This is a short story of mine that was published in the Scottish magazine Northwords Now.
Louder than usual, the sea roared and rushed as if scouring out the inside of Harry's head. He felt its salt bite at the quick of him. He picked out driftwood and laid it aside out of the reach of the waves. Later he would return and gather it up. His feet trod his steady pace into the sand between the thin tracks of his pram wheels.
Harry collected what he wanted, a packing case that would break up easily, and a limb shaped like a gnarled, bent walking stick. There was no shortage.
He walked his distance, then returned home with his plunder. Timber he might have missed preyed on his mind like an anxiety. His eyes looked for precious flotsam here, there, and everywhere else. Sand, wood, and the surge of sea engulfing his thoughts with giant breakers were all there was for him - and the fulmars who complained when he walked past their cliff edge.
He trudged up the hill back to his house. He dumped his load in the back garden. A testimony to his industry, it was full of sinewy branches flexing their muscles into unusual postures. Straight-angled boards in erratic bundles. like the arms and legs of a Cubist beast, added a crazed geometry to a garden that had become a gallery for wood.
A functional dresser, a table, one seat and a cooker furnished an austere kitchen. A window looked out to moor and hills. He put the kettle on. The cottage was at the back of the village, well away from the sea, but the waves still thundered at Harry's head. Sometimes the oceanic roar dropped to a low presence. But it never left him alone, as if it were trying to erode him. He felt washed up by the tide, like a piece of wood he had gathered, or some sandstone sculpture with its insides worn out, ready to collapse upon itself, on its way to becoming grains of sand.
'Timed it well!' a voice yelled. David. 'I see the kettle's just on! Nothing strange.'
Harry stared at him as if he were a particularly unexpected sight, standing on the worn lino under the naked bulb. Something slowly stretched awake in Harry's eyes.
'Would you like some tea?' Harry asked him.
'Nothing stronger? You used to always get something better here.'
Harry went through the complicated process of remembering where the other cups were. He even found some biscuits. They looked slightly soft and he hoped they were not stale. He looked wonderingly round the room before wandering off and reappearing with a chair. He sat down too.
David took a bite of his biscuit. 'Best fossil I've ever tasted!' he said. 'Almost edible.'
Harry looked at the muscles of David's face as they swelled out. You'd have thought David was shouting.
'So how are you keeping, Harry? Long time no see.'
The waves churned around the right side of Harry's skull. But there was a calm day on the left and he heard David clearly enough when he pointed that ear towards him.
'You keep yourself to yourself so much,' David said. 'Anyone could forget you lived here.'
Harry nodded, as if David had said something else. 'Saw John's car the other day,' he said to David.
'You were quick,' David replied. 'It wasn't there very long.'
'He should've dropped in.'
'I was lucky I saw him myself. On a tour of the Highlands with the new girlfriend. Didn't take his eyes off her the whole time. Hardly said a word to me,' David complained.
'Like his piano playing,' Harry said.
'I think his mother sees him a lot. He always was closer to her.'
Harry was miming playing the piano. His mind was going back to another visit of John's. It had been a quiet day in Harry's head, so he'd heard John clearly. The keys had rolled softly in a current of sound as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata had painted gleams of silver on a calm, midnight sea.
'Plays jazz piano in a club now. Still teaches music in the high school. Look, I'll tell him to make sure he calls the next time he's here,' David suggested.
Harry kept on miming the piano. Suddenly he stopped. 'You busy in your workshop?' he asked.
'That's what I wanted to see you about,' David said.
Harry clattered at the cooker again. Then he was pouring out more tea.
'Thanks. I've got enough,' David told him.
Harry pushed the plate of biscuits towards him. 'I was down at Lairg,' he said. 'Saw the woodworker there.' Harry often rattled on about things that had nothing to do with what you were talking about with him originally.
'Oh, yes?'
'Marvellous stuff. Chairs that looked as if the wood were still alive. He looks at the timber. Says what would that make? The chair's like the wood. He doesn't shape the wood to make it like a chair.'
'Gerry's work. I know it. Smashing joints. Are you saying his stuff's better than mine?' David tried not to sound annoyed but failed.
'Oh no.' Harry looked offended now.
'The smaller stuff sells better. I've done big stuff like Gerry's before.'
Harry said nothing in reply.
'I've got a new line,' David went on. 'Aeolian harps. They're much admired.'
Harry appeared to be listening to something with his right ear. It annoyed him. His brow separated into five parts.
'The wind plays them,' David said.
Harry jerked his head up. 'The wind plays the harps?' he asked.
'Did you not see them when I had them in my back garden? Had a few of them playing at once. None of them were quite the same. But there was an odd kind of harmony.'
Harry was trying to imagine the sound of wind thrumming its arbitrary notes. He thought it would be jarring and eerie. He saw the wind as a semi-transparent figure in robes that flowed in its own breezes, as it ran rustling fingers through the strings. And what would the sound be like in a gale? What howlings and yearnings there would be! The wind became a demented demon in his mind. It thrust its trident and commanded tidal waves to its whim. Why would anyone want to listen to a sound conjured up by the wind?
'But I ran out of wood. I had to stop.' David paused, hoping some sort of helpful connection would be set up in Harry's head.
Harry started talking about John's piano playing again. David couldn't tell if Harry had heard him or not. 'How's your mother, Harry? She hasn't been up to see you in a while?'
'She's coming up in the spring.'
'She's still in good health?' David asked him.
'Her blood pressure's high.'
'She wants to stop eating so many of your biscuits.'
Harry pushed the plate towards him again.
'That's not what I meant. Look, about the wood.'
'She writes all the time,' Harry told him. Then he was up, rummaging in the dresser. He brought out a handful of letters. He put them in front of David.
'She's a dutiful mother,' David said. 'But I couldn't really, I really couldn't read letters she'd written to you.'
Harry looked disappointed but David insisted on handing them back to t him.
'Do you feel lonely up here, Harry?'
Harry started playing the piano again.
'I know this business of your hearing... It's difficult for you. You're still going to the doctor's, Harry, taking his advice?'
Harry stood up and walked over to the window. And David realised this line of conversation wasn't going to get anywhere. Harry stared at the wood sprawling over the garden. Which started David thinking again.
'I really came to see you about the wood There's a shop in Inverness wants some sculptures from me.' David's voice grew louder towards the end of his sentence. Harry still said nothing. David realised he would just have to come out with it. 'I haven't the timber. Could I have some?'
Harry gave the impression he'd known what David was after all the time. His gaze at the log in the far corner didn't alter. He liked the shape of it. It reminded him of someone just about to stand up and walk. Each piece in the garden meant something to him. it was a living being he'd saved from drowning in the sea.
'I don't think I can spare any,' Harry said.
David sipped his tea. 'Harry,' he sighed.
Harry just kept on looking at the wood.
David went out again, back to his own house. There he looked at the list of orders for the shop in Inverness, and the bills behind the ginger jar on the mantelpiece. He walked over to his pile of wood, decided which piece to use and put the other back.
Next day, Harry was on the beach again. The silence in his left ear disturbed him. He couldn't do anything to stop the noise in the right. But if he could match it with the sound of the waves on the shore, he could almost relax, pretend it was all sea on sand. At other times, the noise was a grating crescendo of waves crashing down on a rocky foreshore, dragging pain through his skull. And you couldn't pretend anything else.
When Harry came back along the beach with his pram, David was standing there waiting.
'I could get my own wood but you always beat me to it,' he said.
'Aye,' Harry replied.
'Anyway, it needs to dry out. And for every ten pieces, there's only one that will do. But you've been stockpiling the stuff. Couldn't you let me pick out a couple of bits?'
Harry talked about the weather very pleasantly, then walked on. When tourists left after their summer holidays, one of their memories of this beach was of a thin, stooped man, scuttling along it, picking up, stockpiling pushing extravagant disorders of wood. Harry looked now as he always did.
David was counting his pennies to see if he had enough for his groceries for the week when he next saw Harry, at the Post Office counter. Harry handed over his Giro book and was given a handful of notes in return. Incapacity Benefit. Well enough merited, thought David, but strange. Harry had no money, no work, and all that wood. David had no money, plenty of work, but no wood. Harry chatted cheerfully about the weather again, then made his way back to his cottage.
David went to the pub. He met Donald the leatherworker. They talked about business. Donald had good orders too - for key rings and belts. An ambitious young man with a family, he produced endless leather goods. His workshop overflowed. There were rumours he was moving to somewhere with larger premises and more tourists. He would do well, as long as he didn't divert himself to the pub. David had talked about council tax, the roads, and a proposed new water supply - about everything but what was on his mind. Talk came round to their crafting problems at last.
'I've awful difficulties getting leather,' Donald complained. 'it's the quality. What I get's good enough for key rings. But I can't get belt hide at all.'
And David told him his problems.
'You don't say. And have you been to the tip lately?' Donald suggested.
'The tip?' David repeated.
'Aye, I'd an old cooker that didn't work and just took it up there myself. Good for a nose around. The things that folks throw out. Got a candlestick the last time, a frame the time before that. But there was nothing there - except wood. Loads. Somebody's been chucking out sheds and outhouses. You might find something there.'
'It'll be well matured that,' David said.
'Aye.'
David downed his half pint and made ready to go.
'If you give me time to finish, I'll come along,' Donald suggested.
'Fine.'
They trundled off in David's van. The tip was a mile off, on a side-track off the main road, up a slope then into a dip where it couldn't be seen by traffic - apart from the plume of black smoke, which worried David. But it was all right. Somebody had set fire to an old car.
David felt he'd found riches. They picked out the decent pieces and piled them in the back of the van, then made their way back to David's house. Donald helped him unload them into the workshop. David broke out a bottle of home-made elderflower wine and poured warm sunlight into glasses.
Harry stared blearily at the fire. He held his hands above it, rubbing them slowly and with great satisfaction. He did bring wood back to life. Its flames flashed and danced as it sparked out its carnival mini-fire-crackers. He enjoyed its company. But he like it fine when David called. David didn't seem to mind when Harry didn't hear properly. Harry stood up and looked out of the window at his garden. His eyes lingered on the bough on the left. He was particularly fond of it. The pattern of its bark was swirling and vibrant - and its arm swept down, like a movement caught in a photograph. But maybe there was something somewhere he could give David. His eyes swept slowly round. He shook his head and then went back to the fire. He would have to think about this.
Harry collected what he wanted, a packing case that would break up easily, and a limb shaped like a gnarled, bent walking stick. There was no shortage.
He walked his distance, then returned home with his plunder. Timber he might have missed preyed on his mind like an anxiety. His eyes looked for precious flotsam here, there, and everywhere else. Sand, wood, and the surge of sea engulfing his thoughts with giant breakers were all there was for him - and the fulmars who complained when he walked past their cliff edge.
He trudged up the hill back to his house. He dumped his load in the back garden. A testimony to his industry, it was full of sinewy branches flexing their muscles into unusual postures. Straight-angled boards in erratic bundles. like the arms and legs of a Cubist beast, added a crazed geometry to a garden that had become a gallery for wood.
A functional dresser, a table, one seat and a cooker furnished an austere kitchen. A window looked out to moor and hills. He put the kettle on. The cottage was at the back of the village, well away from the sea, but the waves still thundered at Harry's head. Sometimes the oceanic roar dropped to a low presence. But it never left him alone, as if it were trying to erode him. He felt washed up by the tide, like a piece of wood he had gathered, or some sandstone sculpture with its insides worn out, ready to collapse upon itself, on its way to becoming grains of sand.
'Timed it well!' a voice yelled. David. 'I see the kettle's just on! Nothing strange.'
Harry stared at him as if he were a particularly unexpected sight, standing on the worn lino under the naked bulb. Something slowly stretched awake in Harry's eyes.
'Would you like some tea?' Harry asked him.
'Nothing stronger? You used to always get something better here.'
Harry went through the complicated process of remembering where the other cups were. He even found some biscuits. They looked slightly soft and he hoped they were not stale. He looked wonderingly round the room before wandering off and reappearing with a chair. He sat down too.
David took a bite of his biscuit. 'Best fossil I've ever tasted!' he said. 'Almost edible.'
Harry looked at the muscles of David's face as they swelled out. You'd have thought David was shouting.
'So how are you keeping, Harry? Long time no see.'
The waves churned around the right side of Harry's skull. But there was a calm day on the left and he heard David clearly enough when he pointed that ear towards him.
'You keep yourself to yourself so much,' David said. 'Anyone could forget you lived here.'
Harry nodded, as if David had said something else. 'Saw John's car the other day,' he said to David.
'You were quick,' David replied. 'It wasn't there very long.'
'He should've dropped in.'
'I was lucky I saw him myself. On a tour of the Highlands with the new girlfriend. Didn't take his eyes off her the whole time. Hardly said a word to me,' David complained.
'Like his piano playing,' Harry said.
'I think his mother sees him a lot. He always was closer to her.'
Harry was miming playing the piano. His mind was going back to another visit of John's. It had been a quiet day in Harry's head, so he'd heard John clearly. The keys had rolled softly in a current of sound as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata had painted gleams of silver on a calm, midnight sea.
'Plays jazz piano in a club now. Still teaches music in the high school. Look, I'll tell him to make sure he calls the next time he's here,' David suggested.
Harry kept on miming the piano. Suddenly he stopped. 'You busy in your workshop?' he asked.
'That's what I wanted to see you about,' David said.
Harry clattered at the cooker again. Then he was pouring out more tea.
'Thanks. I've got enough,' David told him.
Harry pushed the plate of biscuits towards him. 'I was down at Lairg,' he said. 'Saw the woodworker there.' Harry often rattled on about things that had nothing to do with what you were talking about with him originally.
'Oh, yes?'
'Marvellous stuff. Chairs that looked as if the wood were still alive. He looks at the timber. Says what would that make? The chair's like the wood. He doesn't shape the wood to make it like a chair.'
'Gerry's work. I know it. Smashing joints. Are you saying his stuff's better than mine?' David tried not to sound annoyed but failed.
'Oh no.' Harry looked offended now.
'The smaller stuff sells better. I've done big stuff like Gerry's before.'
Harry said nothing in reply.
'I've got a new line,' David went on. 'Aeolian harps. They're much admired.'
Harry appeared to be listening to something with his right ear. It annoyed him. His brow separated into five parts.
'The wind plays them,' David said.
Harry jerked his head up. 'The wind plays the harps?' he asked.
'Did you not see them when I had them in my back garden? Had a few of them playing at once. None of them were quite the same. But there was an odd kind of harmony.'
Harry was trying to imagine the sound of wind thrumming its arbitrary notes. He thought it would be jarring and eerie. He saw the wind as a semi-transparent figure in robes that flowed in its own breezes, as it ran rustling fingers through the strings. And what would the sound be like in a gale? What howlings and yearnings there would be! The wind became a demented demon in his mind. It thrust its trident and commanded tidal waves to its whim. Why would anyone want to listen to a sound conjured up by the wind?
'But I ran out of wood. I had to stop.' David paused, hoping some sort of helpful connection would be set up in Harry's head.
Harry started talking about John's piano playing again. David couldn't tell if Harry had heard him or not. 'How's your mother, Harry? She hasn't been up to see you in a while?'
'She's coming up in the spring.'
'She's still in good health?' David asked him.
'Her blood pressure's high.'
'She wants to stop eating so many of your biscuits.'
Harry pushed the plate towards him again.
'That's not what I meant. Look, about the wood.'
'She writes all the time,' Harry told him. Then he was up, rummaging in the dresser. He brought out a handful of letters. He put them in front of David.
'She's a dutiful mother,' David said. 'But I couldn't really, I really couldn't read letters she'd written to you.'
Harry looked disappointed but David insisted on handing them back to t him.
'Do you feel lonely up here, Harry?'
Harry started playing the piano again.
'I know this business of your hearing... It's difficult for you. You're still going to the doctor's, Harry, taking his advice?'
Harry stood up and walked over to the window. And David realised this line of conversation wasn't going to get anywhere. Harry stared at the wood sprawling over the garden. Which started David thinking again.
'I really came to see you about the wood There's a shop in Inverness wants some sculptures from me.' David's voice grew louder towards the end of his sentence. Harry still said nothing. David realised he would just have to come out with it. 'I haven't the timber. Could I have some?'
Harry gave the impression he'd known what David was after all the time. His gaze at the log in the far corner didn't alter. He liked the shape of it. It reminded him of someone just about to stand up and walk. Each piece in the garden meant something to him. it was a living being he'd saved from drowning in the sea.
'I don't think I can spare any,' Harry said.
David sipped his tea. 'Harry,' he sighed.
Harry just kept on looking at the wood.
David went out again, back to his own house. There he looked at the list of orders for the shop in Inverness, and the bills behind the ginger jar on the mantelpiece. He walked over to his pile of wood, decided which piece to use and put the other back.
Next day, Harry was on the beach again. The silence in his left ear disturbed him. He couldn't do anything to stop the noise in the right. But if he could match it with the sound of the waves on the shore, he could almost relax, pretend it was all sea on sand. At other times, the noise was a grating crescendo of waves crashing down on a rocky foreshore, dragging pain through his skull. And you couldn't pretend anything else.
When Harry came back along the beach with his pram, David was standing there waiting.
'I could get my own wood but you always beat me to it,' he said.
'Aye,' Harry replied.
'Anyway, it needs to dry out. And for every ten pieces, there's only one that will do. But you've been stockpiling the stuff. Couldn't you let me pick out a couple of bits?'
Harry talked about the weather very pleasantly, then walked on. When tourists left after their summer holidays, one of their memories of this beach was of a thin, stooped man, scuttling along it, picking up, stockpiling pushing extravagant disorders of wood. Harry looked now as he always did.
David was counting his pennies to see if he had enough for his groceries for the week when he next saw Harry, at the Post Office counter. Harry handed over his Giro book and was given a handful of notes in return. Incapacity Benefit. Well enough merited, thought David, but strange. Harry had no money, no work, and all that wood. David had no money, plenty of work, but no wood. Harry chatted cheerfully about the weather again, then made his way back to his cottage.
David went to the pub. He met Donald the leatherworker. They talked about business. Donald had good orders too - for key rings and belts. An ambitious young man with a family, he produced endless leather goods. His workshop overflowed. There were rumours he was moving to somewhere with larger premises and more tourists. He would do well, as long as he didn't divert himself to the pub. David had talked about council tax, the roads, and a proposed new water supply - about everything but what was on his mind. Talk came round to their crafting problems at last.
'I've awful difficulties getting leather,' Donald complained. 'it's the quality. What I get's good enough for key rings. But I can't get belt hide at all.'
And David told him his problems.
'You don't say. And have you been to the tip lately?' Donald suggested.
'The tip?' David repeated.
'Aye, I'd an old cooker that didn't work and just took it up there myself. Good for a nose around. The things that folks throw out. Got a candlestick the last time, a frame the time before that. But there was nothing there - except wood. Loads. Somebody's been chucking out sheds and outhouses. You might find something there.'
'It'll be well matured that,' David said.
'Aye.'
David downed his half pint and made ready to go.
'If you give me time to finish, I'll come along,' Donald suggested.
'Fine.'
They trundled off in David's van. The tip was a mile off, on a side-track off the main road, up a slope then into a dip where it couldn't be seen by traffic - apart from the plume of black smoke, which worried David. But it was all right. Somebody had set fire to an old car.
David felt he'd found riches. They picked out the decent pieces and piled them in the back of the van, then made their way back to David's house. Donald helped him unload them into the workshop. David broke out a bottle of home-made elderflower wine and poured warm sunlight into glasses.
Harry stared blearily at the fire. He held his hands above it, rubbing them slowly and with great satisfaction. He did bring wood back to life. Its flames flashed and danced as it sparked out its carnival mini-fire-crackers. He enjoyed its company. But he like it fine when David called. David didn't seem to mind when Harry didn't hear properly. Harry stood up and looked out of the window at his garden. His eyes lingered on the bough on the left. He was particularly fond of it. The pattern of its bark was swirling and vibrant - and its arm swept down, like a movement caught in a photograph. But maybe there was something somewhere he could give David. His eyes swept slowly round. He shook his head and then went back to the fire. He would have to think about this.