Being and Ruin

I cannot even remember the name of the castle. We were living in London and it was not unusual for our parents to drag us to another heritage site scattered over the hilltops of England. But I remember how we had recently become irritating to Bella, my older teenage sister, who viewed us all as the cause of her unendurable torment.

My younger sister, Chrissie, and I would retreat on those long winding drives into our games. Sometimes I would let the endless winding highland roads sway me round and round until I slumped on Bella’s shoulder.

Bella would push me off, at first in silence, failing to recognise my simple need for connection. My need to pull her back with me and Chrissie to the world of infantile simplicity.

“Get off me you loser,” she said, pushing me away at the moment we took a sharp right-hand bend.

With her forceful shove I was launched on top of Chrissie, who let out an ear-piercing scream as I squashed her against the door.

“Jesus Christ!” my father yelled as he swerved and put on the breaks. The car swung into a farmer’s road that wound its way up a steep rocky hill, from where we could see the castle in the distance.

“What’s going on, Bella?”

“He keeps leaning all over me.”

“We’re just playing a game.”

“Play a game…” Chrissie echoes me.

“Well you can stop that now. All of you.”

“Stop making Chrissie scream like that,” my mother puts in.

“It wasn’t me. She’s the one.”

“Just leave Bella alone.”

“I can’t stand this anymore!” Bella says. She gets out of the car and slams the door.

“Oh Christ, Bella!” my father winds down the window and shouts up the hill. “I’m not coming up there!”

“Good,” she shouts back. “I’m walking home.”

Looking out of the window, Chrissie begins to cry.

“Bella — Bella come back!”

“For God’s sake go and get her!” my mother says.

“This holiday is a disaster,” were my father’s parting words as he got out and slammed the door.

“Give her this,” my mother said. She handed me a lolly snake.

“Stop crying Chrissie,” I said, waving the snake in front of her. “You want this?”

“I want Bella…I want Bella…”

“Bella’s coming back,” I said.

She took the snake.

My mother looked out of the window, in the opposite direction, into the whiteness of stone and fog. Into the ruin of the castle.

It was as if her gaze had stripped away all of its claim to ‘history’ — revealing only ‘being’.

I knew this look of hers. It was blank and detached, a portal to another world, dreamy like a reverie from which we were forever excluded. Whatever had revealed itself to her in the jagged walls and rocks of the castle, had not revealed itself to me.

This defiance of Cartesian geometry. There were no coordinates in this space. That is the meaning of privacy. It is why children do not know of its existence, not in its grand, elusive sense. My own thoughts I knew to be apart from the world, but not myself. Never myself. The urgency of impulse will always assert the affirmation of its object. A child’s waking body is never still.

But my mother’s was.

It could have been the closest experience I had ever had to the premonition of death. She was like a statue, at one with those ruins of time.

This is a child’s greatest fear. It is not so much the indifference. We had all been attuned to her moods and her abrupt need for solitude. Her look froze her body and it was an icy sensation that overcame me and kept me mute, as if to speak would be to disturb some eternal silence.

Still, I demanded to know — where did she go? From what was I excluded? How could there be such stony and ephemeral places where I did not feature in her thought?

A profound sense of doubt came upon me. Did I know her? Who is she? Perhaps it was her silence or the way she looked upon the stones that so unsettled me.

Of course she was my ‘mother’, but what is a mother? I had always entertained those child’s questions — where did I come from? How did I come to exist as ‘me’? But before then, I had never really considered this same question of others — ‘who are you’? ‘Can we ever really know another’?

If I had always only seen her as my mother, in that moment what I perceived was another being. And I asked myself: how does she see this ruined castle? Is it the same as me? How could it be?

For the first time, I felt the fear of the abyss. She was there, physically before me, and yet unknowable, her tangible nature suddenly evaporating like a ghost.

I felt the awful realisation that she could at any moment turn around and say, ‘I’m leaving. I’m not going to be your mother any more’. Perhaps it was because we had been fighting, and I could see in her mood the unhappiness expressed as silence. But how did I know this? Hadn’t I just convinced myself that she had fled from me forever?

“Is Chrissy o.k?’ — she said.

These words were bridges. And yet, how could I trust them again? I sensed acutely that, even when we speak, there will always be these stones, mysterious and impenetrable, existing all on their own.