STAR-CROSSED
by Heather Macleod

There are two kinds of sickness in this world, those of the body and those of the mind. I am well qualified to treat the former. I have healed the most purulent of wounds and the most intractable of afflictions. As a specialist of internal tropical parasites, I am used to finding the cause and eliminating it. I am, shall we say, something of a name in my field. But of the latter? I know no cure for the agony of the mind. I have tried opiates, alcohol, anything that numbs the senses. They dull for the moment but then the pain returns in all its intensity.

I have borne it for many years, craving the escape of death which releases those sufferers of physical illness when all else fails. But I remain in perfect health driven to thoughts of self-destruction. I have told no one, withdrawing from those who question my manner. So why now and why you? Perhaps it’s because there’s something of her in your eyes, perhaps it’s because you are paid to listen. Or is it that I am afraid to die before I confront myself as I really am?

This is the picture I have burnt in my mind…

A mother lies clothed on a bed. She lies still, her face expressionless. A tiny red ant explores the curve of her forehead but she makes no attempt to rid herself of it. She feels nothing. There's a whine of mosquito, the scarcely audible patter of gecko feet on the low white ceiling. A soft wind billows a muslin curtain bringing with it the strong evening scent of datura. Outside the forest drips and distant thunder rolls. Otherwise silence. The night has yet to come alive.

In one arm she cradles a child. She too is motionless, her garments twisted around a slip of a form. Her small muddied feet have soiled the sheets and now lie clamped between the mother’s warm calves. The child’s damp hair drapes across the pillow and a vivid burn marks the child’s pale neck. It looks for all the world as if she’s sleeping.

………………………………………

Heppie came from the stars. That's what she told people. And for me it was just as if a shooting star, a bright comet had suddenly burst into my life. So who was I to contradict? She made it sound so convincing as if she, in her childish innocence, were party to knowledge the rest of us had somehow lost. Yes, she came from the stars - her birthmark, the splash of a white rash on her neck, becoming stardust from when she fell to earth. She would proudly show it, pulling down her T-shirt for a better view. And sometimes when we stared deep into the night sky, she would whisper conspiratorially "You were waiting for me, weren't you?" and I would ruffle her hair and think myself the luckiest man alive.

I first knew Heppie’s parents in Ivory Coast before she was born. Will was surveying vast tracts of virgin forest, noting anything that flickered or swung, wriggled or crept through its humid depths. He was a born naturalist who had learnt to study nature not in the superior manner of a scientist but with the humility of an indigenous forest dweller. There was a quietness about him, a calmness which reflected a profound knowledge of the animal world. He spent long unbroken weeks moving silently through the forest, sometimes accompanied by a local hunter, often alone or with Anna. In Anna too there was deep compassion and dedication - she was a botanist, her alert and enquiring mind finely tuned to the complexities of nature.

There was nothing I liked better than to visit them after they returned from the bush. A message would arrive at the clinic faster than they could reach home and that evening would see us talking way into the night, surrounded by a tangle of mist-nets and botanical specimens. Anna would be bending over her collections, her brown hair illuminated by the orange glow of the hurricane lamp. Gently she would tease out the delicate blossoms of some fragile orchid before the last hint of forest perfume was squeezed between blotting paper and press. She would work long and hard, sifting through cut vegetation, pickling soft fruits before wilt and decay set in. She would hold up for me to admire the exquisite tracery of a minute fern, the razor sharp leaf of an undescribed grass, or the stinking phallic blooms of a saprophyte, wizened and etiolated. Sometimes too, Will would have specimens, of bats perhaps new to science, which he would inject under the skin and keep in jars of formalin. But mostly he talked of their adventures since I last saw them, the sightings of leopard and rock fowl, of swimming in crystal pools and the guttural dawn chorus of colobus monkeys, of forest paths lit by phosphorescent fungi and the thrill of climbing great buttress-rooted trees high into the unknown world of the forest canopy.

I marvelled at their zest for life and their enthusiasm. It was the tonic I needed for my own world of illness and death. As a doctor at the local mission hospital, I saw so much I wanted to prevent and yet could not. I was exasperated by people’s beliefs in a culture I found hard to penetrate. The power of the witch doctor was strong, the treatment bizarre to my western eyes and often patients would be brought to me as a last resort. My efforts to understand local customs and cures were met with resistance. In my dreams, I spoke to shamans with fetishes, and corpses slit open to reveal pythons nestling where intestines should have been. Often I was overcome by an enormous sense of frustration borne out of the fact that I failed to prevent even the most needless of deaths and that I couldn’t reach beyond the four walls of my clapboard clinic. Anna and Will provided a welcome means of escape.

There was something else I had in my possession at the time that gave me enormous comfort. It was an old photograph. Why and how it wove its spell on me I don't know, but it chose to intoxicate me with its innocence and beauty…

On home leave, shortly after meeting Will and Anna, I was spending a day idly poking around the book shops in Hay-on-Wye. I was half-heartedly looking for old books on the birds of West Africa, part as a present for my new friends, partly for my own growing interest in the natural world inspired by their work.

The day was warm and sunny. In Farrow's Bookshop, a comforting smell of mildewed paper, warm leather and fish glue mixed with the faint perfume of blossom as wafts of spring air billowed in with each customer. I strayed further and further into the dusty recesses, the tinkling of the shop's bell and muffled enquiries gradually fading into another world. I'd been leafing through a few books, admiring the swirling marbling of their end covers more than the amateur wildlife plates, when I stumbled against a box lying on the wooden floor. A sudden shaft of sunlight illuminated dust I had disturbed with my movements and for a moment I was dazed by the bright light and dark shadows. I turned my back to the brightness and squatted down to examine what I had kicked - it was a box of old prints.

The first was of a humming bird, enough to arouse my interest. I started to flick through slowly, studying each one, wondering at the lives of those who had sketched them, staring past the golden orioles, bee-eaters and sunbirds to the pen and ink backgrounds of minute palms, tree ferns and waterfalls scratched delicately onto thick paper. I'd almost got to the back of the box, my knees beginning to ache, when I flicked over a rather dull picture of a nightjar. I must have shifted slightly because the next print was struck by light. It was not of a bird at all, it wasn't even a print. It was a photograph of a young girl.

It was old, in sepia and cream, the blurred imagery only adding to the feeling of movement and life. She was dancing along a shoreline, caught in mid-motion, one foot raised, the hem of her garment tracing her bare calf and the line of her ankle. A pale bodice had slipped from her thin shoulder, her fair hair swirled, her lips were half-open as if in song. The sway of her body made her skirts swing and fold, her eyes followed the movement of a ribbon, held in one hand, which fluttered away in the breeze of a day long past. The whole picture looked as if it were still moving, as if in slow motion, and that if I stared long enough, I would see the child alight, her dress hang still, her hair rebound and with wondering eyes, she would turn and look at me. But … there she was, suspended, forever dancing in that one caught moment.

It seemed inevitable that I should buy the photo. From the moment I saw her, I knew she would be part of my life. It was as if invisible rays emanated from her spirit and mingled with mine. I knew they were there, like the force that exists between magnet and iron. I longed for her to look at me, imagining her deep, questioning eyes… Yes, she wove a spell on me right from the start and I could not resist such temptation.

For a while I was obsessed by who she was, where she lived, how she had died. The more I studied her the more I was convinced that she had not been long in this world - I saw it in the fineness of her features, the freedom of her spirit. I would turn the photo over, removing it carefully from its mounting board and study the spidery writing on its reverse. 'McPherson,1843, Loch Nymph'. Though I found out something of the photographer, I could not trace the subject. But after a while, I no longer cared about her unknown history. Just the fact that I had her now, that she was mine was enough.

………………………………………

Anna and Will did not remain long in Ivory Coast. Within two years, their fieldwork and funding ground to a halt. With their departure, the photo became my main escape. I would flop down on my bed at the end of a hard day, cold beer to hand, and gaze at Her, propped in a pewter frame, laughing at my infatuation with such an ethereal being.

Anna wrote intermittently of their new life, as time and postal services dictated - her unexpected pregnancy, the slow cancerous death of her father that tied them to home. She spoke of their child, the croft house they rented in the Scottish Highlands. Her letters were filled with domesticity - she painted scenes of bread-baking, breastfeeding, vegetable growing, her botanical skills re-tuned to gardening ones. She told of Will's work with the Forestry Commission, the office drudgery, the planting of great acres of moorland with exotic conifers. And though the letters were always cheerful, I sensed between the lines a resignation not altogether of their choice. I could almost feel Will's growing restlessness and Anna kow-towing to family pressure and the role of motherhood.

Five years passed. I was posted from Ivory Coast to Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Somalia … where borders and cultures are blurred by natural disasters, poverty and war, and suffering is universal in its cruelty. With each torn and gaping wound, each child futilely blown apart, each new emaciated refugee, I grew a tougher skin like chain mail until I no longer flinched at the smell of burning flesh, and amputating crushed and useless limbs became routine. I gave up trying to make sense of all the wretchedness. My stoicism was noticed, commended even. It was only at night that I could rid myself of that heavy armour and even then it was becoming increasingly difficult to peel it back, like skinning myself alive in order to feel the excruciating pain of the living. I became scared of my own toughness, my lack of visible emotion. True, I had affairs but these were purely physical, impassive on both sides, leaving me curiously empty and even more devoid of feeling. My only salvation, I felt, was in Her. There were nights when I longed to kiss Her lips and bury my face in the folds of that dress, breathing in Her innocence. I drifted from one war-torn country to the next, with no meaning but Her and little faith in the future.

And then came the opportunity to escape from those maelstroms of despair and work in a country not devastated by disaster. I grasped it with such eagerness, I feared my application would be turned down.

I wrote to Anna of my new job in a small community hospital in a remote corner of south-west Gabon, my joy of returning to peaceful climes, the verdant paradise it would be. Come and see us before you go, she begged.

So imagine this … a June morning, a long single track road, running first along the base of mountains, then climbing through passes whose horizons are still etched with snow. Lochans drink in the waters of that high ground, red-throated divers scoot over their mirror surfaces shattering the reflected peaks into a thousand ripples. The sky is blue, echoing with the croak of ravens. I’m driving slowly, the clear cool air refreshing my weary soul. The car traces a coastline of low cliffs, the edge of a blue sea scudded white, beaches wet with seaweed and the scent of otter.

I feel strangely elated, which is more than the promise of a beautiful day, the prospect of seeing old friends and the luck of a new job. There's a feeling that the day holds something great, beyond words, beyond imagining.

And now, a house, white with red roof tucked into the shelter of a hill, surrounded by wind-whipped trees and the trappings of self sufficiency - an old Fergie tractor, well cultivated soil sprouting the beginnings of a harvest, a polytunnel tinged with green inner growth. And there, at the porch a woman, arms folded over a red apron. Her face dimples with a broad smile, her arms fly about my neck. And there too a man, his broad frame blocking the small doorway, his blue eyes reflecting the sky.

I’m sent to fetch her and follow a well-worn path edged by gorse, heavy with the scent of coconut and violent with yolk blossom. The path leads to a beach and the rise and fall of a childish song, ribboning away like a skein of geese. On the sand is a small girl. I approach unnoticed. She's dancing at the water's edge, one foot raised then the other, the hem of her salt-stained garment tracing her bare calves. Her T-shirt's slipped from a thin shoulder, her fair hair swirls, her lips are half-open in song. The sway of her body makes her skirts swing and fold and in one hand she clasps a seaweed frond which flaps about her in the breeze of her motion. And as I stare, transfixed, her dancing ends. A hand flicks wind-blown hair and with a smile those eyes, those magnificent eyes, look straight at me.

………………………………………

So Heppie entered my life, like a bright comet on that cool spring day between Somalia and Gabon. And now you must understand why I couldn’t let her go, why I spent days and nights reasoning with Will and Anna, lecturing Will on the utter waste of his knowledge, persuading Anna of her need for intellectual stimulation, rekindling their passion. You will understand why over the next few months I did all I could to oil the pen-pushing bureaucracy of Libreville to obtain acceptance of their proposal, work permits, and the promise of housing near my hospital sandwiched between oil palm plantations and the dark recesses of the rainforest.

………………………………………

You come to their home now through forest thick and heavy, whirring with the hum of countless insects. The road, if you can call it that, is orange, pitted, gouged out after heavy rains. Wattled hornbills with grotesque beaks and bare blue faces bray and whoosh across the road. You approach gradually, low gear, low ratio and the forest gives way to small clearings of yams and banana palms, then dwellings, as orange as the road, thatched with raphia or sheeted with tin which blinds in the sun, deafens in the rain. A pig wallows in the dusty ground, chickens squawk and scatter. A small girl runs across your path, a fat baby strapped to her small back. She flashes you a smile. Women sit in doorways sorting beans, and foetid forest odours have changed to that of wood smoke, sweat and the sour-sweet smell of decaying cocoa pods. There’s the sing-song murmur of voices, the screech of children. Past the playing field and the school, you see their house, moonflowers growing in profusion over the tin roof. It’s set apart from the others, on a track winding up through farms and relic trees. Beyond it lies a lake, hidden, secret.

And there’s Heppie, small and lithe, playing on the veranda. She’s squatting, poking at something you cannot see. Then she straightens, swiftly reties the cloth about her waist and wriggles her hips to a distant drum beat. Each day Africa grips her tighter and she loves it. She wants black skin, curly hair and slips into the cookhouse to rub herself with charcoal.

Her mother presses leaves and flowers in the back yard. Her father’s often away, coming back with tales of forest elephant, bringing home its dung germinating with forest seeds. And I’m there when Heppie makes the startling discovery that from such a pile great things can grow, that she can hold all this beauty in the palm of her hand. These are moments of pure undiluted wonder. They captivate me. She is completely untouched by the constraints of western education. How, I ask you, could I have left her behind to go to school? It would have been like trying to put a sun beam in a bell jar.

But here… here it is different. As the sun rises through the mists of early morning, she meets her friends under the mango tree. They chatter in pidgin. In their plain blue shifts they chew on roasted groundnuts as they scud through the red dust towards the long low building that’s school for them. There’s no glass in the windows, the door is open and she learns her letters to the constant irrepressible babble of grey parrots and the zither of dragonfly wings.

And when I finish work, I drive down that road to be with them, with her. Will likes to think I keep Anna company. But it’s her I come for, this enchanted child like a burst of sunlight on a winter’s morning. From the very beginning I knew she was extraordinary but there was something else, something that went far beyond her uncanny resemblance to the photo. She looked older in that, it was true, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was Her. It was as if I had willed her into existence and that she knew it. We were both conspirators in some terrible fantastic secret. The incredible thing was that when I looked closely at the photo, I could see a faint white mark just like Heppie’s, on Her neck. Was I imagining it now when I had failed to notice it before? Was it mere coincidence or the blurring of time and fading chemicals? It seemed inconceivable but there it was and I didn’t want to question it any more than I wanted to show the picture to Will or Anna … or her. In some foolish way I feared I would break the spell. When I looked at the photo now, I no longer felt the pull of those invisible rays. She wasn’t there – and Heppie had come to me. I burnt it so she could not return.

I visited as often as my demanding job let me. Can you imagine the excitement I felt from the moment she saw me coming? She would run to me, launching herself at me, trusting me completely, as I caught her up in my arms, her beautiful grin dimpling her pale cheeks. Or sometimes she approached very slowly, holding something in her hands - a caterpillar, a butterfly’s wing, a jar of cockroaches she’d been feeding on nail clippings. We would look silently, heads bowed over the day’s treasure, and she would touch these things gently as if reading them with her fingertips, as if by some process of osmosis she could tell what they were, how they worked.

These meetings became punctuated with questions, things she had thought since my last visit and saved up to discuss with me. It might be to ask how many times a second a mosquito flapped its wings or how a dew drop could hang from the tiny tip of a leaf without falling. Or perhaps she might ask who I had cured and who had died since last I saw her. She showed no fear of death, only morbid fascination.

And later, if the mood took her, she’d give me a ‘show’. She would stick on earrings, feather boa, rouge and dance to music, flinging a glance my way every now and then, pouting “You must watch!” She demanded attention and I, standing in the shadows, would smile to myself at her ability to hold captive her audience through three song tracks and two changes of costume.

Sometimes, before night fell, we would trudge up to the lake for a swim, cool and delicious after a hard day. The lake was deep, deathly still, its turquoise water layered with warmth and the forest sediment of a million years. We would jump off the old iron jetty built in colonial times and burst through the silent surface. I would float on my back, soothing away all thoughts medical, whilst Heppie paddled along in her curious water-rat fashion. She liked the thrill of opening her eyes underwater and spotting blurry shapes far below us – stealthy cruising fish or the eerie branches of fallen trees lying deep in their watery grave, reaching up like hands to grab her. And without even the slightest breath of wind, puffs of soft kapok would billow down from the high canopy and be carried over the lake’s surface, brushing against us like newly fallen snow.

On return, after night had fallen, we would sit on the veranda and listen for the shrill tremor of night insects, the skirmish of waking bats beneath the eaves, the fierce orgasmic cries of a tree hyrax. We would watch the moth’s death dance and the gecko’s strike, a spider’s web stirred by the breath of the lamp. Some nights, old Bafon, the house boy, sat with us, his back against the veranda pillar. Heppie would beg for a story and, chewing on cola, he would begin to weave tales as black and mysterious as the night, of trust and betrayal, love and tears, of people possessed of the power of change, who could transform themselves into any animal, big or small. And gradually she would edged towards Anna or me and snuggle her warm self between our legs, peering out with those deep marvellous eyes.

It was at night that I loved her most, when she touched on strangeness beyond the bounds of childhood. Her questioning became deeper, as if the night stretched her imaginings. We would ponder the beginning of all things and of what stuff the stars were made. Often she would see wonders where I failed. She would ask for binoculars, wobbling them drunkenly, the huge lenses dwarfing her face. And with a sudden intake of breath she’d find what she was looking for. And there she would stay with the stars glittering about her. Only her body remained with me, taut, upright until with meteoric force she returned, brimming with discovery. Her eyes would reflect the heavens and the mark on her neck would shine whiter than ever. And sometimes, as I took my leave and Anna tucked her under swathes of mosquito net, the moon would hang like a great white cradle rocking her to sleep.

Once, on returning home, I realised that on picking up my jacket, I’d taken the garment under it too. It was her T-shirt, discarded and dirty. That night, I held it against me, breathing in her childish odour.

It had been easy to fool myself, easy to fool them, to cover up my own grotesque desires. I’d wished for something, anything - an electric shock, an injection - that would allow me to dispel these thoughts. Usually a single effort of the will was enough. But not that day – I grew weary of the mask I wore, my mood was like the weather….

The sultry afternoon was dying a slow death. The birds were silenced by the brooding gloom of the forest and even the cicadas were still. The world lay panting under heavy pregnant clouds. I’d finished work early hoping for a swim to ease the unbearable pressure, the thoughts that were like maggots crawling through my mind. I should have known to stay away.

We had started the slow climb to the lake when Heppie tugged at my shirt. “Listen,” she cried, “listen…”. Holding her moist hand in mine, I heard a noise like an approaching train, soft at first and far away but rushing ever nearer. All was strangely clear and sharp, as if each living thing had sensed what was to come and was tense with anticipation. A small breeze sent the dry grasses bending and whispering, swirling the red dust into eddies. The far horizon heaved, wild and angry under a strange yellow-grey sky.

We watched the advancing wave of the storm as it crashed through the trees, thrashing and tearing at the vegetation. We heard the frightened, confused gibbering of monkeys in the still calm forest beyond. Suddenly, thick with dust and leaves, a vast wind hit. Lightning crazily unzipped the sky and thunder, loud and metallic, split the air. For a moment the sheer force and beauty of the elements rooted us to the spot. Then quickly I grabbed her and ran back down to the house and the shelter of the veranda. Anna, shouting above the rattling of roof sheets, disappeared out the back to where her presses and specimens lay. Heppie clung to me, seeking reassurance. I felt her warm quick breath on my face, the pulsating of her heart, the pressure of her arms around my neck. I streamed with sweat, filled with a mingled terror and delight.

At last the rain came, like a great tidal wave, sudden, tremendous, lashing against ground and house in a deafening roar. And all at once I could contain myself no longer, I was beside myself with desire. As she turned, her face wild with exhilaration, I pressed her to me, my tongue tasting the faint mango sweetness of her lips, the wet quiver of her mouth, my hands feeling her, touching her softness. She squirmed but I held her. I couldn’t let her go and a cry of anguish, of joy burst forth from the depths of my being. A moment of pure ecstasy…before something seemed to give way, shatter, something inside her, like the snapping of a tightened bow. She didn’t cry, she just hung limp before burying her head in the base of my chest and wriggling out of my arms.

And it was as if my life ceased from that moment.

………………………………………

I can scarcely make out her small figure running through the rain. I follow, clumsily slipping along the lake path, now lethal as ice and rapidly turning into a raging torrent. I’m running but everything happens in slow motion and my limbs are heavy as lead. I shout but no sound comes out, only a low, rasping moan. The earth and sky seem to merge into one and my vision is blurred, by rain or tears. I cannot tell which.

When I reach the lake, she is standing on the jetty. The storm is passing but the waves are wild, the rain torrential. I have so nearly reached her. I call her name. She turns and with a blinding flash, the lightning finds its mark.

…………………………………

I still stand there in the half-light, suspended in time, wet, dishevelled, understanding yet not, my arms still heavy with the weight of her body. I watch them, through the open door, Anna cradling Heppie who lies so still, as if she was only sleeping. A soft wind brings with it the evening scent of datura and outside the forest still drips and distant thunder rolls. And I groan through the years in silent grief.

But now this festering mind has burst and I howl to you, long and low. Judge me how you will. Then burn this picture from my head. Burn me with it.

© Heather Macleod
Reproduced with permission

---

THINGS HEATHER LOVES:

Wide open spaces and cartwheeling on wet sand; dancing; music from Shostakovich and Arvo Part to Tom Waits and Kepa Junkera; The Glaswegian artist Alexander Goudie and his wonderful paintings of Burn's Tam O'Shanter; reading Philip Pullman to my kids; watching films, plays and dance at Eden Court Theatre (recently especially Rabbit Proof Fence, anything by Dundee Rep, and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company); travelling and wild camping; red wine and olives...

---

SELECTED LINKS:

World Wide Dance UK

Scottish Ballet

Pulp.net

Scottish Poetry Library

---

Your first name:	Your URL:
Use the box below to leave messages for Heather. Begin message: For Heather MacLeod

---

View My Guestbook
Sign My Guestbook

---

SITE
FORUM

---