Emotionally Weird(2)

I used to wonder if, long ago, Nora began her journey in Land’s End and was trying to get to John o’Groats, although for what reason I couldn’t imagine – unless it was because she was Scottish, but then many Scots live their whole lives without ever finding it necessary to go to John o’Groats.

Now she says she will die here, but she is only thirty-eight years old, surely she is not ready to die yet? Nora says that it doesn’t matter when you die, that this life is nothing but an illusion. Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t stop the cold rain from soaking us to the skin or the gales blowing in our hair. (We are truly weathered here.) Anyway, I don’t believe that Nora will ever die, I think she will merely change state. It has begun already, she is being transformed into an elemental creature, with tidal blood and limestone bones. She is unevolving, retiring into the ancient, fishy regions of her brain. Perhaps soon she will crawl back into the watery realm of Poseidon and reclaim her Saurian ancestry. Or metamorphose into something monumental – an ice-capped ben, littered with granite boulders, or a tumbling, peat-brown burn, bubbling to the sea with its cargo of elvers and fry and frothy green weed.

I am bound to the unknown and neglected Stuart-Murrays by spiralling tapeworms of genetic material. We are, dead and alive (but mostly dead, it seems), the glowing molecular dust of stars, a galactic debris of bacteria and germs. Our veins are the colour of delphiniums and lupins, our arterial blood a febrile brew of crushed geranium petals and hot-house roses, thinned with plasma like catarrh and—

~ Wheesht, says Nora, talk sense, our bloodline is that of ancient warriors, of berserkers and invaders. Our blood tastes of rusted weapons and hammered-out coins. We are not the sort, she says, who stoically slit their thin veins like reeds, and slip away quietly down their own bloodstream, we don our breastplates and hack and hew and rive at our enemies.

The Stuart-Murrays, it seems, are even-handed – they have fought against the English and also stood shoulder to shoulder with them in support of Empire and exploitation. We are numbered amongst those wha’ bled wi’ Wallace and have been present at nearly every rammy, stushie and stramash in Scotland’s tortured history.

And where are they now, these feckless Stuart-Murrays? The line, Nora says, will end in daughters. Or, to be more precise – me. I am, it seems, the last daughter of the house of Stuart-Murray.

I am a young woman composed of blood and flesh, sugar and spice, all things nice and the recycled molecules of the dead. I have thin bones that snap and shatter too easily for my liking. I have Nora’s narrow insteps and broad toes, her love of sentimental music, her hatred of Brussels sprouts. I have my mother’s temperamental hair – hair that usually exists only in the imagination of artists and can be disturbing to see on the head of a real woman. On Nora it is the colour of nuclear sunsets and of over-spiced gingerbread, but on me, unfortunately, the same corkscrewing curls are more clownish and inclined to be carroty.

I also have my mother’s native tongue, for we led such an isolated life when I was a child that I speak with her accent, even though I never set foot in her country until I was eighteen years old.

Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.

Some people say that we are nothing more than a bundle of perceptions, others claim that we are composed entirely out of our memories. My earliest memory is of drowning – like my mother, I am clearly drawn to the dark side. Perhaps I am a living, breathing example of reincarnation – perhaps the drowning Effie’s spirit leapt out of her body and into my newborn one?

~ Let’s hope not, Nora says.

Memory is a capricious thing, of course, belonging not in the world of reason and logic, but in the realm of dreams and photographs – places where truth and reality are tantalizingly out of reach. For all I know I have imagined this aquatic memory, as insubstantial as water itself – or remembered a nightmare and thought it real. But then, what is a nightmare if it isn’t real?

Before she had a purpose (turning into landscape) Nora herself was always a distracted and absent-minded person. Mnemosyne’s forgotten daughter. How else can you explain the obliteration of the Stuart-Murrays, not to mention the terrible circumstances of my birth?