Surfacing Read online

  You make an effort, and recall a story. Not a story, they were neither of them storytellers. They placed no value on that. But you recall Nana telling you about her father being brought to the surface after a blast below ground. He’d been laid off, maybe it was during the Depression, and in his time idle he’d lost the sixth sense which warned miners if something wasn’t right. He’d only been back at work a few days before he was caught in a blast and brought to the surface with a sheet laid over him with holes cut for his eyes. He was sent to a convent hospital, where the nuns often tended injured miners. A Protestant, he would never again hear a word against nuns.

  Are you making this up? How could you? But you can’t recall the sound of the telling. Something remains, however: the cadence. You recall the less patient cadence of your mother. She seemed to expect you to know and understand things without them ever having been explained. Nana’s speech was lower, her accent richer with the Scots she’d never regarded as an impediment to progress, because she was never going anywhere.

  ‘Brought to the surface’ is the recurrent phrase. There is a desperate list of mining accidents in Ayrshire, as in every coalfield. Fatal ones, that is. The many non-fatal injuries went unrecorded. Blasts were not so common, more frequent were crushings caused by roof-falls or runaway wagons and hutches. Like the time a shift of miners was being hauled up an incline to the surface in wagons, four men to a wagon, but the chain snapped. Or the Knockshinnoch Disaster of 1950, when a new working broached the bed of a glacial lake, causing countless tons of peat and sludge to empty into the tunnels deep below, filling the escape routes, leaving 129 men trapped down there. Thirteen were lost for good, but the others were there for three days, until fellow miners rescued them by cutting through from old disused workings nearby, which were gas-filled. They were all led to the surface wearing breathing apparatus.

  Nana’s voice is coming back, it was just mislaid. You hear her short phrases and pet words. She often sounded a bit bewildered. The world was complicated, puzzling. Then there was the time of terrible silence, when she forgot how to speak at all, when for weeks or months, God it felt like years, she sat straight-backed and mute, trapped in the black mine of depression. It was during the school summer holidays, she’d been brought to stay with you. One morning Mum sent you three kids to McColl’s for sweeties and so you skipped off. Sweeties! First thing in the morning! But it was a ruse. You realised that when you turned the corner home and saw the ambulance, the neighbours watching and the crew bringing her out, covered by a sheet.

  You must be misremembering. Why covered? She was overdosed on sleeping pills, not dead.

  Dead to the world. She had ECT, to shock her to the surface of her own mind. She was to be hauled through tunnels up and out of that place, for a while at least.

  Once, she told you about having diphtheria as a small child. Her throat was closing, the spent air unable to reach the surface, the new air couldn’t enter. Her father was preparing to cut her trachea. How did she know that, did she overhear, despite her fever? And with what would he operate? Doubtless his own razor, called a ‘cut-throat’ for a reason. But it didn’t happen; the crisis must have passed, maybe a doctor arrived with a better idea. And where did they put her, to isolate her and her infection in that crowded house? You can’t reach her now to ask.

  The deep mines are all closed, the pithead buildings cleared. Some efforts are being made to heal the wounded land by planting trees, and blocking drains to restore the moor, so the curlews might return. Bings and old railway beds are grassing over. The open-cast scars are deep gouges that might one day become lochs, maybe. Sometime deep in the future.

  Once, in Nana’s tenement flat that smelled of town gas and coal (her voice comes to you), she caught sight of herself unexpectedly in the mirror that hung above the mantelpiece.

  ‘Oh, I look like ma mither!’

  ‘What was she like, your mother?’

  A pause, as if puzzled, as if she had forgotten. As if no one had ever asked, which they hadn’t. Why should they? What was her mother but a miner’s wife, a mother of seven.

  ‘Ma mither was very kind.’

  From the Window

  THE WINDOW OVERLOOKS a neglected back green where a few shrubs grow with their backs to the wall. Under the washing lines, grasses heavy with seedheads all incline slightly southward, and among the grasses a lone yellow plant, maybe a ragwort.

  It’s evening. From time to time the grasses move in the breeze. Now a feather comes wafting down, a pigeon’s or a herring gull’s. It’s cloud-grey, as though plucked from a cloud.

  A century-old back green, walled in on three sides by tenements four storeys high and stacked with other folks’ windows, other folks’ lives, their ages and stages, their phone wires and drainpipes, slate roofs and all the disused lums above the roofs near-silhouetted against a sky that’s glowing white between greyish clouds. The opalescent northern sky: it is late summer.

  You’re watching the grasses move, and the way the telephone cables serving the flats radiate from a common pole, planted out there in the back green, and how the wires divide the air into segments. You’re watching the chimneys darken and that cool sky as it intensifies in the last light, a cold glow. Just looking out the window.

  That near-white sky. Hadn’t you seen the same shine and tone earlier in the day? Yes, it was the pendant your daughter was wearing, an oval stone set in a silver rim, on a silver chain, the stone just the size of a thumbnail. A pendant she often wore, cool and calm, that changed in the light between cream and pale grey.

  You’d been shopping, and had bought some kitchenware for the life she was about to embark on as a student in another city. You noticed the pendant against the neck of her terracotta-coloured top the moment before she turned away. Shopping done, she was off to meet friends, leaving you standing on the street in late midlife holding a bag containing a colander and two tea towels. ‘You can take these for me, Mum. Bye!’

  Put it another way: for a long moment the sky above the ranks of disused chimneys was the hue of a polished stone worn by a young woman as she walked away up the street into her own life. You watch her go – long hair, skinny jeans – thinking, what?

  Thinking: may she be spared.

  Thinking: okay, what now?

  You go home. The evening is your own. Having put the colander and tea towels in her room along with her other new things, bedsheets and plates, you spend a long moment looking out of the window as the light changes, thinking: okay, then, what now?

  A Tibetan Dog

  FAR AWAY FROM HERE, in the province of Amdo in China, there lies a town called Xiahe. To the Tibetans, Amdo being a Tibetan province, the place is known as Labrang. It is the site of an important monastery.

  A river flows through the town, which eventually joins with many others that rise on the Tibetan plateau to become the Yellow River. The Yellow River is three thousand miles long and is nowadays dammed in a dozen places and poisoned by industry.

  In Xiahe this river is spanned by a concrete bridge. On the south side of the bridge stands a hugger-mugger of Tibetan dwellings with flat roofs; on the north runs the town’s dusty main road.

  One evening many years ago, walking alone, I was about to cross that bridge from the Tibetan side when, emboldened by dusk, a little terrier came rushing out and nipped my calf. I didn’t see it coming; the first I knew was the sensation: ‘nip’ is the very word. I felt a quick pain, so spun round to see the creature already scarpering back among the houses, even as I yelled. I think I threw a stone. The brute had rushed out specially to bite me, a foreigner. The tiny wound was dribbling blood, so back at the hotel I dabbed at it with iodine.

  I had two companions there: Sean, with whom I was travelling, and Elena, a young Italian woman who was staying down the corridor.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘A dog bit me. A Tibetan one.’

  They didn’t see
m too bothered.

  ‘They love dogs, the Tibetans,’ said Elena. ‘They say they are the reincarnations of lamas who ... how do you say?’

  ‘Didn’t make the grade?’ said Sean.

  ‘Lama or no, the damn thing bit me.’

  And then the incident was forgotten. Of course it was. I was not much older than my own children are now. I had my travelling adventure, came home, a quarter-century passed. Partners were met and children were born and grew. Friendships were forged and lost. Jobs, projects, homes, bereavements, the stuff of life – if we’re spared. The undammed rush of life.

  If we’re spared.

  * * *

  * * *

  As you may know, having biopsies done can be horrible. The tests themselves are awful: hospitals and long needles, shock and bruises, but then comes the waiting and the fear.

  In my case, it was a week between the tests and the results. I already knew my lump was a cancer, but there were questions about how aggressive the cancer was, and how far it might have spread, and what treatments might be offered.

  What are we meant to do, to feel, at these volatile times? Each to her own. We try on and discard different attitudes to see if they fit and none do, then leave them lying around to kick at, like a teenager her clothes. Grief and grace. Bewilderment. A pious gratitude for the life we’ve had and a struggle to remain composed and then the rage: why the actual fuck should I remain composed? Then, calm. Why feel anything? It’s all in the lap of the gods.

  One night during that fitful week I managed to sleep some, and had a vivid dream. In the dream I was walking along a busy street when suddenly I felt a hard pinch on my left calf. Twisting round, I saw a small dog in the act of biting my leg. The dog waited till it made eye contact with me and only then, when it was sure I had seen it clearly, did it unclamp its jaws, release me, turn and trot away.

  What a strange dream! I woke with it clear in my mind, the bite, the dog’s look. But something had changed in me. I woke relieved and strangely reassured that I wouldn’t die of this cancer, not this time, not now. I was being nipped, and would be released.

  And that dog! It was the same Tibetan mutt, utterly forgotten until now, twenty-five years later. The dream-nip was the very sensation I felt then, in the same place. How funny, to think my subconscious must have waited till I’d fallen asleep, then gone rummaging through a million long-lost memories to find an image it could craft into a message I would wake from and understand. And what had it come up with, so triumphantly? That little dog, and its teeth.

  Now that it’s all over, it pleases me to imagine that the lama-dog knew what it was doing back in 1989, that it was laying down an act of kindness, and that I’d regret the stone-throwing and cast a blessing after its memory instead. I’d thank it for becoming that dream-metaphor trawled up to reassure me in an hour of need.

  The dog is long dead now and quite gone, unless it is indeed caught in the eternal wheel of rebirths, in which case I wish it a happy incarnation, next time round.

  Anyway, strange dreams for strange times. My husband came with me to the hospital to hear the results of the biopsies and, because it was June and mild, we waited in an odd little courtyard with a lone thin tree before being called in. The surgeon and the nurse explained that the prognosis was good. They offered a plan, an operation, more tests, and assurances: we could hope for a happy outcome.

  Soon, I broke the vow I made to myself at the time: to live for the day, to relish every moment of being alive, to smell the roses, all that. Time may work in mysterious ways but it still passes. However, although life gathered pace again, one thing lingered at the back of my mind. The Tibetan dog dream had opened a hinterland of other memories. It had reawakened the experience of being in that Tibetan town, at that time. A time of being young. Memories had surfaced because of the dream, and I knew I wanted to explore them with calm hindsight, to remember and maybe write about them, when the chance arose.

  * * *

  * * *

  As it happened, it took ages before I could settle to the task – even the cancer was becoming a distant memory – but the idea persisted and eventually I cleared my desk and cleared my mind as much as possible, the better to immerse myself and remember the town of Xiahe, and my few weeks there when I was half as old as now.

  First, though, I needed to find the notebook I’d kept at the time. That wasn’t difficult, just a matter of squeezing through the tiny door that opens from our attic room into the space under the eaves, a dark cubbyhole where the temperature drops. In there, next to the Christmas decorations and an old Olivetti typewriter, is a cardboard box full of my old notebooks. A lot of them! Mostly they’re abandoned when there are still more blank pages than filled. A new direction of thought, a new adventure, requires a new notebook – or so I tell myself.

  I rummaged down through the layers of my own life, as stored in the notebooks. Some were spiral-bound, good for opening flat on the knee. Some were small enough to slip into a back pocket, most were slim enough to bend. None was fancy, no colours or gimmicks. I knew the book I was seeking was unusually thick and business-like; I remember reasoning that I’d be abroad a while and replacements might be hard to find. Then it was in my hand, a robust black Alwych thing with blue edges. It was easy to identify because at some point on its travels I’d pasted a postcard on the cover showing a Tibetan Buddhist painting, a thanka. Seeing the card again, I dimly remembered buying it at a street stall, not knowing what it meant, just liking the exoticism of the image.

  The old notebook retrieved, I closed the box, shoved it back into its place in the dark, reversed out of the cubbyhole, fastened the half-size door. I had my handwritten notes, and also – in another box – some evocative black-and-white photographs taken by my travelling companion at the time: street scenes, portraits.

  Then they were on my desk with their curled corners and thumbed edges, real things from a time before the digital age. Archaic objects with material existence in the world. Photographs, developed by hand in a darkroom. The handwritten notebook with its picture postcard on the front. Museum pieces, but they seemed like old friends, which they were, for what is a photograph or a notebook? A reaching out to a future self, the future self of next week or half a lifetime. I was the utterly unimagined future person the notes had been made for, although I didn’t know it back then.

  The card shows Shakyamuni, with blue hair and long earlobes, sitting enrobed on a stylised lotus flower, almost floating above many fiery demons. Amid calm yet sumptuous shades of blue and orange, he represents perfected wisdom, all-compassion. The Buddha on the front cover and, when I opened it, the notebook released a particular faint smell: paper, of course, maybe ballpoint ink, but also a herby, dusty aroma. Yes, of course: I’d picked some wildflowers at the shore of Qinghai Lake and pressed them between its pages. They were still there, flower-ghosts, fit to crumble at the slightest touch.

  * * *

  * * *

  To compose the piece took several weeks. Absorbed, I was able to carry the ‘feel’ of those days through my present tasks, inhabiting two worlds at once, as writers often do. The notes were scarcely adequate, just earnest jottings in small handwriting, but it was the best I could do at that early, bewildered age. I was twenty-seven, a young woman trying to be a writer, trying to find a way to live that life, whatever that life was. Are we supposed to feel something when we encounter our younger selves? Nostalgia? I felt no nostalgia. Are we supposed to feel something when told we have cancer? What? Says who?

  It was late winter as I wrote, the sky darkening the window in the afternoons. What emerged were questions, to which I still have no answer.

  I deliberately avoided the Internet, and its unnuanced, memory-crushing, what-actually-happened gobbets of ‘information.’ No dream-dogs there.

  Perfected wisdom, all-compassion. I wonder where Elena is now.

  The Wind Horse

>   BECAUSE THE DOOR to our room had dropped from its hinges, it would open only a hand-span, then rasp against the concrete floor, needing a hefty shove to open it completely. The rasping was a noise we’d come to know well, with our comings and goings.

  The hotel was a grudging, recently built affair in the Chinese end of town, right opposite the police station. You entered the hotel from the main street, an unmetalled thoroughfare where umpteen bicycles trilled by, and small chugging tractors, and official-looking Jeeps bearing men in peaked caps. It was the only place in town foreigners could take a room, but even so the attendant was inclined to refuse. She was a young woman in her mid-twenties, much the same age as ourselves, who had her own small quarters behind a sliding glass panel in the lobby.

  We insisted and entreated and at length were given the cards to fill in: name, passport, all that. Then we were allocated a plain room on the first floor, midway along the corridor at the back of the building. The hotel girl led the way with a bunch of keys. She always admitted us to the room in this manner. Every time we came back from our wanderings in the town or the surrounding hills, we had to summons the girl and her bunch of keys. She never smiled back, not at us anyway. She led the way along the grimy corridor, a small figure in slacks and a blouse and worn little shoes.

  Always, the door stuck. Sean was six foot or so, and even if he leaned over the girl to shove the door, in a jokey way, she never smiled.

  The room she led us to had been swept, but not recently painted. Bare greenish walls, two narrow beds with mattresses of horsehair or straw, a washstand and tin basin, a rickety table. On the table, a red Thermos flask with a cartoon panda printed on it. A dangling bulb above. Curtains hanging as though from a gibbet. It wasn’t much but we were tired, dirty and thwarted, and relieved to be anywhere at all. At least there was a decent-sized window, a long rectangle that looked onto the backyard, an arena of grey gravel with a boiler house and latrines on the far side. Then, beyond a brick wall, the land fell a few yards to a shrunken river.