Surfacing

by Chris Maitland

******************

After living a submarine existence for years, I decided to surface. To
look around at
what went on in the world whilst I burrowed on, deep below the moving
waves of life,
in my small capsule full of re-breathed air.

The odour of my own sins was overpowering - I needed to break surface
from the
claustrophobic artificially lit existence beneath the fomenting
currents of each day. I
could no longer breathe the clammy coal damp which my self centred
solitude had
created.

The church spires were inert. They sat at the top of hills which
bordered the fast
arterial road through the town in which I had grown up . They were
three old friends,
and I always felt their friendly presence when I visited the town, they
were there to
welcome me back, and to say farewell.

There was no greeting from them this day.

I'd made a detour - just to revisit these three church spires - each
one marking a phase
of my life.

Penkhull, school years - the spire was opposite the pub I nervously
entered (still in my
school uniform) on the day I finished my 'O' levels. A stroll from my
old school.

All Saints, Hartshill, with its golden weather vane - the church where
the banns to my
wedding were read, and where my mother's funeral had taken place.

St Margaret's, Wolstanton - its churchyard facing a row of terraced
houses. A short
street, leading to what was once the local coal pit, and steel works
beyond. It had been
a leafy, peaceful, sleepy place, which I still peopled with Mrs Price
standing in a
pinafore on her front step, my long dead Grandfather with braces
holding up his
sleeves, and my brother and myself as boys - playing and clapping our
hands to scatter
pigeons.

It was almost as though these spires had never known me. They peered
from their
respective hills, and they said nothing to me.

Landmarks all the way up the motorway to Scotland.

Preston. Garstang - names I remembered from family trips to Blackpool.
Kendal - a
weekend many years ago - a hotel, with a girl I loved, but who I
betrayed.

Memories, people, places, coursing through my mind, as I kept my car
racing north,
putting distance between me and my life. That morning I realised that
the point had
been reached where a decision had to be made. It was impossible to
continue as it had
become. For years, I'd been having iron coffin dreams - the dreams of
submariners -
nightmares of drowning in tiny, dark spaces.

Gilded cage dreams.
Pull the wings off flies dreams.
Lock the dog in the outhouse dreams.

That morning I awoke to another day of submarine existence - wading
slow through
currents pressing and pushing, prodding and pummeling. As I sleepwalked
through the
morning's preparations, I remembered how an old colleague, Henry, once
broke the
stale silence in his car as we wearily weaved to work together,

"One day, we'll not go, eh? One day, we'll just say, 'Stuff it today,
they can manage
without us,' and we'll carry on past the gates, and we'll go to
Cleethorpes for the day."

We smiled, and laughed, and he promised that he'd do it. One day - I'd
have no say in it
- he'd carry it out, we'd not go in, and we'd find ourselves where we'd
never expected
to be. And we'd believe that there still was hope, that our lives
weren't fixed, forever
plunging on relentlessly with ourselves as passengers. And I hoped so
many times that
it would happen, that it would be THAT day! 'Go on Henry', I'd think,
make it today. I
need the sea air today, I need to breathe free - just for a day. But in
five years, he never
failed to flick the indicator, and turn into the gates. And the sea air
had to wait.

I suddenly found myself on the road at a time when I'd normally be
sitting in a Staff
room, waiting to hear the orders and the hollow congratulations. I was
hurtling North,
like a foreign bacterium in a vast arterial system. I was almost
expecting to be stopped
for being where I shouldn't be. Normally, I switched off my car radio
as I pulled into
the staff car park - just after the tips for the 2.10 at Market Raisen,
and the 3.00 at
Ayr. Not only had I listened to the weather and ensuing items, but I
could watch the
3.00 at Ayr from the trackside if I so wished.

Having lived, for years a submariner's existence - deep, dark,
directionless, and
threatened by the crushing waters which wanted to crash in. Now I had
blown my
tanks, and was hurtling upward, toward the world of air. On the
surface, I wanted rid
of the fetid ballast which I had lived with.

The place for which my car now headed had lived a mythical life in my
mind for years.
Cairn Hill - several miles outside Dumfries. It was a place I'd
glimpsed as I drove back
home from a holiday with my wife and children. I had looked across the
valley, at the
rounded top of the hill, and made a mental calculation - I could walk
to the top in half
a day - no rush. Tracks were visible on the side of the hill. I knew
the sensation I was
seeking - the kind I'd had on walks I'd taken in years gone by - a walk
with a friend,
where the point had been company, enlightenment, some kind of feeling
of
connectedness. A sense of being part of the world - a sense of the
submarine of my life
breaking surface, and seeing the sky again, after weeks under low
roofs.

A sense of optimism - that which I had when I would look up to the sun
setting among
trees on a hill, that which would promise that just over that hill, the
sun still shines, and
there will be days to come which could never have been expected - which
could never
have been dreamed.

No one had noticed that I was straining close to breaking. I found that
no one noticed
me - period. I had to constantly repeat things which I said, as if
others couldn't be
bothered to listen the first time, or that I had murmured by way of an
apology for my
existence. People would interrupt conversations I was having - without
any excuse, as
though I wasn't there.

The feeling had been like a sulphurous ball, twisting in my guts -
sending hot vents
through my innards - but I had to learn to remain dormant, though
fissures had seared
close to the surface. Many a time I had exploded in my imagination -
but I knew that if
I did in reality, the result would be another Pompeii.

Reality became so untenable, that I became a full time citizen of the
country of my
mind.

I found that I was resigning from things in my imagination - me,
silhouetted in a
doorway, breaking into the office of a faceless manager, every day,
resigning from my
job - my city - my self.

The sky was a fresh, cold azure when I pulled my car into an off road
track, near to
some damp wooden picnic tables. Holidays - I saw my children swing
their legs, chew
contentedly on sandwiches from polythene bags, and laugh - their elbows
hovering
close to beakers full of black currant juice. I locked my car, and
stretched my legs,
breathed in clean air, breathed out thin steam. The quiet was balm
after hours of the
roar of the road - whisper of leaves, cool sibilance of breeze. I
walked toward the hill.

"You are like an open book to me you know," it was my mother's voice -
long dead
these twenty years, "It's been a disappointment to you hasn't it? All
of it? You don't
have to say anything - I can tell from the way you're walking - the
look on your face.
You didn't get what you wanted, did you? Like the little boy that Santa
Claus forgot."

She was there again, just like she had been in all those kitchen table
chats - never chats
about trivia, always kitchen table profundity. They were the milestones
of years of
suffocation, they were air bubbles to a person swimming below the
surface, seeing the
sun only dimly.

I was indecisive, Mum. Others struck whilst the iron was hot, I
couldn't make my mind
up. I was content to - no, not content, lethargic is the word -
lethargic enough to allow
life to happen around me. Carpe diem? I didn't know the meaning.

"You're not going to like this - your father always hated it when I
said it to him - but
you're like your father. He tried to hedge his bets all the time -
offered a partnership in
a business, a job in Canada, am opportunity in Sheffield. He sat on his
behind and let it
all pass us by."

The words stung, but I knew they were true. In our twenties, friends
went out to work
on a kibbutz, they travelled with backpack to Paris and Berlin. I
rented a video player.

"I wanted to travel, to get out there and taste what was on offer. It
was all there, on
TV, in magazines, I'd heard it all on records, on the radio, from
friends who'd gone
and lived in other places."

I knew the pangs of disappointment myself.

"And I end up dying in our middle room downstairs. A day trip to
Boulogne was what
I had to remember."

Once again I heard my Father's voice after my Mother's death -

"All I wanted was to be settled. I never ran after other women - I
didn't want to go out
boozing, I never raised a finger to her. I just wanted to come home at
night, have my
tea, watch the telly, and go to bed. I was happy with that. I never
asked for any more."

As always, my eyes were cast down - toward the ground - the russet
leaves were lying
tinged with frost on the gravel. I realised what my eyes were missing,
and looked
upward - up at Cairn Hill. All the times in my adolescence when I had
felt like this - all
the walks I had gone on - I used to think of it as 'going to my
mountain top' - even
though it was very often a turn around the lonely town centre at dusk.
It was a
withdrawal, a deliberate act of solitude.

I'd seek out the churches - looking to see the stained glass, to try to
catch a glimpse of
a saint, or perhaps of Christ, caged in lead and coloured in
ultramarine and ruby. I had
faith as a boy, but not a formal faith - my family were a pretty
godless bunch, of the
hatch, match and despatch C of E variety. They regarded spiritual
sentiment in me as
an eccentricity, and tolerated it through embarrassed stares and
shrugs. They had no
language with which to discuss such things - I wondered if they even
had a language to
think such things.

All was clearer up here on the hill. I couldn't bring to mind what I
should now be doing
- back in my abandoned life - it just blew out through my mind, and
over the hedges
and across the fields. It was just the hill, and a decision. I stopped
a moment, and
caught my breath, turning round to look at the hills draped across the
skyline, and feel
the sharp air wash across my face, forcing tears from the corners of my
eyes. A car
moved along the road below - once again I saw my sleeping children in
my car, as I
drove south and left behind a wonderful holiday. Now I pressed on, and
knew that
come the summit I would make my decision. Would I drive south again -
or would I
press on North, and keep going until the land ran out? What then? Sit
and wait?
Perhaps even walk on amid the freezing currents, to sleep among the
fish?

I reached the top, my mind turning over events from years ago.
Betrayals, self
loathing, regret, unrealised ambition. I wanted the height, and the
clean chilled wind to
sweep them away, forever, and to leave me new. And I realised that what
I wanted
was no less than to be reborn. I stood at the top of Cairn Hill, and
listened to the wind
rush as the earth turned. I could stand here, face the north, listen to
my dead mother
and renounce my past, and, like a baptised infant, become a new
creature, striking out
for the unknown. Or I could turn south, hear the comfortable words of
my father and
gather my past around me like a damaged cloak, and return, familiar, to
the familiar.

I had a choice - was I to be forever a son, or forever a father?

One thing I knew I needed. I needed to empty my stomach of the tears
I'd had to keep
swallowing for years - to keep inside, a hidden reservoir of salt and
anguish.

To travel in hope is often better than to arrive. I knew that on top of
Cairn Hill. It was
all the things I'd admired and loved in poetry - raw, beautiful,
untainted,
uncompromising, pure - and most of all, other worldly - but it did not
embrace me as I
hoped it would - there was no comfort there. There was only emptiness.
I had thought
that some ancient spirit of the earth might speak to me, might point me
in the right
direction - but only phantoms from my own past, living and dead cupped
their mouth
to my ear.

Standing at the top of Cairn Hill, I felt as Prospero did, standing at
the highest point of
his prison island - but I was Lord of nothing I surveyed. I was Lord of
nothing I could
remember. I took out my notebook, from my inner pocket, and began to
list all of the
times and events which I had rather never happened. It was a list of my
sins. It was the
ballast of my submarine life - that which had dragged me further down
into the murk
and the malignity of a course with no true setting.

The manipulation of girls when I was in my teens, my twenties...
The selfish tangle of bodies for which I had so often deceived.
The failure to use the time I was given.
My failure to reciprocate the people who I missed bitterly now.
My speaking out when silence would have been so much better.
My failure to act - to strike, to move.
My continual refusal to commit - in the belief that in not doing so, I
was free.

I could do nothing about any of it, but I wanted free of it - I wanted
it submerged
and suffocated.

I sat in the wind and the cold sun, the clean smell of the fields and
hills whipping about
me, and I wrote.

The sun was setting when I finished. The notebook crammed with my sins
- full to
bursting, with words in the margins and appended and added so that the
sins were
layers deep. As the words had multiplied, so the day had become darker,
and the Hill
colder. The sun was a tired watery orange eye heavily lidded with grey
and purple
clouds.

It is the moment I love most in any day, the moment when the drowsiness
settles over
the earth and towns and countryside draw on shadows and darkness like
bedsheets. I
had always felt a surge of possibilities with the setting of the sun -
knowing that a new
day was gestating over the horizon, and the dying brilliance and colour
of the sky was
a promise of what might yet be.

Many times, as the canker had crept through my daily life, I had
considered
disappearing. One day, just like Henry's idea of going somewhere
unexpected, I could
go, and I could live quiet and solitary, peaceful, hurting none, and
being troubled by
none. I could disappear over the horizon, and re emerge into a new day.
Crazy notions
had filled my head in recent days. The hermit's cave which existed on a
tiny islet just
out from Broddick on the Isle of Arran - I had watched the islet slip
by the bows of a
paddle steamer I was aboard, and I had mentally marked it 'where none
would come' .
Caves which I had visited under the Monastery in Kiev, where mediaeval
Orthodox
monks had sat in chilled silence and darkness for years - now, on top
of Cairn Hill, I
understood a little of the motivation to sit as they did. To stare into
the eternal dark,
and have it stare back.

I pondered becoming a true submariner, and diving deep into the cold
water of a
quayside, after letting myself gently down into the black waves at
night - slipping out
with the quiet determination of a submarine. Some say it is not the
worst way to
disappear. And all of my sins would drown - they could not be washed up
again,
though the husk of who I was might re emerge, the sins would lie, to be
fossilised and
ossified and wait until the world grew cold, and dark, and
lifeless.

I left Cairn Hill - and carried my now full book with me. All of my
sins, every one - the
bleakest and most heartless, the shameful - which I had transferred on
to paper, after
they had been tattooed on the inside of my skin since their first
conception and
inception.

The town lights of Ayr were behind me - an orange sodium chandelier -
as I looked
out to the distant pin light of Arran - across the moving restlessness
of spray and
shimmer. The wind from the sea smeared and slapped my face with frosted
velvet
gloves.

My decision was made, and the wind howled its approval. I would drown
my book -
like a powerless Prospero, I would bury it, and carry on to Arran, to
walk the hill
above Broddick, and consider the mainland, and when, and if I should
ever return.

? 2002 Chris Maitland