The heath- Copyright Robert Fullarton 2013

 

The Heath-

 taken from our Lives as Fiction- Copyright Robert Fullarton 2013

 

It had become too much for me to bare that night, through four courses, through all the turkey trimmings, the mountains of orders, the bottles of vintage wine, the beer, the ham and the plum pudding. Every belly lay ready for bursting, sloping down from the slouched dinner guests, as the buttons popped off every waste and the corks pilled up like little mole hills on the stained white muslin cloth.

Husbands snarled at their wives in drunken revelry, wives shouted in the ears of their hapless and half negligent children, the butlers threatened the maids with the carving knives and the grandparents sat in fading dissidence in their corners, as veterans of the world, moaning and moping on about the “hardness and meanness of life” in its core.

They of course smelt of mothballs, mixed with old brandy, chardonnay and a slightly rancid trifle.

The fine stately home of Darbyville bore a halo through the night in the bleached silhouettes of a false light, filled with the electrical fluorescent lights of mankind. These lights stretched on throughout the kingdom, the candles and the electrical currents ran like tides through every stately home, through mansions and cabins, through cottages and bungalows, the light was tied with a festive connection. Secret stories, fatalities of winter, the liaisons of the human affair and the human current were all housed and harvested in a comical theatrical game which the residents called

“the feast of feasting”. All had forgotten why it was called “the feast of feasting” to be precise, but the feast simply existed and that was it. It had existed for hundreds of years, from the ancestral vomitoriums to the homely harems of gastro and alcoholic intoxication. Traditions simply exist so long as they can; get another coat of varnish, a modernisation, offer up the Mephistophilus of human weaknesses.

Something was wrong within me, the neighing and shrilling cry, came from my spirit more so than my stomach. As the evening proceeded onwards I could no longer see my dinner guest in front of me. My glazed vision took sight of what appeared to be darkened figures drinking heavy timber carafes of wine in big swinging gulps and gestures.

“A toast”

“A toast”

“A toast”

Everything and anyone was part of this long Dionysian drinking toast.

Then the laughter began through the darkened environs of the dinning room, shrills and bellowing choruses echoed out through the halls of the stately home.

My spirit lay captive in the wrong life, in the wrong body and certainly in the wrong company.

When a host of unblinking eyes had finely been distracted, I ran the gauntlet and the course for my escape, through the rectangular elongated hallway and out the wooden door. I smelt the foul smog on the country heath, looking out on every corner of the four winds, through the boggy hillsides, the vistas of the frosty earth and the swelling fog that came towards to choke.

Upon the plain of no return, there lies the summit of everyman and it sometimes comes forth in a middle life crisis, a bad marriage, a frightening confession and a happening of epic proportion that takes unmeasured and unequalled precedence.

The passive afflictions of the world down below the mountaintops, had taken their unholy toll, scourging me year after year, month after month. The unrewarding labour, the traditions –bred solely for dogs and the dogs had taken me- the solicitous gestures –tumbling, stumbling and fooling through the grey pavements bowing to reticent beauties and unloving ashen grey faces- of my city had reaped their hideous legacy in the mind of a silent man and I was indeed a silent man. The heath and the mountain, the bog and the frozen lakes were my confessors- espirto scanti amen, amen.

My journey had taken me to a fatal crossroads, a fatal choice, which seemed to be the limbo of all choices, inevitable for every fool and every charlatan to even think and graze upon. The signpost before me was bare, a mere stump that stood out of a boggy heap. As far as my memory could afford, I could faintly remember gathering the tail end of a conversation between two locals, one stated that the northern path ahead lead to St. Simon’s Gorge where the footpaths immediately halted, the Western path lead to the Darbyville waterfall, which was littered with the treacherous nooks and crannies where bandits would congregate –men who had even mugged their grannies and lived to tell the tale- amid the jagged rocks and shallow pools of the mountain view. The eastern path led apparently to the Holbein forest, where the silver wolves would roam and prey upon the loaners of the night. All paths were blocked, all choices were fatal and difficult for me to make. I could go south back towards Darbyville House and find an old derelict cottage, sleep it rough and wait till morning. But the night was cold and the frost was eating the very tips and crevices of my toes and the butt of my nose in vengeance.

I cried out to the curator of the mountains, the voice of the forest and the bogs to help me through the night. There was no answer but a long deadening silence. It had dawned on me finally that through all possible lives silence is the only possible answer to any prayer and any solution. I gave up, I surrendered to a deadening cloud of nonsense and illusion, I retreated back once again on my weary trail to Darbyville cottage and back to the “feast of feasts”. Behind my back I heard a silver wolf howling in the distance. Silence, is amidst silence, for it is the language of reticence between the human races.