O Caledonia

Janet wondered what to do now. She wanted to go; she wanted very much to go. But if Lila woke and found her gone, she might be disappointed and hurt. She gazed gloomily out of the window. Someone had taken in the washing. Would Lila care if she went? She was distracted by voices outside the door. The mountainous sedentary woman, not unlike the manatee, now she thought of it, seemed to be engaged with a nurse. Said the nurse, brisk but kind, “Of course you’re not a snake.” Mountain: “And hoo dae ye ken, can ye say that for a fact?” Nurse: “I most certainly can. Snakes have scales. You have lovely soft skin.” Mountain: “I’m no a lass. Ye ken, I’m no a lass nae mair.” Nurse: “Well, you’re not a snake either.” Mountain: “Then wha’s the snake?

Ye maun be the snake. Aye, it is yersel’.” A series of squawking gasps. Nurse: “For heaven’s sake, Mrs. Farquharson. I’m getting the doctor.” Then, meaningfully, “I think you’ll have to Go Downstairs.” There was a click of retreating heels. The squawks rose to a gruff choking climax, then subsided. They were replaced by sonorous mutterings. Janet looked again at Lila. She lay there like an effigy, the sheet scarcely rising as she breathed. She looked out at the blank sky. There was still one object hanging from the washing line. It was a tiny black velvet child’s party frock, pinned by its lace-trimmed sleeves, as though Beakface had shrunk like Alice in Wonderland, and evaporated into the bitter wind. For a moment Janet thought she had caught the madness or crossed into a realm where all was possible. She pulled her left pigtail hard. It hurt. She was Janet, and the thing on the line was a clothes-peg bag, made perforce in some heartless handicrafts session, by a person of tragic destiny. “Goodbye, Lila,” she said. There was no answer. Out in the corridor the woman in the chair was lying back, breathing heavily, eyes half closed. Now both eyeballs showed only white. As Janet warily skirted around her, she mumbled, “Rabbits.”

The bus toiled noisily into the twilit hills. Janet reflected on her expedition. Strategy apart, it could not be called a success. She had imagined Lila’s ravaged face softening into her rare sweet smile at her arrival. Her black eyes would glow with pleasure as Janet told her of the infant Heracleum

which she had dug up and transplanted to adorn the grave of Mouflon. There would be talk of animals and trees, of fungi and the great draughty castle, but not of its inhabitants. Lila shared Janet’s distaste for the Teutonic and she had hoped to describe St. Uncumba’s German nativity play and reproduce the turgid gutturals of Gabriel’s message to Mary. It seemed curious to her that the Germans, who had murdered so many Jews, should be widely regarded as a people appropriate to proclaim, in folksy manner, the miraculous birth of the doomed and Jewish babe. Why not perform a Latin play about the slaughter of the Innocents? It would be more honourable and at least it would sound beautiful, apart, of course, from the yells of the Innocents. The hideous short “u” which occurred in so many English words of disparagement, insult or plain dreariness, she ascribed to the Teutonic influence. “Rut,” she thought. “Ugh. Lump.” And there were worse, far worse. Such sounds did not exist in Latin or Greek. Francis claimed to have found an especially satisfying and characteristic German word: Ein beutelrattengittenwettenhof. “In other, simpler words, a kangaroo shelter. Current among ex-Nazis, hiding their shame by farming kangaroos in the Australian outback. Their wives take the Joeys, or Johanns more properly — baby kangaroos to you — into the house and dress them in

lederhosen. Sometimes they don’t notice as they bustle about attending to Kinder, Kirche, und Küchen

that little Johann has grown up and is now nearly six feet tall. Sometimes Hausfrau and Johann meet in a rather unexpected manner in the corner of the kitchen. But this is not for your girlish ears, Janet.”

She was aware that she was trying not to think of the asylum and the people she had seen there. Later, there would be a time for this, and she feared its coming. One lovely thing had happened. As she walked away from Sunny Days along the cliff road, she had been followed and escorted by a great white bird, a fulmar. It floated just below her, beneath the edge of the cliff, dipping and drifting, its inscrutable disc face turned towards her. She thought that perhaps it was Lila’s soul, briefly escaped from her little white cell and narrow bed and slumbering physical being, and ranging free on the back of the wind, a phantom presence come to wish her well.