Ocellus

By Andrew McEwan

There is a mythology inherent in regions with a strong cultural identity, none more so than North East England, where the fabulous exists alongside the mundane and both are treated with a dispassion born of having seen it all before. The world was invented here, and it started with the first bridge, Pons Aelius, over the Tyne.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew McEwan
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301139675

Andrew McEwan

Van driver from Newcastle. My work divides opinion. Look me up on Goodreads and Twitter. I welcome all reviews.

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Ocellus

:a Geordie sketchbook

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www.apefiction.co.uk

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Copyright 2013 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

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for Frank and Jack

It looks like an ashtray...

unknow

~ Index of Notable Personages ~

Swene McEwan: future time traveller, past undigested anomaly, bard

Little Billy: one-armed ladder maker, future Swene's grandfather

Harry Hotspur: Lord Henry Percy, impetuous singer-songwriter

Robert McEwan: bricklayer and beer drinker, future Swene's great-grandfather

Lord Armstrong: arms manufacturer and cigar chomper

Joseph Wilson Swan: inventor of the light bulb, father of time travel and sworn enemy of Thomas Edison

Thomas Bewick: crime fighter, Swarley's Club enforcer, wood engraver and ornithologist

Stalwart Soap: determined idiot, journalist and trouble magnet

William Hedley: early railway pioneer

Charles Hutton: mathematician

Nancy Spain: feminist, time traveller, demon hunter, adventurer and author of detective novels

Jack Common: socialist, author, Nancy's righthand man

Great Uncle Jim: gentleman thief, golfer and automaton

Robert Smith Surtees: squirely writer

Frank Graham: historian, communist, Spanish Civil War veteran

Mr. Dog: accursed crime lord, piper and puppeteer

Cuthbert Collingwood: vice admiral, admiral, stealer of pants

Tommy Ferens: slippery oracle of the Tyne

George Stevenson: inventor, railway mogul and sometime lycanthrope

John Clayton: town clerk, archivist and self-styled ladies man

Richard Grainger: builder, spectre

John Dobson: architect

Robert Stevenson: engineer and occasional giraffe

Arthur Stanley Jefferson: one half of Laurel and Hardy

Dr. Gibb: surgeon, blood enthusiast and card dealer of Death

Blind Willie: Newcastle eccentric

Ralph Hedley: artist, Swarley's Club member

Captain Starkey: Newcastle eccentric and rumoured alien

Harriet Martineau: essayist and keen observer

Mr. Handsome Ankles: harbinger of just desserts

Fate: herself

Part 1. Maps and Fragments

Prologue

The flabbergaster regularly regaled passersby with tales of impossible breadth and width, claiming amongst other things that he had walked from Land’s End to John O’Groats with two broken legs, which feat might explain his buckled limbs and irregular gait. He was a down-and-out, a tramp, a beggar whose eyes yet shone. And it was the flabbergaster’s eyes that spoke the most. The truth in one, but which?

Swene often bought him drinks in the hope of finding out. He listened, but did not always hear, for half at least of what the flabbergaster told him was fanciful at best. His eyes were most easily scrutinised through the bottom of a glass. Only a fool would get too close. The man’s breath was reason enough to maintain a distance. Yet Swene understood up front what most individuals found out too late. That the other eye, the bad eye, the lying eye, was truly the one of note.

To be possessed of knowledge was not the same as being possessed of wisdom, however, and Swene had - despite his earnest intentions - the tendency to act in haste, a reckless streak that had seen him fall short most of his life. Or should that be lives? For a hundred Swenes stretched back a thousand years and more. This, his latest incarnation, was perhaps the first to realise the truth of his unique situation; the one Swene able to travel back in time and investigate his earlier selves. A mixed blessing, for what he found was often the same wayward incompetence, the same minor character inching his way through history with seeming minimal effect.

The future stretched, crudely formed, only a short few decades ahead. It was possible to travel farther but the holes got too big. That way lay madness. The past though; the past was full not of holes but of lumps, and lumps it was possible to iron out. They may well appear elsewhere, but at the end of the day no real harm was done. It was simply a jigsaw of mistakes.

Thus Swene’s fascination with the flabbergaster, a purveyor of stories of unknowable depth. He knew himself to be involved in a good few of them, potentially at least. Others, too, rootless souls forever blowing across a desperate landscape, piecing together dates and facts in an effort to complete themselves whilst forever losing other fragments to friends and rivals both. It was endless. But it had to begin somewhere, and as good a somewhere was the pub.

The flabbergaster sucked the foam from his beer and laughed. What few teeth he had remaining leaned from his gums like gravestones from a cliff. Below, the tide went in and out. Swene imagined him shuffling cards till one fell from the deck. He’d stab it with a grubby finger and that, my friends, would be that.

One

It was on a Wednesday, about two o'clock. There was Swene, singular of years and purpose, careening down the hill towards the cemetery, and there was the charabanc pulling out of the junction. The universe brought them together; Swene’s bogie without brakes, an errant meteor, space dust haphazard, the charabanc jauntily off to a picnic, twenty-six persons on board and numerous hampers, tartan rugs, tea urns stoppered, fruit cakes tinned, stashed umbrellas. The yellow sun painted dark patches onto pavement. A doll's head, a broken nose, endless back streets aflutter with washing, manifest with the ghosts of butterflies made large, animated by wind and redeemed by the virtue of soap powder. Just so. Now. A poised clock arm stilled. Gravediggers paused. A barber a hundred miles removed quaking, almost drawing blood, at that very second caught in the outrushing wave, speed of light and such, of Swene's tousled brow meeting with charabanc's steel wheel arch. Thunk. Everything in that boy's head emptied into space. Luckily, as fate would have it, for us to read.

117 AD

The raw mutton jaw. Ewen swung it at a tooth. The tooth spun through the air and deposited in a rabbit hole. Lightning beamed down and painted all flesh blue. The moon gulped. Ewen raised himself up and pursued the tooth, fetching it from its resting place and placing it atop a pebble. He took aim, waggled the mutton jaw, and to the excitement of all assembled thumped it in the direction of another rabbit hole, marked with a piece of cloth on a stick. Swene, seeing how interested the girls were upon this feat, grabbed himself a mutton jaw and sidled up, winked at the moon, and followed suit, only landing his tooth closer to the rabbit hole, at which, having exchanged glances with Ewen, it was decided that Ewen should continue next. With mutton jaw and tooth.

1906

Little Billy squinted at a blurred assemblage of shapes and had no conscious thought as to their rightness, wrongness or otherwiseness. He had just floated into the world, deaf momentarily and partially blind, in a state of shock that would linger till his death some eighty years later. That his demise was attempted a mere seventeen years hence was of no immediate consequence. Here he was, newborn and a little sticky, pushed from his mother's womb, made to breathe alone. His twin brother had been whisked away in a porcelain basin having elicited no shriek (not that Billy could hear, but he felt the lack of it) on being suspended by the ankles like Achilles and not so much dipped in the Styx as slapped soundly on the buttocks to wake him from his reverie of womb-warmth and the cozy indoors. Gone now, that haven, stretched and shrunk back, bloodied and torn. Two o'clock. The fat nurse with the horse face and elephant thighs appeared panicked. One baby had vanished! No! Here he is, dropped to the cold tiled floor, on impact venting the required noise and sucking life into his peculiar lungs, but on looking not to be found, somehow spirited away. Or so Billy believed. The doctor, the nurse, they entered into a conspiracy neither would ever betray. Mother was unknowing, out of the picture unconscious. Little Billy too little to understand, although he witnessed it all, his twin's birth, that heart for so long pressed against his own, his brother’s seeming lifelessness and subsequent disappearance a reality to trouble him on and off, the nurse and doctor bewildered and disbelieving: a newborn mislaid, perhaps taken by angels - or the Devil, they dared not say.

1342

The walls, high as they were, were as nothing in terms of threat and wonder as the clouds overhead. The clouds loomed precariously as if about to loose upon the rabble below a torrent of such force it would wash the Scottish army away more effectively than arrow or pike. All colour drained from the world, what there was gathered about Scotsmen, highlighting them like targets to a sneering English eye. The sky groaned with noise. Clan leaders talked in whispers and the king stalked nearby woods like a drunk dog. The New Castle walls, licked by mud, several feet thick, remained aloof.

1388

All was set fair. The wagons rolled smoothly. The smell of blood carried on the wind from butcher's carts stationed along the road, meat aplenty to satisfy an army fit to gorge. Few knew where they were, and few cared, thinking only of family far removed. Riders stalked the high ground, fleeting shadows, spies on fat clumsy horses that nevertheless were impossible to apprehend. Flies crawled and buzzed. Clouds wandered. Camp followers pointed at their mouths and lifted their skirts. All grist to the bard, Swene himself chewing a length of dry grass and composing in his head an heroic ballad.

It didn't come easy, the composing, and those few lines he had entered onto parchment brought only frowns from the motley. He walked amongst them in hope of literary enlightenment, some wink of fabric from torn trews or note of worldly wisdom, hints buried in knife edges or floating groundwards trapped in spittle, the truth as ever ensconced in the least likely places, ground under cart wheels or growing on the back of a child's knee. For the bard an endless search. For the army a bent road south then north. The latter's path seemed more successful, although they had been diverted homewards having taken their fill of Hotspur's well and were now within half a day of Ponteland, where the earl - Swene having his ear - thought to tarry, seeking no greater satisfaction from this latest siege than to loiter on English soil. That and amassing cattle. Besides, what lay at home but disgruntled peers? Much the same here amidst the Percies, a fact Douglas sought to exploit in the first instance.

There was a commotion of horses as the ground fell towards the river. Wagons slid and skidded in the mud and a man was crushed as one overturned. Those on foot paid scant regard, absorbed with their bellies and their weapons. The sun teased through the tops of trees. Swene ran ahead and had his hair parted by an arrow. Another such bolt a day earlier had skimmed his nose like a hornet even as he paused mid-stride to avoid setting his foot in a mound of human excrement, the wincing then a lifesaver as he braked, pulling his head back and away, the arrow missing by a hair's breadth. Similarly now, ducking under a branch into which the missile sank, making for the larger wagons arranging themselves at a safe distance from the tower. Finding admittance here difficult, he cut back to the water's edge and, having taken a thoughtful piss, one so nearly denied him, pondered at length a suitable opening stanza.

All the while Hotspur thundered north. He arrived at the Rede after dark and came unexpectedly upon the Scottish camp.

What happened next was chronicled by sources unreliable.

Swene climbed a tree.

Sparks flew under moonlight. The noise was terrifying and men died without seeing their enemy.

That morning, gazing into an unsatisfactory mirror, Harry Percy had been taken with the notion of a duel. Such things as death amused him. He had no patience with life and life, similarly, had no patience with Harry, thwarting him, it seemed, at every turn. That comely lass? Made off with his brother. His favourite horse? Died of a fever. The Earl of Douglas and his rabble, great in number as they were, had no place in his thoughts, lest the earl present himself in manly form upon Barras Bridge, whereupon Harry would surely hand him his testicles. Indeed, a report of just such a meeting had reached his ears; but there were so many frauds and braggarts in God's world this came as no surprise. He, Hotspur, had dispatched his foe, besting him in hand-to-hand combat, kissing Douglas' cold brow as he died and kneeling thereafter to pray for his soul. Or another tale had Douglas steal his pennant.

What was fact, he had a tooth screaming in his jaw.

The moon was sufficient, the Scots unprepared and Harry determined to press home the advantage. Tired men by the hundred streamed into the valley and the enemy was met, the stink of it great and the roar of it drowned, limbs falling away and eyes blinded in the bloody cauldron of battle.

Morning came, and with it death for Douglas and defeat for Percy

The earl's ghost had won a splendid victory.

Clansmen shat and shivered under the tree in which Swene reposed, warmly frozen.

The fires that burned consumed dead and living souls.

And still he could write nothing.

It was left to the timorous margin-painters to glamorise the scene, to elaborate and scandalise the wantonness of the night, a pack of them slithering from cover, emerging from bushes and rabbit holes, picking over the remains and reporting what had transpired mostly from imagination. Swene gazed down at them. He could have no complaint being impotent of verse, yet their very excitedness offended, scurrying like dung beetles and nodding like fireside hounds. They did not respect the dead and cared less for the living. They muttered to themselves and clasped their hands, joyous in history, perhaps remotely relevant, one at least drowning in the Rede while his fellows watched, thinking to interview a passing laird, face up and barely breathing, on his way to the all-swallowing sea.

Swene closed his eyes and stared at the sun. It gave him a headache, but for a moment he thought to see the future; himself there in it, perhaps gazing back. Confused, he gripped his buckle and focused all his intent on what had passed, poorly illuminated, determined, through verse, to bring death to life.

1962

Some years before Alan Price opened a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale on a piano in the presence of Bob Dylan, touring at the time, just having played the City Hall, Hilton Valentine, future mechanic, sat picking at guitar strings and smoking cigarettes in the back room of the Dun Cow, himself and one Bryan Chandler at odds over chords and whose round it was, Price late as ever, Steel and Burdon playing darts. You could barely see the dartboard for smoke. It was an atmosphere of disagreement, uncertainty and flying arrows. A photographer, had one been present, might have captured an epic moment. But like much of history it went unrecorded, anonymous in time, what passed between those assembled, upright and sat down, inhaling and exhaling, animals to a man, adrift as light through space, only given substance via collision, in this instance with the page.

A full-stop crumpled into an ashtray.

Hilton stroked hair from his brow and cracked his thumbs. He wouldn't be around for Top of the Pops. He'd take a cup of tea and ask Swene for a spanner in 1981, get married and joke about pubes in his teeth, shiver in winter, laugh in spring, and ultimately fade like a comet's receding tail. That is, not fade at all, just move away.

1981

Perhaps it was the yet unknown nature of the hole. Perhaps it was the sheer enthusiasm of the hole digger. Soil, broken bricks, bottles. Six feet of it, three feet wide. Never did one soul take on such an exercise with such willingness and determination. The intercession of a JCB to complete the work, sides collapsing, the depth akin to a grave, met with disjointed opinion. Pour the concrete. Go ahead, still an inspection pit with one boy's name on it, frozen, burned and loving every minute, not far up the road from the public house that shared this garage's name, the pub having come first, the dun cow after which both pub and garage were titled grazing these hills long before the railway cut through and ‘the rocket’ was erected, the hairdresser’s across the road evolved from a front room and the chip shop round the corner mutated from a back kitchen the genesis of which was off the page. Good chips though. All demolished in time. Save the rocket, a block of flats endlessly fuelled by piss and vomit, made briefly famous by a 70’s commercial for Tudor crisps but yet to breach the clouds.

The garage was a desperate place that winter. Having left school in October, a dalliance with 6th form maturity backfired, Swene found himself unemployed, a term barely scratching the surface of the time as Thatcher's Britain convulsed, the post-school reality a starved river. He'd grown up with this era's genesis, the power cuts and shortages. He'd adapted to it, no longer taking sugar in coffee or tea. Impossible for a lad of sixteen to feel disappointment, however. So it was to the sump and the rusted chassis, long hours on freezing concrete under a vehicle pressing a hammer against steel plate while Davy welded the corrupted bones of Austin and Ford, burning his hands to the semblance of Titan and blinding him with a kind of truth. In heat and light majestic, thereunder, gazing away from the burning incandescence of exactly that time, the startling moment.

Davy's dog ran unfettered another day, a lurcher that foundered under a car in motion outside the concrete shell with its six by ten windows, those same to be bricked in the night by protagonists Swene was too naive to appreciate. He broke his arm soon after. A separate accident. A separation in time. But the end of an era.

The pit belonged to a new MOT bay. He spent hours painting the Ministry of Transport sign on a blanked window. Tricky those triangles, the way they intersected, but just about right and not a bad job really, white on blue and the business expanding. It was necessary to move all vehicles inside of an evening lest they be vandalised, and there was that time Swene was out back clearing spent car parts and tidying, when, from the heavens, a pool ball in a stocking tied with a length of string buried itself in the earth by his left boot.

No. 7, orange spot, thunk like a meteor. Its trajectory took the projectile back over the railway cutting where no one was to be seen, missing his head by inches.

Hilton was amazed. Davy incredulous. The boss fumbled for Benson & Hedges. Another window went out. The man in the imported Volvo coupe happened by with increasingly regularity, his face unrecognisable and his breathing shallow. The hairdresser’s closed. The days warmed. He looked back on the below zero mornings when the only liquid that was liquid was the milk in the fridge and the paraffin at a pound a gallon he fetched now and then from down the road.

His arm was broken foolishly weaving in and out of white lines on a pushbike. The garage, the emptied buckets of nuts and bolts, the making of tea, the cigarettes and the pissing out the back door, all sailed into history, with it the two busses to transport him home, save that one time Davy took him on a Suzuki.

The cold shell became a replacement window business. Swene became unemployed and the world turned, as ever, leaving some of its crew behind.

And that was that, brief and put through memory’s kaleidoscope, the pit’s significance yet untold.

1898

Each cold brick in his hand felt like a piece of history. The cement was his understanding, his appreciation of events past, moments momentous and mundane, breaths drawn and life uttered, whether silent or shouted, exclamations all. A year, a month, a day, an hour, a minute. Each was fired with equal importance, like the bricks themselves, here pasted into history. Foundations, abutments, walls. Thus rose a building, house or workshop, a public or private institution, in this instance a school.

Across the valley chimneys grew, outnumbering trees. The sun treated them the same, painting with a delicate brush. So many shades of grey, he thought, interspersed with green and gold, the reflections off painted awnings and polished brass, a world away from brick and mortar, the here and now of the bricklayer's task, which deemed nothing of import might exist outside of the run. The boundary line, the limit of his working eye a taut string. Hauling himself inside it once more he hefted a fresh fired stone and planted it amongst its peers, scraped and settled and fitted another piece of the jigsaw. And so did the wall rise, much as Hadrian's, a short sprint from here, sandal-footed legionnaires labouring over a different history, one centuries removed, casting eyes askance at colours in the sky and in the ground that still bore their footprints. Same as now, same as ever. Robert McEwan acknowledged them, at that moment sparking up and skipping down, in two hops and a jump on his way to the pub and a pint, froth on his lip and a doubt in his ear. Just how well had he secured that lintel?

His name was all over it and that mattered. A simple thing you might think, but in reality the setting of stones, whether by man or nature, was enough to shift fates and unbalance worlds.

209 Stanhope Street.

It may have been the nearness of Roman footworks, centurions shuffling through the parlour at all hours, but something about number 209 was wrong, amiss, chronicled in back streets and exaggerated in churchyards of a Sunday, where always the good were gathered. Rob often listened to the whispers of neighbourhood children previously missing for days, waifs returned to coal cellars wide-eyed and babbling in foreign tongues. Cats and dogs gyrated in crazed circles. Whole back terraces lit up with the semblance of vistas far removed, horizons recognisable yet absenting the streets themselves, unbroken by chimney or church spire, horizons from another age, one in keeping with the manufacture of a defensive wall, whitewashed and imperceptibly tapered, running east to west, twice the height of a man, castled by the mile and engraved with much Latin jocularity.

The fire was always lit. Smoke issued from the chimney a lighter shade of grey, however, as the coal burned in the hearth was transcendent, somehow purified by time. His mother sat before it as she had for years. His wife too; or almost his wife, that ceremony weeks away, the pair of them guardians of this mundane shrine. Perhaps they worshipped Mithras, much as the first men to bridge the river, Pons Aelius lasting a thousand years before it was destroyed by flame, its place taken by a stone crossing subsumed by flood centuries later, replaced then by a more substantial structure that itself gave way to the mechanised wonder of the Swing Bridge. Opened twelve years ago to much applause, thousands gathered on the Quayside thereabouts, a young Robert on his father's shoulders jostled amongst the crowd as the Europa, an Italian vessel, was first to pass through the gate of its clocklike jaws, hydraulic engines turning the roadway ninety degrees that the ship might collect a hundred ton gun from upriver at Armstrong’s Elswick works. Armstrong that had designed the bridge, whose factories along the Tyne supplied much of the world with munitions. Steel death, cold and clean.

An entire Japanese navy had germinated here. An American civil war had been populated with armaments from factories along these shores. Guns were Armstrong's stock in trade, great polished barrels and smoothly engineered projectiles, democracy at work as all were welcome to buy.

Robert's art was not dissimilar, only less deadly, the bricklayer attuned to symmetry as much as the arm's dealer, the stonemason akin to the business mogul, both being concerned with the exactness of the run. As he saw it, a row of bricks in sublime precision, as Armstrong chewed on his cigar, the beauty of man's sublimation of nature, and the bottom line. Armstrong saw himself as a visionary, electric light in his gothic pile a first, power drawn from water, spun and cranked and made to glow from Joseph Swan's own bulbs.

From his scaffold Robert could see a hundred streets. They ran mostly at ninety degrees to the river, uphill from the factories, the docks, the graveyards, interpolated by pubs and shrouded in shadow. They rang with life. They resonated with dreams. It was an enlightened age. As many schools as churches now, a new century beckoning and a union of his own on the horizon, a wife, and children to follow, and many, many pints of beer.

1432

Swene gazed out over Loch Fyne and understood he was lord of all he beheld. He clutched the staff that told him so, this descendant of Dalriada, son of nameless fathers, brother and ghost. All that lay ahead was future. All that lay within his vision was his, contested by none save otters. Their industry served as an example, he thought, a hint at earthworks and buildings to follow, the descendants of Ewen to look back on this place and take strength from perseverance, from building anew. Grow green, the land told him, survive and endure. Always new shoots, even from a stump.

1916

‘Two crowns! Two crowns!’ bellowed the private, circulating about a card game in Northern France. ‘You'll come to neither harm nor hurt!’ The luck with him as far as swirling hair patterns were concerned, two whorling universes colliding on his scalp. No such fortune in the hand dealt by the smirking sergeant who would prove his nemesis. ‘Two crowns!’ again declared, the private winking aback Rob McEwan, here too old for the army, here no questions asked. Here after too many pints. Here, fact. Family far removed. Here to make explosions.

‘Two crowns!’ Lucky Robby.

The rain pissed on him for days.

Shit, too, fell from the sky.

He lived in a hole and swam amongst human detritus.

Blood poured red, but the colour was first to drain away.

You didn't want to lose your tin opener.

You made sure your smokes stayed dry, even at the expense of your feet.

Best not to remind yourself of what you'd left behind.

He wasn't even sure he could fire a rifle. The first occasion he was obliged to it completely slipped his mind. Bullets flashed by, angry comets somehow disturbed by his gravity, the passage of each illuminated like a length of brilliant string. He could see the barrels from which they issued, trace their course through smoke and flesh, watch as they stitched men and lifted them from their feet, made bloody daisy-chains of his friends and comrades, exploded their heads and emptied their guts, tore their arms and ripped their legs, smashed their youthful faces and punctured their trembling chests. But he, Robert, not so much as a scratch.

‘Two crowns!’ bellowed the private, circulating about a card game in Northern France. Three of a kind to the sergeant's two pair.

What