Zoë Strachan

“The museum shop and toilets will be closing in fifteen minutes.”
Parents start trying to coax children away from the goldfish.
“The museum will be closing in fifteen minutes.”
Teacups clatter in the café as the staff clears up for the day.
“You know we’re getting ready to close now?”
The attendants are polite but firm as they round up those who’ve lingered too long in enthralling corners, shooing them gently towards the lifts and stairs.
“The museum will close in five minutes.”
Security bands snap into place across bridges and pathways. The last coat, red wool with oversize buttons, is checked out of the cloakroom. Those who spend each and every one of their days in the museum, lurking in quiet spots, reading books or gazing into space, swapping benches with each chime of the clock, gather their belongings and disappear into the Edinburgh evening.
There’s more bustle now, all of a sudden, an occasional raised voice or trickle of laughter as the doors are locked and the lights switched off. Swift feet rattle up stairs, past the Flodden wall where one voice leaps above the others in song, punctuated by giggles:
“The flowers of the forest are a’ wede awa’”.
A man heads across the road to Sandy Bell’s for a pint of IPA and to share the things he knows with other drinkers, interested and not. A woman is tempted into a glass of dry white with friends in Negociant’s, though she’d planned an early bath and bed. Car headlights dazzle through scraps of haar, and people flow towards the Meadows, towards the town. Alone and in clusters, the front of house staff pass through Bristo Port and scatter into the city.
Curators sigh and power down their computers, put proposals and reports aside for the evening. One woman wraps her hand round a bolt from the Forth railway bridge and squeezes, another polishes a small resin block in which an undulating polychaete is frozen. One after the other they emerge from behind doors marked Private and pad down the red-carpeted stairs, blinking at the darkness of the museum corridors.
When the last person has gone home, when the alarms have been set and the staff entrance sealed, the museum breathes a sigh of relief and settles in its foundations, nudging up against the middens of the old town, the dropped coins and butchers’ bones. A fish leaps clean out the water, turns a graceful arc and splashes back down. After a while the first tentative, twitching whiskers of a mouse edge out from below a case in which a silver hoard dully glows.
It isn’t until after midnight that a new noise begins on Level 3. A persistent click; some piece of machinery trying to catch. The mice pause, look around, decide there’s nothing amiss and scurry along the hems of the cabinets, nosing towards any tasty scraps which have dropped from visitor’s bags or pockets.
Thunk.
The noise resonates through the silence, and this time the mice scatter. Click. Creak. Clunk. Thud. Another creak as the mechanism warms. A soaring moment then another clunk. A whoosh like far away wind in the eaves. Thud.
Slowly building again to click, creak, clunk, thud.
The alert spreads through the gallery, reflections plummet down the darkened glass of the cases, a tremor of impact shivers through the floor. The Newcomen engine is cranking up, remembering, pumping water from a non-existent colliery which slices through the heart of the museum. Corridors and stores fade into ladders and levels, and deep down underground shadowy men chip away at a seam of sparkling black coal.
Dredging for water that isn’t there, the engine heaves up stories instead.
Clunk.
Creak.
Thud.
Tallie whechars flicker in the dim, projecting a magic lantern show of scenes. The museum spreads just like a mine; it twists and turns into tunnels and hollows, rich lodes in each one.
In Dunbartonshire, a woman shoulders a creel of peat and begins the weary trek home. As her feet squelch in the boggy ground Jean looks toward the fermtoun and tries hard to imagine another way to live. But her daughter Annie has a fire roaring up the chimney of the cruck-framed house, and soon Jean’s feet are drying and her bones growing warm. If she knew at that moment a salmon was writhing on a leister, earmarked for dinner, she’d feel happier still. Annie has just learned to operate the spinning wheel, and though she’s a great deal slower than her mother she keeps at it, slowly teasing the wool they’ve gathered into yarn.
Clunk, thud, goes the engine, and pictures are drawn from further north and further east, halfway to Shetland, where it’s getting too dark to see by firelight. The click of knitting needles on Fair Isle ceases for the evening. Stockings and bunnets and scarves are laid carefully aside. Since the Prince wore a pullover on the golf course nimble fingers have been blistering as they rise to the demand from the stylish southern crowd, looking for complements to their plus fours and Oxford bags.
Clunk, thud, goes the engine, through firedamp and roof falls and noble pit ponies, and all the while the miners chip away. “You’re pissing up my leg”, Davy shouts over the din, answering a bellow from a workmate along the tunnel. “Close the pit? With this amount of coal?” The reek of cordite fills the air.
Clunk, thud.
Out at sea, over on St Kilda, Richard Kearton watches as Finlay Gillies lays a horsehair trap along a crest of craggy rock. The puffins are canny, they circle overhead under finally curiosity gets the better of one. He alights, starts pecking, then when he tries to fly away he can’t. One foot is snagged in a noose. His wings flap, attracting another bird, then another, until the trap is a seething mass of squawking, squabbling puffins, each blaming the next for their own misfortune. So that he can photograph the drama, Richard’s brother Cherry is secured by a rope, also fashioned from horsehair, though there haven’t been any horses on the island for many years now. When Finlay goes to collect his flapping prize he spurns his heirloom rope, skimming the rock in stocking soles, never looking down into the choppy waters below. Richard makes notes in his book, Cherry’s camera shutter clicks and releases, and if either of them wonder for how much longer men – and women, for didn’t Martin Martin record that one woman snared 127 puffins in just three hours on Stac Lee? - will trap birds in this way, in this brutal place, they refrain from mentioning it, even to each other.
“Just think,” Cherry says year later, “No music, no play.”
Clunk, thud, goes the Newcomen engine, clunk, thud.
He only stole bread to stop from starving, and surely to cling to survival without causing injury to others is man’s moral right? With a hideous sizzle of flesh, a mark the size of a sixpence is branded on the forehead of Alexander Steuart. Despite this, and the heavy collar fastened around his neck, his brush with the gallows has left him glad to be alive. Whether he’ll feel the same a year – or ten – from now remains to be seen. Lying in the dark, his lungs full of dust, back crooked against a two-legged stool as he tries to get purchase on his holing pick, he might well wish he was dead rather than a serf.
Clunk, thud, goes the engine, clunk, thud. It’s 1984, and techniques have improved since Steuart’s day, but no laughter rings out 3000 feet under the Lothian soil. The strike is coming for sure, and no priest will venture down in the cage to give the pits the last rites.
Clunk, thud. “I am come home sir,” says the Bonnie Prince as his first footsteps tramp an unfamiliar seed into Hebriddean soil. A month later he toys with his fine new canteen of cutlery, untwists the cork from the neck of a bottle and sniffs, wondering how long this tour of the Highlands will take. Letting his thoughts drift forward into a fantasy of kingship. But the bindweed tangling along the shore of Eriskay will prove more lasting than the excitement of the Forty-Five. In the blink of an eye Culloden’s been and gone, and Carolina Oliphant is crafting a lament for her namesake, hoping it’ll cheer her father and grandfather, old Jacobites the pair:
“Sweet the lav’rock’s note and lang,
Lilting wildly up the glen;
And aye the o’ver world o’he sang
Will ye no’ come back again?”
Sparked by the engine, a new noise bounces around Level 3, echoing off pillars and ceiling. A bolt popping free from a girder and clattering over the pale limestone floor as Victoria’s train whisks her across the Tay, the bridge weakening a fraction more under her trunks full of tartans and plaids. Six months later, more bolts than one fly out and seventy five people plummet down with the train. The girder screams and warps at the memory of the day the bridge collapsed.
Clunk. Thud.
At Glenfield and Kennedy, a man dips a fine brush in enamel paint and sketches a swan and cygnets onto a display water meter. Thinking of fishing, of afternoons spent on the bank of the Irvine, of how when the weather improves he’ll walk there with his son, telling him of flies and lures. He adds ripples of cooling water, a few swaying reeds.
Clunk, thud goes the engine, and over in Glasgow, the silhouette of luxury flats fades and time shifts back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Seven men sweat as they guide a heavy shaft for the Great Eastern under the massive steam hammer at Lancefield Forge. The piston falls once more, clunk, thud, and the Countess of Dundonald graciously accepts a silver casket and ivory hammer from a representative of Fairfield’s, not quite sure where she’ll put them but mildly gratified nonetheless. HMS Cochrane slides out into the Clyde, primed for the Great War and destined to survive the Battle of Jutland only to be wrecked two years later in the homelier waters of the Mersey.
Clunk, thud.
At North Ronaldsay the light twinkles and flips, eight radiating beams sweeping round the horizon in their own unique pattern . The highest land-based lighthouse in Britain, in 1998 it’ll work alone, automated.
“Lighthouses, eh?” the young Stevenson says, passing by the Bell Rock. “I’ve seen enough lighthouses on this jaunt to last me a lifetime. But I’ll warrant I can dream up a tale of high adventure set on the open seas.”
Sure enough, one chill September morning at Kinnaird, an adventure for boys takes shape, and Robert Louis’s father proves the biggest boy of all. “Flint’s old ship was named the ‘Walrus’!” he cries, and his son is pleased to concur.
Clunk, thud. The Comet eases out of Leith en route to London. Emigrants and adventurers wave goodbye to Greenock and Dundee, seeking new lives and new fortunes in New Zealand and Canada. Ranges are fed and clothes put through the mangle. At crossroads and village halls, in parks and town squares, war memorials blossom all over the land.
It’s halfway through the night now, the dead hours. Darker stories approach, ones which would send a shiver down Alexander Steuart’s aching spine. The swoop of the piston mirrors that of the Maiden as it cleaves some poor hapless soul’s head from his shoulders. The next swoop conjures up another execution, less smooth, less clean. Mary’s lapdog cowers under her skirts, his yelp unnoticed as his mistress slumps to the floor.
“Sweet Jesus,” she’s heard to whisper, but it takes another blow to sever her neck, another still to slice through the last bit of gristle. Henry Grey, Earl of Kent, fastidiously notes that, “the blooddye cloathes, the blocke, & what soever els bluddye was burned, in the chimneye fyer”. Lucky then for little dog Geddon, that when he’s finally wrenched from Mary’s corpse he’s whisked off to be washed, so imbrued with her blood is he.
Tireless - clunk, thud - the engine keeps on, forcing up deeper, more distant stories. It’s check mate on Lewis, the white king tips over. A penannular brooch dazzles as it’s pinned to the breast of a cloak for the first time. A drunk man scrambles onto the back of a long-suffering pony for the hundredth time.
A Roman shyly hands a gift to a Scots woman, whose father was a Viking. She turns the pot over to see the letters he’s written, listens as he explains what they signify. She’s suspicious, but reckons that even if it’s a spell, it’s one she wouldn’t mind falling under. Love Me, he says, I Love You.
Sharp flint lodges in a man’s spine and he crumples in the long grass. Cain’s history won’t be written for another six thousand years, but this is no accident. An arrow fired through experiment rather than malice, a warped quest for knowledge, a tragic “what if?”
Down, much lower down, the first pines take root in the north, the first oaks in the south. An Arctic fox barks and a bear yawns wide.
Thud, clunk, thud, clunk, emotions surge through the building, pulses of fear and joy and hate and love. Boredom is there too, of course it is, and resignation, but the Newcomen engine sifts through it all, casting up glittering fragments on the tide of murky water. The memories which give the exhibits meaning, the people who once stained them with sweat and blood and tears, with the warmth of hope and the chill of despair.
All through the night the engine thuds, until dawn breaks and the last reverberation echoes against stone. Slowly the levels fade again, history freeze frames on pedestals and behind glass, and the museum is still. The mice conduct their last reconnaissance before the cleaners come in, and a little later the Bristo Port entrance reopens.
One man has a skip in his step, for he found a captive audience of tourists keen to hear his tales of resurrectionists and other ghouls. One woman drags her heels and curses another late night. At nine o’clock the Tower entrance admits a group of early visitors, eager and fresh. Behind them a familiar face, a man plodding up to level 5, a quiet corner seat in which to read his book. Before long children are screaming through Hawthornden Court on their way to see the Maiden. Hearts beat a fraction faster as visitors twirl to follow the declaration of Arbroath. And sometimes, just sometimes, a person stands with her nose pressed against a display, and before she knows what’s happening the light changes and the noise of the museum fades. Some tiny invisible key inside her springs the case wide open, and just for a second, she steps forward and into the past.
At 3.30pm a man in a blue boiler suit will press the button which starts the Newcomen engine. And with a somnambulant thud, the piston will begin to rise and fall, rise and fall.