Scotland

The rain is falling in a curtain of chilled out silver beads. It fills the half-finished fish pond, with its patient Buddha and dearth of gold fish, in the back garden of my folks new house. It beads on the black, oily, otter-shiny coat of my parent’s Labrador pup, Max, as he stands oblivious to the heavens ongoing effort to drown Scotland with his bright candy-pink tongue hanging over the flashing white teeth that line his laughing mouth, tail wagging furiously.

That tail is dangerous. Whoops, there goes Buddha.

My own dog is lying at my feet as I type, staring morosely out the open kitchen door at the continuous wet outside. Dougal is a Louisiana dog, and not at all impressed by the way the rain has suddenly turned cold or the sudden loss of his flighty Chicago girlfriend Stella. He now shares his digs with a huge, clumsy, 90Ib, overgrown Labrador pup called Max, and he is not at all impressed by that either.

Max loves his new found best friend and spends hours gnawing and licking at Dougal’s face, whining and bowing, presenting his well–chewed rope-toy to my dog’s stoic, topaz, and long-suffering gaze.

“Play with me! Ahhh, go on, play with me!” Max seems to be saying, bouncing and dancing, throwing his big, soft body in earnest circles, thick powerful tail wind-milling and flailing, knocking all the tea cups off the table and battering into the walls and the tender legs of onlookers

“Go on, grab the rope and pull. It’ll be great! It’ll be brilliant! Goan, goan, goan…”

The Maxinator is a lovely, big, eedjit of a dog and it’s hard not to feel sorry for him when my beast can take no more and, with a sudden, southern snarl of total exasperation, rugby tackles hims, bowling him flat off his paws into the mud. The big dog falls on his back with a house-shaking thud, an ever-surprised yelp and a piteously shocked look in his eyes.

Dougal stands over him, stiff and snarling with exhausted malice, his teeth buried in the loose skin of his tormentor’s neck. Max freezes in terror until the wee red southern savage slowly unlocks his jaws and lets the big dog get back on his soft puppy feet.

Two seconds later the rope is back in Max’s mouth, he is whining and dancing in his pleading circles and Dougal is staring at the ceiling, shaking his head.

Goddammit, I can hear him say, if only I had a gun and an opposable thumb.

My dad is practicing fiddle whilst my mother is at work. He plays a slow air he knows I like, and as I listen to the fiddle’s mourning I look out the open kitchen door on to a cold and rain-watery Scottish day.

It has been raining since yesterday morning. Most people would describe the weather outside as grey, dismissing it out of hand as another overcast, alleged sunrise in the grim north, another typical Scottish summer day.

Graham Burn, the husband of one of my best and oldest friend in Edinburgh smiled into his coffee on my last visit to their basement castle apartment as we looked out from the welcome warmth of their large stone kitchen, and sought the courage to brave the endless sheets of water tumbling down over the elegantly shining, water-stoic city of Edinburgh.

The Festival was in full swing but the kitchen jwas just too very comfortable to leave. Not to mention dry.

“Scotland does grey very well,” he murmured almost to himself, dark and grey-eyed himself, coffee cup sending fragrant curls of steam into the fire warm air. “But grey is my favourite colour, so that’s ok.”

I don’t think of the cloudy skies of Scotland as grey…grey is just too small a word.

The Scottish skies are silver and palest steel. They are thin layers of mercury and platinum through which the sun shows ghostly pale but determined. The Scottish heavens gleam and glisten rather than shine and glow. They are washes of water colour, subtle blues, improbable ambers, heavy indigos.

It always brings to mind that old nugget of info about the Eskimos and their hundreds of words for ’snow’. Likewise ‘grey’, used as an adjective to describe the skies of Scotland really just doesn’t cut it.

Only as the sun goes down, after a hard work day trying to punch through the drifting blankets of water draped softly over the green and sodden landscape, do the skies release their bright colours in the west, igniting the magnesium of the Caledonian firmament and throwing flames of red and gold across the clear darkening blue of the horizon in an exuberant last bow, before the sun slides exhausted and triumphant under the waves of the Irish sea on its way to the Caribbean, where I imagine cocktails and sunchairs are waiting.

Aye, it’s a plain kind of day, right enough.

I am rediscovering the joys of thick woolen socks, high boots and wooly hats. Waterproof jackets, gloves and hot chocolate. It’s the kind of research I really enjoy, especially with marshmallows.

It’s tough sometimes. After years of deciding only which colour wife-beater to team with my denim cut downs, or which pair of flip-flops to wear with a new cotton sundress, all this layering up is hard to get used to.

My fingers are always slightly cold, and my hair takes forever to dry in the cool, water-laden air. Whisky in my tea is appreciated now as never before, I cook thick stews and soups instead of salads and chicken and I can take up to twenty minutes to get out of the hot shower. It’s so nice and warm standing under the hot splash of water; it’s really so not once you are out and shivering in the chilly air.

My dad loves the hot spicy food of New Orleans so a small exclusive kitchen in Ayr is periodically busy with gumbos and red beans. Albert Alfonso’s hot sauce is taking a beating, but he has promised to bring more next time he visits.

Supply and demand, baby! And if demanding fails try begging.

The sound of Kermit Ruffins is drifting from the CD player, along with Lunasa, Steve Earle and the Zydepunks. I’m a fan of compilation CDs. Sometimes the mixes are a bit little bit strange but I like it that way. Music, like food is better with a lot of different flavours in the mix.

Even the air smells different here, thick with the salt-tang iodine of the sea, not the heady heaviness of fecund river mud perfumed with flowers.
If scents had a tint, if the air of a particular place could be a colour you could see, New Orleans air would be a dense, velvet-soft red, shot through with twisting veins of burnished gold. Ayrshire, on the other hand, would be a pellucid swirl of ice-blue, grass-green and white glittering salt underpinned with dark base of moist, grudging earth.

The Deep South of Louisiana, and the South-west of Scotland; such opposite parts of a internal spectrum. I’m in love with both.

My dad and I take the dogs to the beach almost every day, when it isn’t raining too much that is. My Ninth-Ward Crack-Hound has ruined Max’s training.
Obviously the glamour of a newly arrived Louisianan outlaw pooch supersedes all my father’s painstaking teachings and, at the moment, Max is in full teenage puppy rebellion.
No more fetching and carrying for him.
If he were human he would be painting his bedroom black, but since he is not he has picked up Dougal’s habit of going spontaneously deaf when told to do something that he doesn’t want to instead.

Dougal’s joy at the wide, wild beaches and the empty fields of Ayrshire comes off him in waves. There is no happier dog in the world than my Dougal when he off the leash at Dunure, or Glen Trool. He can run like a small, ginger greyhound when he wants to, and he does, straight towards some folk who are heading towards the ruins of Dunure castle just a little bit further along the beach. Max takes off after him, both dogs spontaneously losing their ability to hear despite my loud swearing. The distant figures, canine and bipedal, have their silhouetted drama thankfully out of my only-human hearing range. It looks pretty heated. There is much waving of arms and throwing of stones.

My dog is a bit of an asshole and his newest untaught trick is running up to distant children, peeing on them and hightailing it away.
I am filled with deep shame for my dog’s delinquent behavior, I have no idea where he picked it up from, and it’s not funny.

Well, not to the kids who have just been unexpected showered with love anyway.
Nope, not funny.
Not even kinda sorta. Honest.
Wanker dog.

Mardi Gras

St Charles and the floats of Bacchus move slowly down the oak-shadowed, ancient route, glowing shimmering rainbows of manufactured fantasy. The floats are confections of light.

The Krewes bombard the cheering crowds with glittering beads of all hues and the small translucent dots of colour are caught by eager grabbing hands. Faces gleam with smiles; stretched thin on some faces, heavy and sweet on others.The beads throw back the warm orange flames of the flambeaux; the convicts pause in their dance to catch up the silver quarters tossed by the bewitched onlookers.

The prized, long pearly strings sail briefly through the moist New Orleans air- free floating in history-only to be pulled excalibur-like beneath the waves of questing hands. They disappear in a white spumey flurry of triumphant laughs and disappointed shouts.

Green. Gold. Royal purple.

Enchanted children gaze with soft shining eyes, their faces glowing in the purple gloom, the familiar jarring brass of the bands slicing the smoky air, bright blasts of noise, shining sequined dancers writhing like fishes caught on a gaff of music.

I’m back in New Orleans, he thinks, back home after all this time

The years roll back as the excitement fills him anew. He could be ten again instead of forty as he breaths deep, the warm, moist air redolent with the stink of spilled beer, attar of bruised sweet flowers and the sour tang of sickness.

“Throw me something, mister,” he shouts, upturned face flashing in the illumination and the beads fall neatly into his upstretched hands and he laughs, the sound bright on the dark air, the sheer pleasure of the moment filling his soul.

There is sharp tug on the spoils of carnival in his hand. A smooth white hand, long black nail tipped, touches him. Slim talons grasp the dangling beads and hold fast and the pale skin shimmers with a thousand points of light, knuckles lucid with assured strength.

Glitter, he thinks. I remember the costumed girls and the fairy-tale shimmer of glitter on their smooth skins.

He turns, unwilling to relinquish his plastic treasures, but smiling. He is happy and eager to please.

The face upturned to his is neither young nor old. There are faint lines reaching frost-like from the corners of the dark eyes, but the skin shimmers, firm and thick as cream. Her smile is wide and scarlet, a disturbing carnal stain. Green sequins shine like reptile scales on the white temples. There is a drift of colour on the wet eyelids, a faint misting of silver. Small gilded horns reflect the red light of the flambeaux and the oily flames shine in the wise, wicked eyes. Little red fires that drown in the glee of Mardi Gras.

“Mine.”

The voice is soft, low and amused. The clawed hand tightens on the string of beads; teeth show in a flash of white.
Red on the mouth, with red feathers shivering on her shoulders, catching the warm breeze and quivering with secret exaltation.

Red flames. Red wings. Red smile.

Costumes and beads, blaring music, the synchronized high kicks of the be-glamoured children as the school bands march towards the wide boulevard of Canal St and the throngs that wait patiently for them.

He remembers …and smiles.

“Sure.”

He lets go his grip on the sparkling beads with a bow, and turns back towards the tree-lined spectacle, obscurely pleased by his random magnanimity, hand upstretched to catch more favours, smile shining, oblivious to the smell of beer and sickness.

He feels the hair on his neck prickle – she is behind him.

Cold hands slip around his waist like an icy eddy of water, raising drowning shivers of sensations as her soft body presses against him. Attar of jasmine and roses and black burned wood.

Mardi Gras, he grins into the dark as he leans back into her cool embrace, briefly clasping the wandering caressing hands, his head thrown back. If you can’t get laid at Mardi Gras…

A low laugh ripples behind him

“Catch me something, mister,” the soft voice of her entreats.

And he reaches again into the darkness for the bright baubles, his heart beating faster, collecting a dowry of colourful sorcery, eyes blind full of carnival.

The hands around his waist grip tighter and he can feel the feathers of her wings tickle the back of his arms as a sharp chin digs between his shoulder blades, replaced almost at once by the soft press of lips.Devious kisses burn a trail over his skin, hot through the thin cotton of his shirt. He leans back into something sharp which cuts through his shirt, breaking the skin and causes the thin, stinging blood to rise but he hardly feels it.

The old cry beats at him, the large garish shop beads destined to disgrace the necks of drunken tourist fall forgotten to the ground. The street is packed with jostling bodies, a sea of blurred faces with mouths opened wide to gulp down more booze and fill the humid air with bacchanalian cries.

The eyes of the revelers are vapid with unthinking frenzy and instinctive hunger, eyes staring like the glassy orbs of sacrificed animals, their throats bared to the killing knife of carnival.

The screams of frantic laughter hand in the air like torn streamers, gleeful and doomed to desperation. He staggers a little, suddenly dizzy
.

She is cool and scented and soft and welcoming.

He turns to face her with his treasures and a smile that wants him beckons with flytrap sweetness. Her eyes are bright and strange and savage. Her hands hold tight to his. They are cold. He studies her face.

Her skin is pale as wax, chalky and shimmering, each green gem floating like a bubble on milky water. The golden horns peek slyly from the dark tangle of hair; he can’t see the tying band he knows has to be there. He raises her hand to his mouth, playfully biting on the long black nails, wanting to hear her squeal and snatch back her disguise before his teeth do damage.

How perfect the make-up is, he thinks, wondering in a careless way at the illusion.

She looks into his smile, holding his gaze, eyes predator steady, almost opaque, strangely amused. The hand is quiet in his mouth, relaxed and content, the shiny nails just touching his tongue. He bites down tasting salt, and a surprised yelp is forced from him as razor tips pierce the sensitive flesh. The copper taste of blood fills his mouth, and the smile on her face widens in pleasure.

She softy laughs as he tentatively touches his wounded mouth, his face uncertain.

Cold hands stroke his face, gentling, teasing, coaxing, tempting.

His gaze drops to her neck, her half-exposed breasts, swelling under a cobweb of fragmented light. Her perfume stings his nose.

His speculative eyes are caught by burnished beads that glimmer around her neck. More like gems than beads. Dozens, some blue fire in the dark, some strangely dull and blasted, strung on silver ropes. He is looks closer, studying the interplay of light and shadow in the strange gems. Like moonstones but not, opalescent but other.

Swamp indigo blue. Palmetto green. River red and violet. The Aurora set in ice.

She murmurs laughter, dark and bubbling. An image of bright white ice cracking to reveal black chill waters fills his mind, here and gone in a flash of apprehension.

Her eyes are the colour of ash, black pupils reflecting the fire, flames burning under ice, black lashes like spikes of wire in the clammy skin glisten beetle-like in the light. He can smell a wet musk of jasmine, burning wood and meat. The red lips part, suggestion of black movement inside. Red as blood on snow; her smile now feral.

He stares, mesmerized by that labial parting, and leans towards her. He doesn’t feel the sharp claws puncture his skin. Red blood-beads well to the surface and fall , tumbling through the air uncaught, to be consumed by the starving soil.

Freezing lips fasten on to his in an icy communion of want, and his thoughts explode, boiling and unraveling, spiraling into the darkness, screaming into the devouring silence, his eyes blinded by the blazing violence, searing his skull, fading, fading, fading going out into the maelstrom of light.

The parades are over. Carnival is over. The bars are starting to refill.

The convicts sweep the refuse away and blaring sirens replace the blaring music. The rotating yellow lights from the cop cars smear the ancient oaks with a sulphurous and rotting patina. The bars on St Charles are warm neon in the night, snatches of songs and strands of conversation strewn out into the night.

Blue beads on a silver chain are twirled by a taloned hand. On the chain one more bead is shining bright and blue; one less hangs dulled and blasted.

The figure walks alone under the Indian oak trees, horns glinting gold, red feathered wings shivering, feet tapping a cloven hoofed tattoo on the wet New Orleans sidewalk.

Tip…tappitty…tip…tap…tip.

Maelstrom

Maelstrom
Category: Writing and Poetry

If you catch the train from the small, west coast fishing town of Ayr to Glasgow, that fast growing city drawn in black ink, you pass close along the Newton Shore.
Off Newton beach there sits the wreck of a coal boat that has been there for as long as I can remember. She sank within a stones throw of land and, as far as I know, everyone on board when she foundered made it out alive. The story runs that she was stolen by the mate when he was drunk, and his attempt to sale her home ended in comical disaster.

At high tide all you can see is the top of her mast, reaching upwards towards the sky through cold, murky water. She sways with the tide and when the water is low you can look down inside the seaweed and barnacle encrusted stairs to the empty hold below. There’s no coal in her now; the people of Ayr made salvage within days of the sinking.

The town of Ayr enjoys the warming effects of the Gulf Stream – those hot waters that feed the hurricanes off the Gulf Coast of America.It is relatively balmy… for Scotland, of course
We have palm trees that try very hard to grow in the more sheltered gardens along the coast. They alway look a little apologetic to me, a little out of place, bright green tropical leaves under lowering, silver, water-sodden skies. I like them though. They are brave.

It rarely freezes hard on the south-west coast, and the snows that block the passes for months up north around Glen Coe and Lochailort occasionally dust Arran white, but seldom linger long. The salt in the air and those warm, nurturing, storm-feeding, treacherous gulf waters keep them at bay.

Ayr is a soft Shire with a hard, bloody history. Rabbie Burns, our national poet, grew up there, wrote his poets, dallied with his women, became the toast of Edinburgh society and died young. William Wallace stares sternly from his lofty seat in the tower on Ayr High Street; Stirling Bridge and Falkirk are both close by. Auld Ayr is a town of farms and sheep, cows and llamas. I have heard tell of ostrich farms too.

The town harbour used to be crowded with fishing boats and loud with fishermen talking and laughing: the gulls screaming as they fought for the guts and the heads of todays catch, and the occasional unguarded cod or mackerel. My dad told me a story of an unfortunate fisherman who lost a finger on the cold slab of the gutting table, first to a clumsy, careless moment and then to an agile and opportunistic seagull. May God strike me down it’s not a true story, said my dad. I believe him.

The Smugglers Bar still opens at five in the morning, but it is the late drinkers. the town jakies and the lads just off the night-shift from the local supermarket that drink there now, and not the newly on-shore.

Expensive flats look over the empty bay, out towards the beautiful island of Arran, lying supine in the Sound. The crowded fish-market, and the early dawn ruckus is long gone. Seagulls still circle hopefully above the clean concrete and the ruined walls of the ancient Viking fort, and the high hill-hewn profile of Arran and the empty market place stare at each other across the choppy sea.

We don’t see the snows too much, we don’t freeze too hard or too often in winter, and the summer days are long and welcoming, but then winter comes and in January and February we are lashed by the fierce living gales which rage for days on end. When the gales arrive, people go down to the beach in their cars to watch the storm waters. The high roaring waves crash white, blue and cloudy jade-green on the storm wall, and sometimes they cover the parked cars in frothing blankets of salt-seawater.
It is an amazing sight, although I am sure it cannot be good for the car engines.

Last year the storm-walls, which had held back the seas for so many years, were smashed to pieces. The battering waves picked up the huge stones which made the walls, and threw them across the shore lining fields. They broke windows in houses, they smashed cars, they put the fear of God into the house-holders along the beach, and now the old wall is gone and the sea can reach far inland.
Awesome, the casual damage inflicted by the sea water…in the true sense of the word.

Not too far from the sunken coal boat there stands the Lighthouse.
It’s not big, the Lighthouse, it’s not fancy and nobody mans it now, but it still throws its warning light into the roiling blackness of the January and February storms.
Sometimes, from the train window en-route to Glasgow, you can barely see it through the gleaming, iron-grey waters that batter and bash at its white-washed walls, storm winds blasting hard enough to toss salt water on the train window, over half a mile inland.

The storm-waves look like they are made from molten lead or mercury. They are silver and black, shredded by the wind into pale shining storm-caps. We call the storm-caps ‘white horses’ and herd after herd of these horses gallop landwards to leap over what is left of the storm wall, and break themselves against the cars, smashing against the stone houses and the cool, stoic, watchful fortress of the Lighthouse.

It makes the hair rise on your neck, the sound of that ocean.
Heard from the warmth of the train cabin it is faint, but still so full of casual, indifferent power. The crash, and the roar and whispering voices.

And still the Lighthouse stands.

And still the white horses keep coming…

MAELSTROM

We awake.
Five score fathoms down and coldly gleaming.
We stir.
And the cold, sullen waters recoil around us.
The weight of midnight oceans, heavy on our shoulders.
Chill fingers caress sleep flanks.
We slowly turn and twist, unquiet in our dreams.

All around us…
Enveloping. Cocooning. Secret velvet darkness.
The teeming Void.
Black depths. Never lit by dawn.
The inside of a dreamers eyes, studded with nightmare creatures. Monstrosities all aglow with unearthly light.
Impenetrable murk.
Luminous sequins.
Voracious appetites.
Slowly waltzing in an eternal dance of predatory death. Life eating life as we
slumber,
our ears pressed to the pulse of the world.

Distant thunder.
The sound invades our dreams.
Slow, deliberate hearts begin to beat,
to the rhythm of the tides.
Beat.
Ancient eyes turn towards the surface. Yearning.
Beat.
Beat.
Listen….

The Maelstrom calls us.
Rise! Rise!
Dance on the raging waves!
Fling the paean skywards.
And lead the storm to shore!
Limbs brace against the shadowy bed. Muscles coil under pale silk hides.
Push!
Upwards.
Scattering of stones, buried in a soft, silt shroud. Soaring into the eternal blackness.
Above and below us.
icy water and we, pale comets suspended in inner space.
Upwards.
Gathering speed.
Inky waters. The darkness gradually emptying and
filling with light, gilding sea-stained skin with dapples of gold and verdigris.
Incandescent in the gloom.
The Sound.
Siren sea-song. Rushing. Sibilance.
Murmuring past our ears as the light grows stronger. Brighter.
Stabbing and blinding us as we near the surface.
Roiling waters. Speeding our ascent.
Faster!
Amniotic waters fill with green light,
Faster!
The rumble of thunder.
Faster!
Crashing. Billowing waves.
They break
against each other, smashing into a million lightning-lit splinters.
Electric white,
Neon blue,
Luminously radiant
We no longer gleam,
We shine
and the sea catches fire around us as we explode through the surface.
Punching skywards
in a germination of frothing white foam. A flowering as fragile as ice held up to light.
Hard as the heart of evolution.
Surging around us, the Sea is
the flawed oily colour of archiac glass
hidden deep-drowned in sunken ships far below.
Rain falling
Sheet,
after sheet,
after sheet,
striking the heaving obsidian surface.
Perfect crystal beads
glittering momentarily in the storm light before
vanishing forever
amid the roar and the tumult of the elements.

Lightning flashes from cloud to cloud
charging the air. Electricity raises the fine hairs on our icy bodies.
Maddening us with
a thousand prickling kisses.

We are
the epicentre,
of a swirling whirlpool of shrieking wind and furious ocean
and we dance the razor edge between
the lashing waters and the crackling skies.
We turn our heads to the wind, baring our fangs.

The storm has us and hold us tight in a lovers embrace,
Backs arch
against the driving force of the living gale.
The wind
tears our manes into pale banners,
that catch the wounded light of the bruised heavens.
Illumination
sliding over our skins and carving our forms in
crashing water.
Promethial fire courses through our viens; ichor, countless aeons old.
We throw back our heads and scream
the battle-cry skywards.

Before
the first sea-born abandoned the oceans
we were.
The skies silent,
the desolate keening of the wind moving over still waters.
The stars blaze from the firmament and ours the only eyes to see them.
The aurora undimmed by land-locked light.
Now
Bitter eyes turn towards the coming shore.
There.

The Light-House.
Standing defiant on it’s salt-wave-battered, glistening rock.
Thread-bare beam, thin and brave,
swings
through raging storm, cutting a swathe through the deluge.

Our eyes reflect the illumination,
glowing
ember red in the darkness.

The Light-House.
Futile.
Fragile.
Guardian of the alien storm-tossed lives.
The indomitable Light-House, throwing it’s life-line into the raging storm.
Battling the roaring waters.
Defying lashing rain.
Refusing to abandon those held in thrall far out to sea.
Guiding them home.

We lash the sea to greater fury.
Dark waters
gather and surge,
wave after wave,
bearing us landward
as our fury rises and mists our minds blood-red.

We are here as we have always been and we remember.
We do not forgive, we do not forget.
We await our chance and we are always watching.

We live in the Seasons. The Encircling Waters of the World.
The synaptic voltage of the the Thunderbolt.
The Heart of the Maelstrom.

We reach the Light-House screaming
and,
rearing,
We smash our hooves against it!