We’re all desperate to be in the Book, of course, even those who led exemplary lives, giving to the poor and praying a lot and working their socks off, and who now find themselves on unremarkable twigs with no added extras, for an unremarkable length of time, in moderate temperatures, waiting rather smugly to go to heaven. Very little narrative life in them, I feel. Now a poor sinner like myself, five hundred years and counting in an oak that refuses to die a natural death, struck by lightning, hollowed and twisted, no good now for beams or planks and so far off the beaten that you’d need a real effort of will to get the tools out here to do the job. An excellent case study, if he only knew, what with my sins being so many, so unusual and so apt.
There is endless speculation about his taxonomy. Something sternly Linnaean would work best, I am convinced of that, a proper natural history of the species and habitats of the anaon, carefully teasing out their similarities and differences. The drowned, for example, if it is not tactless of me to dwell on them, should be separated out into:
The drowned at sea
– working, as sailors or fishermen
– travelling, to pardons or for pleasure, as his own beloved sisters and their husbands and his father will be one day
– and those who are occasionally swept – or throw themselves – off cliffs and promenades
The drowned in rivers
– working, as fishermen, or bargemen, or loaders of tobacco and sardines at the docks
– travelling, to pardons, or for pleasure, or both
– fooling around
The drowned in ponds, wells or ditches
– children
– drunkards
– suicides
– the murdered, especially newborns, you’d be surprised how many.
And then, for each type of drowning, the relevant premonition:
– by dream, witness the story of the parents obliged to watch their little girl asleep, unable to wake, dreaming that her bed, and then the whole room, was filling slowly with water.
– by signs, subtle and deadly: a false reflection; white moths outside a window.
– less subtly, an encounter with wet and ragged Iannik an Aod who, when their time is coming, calls out in a fearful voice to those who live and work along the coast.
And then, for each type of drowned soul, the most likely place of penance: not always twigs, from what I hear, though many of course end up in gorse bushes and thorn trees along the coast. Witness the admittedly aberrant case of the woman who did fifty years in a farmyard water tank, waiting for someone to throw in a ‘rescue pebble’ (not a concept I would, myself, have permitted in the great scheme of things, but there you are, recorded is recorded and it must be classified somehow). Which some child did, eventually, and was startled out of his wits to see it thrown back out again.
And then, if necessary, any significant regional variation: assuming, as they all seem to, that Tregor will be taken as the norm, the gold standard, the Attica of Breton tradition.
And that, heaven help us, is just the drowned.
I’m no expert, of course, having only ever destroyed books, not written them, but I suspect, deep down, that his weakness for sentimental description will get in the way of him producing a decent working system.Though I keep that thought, as far as I can keep anything now, to myself.