Free Strip the Willow by John Aberdein

accident, for I only met him afterwards, sometimes made him seem not so much a harp as an empty hall, with hollow echoes of glory and servitude. No, let me get that figure closer. There were portraits on his wall, and French windows flung open, at both ends. Wind made the portraits rock where they hung, to gouge thin grooves in ancient plaster.
     
    The first portrait that sprang from his throat threw me. Not that I was supposed to be thrown, my job was just to keep the tape-machine running, put in new spools, thread them through the recording head, and start again. Sometimes I missed some of the stuff that came from him, because he wouldn’t stop. He was in a trance after the operation, and he wouldn’t stop, nor could he be shaken from it. Lady Macbeth, sleep-talking. So I tried to remember that stuff, some of it no doubt lost for ever. You have a life, maybe momentous, maybe not. Yet if the moments go, you might as well not have gone to the trouble of living them. Without a proper connected story you start to decline to a kind of newspaper, each day new, that never gets a second reading. The ecstasy of your soul and all its troubles start to fade, like so much drawer-liner or scrunched absorbent for wet shoes. I exaggerate, but you get my drift.
    Well, the first portrait threw me, because it wasn’t his father. No doubt his father made a huge impression on him, a huge depression too, but it was of his father’s friend Ludwig that he spoke most at first. Ludwig had lost a hand, that was probably what made his portrait stick, Ludwig had lost a hand in an industrial accident. He nearly bled to death, after his wrist was shorn by the whirling blades at the top of a fertiliser hopper. The bleeding stump they stuck in superphosphate. His ex-hand they plonked in a Time-and-Motion inspector’s briefcase, before they rushed both to Casualty. It was easy to see how this would stick in a young Jim’s mind. Not that he was a witness, but he heard about it at table, after meat, and he marvelled at Ludwig’s hook.
    The next portrait threw me too, because it wasn’t his mother. His mother was dead. Jim’s mother died when he was not much more than a lad. He remembered releasing her ashes out of a glider window, as they overflew a mountain. Was that a flight of fancy, as some might say? I don’t think so. It seemed, as I taped it, remarkably real. But it wasn’t his mother he spoke about at first, but of two other women, Amande and Lucy. Amande could be fairly intense, which seemed to embarrass Jim. She was an older woman who had come across from Brittany in the war, married a whitefish skipper, then been bereaved, a shocker of an accident at the mouth of Aberdeen harbour. For which she was not consoled. Yet isolation and consolation became her themes, and it emerged she and Jim had been mighty close, mighty close in some lifesaving sense.
    Then there was Lucy, the portrait of Lucy. To say she was the love of his life is to understate. But love is the home of all extremes, I think, and this love was so full of truth, for so short a time, so full of imposture and needless harming, that even extremes became beggared.
     
    Jesus, thought Lucy. Is that where we’re going.
     
    With Lucy he seemed to want her so much, he was able to imagine her inner life, though how accurately we can never know. He would be running along with his own story, and then there would be something like At her window, gazing or Meanwhile, in bed and it would be about Lucy. But then men are notorious projectors, as my wife Iris is never slow to point out. (Whereas she is so rooted in circumstance, locality and practicality, it makes your eyes water at times. And a complete anarchist.)
    Then again, with his long-time nemesis, Spermy McClung, a similar thing applied. Not that there was inner life to imagine where Spermy was concerned, Jim didn’t spend a whole barrel of time looking for that. But where Spermy was, what he was doing, who he was bawling out,