Emotional Geology Read online

  ‘And your next fix of reality.’

  He glares at her but she is gazing up at the rock face, her head thrown back. ‘What do you do when you come down... to earth?’ She smiles. ‘I mean, how do you cope with all the unreality?’

  ‘Drinking. Fucking. The groupies are usually very accommodating. Climbing turns some women on, you know.’ He runs his eyes over her breasts in an appraising, professional way.

  ‘Really? I’m surprised you find the energy. I suppose it must be in the blood.’ He looks puzzled, momentarily at a disadvantage. She extends a hand and touches the damp, blond thatch. ‘The Viking ancestry. Rape and pillage as a not very subtle way of celebrating the fact you’re still alive.’

  ~

  I dress like a bag lady. The only sensible outfit to wear in this climate is wellies, thermal underwear and several woolly jumpers. No make-up - what use is mascara in perpetual mist and rain? I slap on moisturiser and lip-salve as often as I remember but my complexion still resembles stewed rhubarb. My long hair is proving inconvenient and resembles the heaps of seaweed that are washed up here after a storm. When I go outside I can't see unless it’s tied back in a heavy-duty elastic band and the constant tangles are beginning to annoy me. I suppose I could have it cut. I notice none of the younger women on the island have long hair and the elderly have theirs scraped back with vicious hairgrips.

  Am I becoming de-sexed? Most of the trappings of townie femininity have gone by the board - shoes with heels, tights, perfume. I live now in my unadorned state, shapeless and colourless. I no longer engage in anything David Attenborough would construe as a mating display. But then as I recall, in Nature it is the male of the species who is supposed to make all the effort - the female just sits back and waits to be entertained. It’s rather like that here as there are so few young women. The ones that have resisted the lure of jobs and education on the mainland seem unimpressed by their male peers but the men and boys are polite, eager to please and take trouble over their appearance on social occasions.

  I notice such things but they are other, they do not concern me.

  But I shall buy a bottle of industrial-strength conditioner next time I’m shopping in Balivanich.

  ~

  I popped into Shona’s today to ask about the mobile bank. We sat at her kitchen table drinking coffee. She has the most wonderful job. I wish I had it for the sheer pleasure of telling people how I earned a crust. Shona counts corncrakes. She counts them for the RSPB and in summer she goes out at night and counts the number of corncrake calls she hears. She logs the calls and ventures into fields with her torch to locate the birds so that the RSPB can work out what corncrake numbers are doing. The money’s pitiful but I think Shona quite likes having time to herself, albeit in the middle of the night. She doesn’t appear to sleep very much. She says ten years of getting up to children in the night have cured her of needing anything more than catnaps.

  She appears to have four children but it may be fewer, or indeed more - I haven’t been able to do a head count as they don’t often assemble all together and when they do they tend to rush about, shouting and squealing, making their number seem larger. If Shona and I ever manage to have an uninterrupted conversation I think we’ll find we get along just fine.

  Every available surface in her kitchen was strewn with toys, felt-tips, newspapers, books, bills, letters, half-eaten biscuits, brown apple cores, hair-slides, exercise books, screwdrivers, spanners, knitting, mending and seed packets. Shona surely never needs to dust as no surface can ever be exposed long enough for dust to accumulate. When the children came in and needed room to eat their snacks and do their homework they swept the table slowly with their arms in what looked like a practised gesture, until they had cleared some space.

  Not surprisingly, Shona is always lamenting that she cannot find things, but Aly, the eldest, a cheerfully precocious ten-year-old with a face like a currant bun, can usually find anything within a couple of minutes. ‘Lost Property Office’ is apparently the name of a game the children play, a variant of Kim's Game, invented by Shona’s younger brother, whom she refers to with obvious affection as ‘wee Calum’. Aly always wins. When I got home (‘home’ - it still sounds strange) it struck me for the first time how odd it is that my house is so tidy apart from my workroom, which always looks as if a particularly chaotic jumble sale has just taken place. I couldn’t bear for the workroom to be tidy and I couldn’t stand disorder in the sitting room. (The disorder of my mind is quite enough.) The chaos of the workroom is only an illusion in any case. The clutter is controlled. When it reaches a certain height and depth I sweep it aside, as Shona’s children did. But I know what is there, hidden under the heaps of scraps, stashed away in shoeboxes and carrier bags. I can put my hands on a gold sequin, a piece of felt or a fragment of antique silk kimono within minutes. Just like Aly.

  There’s method in my madness.

  ~

  Two dark curly heads, one large, one small are bent over an exercise book at the kitchen table. Without lifting her eyes from the ironing Shona announces briskly, ‘You’ve a new neighbour, Calum.’

  ‘Oh, aye?’ The man points. ‘That’s not how you spell “because”, Aly.’

  The boy gapes, first at his book, then at the man with the red pen. ‘It is too!’

  ‘Trust me. I've been spelling that word for over thirty years and it’s never had an “o”.’

  ‘She's bought poor Lachlan's house.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘Your new neighbour. Rose Leonard.’

  Aly sits back in his chair, arms folded, truculent. ‘Well, how do you spell it then, Mr. Clever Clogs?’

  Shona and the iron hiss. ‘Alasdair, you'll no’ speak to your uncle like that! I’m sure he has better things to do with his time than help you with your homework.’ She smoothes a shirtsleeve carefully, then smoothes her voice. ‘You should drop by some time, Calum.’

  ‘B-e-c-a-u-s-e.’

  Aly makes an indeterminate choking noise. ‘You're kiddin’ me!’

  Calum spread his hands and shrugs. ‘Would I joke about spelling?’

  Shona persists, unregarded. ‘She’s English, mind, but she seems very nice.’

  Calum leans back in his chair and announces, ‘Big elephants can always upset small elephants.’

  His sister bangs down the iron. ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Och, I was talking to Aly... That's how you remember to spell “because”. You take the first letter of all the words in that sentence - big elephants can always upset small elephants. Because. Easy.’

  ‘Cool!’

  ‘Sausage.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s your next spelling.’

  Aly groans and bows his head over his book. Dragging another shirt from the overflowing wash-basket Shona continues, ‘She’s an artist of some sort. But then they usually are. No doubt you'll have a lot to say to each other. She's a real intellectual, mind.’

  ‘You managed to establish that over a quick cup of Nescafé, did you, Shona? What did she do - offer to lend you her back-numbers of The New Internationalist?’

  Shona sniffs. ‘It was obvious.’

  ‘How, obvious?’

  ‘She has a room full of books and no TV.’

  ‘I’ve got a room full of books and no TV.’

  ‘Aye... But you come over here and watch ours.’

  ‘So what does that make me, Shona?’

  ‘A pseudo-intellectual.’

  Aly sighs and prods his uncle with his pencil. ‘If you don’t hurry up and finish testing me on ma spellings we’re gonna miss The Simpsons.’

  Calum places a hand on his heart. ‘Et tu, Brute..?’

  Aly frowns. ‘That’s no’ one of ma spellings, Uncle Calum...’

  ~

  I discovered today with something like relief that, no, I am not quite neutered. I finally got to meet ‘wee Calum’, Shona's brother. Wee Calum is six foot if he’s an inch and seemed to take
up a lot of room in Shona's kitchen. His designation as ‘wee’ would appear to be merely a concession to her seniority. He appears to be mid-thirties - could be older I suppose, which means Shona is older than I first thought, but probably still younger than me.

  Calum, like many island men, seems to be a jack-of-all-trades, one of them climbing. He teaches at the high school on Benbecula and, in the summer holidays, at an outdoor activity centre on Skye. With the characteristic black curls and startling blue eyes of the Celt, he looks like one of the models in the Hawkshead catalogue, only not so self-absorbed. From the way he moves you can tell - and I think perhaps I would rather not have known - that underneath the layers of wool, fleece and ancient denim is a rangy, athletic body.

  My decision to abandon mascara and all other artificial improvements was perhaps precipitate. Could eyelash dye be procured by post, I wonder?

  ~

  Collecting pebbles on the beach I fill my pockets like a would-be suicide. So many shades of grey, beige, brown, oatmeal, ivory. The odd faint tinge of orange and pink. My eye is caught by some dazzling lime-green seaweed, dramatic against Rastafarian black bladderwrack. I wish I knew the names of the different types of seaweed... I could check in the library. Somewhere new for me to venture. An expedition.

  I bring the pebbles indoors to study their colours, sorting them, arranging them in piles. Playgroup play. I reject the more colourful stones and settle for a monochrome selection of greys, browns, taupes, creams and a dazzling white.

  Feels right...

  Looks wrong...

  I pull out fabrics in a similar colour range, drape them, twitch and fiddle, irritated. They look dull, colourless. Like the men’s wear department in Marks & Spencer. But the pebbles don’t. Something is missing. A colour? A texture? Maybe silks would work better, have more life?

  I abandon the pebbles, leave them heaped on my work-table, like a memorial cairn.

  ~

  White sand, crystalline, colourless, slithering between my fingers, dusting my boots; castaway seaweed; scattered shells like broken beads, precious and useless. Elephantine lumps of rock, humbug boulders, striped and stratified, like a pile of collapsed deckchairs.

  So much sky...

  So much space...

  I shrink, entirely irrelevant. My soul expands. Tears mix with salt spray on my cheeks.

  ~

  A running figure, male, tall, wet hair slicked back by the wind, running easily, naturally, leaving deep, ridged footprints as his trainers bite into the wet sand. He slows down as he sees another figure: female, dressed in a waxed jacket and wellingtons. Her long thick hair flails around her head, Medusa-like. She scrapes it back behind her ears, bows her head, unaware of the man’s approach. She bends down, turns over a few pebbles, picks one up, discards it.

  The man jogs to a halt beside her and says something. She looks up alarmed, takes a step backwards. He smiles. ‘Hi... I didn’t realise it was you, Rose.’ She still looks confused, almost distressed. ‘We met yesterday. Calum Morrison. Shona’s brother.’

  The woman peers at him. She registers wet, tanned skin stretched taut over prominent cheekbones; a long, straight nose pinched with cold; eyes of a glacial, glittering blue. She remembers the eyes.

  ‘I'm sorry! I didn’t recognise you. You look different today. Your hair’s so wet. I remember it as shorter. And very curly.’

  ‘Aye. It was raining a wee while back. But it’s no’ so bad now.’

  ‘No. Well, not bad for January, anyway!’

  ‘Have you lost something?’

  ‘Oh, no, I’m just beachcombing. Collecting material for my work. Seeking inspiration.’

  ‘I’ll leave you in peace then.’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’re not disturbing me. I was about to call it a day anyway. I’m rather cold so I think I’ll head for home.’ She smiles. ‘It still seems odd to call it that. I have to keep reminding myself I’m not on holiday.’ A vicious gust of wind whips long strands of hair into her eyes. She tosses her head back, laughing. ‘Some holiday!’

  She gathers up all her hair with both hands and whoops with excitement as the wind buffets them. He sees that her head under all the hair is quite small, her face heart-shaped, not young, but firm and unlined. The smile she turns on him is sudden, dazzling, a bright slash across her face. ‘It’s so beautiful here, it makes me ache! Even on a day like this... the space, the scale... Oh, I can’t describe it!’ She lets down a cascade of hair. ‘And you certainly can’t photograph it.’

  ‘Aye, you really need a wide-angle lens.’

  She rakes the dunes with narrowed eyes, then stares out to sea. ‘Actually, I think you need a wide-angle mind...’

  ~

  ‘We can ease the pain, Rose, you know we can. And you can make something out of it, something positive. You of all people will know how to make a silk purse out of this particularly nasty sow’s ear.’

  ‘Ha, ha, very funny.’

  ‘You will survive. You will grow as a result of all this. I’ve seen it happen many times. Your illness is a terrible gift. It makes you see things differently, it makes you create. Without it you would probably not be an artist, a maker. And if you didn’t make things, who would you be? After all, isn’t that the reason you stopped taking your medication?’

  ‘But the pain in my head…’

  ‘It will pass, believe me. But you must let us help you.’

  ‘If a dog or a horse suffered like this you would put it down!’

  ‘The fact that you can articulate that thought shows how far you are from being a dog or a horse.’

  ‘But why should I have to suffer more than them?’

  ‘You don’t. You have choices, Rose. Very hard ones.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You could have killed yourself. If you had slashed your throat instead of your wrists I doubt you would have survived.’

  ‘I wanted to die!’

  ‘You no longer wanted to live.’

  ‘Is there a difference?’

  ‘Oh, yes, a great deal of difference. We can do very little for those who want to die.’

  ~

  I lay awake for some time last night thinking about Shona’s brother, Calum.

  It appears I am not going gentle into the good night of a contemplative, blessedly celibate middle-age since I spent some considerable time trying to imagine what it would be like making love with Calum. Having imagined this in various locations and positions (in a tent on a mountainside on Skye, in the dunes with the Atlantic breakers crashing around us, on Shona’s kitchen table) I came to the conclusion that it might be very nice indeed.

  This will not do.

  Tomorrow I am going for a long, exhausting walk on the beach. Sexual frustration is not a complication I wish to incorporate into my new simple life. I am surprised and dismayed. I had thought all that - ‘all that’? Oh, Gavin, listen to me! - was long dead. My passions are for my work, for causes (preferably lost), for poetry, for landscape.

  My body has slept.

  But now Sleeping Beauty wakes...

  Is it possible to feel such an animal attraction to a man you have met only twice, who says very little, some of which is in a language you don’t understand?

  It’s not just my body that stirs. Memories too.

  When I look at Calum I remember Skye and why I chose to live here instead. The landscape here on North Uist is female: pale, undulating, yielding. There are no cliffs or mountains, no wide rivers, no great heights or depths, not even many trees. There are sparkling lochans like jewels, wild flowers scattered on the dunes like bright beads, burns that chatter and gurgle like Shona's children. I feel safe here, even in the teeth of a gale. To be sure, the wind and sea seem male, gnawing away at the land, occasionally beating her into submission, but they come and they go, like the fishermen.

  When I stayed on Skye the world seemed very different. I walked in a masculine country of hard edges and angles, of ridges and gulfs. The upward thr
ust of the Cuillin mountains, the perilous cliffs and precipices seemed male and exciting. Disturbing. Sexual. I felt small and helpless, excluded and overwhelmed, but that too was exciting. I was alone on Skye but I wanted desperately to make love. I tried to think who it was that I wanted to love. Certainly not Gavin.

  Then I realised there was nobody. No body. I wanted to fuck the land. The whole fucking island.

  But instead I came here.

  Damn you, Calum. I had almost forgotten.

  CHAPTER TWO

  January 18th

  Dear Megan,

  I was thinking today that there is a difference, isn't there, between being lonely and being solitary? I’m enjoying the blessings of solitude here but I have to admit that there is no one on the island to whom I feel I am remotely connected. There is no one in whom I think I could confide, should I feel the need. (I don’t.) I think I feel impelled to write to you to create intimacy - or at least the semblance of it. Perhaps that will be superseded by friendships eventually, or at least some sort of an inter-dependence. I have offered to baby-sit for Shona to give her a break but she hasn't taken me up on my offer yet. Perhaps she thinks I won’t cope with her brood? (She could be right - motherhood was never my strong suit, was it?)

  The social life here is awkward for those not used to it. If you fancy some company you just turn up on people’s doorsteps, preferably with a half-bottle of whisky, and you sit round a fire and chat. (It’s called ceilidh-ing and the connection with music dates from pre-TV days, though I think people do still pull out a fiddle or an accordion and have a sing-song now and again.) Cynics say it’s a way of saving on your heating and food bills since visitors must be offered food, preferably home baking, but I prefer to give the islanders the benefit of the doubt.

  No one has turned up on my doorstep yet (maybe they’ve heard about my baking?) and I’m wondering whether to issue a specific invitation (a coffee morning?!), but that isn’t the done thing. I’d like to ask Shona's advice, but I think that might sound as if I am lonely, which I’m not. It would just be nice to ‘fit in’, be one of a crowd or feel part of the community now and again. I suppose I am just a little bit jealous of Shona and her extended family, something you and I never had...