The Sleeper
I woke in the small hours and listened to the night. Too early for gulls, too late for the murderously screeching cats.
The previous night, I had wakened at the same time and heard a voice (or was it two?) echo around the backgreen. The voice, not loud, was like a radio turned on low. The breathy words sounded close. I rose, stood in the bay between the curtain and the windowpane, and looked out into fog – proper flickering movie, murder-mystery fog. It filled the night with thick white cushion stuffing. The padding played tricks on my ears, it held the noise delicately then passed it around slowly in the darkness, the voices moving from right to left, from close to far. I was compelled to open the window wide and speak, as though someone out there would hear me. Whatever I was hearing and feeling did not unnerve me, quite the opposite, and I slipped back under the covers and let the somniferous whispering do its work.
This time, however, there were no lullaby whispers. I lay awake in a crucible of silence and the more I tried to sleep, the more alert I became. Time for the routine: listen to the radio; read a few pages by lamplight; make tea; open notebook and commit distracting thoughts to paper; try to sleep. Failure. By 9am I remained on the sleepless platform, my depth of tiredness was over-packed luggage, heavy and bulky. I was a road map torn into a hundred pieces. I was rubble on the ditch of a dug-up road.
This day, I told myself, will be a write-off unless I sleep. Give me one hour as a patch-up, an emergency repair kit.
I lay still and solid as the Ailsa Craig – move nothing, that’s the trick. A tiny tickle on my forehead, an itch on my ankle, and finally, a dribble trailing from the corner of my mouth and I’m pulled into…
Her Watcher
A few nights ago, I saw you looking from your window, searching for me. You heard me in the fog, a voice so light and airless that only fog can scour it into sound. Had you stood longer, you may have seen me: an outline, a shape. But you dismiss me, and we are destined to miss what we deny. Negative bias. If you don’t believe in me, you’ll never see me. You may as well be blind.
I enjoy these nights warmer when you open the window a crack, when I can slip out and explore. I never go far. I wander (more of a hover) Montgomery Park where I used to take the dog and let him run. And I go up to Abbeymount, to the old Primary School, now an Arts Centre. Those arty types keep the strangest hours. One girl – blue silk headscarf keeping long black hair off her face – works through the night making mosaics from tiny pieces of broken porcelain. She’s fearless, the only one there in the middle of the night, and I’m sure she sees me. She fixes her eyes on rather than through me. She looks sorrowful, halfway to becoming a ghost herself, and the way she works, so slowly and methodically, it’s as though she is gluing herself back together with every fragment.
Sometimes I go in the other direction, down Easter Road, to the graveyard, and I hover over my own headstone, and laugh at whoever thinks I might be in there. You lot seem to take great comfort in having a place to go, somewhere to talk to us. If only you knew. There is no one place. We roam. We can be spoken to anywhere.
I shushed you back to sleep on the night of the fog. You were unnerving me with all that staring. Oh yes, we can get spooked too. You’re an odd creature, but I watch out for you, nonetheless. I keep your home feeling calm and serene. I sometimes whisper in your ear and tell you what to write.
Do I get lonely? Yes, is the honest answer. When I get lonely, I wake you up and I watch you potter, talking to yourself – you are talking to me, even if you call it talking to yourself.
No, you may not ask who I am. That’s tantamount to asking an older lady her age. It’s rude. This much I’ll tell you: I’m not one person. I am him and her. I am from hundreds of years ago and I am from not so long ago. I am from nearby, and I am from far off shores. I am old and I am young. Know that I am here, then forget about me.
Live.
My Edinburgh Press 