Limestone Read online

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Mike Bradstock, John Herbert, David Elworthy, Ros Henry, Doug Hood, and to Robyn Lynch and the Rathcoola Residency, Donoughmore, Ireland.

  Dedication

  For Doug, Ursula and Susannah, as always.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  About the Author

  Copyright

  One

  I was born in limestone country.

  This has implications.

  It is a different thing to be born to clay, or schist, or basalt.

  Basalt country, for instance, teaches its children the lesson of insecurity. The hills may be quiet now: heavy muscled creatures, cloaked in bush or tawny tussock. The harbours cupped in their big hands may dazzle, dizzy with playful yachts in toy-box colours or serious with the chug and hum of freighters and containers and naval frigates and the occasional cruise ship materialising like some Miami hotel amid the dockside pubs and chip shops of a scruffy little port. All may appear in order, but that is just the surface. Once those hills ran liquid fire. Once that harbour seethed beneath towering clouds of steam and ash. And below the peaceful idyll, through fracture and fissure, the earth still burns. Rocks melt. This solid ground could burst beneath your feet. A plume of steam could hiss from a crack in the road by the chip shop, a vent might open and hills and harbour, cruise ship and pub, could be tossed into the fire.

  To be born in limestone country is to learn a gentler lesson.

  You live on top of a reef.

  For millions upon millions of years, a milky sea has washed over the ground on which you stand. Tiny creatures have lived here in numbers beyond counting. There is no word for their abundance. Fish and snails, marine worms, shrimps and pipi and mussels and, outnumbering them all, minute creatures called bryozoa.

  They still exist, at the margins between sea and land. Hundreds of different species, but each possessing brain, mouth, gut and bum. Like us. Each living out its life in a shelly box no more than a millimetre wide. The box may be square, hexagonal, oval — whatever makes the neatest fit with its neighbours, for the creatures form a colony. Clustered at the tidal margin, contained within their boxes, they live an uncomplicated life. Hermaphrodite, male and female allied within one body, they reproduce without all the restlessness of sex, releasing both egg and sperm. They feed by sending forth clusters of tentacles like minute umbrellas blown inside out by a fierce wind. Hairy cilia on the tentacles waft edible particles to the creature’s mouth. At the slightest disturbance, they retract, zipping back at a speed faster than the muscular contraction of any other creature in the animal kingdom. The lid snaps shut. The creature waits until it judges it is safe to venture forth again.

  And the most extraordinary thing about them, the thing I love most, is this: they have acquired the knack of resurrection. Within their tiny boxes they live for around six months — but during that time they die, three times.

  They putrefy. Brain and gut and mouth and bum melt down to a brown sludge. Seemingly dead, they rot inside their box. Then, amazingly, after a few days, they revive. Brain and gut, mouth and bum take their previous forms. The lid flips open, the feeding tentacles re-emerge. The creature is reborn. They live and rot, live and rot, until finally they die for good. Brain and gut, mouth and bum melt. The little shell box crumbles. It dissolves. New bryozoan larvae, budded from their sexually conflated elders, absorb the calcium released into the sea and from these particles build their own tiny boxes. So, in a perfect reversible reaction — dissolution and precipitation in near-exact equilibrium — by infinite tiny accretions the colony expands. Isn’t that astonishing?

  I was born in limestone country on a reef made up of their remains. It stretched for hundreds of kilometres, a white bone running the length of a narrow island. The white keel of a canoe, the myths said, wrecked mid-ocean, its crew chilled to stone as the mountains of the main divide, its hull scraped flat by a demigod equipped with a giant rake who made of the wreckage a place fit for people to live on. Sometimes, when the wind blows fierce and bone-dry from the nor’west and clouds arc above the mountains like the shreds of a great sail straining at the mast, demigods can seem as likely as small creatures dying their three deaths.

  The reef emerged as white rifts in the rolling country where I was born. The slow grinding of tectonic plates was forcing the island to roll like a broken craft from east to west. The western mountains were sinking beneath the sea as the east coast rose, dripping, into the light. The reef rose pure white: bleached oolite, the most beautiful of all the many varieties of limestone, each granule as perfectly formed about a single grain of sand as the fish roe from which it took its name. Oolite. ‘Egg stone’. A reef of white shell laid down beneath the warm lapping of ancient seas. Eocene. Oligocene.

  I’ve been thinking about that reef and the way it broke forth among the brown chenille tufts of tussock and the flap and clatter of cabbage trees. And how it shifted shape as we passed on a white road as if it were alive, not solid stone: one minute a horse’s head, the next, a monstrous face with a round nose. I’ve been thinking about the caves and holes that gaped above secretive oily creeks seething with eels under a tangle of willow and the hint of underground landscapes, like the caves in stories where children found chests full of diamonds and rubies, or disappeared altogether, never to be seen again. Hillocks of limestone popped up through the tarry soils of the market gardens along the coast where I was born. They burst through rippling rows of cabbages and lettuces and plain houses barricaded by vege crates, each island a fantasy of a little crooked village with turrets and battlements where knights might ride and girls might sit combing their yellow hair. And instead of nuggety tractors and the pickers bowed beneath the blue bowl of a summer sky, there was an echo of war horses and the snap of pennants flying and gold dragons rampant. Inland, where the mountains formed a snowy barrier, there was the dazzle of gravel roads cutting across the high country where ordinary cars and trucks raced before towering billows of white dust like Pharoah’s chariots charging down upon the peoples of the plain.

  My heart still lifts when I turn a corner in some foreign place to find that familiar white rift ornamenting a plain country. I love its wild inventiveness, sculpted by wind and rain, and the way its white face becomes stained by mineral seepage to wild expressionist streaks, as if the whole history of art has come full circle: from marks on white stone, to marks on a canvas made ready with a lime wash to be the proper white place for art, and back to stone again. I love walking in limestone country, where the reef rises on either side like a white wave frozen at the turn and I am reduced to some small creature scurrying over an ocean bed beneath its towering curves.

  I’ve read somewhere that around four percent of the earth’s crust is limestone. All those billions upon billions of tiny lives are laid down beneath the gentle contours of pastoral country nourishing the animals and plants on which we depend. All those tiny lives make up entire islands: storm-ravaged islands where people and cows shelter within a maze of limestone walls. Or sunnier islands with their cubic villages of white stone. Great mountain ranges rest on their remains: the homes of gods, the Dolomites, Olympus, the Himalaya. Individual chunks have become objects of reverence: a baetylus, a bethel.

  I’ve sought them out: the omphalos at Delphi, that limestone plug that was the earth’s navel, carved with a woven web that looks like a web of daisies, lit and labelled on
its plinth in the museum — though properly it is a thing of the dark. Once it stood in the cavern sanctuary where the Pythia enunciated prophecy. Seekers knelt beside it to put their questions to the woman seated on a tripod over a crack in the ground from which sweet fumes rose: ethylene, the experts say, released by the friction of oily bituminous limestone moving deep within the earth, that same sweet gas that gives anaesthetic release from pain but in smaller doses induces euphoric hallucination. I have stood looking at the earth’s navel on the flank of a mountain where the only two survivors of a great flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha, were instructed by the goddess Themis in the way you repopulate a devastated earth: you gather up white stones and toss them over your shoulders and as each chunk falls to earth it will turn to bone and flesh. A whole new crop of human beings will spring up instantly behind you. Seeded by limestone, bone to stone to bone.

  Or London Stone, that chunk of limestone that marks the centre of a great city. All distances were reckoned from it: oaths were sworn on it and deals finalised. I’ve visited that too, standing on the footpath opposite Cannon Street tube station, peering through a grille let into the wall of a sporting goods shop at a chunk of grubby oolite about the size of a suitcase with a couple of deep grooves worn on its upper surface. It’s been around here for ever, shifted a few metres this way when the road was widened back in the eighteenth century, lifted into the wall of a church, then moved a few metres that way when the church was destroyed in its turn by German bombs back in 1941. And here it is, labelled and lit behind bleary glass, the centre of this seething place where the lunchtime crowds clatter past without a second glance.

  I love such things. I love this limestone that in the bed of a Texan river bears the footprints of the creatures who have preceded us on this shifting planet. Or that on the wall of a French cave bears the images of cows and ponies from a time when humans were new and filled with wonder at being consciously alive in the company of such marvellous creatures. I’ve stood in those dark caverns in the Périgord and the Pyrenees, looking at limestone which here, a thousand metres from the changeable surface, is a perfect glittering white, like newly fallen snow. I’ve looked at those little human hand prints outlined in red ochre and thought about art and religion and how the impulses that have driven my own life took shape here, on this stone wall.

  This white stone, this perfect stone, these countless tiny lives compressed. This tabula rasa, the white places where we have figured out how to be human. The limestone country that forms dragon landscapes round Guilin. The valley in Russia they call simply ‘the White Country’ from which domed cathedrals sprout like plump white bulbs. The glistening white of Egyptian pyramids and the imperious bulk of the Sphinx, sculpted from one of the limestone outcrops typical of the region that are carved by a grinding desert wind to a raised rounded head atop a recumbent leonine body. The ancient artist did no more than refine what nature had already proposed.

  Seated here in the dark I have been thinking about these places and how I have been drawn to them all my life. The places that are visited by thousands, and the small secret places. A spring in a green field once, in England, where the water bubbled out depositing tiny stars on the sandy bottom. Each was perfect: a five-pointed star like a tiny elderflower, the remains of sea lilies that lay as fossils in a layer of cornbrash oolite beneath our feet until the water drew them up into the light. Cows crowded round to look, their sweet breath misty in the long wet grass. My feet cramped in the freezing water. I brought some stars home with me and put them in a matchbox.

  I love such things.

  Limestone is a gentle teacher. It teaches its children about time, and patience, and the beauty that lies in the accumulated detail of small insignificant lives.

  And I was born in limestone country.

  Two

  After a ten-hour delay before take-off waiting for fog to clear at the airport …

  After a ten-hour delay and twenty-seven hours flying, not counting two hours in transit at Singapore …

  Two hours spent sniffing the perfumes in the duty-free shop, squirting little damp patches up each of her arms till her skin felt as if it had been thoroughly licked by a delirious puppy all the way from fingertip to elbow, and all the smells had coalesced into one overpowering flowery/musky/spicy chemical bouquet.

  And eating a bowl of noodles, though she had just had breakfast — or was it lunch? — on the plane. The noodles were scattered with little bits of sausage and chewy pink prawns like toenail clippings.

  And listening to a string quartet in immaculate white shirts and black trousers who materialised by the escalator among banks of blooming orchids, pink and white as puckered lips, to perform Lloyd Webber favourites.

  And browsing the bookshops, looking at the photos in the autobiographies: the author’s parents, the author at eight months, the author at school, the author with a peculiar and embarrassing youthful haircut. The author raising a glass at a celebratory table, or arm in arm with some other famous person whose autobiography would no doubt be somewhere nearby on the shelves, so that the famous remained arm in arm, side by side, even in death, for all eternity. The author singing or acting or climbing a mountain or hitting a golf ball or carried shoulder high through an ecstatic crowd, or doing whatever it was that had made their life worthy of autobiography in the first place. The author at last, older and grey-haired, seated in the garden in the company of numerous grandchildren/the fourth wife/the third husband. The author content with the rewards of a rich and well-documented life.

  And reading a local paper left abandoned on a plastic chair. A Filipina maid had taken her employers’ child and threatened to jump with him from the balcony of the twelfth-floor apartment she had cleaned with no apparent resentment for more than four years. Her employers worked for Digitech. They were perplexed. They had given the maid her own room with a television. They had given her her own supply of coffee. For some months now she had been agitating for leave to visit her son who lived with her mother in Manila. She had become a little withdrawn.

  And having a shower with a fluffy white towel in a marble-tiled cubicle.

  And walking up and down the concourse between the shops with their chocolates in golden boxes and their glitter of single malts and brandies and liqueurs flavoured with orange or melon or secret blends of herbs devised by monks in mountain monasteries. Walking to stop her blood giving up the effort to circulate in the confines of economy class, en route for Heathrow, and forming clots instead, so that one day weeks, perhaps months, after she has flown she will suddenly gasp, feel her heart trip, and know for the split second it takes for her to die that she’s been ambushed by her unreliable body. Yet again.

  After a ten-hour delay waiting for the fog to clear before take-off, and twenty-seven hours flying, and two hours of suspended reality in transit at Singapore, and an hour and a half at Heathrow waiting for the connecting flight to Cork …

  An hour and a half she spent negotiating Heathrow’s grubby plywood maze with its population of grumpy cleaners desultorily sweeping away the day’s detritus, and its ranks of airline officials in their array of parakeet suits — orange, green, brilliant blue — all groomed to boredom and fielding the four-hundredth inquiry that day from someone distracted by a fractious kid who has just spent three hours strapped down in a car seat as the first stage of the week-long family break in Tenerife.

  An hour and a half sitting among the Euromen in their shirtsleeves, for this was the end and not, as it was for her, the beginning of another busy day. The Euromen sat with their heavy thighs nudging at spindly tables and talked to phones that appeared to have been surgically implanted on their skulls, like the photo she had seen somewhere of a human ear attached to the furry flank of a laboratory mouse. Some Euromen had dispensed with the cell phone and favoured hands free, so that there was that split second of confusion when it was possible the conversation was not after all between Alan-from-Sales and Deirdre-back-at-Main-Office, but the ranting of a madman wh
o had forgotten to take his medication and was now wandering about a public place chatting animatedly with the Archangel Gabriel. The Euromen called home or the office or compared notes over pints ordered from another languidly bored airline employee at the bar. Some occupied a circular enclosure among the spindly tables that looked as if it might at any minute blast off through the roof of the departure lounge, bearing its human cargo direct to Betelgeuse without the bother of waiting for the 17.05 to Dublin or the 17.30 to Cork.

  That, though, was just the stupidity of a mind jetlagged after twenty-seven hours of flying, two hours of perfume and the desperation of Filipina maids, too many episodes of Friends and too many miniature dinners. For the structure was, of course, just the smoking area, where the smokers sat in a penitential circle to indulge their vice while their smoke was sucked from beneath their feet and conducted by cunning devices out of the building to blend with the tawny blear beyond the sealed windows.

  After a ten-hour delay waiting for the fog to clear before take-off and twenty-seven hours of flight and two hours of perfume and an hour and a half of Euromen; after all that …

  Well, you’d be bound to feel a bit ragged, wouldn’t you? A bit dizzy. Ears a bit buzzy. Mouth a bit fuzzy. Even if you had drunk litres of water, showered in Singapore with the white fluffy towel, avoided drinking more than a total of two gin and tonics and three glasses of wine with the miniature dinners, and retreated at regular intervals to perform a sequence of deep knee bends and leg swings in the narrow gap by the rear toilets. Even though that had meant every time stepping over the man occupying the aisle seat.

  Clare had watched with dread as he approached down the aisle in Christchurch. Ahead of him there had been another man: a nice-looking man, with curly hair going grey at the edges and a nice black woollen jacket and a copy of The Economist in one hand. The kind of man you could imagine talking to over the miniature dinners, not obsessive about selling plumbing fixtures or Formula One racing. He paused at her seat and lifted a nice slightly-dog-eared-but-real-leather laptop case into the overhead locker. The jacket rode up a little. Nice trousers. Nice flat stomach. Nice solid body. He caught her eye, smiled briefly, then he said, ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ to the woman in the aisle seat in the row ahead and slid in beside her. And Clare was left looking directly at the back of his head. Nice hair. Curling slightly over the nice collar.