Snorri Sturluson*

Götterdämmerung - 79

 

His breath has rapidly slowed. Two weeks ago I first visited. He has lain here pretty much ever since. Or sat in the chair next the bed. His hair greyed. Beard beginning to come through.

‘I love you boys.’ Even this is said in a voiced whisper, pipes and whistles in his sound.

My brother, James, who has zoomed-up here from deepest Yorkshire in his German soft-top, opens his teary mouth: ‘I love you too.’

Slightly peeved James didn’t include me, I echo this rejoinder. As he is honoured, so we all rejoice.

Dad’s shrunken shank twitches as another spasm hits. The tubes jangle. And as he suffers, so we his sons suffer with him. I double-press the ‘assistance’ button, summoning a nurse to empty the straining amber bag Velcroed to his ankle.

Matrons are efficient, firm, and kind; healthcare assistants do a nasty job with saintly vigour and coarse wit; doctors are rarely seen: Welcome to today’s NHS, if the superbugs don’t kill you, the food surely will! For years after, I will reflect on my father’s good run, health-wise. He was only hospitalised once before this in all his seventy nine years, and that for a GP's muddle in his prescriptions dosage. Never broken a bone. Never had an operation, excepting a probe here and there. Of course, the vast array of pills he took might make one think he were ill, but that is just modern medicine’s approach to all and sundry who reach fifty five and over.

His religion has taken over.  His Saterlandische mystery novel lies with a bookmark between pages three and four. The grapes a neighbour brought around wither in their plastic sarcophagus. Olives uneaten, for now all he’ll touch are jellies and cups of tea. He mumbles prayers to himself like a rosary whenever the pains crescendo.

A local priest pops in after a request from the diocese, sacrament is taken. The blue eyes become all that can move; mistier and bluer than ever as he clutches for our hands either side. I tell him that Father MacKenzie is driving down from Oban tomorrow – last rites are not mentioned, but it is understood.

Nothing can prevent him fading away. The towering presence of memory. Keeping him to this point is cruel enough. The next several eetlem will grind this point home, days and nights an endless Götterdämmerung, as Father Time grinds through stone itself; the harvest should never take this long.

 

There are no Gods - 61

 

‘Pootey-beebs, hello!’ My father, even though I am twenty-one today, and even though he is Professor of Philology at a top university, has never acknowledged the passage of time so far as his children are concerned.

‘Hello,’ I say back, engulfing him in a bear hug. His unruly brown mop barely reaches my shoulders; the mother, at six foot, was the tall one. Although his hair remains dark, a symptom of hypertension apparently, his returning beard is both silvered and bushy.

‘Yay, you’re growing your beard back at last!” He always had a beard when I was a kid, but not for the ten years till now. We carry his suitcase up the station steps.

‘I’m taking the plunge,’ he says. ‘You know I’ve always said I have terrible stage fright, ever since the Christmas show, aged six, with Charlotte Werber… when I wet myself? Well, there’s a group on the island want to stage the Life of Jesus Christ, in the Castle gardens. And I’ve been cast as Joseph of Aramathea.’

‘Going method?’ 

‘As much as I can, mayn zun,’ he says, tugging at a payot. ‘I was circumcised at two years old, so the rest can’t be all that perturbing!’

He wants to go for a pint, so I text Michèle to meet us at the Freelance and Firkin. The Freelance is notable for two things: it is the only happily gay bar in this university town; and it is the only pub within a half mile of my flat that pulls a cask pint – even better, they brew several of their own on the premises. My dad, who holds prejudice only in favour of decent ale, always insists on coming here.  He elbows aside a rattan tray of complimentary Trojan sheathes and watermelon flavoured lube, looks the barman straight in the eyeshadow, and asks if they’ve got anything ‘hoppy, but not too dark?’ The barman looks more a vodka and Marlboros fellow, so he proffers us some preliminary tastes. Dad goes for ‘The Ferret’s Trousers’, I stick with plain old Guinness.

‘Daddy,’ – the reasons for this infantile mode of address shall not be discussed, I suspect neither of us have been at ease with it these past fifteen years – ‘Michèle’s going to meet us for a swally.’ He looks over his pint, a festoon of froth upon his vontses.

‘I thought you…’

‘Well, we seem to have patched things up, for now.’

‘Ah, good… yes well… that’s good.’ He once wrote me a letter thanking me for my solid support in the High Court divorce case. He wrote that  he wished he could tell me he loved me out loud, but that he did, ‘very much, nevertheless.’

Michèle arrives and my dad gives her a hug and a kiss, as if he was unaware of our six week hiatus. Despite our protestations, he goes and gets us another round.

We hit the gig early, to get a good spot. Dad, resting his pint on his gut between songs and clapping same belly with his spare hand for applause.  Even though no-one here with me is a fan of Eric Bogle, they all seem to have a great old time.  The party is one and we are all a part of it, Dad makes friends with everyone.  Michèle challenges the assembled to see who has the most realistic dog bark, and we end the night harroo!-ing all the way back to his hotel.

 

The Witch's Step - 47

 

Daddy rides up front in the passenger seat; he failed his test eleven times before declaring he didn’t like driving, and wouldn’t.  I’m in the back wrapped in a car blanket. The cast iron Saab 900 roars the roads to the eight-twenty ferry. This is the first week since we moved from the temporary cottage into the big house, the dry-rot treatment now dried.  Daddy’s going back to work on the mainland, commuting weekly. No more popping home at lunch for a sausage wrapped in a slice of Mother’s Pride to see me after nursery school. So, this is life.

We had spent Sunday, Daddy, James and me, hiking out to King’s Cross Point. On the way home, we stopped at Sandbraes beach, as we always did on our holidays here, and he got his toes wet splashing some seawater on his forehead.

‘That means I have to return,’ he said.

I hope he returns soon. It’ll be a long week without him. I’ve started school in the village and I miss my friends.  I always, for ever and ever, thought I would be going to Big School in Glasgow.  My best friend Philip and I talked about it whilst playing Ivor the Engine in the playground.

‘I hope they have a big red engine barrel like this,’ he said, pulling a dragon out of the fire box so he could shovel another load of coke in.

‘James says they play football,’ I said. This was new to me, playtime for me was Tolkien and Ransome stories, or He-Man in the back lane.

‘I hope it’s not too different,’ says Philip.

And it is different.  Very different.  Every weekend daddy says we can go walking. There’s Goatfell to climb.  I imagine a goat on its side at the top, maybe back when the Victorians were around.  There’s Ceum na Caillich, the Witch’s Step.  Coire na Ciche, the Devil’s Punchbowl.  And Cìoch na h-Òighe, The Maiden’s Breast.  I suspect Daddy wants to climb these to get inside the language as much as to reach the tops.  He’s afraid of ladder heights.

We drive down the pier and I look over the edge into the maelström as the boat comes in.  The salt is ground from my eyes, and dribbles from my nose, dripping once into the Feldgrau waters below.  Daddy’s hand on my shoulder turns my shining morning face around and away from the danger, and he gives me the biggest cuddle and tells me it will be alright and he’ll see me in a week.

And then, because he’s my father, he begins in earnest,

‘“You are old, Father John,” the young man said, “And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head – Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

I say to him, serious now, ‘do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?’

Then together we shout, ‘Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!”

 

The ferry takes him away from the land I stand on for the first time in my life.  Left here on Kyöpelinvuori, the Witch Mountain, with only my brother for comfort.

 

 

*Snorri Sturluson (1179 - 1241 ) was the Icelandic writer from whom we received the stories of Norse Mythology