This week Scotland on Sunday's publishes a new anthology

Published on Friday 14 August 2009 13:14

Headshook challenges 24 of the nation's finest writers to envisage Scotland's future.

This brilliant story by A L Kennedy is a dark tale of a life-changing event, rich in language and mordantwit, which encapsulates

the collection's ambition

'Blackthorn Winter', by A L Kennedy, is the story that provided the title for a new Scotland on Sunday anthology, published by Hachette Scotland this week – Headshook. The brief for the book was both simple and formidable: new work by 24 of Scotland's leading writers of prose and poetry, on the theme of Scotland's future. The result is a dazzling collection, by turns comic, anxious, oblique, direct, bewildered and impassioned. It's a perfect showcase for the strength of contemporary Scottish writing, and it has been a privilege to assemble it.

Winner of the 2007 Costa Book Prize, stand-up comedian, dramatist and broadcaster A L Kennedy has secured her position as one of the finest talents of her generation. The author of five novels – including the critically acclaimed Day – and five collections of short stories, her work is both humane and darkly comic; clear-sighted about the ordinary tragedies and everyday failings of life, but never self-pityingly morose and always enlivened by Louis MacNeice's insight that the "world is suddener than we fancy it... incorrigibly plural".

'Blackthorn Winter' shows her skills at their sharpest. In the opening sentence, the reader learns that an injury has already propelled the child narrator into adulthood. With her usual grace and insight, Kennedy elaborates on ideas of trauma and exception, epiphany and error. Haunted, perhaps, by Scottish literature's famous boy who never grew up, the story reaches a crescendo of steely realism and temporary forgiveness. Many of the pieces in the book deal with the ambiguities of ageing: the loss of innocence and the necessity of maturing; the choices we make that determine our adulthood. It seems a sign of a more self-confident, self-questioning culture.

When commissioning the book, I met A L Kennedy at Glasgow's Aye Write! festival. We had been in touch by e-mail, and I nervously asked when I might expect to see her story (editing is 90 per cent diplomacy). The story appeared in my in-box the very next morning with a brief note: "And here we are then. This is shorter and odder than I'd thought. See what you think." I was flabbergasted. Punctual and perfect is a rare combination indeed.

With a preface by First Minister, Alex Salmond, Headshook features new work by Alan Spence, Robert Crawford, Kathleen Jamie, Aonghas Macneacail, Janice Galloway, Tom Leonard, Andrew O'Hagan, Ron Butlin, Don Paterson, W N Herbert, Rody Gorman, Ali Smith, Andrew Crumey, John Burnside, James Robertson, James Kelman, Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay, Robin Robertson, William McIlvanney, Anne Frater, A L Kennedy and Alan Warner, with illustrations by Alasdair Gray. It will be launched at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 20 August, at 3pm, where I will be discussing Scotland's cultural and political future with William McIlvanney.

Stuart Kelly

His earliest adult experience – he wakes up in a hospital wearing someone else's clothes. Also there is a difference in his head. He is not alarmed, the boy, only puzzles in the cloth – and sour-tasting darkness of the ward until he knows it is a ward and that something has gone wrong and put him here.

"Nurse?"

The boy does not say this. He would never have thought to call a nurse: his character is undemanding and, besides, he cannot imagine needing anything beyond perhaps an explanation for the maritime rush which is catching at his ears and this dizzy, laden, weakness of his thinking.

"Nurse?"

It is this word that woke him, he believes – its repetition. First word of his alternate life.

"Nurse?"

Footfalls consent to be summoned and close, as fast as irritation – heelthumps before toethumps and a squeak each time they argue with the floor.

The nurse's shape halts three beds down from the boy and interrupts the glimmers of a window in a way which seems peculiarly shocking.

"What do you want, then?"

She is nothing like the boy's mother, has a voice which is entirely strange to him, and sharpened – it sews through the air, passes over him, then on. He hears it ting against the farthest wall.

"Well?"

"Can I have a glass of water?" The melody of the question is indecisive, apologetic.

"No."

And the nurseshape begins to leave again, even more quickly, while the boy wonders if the other child, the thirsty one – who sounds like a boy, too – will maybe die soon from a lack of water. Water does seem such a plain and reasonable requirement that only some fatal intention would allow it to be denied.

Lying still and heavier than he has ever been, the boy recoils very slightly within his unfamiliar pyjamas. He believes, almost at once, that these are the clothes of some previous small patient who has died while on the ward, belongings left behind for the benefit of others and no further trace remaining. There are numerous, uncountably numerous, places where the boy's skin is being touched by the deadboy cloth. The jacket cuffs nuzzle limply against his wrists. It is very likely his arse is where a deadboy's arse has been and moreover his personal parts, which are meant to be secret, are maybe just comfortably settled in these trousers, because this is how the deadboy's used to rest. A coldandsmokey rush seems to rummage across him as he considers this and his left hand sneaks beneath the covers to make sure of himself and feel that all is well.

The hand seems slower and more clever than it used to be.

"Nurse?" The boy tries his own mouth with the word and it emerges much as he'd expected.

"Yes." She has paused because he has spoken and this makes him proud, but wary of coming responsibilities. "Yes, what do you want?"

"Can I have a glass of water?" He isn't thirsty, only curious.

"Yes."

And the water is brought to him, shining with guilt, and set between his palms when he has raised himself through a wavering and thickened space. The boy holds his drink with monumental care – has to concentrate on gripping, as if he might soon forget how. He clings to its smoothness, to someone else's want, swallows loudly and with a kind of grin.

"Why does my head hurt?" Because it does – the left side of his skull and even his cheek are singing with a weird, dark ache, something exhilarating.

"A horse trod on you."

This seems not unlikely.

He tucks the water inside himself, understands it is coiled now in a blue shape that perhaps half-fills him. "Thank you." He is polite. His father and mother would expect that of him. Then he slides back down to be flat, the water lapping and giggling as he moves.

A horse.

Yes.

There were horses.

There were lessons with horses to make the boy confident and able to sit up straight, a commanding presence in later life. A premeditated Christmas present that had started in January: ten o'clock on Saturday mornings, an hour with himself and various older, wilier boys in a wide, high barn – peaty and sawdusty stuff underfoot and everywhere alive with a humid and dangerous reek. Snow beyond the walls, but the boy hot, the boy feverish with horses.

They were large in the manner of trees – a threat of falling about them, of terrible damages waiting in the hollowsounding jaws and the long bones of their faces, the fierce, unsettled gouging of their hooves. They were big machinery with sudden blares of thinking, eyes that could not be relied upon. Hoisted and struggled up on to the leathercreak and sway of their backs the boy was too astonished to recall what he ought to do with his hands, his heels, his spine, his legs, his courage and his common sense. These were things that he could not learn, that he lost in the massive breathing of every animal.

At eleven fifteen on Saturday mornings he would sit in the back of his parents' car and he would smell of harness and terror. He would experimentally consider that his pain tomorrow might be easier if he had been beaten, that his bruises would be less shaming then.

No one has, in fact, beaten the boy at any time – although his mother did once hit him hard across the face and he does not know why. His father was already crying when this happened and the boy believes the crying was pre-emptively for him, his jolted mouth. The incident made him feel briefly and overly close to both his parents. Of course, he has often read stories where English boys are flogged in vast and incomprehensible schools and there are no parents – he sees it as wicked that he treasures these scenarios, prefers them to his current reality.

The boy holds thoughts he cannot name, he hates and wants and wants and hates his endless failures and the yelling instructor in the barn and the better riders' indolent disgust. On the drives home his personal parts, which are meant to be secret, will occasionally flinch and tease and he will form blurred wishes to be altered, simplified, cleaned.

When his mother and father ask him if he enjoys his riding lessons, he tells them, "Yes."

Although today – yesterday – the boy is pleasantly unsure of when – he was saved from having to tell his parents anything.

This is how you get to be alone in hospital.

A horse.

It was called Cobble and had a white nose and was in a bad temper. That morning they were strung and circled outside in a field – no more barn because this was meant to be the spring – but the ground was stiff again, ice layers cracking over empty ruts and slush where the sunlight was lying. Cobble didn't like the cold. Cobble strayed and headshook and his mind turned, the boy could taste it, a slithery panic before the hooves ever dug, or the charge ever started, the bolt.

No one had told the boy how to stop a bolting horse.

Some shouting somebody loomed alongside him, reaching for the reins, but this drove Cobble faster and out on to tarmac, out to a road, out into a blindwhite pitching sky, flogged breath, clinging, sweating and the small decision, and then much larger, that the boy should let go, must be over with this and drop.

Head injury.

In what is still the boy's favourite story a man fell from a ladder and was given a head injury and when he woke he could see to the future and find the lost.

This made him famous.

He was called Peter.

Which is the boy's name.

Head injury.

The man was Dutch – being from Holland means you're Dutch.

Which is confusing.

Dutch sounds like Scotch, but Scotch is a drink and Scottish is a person, so the boy is not Scotch – the boy's mother and father are quite sure about that.

If he says he is Scotch he will be wrong.

If he laughs too outloud he will be wrong.

If he spoons his soup towards himself he will be wrong.

It would be equally wrong for the boy to keep a hard light of intention burning at his heart, a need to draw in calamity and blows to the brain.

He does it anyway.

And now he has one, a head injury, he holds it like a smile poured in under his hair.

The boy pictures his brain as newly alert and changed to a glistening mass, a larger cousin of the oyster his grandfather made him eat last summer – told him it was living, that it would forage and thrive beneath his skin and scour him out into a better health. He is sure the accident has roused his oystermind and that it is currently flexing, searching forward with an appetite he admires. He hopes it has decided to look at his future.

The effort of this will surely be taxing and the boy is not alarmed when it presses his eyelids unstoppably shut and sets the night running and swinging and plunging him to sleep. He leaves himself and travels.

But it is, quite naturally, his past which takes him, rides him, makes the boy a creature of belief – he has no other possibilities. So into a song he goes, into the other time he saw his father cry – head back and the words there, red and wet in his daddy's mouth and at the end of them weeping. The boy's happiness, he dreams, will be in evenings where he sings and there are men about him and hugs which cuff his head and magnificent griefs, such marvellous injuries to shape him and let him rage.

His mother's table, on which he must never lean his elbows during meals, shines oddly and draws his attention to stand beside it and peer down. Laid along the mahogany, he sees his older body, naked and washed. The boy studies his wish to be solid, shortbearded, complete, and to have impressive arms with one tattoo – a little flag with writing underneath it which he cannot read, but realises is important. His personal parts, which are meant to be secret, remain as he knows them and are then transparent and then, after that, are spilled away. Their loss seems justified, a proper punishment for spoiling the table's shine. It is by no means extraordinary that he feels them more than ever when they are gone.

And at around this time, two men who are foreign come to resurrect him – the boy has been told about resurrection and also resurrectionists and both these things excite him. As his limbs shiver and tick, the men open his body like a book and dig into the truth of him, wrist deep, and find a metal fish, a rifle and a chanter, the shine of a plough, forgetfulness twice-distilled, broom flowers and roses, a lobster up-ended and balanced on its claws, a woman's hair dragged from its scalp and thick as jute, a righteous and clever tawse, a burning rivet and a burning brand and a burning cross and a burning word, a collar the colour of blood, a whale bone carved with a ship and on the ship a man who travels, who will scour the world, who will march in a black line and clean it, burn it, bleed it and suffer as he steps and held in his hand is a heart, a sleeping heart, a hunted heart, a heart like a dirty hole through to nowhere that he lifts above his head.

He waves to the boy and the boy waves back.

This waving troubles the boy – it grips him.

"Hold still."

He is seasick as he rises up into the ward, hears the tiny panting of the pressure cuff as it inflates. His arm is stinging and frightens him.

"I said hold still. You can be brave, can't you?" The nurse, another nurse, whispering. "Can't you try and be brave?"

This will be a predictable element of his recovery. Every three hours, night and day, someone will come to measure the condition of his blood, put the chill of a thermometer under his tongue.

"Don't bite it."

For the boy this will be wearying and unheroic.

Tomorrow afternoon his mother will arrive and sit next to his bed with a new copy of The Beano and The Dandy and, in a paper bag, the Oor Wullie annual he was not allowed for Christmas, because it is full of rough talk and ways that nobody decent should behave. His father will not visit, but will sit in the parked car outside and listen to football reports on the radio – this will be because the smell of hospitals makes him sick. He will send his best. If he knew about the Oor Wullie annual he would probably not.

The boy will take his comics and his mother's kiss on his forehead and on the one of his cheeks which is nearest to her. He will think he doesn't want to read them, because he suspects reading might be difficult, but he won't say that, for fear of being rude. He will not know what to do when he sees that she is very sad about him and so he will pretend that his head hurts more than it does and she will nod a lot and put a bottle of Lucozade wrapped in crinkling yellowstuff on the bedside cabinet which is his while he is here and then she will stand up and he will suddenly regret that she is leaving.

Once he is alone he will still have the scent of her on his skin. There will be an afternoon in thirty years' time when he will be caught by that exact perfume as he walks behind a woman in the street and he will follow her and want to touch her shoulder and to scream and to be hurt by strangers until he cannot think.

But while he is a boy in his bed at the edge of that first morning after it happened he is brilliant with wishes, unsteadied by so many opening paths towards whoever he may be. His powers, he believes, will be remarkable.

If the boy truly could see the rest of his oncoming life, he would appreciate this is the kindest way in which he will ever be wrong. This is the best. r