panjandrums

I’d wrapped up for a winter walk with woolly hat and gloves even though it was just the beginning of May. Clydebank meteorological charts being changeable. Sensitive skin and safety, however, remained a constant.

I prospered not because of my brilliance, my understanding of many and varied languages and cultures, but because I was poor and friendless and knew the value of making others poor and friendless too. Each job becoming more lucrative than the last.

Animists and some Buddhist sects believed in saints and demons. Sons of the dead beyond the cosmic dust. A balance sheet in which the shape of a human soul may find itself falling into the waiting body of a raven or rat. I left far behind the tinkled prayer-bell of such uncivilised nonsense.

I had one of those home-helps, Mrs McGregor –call me Jean – who prepared, without much thought, or effort, a decent enough sandwich for luncheon. But she had been replaced by a flock of spectres. A younger breed mesmerised by messages from a screen that lit chins and faces, but dulled the brightness of their eyes and their hands had been replaced by a time-saving phone. I’ve tried several languages on them but all they did was grunt. Urdu almost proved to be an eye-rolling success. An oversight, I was sure they would be cured of their haste in this world. Language being only as good as its listener and being still a learner, I fended for myself by leaving them sitting on my leather couch like  unblinking panjandrums, going beyond their worlds and stepping, high arched,  on to the melting tar pavement with lucent white stones I once chewed for a bet.

Each post-hospital step was reborn with a walking frame, the muffled armour of the tortoise, in my long and varied journeys in which my feet found their way to Dalmuir Park. I brought nothing for the ducks but my presence and they didn’t seem to mind the huffing and puffing beast gawping at them and listening to them splashing on the water.  

I was sure there was a bandstand where they played martial music, but even the skeleton was gone and grass grown underfoot. Darkness brought midges. They sought the red lamps of watery eyes and to breed in pools of drool and the hollows of my limbs. Noise of the traffic abated, but I was not lost because I was not going anywhere, but waiting.

Cold water washed down from the hills, fast flowing, turning pebbles and settled into the hum of a song familiar, yet unfamiliar. The shape of a cat grew out of the crow-feathered limbs of a fallen tree and a bright-eyed rat laughed and spoke to me in the language of my youth.   

And I was squatting potbellied and naked, before a statue of Buddha the merciful, and my brothers and sisters being cut down making a darting run from mum and dad. Ensconced in the arms of those great gods of beef fed and red-faced men, with cropped hair, carrying rifles like sticks over their shoulders, I found myself parcelled among the tramp of boots and the rhythmic swaying of their shoulders, and that smell, that bitter taste of a cold country. And I was falling, falling.