There are many things I love about Edinburgh. It is big
enough to be a city; small enough to be called a village. You can be sure to
bump into someone you know within ten minutes of leaving your door… though you
can’t go anywhere without being spotted. Here, the rule of six degrees of
separation is reduced to two, and the myth that August is the month of Festival
is scotched by the fact that in every month there is a Festival of some sort.
Sometimes I long for the anonymity of London, my ‘home
city;’ sometimes I feel homesick for its vibrancy. Yet here I am a 15-minute cycle ride from the
seaside or the city centre; I have a 650 million year-old volcano at the end of
my street and scores of galleries dotted all over the city crammed full of
contemporary art. I have more friends than I have ever had, and never stop
meeting many more fascinating, inspiring and beautiful people every week.
When I see floating down the various social media feeds
articles or blogs about how lucky we are, or addicted to, or spoiled by Edinburgh
I am inevitably drawn to click on the links such as this.
There is something twee, but undeniably meaty about a city
that can voice a protest through crochet, decorate a post-box in wrapping
paper, and name a street that looks – on a map – like a crude cock-picture
“Bellenden Gardens.” We have a statue of a poet that is frequently bedecked
with foliage or knit-ware, and our main Railway Station – Waverley – is the
only train station in the world to have been named after a novel.
Celebrating the 200th anniversary of our
celebrated writer’s achievements, my friends at the City of Literature recently
transformed Waverley Station with temporary floor-art and permanent
window/glass installations featuring quotations from Walter Scott’s novels. Edinburgh
didn’t need to be put on a literature map – it is the first designated UNESCO
City of Literature – but there’s no denying the inspiration it provides the
local writing community.
I’m sure that ‘yarn-bombing’ goes on elsewhere, but when I
saw the Robert Fergusson statue wearing leg-warmers, I knew I could get a story
out of it. But it wasn’t until Waverley Station was bedecked with Scott-quotes
that I knew what truly informed the piece I wanted to write. First off, it was
the writing on the floor: “O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive”
Next, I saw the glass pane with this on it. Have found
myself personally woven into a tangled web of appalling and tawdry deception, it
was easy for me to transpose my experience into a web of surreal fiction. As we
know, fiction is a loose term, and a large part of this story is painfully
real. But the loosely gothic element in which the romantic ideas of the
narrator become unbelievable – even to him – is a wee nod to Edinburgh’s
literary heritage.
Revenge, the Sweetest Morsel?
It’s hard to say where it all began. It was spring; that I know: I
remember how colour-co-ordinated it was. The walking statue of Robert Fergusson
outside Canongate Kirk had been given a lovely pair of leg-warmers. The pinks
and purples perfectly matched the blossom that had just appeared, you could
say, overnight – that, after all, is how these ‘appearances’ came into being.
Obviously, whoever did this acted at night-time to avoid detection. Eluding
CCTV cameras was easy enough, and even if the words around the base of the
statue were true – ‘Auld Reikie…kens beneath the moon’ – neither poet nor City
were going to yield their secret very soon.
That day, as if in
subconscious acknowledgement of the event’s significance, I sat in the window
of the coffee shop opposite, my view obscured from time to time by the open-top
tour-buses that stop at the church. ‘The Canongate,’ the tour-guides announce
from the top-deck, ‘So-called because the Canons used to walk up and down
between here and the Abbey at Holyrood.’ Between buses, the usual number of
tourists and passers-by stopped to take pictures next to the poet’s statue.
They would emulate his walking gait, and on this day many held a posy of
blossom to imitate Fergusson’s other adornment.
None of them seemed fazed
by the knitted leg-warmers. To them, it was no more than the quirky addition of
a traffic-cone on a statue’s head, or dressing one of the Gormley statues in
the Water of Leith in a pink bikini. Most pranks of this sort are short-lived –
only the Duke of Wellington by Glasgow’s Museum of Modern Art seems unable to
shift his dunce’s hat. Our poet was soon stripped of his stripy clothes, just
as the blossom fell as pink mulch in the springtime rain. As I said, these
overnight occurrences are gone in the same blink of darkness. Nature takes its
course. Blossom and leaf sneak into being; new blades push up through soil, and
sap and snowdrop seem to surge from nowhere… but they don’t just appear. They
evolve.
I’d like to say that
love does the same. You don’t simply wake up in the morning all in love. The
person you’ve been secretly admiring in the office, or chatting with over
coffee, or – if you’re persistent – been texting prolific compliments to (and
from) doesn’t suddenly appear in your bed and offer the best sex you’ve ever
had. That’s not how it happens, even if you believe in love at first sight.
That’s how it happens if you want a casual encounter. That’s how it happens in
the movies. Or, if you have another agenda, that’s how it happens when you want
to get something…
♥ ♥ ♥
We
did all the things that new lovers do: the furtive glances led to casual
coffees; texting became frequent; we’d meet in favourite places. The glances
led to kisses; the rapid-fire texts turned suggestive; the places we met became
‘special’ and – finally – we consummated our relationship in a way that no film
can. She was, at first, reticent to commit, but I let it pass. On my side,
there was a secrecy to which we were both sworn. My position in the University
gave her a frisson; me, a vulnerability.
As summer lingered, I
knew time was on my side. If money can’t buy love, it sure as hell can’t buy
time. Once, as we sat on newly-mown grass in the Gardens, she suddenly said: ‘I’ve
got a secret.’
‘Oh?’ I sat up,
curious.
‘It’s a biggie,’ she
added.
Quietly pleased to be
let into her confidence, I said, ‘Go on.’
‘I’ve always secretly
wanted to have a child. On my own.’
‘On your own?’ I
pointed out: ‘Impossible!’
‘Not so,’ she
explained: ‘You can buy the means off the internet.’
Perplexed, ‘But…’ Touching
the fingers of her left hand I said: ‘You’ve got me.’ Her hair dropped over her
eyes as she lowered her head.
‘I know,’ she replied,
a half-smile breaking on her lips as she moved to kiss me: ‘I know.’
By autumn, it was over.
Not a word, explanation or reason. Not a hint of the season which had warmed
our bodies was to be seen. I dropped by her flat one evening, but looking
through the bare windows saw the room was cold and empty. She was gone.
♥ ♥ ♥
I watched the trees
turn rusty. The leaves dis-coloured like greying hair, then fell like Samson’s
locks, emptying me of what strength I had enjoyed that summer. God knows how I
got through winter, but when I saw those leg-warmers, my heart felt the first tremor
of recovery. The following Thursday (the day we habitually would meet) I passed
the Poetry Library and saw the first street-tweet. There was a modicum of
interest from the librarians, but it wasn’t on the scale of their beautiful
paper book-sculptures gifted by that anonymous benefactor.
The tweets, however,
similarly un-authored, were not associated with a ‘real’ (or ‘cyber’ – which is
reality to some) twitter account.
@streettweets
Grass whispers
secrets I've heard,
Trees on a
need-to-know basis.
A pavement
pronounces loud words
Proud of a
sense of stasis.
For obvious reasons she
must remain anonymous, but I knew – let’s call her ‘Rebecca’ since it’s a
popular name – I knew ‘Rebecca’ was behind it. We had talked about it during
the Festival Fringe, when she took photos of the street graffiti advertising
venues and shows. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun,’ she said, ‘If someone chalked anonymous
verse at various locations in August?’ We agreed, hilarious, although we didn’t
come up with any suggestions.
‘You don’t take many
pictures of people, do you?’ I asked her once. She cagily avoided the question.
She had taken a few head-shots apparently – one actor I knew had used her
services – and there was a rumour that she had done a few ‘glamour’ shoots at
some point, but again my enquiry was met with silence. So that night, in bed, I
teased her. ‘I think you’re scared of shooting people in, you know, their
natural environment.’ This led to a slight contretemps.
‘Are you saying I limit
my artistic integrity?’ She snapped at me. ‘I can take pictures of who or what
the hell I like!’ She pulled the sheets up around her breasts like a protecting
veil.
‘No, I didn’t mean
that,’ I tried to wriggle out. ‘It’s just you seem to go for inanimate things.’
She reminded me of the expression ‘still life,’ to which I retorted: ‘But your
stuff – what I’ve seen – seems more abstract?’
‘Are you challenging
me?’ she sprang out of bed and grabbed her camera. ‘It’s all about angles,’ she
said, smiling with half her mouth. As she clicked random shots I remembered how
much of her photography was strangely angular. But these were not the angles
she was meaning; it was the tangled web she was weaving. The camera doesn’t
lie, but it certainly deceives. I didn’t think a thing as she shot angle after
angle. It excited me. When she was done we made love in the sweetest, most
complete reconciliation.
When the street-tweets
appeared, in pink and purples on the pavement, I considered taking pictures of
them. Something about my memory of ‘Rebecca’ prevented me. To this day I don’t
know how many were washed away in the April showers before I’d spotted them. I
wasn’t quick enough to catch and write them down, given their self-confessed
ephemeral nature:
@streettweets
Will I be chalked
up for eternity;
as a permanent
hint of sublime?
Or like
graffiti sprayed on gravel,
be worn away
with time?
There was nothing
macabre about the verses, nor the yarn-bombs that appeared next. I knew I was
being baited. ‘Rebecca’ was nowhere to be seen; she’d left the University
without a trace. She had no internet presence (none that I was aware of) and we
had no friends in common – not even in Facebook’s cyber-realism. I discovered
she’d blocked me anyway, so I posted pictures of the yarn-bombs on my
time-line. Only she and I knew the significance: all their locations were
situated in our ‘special’ places.
Our first date was at
the Gallery of Modern Art. Sure enough, the Antony Gormley bust sticking out of
the tarmac had a pink, quasi-balaclava hat. After our first film-date at the
Filmhouse, we hid surreptitiously behind the Mother-and-Child statue, by the
cycle-racks on Festival Square and kissed. This was the next victim of
guerrilla-knitting: a scarf around the woman’s neck with the ends wrapped
around the waists of both figures. I thought the knot had connotations of a
noose, but I dismissed such a sinister notion. Next, on the railings opposite a
pub we frequented: a spider’s web or, possibly, an intricate cat’s cradle.
Recalling the chronology
of our trysting-locations, another week I went down into Princes Street
Gardens. We used to sit together on the grass beyond the Ross Fountain – off
the beaten track – drinking red wine out of plastic glasses, eating black
olives and kissing until our lips were as purple as the dimming sun. It took no time for me to find what I was
looking for, although it was the voice of an American tourist, asking: ‘Is that
a diaper up there?’ I felt my throat close as I stared up. This was large-scale
guerrilla activity, not the work of a single person: the cupid-like figure at
the top of the fountain was wearing, to translate the American, a nappy.
How the hell did she
get it up there? It seemed too unbelievable to be true. But ‘Rebecca’ was,
herself, too good to be true. I began to doubt everything; even my own love for
her, since hers seemed to be proving increasingly false. Swallowing hard the feeling
I was the butt of an unpleasant joke, I wandered through St Cuthbert’s
Churchyard and back to Campus, thinking to myself: ‘Why do fools fall in love?’
Then I did something very foolish. I tweeted pictures of the yarn-bombs, from
my University twitter account.
I really didn’t think
any harm would come of it; we had no connections (it seems ‘Rebecca’ had made
sure of that.) But the twittersphere is far wider-ranging than the insular
world of Facebook, where I was stalker-protected. I hadn’t taken the same
precaution with twitter. For that matter, ‘Rebecca’ and I were unwise when it
came to other precautions. She told me the name of the pill she was on, and I
had no reason to think it was made up or fake. With more of a ‘nocebo’ than
placebo I had left myself open in ways I hadn’t imagined.
In the time it takes
for a shutter to open and close, the click of a button marked ‘send’ or the
spasm of joy we call a ‘little death,’ a life can be changed for ever. These
are the ‘no return’ moments, from which there is no respite either. They haunt
you for the rest of your life. My tweeting created a minor storm. Not an
earthquake, but the ripples reached wherever ‘Rebecca’ had taken herself away
to – and a few others besides. It was the ‘captions’ I tweeted that caused a
stir.
Does anyone ken, beneath
the moon,
who
warmed Rabbie’s legs? Why? When?
Then things started to
come out, like a long-gestated secret. I had spent over half a year wondering
where she had gone, and why. Slowly things became clear. A colleague (again,
I’ll leave him anonymous) told me he’d seen the pictures elsewhere on the
internet, on a social media site associated with ‘Rebecca’ – he wouldn’t tell
me where. It seemed her guerrilla knitting had a more quotidian focus.
Can
anyone unravel the mystery
of
cupid’s pink-and-purple nappy?’
My colleague printed
off a picture of a baby wearing clothes made of the same wool – at least, the
same pink and purple hues – that had bombed the public statues. ‘You knew she
was with someone?’ he asked me, seeing that I was disturbed – though I couldn’t
tell him why. ‘I never met her ‘significant other’,’ he went on: ‘But I heard
he was significantly older.’ If this was true, I thought, he must have had
‘issues.’ Then I recalled, with shuddering significance, the strange question
she asked me after we first made love.
‘Have you had the
operation?’ she asked, cradling me inside her still. Was she that naïve? So I said I wasn’t Jewish. She
replied: ‘No, not that sort of snip.’
‘Oh, the snip?’ Why was she asking me this? ‘It’s
not the sort of thing a single, middle-aged man gets done for fun.’ I
suggested, bemused.
‘It’s just, I’m not
sure my contraception has kicked in yet.’ As I twigged the implication, I felt
another surge inside, and watched the corner of her mouth twitch into a smile. ‘Don’t
worry: it’ll be fine,’ she assured me, as our bodies pulled together.
Putting the pieces together, I began to see
the picture. I had been duped into becoming an unsuspecting donor – cheaper
than the internet option she had toyed with. Whether I was wrong or right, I
was angry.
A child’s future is hardly worth a
snip
if you didn’t have money to pay for
it.
If my reaction, to
avenge her robbery of my heart or my love or my life, was out of bitterness,
god knows what led to her final act; her ultimate guerrilla-attack. Apart from
the obvious: she was guilty, and knew it. ‘Rebecca’ had to do whatever she had
in her power to protect herself from being revealed as a pilfering fraudster.
She was a thief, and yet had tried to share her perfidious behaviour, expecting
me to sit back and accept it. I did not. And so, she needed to silence me.
Purple balaclava, pink hat,
protective helmet?
Or is Sir Antony dressed in a baby’s
bonnet?
As the months passed, I
felt increasingly weak. Nobody seemed to know where she was; I got no more
clues from the colleague who’d tipped me off, and as yet I didn’t know that
‘Rebecca’ had seen my tweeted questions with the yarn-bomb pictures. I was
neither able to grieve for the loss of love, albeit fraudulent, nor smile for
the child from which I was potentially banished. One bright summer morning, I
walked through the Royal Park, with Schumann’s Dichterliebe floating through my head. God, those Romantics knew a
thing or two: we academics must seem like fakes in comparison.
Skirting the lakeside,
looking at up the remains of St Antony’s Chapel (where we had our last parting)
I saw the final street-tweet.
@streettweets
My mother
smiled, my father wept,
Into the
dangerous world I leapt.
A public
twitterer revealed
a secret
intended to be kept.
My heart sank. As I set
out along the lake and up the pathway towards the ruined chapel, I felt myself
wanting to faint as I recalled my colleague’s advice. ‘Leave her alone,’ he said:
‘There’s nothing you can do.’ I figured he knew more than he let on. Maybe she
was married all along, to a man who couldn’t bear her the son she dearly wanted
(so she told me – if anything she said can be believed.) If so, there would be
no case in law to challenge the paternity of the child.
Trudging up the shingle
path, my feet slipped and bashed on the wooden wedges that formed steps up to
the chapel, while my head pounded with pointless questions. What’s the opposite
of being ‘raped?’ I have been ‘reaped’ – not violated, but deceived into
involuntarily donating my seed; lured into fatherhood without the privilege of
future parenthood? Increasingly breathless, I wondered: is this just my
fantasy, as ludicrous as the Ross Fountain cupid in her nappy? The chapel
loomed above me, casting a gothic shadow across the grass. I was half-expecting
to see strands of pink and purple wool wrapped around the gaping windows.
Instead, I noticed a
group of tourists gaining peculiar pleasure from the information sign: pointing
at something more amusing than a dull historical illustration. My heart then
thudded as heavily as my head. I heard myself shouting as I scrambled up the
final stretch. My absurdity dispersed the group. God knows what I said or
looked like. Like a madman, I ripped at the photographs pasted onto the sign,
then tripped as I ran to the next. Some of the pictures flew from my hands, and
fluttered off the edge. Thankfully, my hobbling prevented me from flinging
myself over to rescue them.
I attacked the second
sign more calmly, wondering pointlessly how long ago these images had been
posted, who had seen them, how many were there? I sifted through the shredded
pages to see if there were any identifying features. They were all taken from
abstract angles. But I remember ‘Rebecca’ taking shots of my face that fateful
evening. More worrying was the potential for future postings. Clutching my
stash of compromising photographs, I continued needlessly to the top of
Arthur’s seat, admitting that ‘Rebecca’ had finally defeated me.
What had I done to her
to be treated with such malice? I had heard of something called ‘revenge-porn’
but I’m not in the habit of looking up such things, and had no intention of
trawling the internet to see if ‘Rebecca’ would dare to stoop that low.
Nevertheless, those pictures exist, and could appear at any point. Reaching the
summit, I looked out over Edinburgh, gleaming as the mist dissolved; a city in
the throes of Festivity. I felt the life drain out of me. But the questions remained.
Why did she do it? What
could I do? I was powerless. Impotent: ‘Rebecca’ had got what she wanted.
Revenge.
For what? I thought I
loved her, but I was doubly deceived – by ‘Rebecca’ and myself. What a fool.
Love – not revenge – is the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked
in hell.
Regular or frequent readers of this thread will be familiar
with the background of this story; furthermore you will have read a 10% ‘teaser’
last July. If you would like to know where the poems and stories that I re-produce
here on my blog have been officially published, please leave a comment or
contact me.
