The Mysteries of Light
by Garry Stanton
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: A young disabled man reflects on his existence.
_____________________________________________________________________
“Don't you know
Upon the pillion of time's bike
We roar onto the stage and too soon we're dead centre
Don't you know
Buffalo Billions raised his sight
He's picking off the whole herd as soon as we enter
So you won't mind if I kiss you now
And maybe come on in for the night
Don't you know in this new Dark Age
We’re all Light.”
(‘We’re All Light’ by XTC, music and lyrics by Andy Partridge from the album ‘Wasp Star’, 2000)
She’ll be here soon. In about twenty minutes, she’ll be here. She’s always on time, you know. She’ll be able to fix that knackered plug on my radio. I have, myself, tried a knife, taking it from a low location on the kitchen worktop, but the blade proved too thick, or the screws on the plug too thin. Incompatible, anyway.
It’s December. I’m sitting alone, in silence. It’s a silence I both relish and despise. Actually, the quiet doesn’t last, the rising wind beginning to invade the hollow of the long-gone fireplace. It rumbles and creaks, a bit like me. I have no television. Probably just as well: if I did have one, the fuse would likely blow on me. I can feel myself kind of looking around the room blankly. If someone was watching me, you know, covertly somehow, from behind that hideous mirror or from inside that old carriage clock, they would see a young man, blank of visage. It wouldn’t be very interesting, that’s for sure. And the room, with its magnolia walls, dark wood of the type you might see in The Ladykillers, or 10 Rillington Place, or in a thousand neglected front parlours from Torquay to Tain. When I was younger, I used to half expect old Dickie Attenborough as John Christie himself to show his head round the door whispering “coom in, do”.
The carpet is an offensive mustard tone, complemented by rather sickly bucolic paintings. The paintings were, in the main, done by the owner of this place, my great-uncle Job. He had some kind of talent as a colourist, a Peploe or Fergusson for the fifties. But then he started getting commissions to do portraits and ‘pretty’ rural scenes and lost his genius to mortgages and the demands of council rates and a Laphroaig habit. Old Job’s in Kenya right now, painting safari scenes for rich Americans. He’s the eternal escapist. The only other living relative I have is his brother Enoch, whose Calvinist ideas are so fixed and uncompromising he makes John Knox look like that happy camper Paul O’Grady. Anyway, Enoch took himself off to Stornoway where he seems to have taken up with a male friend he has known for about a hundred years. No questions: I don’t want to know.
So, why am in this place? I am twenty-four, living in a house that should be inhabited exclusively by coffin-dodgers. Well, it’s a long story.
Outside, a few teenagers drift by, bored and aimless in their hormone-induced Slough of Despond. As I wheel myself to the window, it looks cold beyond the lace curtains of my sanctuary. As dusk begins to fall, I wonder again where the hell she is. Its three minutes past three! Outrageous! Then I hear them, the unmistakable footfalls of Mrs MacPhail, as she approaches the house. I hear her unlocking the front door and rustling bags, as she shouts to me.
“Afternoon, Graham! I tell you, it’s a beezer the day. A beezer o’ a freezer!”
A beezer o’ a freezer?, I muse.
Is it?, I think. Is it?
As she enters the living room, I ask her how she is.
“Good enough for seventy-one, I suppose. I tell ye, ye dinnae want to be oot there though!”
I think, yes I do. I do. Get me out of here. But I don’t say anything.
She is loud but she has a presence that is comforting. Mrs Isa MacPhail (how many Isas were born in Scotland in the 1930s?-someone should do a thesis on that one) is a carer and home help extraordinaire. She walks into the kitchen, trailing Coty L’aimant and all sorts of cosy banalities and everyday tales of her sister Agnes’s bunions and of Grace Paterson’s dog Betty. Betty is no longer with us: she had to go to the vet for a final visit.
“Fifteen though, she was. A guid age. ‘Course, the 57 varieties usually live longer than the pedigrees. Less fragile breedin’ in thae mongrels”.
Really? I didn’t know that.
She dusts, vacuums and washes the small pile of dishes. She then carries the screwdriver from its (high) position and places it on the low table. Wordlessly.
“So, football on the wireless this afty?”
I reply that there is, and that the programme has already started.
As she carries on with her chores, I am listening to Radio Scotland: Hibs against Motherwell. As I listen, I cannot help noticing, and not for the first time, how large Mrs MacPhail is. Not fat, really, just…big, like a senior citizen all-in wrestler, if there could ever be such a beast. The vivacity which you can tell she possessed as a younger woman is still there, though it has changed into a kind of briskness, an economy of movement. She never stops, a fit old bird. Mrs MacPhail’s Work Out. Make It Burn! I find myself chuckling inwardly at the thought of her and her OAP buddies giving it laldy at the aerobics class down at the community centre.
At least she’s able to keep fit though. Though my legs are more or less fucked (I’ll never sniff walking again) I do have pretty powerful arms and shoulders, you know, upper body strength. That’s the big pay-off for contracting sclerosis in your twenties. You get an awfully good upper thorax, although you more than likely will not be able to reach a screwdriver on a shelf to fix a plug. As my mind begins to wander into caverns I don’t want to, I scold myself.
Anyway, she shatters my tangent.
“So, anything you need at the shops Graham? Oh, wait a minute…there’s a wee list”.
She goes to the fridge and removes a post-it half-concealed under a magnet showing Elvis in his ’68 comeback pomp. Job has other magnets on there, that Monet one in the garden, an Abbey Road album cover facsimile, and that Winslow Homer painting, in miniature obviously, called The Blue Boat. Its one of my favourites.
“Oh aye. Milk, marge, toilet rolls”.
Toilet. Well now, what a performance that is these days! As she leaves, the commentator is becoming animated. A penetrating cross, a looping header, a goalmouth ‘stramash’, a….bloody own goal! Shit. That Polish goalkeeper is a joke. As some wag said the other week, we have twenty thousand Poles in Scotland, and we’re stuck with that useless bastard!
I see her disappearing at curtain left. The match restarts after the disastrous Motherwell goal, but I have lost interest, instead letting my mind wallow stubbornly in my predicament. I don’t know why I do this, it’s like I have to go over it and over it, every stupid detail of my demise and of those of my loved ones. How did I get here. It’s unbelievable! In a nutshell, three months after going to university in Edinburgh, my parents decide to treat themselves to a kind of second honeymoon in the Far East. My sister Claire begged them to let her go, and so all three of them went to Sri Lanka. Yep, you guessed it. They’d have been better going off to Scarborough Butlins or Bournemouth, boring places that are not afflicted by Force 9 earthquakes and resultant tsunamis. Their bodies were never found. My dad’s business (his firm manufactured outdoor gear) turned out to have terrible debts and the house had to be sold off to service them. Pretty unlucky, no?
So, here’s me in the house that Job deserted. You know, I should really get all the shelves lowered in this place. Maybe Mrs Mac would…
As the December afternoon glides into the shadows, I don’t feel cold, just dark, inside and out. I switch on the standard lamp (with a lovely sepia and rather Wordsworthian pastoral scene on the shade and with specially adapted low switch) and inadvertently catch sight of myself in the long mirror. Shadows flit around the room, dancing elusively in the amber glow of the old gas fire. I look away as the fire hisses distantly, lit low. It is punctuated by the still-rising wind, persistent in its efforts to break through. But, as I said, I’m not cold. I have one of those tartan travel rugs draped over my knees, like a veteran of the Somme or Ypres in some pish and custard home for the imminently doomed.
Funny. Cripples always seem to have blankets or something around or over them, a shroud depicting not death but debilitation. Comfort given where comfort cannot possibly thrive.
I wonder what the point is. Really. I am twenty-four. I have acute sclerosis. My bones, young bones, are brittle and hard. I cannot walk. I have no living relatives, save for the distant entities that are Enoch and Job. There is only Mrs MacPhail, a woman who is kind and who means well, but who means nothing to me. I am aware, through this existential fog, of the half time whistle blowing. She returns, her perfume trail faintly following but failing to disguise what she really smells of: an earthy, cold Edinburgh afternoon.
You know, I could go out, if I wanted to. I’m not a prisoner and I have had the front entrance ramped. I could wheel myself onto one of those buses with the special hydraulic lifters. Actually, I did go out, not long after becoming wheel-bound. Never again, though. It was the eyes in the shopping centre, all over you. They look at you when you’re still thirty feet away, a kind of morbidly fascinated rubbernecking, the classic car-crash scenario. Then, as you get closer they go out of their way to look at something, anything, else – a snotty toddler, an old guy with piss-stained trousers on, a metal bench, an advert for haemorrhoid cream in a shop window. Anything but you, the junior spaz. Mrs Mac is always encouraging me to try again. She says, in that pithy way – “It’s mostly in your mind” – but it’s not. It’s just too miserable an experience to convey.
She has the shopping now, which she puts away. Then, beaming, she produces a bulging envelope. “Wee Brenda’s christening photies. I remembered them!”
All babies look the same if you ask me, like pink Bassett hound pups, wrinkly and conversationally-challenged. I suppose I would have liked to have had a couple eventually (children, not Bassett pups) but that’s pretty much off the agenda now. I must be frowning or staring into space because the intuitive marvel that is Mrs Mac quickly, after a few had been shown, disappears the photographs, fleet of thought and sly of hand, changing the subject. I can’t remember what she says next, but after another cup of tea, and a slice of Battenberg cake, she is gone.
I wheel over to the bookshelf. I still have books I used for my English degree – Conrad, Donne’s poems, Chaucer, some anthologies. But the book I am reaching for now is a Collins dictionary. I leaf through it, apparently absently, but I know what I’m looking for. Death. I need to look it up. It’s an easy word but I feel compelled to confront a definition of it. Maybe I want to say it out loud, laugh at it. Maybe shout it out…. “n. Extinction of life; manner of dying; state of being dead; decease, dissolution”, and so on. Pretty straightforward, but it doesn’t really tell you much. ‘Death’ is derived from the Old English ‘dead’. I know I will be dead soon. It may be a year, six months, five hours. Strangely, although this cheery line of thinking is not exactly comforting, the sureness of my imminent demise smacks me in the face with the impact of a cotton bullet, if that makes any sense. I wheel back to the window, where two people are walking, hand in hand, as the first snowflakes descend. My mind flips back a year, to Wendy. She was my first, and last, girlfriend. First and last, maybe, but I loved her. I still do, but God knows it’s all too late for that now. We went out a few times, and were even what my mum quaintly called ‘steady’. That’s when I was steady too, as it were. But when this illness started to bite, when the pain fizzed and some days improved, two steps forward, three turns of the wheel back, things changed. The problem, and I admit it, was me. I changed, shutting her out. She was so constant at first, just being there. But it was, I was, too much for a young woman to cope with. It was me who killed it. However, she did stay until the day I was nailed into this mobile sarcophagus. Then, of course, and I thank God for it, she changed. Things changed her. She made new friends, people who could walk, run for a bus. Where is she now? I want to see her. Maybe if I’d been more….
Funny, I can picture her now, with those exotic dark tresses, those Aegean eyes. I try to kill a tear, but realise the futility of it. I think back to something I heard on a late night radio programme in which some boffin was warbling on about his theory that we are all just distant derivations of light, of Light, eventual results of The Big Bang, organic produce of the cosmos. It was weird but somehow comforting.
I am shivering now, as eternity or whatever is lurking out there in the fading light, beckons to me. It is gathering its forces. The late afternoon sun, weak diluted orange now, is shutting down its light. Outside, the snow grows heavier, a trillion exploded pillows emptying their contents upon the earth. I see my own reflection in the darkening glass, for as long as that wan winter sun remains in the sky, low and distant. Then, as the globe is taking its leave beneath the far horizon, I remember something I heard once, something about light. And it’s true, I just felt it, right now.
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: A young disabled man reflects on his existence.
_____________________________________________________________________
“Don't you know
Upon the pillion of time's bike
We roar onto the stage and too soon we're dead centre
Don't you know
Buffalo Billions raised his sight
He's picking off the whole herd as soon as we enter
So you won't mind if I kiss you now
And maybe come on in for the night
Don't you know in this new Dark Age
We’re all Light.”
(‘We’re All Light’ by XTC, music and lyrics by Andy Partridge from the album ‘Wasp Star’, 2000)
She’ll be here soon. In about twenty minutes, she’ll be here. She’s always on time, you know. She’ll be able to fix that knackered plug on my radio. I have, myself, tried a knife, taking it from a low location on the kitchen worktop, but the blade proved too thick, or the screws on the plug too thin. Incompatible, anyway.
It’s December. I’m sitting alone, in silence. It’s a silence I both relish and despise. Actually, the quiet doesn’t last, the rising wind beginning to invade the hollow of the long-gone fireplace. It rumbles and creaks, a bit like me. I have no television. Probably just as well: if I did have one, the fuse would likely blow on me. I can feel myself kind of looking around the room blankly. If someone was watching me, you know, covertly somehow, from behind that hideous mirror or from inside that old carriage clock, they would see a young man, blank of visage. It wouldn’t be very interesting, that’s for sure. And the room, with its magnolia walls, dark wood of the type you might see in The Ladykillers, or 10 Rillington Place, or in a thousand neglected front parlours from Torquay to Tain. When I was younger, I used to half expect old Dickie Attenborough as John Christie himself to show his head round the door whispering “coom in, do”.
The carpet is an offensive mustard tone, complemented by rather sickly bucolic paintings. The paintings were, in the main, done by the owner of this place, my great-uncle Job. He had some kind of talent as a colourist, a Peploe or Fergusson for the fifties. But then he started getting commissions to do portraits and ‘pretty’ rural scenes and lost his genius to mortgages and the demands of council rates and a Laphroaig habit. Old Job’s in Kenya right now, painting safari scenes for rich Americans. He’s the eternal escapist. The only other living relative I have is his brother Enoch, whose Calvinist ideas are so fixed and uncompromising he makes John Knox look like that happy camper Paul O’Grady. Anyway, Enoch took himself off to Stornoway where he seems to have taken up with a male friend he has known for about a hundred years. No questions: I don’t want to know.
So, why am in this place? I am twenty-four, living in a house that should be inhabited exclusively by coffin-dodgers. Well, it’s a long story.
Outside, a few teenagers drift by, bored and aimless in their hormone-induced Slough of Despond. As I wheel myself to the window, it looks cold beyond the lace curtains of my sanctuary. As dusk begins to fall, I wonder again where the hell she is. Its three minutes past three! Outrageous! Then I hear them, the unmistakable footfalls of Mrs MacPhail, as she approaches the house. I hear her unlocking the front door and rustling bags, as she shouts to me.
“Afternoon, Graham! I tell you, it’s a beezer the day. A beezer o’ a freezer!”
A beezer o’ a freezer?, I muse.
Is it?, I think. Is it?
As she enters the living room, I ask her how she is.
“Good enough for seventy-one, I suppose. I tell ye, ye dinnae want to be oot there though!”
I think, yes I do. I do. Get me out of here. But I don’t say anything.
She is loud but she has a presence that is comforting. Mrs Isa MacPhail (how many Isas were born in Scotland in the 1930s?-someone should do a thesis on that one) is a carer and home help extraordinaire. She walks into the kitchen, trailing Coty L’aimant and all sorts of cosy banalities and everyday tales of her sister Agnes’s bunions and of Grace Paterson’s dog Betty. Betty is no longer with us: she had to go to the vet for a final visit.
“Fifteen though, she was. A guid age. ‘Course, the 57 varieties usually live longer than the pedigrees. Less fragile breedin’ in thae mongrels”.
Really? I didn’t know that.
She dusts, vacuums and washes the small pile of dishes. She then carries the screwdriver from its (high) position and places it on the low table. Wordlessly.
“So, football on the wireless this afty?”
I reply that there is, and that the programme has already started.
As she carries on with her chores, I am listening to Radio Scotland: Hibs against Motherwell. As I listen, I cannot help noticing, and not for the first time, how large Mrs MacPhail is. Not fat, really, just…big, like a senior citizen all-in wrestler, if there could ever be such a beast. The vivacity which you can tell she possessed as a younger woman is still there, though it has changed into a kind of briskness, an economy of movement. She never stops, a fit old bird. Mrs MacPhail’s Work Out. Make It Burn! I find myself chuckling inwardly at the thought of her and her OAP buddies giving it laldy at the aerobics class down at the community centre.
At least she’s able to keep fit though. Though my legs are more or less fucked (I’ll never sniff walking again) I do have pretty powerful arms and shoulders, you know, upper body strength. That’s the big pay-off for contracting sclerosis in your twenties. You get an awfully good upper thorax, although you more than likely will not be able to reach a screwdriver on a shelf to fix a plug. As my mind begins to wander into caverns I don’t want to, I scold myself.
Anyway, she shatters my tangent.
“So, anything you need at the shops Graham? Oh, wait a minute…there’s a wee list”.
She goes to the fridge and removes a post-it half-concealed under a magnet showing Elvis in his ’68 comeback pomp. Job has other magnets on there, that Monet one in the garden, an Abbey Road album cover facsimile, and that Winslow Homer painting, in miniature obviously, called The Blue Boat. Its one of my favourites.
“Oh aye. Milk, marge, toilet rolls”.
Toilet. Well now, what a performance that is these days! As she leaves, the commentator is becoming animated. A penetrating cross, a looping header, a goalmouth ‘stramash’, a….bloody own goal! Shit. That Polish goalkeeper is a joke. As some wag said the other week, we have twenty thousand Poles in Scotland, and we’re stuck with that useless bastard!
I see her disappearing at curtain left. The match restarts after the disastrous Motherwell goal, but I have lost interest, instead letting my mind wallow stubbornly in my predicament. I don’t know why I do this, it’s like I have to go over it and over it, every stupid detail of my demise and of those of my loved ones. How did I get here. It’s unbelievable! In a nutshell, three months after going to university in Edinburgh, my parents decide to treat themselves to a kind of second honeymoon in the Far East. My sister Claire begged them to let her go, and so all three of them went to Sri Lanka. Yep, you guessed it. They’d have been better going off to Scarborough Butlins or Bournemouth, boring places that are not afflicted by Force 9 earthquakes and resultant tsunamis. Their bodies were never found. My dad’s business (his firm manufactured outdoor gear) turned out to have terrible debts and the house had to be sold off to service them. Pretty unlucky, no?
So, here’s me in the house that Job deserted. You know, I should really get all the shelves lowered in this place. Maybe Mrs Mac would…
As the December afternoon glides into the shadows, I don’t feel cold, just dark, inside and out. I switch on the standard lamp (with a lovely sepia and rather Wordsworthian pastoral scene on the shade and with specially adapted low switch) and inadvertently catch sight of myself in the long mirror. Shadows flit around the room, dancing elusively in the amber glow of the old gas fire. I look away as the fire hisses distantly, lit low. It is punctuated by the still-rising wind, persistent in its efforts to break through. But, as I said, I’m not cold. I have one of those tartan travel rugs draped over my knees, like a veteran of the Somme or Ypres in some pish and custard home for the imminently doomed.
Funny. Cripples always seem to have blankets or something around or over them, a shroud depicting not death but debilitation. Comfort given where comfort cannot possibly thrive.
I wonder what the point is. Really. I am twenty-four. I have acute sclerosis. My bones, young bones, are brittle and hard. I cannot walk. I have no living relatives, save for the distant entities that are Enoch and Job. There is only Mrs MacPhail, a woman who is kind and who means well, but who means nothing to me. I am aware, through this existential fog, of the half time whistle blowing. She returns, her perfume trail faintly following but failing to disguise what she really smells of: an earthy, cold Edinburgh afternoon.
You know, I could go out, if I wanted to. I’m not a prisoner and I have had the front entrance ramped. I could wheel myself onto one of those buses with the special hydraulic lifters. Actually, I did go out, not long after becoming wheel-bound. Never again, though. It was the eyes in the shopping centre, all over you. They look at you when you’re still thirty feet away, a kind of morbidly fascinated rubbernecking, the classic car-crash scenario. Then, as you get closer they go out of their way to look at something, anything, else – a snotty toddler, an old guy with piss-stained trousers on, a metal bench, an advert for haemorrhoid cream in a shop window. Anything but you, the junior spaz. Mrs Mac is always encouraging me to try again. She says, in that pithy way – “It’s mostly in your mind” – but it’s not. It’s just too miserable an experience to convey.
She has the shopping now, which she puts away. Then, beaming, she produces a bulging envelope. “Wee Brenda’s christening photies. I remembered them!”
All babies look the same if you ask me, like pink Bassett hound pups, wrinkly and conversationally-challenged. I suppose I would have liked to have had a couple eventually (children, not Bassett pups) but that’s pretty much off the agenda now. I must be frowning or staring into space because the intuitive marvel that is Mrs Mac quickly, after a few had been shown, disappears the photographs, fleet of thought and sly of hand, changing the subject. I can’t remember what she says next, but after another cup of tea, and a slice of Battenberg cake, she is gone.
I wheel over to the bookshelf. I still have books I used for my English degree – Conrad, Donne’s poems, Chaucer, some anthologies. But the book I am reaching for now is a Collins dictionary. I leaf through it, apparently absently, but I know what I’m looking for. Death. I need to look it up. It’s an easy word but I feel compelled to confront a definition of it. Maybe I want to say it out loud, laugh at it. Maybe shout it out…. “n. Extinction of life; manner of dying; state of being dead; decease, dissolution”, and so on. Pretty straightforward, but it doesn’t really tell you much. ‘Death’ is derived from the Old English ‘dead’. I know I will be dead soon. It may be a year, six months, five hours. Strangely, although this cheery line of thinking is not exactly comforting, the sureness of my imminent demise smacks me in the face with the impact of a cotton bullet, if that makes any sense. I wheel back to the window, where two people are walking, hand in hand, as the first snowflakes descend. My mind flips back a year, to Wendy. She was my first, and last, girlfriend. First and last, maybe, but I loved her. I still do, but God knows it’s all too late for that now. We went out a few times, and were even what my mum quaintly called ‘steady’. That’s when I was steady too, as it were. But when this illness started to bite, when the pain fizzed and some days improved, two steps forward, three turns of the wheel back, things changed. The problem, and I admit it, was me. I changed, shutting her out. She was so constant at first, just being there. But it was, I was, too much for a young woman to cope with. It was me who killed it. However, she did stay until the day I was nailed into this mobile sarcophagus. Then, of course, and I thank God for it, she changed. Things changed her. She made new friends, people who could walk, run for a bus. Where is she now? I want to see her. Maybe if I’d been more….
Funny, I can picture her now, with those exotic dark tresses, those Aegean eyes. I try to kill a tear, but realise the futility of it. I think back to something I heard on a late night radio programme in which some boffin was warbling on about his theory that we are all just distant derivations of light, of Light, eventual results of The Big Bang, organic produce of the cosmos. It was weird but somehow comforting.
I am shivering now, as eternity or whatever is lurking out there in the fading light, beckons to me. It is gathering its forces. The late afternoon sun, weak diluted orange now, is shutting down its light. Outside, the snow grows heavier, a trillion exploded pillows emptying their contents upon the earth. I see my own reflection in the darkening glass, for as long as that wan winter sun remains in the sky, low and distant. Then, as the globe is taking its leave beneath the far horizon, I remember something I heard once, something about light. And it’s true, I just felt it, right now.
About the Author
Born in Edinburgh and now living in Fife, Garry Stanton is a musician to trade, as well as a teacher in training. His debut album, Indigo Flats, was released online in 2010.
Garry also writes, having completed several short stories, his first novel and a lot of poetry, some of which has been published in the Edinburgh-based poetry magazine, Harlequin.
Garry also writes, having completed several short stories, his first novel and a lot of poetry, some of which has been published in the Edinburgh-based poetry magazine, Harlequin.