My first novel is finished. Well, for now, more editing is on the horizon. Some of the story takes place in the Solomon Islands, and on an overland journey from Afghanistan to London; roughly matching my two-year stint working in the Western Pacific archipelago and my subsequent travels home to Ballymena.
The route took me from the island nation, as it is now, on the western reaches of that vast ocean to my Irish home, a nine-month journey, most of it overland. Since then, I have managed to hold on to a few notebooks, two maps and a small guidebook from that time. They helped jog my memory of people and places. Whether these prompts have helped create a story of any merit is not for me to judge.
Here I’m interested in memory, my memory. How come some places, incidents, and people are crystal clear, while others seem lost? And is it reliable? I had a beard then.
‘Memory is fiction. All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction,’ Damon Galgut says. This may sound a little too blunt, but there’s a ring of truth about it. Put another way, Professor David Eagleman says, ‘beneath the level of consciousness we are a riotous democracy of mini-selves locked in a battle for dominion.’ Fabrication of stories, he adds, ‘is one key business in which the brain engages. Brains do this with the single-minded goal of getting the multifaceted actions of this democracy to make sense.’ And that sense, is me, accepted without question. So, how I remember myself those years ago, may be a fiction?
Drafting a talk recently for an evening’s presentation to an environmental group about my love of trees and forests – years of growing saplings from seed, planting and tending woodland and forests – my memory proved unreliable. I’d included a rather poor-quality photograph among a selection to illustrate a thirty-mile walk I once took across the tropical forested island of Santa Isabel. The visit was primarily to assess a fresh water supply for a hilltop village, though I remember being drawn to the day’s walk through the bush to reach this small, isolated community. Almost all of my travel in the islands was by sea, to the more common coastal villages.
The photograph of my guide, whose name I couldn’t remember and never expected to, was taken against lush bush that dropped off sharply to the bay and the dense mangrove inlet, from where we’d started out. The photograph helped me remember him and parts of the two-day trip, but not his name. It was lost in time, it seemed.
There he stands, strong upper chocolate-coloured body typical of a coastal dweller, a small bag clasped in one hand, the other by his side holding a bush knife. He was a council tax collector. I recall that we missed the path that turned off a stream up to the village; that we spent some anxious hours – anxious to me anyway – in a rough shelter we’d come across, finally reaching the hilltop with its red earth clearing and six or seven houses, later awakening during the night in the large communal sleeping house to see an old man moving around to tend a smouldering fire, and hearing a baby’s soft cry. I’m pretty sure this happened, though I haven’t any notes of that time to confirm it. But the rest of that trip is hazy.
Some weeks after I’d first drafted the piece, his name, or the name I knew him by, suddenly occurred to me. Nelson.
Nelson walked comfortably on his broad feet over rough bush paths, slashing at hanging vines and branches as he went. I followed, carrying my small rucksack, going barefoot too, as my best option: laced boots had proved too sweaty, and flip-flops and sandals became slippery skaters in mud. We shared a little pijin conversation, mostly I asked questions. He was at home on these shaded tracks that snaked around trees and climbed over rocky outcrops. Did I mention that we got lost? Or that I had a beard then. That’s without doubt.
How could his name still remain in my memory after fifty years? And writing the novel turned up many such examples, recalling later what had first appeared completely lost. In the meantime, every cell in my body has changed many times over. In terms of atoms and molecules, I’m certainly not the person I was.
At my children’s bedtime, I retold many of these stories, and I’m sure that has helped secure their hold in my brain’s chemistry.
So, what to do now with this small pile of redundant, worn-looking notebooks that sit on my desk, artefacts of a life lived many years ago? I’ll not throw them out. I’ve learned that, for the writer, they are a valuable resource: for a character, a story, or to help a narrative along. So, I’ll read the ones I haven’t, and see what emerges. Test my memory, try to tease out the fiction. And I’m interested in making contact with the young bearded man who penned those notes all those years ago, and ask him to join me on the slippery paths into the future.
END
The Curlew's Call 