By hand or by brain
by Ruth Aylett
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: What happens to an expert from the Royal Museum of Scotland in a future Edinburgh that has been badly bombed by invading Norwegians.
_____________________________________________________________________
I only went back once, a whole week after that terrible night when the Norwegian jets screamed in from the Forth. Don’t you have to see the body to believe someone is dead? The Norja bombs had shattered the Museum. My twenty years working there were the memories of some other, different, person who no longer existed. I saw some of my colleagues searching the wreckage obsessively for fragments of our exhibits, but I knew nothing of value could be rescued from that fire-blackened rubble. I tried not to breath in the sick-sweet smell of the fractured sewers as the dust still hanging in the air made my eyes water.
Chambers Street had lost its boundaries. It was flooded with low winter sunlight no longer blocked by the Museum’s confident Victorian bulk. The first ten steps sweeping up to the old main entrance were all that was recognisable. They disappeared under a chaos of broken masonry. Steps to nowhere. That image returned every day when I forced myself, shivering, from out of my cocoon of blankets into the tenement’s freezing bedroom. There was still no gas, and only intermittent power. Another day leading nowhere. I walked the suburbs staring at the houses, wondering how they could look so solid and normal when so much of the town centre was a ruin.
There were fading posters from before the bombing outside the newsagents where I used to catch the bus to work. “It’s Scotland’s Oil”. “Fight Norja Imperialism!” “Scotland and England Unite for Peace”. They seemed as topical now as the Museum’s Relief of King Ashurnasirpal of the Assyrians. I touched the damp surface of one of the posters. Once that same finger had brushed across the two-thousand year old image of the King. Greek, Roman and Assyrian exhibits had been my specialism. The Norja had finally destroyed what more than two millennia of wars and disasters had spared.
“The English did the ‘peace’, right enough,” a familiar voice growled behind me. “Shame about the ‘unite’.” Gordon rented the flat a floor up the tenement from mine. Though we had little in common, we had sometimes chatted. He was a large dishevelled man who worked for Scotclean emptying the dustbins. His job wasn’t going to go out of fashion.
Of course he was right – the English Government had made a separate peace faster than a speeding Norja bullet two days after the bombing. As so often, we’d been the guinea-pigs. The destruction of so much of the Old Town, including the Museum and the Parliament, was an unmistakeable warning to London.
I shrugged. “Maybe the English did the right thing. If we’d just given the Norja the oil the town might still be in one piece and we wouldn’t be living on Food-Aid.”
“Don’t be daft, man. They were just looking for someone to throw their weight at, ken?”
Gordon had never struck me as a political animal, and maybe I let the surprise show on my face. He gave me a very hard look.
“Nae all of us that uplift rubbish are rubbish, ken?”
I mumbled an apology.
Our Food-Aid was distributed from a former supermarket on Bruntsfield, and the next day I went to queue for oatmeal and long-life milk. Inevitably someone had decided porridge was a good way of stopping us all starving to death and though I hated the stuff there wasn’t much else left. Hundreds were already waiting, all the way down the street, and I knew it would be a good hour before I got to the front.
An aerial staccato gradually became audible and tension spread up and down the queue. A set of three Norja helicopters, flying low from their base in the Castle. We all knew that they’d also been involved in the bombing. They kept coming and I felt myself flinching, started looking round for cover. Was Bruntsfield about to be flattened?
As the formation roared overhead some people dropped to the ground, but I made an effort and kept to my feet. Then objects started falling on us. White, fluttering. Leaflets rather than bombs. We picked them up in a horrified silence. The bombing of the Old Town had been preceded by a leaflet drop telling everyone who lived there to get out or suffer the consequences.
Then a hubbub spread up and down the queue. It was easy to see why. This leaflet was not a demand to evacuate Bruntsfield. The Norja were here to help us. Except that a small minority were out to spoil things. In a hectoring tone it warned that terrorist behaviour would not be tolerated. Any citizen that knew of terrorist intentions, or witnessed such behaviour and did not report it at once to the authorities, would be assumed culpable themselves.
If the tone made me angry, the message gave me hope. Would they bother if they weren’t meeting trouble somewhere?
Maybe it was the look in Gordon’s eyes, or maybe it was the arrogance of the leaflets. Later that week I crossed the Meadows to the University. After my private wake at the Museum I’d wandered round the University area looking for something, anything, solid and standing after the bombing. Many University buildings had gone, but the History and Archaeology department had somehow survived. All of us Museum staff had been there to talk to the academics about this or that exhibit.
There had been a buzzer to get in if you hadn’t a card. Now the door opened right away when I pushed it. For once the power was on, but the lobby was chilly from all the broken windows. It smelt of masonry dust and emptiness.
“Where do you think you are going?” I jumped at the sudden challenge. The janitor emerged from his glass-sided office, surreal in his black uniform jacket with the University badge on the top pocket, as if it was just another working day.
“I’m from the Museum. Well, the former Museum. I wanted to use your library.” I hadn’t meant to sound so pathetic.
His face softened. “Not much call for that these last months, Sir. You’ll know where it is then.” Of course I did.
When I was a child, the town library had seemed filled by low voices only I could hear. Each book was speaking in a murmuring undertone, a hum of ideas and imaginings. For me, the Museum had been the same, full of the distant voices of those who’d made and handled our exhibits. Standing between these library shelves, for a moment I thought I was going to weep for the lost and dead.
But this wasn’t the time for tears.
I didn’t have muscle, like Gordon. Each to his own. I reached for my first book.
“On Guerrilla Warfare,” by Mao Tse-tung.
Swearwords: None.
Description: What happens to an expert from the Royal Museum of Scotland in a future Edinburgh that has been badly bombed by invading Norwegians.
_____________________________________________________________________
I only went back once, a whole week after that terrible night when the Norwegian jets screamed in from the Forth. Don’t you have to see the body to believe someone is dead? The Norja bombs had shattered the Museum. My twenty years working there were the memories of some other, different, person who no longer existed. I saw some of my colleagues searching the wreckage obsessively for fragments of our exhibits, but I knew nothing of value could be rescued from that fire-blackened rubble. I tried not to breath in the sick-sweet smell of the fractured sewers as the dust still hanging in the air made my eyes water.
Chambers Street had lost its boundaries. It was flooded with low winter sunlight no longer blocked by the Museum’s confident Victorian bulk. The first ten steps sweeping up to the old main entrance were all that was recognisable. They disappeared under a chaos of broken masonry. Steps to nowhere. That image returned every day when I forced myself, shivering, from out of my cocoon of blankets into the tenement’s freezing bedroom. There was still no gas, and only intermittent power. Another day leading nowhere. I walked the suburbs staring at the houses, wondering how they could look so solid and normal when so much of the town centre was a ruin.
There were fading posters from before the bombing outside the newsagents where I used to catch the bus to work. “It’s Scotland’s Oil”. “Fight Norja Imperialism!” “Scotland and England Unite for Peace”. They seemed as topical now as the Museum’s Relief of King Ashurnasirpal of the Assyrians. I touched the damp surface of one of the posters. Once that same finger had brushed across the two-thousand year old image of the King. Greek, Roman and Assyrian exhibits had been my specialism. The Norja had finally destroyed what more than two millennia of wars and disasters had spared.
“The English did the ‘peace’, right enough,” a familiar voice growled behind me. “Shame about the ‘unite’.” Gordon rented the flat a floor up the tenement from mine. Though we had little in common, we had sometimes chatted. He was a large dishevelled man who worked for Scotclean emptying the dustbins. His job wasn’t going to go out of fashion.
Of course he was right – the English Government had made a separate peace faster than a speeding Norja bullet two days after the bombing. As so often, we’d been the guinea-pigs. The destruction of so much of the Old Town, including the Museum and the Parliament, was an unmistakeable warning to London.
I shrugged. “Maybe the English did the right thing. If we’d just given the Norja the oil the town might still be in one piece and we wouldn’t be living on Food-Aid.”
“Don’t be daft, man. They were just looking for someone to throw their weight at, ken?”
Gordon had never struck me as a political animal, and maybe I let the surprise show on my face. He gave me a very hard look.
“Nae all of us that uplift rubbish are rubbish, ken?”
I mumbled an apology.
Our Food-Aid was distributed from a former supermarket on Bruntsfield, and the next day I went to queue for oatmeal and long-life milk. Inevitably someone had decided porridge was a good way of stopping us all starving to death and though I hated the stuff there wasn’t much else left. Hundreds were already waiting, all the way down the street, and I knew it would be a good hour before I got to the front.
An aerial staccato gradually became audible and tension spread up and down the queue. A set of three Norja helicopters, flying low from their base in the Castle. We all knew that they’d also been involved in the bombing. They kept coming and I felt myself flinching, started looking round for cover. Was Bruntsfield about to be flattened?
As the formation roared overhead some people dropped to the ground, but I made an effort and kept to my feet. Then objects started falling on us. White, fluttering. Leaflets rather than bombs. We picked them up in a horrified silence. The bombing of the Old Town had been preceded by a leaflet drop telling everyone who lived there to get out or suffer the consequences.
Then a hubbub spread up and down the queue. It was easy to see why. This leaflet was not a demand to evacuate Bruntsfield. The Norja were here to help us. Except that a small minority were out to spoil things. In a hectoring tone it warned that terrorist behaviour would not be tolerated. Any citizen that knew of terrorist intentions, or witnessed such behaviour and did not report it at once to the authorities, would be assumed culpable themselves.
If the tone made me angry, the message gave me hope. Would they bother if they weren’t meeting trouble somewhere?
Maybe it was the look in Gordon’s eyes, or maybe it was the arrogance of the leaflets. Later that week I crossed the Meadows to the University. After my private wake at the Museum I’d wandered round the University area looking for something, anything, solid and standing after the bombing. Many University buildings had gone, but the History and Archaeology department had somehow survived. All of us Museum staff had been there to talk to the academics about this or that exhibit.
There had been a buzzer to get in if you hadn’t a card. Now the door opened right away when I pushed it. For once the power was on, but the lobby was chilly from all the broken windows. It smelt of masonry dust and emptiness.
“Where do you think you are going?” I jumped at the sudden challenge. The janitor emerged from his glass-sided office, surreal in his black uniform jacket with the University badge on the top pocket, as if it was just another working day.
“I’m from the Museum. Well, the former Museum. I wanted to use your library.” I hadn’t meant to sound so pathetic.
His face softened. “Not much call for that these last months, Sir. You’ll know where it is then.” Of course I did.
When I was a child, the town library had seemed filled by low voices only I could hear. Each book was speaking in a murmuring undertone, a hum of ideas and imaginings. For me, the Museum had been the same, full of the distant voices of those who’d made and handled our exhibits. Standing between these library shelves, for a moment I thought I was going to weep for the lost and dead.
But this wasn’t the time for tears.
I didn’t have muscle, like Gordon. Each to his own. I reached for my first book.
“On Guerrilla Warfare,” by Mao Tse-tung.
About the Author
Ruth Aylett lives in Edinburgh, teaches computing at Heriot-Watt University, wonders why we let the world go on as it does, and writes poems and short stories. She has been published by Textualities, New Writing Scotland, Doire Press, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Red Squirrel Press, and others. More at www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ruth/writing.html.