Surplus
Darran Anderson | Tolka Issue Four, December 2023
The job was to collect memories. I hadn’t been back in town long and I wasn’t in much of a state to work, although I was even less cut out to starve. It was only temporary and I’m not sure there was ever an official job title. ‘Are you a good listener?’ was all they asked, which somehow sounded like a trick question.
The job required a researcher, of sorts, on a Mass-Observation-style project, to be sent out to homes, pubs and workplaces. While there, I’d simply encourage people to reminisce. Each time, I had to roll out a disclaimer that, in all likelihood, their testimony wouldn’t be used or would be whittled down to a passing anecdote in a leaflet. Still they wanted to share their stories, in meticulous and sprawling detail. So, paid by the hour, I let them.
The reels of tape grew from hours into days, full of lost things and first moments: the infancy of motor cars, electricity, telephones; the everyday music of shipyard steam whistles from a now-vanished harbour, air-raid sirens, shirt-factory horns; rabbit trappers and flax gatherers; the arrival of the American GIs; the disappearance of windmills and soap factories and the distillery closed by the boss who’d destroyed his own business rather than talk with a union; blackout wardens and rag-and-bone men and dead children. Many of those to whom I spoke could remember the days when the city was a port, when it had some dialogue with the wider world via the sea – not just in maritime tales of emigration to Liverpool, Boston, London and Melbourne but further afield. Boxing matches in Montevideo; explorations in the Arctic; missionaries in Polynesia. All gone now. Except in memory.
A case in point: Reel Fourteen, William ‘Billy’ Campbell, a sailor.
‘It took place in Christmas Island. Do you know it?’
‘I don’t.’
‘South of Java. Indian Ocean. I saw three atomic bombs dropped there. They gave you a photo, which I have somewhere . . .’ He waved towards the ceiling. ‘We were at sea. It detonated further out, maybe twenty-five miles from where we were. Five miles in the air. Airburst, they called it. A Vulcan bomber unloaded it and then flew all the way back to Britain to pass on the test results. A flash; my god, what a flash. And then, a few minutes later, the blast wave hit us.
‘We had a routine they tried to drill into us beforehand, but hardly anyone listened. Some of us had anti-flash goggles and sunscreen. Most didn’t bother. You couldn’t stare at it. With the initial explosion you had to turn your back, kneel down and hunch over, close your eyes and put your hands over them. Even then, the blast was so bright. It was like an X-ray. You could see the bones of your hands. You know when you were a boy and you pressed a torch to your skin? You know the glow and the shadow of your skeleton? It was like that. You felt the heat on your skin, tingling, and we all had sunburn, even though we were twenty-five miles away. The tidal wave hit after the blast and the ship rose up . . . Christ, at least thirty feet on the swell, I’d say.’
Billy’s wife, Jacqueline, came in after a quick rap on the door and offered us more tea. She was sprightly, kind, but from the moment we met she seemed to be carrying something I could not place. Not physically. Something intangible and silent, but a weight nonetheless. I’d asked her if she was willing to speak to me of her earlier life, but she’d laughed off the invitation awkwardly, in a way that made me feel I had somehow transgressed. All she had offered, with a curious degree of pride, like a child handing over a gift, was her maiden name: Woodbridge. She moved around the table humming a tune I could not place. The whirr of a lawn mower outside was broken by the sound of trucks shunting past. Time seemed to slow. There was a lengthy pause during which I felt irritation silently emanating from Billy. He barely glanced at her. I thanked Jacqueline for her kindness. Billy continued only when she left, as if exhaling a long-held breath.
‘There wasn’t a mushroom cloud like you see on the films. No, it was stranger than that. It happened way up in the sky, and it was every colour imaginable. It was a glowing ball climbing up into the air, with ropes hanging from it, like serpents crawling around each other, all of them changing colour. Shimmering like fish skin.’
He shook his head in disbelief at his own recollection. ‘It burnt the sky for three days. We told the locals in advance, so we wouldn’t frighten or injure them with the flash, but it blinded all the birds on the island. Permanently. No one had thought of that. It was only when their chicks hatched that any birds there could see again.
‘Years later I heard about the radiation. They hadn’t told us. Ah, we were probably all exposed. I knew sailors – good friends of mine, young fit men – who got cancer of the bones, the blood, the brain. For a while I thought it was the reason I had this hip of mine taken out . . .’ He tapped the rim of his wheelchair. ‘Maybe they didn’t know.’
‘Maybe.’
After I’d left their home I walked along the back roads, past the traveller encampment, a donkey tied to a tree, a burnt-out community centre. Having put enough distance between us, I stopped and sat at a derelict bus stop, checking my tape to make sure it had all recorded, cringing at the sound of my voice, the clumsiness of my questions, the little opportunities I should have pursued, the temperature of the discussion that I’d misjudged. When Billy mentioned visiting whaling stations close to Antarctica, I’d let romanticism get the better of me and suggested that the remoteness must be awe-inspiring, sublime. He immediately shot me down. They had been terrible places ‘where men had no honest business’. Norwegian sailors, ‘tough as old boots’, would sometimes harpoon the wrong part of a whale, the grapple embedding in its head, and the creature could drag the ship for miles. Despite his disgust, Billy’s voice carried the briefest traces of wonder, as if he could still not quite believe what he’d seen.
‘I stood with my boots on inside Shackleton’s hut, would you believe it. Place called Cape Royds. They’d wintered there, the crew of the Nimrod. Beds. Stove. It still smelt of coal and whiskey. Old bottles and tins on the shelf. Coats still hanging there. One of our lads – died young, poor sod – stole something from it. Wouldn’t even show us. So, we told him it was bad luck, cursed, and kept telling him, broke his balls night and day, until he threw whatever it was overboard, and then we told him that that brought even worse luck.’
Billy burst out laughing and rocked back on his wheelchair, a deep hearty laugh turning into a cough which he waved away like smoke.
‘Son, I could barely tell you what year it is or how old I am without counting, yet I can see Lorenzo Marques clear as day in my mind. Folks living inside craters on Tristan da Cunha. Stone Town. Cape Coast. All of them, crystal clear. I can see people walking around as if I’m there right now. Then other times . . . other details . . . I don’t know . . . the mind won’t stay still. It won’t come into focus. Somewhere . . . Freetown . . . Durban . . . I can’t be sure . . . I spent hours there once, watching bodies floating down the river into the sea, from the interior, whatever they were doing.’
I knew, sitting at the bus stop, listening to our voices already in the past tense, that Billy’s tales would not be used. They would be deemed too excessive or too astray. They would not fit the remit.
The project was not without purpose – they wanted stories they already knew. What use or interest could they have in the story of a bunch of sailors half a century ago on the other side of the world drawing straws to see who had to go with pickaxe handles and euthanise crazed birds, with their eyes burnt out, flying wildly along the ground? What relevance did an island rendered uninhabitable matter to the here and now? We were so much further along. I already knew but I sent it anyway, alongside others, and, sure enough, Billy’s story was deemed surplus to requirements and was never used or acknowledged.
I forgot about our talk until it turned up years later amid whatever data could be salvaged from a broken hard drive. I hadn’t even remembered that I’d kept or digitised any of the talks in the first place. Billy is long dead now, ending up where the blind birds went. Our voices sound strange on the recording – too high, too faltering, as if they were the voices of other people entirely. It makes for uncomfortable listening. A kind of past life regression. ‘Has it ever struck you’, Tennessee Williams wrote in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, ‘that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you hardly catch it going.’
There are lots of tangents to the conversation I didn’t remember until listening to the digitised recording. Or, rather, I’d forgotten that I remembered, like they were misfiled in a library. Before he was aware the tape was rolling, Billy had regaled me, with a ridiculous John Wayne swagger, with tales of how popular he had been with the ladies of Hong Kong, Indochina, Ceylon, back in his heyday, and how handy he had been with his fists, taking on Canadians, Yanks, Aussies, Kiwis, on shore leave. I remember now how he watched my face, intently, almost tenderly, for a reaction.
Yet the past erodes too, just as the sea consumes the land, so that all that was endured, all the experience and trauma, effort and particularity is washed away and forgotten. But, then, what does it matter? What is an island full of blind birds in the scheme of things?
Listening back, before filing away the audio, I remembered how Billy had rolled up his sleeves, showing off Union Jack and British bulldog tattoos, even though he’d lived in a Republican area most of his life. I remembered that he couldn’t get up from ‘the throne’, as he put it, to see me to the door, and how he remained sat in his wheelchair, staring into nowhere as I left. And I remembered his wife, maybe still alive, the whole time we talked, listening in at the other side of the living-room door, hearing those stories for the first and last time.
Darran Anderson is an Irish writer living in London. He is the author of Inventory (Chatto & Windus) and Imaginary Cities (Influx Press). Darran was a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Non-fiction Prize in 2023.
‘Surplus’ was first published in Issue Four of Tolka (November 2022). You can also subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
