Resting in cemeteries flooded with wild flowers in the field of wooden churches

little red riding hood and the big bad wolf under a yellow moon - jeff burgess

Resting in cemeteries flooded with wild flowers in the fields of abandoned churches Andrew McCallum

Published by White Craw Publishing 2014 This is a freely licensed work, as defined in the Free Art License 1.3, the text of which can be found at http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/

Working from a randomly discovered blog and John Alexander’s notebooks I have reconstructed the circumstances surrounding the strange case of Mary Inglis.

John Alexander was one of the detectives dismissed by Police Scotland at the end of the oil strike. For a time he devoted himself to providing security advice to a group of private companies, but then he was accused by the host of a talk show of promoting terrorist activity. He had the foresight not to defend himself and to avoid any contact with his former colleagues,

notwithstanding

that

he

received

various

expressions of sympathy and offers of assistance, all of which he declined. He was a good detective; he had experience of this kind of thing, and knew that anyone could be involved in his denunciation and that, consequently, if he trusted anyone he could end up in jail or dead. It was better to just keep a low profile, wait until the dust had settled, pack a bag and leave.

He went to Portpatrick. He started, eschewing any help from his compatriots in exile. He did not like to think of himself as an expatriate: life’s ways are inscrutable; it moves people about liberally and had placed him there, in this place, which was where he was and nowhere else. After working as a waiter in a hotel and as a management assistant in a small fish-

smoking business, he began to gradually reveal his sleuthing skills. He was an excellent investigator. As a favour to his boss, he unmasked the young woman he had been fucking as a gold digger and brought to light the infidelity of his wife with a used car salesman.

But mostly he lived a kind of retreat, in that quiet place of rhinns and sea, whipped by storms every now and then.

Mary Inglis, resident of Newton Stewart, journalist, disappeared one day in the manner of the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Or so John Alexander was given to believe by the extravagant mouth of Matthie Bold.

The old fisherman told him the story one afternoon at the hotel bar where John Alexander used to play pool and have a couple of glasses of Jack Daniels. That line about the fairy tale was enough to spark a basic interest and a desire to pursue the substance of the tale. It was a matter of self-esteem. John Alexander was fed up uncovering the childish intrigues of Portpatrick. Retirement at thirty is not good for anyone. Darts in a bar overlooking a quiet harbour in the company of the village’s two whores is a slow sad death.

He set out to track down the journalist. This was a puzzle he had to solve to leave behind a story. For what is a story if not just the solution to a puzzle and its branches held within the frame of a symbolism? People have always thus gone after a

story, putting the puzzles of existence into religious, ideological and/or sentimental frames of nouns and adjectives. Or so I have been told by a devotee of Carl Jung, whom John Alexander interviewed early in his investigation.

John Alexander was led in his investigation by the complicated archetype that affirms that women who exhibit obesity at all naive. In the symbolic and unfathomable universe through which this archetype led him John Alexander found Oedipus, Diana, Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory, and when it led him into the neighbourhood of the Yoruba cosmogony he also found the mother, Chango. As he pursued his pursuit of archaic archetypes as clues to the disappearance of Mary Inglis, John Alexander took copious notes and sketched elegant mandalas in his notebook.

The police

had ruled the

husband

out

of

their

investigation, despite his having been for a long time their chief suspect, but they had no – not even circumstantial – evidence to support a case against him. John Alexander had obtained an appointment to talk to him through the subject of one of Mary Inglis’ newspaper features; a kind man, a Jungian, founder of a network of car auctioneers and partner in a small shipping firm which specialises in immigration matters.

Mary Inglis’ husband was a building contractor in Stranraer.

I do not think I can add anything to what you can already read in the records. He was young, a little haggard and of normal height, a broad-shouldered swimmer who looked like a holy fool; a huge bigot or a big dude, was John Alexander’s estimation. They met in the hotel restaurant.

“Maybe if we begin with the usual questions we could sniff out other clues.”

“What are the usual questions?”

The former detective looked with surprise into the wolf face of his interlocutor. He had not been expecting that question. In fact he had not been expecting anything at all.

“Well, you know, enemies, lovers, threats… stuff.”

Those things the man repeated slowly, lengthening his jaw.

“I'd like to know her routine, what she did. I know the police will have asked you all this, but I want to review everything.”

“Is this a special question?” He smiled, his face the expression of a Christian martyr or a sly mafioso. “She took care of the children. Or rather, you know,” he corrected himself, “she ensured that the children were taken care of. She organised their activities; karate, swimming, French classes, those sorts of thing. And she went to the gym, went shopping and sometimes met up with a friend for coffee.”

“Was she not a journalist?” John Alexander asked.

He noted that the husband held his smile.

“She wrote features and opinion pieces for some of the newspapers.”

“And nothing else?”

“Do you think that’s too little?”

“Tell me about her friends. “ “These are unusual questions,” the husband insisted. “A former fellow student; two or three contacts on Facebook or something.”

“Were her friends married?”

“Really, your insinuations are outrageous.”

John Alexander resisted the urge to spit in his face.

The husband whistled out a sigh.

“Look, my wife and I have an open marriage, not a jealous one. Our lives are transparent to one another, you know. She knows my stuff and I ignore hers. I don’t care to know whom she sees or what she gets up to.”

“Because curiosity killed the ...” John Alexander wanted to tell the idiot, the dude, the jinxer. He paused. “Look, curiosity exceeds these liberal covenants. Were you never tempted to know?”

“We talked about different things… Listen, I’ve had enough

of

your

conversation.”

innuendo.

I’d

rather

we

ended

this

Abruptly and awkwardly the husband got up and moved clumsily through the dark restaurant, leaving a trail of run-ins with tables and chairs, and John Alexander with the impression of a skinny nag-faced elephant.

John Alexander asked a dwarf waiter for a shot of Jack Daniels. He spent a while thinking that he could have been more diplomatic, lengthened the meeting, pursued some really unpredictable questions, but concluded that the guy was a show-off, revealing too much, so much so that all those things between truth and falsehood had been lost.

The Purloined Letter.

This reference to Edgar Allan Poe he found in the correspondence Mary Inglis had had with her former classmate and her friends on Facebook, all scattered around the world, with their arses glued to their chairs, cursing the bad time, the wrong time, the late hour.

John Alexander went back to his digs opposite the church.

It was winter. He drew back the curtains and looked at the large building before him; a brown tower appended to an old barn.

He felt a slight dizziness and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he saw the clouds moving rapidly above the distant horizon. They were loaded with snow. The moon grew through the sea-fog and a distant siren howled, wringing his heart with an oppressive force.

Trembling he sat down at his desktop and began surfing.

Despite knowing that information and expertise had exploded with a big bang in the virtual universe, John Alexander was a conservative man. He kept notes in notebooks.

He placed his notebook beside the keyboard and began the task of deciphering the codes that would let him enter Mary Inglis social networks. Once in he found as usual the horizontal tedium of chaotic novelty, the predictable dynamics of virtual anarchy; greetings, bows and curtseys, photos, flirting, comments, complicity, irony, political activism and mystical powers of originality, all repeated in a dull mirror of kaleidoscopic effect, multiplying ad nauseam like a virus. All social network accounts, John Alexander reflected, could be your own.

He heard again the howling siren, a desperate moan from the gullet of the North Channel, a gut-wrenching keening over the towers, mounds, graves, cemeteries of the Rhinns. With a click he left Facebook and by chance (the result of a nervous tic) entered an email account, opened a link and…

Nothing; an empty blog entitled. ‘The blog of Mary Inglis: My grandmother ate the wolf.’ John Alexander gave a silent laugh. This woman really was gone on the Riding Hood tale.

He could have swallowed, said ‘fuck’, grumbled; that would have offset some of the frustration he felt. But instead he made another click, tried three or four combinations of

keystrokes and came to a hidden blog page, a page to be read only by the owner of the account. It was a sort of log, a list of disclosures. He entered.

He followed one, two, three links; then he left Portpatrick forever, its absurdities, howling shipping passages and seamen’s cemeteries. He walked a labyrinth, a network of words, a series of horrors that absorbed John Alexander and his scribbled notebooks, his decision to retire, to reclude, to come to this quiet place of rhinns and sea, whipped by storms every now and then.

This is the most interesting game I have proposed: to be part of a story.

Once upon a time my grandmother went to Glasgow and was lost. They searched for several days. She disappeared in a wood near the city centre, in one of the city’s icy parks.

And once upon that time I was single and went to visit my grandmother.

[It is impossible to tell just how many years ago this happened, let alone to put on these pages an account of the things from those days that no one any longer sees. This is just to warn you.

But anyhow: back to the story…]

After watching the shadows move over the cemeteries that were covered by the city, I was married to one of the weak spawn of the great masters, the architects of life. I was married and forgot everything, including the rite in the cave‌ The played

church there

had as

a

a

beautiful

child

before

basement.

I

came

I to

inhabit this foreign body; played there before they built the church. Before the church was built, the cave...

Children play holding hands, making wheels and singing as the sun sets. They are innocent, playing near woods and streams, in each and every

unexpected

place.

Take

Mary

Inglis

myself: it was difficult for her to remember the forgotten, on that day when she went to visit

her

grandmother

in

Glasgow.

Children

played in the woods beside the road. Children played and the wolf was not. They knew that Grandma was lost, and sang verses that sang, ‘Grandma was lost by the shortest path, the shortest path, the shortest path; Grandma was lost by the shortest path that reaches home in the morning; reaches home, reaches home, to the cave from where Mary will marry; reaches home,

reaches

home,

to

the

story

is

as

weak

beast

Mary

will

day

Mary

find

her

shortest

path

marry.’

The Inglis’

grandmother

granddaughter; through

follows:

the

she

left took

woods;

she

the went

one to from

autumn

to

winter, north to the largest city in Scotland – Glasgow. The story begins with the rituals of the brethren of the cave, who are charged with protecting the memory of the burial places. She joined that company as a spiritual exercise of charity, went in autumn to Orkney, Galloway in winter, and returned to Scotland as to the hand of

a

deformed

and

monstrous

creature.

Throughout her journey she fed on the milk of foxes.

She returned by different ways, by spring via

Clackmannan,

Distant

and

via

strange,

Callanish barely

by

summer.

retaining

her

lucidity, everyone believed that Mary Inglis’ grandmother had begun to get lost in her mind.

My sister, Heidi, said that the shortest path leads to the deep forest paths of the mind, which is not the domain of a predator. (But she spoke falsely). For some time I took the same path, the shortest path, via Lochee and Joppa;

the path of the great yew, Pencaitland; the way of the Glen Affric pines. My grandmother lost in the woods now that the wolf is not.

Once upon a time, when I went to visit my grandmother one evening before dark, I met some girls who were walking through the forest. We played hide and seek behind the big dry tree trunks kisses.

and

I

They

stole were

my

first

restless

sweet

and

sapphoic

happy

girls.

Life proved all paths short and pleasant. We were willing to pay the price to walk them, but none went so far as I did. I watched a deer, ended the autumn in Newlands and decided to follow those marks on the wet ground, all the way to the Tweed. About me spilled the orange sky before sunset as blood on the great forest of Caledon. In this landscape I saw the wolf for the first time. He ran on all fours, his back full of hair, danced on the fallen trunks, and leapt small hills and high ridges with the same single bound. He stopped, turned his head, looked

at

me

with

eyes

blazing

ice

blue,

burning me with his eyes. His jaws bit the winds. His tongue hung dripping from those jaws

and seemed to say, ‘Just take the shortest path and soon you will have me in your tummy.’ When night falls in Glasgow, rotten leaves float dead on stagnant water and the walls of the

sweat

shops

and

bars

lose

their

materiality, unfold, are mirrored shimmering in the river and canals. Beneath the city the dead lie in their cemeteries, beneath the towered buildings, near the cathedral church, among the ruins of Alt Clud.

I see now, as I write, the shadow of the night to come. I feel the flame of that first afternoon

in

the

cave,

where

the

wolf

gave

birth to the child who became my grandmother who returned and ate the wolf. Time has passed; that child is in a wooden box buried beneath a flood

of

wild

flowers

beside

an

abandoned

sepulchre of God, moaning and snuffling, weak (I know) and wanting to die in the place where her ancestors died. I hear the call, nightfall; no one follows me. The shadow of my husband has seen these wild encounters in the wastelands above our cemeteries.

I

have

been

invited

by

the

children

to

play, to participate in the project to rewrite the story. It is part of the game of life,

leaving these notes for you; the legacy of my ancestors in the caves, the builders of the cemeteries, the pilgrims, the forest prowlers.

I will make the last deadline and take the shortest

path

that

grabbed

my

grandmother

before me.

Nobody can be actively involved in a story and return. I know that its ellipses, silences, omissions terrify those who read it. I know all its

possible

endings.

I

know

you

have

no

choice. I must leave this message, pass the torch. You too must fulfil your destiny.

You crossed the winter and spring to arrive in Portpatrick to wait for the summer, the fury of

the

elements.

We

can

blindly

believe

in

freedom, in escape. But when we are in a story, John Alexander, we fly like a dart towards its single last period.