Moon Song - Excerpt
1. Beginnings & Endings
Isoldé
In my beginning is my end
TS Eliot: East Coker
Coffee mug in hand, Isoldé went to the door of the flat to collect the newspaper. She took it to the balcony and stood looking out over the gardens that stretched between her and the east side of the British Museum. The sun shone, the fresh smell of wet earth was interestingly mixed with last night’s curry leavings. It reached her, along with the racket of ubiquitous dust carts, rumbling along four stories down on the other side of the building, collecting the hotel and restaurant garbage. Life in the twenty-first century. She put the coffee down on the little iron table and curled up in the basket chair to read. Furtling through the magazines, the headline in the Arts section stopped her.
“Celtic folk-singer idol, Tristan Talorc, dead!”
She put the coffee down.
“The body of the internationally famous and gifted, Celtic and mediaeval singer, Tristan Talorc, was found dead on Saturday night at the bottom of the fateful “Lady’s Window” on the wild Cornish cliffs above his home at Caer Bottreaux. The Celtic singer and scholar had been ill for many years since contracting AIDs from a dirty needle on a mercy mission to save a child’s life while hunting songs in North Africa thirty years ago. He was last seen by his housekeeper, Mrs Protheroe, on the evening of Wednesday 31st July when she left him after getting his dinner. When she returned at breakfast the following morning he was still out, had not gone to bed. She was not worried at first, ‘He was often out all night,’ she told our West Country arts reporter. ‘But when he hadn’t come home that night I was concerned. I phoned up the police and coastguard, got a search started for him’. So far, there’s no conclusive evidence for suicide although, the recent rapid progress of his disease does suggest that to be the case. No note was found but Tristan’s illness had been getting rapidly and progressively worse over the past year. It’s nearly two years now since he gave any live concerts. It seems, sadly, very likely that he took his own life.’
Isoldé sat staring at the paper. Tristan dead? She couldn’t imagine it. He’d been her musical inspiration for over twenty years.
‘Gone?’ she whispered.
The paper slid off her lap, she sat cradling the cooling mug of coffee as the pictures formed again in her mind’s eye. There was the sound of singing inside her head.
That is the Road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae
She knew the song, True Thomas. It was one Tristan had made very much his own early on his career, he was always asked for it as an encore after a performance. Those were the lines where the fairy queen tells Thomas where she is taking him. Fragments of the dream returned. Now she saw Tristan walking out across the sea, on a bridge of moonshine, to that impossible shadow-land, Elfland, on the horizon.
Isoldé’s breath caught in her throat. She clutched at the balcony, a leaden feeling settling in her stomach. Tristan was dead. He had been her hero and musical inspiration since Uncle Brian first took her to hear him in the smoky Belfast club when she was all of fourteen years old. That gig had begun Tristan’s recording career, the right people happening to be in the audience, one of those luck-moments. Isoldé was lost then, twenty-plus years ago, hearing him again for the first time.
A massive honking combined with an explosive shouting match from the street brought her back to London, probably a car driver trying a tantrum on the dustcart men – a complete waste of time. She wandered through to peer out the kitchen window in time to see one of the dustmen trip and tip a mass of garbage over a silver BMW whose soft top was fortuitously down. The car driver, silk-suited, was yelling at two other dustmen to get out of the way and stop blocking the road. He turned just in time to see a multicoloured mess from the curry house opposite land all over the inside of his car. The shrieks he made would have done justice to a steam train, Isoldé had to grin. She washed up her cup and took herself into the shower.
The flat belonged to her friend and colleague, Evelyn. They had shared it for three years before Evelyn had crossed the pond to go to New York. It was close enough to The Guardian’s offices in Farringdon Street so they could walk to work. Isoldé had always hated the tube, didn’t even like buses. When Evelyn had got the three year exchange with the New York Times Isoldé had taken over the flat in Montague Street, living there on her own, happy in the solitude although she had enjoyed living with Evelyn. At first, she’d been envious her friend had got the job they had both applied for but now, with all the fear-mongering and security clamp-down after the WTO buildings had been hit, she was glad she hadn’t gone. New York was nowhere she wanted to be.
She got herself out of the flat only ten minutes past her usual time, her thinking a muddle between Tristan’s death, amusement at the BMW fiasco and crossness at the British government for getting mixed up in the American war against terror.
‘Stupid Yanks! Why do we get involved in their mess?’ Isoldé thought to herself, making a face without realising it. Several people coming the other way down the pavement noticed and avoided her carefully. Coming from Belfast, growing up in The Troubles, she had no patience with what she called American hysteria. Turning into the usual sandwich shop she stood in the queue while waiting for her BLT and coffee, watching policemen in flack jackets patrolling Theobalds Road, truncheons in hand.
‘No guns, yet,’ she thought. Not quite Belfast, but far closer than she ever wanted to be again.
Arriving at the Guardian building she climbed three floors and pushed open the door to the main office. Immediately her ears were assaulted by noise. Everything buzzed, chimed and clanged, people shouted across to colleagues, phones rang, computers bleeped, and there was the cacophony of everyone’s different theme tunes on the mobiles. It was like walking into a rave. As usual, Isoldé remembered too late to turn her hearing down.
‘Zoldé! Zoldé!’ a voice caught her ear over the noise. ‘They want us in Whitehall.’
‘What is it this time?’ Isoldé collapsed opposite her partner. ‘Osama visiting Number 10?’
‘No such luck,’ Jeremy grinned. ‘Another bomb scare, but stuff your face first,’ he pointed to her sandwich and coffee which were rapidly cooling. ‘Mickey’s already there getting pictures.’ He thrust the mobile into her hand. It showed workmen, police and military shutting off Whitehall and the side streets around Downing Street.
Isoldé rolled her eyes, ‘The terrorists have got us all running round like headless chickens. They don’t need to actually do anything, we do it all for them.’
‘Ha!’ Jeremy snorted agreement.
Later, lunchtime, in the Cock Tavern by Smithfield, Isoldé cradled her beer morosely. Mickey squeezed in beside her.
‘What’s up?’
Isoldé’s face screwed up, she shut her eyes, took a deep breath.
‘I can’t hack it,’ she said baldly.
Mickey peered at her over the top of his specs, raised an eyebrow. ‘Tis too much like home, so it is,’ he said, perceptively.
Isoldé put down her glass and buried her face in his shoulder.
‘Didn’t think I’d ever see this over here,’ Mickey said as he stroked her hair, his own Belfast twang getting more pronounced.
Isoldé sat back, fumbled in a pocket for an over-used tissue and wiped her nose.
‘Sorry, Mick. I think I’d better go.’
‘Email me the story,’ he called after her.
Tristan
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark
TS Eliot: East Coker
Tristan left Caergollo at dead of night. He parked the car by the bridge at the bottom of the village and continued on foot to the harbour. The way was slippery. Jagged rocks and old ropes caught at his feet but, somehow, all his old strength had returned to him. He felt young again, as before the disease. Rounding the final corner into the harbour itself, the wind caught him, hurling him backwards. He got up, laughing, and pushed his way forward to the edge of the stone quay behind which the calmer waters of the harbour hid from the wild sea.
There was a hint of brightness ahead of him now, lighting the edge of the sea with silver. He stopped a moment, watching the powerful swell running into the bay. Moonlight grew, showing the half-hidden path. Cut away by wind and water, it led him upwards, towering two hundred feet above the waves. In crevices, he caught the scent of tufts of sea-pink, flourishing on the barest smidgeon of soil. The ocean beat deafeningly against the sheer, black walls and the sea-cave howled below, laughing at him as he followed the slippery path around the edges of the chasm.
He laboured up the long, narrow spur, while the west wind beat him back, disputing his passage.
‘I am coming,’ he told it.
Wind and waves laughed. He felt the excitement thrill across his skin. Tonight would be the last and the first day of his life.
Reaching the top, the headland stretched out into the water. The moon had risen further behind his back and would soon bring the foot of the pathway to the cliff edge before him. He waited, watching the light slither over the sea to stop right at his feet where he stood poised at the top of the three rough stone steps that led out into nowhere. Now, as the moonlight joined with the stone, he stood at the end of the silver pathway. Looking up he watched the horizon unfold. The lost land lay straight ahead of him at the end of the moonpath, floating on the horizon at the edge of vision. Beyond it only a bright darkness and the end of the world.
Below, the sea boiled. Waves thundered, shaking the rocks. The way was clear now out to the Isle of the Dead. Tristan stood a moment, balanced against the wind, then stepped out onto the shining moonpath.
Mark
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
TS Eliot: East Coker
Mark drove slowly down the track to Caergollo, pulled the handbrake on and switched off the engine. He didn’t want to get out of the car. He didn’t want to be here at all. He’d told the solicitors, everyone, to go away, leave him alone, let him go to the house on his own and now, here he was. With the car door open he could hear the stream singing and, further off, the faint sound of waves crashing against the cliffs. There was an empty feeling in the middle of him, like a stone, or rather like the place where a stone should be but wasn’t. He kept expecting the door to open and Tristan’s crotchety face to peer round the jamb and shout to him to come on in, get a bloody move on, they hadn’t got all day. But it didn’t.
Mark climbed out of the car and stood looking at the door. He felt in his pocket for the big, old key. It jangled against the iron ring as he pulled it out. The lock turned easily, well oiled. Mark pushed the door open and stood staring into the dim hallway. He was blinking like an owl after the bright sun outside when something soft touched his legs, wrapped itself around them and meowed. Mark bent to pick the cat up in his arms, burying his face in the black fur. At last, the tears came.
In the library, Embar on his lap and a tumbler full of Talisker in his hand, he sat staring. He could hear the voice inside his head.
‘All yours now. Don’t you go letting me down! Embar told me he wanted to stay with you so you make sure he does, right? Mrs Protheroe will do for you, and look after him while you’re away. It’s all yours, brother, all yours. Caergollo, the woods, the sea, the books, everything. And my music, look after that too, but you’ll have help. Embar knows.’
The voice faded. The words were the same as in the letter. It had arrived in Kyoto just after he got back from seeing the Ox Herding paintings. He touched his pocket, he carried his set of cards of the ten paintings always now. And the letter. He pulled it out.
‘You were right, brother,’ Tristan had begun. ‘You’ll never see me alive again. By the time you come back I’ll be gone, but here is the key to the house. Don’t lose it. I don’t need it any more. Mrs Protheroe looks after me. And Embar. I go out in the woods when I can, up to the kieve, and the cottage. The woodfolk give me herbs for the pain. And the passing.
It’s as easy as it can be, considering. Mrs P. lets me have anything I want, which isn’t much. I’m not hungry but I keep drinking just to maintain consciousness. I’m not like Dylan Thomas, I don’t rage at the dying of the light, in fact I welcome it. I shall go to the sea at the end. It’s full moon tomorrow night. Maybe one day you’ll understand.
It’s all sorted, the solicitor has confirmed everything. Jack Ellis is OK, if you get in a muddle just ask him. He doesn’t cost the earth either. It’s all yours now. All yours now. Don’t you go letting me down …’
Mark couldn’t see to read any more, his eyes were full of tears.
Embar nuzzled his hand. He looked down into the bright yellow eyes that held him. Memories floated up through the dark pools at their centre.
Moon Hare
The hare sat in the path. Moonlight lit the grass to silver so the last of the raindrops hung on the stems like glittering diamonds.
Hare and Moon regarded each other, staring up, staring down. A soft wisp of cloud veiled the moon for an instant casting a lacy shadow over the hare. When it passed, a girl sat in the path where the hare had been. Her lower limbs still ended in the long, leaping legs of the creature, her hands too were more paw than fingers and long ears stood up out of her soft silver-brown hair, but she was more girl than hare now. Unthinking, she scratched under her armpit with a hind leg.
She sat up straighter, long whiskers twitching around the human lips. Then she stood and stretched. Something was here, something not herself, she sat back down, very still, waiting.
Over by the rock outcrop the earth moved, quivered, seemed to split open. Something like a new plant began to emerge, growing out of the crack in the ground. Its form was rounded, dumpy, folds of leaves surrounding it. The leaves looked like arms, opened out showing the head rising out of them. The face was all folds again like an old fashioned rose.
‘Mother?’ the hare-girl whispered.
‘Aye, child. What do ye here?’
‘The light is good,’ the girl said after a moment of thinking. It was always hard to use words, they didn’t come easily.
‘Aye child, and so it is.’ The rose-faced woman-creature stood now, came rolling slowly forward on her short legs to sit beside the hare-girl. Long-fingered hands, like spidery roots, reached out to stroke the ears and hair. ‘You can shift some now?’
Shift? The hare-girl told the word over in her mouth and then her mind. It meant something. She looked down at her hands … paws. That was wrong. She looked at the root-hand that caressed her. Taking hold of threads in her mind she tried to twist and twine them, watching as the paws became hands. The shapeshift steadied, held, the girl began to smile, then the fingers slipped again, the nails becoming claws, the hands more paw-like once again. The girl sighed. It wasn’t working, not properly. She didn’t know what to do.
The rose-faced root-woman patted her shoulder, stroked the paws.
‘Tis all right, my lover, tis all right. Tha’s not got the full measure of it yet. When the song comes so tha’ll have it all. Thee’ll lead us all in the dance then, my darlin’ girl.’
The hare-girl knew things were not right, not yet. She tried, every day she tried to shift and hold the form but it would never stay. She knew she should know more of the moon too but always they just stared at each other and she never could understand the words the moon would tell her. But she could feel the pathways, the tingling lines that threaded through the land. Her paws knew the ways, her feet did too even if she couldn’t shift them. The ways were important, she knew that, but not how, not why. The root-mother had told her this would come. She wished it could be soon.
Tristan & Isoldé
Tristan was sitting, nodding, half asleep in the big wing chair by the fire in the library. The time was gone nine o’clock, well past his usual pumpkin time. Since the disease had taken a hold he was usually early to bed but tonight he’d sat on, Embar in his lap, half a glass of Talisker on the table beside him. There was a tingling in his wasted muscles which he couldn’t attribute to anything he’d done during the day.
A movement caught his eye, he turned.
A young woman stood in the doorway, staring like a hare. He smiled tentatively, wondering how the smile looked hanging on his skull-face. I’m a nightmare myself, he grinned internally, or I would be if I could change sex. But it didn’t seem to frighten her away. She let go the door handle and came into the room.
‘Tristan …?’ her voice was a whisper. ‘Are you Tristan Talorc?’
The humour of the situation struck him, he wondered if she was a ghost ... if he was. It coloured his reply.
‘Well,’ he drawled softly, ‘I was when I got up this morning.’
She came into the room.
‘I keep seeing you, dreaming of you, here,’ the girl began.
‘Well, it is my house …’ Tristan’s eyebrows went up.
‘But you’re dead …’ it came out all of a piece. Then the girl coloured up to her forehead, realising what she’d said.
He took this calmly. ‘I am …?’
She came right up to him now, reached out a hand. ‘May I?’
Tristan nodded. He felt her cool, white hand touch his face, heard her let out the breath she’d been holding.
‘You’re real,’ she said, ‘you’re actually there.’
Tristan covered the laugh with a cough. ‘I am, ’ he said unsteadily.
Isoldé stared at him, then plumped down in the chair opposite,sat looking at him. He looked back gently. She smiled tentatively. He smiled encouragingly.
‘I need a drink, how about you?’
‘Yes, please.’
He got up and went over to the sideboard, held up the bottle of Talisker and cocked an eyebrow at her. She nodded again. He refreshed his own glass and poured three fingers for her. Their hands touched as he gave her the glass, it felt electric. Tristan took a deep breath and let the singing feeling in his blood run through him.
‘Tell me about it,’ he encouraged her.
‘In my time you’re dead.’
Tristan gulped his whiskey. ‘I think we’d better do this slowly. Remember, I’m still alive in my time, whatever I am in yours.’
Isoldé smiled. ‘It is weird,’ she said, ‘you don’t look like you did when I saw you last at the Troubadour.’
‘I don’t suppose I do,’ Tristan rolled his eyes. ‘That was a couple of years ago. I’ve gone downhill a lot since then.’
‘Yes,’ Isoldé said.
Tristan took this on board, along with another slug of the whiskey, realising how he was abusing the single malt but the numbers were too close to now.
‘I somehow feel I shouldn’t ask you when I die, died,’ he managed.
That silenced Isoldé.
‘I don’t want to know,’ he said, ‘not for the moment. There may come a time …’ he pulled himself together. ‘I wonder why I haunt your dreams.’ Tristan gazed past her into the middle distance. ‘Do you know what I want?’
Isoldé shook her head. ‘No. Don’t you?’
‘Haven’t a clue! Can’t think why I’d want to. Once I’ve finished the Ellyon Cycle I’ll be happy to go. And not come back.’
He realised Isoldé had stopped listening half way through this rancorous speech.
‘What …?’ he asked abruptly.
‘The what cycle?’
‘Ellyon Cycle. It’s what I’m writing now. I’m just holding myself together until the last song is done and then I’ll go …’ his voice trailed off, he stared at her, the last vestiges of colour draining out of his face. ‘You’ve never heard of it, have you. And you’re from the future. And one of my fans. That means …’he couldn’t finish, buried his head in his hands. ‘No …’ he broke down. ‘No … not that. Oh no!’
Isoldé sat perfectly still. She realised what he was saying. If she hadn’t heard of it then he hadn’t published it. What had happened? She caught her breath, found she was shivering.
Tristan pulled his head out of his hands and sat back against the sofa. His face was wet, there was a hopeless look in his eyes. Isoldé went over and knelt beside him.
‘You will write it,’ she took his hand. ‘Oh, you will. I’ll help you.’
A smile twisted Tristan’s face. ‘Will you?’
He took her hand, kissed it, she leaned into him. He couldn’t resist, pulled her to him, pressed his mouth on hers, found himself kissing air.
Tristan jerked in his sleep, woke himself up, realised he’d been napping. He sat up in the wing chair, slightly dazed, realising the afternoon had gone and he was left with the twilight. The pain of loss was strong, he could feel her in his arms now, awake, even more than he had in the dream.
‘Oh, why?’ he whispered. ‘Why? Why now? Why not when I was young and fit? Why have you come now when I’m dying to tell me I have no time left to finish the song.’
He rolled into a ball around a cushion, curled in the chair, dry sobs hacking his throat. Embar’s soft paw touched his ear, bringing him back to earth out of the pit of misery.
‘Cat!’ he stroked the black fur. ‘Cat. Why?’
The golden eyes stared into his, he felt sucked into them, down into a deep pool. Visions came. He saw himself with the girl in a grove, making love. He knew the place, it was the grove at the top of the valley above Caergollo with the ancient stone head. But something was different, was it the light? He watched himself with the girl.I It was himself, but he was young again, fit and well. The vision drew back and back as though he was rushing down a telescope backwards. He could see a shore beyond the grove, a white pebbled beach, the sea. Then he was on the moonpath, rushing backwards towards another shore, the cliffs by his own home in Cornwall.
Tristan felt himself rushing back to the surface, found himself staring into Embar’s eyes, the cat was purring, butting his hand.
‘Oh gods!’ Tristan stroked his ears. ‘West-Over-the-Sea!’ he muttered. ‘Is that where we meet? After I’m dead?’
If only he could reach her now, alive, talk to her. The vision had been so clear, so real, she was there, until the end when she dissolved out of his arms. It felt as though the dream world was bleeding through into his everyday one, not that there’d ever been that much separation for him. The songs he wrote, the tunes, the poetry of their words, all came to him through daydreams and visions when he was out in his beloved woods, on the cliff tops or up by the kieve. It was his service, his geas, to the gods who watched over this valley, this place.
‘I want her so much!’ he whispered. ‘I want her so much …’