Surfacing Read online

  I said, ‘When the Neolithic people brought their cows ashore here, the first ones, all this land would have been wild. Can you imagine? I wonder what grew here then.’

  ‘I love this valley,’ said Nina. ‘Its different colours. Brown in the spring, then green. The cattle. Quiet, then noisy with tractors.’

  ‘I see it differently through your eyes.’

  ‘They were like us,’ Jason insisted. ‘Caring about their animals.’

  Some folk say time is a spiral, that what goes around comes around, that events remote to one other can wheel back into proximity. Leaving Nina and Jason I walked down to the shore, feeling like a child again, glad of heart to know there is still room in the world for a summer’s day and a cow called Daisy.

  The sea was calm. No one else was on the beach, only some birds and two seals watching me from a few yards out in the water. I stood at the water’s edge and sang the seals a song about time and change, and the seals, out of courtesy, listened.

  Links of Noltland

  II

  In mid-October, almost two months after I’d left, I returned to Westray, sailing out of Kirkwall as slashes of orange light grew in the east and gulls flew over the still-dark sea.

  On the island there was little to announce autumn, there being no trees. But all the fields were cut, and some held flocks of golden plovers. There were no swallows now. The cattle were all still outdoors, it had been so mild.

  This time I was staying at the same hostel as the archaeologists, because a room was free. From there I walked through Pierowall and passed the school now filled with children, then Nina and Jason’s farm, greeting their cows in their field, then turned down to the bay where the waves still crashed ashore. The cairn was on the hill, the wind turbine spun. I was happy to go through the steel gate, to see the barrows and spoil heaps, and greet everyone again.

  A reduced team had worked on into the autumn. I recognised Hazel and Graeme, Anna and Maeve, Dan, Criostoir and Emily, all by their clothing. Emily’s fluorescent waterproof trousers, Dan in his piratical black bandana, Anna by her blue woollen headband. They were still there, and counting the days till they left. All had now spent long months on the island away from their homes, always in each other’s company. Backs ached and wrists were numb. Clothes were trashed. All jokes had been told, all yarns recounted.

  ‘To be honest wit’ you,’ said Dan, setting down his wheelbarrow, ‘I’ve left the site already. My head is already gone, it’s just my body that’s here.’

  ‘You’re home in Kerry?’

  ‘With my dogs. Long walks with my dogs. The fella that’s looking after them says they’re fat. And I’m planning on buying a big TV.’

  The site had been due to close at the end of September, but they had been granted a month’s reprieve. Now, with weather in their favour, they were excavating up to the last moment. The final task would be to photograph everything, and then on the very last day cover the whole site with sheets of black plastic weighted against storms by stones and tyres and more stones. The selfsame stones as had formed successive Neolithic walls and hearths, now heaped aside, would be pressed into service again.

  The team had been spared the massive job of burying the site completely under tons of sand, because HES had announced they wanted to come and laser-scan the whole lot before that happened. Laser-scanning would require weeks of good weather; it would have to wait till next year. Hazel and Graeme had received instructions to cover the site lightly, so it could be reopened again with relative ease.

  ‘So, if it’s open again,’ Hazel said, sotto voce, as if HES might hear, two hundred miles away in their offices in Edinburgh, ‘we might as well dig it.’

  Criostoir kicked an earth-fast stone. ‘There’s stuff to be discovered under all this yet. To be sure. There’s years more work here.’

  The light had diminished since the summer. By mid-afternoon it would be cold.

  Emily and Criostoir were working on a house with a substantial hearth. Emily had discovered, tucked into the lower right corner of the hearth, a stone chest the size of a shoebox, with a lid. No one had seen the like before. What could it have been? A warming place? A tiny bake-oven? A place for keepsakes dug into the hearth when the house had fallen out of use? It proved to be empty. Another mystery.

  There were more prosaic intrigues, too. No one is sure how the houses were roofed. Driftwood, maybe. It was plentiful in those far-off days before Europeans discovered North America and felled its forests and dammed its rivers. Huge logs would have journeyed all the way across the Atlantic, to roll ashore here. Who knows what our Neolithic forebears made of them, what they thought their provenance might be. But they’d have been a boon.

  The house which Emily and Criostoir were now excavating had lain under the Bronze Age fields. Back in August I’d helped Dan and Anna, now both deployed on other tasks, as they scraped away that covering of soil to reach the Neolithic remains beneath. It was as the directors had expected: within the confines of the enclosure wall, another early house had begun to emerge with sundry other structures, as yet undiagnosed.

  Across the site, Maeve still inhabited the same house as she had been working on before. Lean and funny, a runner, she had spent months in its tight confines, turning round and down, round and down: she knew it intimately. Now it was almost done. Hunched in her worn green waterproofs, she had several days of planning to do and was anxious to complete the job.

  ‘There's something about a site closing down,’ she said. ‘An atmosphere.’

  Maeve was spending her days leaning over a grid of string, with a plum bob in her hand, marking on graph paper the exact relationship of stones and gaps she saw on the ground. At 1:20 scale, a work of beauty and exactitude was emerging, which helped her see the site more clearly than the real thing.

  ‘You see, I hadn’t really spotted this line of uprights until I drew them ... and these doorways. Look at that!’

  What she had discovered since August was a well-made entranceway in her house, which pleased her because it was aligned exactly with the entrance to the house opposite. Someone creeping down the passageway would be presented with a door on the left and a door on the right. Two people emerging at once from their respective houses would have bumped heads. The exactitude was part of mounting evidence that the Neolithic village had been planned, in an architectural sense, and well built. It had been thought about, possibly even drawn – without paper, of course – before work on it began. But prior to the planned village there had already been two or three houses. This was Graeme’s thinking. Two or three houses of which Emily and Criostoir’s was one.

  The site was closing down, but over and again people said the excavation was not the half of it, it was the meticulous ‘post-ex’ where the real work was done. The cleaning of bones, the examination of flints and grains. All the boxes piled in the Victorian store down at the pier would have to be opened, sorted through. This was what people were beginning to think about. Some were planning to return to Westray to begin this indoor work, after a winter at home. Maeve put her head in her hands and pretended to weep: she was one of those who’d come back to help analyse the animal bone, boxes and boxes of it. ‘I could still be here into my forties!’ she wailed.

  ‘How old are you now?’

  ‘Twenty-nine! But I’m sure I saw a cat-bone. That’ll be interesting, to get a proper look at that. I’m sure it wasn’t a pine marten or a wildcat...’

  ‘There weren’t supposed to be any cats.’

  ‘Not until the Iron Age. But I’m sure it was a cat ... And the deer. One of the research questions is whether the deer were wild or farmed, or semi-farmed. These are the things we’ll discover post-ex, hopefully.’

  Anna was there, she was frustrated and, she said, ‘a little bit heartbroken’ to have to leave, though her joints were aching, because her area was just starting to look interesting. She was squee
zed between the enclosure wall and a house wall; a well-made drain defined her area. The drain, a little stone-lined trench capped with stone, ran from somewhere in the centre of the site toward the enclosure wall in a manner which, in Emily’s word, respected the curve of her house wall, suggesting to Emily that her house was there first. Anna said, ‘My hunch is that it was a different area of use; there are bones and flints, decorated pots. Maybe it was a dump!’

  She was going to see her family in Romania, and then? She shrugged, sadly. ‘I don’t know.’ She was entering into the strange shapeless world of post-PhD blues. A sense of life and career not quite getting started, at an age when many of the Neolithic folk would already be elders, if not dead.

  The days had certainly shortened. At lunchtime on my second day, I walked around the site while the others were in the shipping container. It was too cold to sit outside now. The site lay silent in the low sun, which brought out the reddish and yellowish tinge to the sandstone that formed the enclosure wall. The marram grass of the dunes stirred, and all was quiet except for the twittering of a small flock of snow buntings. They had just arrived, chased out of the Arctic by the darkening days. Only five of them, a little family, they flitted around the edge of the Neolithic houses, pecking at dried seedheads.

  By mid-afternoon the sun was low enough to send shadows across the site, and every crumb of trowelled earth became sharply visible, each with its own minuscule shadow. The low light made fine work difficult, slanting in at the corner of the eye.

  ‘I think, in the end,’ said Emily, ‘that this was all just like a shanty town, then they moved off altogether.’

  * * *

  * * *

  The season turned on a dime. That night I stood outdoors under the Milky Way. Occasional shooting stars flared, and I heard sounds of restless geese down at the lochside. A few farmlights prinked low on the land. But by morning the wind had changed, bringing cold squalls of rain in across the sea. You could see them coming, grey ghosts out of the north-west. Even the snow buntings had moved on.

  The team worked, heads down and hoods up, as rain slanted in across the site until suddenly Criostoir raised himself upright in his shredded waterproofs, in his filthy jeans and boots, and spoke for all.

  ‘Feck it. Let’s go home.’

  Links of Noltland

  III

  It’s surely a fine, well-chosen day when you drag your boats ashore, with the bound and terrified cattle, the sheep under nets, the seed corn and tools and overexcited children. An island shore you must have known and reconnoitred. Perhaps there’s an advance party here already, who’ve put up shelters.What was your name for this place? Where did you say you were going, when you set off across the water? From where? Not far, surely. A creeping north rather than a leap into the unknown.

  You build a low encircling wall, stone on stone. Within the wall shelter your first houses, with driftwood pillars to hold up the roofs. You make beds of reeds and skins, tend the fires that will reek for centuries in the dark interiors. You turn the cattle out the gate into the scrubby woods, set the bairns to watch them and sing them back at night, within the wall. Outside rise heaps of ashes and bones and broken pots and all those household sweepings and scraps, dogs sleep there curled up warm. But what of the wall? Maybe it’s a sense of wildness that makes you edgy, as it does us now. The wall suggests your status, sets you apart.

  You come stooping out of your doorways, wearing skins fastened by bone pins; you pierce your skin, braid your hair, heap yourselves with beads. You cut down trees, burn the logs that roll up on the shore from who knows where. You plant barley, though you haven’t quite quit foraging: a bit of hunting here, a bit of fishing there, an arrow and a net – but it’s the cattle you adore, those warm beasts with big horns, benign but wild, with soft breath and eyes and soft skins. Cattle you butcher with stone knives.

  You suffer painful joints and toothache. You die in childbirth, lose children to infections. You cough and cough. Despite that, generations pass, the Links becomes home, the place you return to after visits, festivals. A marriage partner might arrive from another village, another island, she might make a few changes, but you’re here. The place is yours because the ancestors say so, from their ossuary on the hill.

  Buildings fall out of use, are reclaimed and altered and, fair enough, across seven hundred years, why wouldn’t fashions change? Maybe there are stories and songs of a heroic past and origin, already long out of mind.

  You know how to work with fire and stone, clay and skin, grasses and herbs. You know butchery and stitching. You stroll the beach seeking wood and flint and seaweed. Bone – you are experts on bone. You make and fire rough pots; some with your signature spiral design. You like to sit on the wall in the sun and work flints into blades, enjoying the midsummer light.

  Beads, tools, every made thing, is the work of your own hands; you have strong hands. You instruct the children in these crafts. Teach them what to love and what to fear.

  Everyone is known to everyone, and everyone works: pain-ridden elders, simpletons, small children confined within the wall, all are given simple tasks. There is no shortage of tasks!

  You know the stars in the winter dark, the green aurora borealis, the solstice moment of rebirth. Midsummer gloamings when you can ramble outdoors at midnight, enjoying the light on the sea. The birds’ movements are known to you, swallows and snow buntings, geese you can catch with a net. The voles that creep in and eat your grain – they were stowaways – you brought them with you unawares!

  There are festivals and great gatherings – spectacles of stone and fire, solar and lunar shafts of light, movements across land and water – but it’s hard to leave the fields and animals, as any farmer will tell you still.

  One day you leave. You don’t go far. The place falls into ruin, then the sands blow in as they’d long threatened to do. Who was it who crept back to the ruined village, entered a house there and left a small stone box tucked within a hearth, before the houses were buried completely? What was her name?

  Time is a spiral. What goes around comes around. The box is found again, but only after five thousand years have turned. By now we number in our billions, have built mega-cities with instant global communications, and send spacecraft out to explore unknown shores. We can live to be eighty, ninety, a hundred years old! You early farmers were a success beyond measure. But millions shrink in poverty. Others build high walls and fabricate missiles. Sea levels rise, storm winds are bearing down on us. We are becoming ashamed of our own layer – plastic and waste.

  Of course, we open the box, hoping for a token, a keepsake, even a message of some kind, but there is nothing inside.

  The Inevitable Pagoda

  THE DAYS ARE LENGTHENING. In the fields around town, the stubble has been ploughed back into the earth and soon the fields will be sown again, obliged to yield again. But for now the earth has a breathing space, it lies open to sun and moon, bare, rich and brown.

  The farmer has left scarce a margin, scarce room for a mouse to run. Head down, you walk this margin as best you can, the wire fence at your right. Every few paces, you reach into the ploughed earth and pick up some new fragment of crockery.

  In no time at all, you have a handful.

  A spiral in three shades of blue, against a background of sapphire blue.

  A faint lacy pattern, like frost on a window.

  Faraway skies, where it’s raining blue rain.

  A chunk of earthenware, creamy yellow glaze all crazed now.

  Diamond shapes, packed together like cells seen through a microscope, each blue diamond with a dot at the centre.

  Fronds, like ferns or pondweed, branching tracts, blue-grey.

  A swag of tiny bellflower shapes, maybe lily-of-the-valley.

  An inch of saucer-rim, butter yellow.

  A built structure, surely part of a pagoda? With a
blue branch. Yes, the inevitable pagoda.

  A slipware bottle rim, sandy brown.

  A cup handle, partial. One green brushstroke, enough to suggest a leaf.

  You spit on them and wipe the spit with your thumb. Not one is much bigger than an eye, a blue eye, or a postage stamp.

  A no-nonsense chunk of earthenware, glazed conker-brown. Hand-thrown, somewhere nearby.

  Heaped in your hands they suggest cottages and parlours or farmhouse kitchens. Rooms with scrubbed stone tiles and dressers showing off Willow pattern plates. Farmers and cottagers. Folk who fetched water from a well in an earthenware jug, or fed their hens from an old plate. Some pieces are handmade of the local clay, some factory made and dainty, but none is throwaway – each must have been washed a thousand times, which was women’s work. A wedding gift of dishes. ‘It starts when you sink in his arms...’

  Remember your grandmother’s formal front room, her ornaments, the plates on the wall.

  Dropped by accident, thrown in temper, perhaps grieved over – they all ended up on the midden and were eventually ploughed into the field along with the dung, where they remain, sometimes to resurface for a while.

  Now you have a handful, spanning centuries. And there’s another piece, winking from the ground; this could become obsessive. Each is a glimpse of a life and a time. It begins to sound like a clamour rising like mist from the empty field. All the stories, the voices, the dead...

  You look out over the new-ploughed acres as over human history, and the next field too and the next, and all the fields...

  Ach.

  They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field again.

  Surfacing

  YOU’RE LOSING THEIR VOICES. When did that happen? You’re forgetting the sound of your mother’s voice, and your grandmother’s. They died within eighteen months of each other a decade ago and today you realise you can’t quite bring their voices to mind.