IONIAN FISHING TOURS.
That word, Ionian …
I remember a tune. A song called ‘The Child’. I smile at the coincidence. My fingers form the first chord and my hand strums down. Cmaj7. It rings out and again the baby falls silent.
I hum the first note. My voice is thin, but I feel the buzz in my ears as the note from the guitar and the note from my throat rub against each other. I’d forgotten this feeling. How long since I played? How deep is the ocean?
The life behind me is lit through broken cloud. Close to where I stand, everything is in shadow – the nursing home, the last years with my husband, the journey which brought us here. I can see the space but not the detail. Off on the horizon I can see a few acres of golden light, my childhood. Between the light and the shade, there are patches of sun, but most of the land is dark. My life is a mystery to me. Mostly I think about the distance between me and that golden horizon.
But the guitar is in my hands and the sound is in my throat. I’m ready to play again. There’s a roll of thunder but I ignore it. Just a show-off percussionist. I strum the first chord and start to sing.
The song tumbles out of me and the boat tumbles over darkened sea. Though my hands are stiff, though my fingertips sting with the pressure of the strings, though my voice is cracked like an unrosined bow, I feel light. It’s as if, after hobbling around for so long, I tried running and found I could sprint like a teenager.
The sounds ring in the cabin. If I play hard enough, it’s as though I’m driving the storm back. The song is simple. That word, ‘Ionian’, comes back to me. Ionian is a way of playing music. A ‘mode’. A way of spacing the notes apart. And it’s old. Before music became Handel and Beethoven and Charlie Parker, there were modes. As old as the hills, as old as the sea. They were played on instruments with one string, clay pipes and ocarinas, instruments made of animal bone and hollowed turtle shells. I can’t remember the others yet, but I’ll try. I’ll try anything to feel this way again, racing downhill.
The song isn’t long. It would fit onto a single page. So I play it again and again, strumming the chords and humming the melody. Without pausing, I look at the baby. He’s watching me calmly. The storm still beats against our thin shell, the room still races up and down, but his eyes are drooping. I smile at him. He looks at me like he looks at Abigail on her breast. His breaths become long and deep.
Even when he’s asleep, I don’t stop playing. I want to enjoy this a little longer. The dizzy feeling has become almost nice. My bones ache, I’m sore from my salt-stained nightie, but I don’t want to stop. I close my eyes. Perhaps it’s the rolling of the sea, perhaps the reeling repetition of the music, but I’m spinning. Not dizzying but slow, like a gigantic whirlpool. Is the boat swirling? Has someone pulled the plug out of the ocean?
As the light starts to fade, I cling to the guitar like a buoyancy aid and keep playing until, swoosh-swoosh-swoosh, I circle the drain and tumble into darkness, the tune echoing in my ears like falling water.
ELEANOR CAMPBELL HAS NEVER been this angry in her whole life. Her skirt has rucked up and her knees scrape the tarmac of the playground. Her tiny fists, balled so tight that the knuckles shine, are pounding the sides and stomach of Kevin MacAndrew, who is curled like a hedgehog in self-defence.
‘Give … her … it … back!’
Kevin makes a wordless cry but does not open. If there is any sense in his bellow, it is lost in the noise of the crowd which has swallowed them both. Ella and Kevin are just seven, but the older kids don’t step in – there are rules. The grey Glaswegian sky is starting to spit rain, so she has to finish this before a teacher calls them in. The thing that Ella wants from Kevin is tightly clamped in the folded stodge of him, like a shilling in a Christmas pudding. She punches him again, in the small of the back. Rene hovers somewhere over Ella’s shoulder, hands cupped over her mouth in an expression of suppressed horror, or laughter, or both.
‘Give … it … back, you wee … you wee …’ Ella summons the worst swear word she knows. ‘You wee bugger!’
She punches him hard in the ribs at the moment of the curse and, like an unvanquishable picture-book dragon whose weak spot has been pierced by an arrow, Kevin’s eyes go wide. He uncurls, lying flat on his back, gasping for breath, the object of Ella’s battle displayed on his heaving belly – Rene’s calf-leather pencil case, with the red ribbon tied on the zip.
‘Ha! I win,’ Ella pants, and has a moment to savour her victory before she is lifted off the ground, upwards and backwards, by her collar.
‘Hey! Geddoff me you bugger!’
The curse, used once, slips out with the intoxication of triumph. The crowd gasps.
‘Eleanor Campbell!’
Ella’s eyes go wide at the adult voice, fear quenching her anger. She sees Kevin being hauled to his feet by another teacher while the headmistress marches her in the direction of the school, parting the tide of children like Moses. She hears whispers as they pass.
‘Man, she’s crazy.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘She’s a gypsy – they’re all like that.’
‘She’s no a gypsy – gypsies don’t go tae school.’
‘She is too! She has dark eyes and hair.’
‘Ella Knorr?’
‘No, Eleanor. Eleanor Campbell.’
‘She fights like an animal.’
With a backward glance, Ella spots Rene. She has escaped punishment, picking her pencil case off the floor and holding it tight to her chest. Nobody comes close; Rene is protected. Ella smiles and does not fight as the headmistress steers her with one hand toward the office.
* * *
‘Thank you, Ella.’
Rene is skipping, blonde ringlets bobbing. By Ella’s count, she has already thanked her eleven times since they left school.
‘Stop thankin’ me,’ she mutters under her breath.
Ella has spent the last three hours in the headmistress’ office, writing lines on soft paper with a blunt pencil until her hand cramped. She was spanked first, of course – ten strokes on the bottom being the highest penalty at Peterhead Primary. She would have taken many more to avoid the lines.
Three hours seemed like an eternity packed with eternities, only divided up by the heavy tick of the office clock and a sharp word from the secretary if she stopped. Ella would write some more, then stop, and count by the clock how long it took for the telling-off to come. Her record was forty-seven seconds. Ella finds that the memory of a punishment fades fast after it is over, but this one is taking its time. Like the time she sucked the ink from her father’s
