Gargoyles

Gargoyles

I had considered myself especially immune to these fables.  I majored in Biology, so of course I would.  In taking on this role my parents and university companions were shocked I can tell you!  I had considered them sad and grotesque, inventions.  For people who just didn’t understand the world that much.    

Gradually, I began to consider myself as a budding anthropologist, just with an, albeit, slightly eccentric field.  These stories, which I have to admit I became adept at sniffing out, tilling, I embellished with a little scientific detail, so they could jump out of legend, and sit hungrily amongst my audience, long after they had disembarked from the coach and were putting their children to bed.   

You see them now, look! Past the mango trees, wearing those silly plastic bags as gloves.  Why? Oh, to catch the falling fruit, of course, and to keep the seagulls away, I expect.  It stops their delicious flesh rotting on the ground.  So, there they are, the graveyards.  I see you are surprised, like spare rooms aren’t they?  Little crescent sanctuaries, waiting rooms, cut into the cliffs.  With a choppy lead and copper sea-view in which the sun will drown just for you, always.  I heard an American, the other week, exclaim they like to let the dead rest in peace.  Yes, exactly!  I think he wants to be in a film too, but maybe he is right.  Maybe we should let them go. 

Is it strange for westerners to see a door into our graves.  Isn’t it?  Look at that one over there, modernist, do you think? Colours like Picasso! How rare, I always point that one out.  I remember when I saw graves in England.  People deep down in the mud.  It made me sad – all those names brushed off the tombs by time.

But it was there, on the face of a small keep-like church, that I saw my first gargoyle!  I became quite the enthusiast. I discovered a passion, the way you do, even when you don’t fully understand why. Notre Dame, Salisbury.  I peeped at all those little, critters.  And well, depending on who’s, um account, you listen to, they are either to scare off demons or to scare us into behaving well.  Or yes! Just to make fun!  It’s quite confusing, for me, working out if they are good or not.  Well I was confused.  It was only when I came back to my own haunted little island that I realised the connection between the ghost stories and the gargoyles.  It means gargling throat, by the way.  French and Greek, or something like that.  Ghastly, no?  Well I think your gargoyles and our, silly, ghost stories are quite similar in some ways, but yet, who’s to really know what the dead thought? 

And so I listened harder.  From the stories of massacred aborigine tribes retold as escaped black slaves, running from the Dutch and burnt alive by British soldiers.    Black devil cave, we will be there soon!  Of the Chinese maiden who, stranded with her grief, on a bed of seaweed in a sodden and raucous cove, bit her own tounge off; before she could see the slick brown crabs, dissect her father’s body like scalpels through a roasted chicken joint. 

Me? Romance? No dear, I lost a boyfriend in a scooter accident in my final year of high-school, and well, I’m past all of that now.  Who would marry me now? So old, pottering around these graveyards. 

Listening on the cliff-tops, and sometimes, whipped into the thumping and breaking of waves in the coves; a gurgling.