We Float Upon a Painted Sea

Saffron needed to meditate. Her mind was still in a state of confusion. It wasn’t the first time she had witnessed violence, but it was the first time she had seriously feared for her life. Her plan had been to be brave and make a determined stand at the Arctic oil rig, despite knowing she and her GM team were entering a disputed zone: since the melting of the sea ice, and the opening up of methane hydrate exploration, the threat of international armed conflict was never far away. When the Russian security guards opened fire, Saffron had dropped her banner and climbed into the ship’s life boat to cower. Later she found one of the crew had been shot in the leg and seven others had been arrested and taken into custody. They would have certainly been destined for a Siberian gulag if not for the intervention of the Earth Liberation Front.

With the destruction of the drilling rig and the arrival of the Russian navy, it was time to flee. The GM trimaran had easily outrun the lumbering Russian warship, but it had been with great relief they reached Norwegian waters and the port of Hammerfest. They had moored at the floating dock for two days and after taking on fresh supplies and making repairs, the ship headed for the Shetland Islands. On entering open seas, they were followed by another ship flying a Russian ensign. The GM ship’s radar could not detect it but visual sightings confirmed it was keeping pace with them. In accordance with their orders, they continued to St Kilda, ironically hoping the military presence on the Islands would dissuade the Russians from following.

High up in the superstructure of the ship, Saffron watched the guillemots flying in an erratic formation, their little bat like bodies jostling for position only a few feet above the surface of the sea. They are a good omen on our journey to St Kilda, despite the pursuing Russian ship, she thought. For a time, a pod of bottlenose dolphins escorted them, but as the trimaran drew close to the Butt of Lewis the Captain decided on a change in direction. Now back in British waters, they had hoped for a triumphant return, but there had been no mention of the incident in the Arctic, at least not by the established media. Instead, they had been informed of a Royal Navy warship spotted close to the Finnan Islands. It was boarding all vessels in the area. They turned south and towards the Isle of Skye, hugging the coastline and still the Russian ship trailed them. On another day Saffron would have appreciated the scenery but on this day her mind was troubled. The landscape acted like an ominous backdrop to an unfolding situation. She studied the columnar basalt cliffs, stacked like the stone pipes of some giant organ and shrouded by vortexes of grey spinning clouds. On the shore below the crushing rocks manifested in Saffron’s eyes like ancient statues, moulded from the molten entrails of Mother Nature and sculpted by the motion of the chilling sea. This was a land steeped in nature’s historic violence, she thought. Such gothic beauty and bleakness. It sent a shiver up her spine. Saffron felt a sense of foreboding wash over her. Moreover, she had lost her Peruvian knitted alpaca hat to the ferocious wind and her face was numb with cold.

They slipped under the Skye Bridge and made for the sound of Sleat. Sandwiched between the Cullin Hills and the Island of Rum, they plotted a course towards Harris and then to Hirta, the largest island of St Kilda. As they approached the shoreline, above the roar of the wind, Saffron could hear the abrasive throaty call of nesting gannets and the softer trill of the petrels. The sounds of bird life offered her some cheer, but signs of human activity would have offered her more comfort. There appeared to be a gathering of sorts in the village. Even at considerable distance she could hear music. She yearned for a return to a level of normality she had previously enjoyed before the Change. It had been a long time since she had went to a ceilidh, danced and drunk poitín until dawn. Nonetheless, the Captain decided they would continue to the quieter side of the island, closer to the military base. Later in the evening they dropped anchor in Loch Ghlinne. A carnival atmosphere would normally have broken out around the decks when making land, but the crew’s hugs and kisses were borne out of a sense of relief rather than celebration. The falling gradient of the sun’s light did nothing to raise their spirits and to compound matters, the Russian ship was spotted on the horizon. They congregated on the foredeck waiting for the Captain to address his eco-warriors, but on this occasion there was no customary speech. He remained in the ship’s bridge and First Mate, Fredrick Van Blauvelt was left to inform the crew of the Captain’s difficulty contacting the other GM vessel. He told them they had to rely on their VHF radio as the satellite communication system was inoperable, but as things stood they were on their own for the time being. He reassured them the Russian ship had illegally entered British waters using stealth technology and would soon be challenged by the Royal Navy. So far the Russians had not responded to their own transmissions. Fredrick Van Blauvelt raised his hands in a reassuring gesture. He asked for calm and said,

“As soon as the Captain contacts the sister ship we will decide on a rendezvous site and…” Fredrick Van Blauvelt stopped, his face frozen. A low pitched, subterranean growl sounded deep in the bowels of the earth and rumbled on like a muffled groan, reverberating around the bay like a tumbling roll of thunder. Saffron gripped the guardrail while the trimaran shivered, its structure amplifying the bellowing sound from below. She gazed towards the shoreline where a precipitous ebb tide was drawing back the ocean to reveal the kelp strewn boulders of the sea floor. She felt a sudden wooziness in her head. Time slowed to a grinding halt. And then a sea stack close to the nearby island of Boreray crashed and fell into the ocean. In Loch Ghlinne, the sea quivered like milk being brought to a rolling boil. Frightened screams filled the air.

Many of the crew held each other in a terrified embrace, but some, like the Boson’s mate remained calm. He sat cross legged, took out his tobacco tin and began to roll a cigarette. The rumbling noise faded but was superseded by an unearthly sucking sound emanating from the water. As the water drained from the shoreline, the island appeared to grow. Saffron was overcome with the unsettling feeling she was waiting for an inevitable outcome, helpless like a fly caught in a spider’s web. Then she was overcome by an urge to take flight from the ship. The ship seemed to groan as its anchor strained against the reverse flow of the sea and then a sudden jolt as the three hulls of the trimaran collapsed upon the unveiled rocks. Standing members of the crew were cast down on the deck, but Louis Vedder, the Quarter Master lost his grip on the guardrail and fell from the ship onto the rocks below. He cried out in pain, his cries acting as a clarion call for a state of open panic to descend around the ship.

The crew stumbled around in no particular direction, like ants when their nest is exposed to the sunlight. Saffron climbed down to the foredeck and attempted to persuade anyone who would listen to follow her off the ship. Like a little girl trying to catch the attention of the preoccupied adults, she buzzed around them, pulling on their arms. More direct action was needed. Saffron untied one of the bow lines and threw it overboard. With some agility, she abseiled to the exposed seafloor, burning her hands on the rope as she went. Saffron ran to the wounded Quarter Master and tried to help him to his feet. Finally her actions caught the attention of the First Mate. It was Fredrick Van Blauvelt who issued the call to abandon ship. The klaxon alarm sounded. Slipping and falling on the kelp covered rocks, the crew stumbled to the shore. They didn’t stop climbing until they reached the top of the cliff. Catching her breath, Saffron looked back towards the ship. A chill of ice ran the length of her spine. Down in the bay, a monstrous wave surged up from the ocean, gathering height and velocity as it met the shallows of the island. Still in the bridge, she could see the Captain staring defiantly out to the sea. As tradition would have it, he was the last off the ship, but it would be too late for him. Panic rose in her breast. Her pitiful scream was snatched away by the roaring wind, throwing her and the crew to the ground in its path across the island. And then the rolling white wall advanced into the bay, raising the ship and propelling it against the rocks.

...............................................................

Saffron would take pride in her unconventional upbringing: her parents had both dropped out of university to join a ménage of new age travellers, taking off to Tibet on a Buddhist pilgrimage. She conceived and was born in a VW campervan a few miles outside the city of Mumbai, near the meeting place of two of Hinduism’s holy rivers, the Ganges and Yamuna. This was the same place where the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi were scattered and where Saffron had once believed was her spiritual home. She was a child of the earth even though the passport she travelled with would state otherwise. She believed nationalism only drove a wedge between people.

When her parents returned to Scotland they picked up their studies again, but both found it hard to adjust to normal life after their travels. When Saffron’s father was offered a scholarship to conduct his doctorate at the University of Southern California he took the opportunity but within four years he was back on home soil and working as a lecturer of Maritime Studies at Aberdeen University. The Burke family all moved to Aberdeen when Saffron was seven years old to start a new school, but within a year Saffron and her mother were back in Glasgow. The following year her father had taken a new job at the National Oceanography Centre in London.

As Saffron grew older she would get the occasional letter, Christmas present and birthday card from her father, but an invite to come and visit or to meet with her failed to materialise. This precipitated her mother to ostracise him from Saffron’s life altogether and she vowed she would, under no circumstances, speak to her father again. Saffron’s mother married a financial expert who worked in Edinburgh and Saffron took her stepfather’s name of Wilton. She protested at first but as she grew older she thought less about her father, Professor Earl Burke. Her step-father became the focus of everything she hated about a society obsessed by wealth, stature and vanity, but he treated her like his own child and put her churlishness down to what he called, “natural teenage rebellion.” Mr Wilton believed this doggedness would be driven out of her after a few years at the Cademuir International Boarding School for girls in Moniaive.

Her step-father’s attempts to normalise the young Saffron had the opposite effect, and as each semester came and went she became more radicalised in terms of politics and her views on society. The manner in which she dressed was a constant source of amusement to him. One summer she returned home for the holidays dressed in a tartan mini skirt, ripped tights and black knee length army boots. Her step-father stood in the doorway of their Kelvinside home and looking at her with a critical eye, he asked,

“Have you been earning extra pocket money working as an extra on that new zombie movie they’ve been shooting at the Necropolis?” Saffron stared at him with a look of contempt etched across her face. She brushed by him, dropped her bag on the floor and said,

“Yeah, if you like Alasdair. If that’s the best anecdote you can come up with?” Her step-father, not to be outdone, followed her down the hallway to continue their altercation. He was now joined by her mother who skidded to a halt and gasped, retracting her hands up to her mouth in surprise when she recognised her daughter under the heavy dark eye makeup, black lipstick and dreadlocks.

“Did you steal those boots off Frankenstein’s monster?” laughed her step-father. Without looking back, Saffron extended a fist with one erect middle finger. Saffron’s mother was now holding onto her husbands arm. She said,

“Don’t Alasdair, you’re only providing her with an axe to grind. I’ll go and talk with her later, when she’s calmer.” He shouted after her,

“Why don’t you just screw some bolts into your neck and be done with it, Saffron?”

When she was home Saffron would spend most of her time sketching in her room or playing with her cat. Willow provided her with the only sense of connection she had with her parent’s house. She would spend hours grooming her coat whilst all the time talking to her in both human and feline voices. Her parents had become more anxious about her pensive moods and need for solitude. One day she redecorated her room, painting a mural on the walls she described as a dichotomy of wealth versus nature. Her stepfather declared it an act of vandalism and ordered it to be painted over. He suspected one of the images, of a pig dressed up to look like city banker suckling on the teat of an exhausted Mother Earth, was too close a resemblance to himself. They talked about psychologists and whether she was taking drugs, but Saffron was never interested in laboratory processed narcotics, not when nature provided her with every bodily high she required.

She studied Sculpture and Environmental Design at Glasgow School of Art where she became involved with her environmental group. One evening they stopped a train delivering coal to one of a new batch of coal fired power stations. When the police arrived, they emptied the coal onto the embankment and chained themselves to the tracks. Saffron was later arrested and released without charge, much to Alasdair’s annoyance. “A good stint in prison will sort the girl out,” he said, only half seriously. Four years later she graduated. She took a year out to retrace her parents footsteps by travelling to India and Thailand and when she returned back home she appeared more content and settled, but not in the manner her step-father had hoped for.

One day, her parents were sitting outside on the garden patio furniture, soaking up the last of the evening sunshine with a glass of wine when Saffron returned from her trip. She was wearing an Indian embroidered caftan with an array of multicoloured ethnic beads around her neck. Her step-father looked around when he heard her voice and then immediately put his hand to his head in disbelief. He waited until she had exchanged pleasantries with her mother then welcomed her return with an embrace, talking to her like she was a child again.

“Ah, Saffron, you’re back and now you’re a hippy! Well it’s comforting to know all the money I spent on your education and sending you halfway around the world to broaden your horizons wasn’t wasted.” His face became sombre. “You better not be smoking any of that wacky tabacky.” Saffron turned to him, picked up the bottle of wine, held his stare and said,

“Still drinking wine from unethical sources dad?” When Saffron walked down the tree lined garden path, rounded the terracotta pots and entered the house, her step-father turned to his wife and imitating a tear in his eye and a sniff, said,

“Did you hear Mrs Wilton? For the first time, she called me dad. Who said money can’t buy you love.”

……………………………..

The Praying Mantis arrived at the Kelvingrove Protest in the Park and through the hordes of environmental activists she had noticed Bull. She watched him curiously from afar, his body gyrating out of time to the music. He then froze and moved his head from side to side as if surveying the scene and then he was off again, jumping up and down and flapping his arms at his side in sporadic movements. She withdrew a photograph of him from her bag and stared at the image. 339’s him, she thought, but why attract so much attention to yourself? She continued to observe from afar, fascinated by his unsynchronised animated motion and ostentatious display of running in circles and then what appeared to be a crude figure of eight. As the choreography unfurled, the crowd parted to allow him space and Bull treated them to some violent head slapping and self-flagellation. This one was going to be a challenge, she thought.

She wondered if his frantic virtuoso display was provoked by a drug induced state of mind, or influenced by one of the symbolic tribal ritual dances similar to what she had witnessed during her trip to the Amazonian rainforest. She felt compelled to get closer, and as she did it became apparent the man was in actual fact being harassed by a bee. She moved towards her subject and stood in his shadow. She studied him – he was much larger than the usual MoDs filters. Filters tended to be weasel-like and ragged in appearance. Perhaps they were getting desperate, she thought. Her subject tracked the departing insect as it disappeared into the sky. She could now begin her psychological assessment. Edging closer, she was almost by his side. She noticed a curious statement written on his t-shirt. This was the trigger she needed. She started to laugh. “Hi,” she said, “I’m Saffron.”

……………………………..

One summer’s afternoon, Saffron called her mother to ask her about an herbal remedy for Bull’s eczema. Soon the conversation turned to her problems with Bull. She complained about his personal hygiene and his slovenliness. Her mother tried to offer some understanding.

“Saffron darling, all men are like lazy, challenging children at heart. If you’re going to change them, you’ll find it’s just a slow process of re-education through a practice of gentle pressure and incentives. Think of it being a bit like house training a puppy, only not as fun.”

“You shouldn’t have to change anyone, you should accept them for the way they are but he makes the narrowboat smells like the chimp house at Edinburgh zoo. When he’s not drinking beer he’s smoking. He lifts his leg to pass wind and he sleepwalks every night. He seems lost but somehow he always finds his way to the fridge. Yesterday, I caught him cleaning out his ears using one of my false fingernails, which he painstakingly glued to his finger for the job.” Saffron and her mother laughed at the ludicrous spectacle manifesting in their minds.

“Maybe you should travel together and experience a change of scenery,” exclaimed Saffron’s mother.

“His work and my campaigning commitments ensure we rarely have the time to emotionally unwind as a couple. Anyway, his idea of a holiday is the Munich Oktoberfest. I tried to tell him about my trip to Manchu Picchu. I tried to inspire him about the lost city of the Incas and share my experience of touring South America. He wasn’t impressed.”

“To be fair Saffron, retracing the motorcycle tyre tracks of Che Guevara isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.”

“His eyes glazed over when I tried to describe Peru, until I mentioned canoeing on Lake Titicaca. He laughed and said, I like the sounds of that resort. I told him Lake Poopo was probably more his type of place.” Saffron and her mother started to laugh again. “There’s so much I want to tell you, but I can’t at this time. I didn’t mean to love him but it happened all the same.”

“Are you sure you’re alright Saffron – there seems to be a lot on your mind. What is it you can’t tell me?”

“It’s nothing, I’m just tired and a wee bit confused. I’ve lost my focus.”

“Are you having second thoughts about Faerrleah?” Saffron regained her composure.

“He still makes me laugh, but if I wanted someone to entertain me all the time, I would have gone to the circus and hitched myself up with a clown.”

“But you were always terrified of clowns, darling. One of your first drawings was of a clown.”

“To be honest, my world feels like it’s shrinking. I don’t recognise what I’m evolving into.”

“You mean you’re conforming to a stereotypical housewife, something you have always resisted.”

“No, nothing of the sorts. It’s complicated. I’m at a loss and I don’t know what to do. There’s so much I would like to tell you but I can’t. I’ve made a bit of a hash of things.”

“Is it about sex?”

“No.”

“You can talk to me Saffron, I am your mother.”

“It’s not about sex.”

“I was once like you but with children and age comes different perspectives, and it’s difficult not to conform to what’s deemed conventional. I don’t think you are quite ready for the conformist’s life just yet. Is your sex life boring, is that it?”

“It’s not about my sex life. It’s something else. It’s complicated. I will tell you about it some day, but not just now. I just needed to talk to you.”

“Ok Saffron, tell me about your friend Maurice.”

…………………………………………..

Saffron met with Maurice at the Organic Cafe on Woodlands road. He stirred his coffee thoughtfully and Saffron sensed he had something on his mind. Maurice told her about his plan to move to New Caledonia. Hopefully, his partner would follow and join him in the South Pacific. If he didn’t, he would find a new partner, perhaps even settle down with a native Kanak, get married and adopt some children. Art in Britain was dead, there was nothing for him here anymore, he said. Saffron kissed him on the cheek and declared this was exciting news and although she would miss him dearly, they would always be friends. Saffron went on to tell Maurice how her mind was made up about leaving Bull. She cried and Maurice tried to convince her she should talk her feelings over with her partner, but she announced she had signed up for the Green Movement protest in the Arctic. As Maurice held her hand, Saffron said,

“I’m travelling to Norway soon. The ship is stationed in Bergen. I’m excited about the trip but I’m worried about how Faerrleah will take it.”

“Oui,” replied Maurice still stirring his cold coffee, “This is sad news about you and Faerrleah, but I’m sure everything will work out for you, whether you are together or not. Sometimes our paths in life divide and take a different direction to our loved ones. Who knows, they may converge again? Life can conspire to do this from time to time.”

Saffron and Maurice went their separate ways and when she arrived back at the narrowboat, she put some of her possessions in a rucksack, picked up Boris and left for the last time. Saffron spent the night at her parent’s house and the following morning she hitchhiked to Aberdeen and then boarded a fishing vessel which took her to Bergen. Boris remained with her parents to be cared for along with all her other pets which had survived from her childhood. At first, her father protested, saying he was going to open an animal sanctuary at the rate she was abandoning her pets.

On the journey across the North Sea Saffron realised she was meant to be attending the Naked Bike Ride for Climate Change in Kelvingrove Park, with Bull. She only stopped sobbing when she arrived in Bergen. She was greeted by her fellow GM activists who had been surprised to hear she was going to be a week earlier than planned. They could see she had been crying and no further questions were asked until she boarded the GM ship. Later, she was introduced to the Captain who provided her with a tour of the vessel and showed her to her quarters. The following week, the ship left for the Arctic Ocean. They returned three months later to a hero’s welcome. Saffron rented an apartment in Bergen and spent most of her spare time, in-between missions, walking, painting and taking photographs of the Scandinavian coastline. At one point she helped out with a marine conservation project and even persuaded her stepfather and banker friends to fund the programme.

Saffron was on her third mission to protest at a Russian methane hydrate drilling rig in the Arctic when a letter arrived from London. Once decrypted, she discovered it had been written by her biological father, Professor Earl Burke and contained details of MoDs plans to conduct a sub-oceanic explosion close to the Rockall trench in the North Atlantic. Saffron immediately contacted the organisation’s headquarters and waited for confirmation her ship was to head for St Kilda to disrupt the Government operation.