To Tessa

Here is a village in a house under a warm African sun. Its rooms hum with swinging see-saw sounds and the beat of a hammer. Here smells and tastes escape from under lids of saucepans and pots. At night it's where the crickets play tiny violins to weave a fine tapestry of ghostly threads amongst a croaking chorus of frogs. It settles softly as a fairy blanket and watches your dreams until it's silenced by a slumbering dawn awakened by cheerful greetings amongst fluttering feathers.

Strips of venison biltong hang at the top of a thatched tower. Down below is a workshop where pipes are hammered on anvils and transformed as fluted goblets. A partially constructed copper-welded space-ship is at one side. It's here where three-legged sliced tree trunk stools are made. There's a nook to the left on the way out where necklaces and bracelets and rings are fashioned for any fantasy of feminine beauty. A wisp of wood-smoke strays in through an open kitchen door where smoked sausages hang as savory ornaments. Two doorways access a double volume L-shaped hall with dining on the left. A wall is draped somewhat disconcertingly with African and medieval weapons. It faces a lawn, hemmed on the right by tall mulberry trees, rolling down to a trampoline. Behind it is the domain of the donkey who ate the spaghetti. The wisp twists across a place where a family sits, snacks, reads and sleeps in company. It drifts over the ledges of walk-through windows, over a courtyard surrounding a pool and spirals up and away over the trees.

Here's a glossy red setter. I can't yet remember his name. He's with us. Mara is about three and I'm about two years older than Philip and Becky is somewhere in between. In a way we're like moths in a spiral around a flame. Tami and Mattias are with us. We're children trying to figure out what's going on. None of us moves except Mattias. He's drowning. An explosion of spray knocks us out of our daze. Here, with the fierce eyes of a lioness, is the fully dressed submerged yet elegant form of a beautiful woman. She's holding Mattias in her arms. Who knows where she's come from? I have a fleeting image of her flying out through one of those walk-in windows. She says nothing and takes him away with her. There's nothing she needs to say. She's hammered a vivid impression into malleable minds.

Oh and in case this isn't in your memory, her name is Tessa. She's one of those beings from a utilitarian realm somewhere between divinity and the carefree world of prepubescent children. She comes and goes as gracefully as a flame weaving a spiral of overlapping patterns from mother to child to neighbour. She joins our world as a child and floats above it as a mother, or else she's queen of the castle in a nearby harbour when things get rocky or lonely. The king is the big stocky figure of Michael the sculptor with his huge bushy eyebrows. Heirs to the throne are two princesses and a prince.

Mara, alternately naked or in a hand-me-down oversized T-shirt, wanders around in her own little world under a halo of blond hair. Becky at the time is a 'girl' fully fledged. She has little interest in what we are up to. Girls have other interests, a puzzle without a solution, a challenge which us boys were destined to encounter, but not yet. And then there's Philip.

"I need a belt!" It's him peering into the tent from outside. He's a quick waker. He's ten years old and it's very early in the morning. Barks are coming out of the throats of a score of wild baboons. They're on a ledge right above us, about twenty feet up. They don't sound happy with the sight of alien invaders, not in this place, the jewel of their territory. Each bark is a verbal missile, hurled with the aim of driving us away, and perhaps also a warning of worse surely to follow if we choose to remain. Once I'm also out of the tent they look a lot more scary than they sound.

"What for?" I ask with stomach like cold fist clenching. I think David Parry is here and perhaps John too.

"They're scared of a belt. They think it's a snake."

Who knows where he got that info from? I give Philip my belt uncomfortably aware that he is the youngest and smallest of us. He turns around and steps forward to face the most ferocious, the alpha male, stares into his eyes and then whirls the belt like a whip above his head. The baboons retreat and remain at a safe distance, well out of the slinging range of a snake. We're looking at Philip with some awe. The lion cub - like mother like son.

It's school holiday time and we have enough mealie-meal and sardines to last for ten days and on the trees are plenty of soft-skinned berries with the taste and texture of lychees except their flesh is a translucent pink. Here we can live free and often unclothed like wild animals exploring a wild wordless nature revelling in our senses with warm sun on skin. Nothing is man-made, no-one else is up here on the back slopes of the Magaliesberg, not a house in sight from the summit patrolled by black eagles to the horizon 30 miles distant.

One evening Philip takes me down to a pool, where we had washed pots and dishes, to show me a moonlight ballet. We sit silently watching the black lines of two long and slender snakes who weave a languid spell on a stage the colour of pearl. It's here in youth and nature where what is seen most easily coincides with what is felt.

It's the morning of the ninth day. I'm at the top of the canyon watching a couple of baboons in a tree on the other side. They're unusually raucous and acrobatic, shaking branches as if they're marooned sailors trying to get the attention of a passing ship. I glance behind me. The rest of the troop are silently slinking downstream behind my back and well within snake slinging range. It's a premeditated diversion. In the distance I can see what may be the cause of their departure. A long line of people, some carrying things balanced on their heads.

As they get closer I recognise the figures of you and Michael with some friends and their children, and what turns out to be a line of young porters hired to carry his cooking equipment. It's a three hour hike up and over the steep face of the mountain. Here's where our experiences meet in the same time and place. So I need say no more except that Hungarian goulash and bacon frying smells even more delicious to those who have eaten nothing but sardines and pap and berries for more than a week.

It was some time after that when you and Michael started to build a new home in Broederstroom. Philip spent time exploring the surrounding caves. He took me once to a cave which had never been entered and gave me an experience which few people have ever had. In torch-light it was a small chamber of clear crystal ferns amongst delicate stalactites and mites, each was coated with a sparkling frost which cannot survive human breath for more than a few minutes. Thereafter the magic is gone. Perhaps everything which is breathed on for too long or looked at too often loses at least some of its magic.

The rhythm of days and weeks and years drives a spiral taking all of us ever further away from where we started. The good queen of the castle left and the nearby harbour no longer offered shelter, but many threads of the past remain intact and were still to weave in with those of the future and may still yet. I was 22 when I decided to leave for Cape Town. Part of the reason has a thread in your thatched village/home but that's another story. It was the third and last time I ever entered the actual house in Broederstroom. I didn't come to say goodbye to Becky Mara or Philip. They weren't there, only you were. It was the last time I looked into your eyes, but I still see you in those times when I'm derided by people whose opinions are not their own. It's then when I need the memory of someone who understands freedom and the art of living. It's then when I can smile and say thank you Tessa.

What's in a fern?

I was looking at a fern and now I'm falling beneath shifting remnants, white footprints on a blue sky, a trail of moments in the giddy swirl of a cloud. They're all part of a story from another time ready now to be matched in this breath with a goddess I once saw. I saw her on the side of the road to Inverness where you turn left to head for the Isle of Skye. I saw her face from a bus window after she'd hailed the driver. She was perfectly proportioned and naturally elegant in movement. Tall as me. Her chestnut hair was a prism of copper light as she stepped up into the passage between seats. I was quick to look down. A girl like that is besieged by stares. I had no right to throw yet another at her. She walked past me looking for an empty seat other than the one next to me. I knew there were many and that the air which softly pressed between us would be the last part of a tragically short experience of her presence. A tap on my shoulder made me look into the curious green eyes of a fox. I insisted she take the window seat so as to see her and countryside at the same time. Her skin is flawless white all the way down from above full eyebrows to the upper swells of her breasts and her face... No magic mirror could ever tell any queen she looked more beautiful. Snow White had stepped out of a fairy tale and was sitting next to me and yes; she's a goddess but she's also a fox.

I figured her for 20 years old. She was a 2nd year student at a London University, on holiday and working at the only lodge on North Uist. I was on a walk-about after a short but taxing contract in Edinburgh. That's how I earned my living then. I was a fox for hire to those for whom all else had failed. I was paid to mend broken promises. We saw each other with a curiosity focused on what may happen next. It's a game like chess but with an aim of adventure and we were not to be opponents. We were to be conspirators, agile partners balanced between two breaths on a stepping stone in a mountain stream. A breath at a time. The next may be another or the same but in a different place and it must be near. A footprint stays still on the ground but nothing else does when we step above its gravity. For a moment we step beyond it into another moment to balance briefly in that before the next. We can move in a swirl of moments, some breathless, which may lead anywhere we let them take us.

In a formal beginning she speaks an immaculate English accent. We breathe through moments and turn between them as her voice becomes edged by a Scottish lilt. At times later she slips into Gaelic of the Outer Hebrides, sometimes with an amusingly apologetic translation and there's a time when the words not needed have fallen away.

People I've known longest are often those I know least. It's easier to meet an awake fox in a stranger than it is to find one in an old friend. Perceptions atrophy as worn and faded patterns of moments in a time past at a place where innocense was then found and is now lost. She leans back against the window, her head against it to face me. I see a subtle stress of caution give way to a faint tension of anticipation. Some sounds are lost and others are found. Textures fade from the picture's edges becoming no more than charcoal lines of a scene in a bus on paper. Sound and motion transform into the whispering glide of a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. At centre stage is an exquisite woman reclined on a shifting horizon of the Cuillins and eyes with the wildness of a fox. We tell each other secrets only strangers may know. We speak without preconceptions or preconcieved opinions until words go but voices remain like notes of a flute in a song which is as much of wordless thought as it is of sound. Her eyes are concentric zones of deep sea green threaded with emerald and amethyst and in them I see supple arms of imagination poised to engage with mine. They reach and entwine in rhythms of a dance. She moves nimbly with me when I guide and leads when she notices what I don't. A momentum grows until I slip and fall to find her falling with me a smile peeking out at me showing me how to fly. She takes me across a bay to a pebbled shore on the isle of Raasay where the otters play and up over heather and higher still on a stairway of lochs reflecting a blue veined far away sky. We swoop down from the top of Dun Caan toward the crater's lake transformed into the dragons who must live there. We gracefully alight on a black beach frosted by diamonds. A delighted smile shapes her mouth to match the sparkle of her eyes. A Gaelic exclamation trips off her tongue and I need no translation. She pulls me back up into the air and across a bay to be swung by wild winds which howl in orbits around the ancient giant sentinal of stone. She calls it Storr. We glide through the skirts of Skye, the clustered pleats of veiled air with as many as three seasons between, and beyond them across an isolation of open sea until her island appears at a cold and misty edge of the world. It's fringed by scores of glistening lochs set in a lacework of heather and peat. We land softly and look into each other's eyes without speaking. It's an eternal moment beyond the measures of age and time. I step out of a bus and stand on a pavement in Portree waving goodbye as the goddess leaves for where we already have been. I stand here ten years later reminded that I can still see her now just as clearly within a wild fern.