The Days of Miracles and Wonders
An Epic of the New World Disorder.
Somerville House, Toronto, Canada; Canongate, Edinburgh, U.K. 1997
Canongate paperback 1998. Interlink Books USA, 1999 (paperback).
Twenty five times a day, the Intercity Express clatters
by, this way and that, its startled passengers looking out upon our
fleeting dot. Mackenzie, who grew up in the area, on the coast, told
me they used to paraphrase the Lord's Prayer, in his childhood, instead
of Lead Us Not Into Temptation - Leave Us Not At Drem Station. It was
a perverse reason to accept the post of director of this newly refurbished
private sanctuary out of sight and mind of local councils, whose machinations
and cutbacks had forced the closure of his beloved hospital training
school for the mentally handicapped at Craddock, the patients wheeled
away to far and scattered destinations, the building itself sold off
to the Department of Nuclear Energy to train asbestos clad stooges
for the post-Chernobyl age. The middle of nowhere, but with some viable
escape. Colditz, handy for the Tube. Ruins of old minor castles. Churches
of the Late Pointed Period gutted by the English who, I am told, carried
off the organs and bells. (Thanks God they left the Teachers.) Volcanic
plugs holding down the muddy dank fields, as if gravity were not quite
enough. An ancient earth-house, of prehistoric man: A mossy bump in
the ground, into which one crawled, to communion with the worms and
the ghosts of ancient Celtic stoics. No graven images upon those walls.
No totems, plenty of taboos.
"'In the lonely glens or over the bare hill-tops of the Lammermuirs may
be heard the cries of the curlew and the golden plover. Ring-ouzels haunt the
burns, peregrine falcons prey on the grouse and rabbits, the pestilent rough-legged
bustards reign over the moors till they fall victim to the gamekeeper. Merlins
also are not unknown, and dunlins are known to nest. Herons are common all over
the county and king-fishers haunt the reaches of the Tyne.'
"But that was a long time ago, laddie, and now we are left with nothing
but the pestilent rough-legged bastards, bashing along on their motorcycles,
with nary a gamekeeper in sight."
Mackenzie, slapping down the old guidebook, lovingly caressing the Auchentoshan
before decanting small doses into thimble sized glasses.
"Slangivar!"
The common room, in the gloaming. Sharp returns of meatballs rising from the
oesophagus, escaping the lips in trills and burps, dancing round the drooping
pates of the ingathered, night staff and clients unwise enough to have picked
up the news of Drem isolation in an advertisement in the colour supplements of
The Observer or the Sunday Crimes: Far From the Madding Crowd. Present if incorrect:
Mackenzie, in his best James Robertson Justice mode of mellow bonhomie and rolltop
sweater, his wife Rhona, deputy, partner and senior headbanger, Avram Blok, the
world's most taciturn therapist, amanuensis and part-time insomniac. The madman
who has taken over the asylum, a man who has passed through this century, leaving
no mark, except perhaps a smudge on life's blackboard, like the rest of us. A
flick of the duster, and hey presto. Matuszek, all-purpose bouncer and long-order
cook, ex-Hearts-of-Midlothian goalie and now stuck between the goalposts of life.
Emma Prideux, night nurse and keeper of the tablets. Mackenzie's cure prefers
positive thinking, slaps on the back, dank Lothian air, after dinner repartee
with occasional drams and a complete withdrawal from television. We are to be
bored back into association with the miracles and wonders of the outside world.
And then the inmates, to whom one turns with a sinking heart: Lucy Mongolfier,
cracked up social worker, paralysed by the inability to decide; Mansur Darwish,
multiply-failed enterpeneur, listless as a saint and just as useless; Jimmy Gold,
ice-cream van man traumatised by occupational violence; Alois Crumb, ex-vivisectionist
drummed out of his career by animal liberationists; old Maggie Mann, last surviving
silent film pianist in Scotland, who has, at the age of 86, developed delusions
concerning the designs of Rudolph Valentino on her person. Finally, ipso facto,
yours truly, Danny Hohenlohe, progenitor's name Pick, world's worstselling author
and manic-depressive non manque. Absent, as usual, the three Watson brothers
of Doncaster, who had booked in to cure their allergy to each other's company
by common confinement, but still took their dinner trays separately in their
rooms. But need any of thesefigure in our narrative, except as shadowy figures
moaning in the background, beggars vainly stretching out empty calloused palms
in underlit underpasses?
"Your health! Did ye know, shipmates, that even this forsaken backwater
once echoed to the kettledrums of war? Cromwell, the bastard, beat the Scots
at Doon Hill, just down the road. The Scots, with their usual foresight, had
backed King Charles the Second. However, at Prestonpans, in 1745, the Jacobites..."
Saved by the front door bell chimes. Enter Kathleen, Avram Blok's better half
(in common law we trust). She is a strong lass with short cropped brown hair
and an excellent pair of pins, who roams the coastline picking up lumber and
flotsam and fashioning it into strange shapes which she exhibits in art galleries
in Edinburgh and Glasgow. I believe she has sold her junk to American, German
and Japanese buyers, thus enabling her to keep up the mortgage on a crumbling
seaside house on the outskirts of Craddock, a small town of eight videocassette
shops and nine Protestant churches a few miles downmist. There they live, she
and the reticent therapist, in bucolic frugality, with the incoming tide lapping
at their window, threatening to swamp their conjunctive repose. Once, Mackenzie
apocryphally related, they were swept out to sea on their orthopedic mattress,
and had to be rescued by a shrimping trawler, whose crew, having heard their
cries for help in the fog, wrestled them aboard with grappling hooks...
"Found the secret of life on the beach yet, hen?" asked Mackenzie.
"Not tonight, Andrew."
"Come and sit by the fire," Rhona pulls up another chair. The log fire
is an illusion sustained by Scottish Gas. The Desolation, thought Hohenlohe,
looking round at the gathering, each soul wrapped in its seclusion. Mackenzie
eagerly proceeding to outline his latest intellectual fad: Morphic Resonance.
He had picked this up from a book by a Cambridge professor of biochemistry who
had specialised in the physiology of tropical legumes in India. Having watched
these legumes closely, the professor had developed a theory of "formative
causation," whereby all nature consists of "morphic fields", which
constitute a collective memory that determines, together with genetic coding,
the shape and behaviour of all things, alive or inanimate. The persistence of
memory, the squishy droop of Dali's dripping watches. We are what we were. Is
this supposed to reassure us? Or merely return us to past despairs?
- Excusing himself from Dr Mackenzie's imminent exegesis, Danny Hohenlohe left
the common room and climbed the flight of pale bannistered stairs to his cubbyhole.
No Bellanys here, just a pastel Edinburgh city-scape: Ancient castle and extinct
volcano. He looked at his bed but could not bear to lie on it, imagining the
two million dustmites bickering and feuding in their hordes. Or worse, they might
have built a harmonious society, of mutual aid and self determination, a microscopic
utopia: From each according to his ability, to each according to his her or its
needs. Or did they prey upon each other, on invisible battlefields, in indiscernable
Sommes and Verduns? Were there a million cries of unheard pain, under the bedlinen?
He sat down at the bedside desk and opened the Document Wallet containing the
unfinished manuscript so rudely rejected by his ex-editor, Gordon McTeague, of
Hammer & Stern Publishers. The morphic resonance of abject failure. On either
side of the walls he could hear the filiophobic Watsons tramping about like so
many splintered Ahabs. He closed the Wallet and rose from his chair. Clasping
his boots to his chest he padded back down the stairs, tip toeing through the
kitchen, opening the back door. The windswept chill of Drem gusted in. Putting
on the boots and choosing from the coatpegs a tattered fur thing belonging to
Alois Crumb, he stepped out, closing the door softly behind him, heading down
the gravel pathway towards the distant lights of the neighbouring village of
New Mains, with its single tavern, the Dill and Dip, three quarters of a mile
distant (No amenities at Drem apart from the post office branch and Scotrail
[AWAYDAYS AT THIS WINDOW]). Trudging onto the deserted main road, the cold open
night sky. A blackness. And did a man pass, abjectly hefting an overflowing,
rusty petrol can? The silence broken by an increasing drone. The echoes of the
five-hundred-bomber raid, and the first ginger handlebar-moustached Englishman,
in Biggles parka, falling burning from the sky. One brushes the burning corpse
aside with one's foot. A lone motorcycle rushes by, one of the ragged trousered
bastards of Mackenzie's ire, heading from nowhere to nowhere...
 |
| |
|
|
|
