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Labyrinth

John Farquhar Young

    “What on earth is THAT?” Angela exclaims, as she focuses on the large human skull on the coffee table in of her PhD supervisor’s cluttered living room. A slightly battered Harris Tweed flat cap sits at a jaunty angle over the skull’s brow.
    “That’s Fergus,” Mark responds, mildly amused by the intensity of her reaction. “Fergus, say hello to Angela.”
    “Some might say that’s just a little bit weird, as ornaments go,” she observes, casting a critical eye over the ancient, yellowish object. “I’ve often seen you wearing that cap. I am never going to look at it the same way again.”
    Enjoying the moment Mark grins mischievously. “And perhaps, to be completely honest, what you really mean to say is that you will also never look at my head in quite the same way again?”
    “Perhaps not.” Laughing, Angela glances again at Fergus then scrutinises Mark’s head. “It’s a very large skull, isn’t it? Your cap is too small for it...for him. It is, or rather was a ‘him’?”
    “Its size and the big brow ridges, or whatever you call them, suggest it’s a ‘him’ skull. I think that the original owner was probably a big fellow... well over six feet.”
    “Where on earth did you get it? But no...” She immediately shakes her head vigorously and frowns.
    For a moment Mark focusses on a strand of her brown shoulder length hair now dislodged from its customary position behind her left ear, and forming an exaggerated, exclamation mark on a pale cheek of her square-ish face. Hmmm. She really is rather attractive, he thinks, immediately reminding himself of the university’s stern strictures regarding relationships between academic staff and students. But she will soon submit her thesis and face her viva. What then? Very pleasing, non-professional possibilities flit in front of his inner eye.
    Angela draws a breath. “The more important question is ‘Why?’ What ON EARTH possessed you to purchase it? It REALLY is ...” She pauses for a second grappling for an appropriate word. “It really is GROSS! Having a thing like that in my house would give me the willies.”
    “I took pity on it...on him, couldn’t bear to imagine him in a bin,” he replies, not for the first time held by the young woman’s intensity. He inserts a brisk matter-of-fact tone into his voice. “I found myself with some time on my hands last month. I didn’t want to hang around in the railway station so I thought that I might investigate a small, rather weird, little antiques store nearby. I noticed that it specialised in assorted bits and pieces relating to Scottish Highland clans - claymores, daggers, military stuff. I was looking for maps, documents, and letters which occasionally can be very instructive. As you know, I have a developing interest in the history of the clans around the time of the Jacobite rebellions. I spotted Fergus. Can’t say it was love at first sight. I have to confess that a rather ghoulish impulse prompted me to look for evidence of head wounds, dents, or perhaps signs of a gruesome end. The shopkeeper noted my curiosity. He said he needed to make space for more saleable items - that he intended to dump the skull if he couldn’t sell him soon. Then on the spur of the moment he offered to give him to me for free. So, I adopted him, took him away in a large cardboard box safely secured with heavy string, named him Fergus, and ... there he is.”
    Angela frowns at the skull. “It’s a good conversation piece, I suppose... at a push.”
    “I suppose,” Mark nods reflectively. “I sometimes like to imagine the mind active within the skull negotiating a life somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, facing fierce winters on mountain sides, biting winds and summer months beside immeasurably beautiful lochs. Perhaps on occasion he was thinking about a forthcoming clan battle.”
    “You are a romantic of some sort,” Angela chuckles, “I should have guessed. How do you know he was a Scottish Highlander?
    “I don’t actually. The shopkeeper acquired him at an auction as part of a lot which included a few valuable items plus a lot of junk. Didn’t know much about him. Fergus provides a way of prompting my imagination - provides a sort of lens so to speak.”
    He suddenly feels the need to give his thoughts some semblance of academic respectability.
    “I don’t know if you have come across Doris Lessing in your reading. ‘There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.’ That’s a quote from her autobiography. For a professional historian that’s quite a challenging thought, don’t you think? Engaging with the past by concocting fiction about the lives that people lived in former times. But in a way that’s what I’m doing.”
    He notes that Angela is nodding her head in a sociable manner but that her eyes have acquired a distant focus signaling disinterest in his thoughts about the truth of fiction.
    “You COULD get some sort of genetic testing done on it! It does look ancient.” Her enthusiasm for the idea adds pace to her speech. “Wouldn’t you like to find out a bit more about it - about him - where he might have come from, how old he is, that sort of thing? I know a guy in the Forensic Anthropology Department. They’re keen on that sort of puzzle.” She flicks a long index finger in the direction of the skull. “I really think that you should find out more about it... about him. Can’t think why you wouldn’t be curious.”
    Slightly pushy, he thinks, suddenly ruffled. “Ah curiosity...curiosity can be thought of in various ways - as an academic duty, or an impulse, a virtue or a vice, or a resource.” ‘Academic duty’ – ‘professional curiosity!’ He is aware that he has adopted his lecturing voice and he scolds himself. Pompous! But yet... his thoughts run on ... finding things out about the skull? That’s something that should appeal to me, the outwardly successful, highly productive academic, someone who can attract PhD applications from young, bright, energetic graduates like Angela. A duty to be curiousÉyes, but duty sometimes chaffs.
    “Some wine?” he suggests, wanting to shift the conversation to a new topic. “...to toast your almost certain success in your forthcoming viva. There is every reason to be confident about the result.”
    Angela nods enthusiastically.
    In his kitchen he fiddles his way through the business of opening a chilled bottle of Pinot Grigio. As he returns to the living room, bottle in one hand, the two wine glasses held awkwardly by their stems, he imagines Fergus on a lab bench being drilled and scraped by students in white coats, bits of him being put into test tubes and being spun around. And what would be the result? A neat chart with percentages declaring that Fergus is X years old, that he has Y Celtic and Z Viking ancestry and ate a lot of porridge. So what? he thinks. So what? Science cannot encompass the truths of embedded lives! Lives are wonderfully complex stories. Fiction does a better job of the truth!
    Half an hour later he watches Angela stride confidently down his garden path. He imagines her having a future similar to his own, a reality bound by gravitational forces fashioned by a hunger for academic achievement, by the relentless need to publish and to burnish her reputation. And perhaps, sadly, from time to time her pride in her accomplishments might be darkened by the intrusion of doubts about the point and worth of it all.
    It is his world as it was, and still is, and yet it is a world from which a part of him longs to escape. But escape to where?
    For a while he sits on his sofa gazing at Fergus while gradually consuming the remaining content of the wine bottle.
    Escape? The word meanders around in his mind. He recalls that somewhere he has rough notes on an idea for an article. The tentative title: ‘Escape as a theme in the development of the British Empire’. His thoughts, he recalls, hovered over the motives which prompted people - nearly always young men - to seek a new life in the British colonies. There was the lure of the new, of course - fresh horizons, prospects - but perhaps also a desire to escape from the comfortable and fixed confinements of their home lives.
    He pads to a filing cabinet in his office and retrieves a blue, battered folder. A few pages of notes clipped together are headed ‘Ideas from literature.’ Underneath are paragraphs summarising a novel, Kazantzakis’s ‘Last Temptation’ (escape from a dream), and a play, Ibsen’s ‘The Dolls House’(escape from domestic respectability). He concentrates on his scribbled notes about Gide’s retelling of the myth ‘Theseus’. “The labyrinth in Gide’s version is not primarily a complex physical structure,” he reads, “but rather a psychological maze, holding a person enthralled by desires and illusions enhanced by the effect of powerful hypnotic fragrances.”
    Thoughts - questions - now circulate languidly in his mind.
    The stories we concoct about our lives, the bits we choose to remember, the bits we conveniently forget: do these stories make a better job of revealing personal truths or do they construct personal labyrinths? Am I trapped in my own personal story, ensnared by my success, sucked down into a vortex of papers and publications - saying more and more about less and less? But then another thought intrudes. How can we stand outside our stories? How to escape our personal labyrinths?
    Six months later: Morning light streaming through the living room window temporarily forces him to screw up his eyes as he pulls back the curtains. He heads for the kitchen glancing briefly at the coffee table. A small squat merrily decorated vase holding an assortment of artificial meadow flowers now sits in the place previously occupied by Fergus. The skull has been consigned to a cardboard box at the back of a cluttered loft. But this, Mark knows, is only a temporary staging point on his eventual journey towards a laboratory bench and perhaps an exhibition case or a ‘resource cupboard’ in the university forensic research facility.
    “I am not going to greet that thing every morning,” Angela declared quietly but emphatically as she prepared to move in. “It’s me or Fergus, me or the skull.”
    Angela, now a trainee librarian, has declared herself to be disinterested in pursuing an academic career.
    Why did she do a PhD, he asked her. “To prove that I could, do it?” came the brisk reply.
    Her formidable intellectual energies are still in evidence but are now firmly harnessed to her self-assigned role as Mark’s volunteer research assistant. “More fun this way,” she often says. “After the PhD I prefer short term work - well defined puzzles.” She derives evident pleasure in giving him the results of her latest burrowings in various archives but always rejects any suggestion of turning the results of her endeavours into an article. “Your job,” she declares merrily. “And you are welcome to it!”
    Mark for his part has the clear sense of having emerged from a state of dark inner doubt and confusion. He has reminded himself of the legend of Theseus, the minotaur, and the labyrinth; and the part played by Ariadne in an original version of the tale, the woman who gave Theseus a ball of string, which when gradually unwound marked out his escape from the maze. It greatly amuses him to think of Angela as his Ariadne, the busy, assertive presence in his life who has guided him out of his labyrinth back into the reality. His life as a story? It pleases to think of Angela co-authoring the next chapter of his history.

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