Maccloud falls, p.18
macCLOUD FALLS, page 18
In the eternal scale, the great orchard, the little station carrying away the fruit and honey to the tables of the grand, even the church-going congregation, seemed no more than the merest spike on the timeline that ran on through the centuries as full and relentless as the river itself. They were all passing through, carried along on the stream, the carrying stream as Hamish Henderson termed it, a cavalcade of busy business that bloomed occasionally but always returned to desert when the flumes broke, or the timber rotted or the iron girders rusted down to what they wanted to be, to what creation always inclined, the entropic, the shapeless, the identity-free. Whether it was called Arthur’s Seat or The Chief, or whatever name the old indigenous culture had for it, the mountainous rock that seemed fixed and motionless above the little town was itself shifting imperceptibly, slowly eroding, grain of sand by grain of sand, and it too would be gone one day. All things must pass through.
The grinding screech of rail-truck wheels rose to fill the air again, bringing an end to his stoned meanderings. The little inn seemed to shudder with the noise. Ken, the CPR linesman, must have spoken, given the okay for the long line to depart along the river, heading for the mountain passes that would bring it to the next halt, to disgorging and uncoupling, to be filled again, to wait a signal, to move on, always on. He wondered about the tree-planters, whether they woke and cursed the interruption to their well-earned rest, or if the fatigue of day on the mountain was so great that they didn’t even hear it.
The great forests were gone, and a billion seedlings set in the clearing in their place. The white monkey magic. He felt dizzy at the thought, seemed to be rising above the land, high into a cartography of satellite imagery, mind racing, twisted into a new shape by travel, by strangeness, beer and the joint of BC bud he’d shared with Doug, who was not Lawrence, not of Arabia or Ranamin or Nottingham, but a student from Vancouver. He rose and staggered upstairs, where he lay on his bed and watched the footage of the ospreys again, the giant chick’s reluctance to leave the nest, the mother – or was it father – hopping on and off its back, trying to shift it.
His mind was still racing, not quite able to sleep despite the fact he’d walked a fair bit and had felt the full heat of the day, so he put more sun-cream on, thinking, discomfort and unease aside, he was feeling something, his curiosity awoken by the unfamiliar, he was alive after all, in spite of himself – how does someone survive when the world turns against them, when people you love die or leave, when your work becomes irrelevant and even your own body begins to destroy you, cell by cell?
He had done it, this far at least, by numbing himself, by ridding himself of all emotions, detaching from all the people and things that had previously given him a sense of who he was, or had brought him pleasure. Moved away from the life he led, closed the bookshop, sat through the long days in his mother’s house in the country, no longer even reading, till she was gone too. He had shut down everything but the essential, a little food, sleep and minimal exercise, surprised himself by how reduced a life could be. Until he found his father’s Canadian photos. And now he was here, in the place itself, eighty years later, stoned and beginning to feel again, to lose the numbness, to care. Like the way a finger feels when it gets too cold and then begins to warm, or how an arm comes back to life slowly after you’ve slept the wrong way and cut off circulation, a seeping of blood to the isolated part. In this case, the isolated part was his soul, or his psyche, the seele of Freud.
And the woman he’d met, who’d swept into this narrow numbed world like a tornado for a few short days, before she drove him to the station to get on the Greyhound in Vancouver that morning, and set him on the next stage of his quest. Could he really care about her, after everything that had happened, after all the loss and the shutting down he’d had to do? He tried to picture her, to see if the image would stir him.
She was tall and slender, in the way that Slavic women often are, but not the White Goth type that the Ottoman sultans had so prized as wives. No, she was dark, another stock, her eyes such a deep brown until you looked closely, and then the gold showed, emerging like a circular aura of sun from deep wooded shadow. He could picture her, feature by feature, if not an entire conjuring. Her nose smallish, ever so slightly squint, but a good shape, certainly not too elfin. Her lips quite thin but shapely. And her chin strong, somehow confident. But all of that was obscured by the memory of her smile, and that alto laugh. And she had seemed kind, empathetic, most of the time at least, until she did that Garbo imitation and wanted to wander off alone.
He sat up. No, it was folly. He couldn’t get involved, he was a cancer victim, it could recur at any time. He had to save himself as much trouble as he could, keep life simple. But then, if that was what he was meant to be doing, why was he here? His mind danced with pictures of her, merging into some weird fragmentary slideshow of images from those days in Vancouver. Hockey and bears in Canucks shirts, her stretched out on his bed, stoned and giggling at nothing, walking through the huge trees up at Pacific Spirit where she’d taken him, pretending a long tangle of seaweed was her tail at the shore as dusk fell, cycling round Stanley Park, eating oysters on the roof at Joe Fortes. And then that dark stare, when her eyes would turn completely opaque and she’d withdraw, as if he’d done something terrible, or come too close to knowing her, as if she’d given away too much of herself in some way or another, as if she’d crossed some invisible boundary of self she’d set for herself. It seemed there was more than one of her, as if she was multi-faceted, a cut stone glinting as she spun and moved. That morning, when he’d left Vancouver bound for a place she’d never been, had never even heard of until he mentioned it, had she really been tearful and upset? It seemed so unlikely, the whole encounter. He might well have dreamt it all.
In the darkness, his senses sharpened till the sound of the river below seemed to boom out a barrage of drumming, and the little moonlight creeping into his room became more than enough for him to see the furniture. The wardrobe, the single straight-backed wooden chair, the long fitted desk and the pile of books he’d gathered there, the tripod with the video camera pointing at the osprey nest. His suitcase and backpack, the evidence of his transience, of just another nameless figure passing through. Except he wasn’t just another. He knew now there was a story here, and he was going to tell it, if he could. At last, he’d write his own book, not simply buy and sell the books of others. That would be reason enough not to jump.
Lying there, his mind drifted to the shop door in Edinburgh. It must be filthy now, unwashed, covered in street grime. Bill posters will have pasted and top-pasted the news of coming festival shows all over the front. If he was there, he’d light the little stove, and welcome bibliophile, browser, potential shoplifter even. But no. That life was gone. The door was locked. He could not conceive of the forces that held him there for so long, any more than why, so suddenly, they should have ceased to apply. But in a world city of literature, as Edinburgh is, there are many ways for a literate person to make a living. In his time, he’d done most of them, starting as a book hound, back in the days when he was still a student in need of some extra money. It began with a chance find, at the bottom of dusty cardboard box of old cinema magazines, in a charity shop full of the detritus of lives undocumented – a perfect 1st edition of the translation of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love with Ezra Pound’s introduction, bought for a pound and sold for £50. He wanted to keep it, but needed the cash. After that, he was hooked. The city then was home to quite a few of them, walking the old streets hunting through second hand shops and jumble sales, in search of their gold-dust – hawking finds where they could. They grew to recognise each other, figures laden down with tell-tale bags bursting with rectangular corners, even acknowledging one another with a faint nod as they passed, but where they went and what they found was guarded as zealously as the old-timer’s stake in the gold rush.
His stoned mind drifted through his past, telling himself the story of his life in recap, as if he needed to understand how it was he’d got to this point. He remembered the excitement of opening the impromptu bookstall, two mornings a week in a basement at the university, selling on less valuable acquisitions, set-texts to students like himself for a few pence, much cheaper than they cost in even the second hand bookshops. How he got to know the real bibliophiles, young professors like Ronnie Jack and the aspiring, got to know the kind of thing they wanted, and made it his business to find that. How, by the end of second year as an undergraduate, so much time was taken up in this hunt that he dropped out. It was a compulsion, a book fever, but much as he loved reading, he couldn’t be bothered with the academic game. Yet he continued to hang out with his university friends.
He remembered the wee flat he first moved into with Zack from his course, and how his mother protested against his leaving home. How Zack had moved in with his girlfriend and, because he could afford the cheap rent, he didn’t go through the hassle of finding someone else. He needed the space, was gathering more and more books – every day seemed to bring home another carrier bag full. But it wasn’t simply about making a living. He genuinely believed – still did – that he was rescuing something of eternal value, making it available once again, to those who appreciated the quality that lay within the covers. Slowly, that little flat had filled up. Piles upon undocumented piles, although he began with the earnest intention of cataloguing everything, the more he acquired the more diverse and confusing it all became. Within a year it was beyond him, and he had simply tried as best he could to remember what was there and what he’d sold on.
His mind went to the MacQueens, how, after he sold them the Pound, he’d slowly got to know the strange old couple who ran the second-hand bookshop down the street, and used to sell on to them whatever he could. They didn’t pay much, but he had learned a lot about what was valuable and what was not, just from what they chose to buy, and after a while they took a shine to him and he’d spend hours in the back-shop, drinking tea and talking trade. Their thing was modern 1st editions. How they became like parents to him, or perhaps the grandparents he never really had, and finally he started to work there. It made perfect sense to take over the shop when they decided they’d had enough, and wanted to retire. For a while he just ran it for them, but the longer he was working there the more it started to feel as if it was actually his, and after a particularly good few months when he was lucky enough to get his hands on three outstanding collections, he bought them out. They were happy to have a lump sum, because they weren’t doing much business any more.
And so the bookshop became his life, his work and his passion. He got to know writers and collectors through that little shop, they all seemed to pass through at some point or another. Ian Rankin as a young student, studying Muriel Spark, McCall Smith when he was still a lecturer and hadn’t made his name with the No 1 Detective Agency used to come in from time to time, and he believed he once bought a lot of Beat generation books from Irvine Welsh, though he had no idea who he was back then. Jo Rowling he met, back in the days when she was spinning out her first wizard tale in Nicolson’s cafe. Those and hundreds of would-be writers who bought and sold books. His shop was a point of exchange, where literature was dusted off, given a wipe, revalued and re-shelved, awaiting the next hungry mind.
But the times he loved best in the bookshop were those midwinter afternoons, when the fire was lit and the shop cosy, the dusk descended, when he’d sit with whatever book he was reading while the world hurried by. Yellow glow heaven – leerie as a lamplighter, the script unlocking worlds and minds he’d never know. It was why he never travelled, he had so much to read, so many places to fly to imaginatively. The world was in that bookshop, the cosmos too. Sometimes, if the book had really gripped him, he’d lock the door and draw the blind, pour a whisky and carry on – another chapter, then another, until the paraffin ran out and his feet got cold. But the evenings, when the lights were lit, when friends and characters, writers and ranters, used to gather! It brought a smile to his face, there in the canyon night. Ah, that was another life, back then. Edinburgh was full of pubs where writers gathered, and it seemed he knew them all – though he was never in foreground, he was a face that everyone knew but couldn’t name. The book guy, who sat at the feet of the great, helped others edit magazines and books, to organise readings, watched as contemporaries rose to prominence. Applauded them. And yet, and yet, some take it all far too seriously. Writing and all that. A lot of the books he handled were simply curate’s eggs, with something to commend but faults aplenty. Out of all those that passed through his hands, more than a few went to the tip, the pulper, irredeemably worthless as text, object or art. He never felt good about dumping any book, though, always had a sense of the effort that went in, the author’s pride, even in the more worthless. The would-be writer inside empathised. Deep down he knew where that ambition was rooted, it was his mother’s doing, and he remembered when he was nine, how he gave his mother a poem he had written at school about an otter. He had never seen an otter, except in books, but it was his first proper poem, employing what he had learned, through imitation, about metre and verse. ‘The Otter’ became an instant classic in their bungalow – she framed and kept that poem on the mantelpiece in the sitting room, told him he would be a proper writer one day, that he’d publish books, as if it was the highest of vocations, and books were gold.
What a notion to plant in an impressionable lad’s mind. This strange currency of books had insulated him from life and led to his retreat, until the outside world and its reality was submerged always in a fog of words, of minds, ideas distant from the street he lived on. Until the towers of titles, threatening to fall, were threat enough to drive him out to Sandy Bell’s, to the whisky, to the music and the warmth. And the writing of his own became a fading myth. But now he was writing – words at least, though not much about Lyle, more about his past and all so fragmented.
As if in an echo chamber, he heard again her voice in Vancouver. ‘So live. Write!’ And at last his stoned mind gave in to sleep.
Hot and sweaty, he woke on top of the covers he’d kicked off in the night. His mind seemed to bear the traces of his dreams, a raccoon he thought he’d seen, a text message he’d had, and her. She’d been there. All night, with him, though she was far away and he had no way of contacting her, no signal for his phone and no internet.
Out the window, nothing seemed to have changed in the little town, though the sun was now slowly sending a descending tide of light down the far side of the canyon wall. On the nesting platform, the osprey chick was alone, a giant baby crouched as it was the day before. He switched on his laptop, checked the time and saw that he’d slept late. From below, the clink of dishes suggested breakfast might be over, that the tree-planters had long since headed off to their mountain. He dressed and went downstairs. Vince was in the lobby, carrying plates and cups to the kitchen.
‘Ah, there you are!’ he said. ‘Wondered what had happened to you this morning.’
‘Slept late,’ the Scotsman answered. ‘Any chance of a coffee?’
‘Sure! And I’ve got something for you. I thought I remembered seeing these over at the recycling plant. Someone must have pulled them out of the garbage.’
From behind the reception desk, Vince produced two magazines printed on a cream paper, monochrome only. ‘That’s your man there, isn’t it? James Lyle?’
And it was. The Scotsman took them and leafed through, as Vince set the coffee machine in process. The magazines dated from 1995, published by the Nicola Valley Museum.
‘I read them earlier,’ he said. ‘Kinda interesting. I had no idea we’d had such a famous resident out here.’
‘These are like treasure, Vince,’ he said. ‘I had no idea they existed.’
‘Well, I guess you wouldn’t over there in Scotland.’
‘How far away is this museum?’
‘It’s over in Merritt, where the recycling plant is.’
‘What kind of thing does it have?’
‘You mean exhibits?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never been there. But you know, Merritt’s a big old cattle town, in the middle of cowboy country. So probably a lot of stuff about ranching. Local history, settlers, First Nations.’
The Scotsman sat with his coffee on the terrace. It was getting very hot even this early. The two museum magazines contained a number of memoirs, and most interesting of all, a transcription of Lyle’s diary from 1910. Not a great deal of detail, and little description, more a log of what he’d done. A few illustrations showed his tiny meticulous handwriting. Reading through, what was noticeable right away was how mobile he had been. There were constant references to catching trains, down to Vancouver or up to Merritt, and it seemed that Cloud Falls had been far from isolated back then, with a regular passenger train service up and down the canyon. He’d even been over to Victoria on the ferry to consult with experts at the university, men whose names the Scotsman thought he recognised from his research, but couldn’t place without access to the internet.
