GOYLE by Jean Sprackland

Goyle

Goyle is geule is gullet is throat. It’s one of those words you can’t live without here, like chert and mire. Goyle. It’s not just ditch. People here know the word ditch, they say ditch when they mean ditch. Goyle is other than that. 

It often marks a boundary. Maybe not the boundary you see on a map, when the solicitor pushes the document across. This is what you’re buying. You will own this parcel of land. (Land is always in parcels, as if it came wrapped and containing secrets. Which it does.) Your land extends from here – he clicks the end of his propelling pencil and points – to here. When you try to pace it out later, that boundary line sits inside a hedge, or wanders across from one streambank to another and back again. So no one bothers much about the lines on the map, unless they’re looking for a front on which to fight something out. The stream will do, the hedge will do. But if there’s a goyle, it’s the indisputable boundary, map or no map. Partly because no one would want to claim a goyle. Hedge or stream, maybe. Goyle, no.

But it is not a line on a map; it is steeply three-dimensional, jagged, narrow and secretive. Excavated by water, but dry six months of the year. Never meant for human traffic at all. Dank, trackless and mostly impassable.

*

When there is nowhere to go, where can I go?

Down. 

It starts here, occult among hazel, alder and blackthorn. Barbed wire grown over with bramble. A rusted gate, no longer capable of being opened and shut, but put to service, jammed across a gap, tied with rope so old it has become interesting, and I remember art. There is a dead thing, too big for a crow, washed down and rescinding. This is the goyle bottom, the clogged and anticlimactic place where all loose things come to rest. An entry point, for one who needs somewhere to be. I have to squeeze through a gap, past the immense stump of an oak, twice my height, bark torn away down one flank to reveal the pulled meat inside. I turn my back on the light and crawl in.

Fear. Not of human, not of any creature, but of the past, and what it might have left behind. I long to find –  of course I do –  arrowhead, potsherd or axe. The goyles do hold these things. But I dread them too. The past is so present, my own life so pressed and compressed I barely exist here. That kind of discovery could collapse time altogether, with me inside it. I inch forward, looking and trying not to look. 

*

The cottage where I am living is a simple instrument for the telling of weather. Wind pushes at the front or at the back, playful or spiteful, importing freshness or agricultural stink. Fingers the curtains as if to judge their quality. An old door slams. Out of every tree a bird takes fright. A dog at the farm makes five short barks in a row. I watch the dynamics of clouds: their sliding over and sliding beneath, the way they thicken and thin, the way they suck up colour and throw it down. A window levered open between them, just a crack at first, then wider, and then a sudden blaze of blue which makes the blood move in your body. You can lean out and feel that blue like a future. You can lean and count until it slides shut.

And now I too am an instrument for the telling of weather. Watching myself for signs. Lying awake and listening for changes. Feeling the recent illness flare and settle inside me. I came here to recover, and while I have been getting well the world has been getting sick. This has become a place of quarantine. Information finds its way along the top road but does not turn down the lane; there’s a sign there with a red circle warning it not to try. In any case the road is deserted now. I walked up there one day and there was nothing to see but a buzzard, tearing at its kill. 

Still, there can be sickness even in the world of the seedhead – I turned one in my fingers yesterday and saw it was stricken. And bees stagger in under the blue cowl of the monkshood, sucking up sweetness and poison in one dizzying draught.

*

How did the water eat so deep a channel, now no more than a seep? Cold sweat runs down the face of the wall. I lick and find it sweet. It runs into a basin of roots, where the twisted feet of trees grip the sill.

A basin lined with moss. A drop swells on the lip of a leaf and falls like a word being said, breaks in the green basin and runs away not quite to nothing. Then a small silence, before the next drop gathers and speaks. I wait the silences the way I would wait between the chimes of a church clock, as I crossed a square in some town or another, listening for the bell to tip and swing on its yoke, for the heavy muscle of the tongue to flex and utter its one word, again and again, the only word in the language. This hour no different from the hour just spent or squandered, this day like every other, and every moment tending towards the next: the toll of the bell, the dripping tap, the footsteps echoing and draining away.

That was another life. Today, water pools and drips and is meek, but it must have other moods. The way darkens ahead, and I have to duck under a prostrate branch, like the barrier at a level crossing – symbolic, wouldn’t stop you if you wanted to. Then over a high complicated threshold onto a staircase of black roots. An ancient ash squats overhead like an old king with his robes hitched up. No no, a machine, parked over the inspection pit, where I stand and examine the underworks (they scan with computers these days, but there must still be a need to diagnose by looking). It’s propped on nothing, and the parts are seized with mud. Couldn’t it fall any moment and crush me? Time too is a structure barely supported, could simply fold and take us all with it. 

These smooth black stools on the rotting branch I know as King Alfred’s Cakes, which I always thought was a folk-name, like shepherd’s purse and snapdragon. But likeness collapses as I look at it – they don’t just resemble the burnt cakes, they are them, snatched from the fire and flung out of doors by a hard-pressed woman who doesn’t know he’s the king, or doesn’t care. You useless bugger, can’t you get anything right?

Yes, that must be it – whatever happened, anytime, anywhere, is happening here, now –

Hush, hush, you’re tired. Get you out from under the royal privy, find somewhere safe to rest. Goyle is a place where no one goes. Ivy makes a good bed, its huge leaves supple as leather, glossy as hearts. Its fat black berries. Ivy will work its enchantment.

*

To lock something down is to hold it fast, keep it still, stop it shifting or changing. Straps and buckles in a rental van, meant to secure your things so they don’t come loose as you take a bend or hit the brakes. A vault, where certain items are stashed – chemicals, papers, quantities of gold. Or a promise, requiring to be sworn and inked and given the legal stamp. But nothing is secured here, nothing is stopped or held fast. Illness has its own vitality. Spring will not be restrained by straps or signatures. Its furniture skids and collides, chemicals are spilt and volatile, promises like apple blossom torched by frost. 

If I made a film of 2020, it would look like this. 
Close-up: a clump of jelly squiggles on the underside of a leaf, with black dots trapped and writhing inside. 
Long shot: the hard, wild eyes of the hen pheasant, eighteen days on her nest in the frozen nettles. 
Cut: Rowan tree with robin. Sparrowhawk. Rowan tree.

*

Goyle is a throat, through which voices are funnelled and mysteriously reversed: the voice of an owl in hunt, a chainsaw, a fallen lamb. A throat that swallows things too – things like light, and time. It swallows me, when I want to be swallowed. So I lie on my quilt of ivy and dream of my days here. Rain feathering brown and white stones. Deer stepped from a medieval frieze. Rookery shattered by gunshot. Bees deep in the brain of the hollow log.

When there is nowhere to go, where can I go?

Moon showing a busted face. Black fruits glowing in the rafters.