macCLOUD FALLS, page 2
‘I don’t know.’
‘Isn’t it somewhere round here?’
‘If it is, I never heard of it. But we only moved here three years ago. My wife might know, though. She’s very interested in all that local history stuff.’
‘Could you call her?’
‘I guess. Though we don’t talk much anymore.’ He pointed to the journal in her hands. ‘Maybe if you read farther back a bit, it’ll tell you what he means?’
‘I will.’ Her eyes were taking a ranging view of Gil’s writing. ‘You go ask around – see if anybody knows where this sacred valley is.’
Again he hesitated, still unsure of whether he was doing the right thing in helping her root around in his guest’s room. Then it struck him. ‘Sigourney Weaver! That’s who it is,’ he exclaimed. She looked up at him over the rim of her spectacles and smiled, then shook her head, as if she’d heard the same idea endlessly repeated.
‘Don’t… please,’ she said.
‘But you’re not… not really?’ he asked, confused.
‘Oh, just go already, will you!’ she commanded. The dog had been watching her every movement and lay down at her feet, panting with the heat, as if scolded. The innkeeper began to apologise to her, still seemingly uncertain as to the woman’s true identity, but she shooed him out the door.
Once he’d left, the woman who was tired of looking like Sigourney turned her attentions to her dog and said, ‘Poor boy, it’s way too hot for you here.’ She sat on the end of the bed. He jumped up beside her and she patting him lovingly with one hand as she flicked back through the pages from the last entry in the missing man’s journal. ‘Let’s see if we can find another mention of this sacred valley,’ she said, perhaps to herself, perhaps to the dog, as she scanned the pages in reverse, making her way back towards the beginning. It seemed to be a record of his movements here in Cloud Falls – but it was written in the third person for some reason. No other mention of this valley caught her eye.
Instead, she began to read the first page.
Coincidence is – perhaps – a symptom of fate. Perhaps, because it arises per hap: through chance. Imagine: you have spent a summer sitting in the garden of the place you are living in, watching planes fly low overhead as they approach the nearby airport. You have watched them knowing that you may never fly again, because you are being treated for cancer by radiotherapy. Your throat is a dried-up wrinkling, red-hot on the inside, red-skinned on the outside. You have no energy, no enthusiasm for an active life, except to watch – you watch the swifts and the swallows as they zip and flit above the river, feeding among the floating specks of insects lit up by the setting sun. Your view is to the west, the end of day, the end of life. But by the time that the first leaves are yellowing, you find yourself on an aeroplane, leaving that airport, flying above your riverbank retreat towards a place you have never been. Yet somehow you are returning to source, swimming upstream. Your seat is in the last row, at the rear of the cabin – you do not greet each other. She is intent on reading, and so are you. After half an hour, you are flying somewhere over the mountains, heading west, when the voice from the cockpit announces a problem with one of the engines, and so the plane will make a forced landing at another airport. You glance at your fellow traveller, the invisible wall of separate concentrations suddenly melted away. There is a look of panic in her eyes – her very dark brown eyes. But as the sun catches her face, a flash of gold among the brown surprises you. There is light and terror in her look, a glancing fear that sparks your interest. But you do not speak. Instead, you gaze down at the mountains and valleys below. A lake, a river, a snaking sliver that cuts the landscape.
From up here, life is tiny. Your life is tiny. And you have thought about that, sitting in the garden of the riverbank cottage, watching the planes. How tiny your life is, and how short it has been. Cancer sharpens awareness, even as it clogs the body with unwanted, non-functioning cells. In the past few months, you have come to terms with death, have put your affairs in order, said goodbyes. If this plane crashes, and you die, it could not happen at a more opportune moment. Thanks to the cancer, all is ready. But she looks as if she has life ahead of her, things she must do, and places she must go. People to see, perhaps children to care for, a husband.
The plane circles above the metropolis, banks to make its approach to the runway. You can feel the collective intake of breath amongst the passengers. It is tangible, palpable, visceral, in that little tube of pressurised air. And the outbreath as the wheels bump and find the tarmac. You have not died – yet. The worried face of your fellow traveller relaxes its frown. You are the last to leave, the stricken... A lot of people left the plane at Calgary. It was a relief, after being squashed in the window seat for seven hours, when the Glaswegian couple took their bags and filed out. A few new faces replaced those who’d reached their destination, but not nearly so many. The remaining passengers spread out, filling empty seats. Some stretched out across a middle three. After walking around a while, peering out at the runway, the airport, the faint cityscape on the plain and the line of distant mountains, he went back to his window.
‘He’s changed person in the middle of the paragraph,’ she said. But she carried on, intrigued.
This was the leg of the journey he’d been waiting for – sunset over the Rocky Mountains – so he didn’t even notice her at first, until she stopped and checked the seat number, then sat with a smile in the outer of three. ‘Hey,’ she said, casually, not inviting a response. He glanced at her, then went back to fiddling with the buttons on his Nikon. But he noticed the book she brought from her bag – it was ‘Anna Karenina’, but in Russian, judging from the Cyrillic script on the cover. He was snapping automatically, trying to get an angle on the incredible white peaks, the blue lakes, the snaking silver rivers, that would exclude the sun’s glare just enough for clarity, when the pilot announced turbulence and the seatbelt sign went on. ‘Shit,’ she said, half to him, half to herself. ‘I knew I should’ve ordered a drink. If I’m going to die, I want to die happy.’ He took one of the full miniatures of Johnnie Walker from his bag, and the second unused plastic cup that had encased the one he’d been drinking from, offered them to her. She looked at it, at him. ‘If you want it, it’s yours,’ he said. She hesitated, then smiled. ‘Thanks, that’s kind. But I don’t like whisky. A gin and tonic’s what I need.’
‘Well,’ she said to the dog, ‘That never happened. And it’s all confused. If that’s the kind of writing he does, I’m not surprised he hasn’t been published.’ But the dog wasn’t listening, it had heard someone coming upstairs, footsteps that stopped outside the partly opened door of room 14, and it growled as a couple of faces peered in. When the interlopers heard that, and she looked up, they ducked out of sight. ‘Nah, that’s not her,’ a disappearing voice said as they went back downstairs. ‘Sure looks like her though,’ said another. She frowned behind her pink-rimmed glasses. ‘Silly men,’ she said, patting the dog, but her interest was in the journal. He’d written about them, their meeting on the plane – though he’d changed things here and there.
Her eyes flitted quickly over the lines, as she turned page after page back through the outsized notebook, till noises from the terrace below rose up and in the open window. The two spies were down below and their conversation drifted upwards.
‘I’m telling you, man, she definitely bought that big house right down on the shore in West Van. We saw it from the water when we was out in the boat, my cousin Dan an me.’
‘Na, that was Oprah. Everybody knows bout that.’
‘No, it’s not that house.’
‘So what would she be doing up here in the canyon, anyway?’
‘Maybe the Scotch guy’s a scriptwriter?’
‘He’s from Scotland, bro.’
‘They make movies there. Braveheart.’
It was far from the first time Sigourney’s image had got in her way. She’d given up trying to stop the misapprehension. At times it even opened doors. So she got up from the bed and pulled the window shut on the conversation. Her dog lifted its head expectantly, but the long legs those canine eyes watched walked back to the bed, where she flicked through more pages impatiently, looking for another mention of the valley. ‘I know, it’s hot, honey. But it’ll be cooler soon and we’ll take a walk then. Maybe Gil will have turned up,’ she told the dog. ‘You like Gil, don’t you?’
Exasperated with her fruitless search, she stopped her backwards scanning, and turned to the beginning again. She started to read, and her expression changed from one of frustration to amazement. ‘Oh my God!’ The dog looked at her, as if understanding the phrase and what it signified. ‘He’s changed our names.’ And she began to read intently, her eyes flitting over the words at speed behind her pink-rims.
On the plane, unprompted, she’d said ‘You’re a little late, aren’t you?’
I looked up at her, puzzled. ‘Late? Why?’
She pointed at the Handbook to the Goldfields on my knee, an 1862 edition from the bookshop in Edinburgh. ‘The gold rush ended about 150 years ago.’
‘Well,’ I answered, laughing. ‘I thought there would still be a few nuggets left here and there.’
‘So you’re a prospector? No, I don’t expect so. But you’re Scotch. That much I can tell from your accent, and the whisky. There are a lot of you Scotch in Canada.’
‘The Scots built Canada, according to some books I’ve read. And the country I’m going to used to be known as New Caledonia, in the days before it became British Columbia.’
‘So where is it exactly you are going to?’
‘Well, I’m going to spend a week in Vancouver – I’ve rented a room on MacDonald Street, which just makes my point about the Scots – and then I’m going to head into the interior, up the canyon to a place called Cloud Falls.’
‘MacDonald is near where I live. But I don’t know Cloud Falls. Where is that?’
‘In the Gold Country, of course.’
‘Touché. But you’re not really going to look for gold.’
‘No. Anyway, most folk probably won’t have heard of Cloud Falls. It’s only about a hundred people.’
‘So if it’s not gold you’re searching for, what is so special about this little town?’
‘I’m doing research on a man who went to live there, about 150 years ago.’
‘You’re a journalist?’
‘No. It’s a long story. I think he’s a relative of mine. I’ve been ill. I’ve wanted to make this trip for a long time and when I got my strength back, I thought this was as good a time as any.’
‘I get it. Bucket list. I thought you looked sick. You’re so thin. What was wrong with you?’
‘Cancer.’
She shook her head, as if disbelieving. ‘Wow,’ she breathed.
‘Anyway, here’s to life ongoing,’ he said, raising the plastic airline cup.
‘And gold.’
‘I hope so,’ he answered. ‘Both.’
It took her a moment to realise that the writer had switched person in mid-passage again. What made someone so unsure of who they are?
‘So this is your first time crossing the Rockies,’ she said.
‘How can you tell?’ he asked, camera in hand.
‘Oh, just all those pictures you were taking earlier.’
‘Well, you’re right. And you?’
‘Oh, many times. I live in Vancouver now. Though not always.’
‘I guessed that. Your accent is...?’
‘Czech.’
Hah! He’d made her Czech!
‘Not Russian?’ He pointed at the Tolstoy, protruding from her bag.
‘No! Definitely not Russian. Though like a lot of Czechs of my generation, I can read Russian as a result of classes at school. But I’ve never read Anna Karenina before.’
‘It’s always good to leave a few classics for later life,’ he said and tossed back his dram.
He didn’t say any of that. He was nowhere near as eloquent.
‘So now you’re reborn?
‘I had to re-evaluate everything. And stop smoking, of course. I don’t know what lies ahead.’
‘Smoking, ah...’
‘I feel as if I’ve lived a very safe life, as if I’ve never done anything dangerous or foolish and it’s almost over.’
‘But you smoked, surely that’s dangerous and foolish...’
Yes, he had smoked – from the moment he first opened his father’s tobacco drawer and smelled the freshly aromatic scent tempting his olfactory nerve, he’d had warm associations with the wicked weed.
And so above the Rockies, you told this stranger the story of your quarry.
He’d switched again! What’s the matter now?
You told her the story of Jimmy Lyle and his wanderings, as you had heard it from your great-grandmother, how she remembered his solitary homecoming in 1901. Of a nineteen-year-old travelling five thousand miles in 1884 from the bare island hills, by sea and land, and sea and land, and much more land, into a desert canyon. And back again, seventeen years later, by horse, train and ship. Of that old magazine in your great-grandmother’s kitchen in Leith with the story about him entitled, ‘Friend to the Indians’. And the photo with his Native wife, and his dog, in front of the log cabin. Of how he’d been ‘Aly’, then ‘Jimmy’, then ‘Jacques’. All the things you knew about a place you’d never been to. Dead people you’d never met.
You looked at her face and she slept, so you ceased. Unlike anyone, and yet from somewhere among the thousands of faces you’d glimpsed or got to know, some recognition seemed to flow.
‘You stopped,’ she’d said quietly, without fully opening her eyes.
‘I thought you were sleeping,’
‘No, not now.’
So you’d shared a taxi from the airport, you were travelling to the same part of the city, only a few blocks away. And when she gave you the neat printed card with her name and address, her phone and email, and you exchanged that for a slip of paper from your wallet with your phone number, you felt that you’d connected, somehow.
If I’m going to die, I want to die happy, she had said. What you did not tell her was that while you’d lain in your mother’s garden and gazed up at the clouds last summer, you’d come to know a younger self that you’d ignored, someone bold and ambitious, eager for challenge and willing to take risks. You didn’t tell her that younger self was angry with you, that you felt him on your shoulder urging you on, to try at least to do one big thing while you still had time. You had been the tethered bear, walking that circle, for just too long.
When the innkeeper tapped the open door of room 14, she seemed lost in the Scotsman’s journal. He cleared his throat and tapped again. His face seemed uncertain as to whether he’d done the right thing in letting her into the room.
‘So you found out what this sacred valley is?’ she said, without more than a glance in his direction.
‘No. Nobody seems to know about it. Did you find anything in his journal? Because I’m kinda worried myself now.’
‘Not yet.’ She laughed a little, the first time he’d seen her smile and he stared intently, as if trying to compare it with what he remembered Sigourney Weaver’s smile to be like. ‘But I found myself,’ she said. She was about to add something, but a sudden grinding, clashing roar arose from somewhere outside, gradually growing so loud that it felt as if the little inn was shaking, and the dog leapt up, barking and howling.
‘CPR,’ the innkeeper shouted over the uproar. ‘It’ll be over soon.’ But the noise got louder, and the roaring and barking went on for some long minutes more.
‘That can’t do much for trade,’ she said, when the commotion was finally over. ‘How often does that happen?’
‘A few times a day,’ he answered. ‘You kinda get used to it.’
‘Do you?’ She put her glasses back on, and picked up the journal which was not a journal but a story, and a story about her, or some version of who she was. How this dying Scotsman saw her.
‘So...’ he hesitated. ‘What do you want to do now?’
‘Me, I’m going to read this. If Gil – Mr Johnson - turns up, then let me know. And in the meantime, I want you to find out where that valley is. Someone must know. Phone around, speak to people. And I want you to bring me some more tea. And some water for him.’ She gestured towards the dog.
Her tone was so naturally commanding, she could well be some big movie star. ‘Up here?’
‘Sure, why not? It’s a pretty nice room. And quiet, except for those trains.’
The innkeeper hesitated again. She had invaded his domain and now was dismissing him like a servant.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s just...’
‘What?’
‘Are you really who I think you are...?’
‘What do you think... what is your name, anyway?’
‘Rick,’ he said. ‘And I just wondered, what your plans are, if you’re going to drive back to Vancouver or carry on elsewhere, because if you want a room here I’ll need to get one ready. And if you want food, then...’
She interrupted, ‘I’m just going to wait here for now,’ but she was already drifting back into the journal.
‘Shall I close the door?’ he asked.
‘On your way out, yes,’ she said, and turned her attention back to the Scotsman’s handwriting.
What was this, a poem?
You hear the kaark kaaark kark of consciousness.
Hugin and Munin flee ilk day,
owir da spacious eart.
Though I vex for Hugin
that he’ll no come back,
it’s for Munin I’m maistlie feart.
Two ravens flew from your shoulders,
Huginn to the hanged
Munin to the slain,
light stealers, shape-shifting
fellow travellers.
Thought and Mind
arguing forever over
the last bean in the can
That was all it said. No context, no notes. She turned the page, found the narrative thread from before.
He woke wondering where the hell he was, remembering a dream about ravens, pulled back the heavy drapes and it seemed to be getting dark. There were a few complimentary groceries in the kitchen of his suite, so he made a cup of tea and ate a biscuit, switched on the TV to discover it was early morning, not evening. His watch still had Greenwich Mean Time. He tried to calculate the time difference, and just how long he’d slept, but the arithmetic was beyond him at that moment.
