Green, Black, Red

Little towns breed stories. There aren’t enough people in these places to come up with a consistent idea of what makes sense and what doesn’t, so people tend to simply watch what happens and call that normality. They don’t ignore the important bits like other people do. Our town is a bit further away than most from the troublesome influence of civilisation, in fact it is the only town on a little spit of an island twenty miles or so off the coast. Still part of Britain of course, in the same way that the moon is part of the Earth.

Here to illustrate my point are three stories from a single year in our town, the year 1985. A birth (or two, or maybe not) a marriage and a death. We’ll start with the green ink, and the marriage of Jonah and Wilma.

Jonah was a boat captain, provided you can be a captain when you’re the only person on the crew. Naval technicalities aren’t my strong point. Wilma was the chef at the local pub, Cthulhu’s Arms. Foolish romantics to the soles of their boots, the two of them decided to marry on the spot where they had first met. They had first met shortly after a shipwreck, or rather during it. Some of the boat was probably still showing at the time. This was before Jonah became a boat captain of course, in fact it was that very shipwreck which created the vacancy for a new boat captain, and indeed a new boat.

Jonah and Wilma had been the only two survivors of the wreck, the latter having hauled the unconscious former ashore with biceps she’d honed through years of dragging barrels up from the harbour. The place where their eyes first met (Jonah’s eyes were somewhat unfocussed at the time, largely because he’d only just started breathing again after a break of a couple of minutes) was Satan’s Toe, an uninviting pinnacle of silverish-green rock trailing out in the wake of the narrow, slithering peninsula which pointed back towards the mainland. Satan’s Toe could be reached on foot once every six months, for a period of roughly four minutes, during the very lowest tides of the year. Could is an important word here.

The day and the hour of the ceremony were chosen by the sun and moon rather than the bride and groom, but happily they selected half past eleven on what turned out to be a very pleasant May morning. The man from the coastguard did a briefing beforehand for the assembled guests. Attention was drawn to the slippery nature of the rocks which had to be traversed to get down to the waterline, as well as to the highly temporary nature of the causeway which led out to the Toe itself. The priest was doing press ups on the beach and muttering to himself as quickly as he could in rehersal for what would have to be a very rapid service.

The outward journey passed without incident, save for several nice dresses becoming shredded by barnacles and a number of top hats being swept away on the wind. One of these was later spotted adorning a rather dapper-looking seal. The causeway appeared exactly when it was supposed to, presented like a wedding gift by the parting sea. The ceremony itself was beautiful. History records that it was rather too beautiful in fact, and the guests stood so long sharing the blissful tears of the newlyweds that everyone forgot all about the sea. Until, that is, the sea reminded them. Jonah and Wilma were once again the only survivors, washed ashore with smiles on their faces. It seemed they didn’t even realise they were wet, and they hadn’t noticed the screams at all.

It was a beautiful ceremony. Everyone on the island says so, even though nobody who is still alive was actually there. They know because they’ve all seen the photographs of the event framed and hanging in the dining room of Cthulhu’s Arms. Nobody is quite sure how the photographs succeeded in remaining extant while the photographer himself did not.

Now we come to death. As my grandfather used to say, we all have to go some time. Better to make it count. If you’ve got any soft tissue left then you’ve not tried hard enough, he was often heard to insist. Recognisable bone fragments are understandable but still best avoided. There’s nothing much to be done about the teeth though, all you can really do is try and ensure that each of them is as far from the others as possible.

Dear old grandad got his wish. An artillery shell removed him from this plane of existence as comprehensively as he could ever have hoped for. He wasn’t in a war or anything, the shell had landed next to him in Normandy some decades earlier. He had taken it home hidden in a bundle of looted fur coats and kept it ever since, a reminder of the litle bubble of good luck in which he had drawn every single breath for forty years. An admirable gesture from a certain point of view; a nod of recognition, if not thanks, to such fates as might be passing.

The only regrettable thing was Grandad’s insistence on keeping the bloody thing on top of his drinks cabinet. Never a man to let that last drop of whisky linger on the nozzle of the optic when it could be in his glass, it was grandad’s overenthusiastic jiggling of a spent bottle that finally roused the shell from its slumber and burst the bubble, settling the score at last. You may well ask me how I know all this. Well, in the crumbling wreckage of his house they found a glass tumbler, unbroken and containing a generous measure of Tallisker and a single human tooth.

Finally to birth, to red ink. The birth of a force of nature, the birth of a Valkyrie. Apparently it never even occurred to her parents. Looking at the two of them I could well believe that. Valerie Kerry, her name was. And from day one they were calling her Val. If they’d tried to think up something like that they’d never have been able to. Serendipity runs in her family. That might seem like a good thing but she’d be sure to tell you that a happy accident is still an accident. Depending on the nature of the mishap you may only be happy about it because of the lingering concussion.

Valerie Kerry carved a little hole in the world and tumbled into it one summer’s day in that already eventful 1985. I wasn’t there at the time, but it’s one of those things you can picture in your head knowing that what you see is prety close to what happened. She would have been born with the flowing red hair, that much is certain. A little tangled, unavoidably, but pro-vitamin glossy and glowing like a glitterball made of grass snakes. I expect she probably opted for a simple, loose dress of some sort. White wouldn’t really be appropriate in the circumstances, dark green is more her anyway. I doubt she’d have bothered with a speech. There was probably little more than a yawn, a cursory wave of the hand and a murmured request for some comfort or other, a blanket or a brandy and babycham.

Young Valerie spent the next three weeks killing time, but she did so in the grip of a certain sense of unease that she’d have been unable to put her finger on even if she had learned to control her fingers properly by that point. She wouldn’t have known it yet, but the world was incomplete with only her in it. The parents, sundry relatives and harried medical professionals that swarmed around her were a tiresome irrelevance. Like ghosts but without the advantage of novelty value. I couldn’t bring myself to look on at this dreadful situation and not do something to help. When three weeks were up I finally came to join her. Arriving naked, bald, slime-soaked and with a lamentable lack of grandeur, I squared my shoulders and began to prepare myself for what lay ahead.

Naturally I don’t remember the details of those first few months of our lives, I only know the broad narrative structure of it all, the bit left intact in between the islanders’ collective memories. It doesn’t really matter how we first met. It’s safe to assume that the conversation wouldn’t have sparkled. Passers-by would not have felt that they could see history being made. Two babies in two prams, pausing opposite one another for a minute or so while their mothers talked. No angelic choirs, no scurrying thunderbolts, no line-dancing lepers. There would have been something though, a cloud briefly obscuring the sun like a little cosmic wink. A pigeon flying away for no reason. A car swerving into a barrier two hundred miles away. Something.

Because in amongst the stories and lurking gently beyond the reach of words there’s one thing that really stretches credulity; one thing that alludes to real magic. Even out here nobody can see it. Against all logic, three weeks late and via a completely separate family, an only child was given her twin brother.