The Fish Ladder (20 page)

The next feature marked on my map was the cemetery to which the wooden signpost referred, although I couldn’t see it yet. Beyond it was a farm, and these two things were the last signs of human habitation, if a cemetery could be called a habitation, on this side of the river. The only other building was on the opposite bank, about eight miles away, and there was no track to it. It was simply called Poll Roy. On my side of the river, at the far boundary of the farm, there was a footbridge across a tributary, and there, I believed, I could rejoin the river.

I came to a boggy pool at the side of the path. In the centre was a cushion of sphagnum moss and in the middle of the cushion sat a rabbit. It started when it heard my footstep but otherwise did not move. Its nearside eye bulged. It was blind. I thought of the glossy hare at Spurn Point that had loped sparkly-eyed from the shore: my wise and lucky sea-hare. Why do we read good omens into pretty things but are so quick to dismiss ugliness as fancy? With difficulty I ignored the rabbit, and tried not to develop the idea that my spirit guide had left me.

I longed to pass the enclosed land, and be alone. Of course I was alone, I had been all day, but the Land-Rover track, the cemetery and the farm buildings ahead of me were all indicative of regular human visitation. I felt vulnerable, and visible, in much the same way that I had at Spurn Point. Some way ahead of me a wall crossed the path and to the right of it was a chambered cairn that I had seen marked on the map. There was a gate across the track and an animal pressed its face through the bars. From a distance it looked like a goat, all devil horns and slanting eyes, but as I drew closer I could see it was a sheep. More sheep came to the gate and I was not sure if this was a response to my approach, or if they were expecting a visit from the shepherd. By the time I reached them, they were thickly clustered and showed no sign of moving. So I climbed over the gate and pushed my way between them, their sticky wool and unexpectedly bony frames rubbing against my legs. Looking up, I could see the cemetery. It had whitewashed stucco walls and was situated towards the edge of the gorge, overlooking the river below. The cemetery was filled with elegant black and ochre monuments. As the path curved, and my angle of approach altered, the monuments appeared to rearrange themselves, like the figures on a Bavarian clock. A padlock and chain coiled around iron gates. Below, in the gorge, the river glittered. I felt happy to see it again, as though I had been reunited with a friend.

Sheep pressed into the whitewashed walls, grubby against the pristine brightness. To the sixth-century icon painters sheep represented thoughts. A good shepherd was someone who had control of their thoughts, who could corral them, stop them from wandering. Orpheus had been a shepherd. It was shepherds who first saw the divine light of the Nativity. Evie’s favourite character in the Catalan Nativity is called the
Caganet
, that is, the Shitter. In add­­ition to the Shepherds, the Three Kings, the Angel and the Holy Family, the animals in the byre and the lambs, the Caganet squats, his eyes fixed on the manger, his skirts hoisted around his waist, while he drops an astonishing turd.

According to legend the
Caganet
was one of the shepherds to whom the Angel first announced the Good News, but unfortunately he was taken short. Anxious not to miss anything, he positioned himself discreetly at an appropriate distance from the Holy Family and relieved himself, while remaining in a state of wonder and contemplation. The field where he was squatting became fertile from that day forth, and so he has come to embody a number of ideas: the importance of a reciprocal relationship between mankind and the earth – for even as he receives he is giving back – and enlightenment, both physical and spiritual.

Ahead of me were the farm buildings. They were still so far away they looked like Lego blocks. Slowly they grew bigger until the track brought me to the farmyard. The moors lifted away on every side. The house and outhouses were well maintained. I peered through a kitchen window. I thought I might see a mug and a kettle, perhaps a packet of biscuits, or a chair. But there was nothing, the house was quite unfurnished, although there had been fresh hay and animal feed in the barn.

I passed quickly through the farm and after climbing over a stile set into the farthest wall, I was at last on the open moor. The Land-Rover track continued a little way beyond the last field, and then formed a neat loop back on itself, as precise as a surgeon’s thread. There were more scattered remains of earlier dwellings, an old cistern filled with farm equipment, and then the footbridge. I had regained the river, and it was smoother now, a curving ribbon, fed by a single tributary. I crossed the tributary with a sense of elation, and was surprised by quite how much my heart warmed at the sight of the water. The river was gently and visibly rising, held in a gentle V in the land. The fear that I had felt when I first saw the map had quite dissipated. While I followed the river I could not get lost. It was as constant and as concrete as a ball of flax. I folded the map away and put it at the bottom of my bag.

Water always takes the easiest path. So, too, do deer, although they are not keen on getting their feet wet. Clear tracks followed the bank of the river, avoiding areas of moss and mud. Smiling, I noticed that the deer also preferred the northern bank. I caught a sudden movement at the edge of my vision, and turned as a vast herd of young stags rustled along the horizon, their antlers drifting like Shakespeare’s Birnam Wood.

On the other side of the river was a stone house – I had reached Poll Roy. A waterfall, a low step, was the last of the river’s features to be recorded on my map and I had been looking forward to reaching this place. I liked the name – it sounded heroic, like Rob Roy. Poll Roy seemed to be a conventional – if abandoned – farmhouse, but the fact that there was no road to the house felt wrong. It was like Dorothy’s home landing out of nowhere on the Wicked Witch of the East, but without the ruby slippers. Glancing down I saw a rusted wire loop encased in plastic. A trap. It was old, and abandoned, but I narrowly missed stepping in a second. I came across two more, the metal nooses shiny. New traps. There was no real danger, although I might have turned an ankle. But the idea that someone might come here unnerved me. I was at least two miles beyond the end of the Land-Rover track. Behind the abandoned house ran a ridge of low hills. I sat down, retrieved the map. Unfolded it. Beyond the hills was a second river, the Berriedale Water, and an unpaved track ran along the side of it. Later the track turned north-east, away from the new river, past a lochan, and then crossed the Dunbeath Water, about three miles upstream from where I was now. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it earlier. It hadn’t occurred to me, on my linear trajectory, that one might cut across the hills to get here, and that I was not as remote from other people as I had supposed.

Evening was refracting all around me. I was aware of the cool air in the shadows of the house, the darkness pooling to one side of it. I was affected by its stillness and sense of uncertain abandonment, like that of the farm below. I wondered how it came to be empty, conscious of the legacy of the Clearances, when tenant farmers throughout the Highlands were turned out of their cottages by their landlords, driven to poorer lands, driven to the coast, or to the cities, to America, Canada and Australia, while their homesteads became vast sheep farms. I found that I was afraid, as I had been when I saw the madman at Spurn Point. I had walked about half the length of the river and although I intended to sleep on the moor, I didn’t want to meet anyone, certainly not the setter of the traps. Although I was as much unnerved by the spirit of this house as by the thought of any human encounter. I decided to try and reach the track – the one on the map that bridged the river – as quickly as the path allowed. Beyond the crossroads I felt sure I would be alone.

The land was rising, and the river was narrowing, winding and curving between broken peat hags that curled down over me, two or three times my height. I was still following the split hoof marks of the deer that speckled the water’s edge. White stones appeared at the bends in the river; other than that the earth was black, the roots of heather forming a ragged fringe along the top of the bank. Traps still appeared, sporadically, along the deer path, so I climbed up to the top of the peat. I could see in every direction, but there was nothing except the moor and the sky, which was as soft and white as the underbelly of a goose. There was no sound; the river, quiet at best, was inaudible from the slight elevation. No feature broke the horizon – either rock or stone or tree. How quickly I might get lost if I were to wander even a short distance from the water! My senses were alternately flooded and starved by the uncompromising austerity of the moor. The dry heather didn’t make for easy walking, being rough and uneven, and the peat was deeply cracked. I was aware how frightening the place might appear if one were unable to trust one’s senses.

When I was twenty-two years old I met a fortune-teller in Brighton. I had travelled there with a girlfriend, Emma, who had come from Nigeria to begin her Ph.D. in London, and we had taken the rattling train from London’s Victoria Station, the grey-green landscape of south-east England obscured by the rivulets that meandered across the window glass. It was November. When we arrived at Brighton the rain had stopped. The sun was like a torch beneath a bed-sheet. A zigzag wind, vigorous as elvers, burrowed into our clothing. There were very few places that offered shelter. We ate fish and chips, and walked along the pier. We sipped afternoon tea from white china cups, and grew dissatisfied as it cooled too fast. We hunched into Lloyd Loom chairs behind chattering conservatory glass. The glass reminded me of garden cloches and I had an incongruous flash of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, naked and sorrowful, squeezing chubbily beneath Mr McGregor’s gate. Simply being there filled me with panic, the desire to run tempered by enervation – it would be ten years before Brighton became fashionable and we seemed little removed, in our wicker chairs, from the old people gazing from the double-glazed care homes that bandaged the seafront like wraparound sunglasses covering the eyes of the blind.

Emma didn’t appear to have noticed, or perhaps the newness of the monochromatic landscape filled her with wonder. Most of what I knew about Africa had been gleaned from a trip to Morocco. It had been an unmitigated disaster, and I was in and out of Africa in less than two days, my girlfriend and I with our inappropriate clothing and short, bleached hair attracting more attention than we either wished for or could cope with. We had spent a miserable night in a cheap hotel in
T
étouan, where I saw my first cockroach, heard my first muezzin, and where strange voices muttered outside the door all night, knocking, and calling,
M’m’selles! M’m’selles! Would you like to see the souk?
In the morning we found the very same taxi driver who had brought us there and begged him to take us back to the port. I thought it unlikely that Brighton was having the same impact on Emma. She seemed enchanted by its gentleness, or perhaps its shabby genteelness, her brows arched with laughter, delighting in the fact that we two were there at all. And so I had tried to temper my anxiety, my longing to shrug off the fug of central heating and the cinnamon plastic aftertaste of teacakes. Later we made our way to the slick wet beach where a mêlée of traders struggled against the low season, recessed into the arches beneath the promenade, like cave dwellers, or bees. I wanted to stamp down to the water’s edge, to stand before the flinty sea, fill my ears with the sound of the waves, and touch the spattering spray. It was the non-human element of the town that attracted me. But Emma was drawn to the life that hugged the shore, and she wanted to see everything, stop at every stall, and I felt it graceless to suggest that we might part. We passed purveyors of smoked fish, mussels, prawns, jellied eels. Fish and chip shops, with mushy peas, and gift shops with postcards bent into curves by the damp winter air, animals made from glued-together shells and imported from Taiwan. Finally we came across a sign above a door that said:
Professor Mirza, Famous Mystic of the East
. Outside was a sandwich board bearing a large delineated hand. We had stumbled across a palmist.

There was a price for one hand, double for two. The hand you have been dealt, and what you will make of it. The professor seemed ancient, yet his face was unlined. His skin was a warm mahogany, although it had the chalky bloom that an English winter’s day gives to everyone. He wore a grey woollen astrakhan hat. I think in part it was a desire to look at the hat that kept me there. Also, it was warm in Professor Mirza’s room, and the know­ledge that cold legs scurried overhead lent a
Wind in the Willows
riverbank feel to the place. It had the same addictive cosiness that Ratty had shared with Mole. Letters lined the walls. While Emma chatted to the famous clairvoyant I studied the framed and often ebullient commendations from his clients. They included a short, polite note from Lady Antonia Fraser.

I don’t remember what the left hand said, other than that I was naturally impulsive and had done little to temper this. But I do remember what he found in the right. I would become a writer – a detail that, oddly, I have only recalled as I write this account. I would live with more than one man. I would have a child in my mid-thirties who would compensate me for the loss of a loved one. I should beware of mental illness at around the same time. I don’t recall the rest. I might have listened more, and argued less. I told him I was going to be a filmmaker, I had already met a good man, and I wanted to have many children. Professor Mirza asked for the birthday of my lover. When I gave it to him he began to laugh, for this was not the one – oh goodness, not at all. Beneath the laughter the professor conveyed a firm yet gentle authority. If I would but accept the knowledge, he seemed to be saying, it would be easier for me in the long run, and I could prepare better for the road ahead. After all, why else was I here?