Remembering Roughside
A shiny wet slate roof was purple steaming to dry blue. There was the sound of water dripping from a broken waste pipe. There had been wind in the night but now it was calm. The wind usually came from the southeast and blew against the southeast corner of the farmhouse. The drainpipe on that corner had come apart at a joint several feet from the gutter. Drop by drop, water incessantly dripped then splashed from that pipe.
There was a plum tree standing against the south facing stone wall of the farmhouse. The constant wind from the southeast had espaliered that tree so that it spread out over the stone wall of the farmhouse, growing around two windows in that wall. One was the living room window. The other was the bedroom upstairs. The plum tree spread its branches out like ivy over the stone wall.
The farm having been acquired by the Forestry Commission, Roughside's farmhouse was let for a peppercorn rent by the Forestry Commission and I had the lease. In its day, Roughside was approached by a horse drawn wagon that followed a path curving around the moor up to the building built below the brow of a rise in the moor that stretched for miles beyond. I walked up from the cattle grid on a forestry road below, often carrying supplies.
Drop by drop, water incessantly dripped then splashed from the drainpipe. Between those two sounds, drip and splash, no sound of separation. Tick and tock. Two sounds to measure distance between things, where the pipe was broken and a mossy stone several feet below. The stone had once been part of a dry-stone wall. Now it rested where the drainpipe should have entered another pipe to take rainwater away from the building towards where a garden might have been. That pipe had broken long ago.
Sound waves radiated from pipe and rock. Rippling out through the damp air coming from their origins. Between that noise of things an essential silence, of movement, of limbs before noise came, a vehicle far away traversing the forestry commission road a mile below in the valley. Before noise there was only a pulse in the ear a steady heartbeat's pulse. Then there was warmth. Somewhere a warm place became a center towards which air swirled was warmed, rose, cooled.
Faster the heart beats as the mind attempts to synthesize all of those strange sounds. As particles traverse the universe, sounds from celestial drainpipes dripping on rocks in space arrive and our scientists play those signals back in reverse forensically, hoping to derive some good rhyme or reason why we're alive or revelation of why we were meant, what purpose, if any, do we survive to receive these signals, these testaments. This Old Testament of events in time whose ripples arrive carrying signals of far-off events, that something was begat, that help us assign clear signatures in deep space annals from which we surmise there are no mammals like us yet found, just more shards of knowledge saying we've nothing more than sonic squeals to log, no patterns more than Orion's edge.
Disruptions, why we ponder our brain's own New Testament? Where memories traverse the mind’s eye reminding us, we were there and present when waves from explosions in time were sent, ripples resonant with complexity, whose signature we then could represent had significance, though in reality, we knew not why.
Cosmic waste pipes drip and splash and matter spirals away down deep black holes beyond our comprehension - some universal sewage system to serve the stars?
I'm thinking of a gift, a female nude, drawn with charcoal on thick art paper, four feet high by eighteen inches wide. Thinking again of that female nude. Every action has its sequel, action/reaction be equal. Concentric ripples like a grenade were dropped. A trout erupted, took a dragonfly. It’s natural for waves to travel. It’s what waves do. So should we believe in that Big Bang Theory or opt for another theory, one that explains cosmic plumbing.
Impact. Consequence. I wish I kept that nude that somebody gave me when I lived alone in London. That was an event in time whose ripples still reach me with a signal of perturbation. I left it at Roughside, the farmhouse on the moors in Northumberland that faced Orion and the southeast wind. I wish I'd taken more heed then because I cannot now remember who she was that gave that gift.
I've asked friends I knew at that time if they remember because I know that some of them were there when I was given the gift of a female nude. They were friends I had met while working in Lagos for Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), the British equivalent of the Peace Corps: Ishbel, Christine, somebody else. But none of them say they remember this event in time. So, I am left to coax my memory to provide an answer. But the answer has rippled away from me and left me bobbing in the wake of its passage. That event generated a bow wave of meaning that left behind incomprehension but perhaps will be understood by waiting receivers on the other side of space who wait for such signals as I wait here.
Roughside high on a moor above a stream that fed the Tyne under the brow of a hill. Approachable on foot, or by Land Rover. Orion in view from the front door. A solitary light shining in the far distance. Short eared owls hunting in daylight.
So disconsolate, alone. Courage, don’t weep, though a million cells broken, life, a strong tea, will steep. Though slivers of glass impale your heart cut jewels with each heartbeat flash.
The charcoal drawing I associate with the girls I had met in Lagos. I remember all of them, but I cannot remember who gave me the picture. Out there in space, aliens are receiving the signals that were sent at the time of those encounters, but such signals have already left me far behind in their wake.
I cannot exactly picture the beautiful body of the charcoal nude, but I do remember the powerful brush strokes of charcoal that limned her curves and the delicate lines that bespoke her features. I remember some of the essential infrastructure of the artwork she was, but I do not remember her as whole, more as fragments, such as Greek statuary taken from a temple sacred to a goddess.
I remember the setting of a flat boulder in a stream in Spain that flowed down from the hills where the road to Ronda, I drove up, climbed from Estepona into the interior of Andalusia. I remember that water flashed in the moonlight as it rippled by pushed by its never-ending response to the pull of gravity. I remember it was after midnight and that I had walked down to the finca that stood by the fast-flowing stream in the dark from the dusty unmade road where I had parked my car. I remember I had found her alone and seeming to expect that I would come. And that was the first time I had ever been alone with her. It was as if I had been pulled to that place. I had been pulled uphill by some force stronger than gravity. It was a warm place on a warm night. But I cannot now remember what I first said to her. And I cannot remember how I explained why I had come down to the small barn where she was staying to knock on its wooden door that had no lock and find she seemed to have expected me. Nor can I remember how it was that we so soon after went out to walk in the moonlight and made love on a flat rock in the stream. Nor can I remember much more than fragments of time that we spent together, at first in Spain, then in London, and finally at Roughside.
I last saw Roughside at sunset on top of its hill. Its smokeless chimneys asserting domain over pressing congregations of fir trees, manufactured trees, plantation growths like cancer choking life from the throat of the hill. I rapped on the padlocked door, heard not even the rustle or scratch of a mouse not even an echo, just absence. Not even a ghost nestling in that old stuffed chair.
There was only an owl. A short-eared owl regarding me silently from the gable. I once had a farmhouse where I lived with a girl who passed away so completely, she's gone forever over the hill and faraway from what might have been. Roughside stands empty except for the owl and was it was her owl? The one she reared with raw meat from a chick that flew from fence post to barn roof. Rust dusted its talons.
And I said:
"No, we can't keep it. We must let it go."
And when we were walking down the hill in those days when the fir trees were just planted, in the time when breezes blew freely and Roughside had plums on its plum tree and adders basked in the sunlight. Songbirds were mobbing an owlet, and it was her owl, and I thought it was dead. I thought I had killed it by letting it go. But it was her owl and now it is mine.
I was given that nude after she had left. And now I remember who gave it.
Dick Russell © Richard M Russell
2014
