On the Edge

 

The man on the television was crying.

His lined face, large and tanned, was set against a background of pale mountains. His turban was coming loose. The camera panned back to show him holding the body of a child as he explained that his own countrymen had been attacking his village with gas. His eyes flicked like those of a trapped animal between the camera and the interviewer. He wanted someone to help him understand.

I watched the footage of dead mothers and fathers lying over the bodies of their children, having tried vainly and naïvely to protect them from the invisible cloud. Then, when the camera cut back to the man, he started to cry. He moaned and then rocked backwards and forwards with grief as he explained that he had been at market in a distant town, so missing the attack. He said that he wished he was also dead then stared silently at the camera, waiting.

 

They called me on the radio, so I turned off the television. They told me a storm was coming and that they were concerned for me. I said I knew about the storm. I had seen the weather forecasts that they regularly emailed to me so of course I knew about the storm. I was my job to know about the storm.

“We are worried about you.”

“I’m OK,” I said.

“But you’re on your own.”

“I volunteered to be here.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I’ll survive.”

“I’m sure you will.”

I turned to watch the gannets through the window next to the desk in my office. They are large awkward birds on land, but once they are in the water, they are powerful and so perfectly shaped. Pure white knives cutting silently into the ocean. They rarely come ashore, except for breeding when they use rocky outcrops like this one. From the lighthouse I could see them both on the rock and also far out to sea where they flew in search of food.

“I’ll survive,” I said again.

 

The man was on television again. Each news broadcast carried his picture and that of the dead villagers. The scenes were becoming padded out with maps and long distant shots of the surrounding mountains, but at the core of the broadcast, the man and his son remained. The man looked old, but was probably no older than me. Some of his teeth were missing in the front of his mouth and he had a deeply wrinkled face. He had a cut above one eye, but the roughness of the scab did not look too different from the rest of his skin. He stared intently at the camera as tears ran down his cheeks; only when the camera panned down to take a shot of the son did his head move to look at the small limp bundle in his arms. The son was lying flopped across his father’s arms. One of the boy’s legs dangled free, a rough dusty sandal on his foot. The boy’s red and green shirt and loose red cotton trousers flapped gently in the air. The man blinked against the sun. He ended in silence, staring at the interviewer before turning to walk away from the camera, back into the house behind him.

 

Between writing my reports in the silence of my glass world and the television, I watched the birds, distant through my small round windows. I kept my binoculars by my side. Occasionally I picked them up to follow the individual birds that were many kilometres out to sea. I watched the silent white splashes appear on the surface of the sea as each bird dived into the gentle swell. They were more active than ever; the young birds were growing up and getting ready to leave. There is usually a lot of activity in the colony, but the movement was becoming intense. The large birds flew to find ever increasing amounts of food for their young. The adult birds spent all day out at sea; diving, flying, diving, flying. Then one day they would be gone.... North Africa, The Bay of Biscay, Iceland....places I had only ever seen on maps.

On the rock, the gannets and kittiwakes began to settle down to sit out the storm. There was less flying out to sea. Instead, they sat quietly and began to await the inevitable. They squeezed into small cracks and crevices to afford themselves a little protection. The adults still tried to give their young some warmth by wrapping their wings around them.

A few days ago, I saw a Roseate Tern. It just stopped for a rest then it was gone. God alone knows how far it had flown or where it was going. This island is not on its usual migratory route. My book described it as a very rare visitor to these coastal areas. So what drove a thing so small and so delicate to this rock? What lay in its sharp skull and behind its pin-bright eyes? It was sitting on the rail around the upper light and I simply moved across the window and it was gone. Presumably it had been knocked off course by the storm. But as the clouds gathered on the distant horizon it headed back towards them and the advancing veils and curtains of rain. I watched it through my window.

 

At school I used to listen only occasionally to Mr Mc Dermott, the teacher, when he told us about birds and wildlife. I would walk to school along the rough road and pay more attention to my games than the wildlife around me. Once Megan Leary pointed to a bird that was singing as it ascended in a series of bursts.

“There’s a skylark,” she said.

“Here’s a right lark,” I said pushing her.

Megan married Declan and moved away from the area before I did. In my class at school, Mr McDermott had much better stories to tell. He told us about the Island of St. Kilda. He showed us a map of Scotland and pointed to somewhere out in the middle of the Atlantic or so it seemed to me. Then he told us about the people who used to live there: Simple and God-fearing he called them. I loved that phrase.

He told us how they were removed from their homes and how the island became a military base. He told us how the islanders used to send and receive mail in a wooden box attached to an inflated sheep’s bladder. The young men of St. Kilda would climb cliffs in their bare feet to get gull and kittiwake eggs for food. Before they were allowed to do this, they had to show their bravery by standing at the edge of a towering granite ledge in bare feet. Then they had to stand with only their heels on the rock, and finally they were to stand with only one heel on the rock with 30 their other leg and their foot wavering out over the distant sea. Mr McDermott showed us photographs of the people of St. Kilda. They were small, almost fat people; perhaps they looked that way because of all the thick clothing they had to wear. Their beards were rough and unkempt. “Simple and God fearing.”

On the way home from school, Megan and her brother, James and I played at being on St. Kilda. James took off his shoes and tried to balance on one of his father’s farm walls. At first he could not manage to balance on the rough granite blocks of the wall, but eventually he edged his toes out over the fresh air. With time, as the dusk drew in around us, he managed to balance on one heel, his foot half on and half off the wall. I could not do it and neither could Megan who was younger than us both. I satisfied myself by thinking that James would not have been able to balance on the rocks had they been a hundred metres high and not just one metre. As we walked to our respective homes, in the gloom I heard James shout, “King of St. Kilda.”

 

The man appeared on the television again. The images hardly varied. Occasionally the order changed, but always the same message came across; he was at market so he missed the gas attack but all his family was killed, including his three year old son. He wished he was also dead. Some images, like these come to represent entire episodes of life, like the picture of the young naked girl running away from the bombing in the Vietnam war. Or the loyalist soldier being shot during the Spanish Civil War, his arms outstretched as if he was being crucified. Sometimes we live through important times.

There was world-wide reaction to the gassing. In a far away building, the Ambassador of the man’s country at the United Nations denied the gas attack and blamed the deaths on The Hand of God. He was surrounded by television cameras, microphones and jostling angry people. Outside the UN building a crowd of people was waving banners and placards.

The man’s role was reduced to a small cameo; we saw his tears and his dead child, but as we heard the voices of the newsreaders we saw other dead mothers and fathers and their children. They must have fallen just where they were when the gas hit them and only a few parents had a chance to cover their children. Some groups of bodies lay next to games or books spread out on the dirt road outside the houses. Others were in the corners of courtyards around unfinished meals. The people from outlying villages arrived to bury their relatives and friends. Those that had not been buried were covered with blankets. And still the man came onto each broadcast crying and wishing he were dead.

 

I ventured out onto the rock.

I had been busy but I tried to get out at least once each day. Walking carefully amongst the birds so as not to disturb them, I passed through a slowly moving lawn of white; like a silk sheet rippling. The birds barely acknowledged my presence, but simply ruffled their feathers and fidgeted on their rough nesting mounds. I walked the hundred or so metres to the end of the rock and looked out over the to the west. Above the line of the horizon, I saw the first few clouds that formed the leading edge of the storm. There, just beyond my view, was the storm that knocked the tern off course as it tried to find its directions in the maelstrom. In the evening glow I tried to bring myself to stand on the edge of the rock, with my toes out over the ocean. Below me was a ten metre drop into the water. I didn’t do it. Instead, I turned and walked back amongst the birds.

When I returned to the lighthouse the radio was crackling.

“Where have you been?” asked the voice when I picked up the receiver.

“Nowhere.”

“We’ve been trying for ten minutes.”

“Sorry.”

“Shall we come and get you.”

“No. I’m fine.”

The next morning, I walked to the top of the lighthouse to watch the clouds gathering. Then I went through my routine and checked the systems. The radio receiver I was upgrading was to be controlled by a single computer; one station would handle over fifteen lights along this coast. I just needed to be present as it was re-tested for the first time.

As the first specks of rain began to fall I went down the steps and out onto the rock. The wind was growing. The birds were adjusting themselves to meet the storm head on. The younger birds were being protected by their parents whilst the older chicks settled down alongside the adults. I was about half-way along the rock when, almost without notice, the wind and rain hit the rock hard. I turned around to return to the light, but before I closed the door into the storm I looked back over the colony to see the birds squatting and crouching close to the rock.

Back in my office, I watched them through the window.

 

Mr. McDermott told us of the storms on St. Kilda. Of how the boats could not put to sea for weeks, sometimes months. The whole Atlantic Ocean would seem to hurl itself at the 33 small granite island and the islanders could only sit and wait.

He read us accounts of the storms, of the islands and how whole herds of sheep were moved from island to island to graze the scarce grass. During storms the sheep could die of starvation if left for too long on small islands where there was too little food. Or they would be washed off the islands by the large waves and their bodies would float, rotting and bloated, between the islands. The storms, he said, were the reasons that the authorities gave for the removal of people from the islands. But, Mr. Mc Dermott said that it was really because they wanted the island for a military base. So Mr. McDermott’s grand-parents were shipped off the island and were given a home in Glasgow. He had a photograph of the tall tenement block in which his ancestors lived and, only five months after arriving off St. Kilda, died.

“They couldn’t take it, you see,” he said as we stared at the crumpled photo. “ And I end up teaching you lot,” he would always say, smiling again.

At the end of each term, as a special treat, he would tell us stories of St. Kilda.

 

Through the storm the television images moved on. They still showed the man, but also the remaining villagers from surrounding areas packing up their belongings and moving down the hillside into the rocky valley floor. They said that they were moving together for safety. They sat in family groups in the bare countryside. Tents were being flown in from around the world and they clung, with their occupants, to the rocks and scree. Simple and God-fearing people. Occasionally the sound disappeared from the television, so the man’s voice came and went. The storm raged outside my room, silencing the man’s sorrow. The hills where the people gathered were bare and dusty and the sun cast deep shadows in the valleys. The people sat motionless outside their tents on the pale stones as the camera panned across their faces. The reporter then stood facing the camera to tell us that the refugees would need to be moved to safer and more suitable ground far away from their homes as the mountains could not sustain them for very long. He told us that the valleys were inaccessible for the rescue services and international aid.

And, finally, the man appeared again, holding the body of his young son.

 

As the storm subsided after many hours, I once again looked out onto the rock below. The groups of birds were bedraggled and weather-beaten; lying and crouching together with the young moving as close to their parents as possible. I watched both the television and the storm until the rain and wind finally abated. When it did so, I went down the steps and onto the shining rock once more. Many of the birds were badly injured, and a lot were dead. Others were just in shock. But already they were starting to get on with their lives. Some were flying off to sea again to seek the food for their young.

At the end of the rock, I stared down into the muddied waters. The storm had stirred up sand and seaweed and clouded the normally clear sea. It moved aggressively some distance below me. I sat on the edge with my feet dangling into space beneath me. I moved my legs from side to side to the rhythm of the waves, tapping my heels against the rock.

After several minutes I stood up and took off my shoes. I moved slowly towards the edge of the cliff. For a short time I waited about a metre back from the drop but then I shuffled, a few centimetres, at a time, until my toes were at the absolute edge of the rock. Then I manoeuvred my feet timidly until the toes were over the edge. I moved on until half of each foot was sticking out over the rock; I rested only on my heels. Then I lifted one foot and stretched it out in front of me. I stood with only one heel on the rock with the rest of me suspended in space over the sea.

I looked towards the horizon from which the storm came and towards which the tern flew. I looked from side to side at the confusion and sorrow around me in the colony until my calf-muscles ached. Then, I slowly stepped back from the edge. I put my shoes and socks on and returned to the lighthouse. The birds were quite still and subdued as I moved amongst them.

Back in the lighthouse I answered the radio.

“We’re coming to get you.”

“I’m alright.”

“We’re coming to get you. How are things ?”

“Nothing changes.”

“We’ll send a boat.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

So now, for the last time, I sit at my desk and through the small window I see the birds. More of them are venturing out to sea again. I pick up my binoculars and follow them. I look down also at the birds still sitting on their nest sites. I look at those that are injured and at those that have been killed by the storm. Their bodies lie in strange, contorted shapes, their necks badly twisted. I think to myself, “The Hand of God.”

From time to time I turn my binoculars towards the headland.

After about half an hour a small boat emerges from behind it. Beyond it, and oddly out of proportion because of the binoculars, rises the cliff; thirty, forty, fifty metres in a vertical climb. I imagine myself standing barefoot at the top of that cliff; The King of St. Kilda.

The boat moves slowly through the open water. It will take an hour and a half, possibly two, to reach me. It moves carefully through the swell which is still high after the winds.

Once it is clear of the cliffs, it turns towards the lighthouse, towards the island and the calm which is all that remains of the storm.