your face in the shine of them. But, last month, Hannah drove to Dumfries for a friend’s poetry launch. She’d not been down for a couple of years, remembered the journey as a dull, long slope through practical farmland. Barely noticed the first one. Two, then three – ach they were just like big lamp-posts, really. Or pylons, or a wood, a forest, my God, a sea. All the way down the motorway: windfarms. The shock of them, teeming across the landscape. Arms akimbo, occupying, demanding. Fingers pointing, far as the eye can see.
You were profligate .
Like exclamation marks all across the hills. There was an ugly beauty about them, and a need, yes, a need. But not here, she thinks. Not in Kilmacarra.
‘Why can’t we put them in the sea?’ someone calls.
Hide them there? She’s heard that’s why whales strand; their sonar addled. Great threshing turbines lurching through the watery darkness, to slice off fins and tails. Mince up baby dolphins. But what to do, what to do? Her children need power, they will continue to need it, long after she is gone. The computer on which she writes needs power, and plastic and lethal metals that leak. Use a pen and paper. Paper munches trees; trees clear sheep; sheep clear people; people munch land. It is a horrible game, where nobody wins. Hannah just wants left alone. Here is nice, it’s good. The thought of giant turbines, circling Kilmacarra. Panic. Noise. The flicker-flicker light and hum of no more peace. The what if there is nothing you can do? The fact of her husband, orchestrating it.
Kilmacarra Glen has been their home for fourteen months. Her love affair has developed slowly, the way the best ones do. Swirling in hints, but no cohesion to the thing, the way a story starts, so that you’re afraid to reach for it at all. Then it keeps nudging at you, until it’s obvious. Like this place. A broad, open valley swept by glaciers, studded with farms and rocks and secrets. Ancient cairns and standing stones marching in a row, making a linear cemetery miles across the great Moss. Some folk think the stones form a calendar. Others see war graves from prehistory. Beardie-weirdies (and possibly Mhairi) reckon they channel spiritual energies, like ley lines or cosmic telegraph poles. But no one knows. Hannah likes that. The stones are there, have been for five thousand years, and that’s enough. Anyone who can’t accept that, well, they have no poetry in their—
— Don’t you care about this place ?
— Of course I care. That’s why I’m doing it .
Ross leans into her breasts. This is new Hannah. No more poems. Writing for young adults means more words, less deliberation. More money too, especially when you factor in the school visits and festivals. This book she’s toiling with; they’ve commissioned an accompanying teachers’ booklet – all tied up with the telly interest. Mmm. Teenage Stone Age. Romance, violence, history, social issues – love it! Can you stick in a bit of supernatural too?
She strokes the dimple on her baby’s knee. Baby. He goes to school next year. The wee soul is bored. Euan said he’d be home in time to watch his wee brother, but there’s no sign of him, and it’s getting dark. At least Euan’s out, though, not huffing in his room. Beside her, Mhairi fluffs up her bosom, folding her arms so her hands wedge under her armpits. They’re a funny pair, her and Mhairi. In a village that is essentially one street, you’ve little choice over who or what you cleave to. But she thinks she’d be friends with Mhairi wherever they’d met. Both make something out of nothing: Hannah writes, Mhairi cooks – and was once an artist, though she keeps that quiet. First time they met, Hannah had found this wild, hairy woman round the side of the café, building a bonfire of thin boards and canvas. She’d picked one up. Hard-etched charcoal sketches, trees around a circle of gravestones; thin and flat, curved on top.
‘These are really
You were profligate .
Like exclamation marks all across the hills. There was an ugly beauty about them, and a need, yes, a need. But not here, she thinks. Not in Kilmacarra.
‘Why can’t we put them in the sea?’ someone calls.
Hide them there? She’s heard that’s why whales strand; their sonar addled. Great threshing turbines lurching through the watery darkness, to slice off fins and tails. Mince up baby dolphins. But what to do, what to do? Her children need power, they will continue to need it, long after she is gone. The computer on which she writes needs power, and plastic and lethal metals that leak. Use a pen and paper. Paper munches trees; trees clear sheep; sheep clear people; people munch land. It is a horrible game, where nobody wins. Hannah just wants left alone. Here is nice, it’s good. The thought of giant turbines, circling Kilmacarra. Panic. Noise. The flicker-flicker light and hum of no more peace. The what if there is nothing you can do? The fact of her husband, orchestrating it.
Kilmacarra Glen has been their home for fourteen months. Her love affair has developed slowly, the way the best ones do. Swirling in hints, but no cohesion to the thing, the way a story starts, so that you’re afraid to reach for it at all. Then it keeps nudging at you, until it’s obvious. Like this place. A broad, open valley swept by glaciers, studded with farms and rocks and secrets. Ancient cairns and standing stones marching in a row, making a linear cemetery miles across the great Moss. Some folk think the stones form a calendar. Others see war graves from prehistory. Beardie-weirdies (and possibly Mhairi) reckon they channel spiritual energies, like ley lines or cosmic telegraph poles. But no one knows. Hannah likes that. The stones are there, have been for five thousand years, and that’s enough. Anyone who can’t accept that, well, they have no poetry in their—
— Don’t you care about this place ?
— Of course I care. That’s why I’m doing it .
Ross leans into her breasts. This is new Hannah. No more poems. Writing for young adults means more words, less deliberation. More money too, especially when you factor in the school visits and festivals. This book she’s toiling with; they’ve commissioned an accompanying teachers’ booklet – all tied up with the telly interest. Mmm. Teenage Stone Age. Romance, violence, history, social issues – love it! Can you stick in a bit of supernatural too?
She strokes the dimple on her baby’s knee. Baby. He goes to school next year. The wee soul is bored. Euan said he’d be home in time to watch his wee brother, but there’s no sign of him, and it’s getting dark. At least Euan’s out, though, not huffing in his room. Beside her, Mhairi fluffs up her bosom, folding her arms so her hands wedge under her armpits. They’re a funny pair, her and Mhairi. In a village that is essentially one street, you’ve little choice over who or what you cleave to. But she thinks she’d be friends with Mhairi wherever they’d met. Both make something out of nothing: Hannah writes, Mhairi cooks – and was once an artist, though she keeps that quiet. First time they met, Hannah had found this wild, hairy woman round the side of the café, building a bonfire of thin boards and canvas. She’d picked one up. Hard-etched charcoal sketches, trees around a circle of gravestones; thin and flat, curved on top.
‘These are really
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