Naamah’s Hand

She hears him before she sees him. The rough shuffle of boots being removed with gentle grunts and mutters. A word spoken to a dog or doorway, an admonition to a coat that won’t hang as per expectation, or a mumbled incantation and ward against weather.

“Bit rougher out there than you’d want, really.”

He shambles into the room and sits with the huff and puff of an old man, a rehearsed dramatization of mundane tasks, and the regular cadence of proof-of-life affirming actions.

“Ah, there you are. How’s all this stuff coming along?”

She can see him moving purposefully through their space out the corner of her eye, his familiar touchstone behaviours falling into place. He’s left his keys on the shelf, put on his slowly disintegrating slippers, walked to sit in his groove on the couch, leaned and looked out the windows to the sky and the trees of the shelter belts.

“Seems like the windle be up for a day or so yet, reckon. Prolly good for the generators though aeh.”

On cue, she crosses the space to sit by him, puts her forearm gently on his shoulder, her chin on the other. Her arm slips to rest her hand on the base of his neck, her forehead now resting in the curve between nape and the base of his skull. She murmurs.

“What’s this darl? You’ll be speaking up aeh.”

“Is it time yet to stop?” she whispers, hesitates, “Sweetest of hearts, is it yet time to stop?”

He rolls his shoulders away and she sits back a little. She sees the outline of the cross on his back, the weight of conviction, of doubt, of resignation. He leans forward and removes his rough shirt one arm at a time, dropping it from his hand to the floor as she takes to his back, her fingers drawing out the tension of the chisel and plane, her locks a gentle prickle as they tweak the hair of this body. She traces the cascading keys of his spine, rubs her palms across the flat of his blades, crushes the nuggets of his traps. He sighs a gentle and familiar refrain, his head falling to the back of his crossed hands as they rest on the arms of the couch. He looks sideways at the middle distance, pauses, speaks.

“It’s done when it’s done…” he says gently, “The song.”

And she softly repeats the last song of the golden age of man, a lullaby to a restless spirit, a dirge admonishing folly and vanity.

One Attenborough

It’s maybe 2010 and I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, weeping. I’d stumbled into a video on the implications of the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, and the sheer weight of the knowledge, the immense truth of it has hit me like a hammer blow. Between sobs I’m asking myself, “How can I look him in the eye?” My boy is perhaps 2 years old, and the deep-seated foreboding I’d quietly harboured since the late 80s has erupted because I know the day will come when he’ll ask me what I did to prevent to death of a world he yet barely registered.

This memory sits alongside another. It’s me as a child, sitting in a warm room, our fire burning offcut pine from some building site, watching a TV with a colour screen roughly the size of the average Twenty-First Century tablet, the background noise of something being knocked together in the kitchen for dinner. We have a small dining room attached to the lounge, but we habitually eat sitting on the floor at a coffee table in the living room, and Attenborough’s voice resonates from that tiny TV to offer us a portal from the back of beyond to the universe.

One Attenborough. The generation from his first broadcasts till now. The time it’s taken to almost extinguish all wildlife. The time taken to turn the wild places over to the reproduction of us, and to rapidly convert the entire biosphere to the service of a rapacious, freely polluting humanity.

A pocket friend recently referred to the existential dread those who understand what’s coming share, and I reflected on what it is to have long had knowledge of the future; to have seen the fire storm on the horizon but be powerless to slow its inexorable advance. To be an enforced watcher and worrier, someone who has spent a lifetime unable to make a damn iota of difference, adrift on a raft in an grass sea of selfishness and rampant consumption, presaging the inevitable collapse of everything, while the grey-black smoke rolls ever closer.

One Attenborough. The time that straddled a career and voice we all know, an icon that opened the countless eyes of suburban households to the endless wonders of the natural world. A time when the wild things of the oceans, the skies, the deserts, the jungles dazzled us in their diversity, colour, sounds, behaviours. A time till now, when his creaking voice heralds the collapse of habitats worldwide, a death-knell streamed to a wide-screen OLED in ultra-vivid hue and tone.

When I hear him now, I pause to reflect on my complicity in this apocalypse. Have I done enough to look a child in the eye when they ask if I could have done more? Is it enough to have always carried a cross of anxiety, to have endlessly murmured my fears to sneering demons? To have tried to embody restraint on behalf of billions of uncaring others, while the engines of progress turn out gigatonnes of waste?

One Attenborough. The time that enfolds the conceit that I might have been be enough to make a difference. The time it took for my fear to give way to callous acceptance of a fate that will be realised. The time I have left to prepare a teen for an uncaring world.

So while I still mitigate wherever I can, prepare wherever I must, and advocate change always, I do so selfishly, that I might pass from this world with the whisperings of my dying heart spoken to angels.

One Attenborough. And when he passes, the natural wonders will likely follow him quietly into the night, and those who remain will be the worse for the loss of our humanity.