Bardskull by Martin Shaw

Author:Martin Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789651553
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2022-12-26T16:37:36+00:00

swim in the waters that come to drown you

Spirits from the deep, who never sleep

Be kind to me

Spirits from the grave, without a soul to save

Be kind to me

Spirits of cold and ice, presiding over crime and vice

Be kind to me

Wolves, vampires, satyrs and ghosts!

Elective of all dark, wild hosts!

I pray to send hither

The great grey shape

That makes all men shiver!

This Slavic incantation, with all its enjoyable, ghoulish theatre, is not what I am in the grip of.

In 1484 it was literally a sin to believe in werewolves, but by the late sixteenth century they were seen as very real, in fact in league with Satan. Career Christians with large brushes sweep all pagan characters into the pit with Old Nick. Black and white. Nature is not to be trusted and bristles with vast, ghastly, positively wicked forces. You kiss the hand of the pope with a ring on it expensive enough to feed a village for a year and you think wickedness resides in the wild?

Christ.

Wolf rubs up against Roma against Black against Irish against Dog. Fucking white-land. Thank god we didn’t succeed in that.

This is the opposite of all that, a scythe to that, a Heyoka to that, an upside-downness to all that.

It is the shortest day tomorrow, when darkness will take the house. It’ll be the death of Tristan and Isolde, but also the gleam seed of their return, as a snorting royal horse carries Isolde who is a Hawk of the Sun back from the night into the fullness of midsummer. Across the sky this will happen; in our shy, romantic, cautious hearts this will happen. Light will be restored, just as right now darkness is being restored.

I went out into the thin brief light and spilt whisky on the roots of the hazel bush. The glass of the bottle was so cold it stung my fingers. All colours look doctored, Photoshopped: loopy-loop lichen, a pale and brilliant green. Everything is about staying warm: most of the cottage is portioned off – I flit between the bedroom and kitchen, the cats omnipresent at the end of the blanketed bed, thirteen years into similar procedures with me.

End of decade. It was a mosh pit, a victory march, a grief hole and a smackdown. I tapped out a couple of times, and staggered to my feet just before the bell. Wobbled and flattened – older and wiser, I hear. I have no clear thought about how I would view myself at the end of it if I glimpsed myself at the beginning.

I can’t conceive of any of it without the old stories. Without the terrific unrest they bear down, bare-knuckle hard on my jabbering consciousness. Never like this though, at the end of this decade they parade under the lintel of the cottage. They squat like shouty punks in my most delicate of dreams, hysterical, flash-mobbing my musings as I walk the river; they refuse to wash up, and steal books as they please.

There is this final push though, this final month before this is done.

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