Robin Robertson

What am I to think now, the white scut of her bottom disappearing down the half-flight carpet stair to the bathroom? What am I to do with this masted image? I put all my doubt to the mouth of her long body, let her draw the night out of me like a thorn. She touched it, and it moved: that's all.

For Andrew O’Hagan Three moons in the sky the night they found him drowned in Sawtan’s Bog; just his cap, sitting there and his wee fat hands poking out. It was no loss to the village, I told them next morning, and the villagers agreed. Horn-daft, he was, havering and glaikit and scaring the children. I mind that time he picked up a mouse and ate it, quick, in two mouthfuls; set the tail aside on the ground like a cocktail stick. I used her well, after that, his Jennie, still in her widow’s weeds, gilping into her whenever I could, in the barn or the boathouse or off in the fields. She slipped two or three out at least, and sank each one in a lobster creel. Her head was away by the end, as mad as her man and no good to me. She sleeps now under Beinn Ruadhainn, her face covered in ivy, scab, and sticky-willow. The dreams came then. Last night, the burning loch, so full of bairns they bobbed to the surface with their hair on fire; black snow; fingers coming through the floorboards; rain like razor blades; the foosty-faced man, there at every corner, hands furred with grey-mould. And her, as always, star-naked, hatching in the herring-nets. The last I remember was my body being driven with sticks through the town to Sawtan’s Brae, and hanged. I broke from sleep and sat up sweating, dream-fleyed in the dark. I groped around for the matches and the matches were put in my hand.

Their long stares mark them apart; eyes gone to sea-colors: gray, foam-flecked and black in the undertow, blue as the blue banners of  the mackerel, whipping west. On land, they are smoke-walkers, where each stone is a standing stone, every circle a stone circle. They would be rumor if they could, in this frozen landscape like a stopped sea, from the great stone keels of  Callanish to the walls of  Dunnottar and Drum. They would be less even than rumor: to be ocean-stealers, to never throw a shadow — to dream the blank horizon and dread the sight of  land. The drink storms through these men, uncompasses them, till they’re all at sea again. Their houses, heeled over in the sand: each ruin now a cairn for kites. And down by the quay past empty pots, unmended nets, and boats: this tiny bar, where men sleep upright in their own element, as seals.

It is always the same: she is standing over me in the forest clearing, a dab of blood on her cheek from a rabbit or a deer. I am aware of nothing but my mutinous flesh, and the traps of desire sent to test it— her bare arms, bare shoulders, her loosened hair, the hard, high breasts, and under a belt of knives and fish-lures, her undressed wound. Every night the same: the slashed fetlock, the buckling under; I wake in her body broken, like a gun.

A figment, a thumbed maquette of a cat, some ditched plaything, something brought in from outside: his white fur stiff and grey, coming apart at the seams. I study the muzzle of perished rubber, one ear eaten away, his sour body lumped like a bean-bag leaking thinly into a grim towel. I sit and watch the light degrade in his eyes. He tries and fails to climb to his chair, shirks in one corner of the kitchen, cowed, denatured, ceasing to be anything like a cat, and there's a new look in those eyes that refuse to meet mine and it's the shame of  being found out.  Just that. And with that loss of face his face, I see, has turned human.