He supposed they would recover the vehicle and it would get sold and she….’

It felt as if he were walking on mattresses, exhilaration like the early days of love - was that it? Was it the same serotonin and dopamine that had struck him out of the blue, how many times? …One, two, three…. four… four times? Was that all? There had been others but… good grief, falling in love only four times in the whole of his life? How many words have been expended trying to define love? How many great literary minds had tortured their imaginations, striving to share the feeling of touching the driving force itself; the very engine that brings life?

And it’s all down to chemicals. Falling in love - just a chemical reaction; like the soaring inner butterflies that accompany fine music, joy, laughter, orgasms and religious awakening…. just chemicals; and now, the realisation of liberation, the invulnerability of the end, the same butterflies.

He was suddenly hungry - why not? It wasn’t as if he was ever going to weigh himself again. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow…. for today…

Exquisitely delicate, achingly precious; eyes closed… nostrils… philtrum… lips absently moving as if to form words yet unlearned; perfect hands in miniature with tiny clutching fingers making fists as they clung to air. He carried her out of the ward and into the car and, within her, she carried him - into tomorrows he would never see.

A piece of timber that looked as if it had once been part of the keel of a small boat was half-buried in the muddy shale of a tiny cove, he reached out a boot and kicked it gently, sending swirls of mud out into the clear water. He looked at his watch without registering the time, took it off and put it in his pocket before walking on.

The car was a distant red dot now; fussy wisps of exhaust smoke reminded him the engine was still running, spitting particulates into this pristine air, as blasphemous as a curse in a cathedral. Across on the distant road a large white van headed toward Lochinver, crossing with a small black car travelling the other way. He had always liked driving until everyone became so rude and rushed. Time - the overseer, thrashing them on… the whips and scorns…

…what dreams may come? Once an idle musing but now a real and present consideration.

‘Are you real, Sue? I mean… right now?’

‘Look before you leap is it?’ She chuckled.

The eagle was still circling; and now he felt hunger and thirst. If he stared at the ranks of rills and whitecaps long enough, it appeared they were stationary, and it was the far bank of the Loch that was moving backwards. There were snacks back in the car, crisps, a sausage roll, a chocolate bar…

Ahead were the ruins of a building, a house. Great double-pointed gable ends stood like an embarrassment of broken teeth; parts of walls surrounded naked door and window openings where wood and glass had proved as impermanent as flesh and blood.

What long-dead mason had toiled here in the austere north to marry each stone block to its neighbour? Trysts sealed in mortar, enduring far beyond the tenure of those who once loved this place. He walked inside, the walls doing little now to shelter him from the wind. Even so, he felt at home in this ghost of a house, understanding now that he saw only a slice of it as it passed through his timeframe.

It had not been the words that stung, shocking though they were. It had not even been the violence of her rebuff in response to his hug and kiss - the scratch marks and bruises (he had not felt the pain until later). But that look - alien on a face so familiar, the utter lack of recognition… the fear… the disgust.

‘Ugh! You pervy old bastard - you’re old enough to be my fucking granddad!’

The voice he had grown used to over half a century, attached now to a mind that, with the decades spitefully burned away, saw him through a schoolgirl’s eyes.

‘OK, if you’re real, tell me something I couldn’t know…. Sue? …Are you still…’

‘Yes.’

Three white birds in chevron formation skimmed close to the surface of the Loch, rising and falling as if on a roller coaster.

‘Go on then, tell me something I don’t know.’

‘Granddad didn’t like you.’

‘I know that.’

‘When you were a baby, Mother wanted to give you away and let Auntie Betty raise you, but Father stopped her.’

‘I think I knew that too, I’m sure she told me at some point… when we were arguing.’

‘Well, if I tell you something you don’t know - how will you know whether it’s really me telling you, or your own imagination?’

The trio of white birds had landed and were bobbing on the choppy Loch. A cloud passed in front of the sun, still low in the southern sky, and a shadow raced across the water.

‘You don’t really want to cross over, do you?’ Sue’s voice was meant to sound kind, but he detected a twinge of disappointment.

‘I don’t want to stay here… I mean… this side. Not anymore.’

‘I know.’

The walk back to the car seemed more of an advance than a retreat. There was no point in just letting the vehicle run out of fuel, making it more difficult to recover. He turned the key in the ignition and left the fob in the shape of a treble clef dangling there. The bonnet made a warm seat to consume a feast of processed food and the dregs of a flask. It was still tepid - heated by the element of a faraway kettle with a crack in the spout.

Would his daughter cry? He had been estranged so long he hardly recalled her voice. Probably not, she may fleetingly embrace a childhood memory but there had been no room for his life in her life - and there would be no sense of loss. He slid to his feet and, ignoring the path, walked directly across the heather towards the water.

A corroded metal frame that had once held a sign shook in the wind. One of its rusty legs was still attached to a pitted concrete support, now torn from the ground. He passed it by, stroking its roughness, the ground now springy under his feet as he approached the Loch’s edge. Reeds squelched; brown water rising above his ankle boots trickling coldly but somehow pleasantly into socks. The sky was empty, the eagle had gone. He took out and lit a cigarette, tossing the disposable lighter out into the reeds.

The ground now sucked as he pulled foot after foot, knees bending, breathing heavier with the exertion, reeds thinning as the water lapped his knees. He laughed and cried - a chuckle and whimper at first then a true, unstoppable howl and convulsive sob. Arms outstretched, cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, he took a last hungry drag and spat it away.

He lowered his arms as the water reached his groin, fingertips touching the slippery green blades of reeds, the mud, saturated now beneath his feet made each step a stair, steeper than he had imagined. Chest… chin…

‘Sue?’

The water had seemed glass from above but as eyes sank below the surface visibility was limited by the churned-up sediment. He had instinctively taken a deep breath, but the numbing cold forced it from him in a violent shudder. The rosy glow of snowman-building cheeks… numb fingers inside soaking gloves… ice-cream headache… He stumbled; knees sinking into silt as a warm, dark blanket drove the cold away…

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