frame 82 June 2026
The Soldier
By James McAleer
James McAleer is a writer interested in natural histories, found objects, and words not found. He has participated in writing programmes through the Poetry School, Creative Scotland, and the Glasgow School of Art. He is currently affiliated with the Warburg Institute, where his research centres around the postnatural and apocalyptic. He lives in London with the dog.
The Soldier
Once a soldier came through the house. I was in the bath, knees bent, peeling the old blue vinyl from the side of the tub to make silhouettes in the cork beneath. Mostly I made maps and animals this way. I liked the bath and loved this game and hung over the side until the water grew cold, and the cold of the tub on my bare arm familiar, and so I never saw him.
We lived midway a valley in a vast white borrowed house at the end of a cart track which pooled into farmyard. At night I read stories in which pack-animals would refuse to go on into the dark ahead and in the morning I drew in the dust of the yard and cast off from the rope swing that hung from the yard’s great beech tree and watched the birds on their business. Beyond the house were fields, in those fields were my parents, and beyond the fields was burn and woods and marsh which climbed into bracken and heather and became the hill. The valley cut a trench through the center of the island and our house seemed to pin the whole thing down.
I read histories and geographies and found out how the world was formed and at night I imagined the sea once again reaching up the valley to paw at our front door then slink away. My brothers would return from secret wanderings with cloth and long bones, and in the garden we would glean shards of china and faded casings, and all this emphasized that we were truly one stage in a staggered caravan passing through this place. So maybe the soldier stood to reason.
He strode from the unlit storerooms of the back of the house through the downstairs bedroom and past the bathroom door, across the narrow corridor that led up and out back, down into where my mother sat fireside, my brothers snarling at her feet, asleep. The house could not accommodate him: his shoulders scraped the ceiling. Turning, he stepped down into the kitchen and out through the wall.
We turned the kitchen light off and stood eyes hand-cupped to the pane, and then, like for luck, threw on the outside light. Outside the air was cool. My brothers padded out and stretched and yawned. My eyes scrabbled for some purchase in the dark and my hair dripped and some thing known to the night and its animals moved away out of sight. He was, of course, long gone.
In wartime a woman stood on a jetty looking out on the water. She stands there and out to sea the gannets hold and fold and drop and pass off southward. A boy watches her. She looks down on her luck and he is essentially good so when he approaches it is with his pocket money in his fist. That evening he learns that his mother has let out the cottage, which will be all the better for life again, to a painter, from the city, for a spell.
With men at war the birds boom. One morning the boy wakes early, dresses quickly in the dark, and heads out. He leaves his bicycle against a tree and follows the river through predawn, aiming first potshot then pebbles at the high branches. Silhouettes of birds explode into alarm and flight, but when he crosses a field to join the estate’s long drive, he’s empty-handed and his rifle is stored. A storm’s coming in with the light and all the birds are singing.
He walks fast and doomed on the long drive. The birds bow back to the high branches and the animals of the field crowd and face their corners. Rounding a bend he sees her at a distance, stood next one of the drive’s great trees, intent on some assemblage. The thought passes. Soon he will see the way she has strung some rough shelter from rope and tarp and the frame of her pushbike, below which her easel stands like a shadowed altar. As he passes the sky darkens and hums and is consumed by a sound like a hundred trees torn all at once from their stations and then the warplane passes and is gone and the storm breaks open. That afternoon will be placid and warm and he will dare the tide with the sanderlings, in changed clothes.
His cousins are at a front. His father is not. A cousin, unknown to him, has died. His father is my father.
He sees her on the jetty again. He sees her on the foreshore collecting soft-edged stones. What they’re for, she replies, is for to keep her weighed down when she paints in tough weather, and he doesn’t know whether to believe her or not. He is doing nothing in particular so they lunch companiable on driftwood and watch the sea and the birds. Somewhere out on the bay the eiders babble like men and women shot of sense. Further out the warships bask. Further still his cousin pokes around a once-house with the snout of his gun. The war will end but not just yet.
In long winter she paints inside. He expects that she will stay forever but of course she does not. She keeps her studio in the ground floor of the cottage and keeps the upstairs fastidiously tidy as though its rightful owner could arrive any minute. The three, the boy, his mother, the painter, spend a Christmas quietly in one another’s company. Afterwards she begins to paint in their kitchen. The older woman sits in her chair and considers and the boy stands in the threshold of the door and mouths his sleeve and watches them and it is hard to say who out of the three becomes part of the room first except that after a half hour, say, a stranger coming home might not notice them at all.
First, we were told stay inside; then someone decided to evacuate certain houses, certain farms, and what was once any one in a season of storms became something to be reckoned with. My parents feared for the lives of animals. In the yard they disagreed in low voices with each other, the law, the storm, who had heard who would stay put, who had really meant it. Every so often the wind picked up.
The day grew close and clammy like some infected thing. My brothers panted as we stowed sleeping bags into the boot of the jeep and said our farewells the house and our father. He stood out in the yard as we pulled away and I watched him recede in the wingmirrors until the track turned and he clipped out, just like that.
In the hall we were shown to a taped-off section and handed juice and biscuits. The place was rich with dog smells and grew full. Together we were like an audience waiting for the lights to dim. When we leaked out the next evening the birds were picking up their songs.
Vehicles in predicaments, pylons down all over, woodland wholly rearranged. Flooding on the coast road and landslips on the heights. In days to come those persons briefly missing would be found in unnatural positions in rushes and under rubble. My mother let the other cars depart and then drove slowly from the village. By the Bone’s farm a doe stepped self-consciously out of the woods, paused before the jeep and crossed over. We watched her make a way across the empty field and she was still going as we slipped into gear and moved on. The rough branch projecting from her side made her totter now and then. I kept my window rolled a quarter as we climbed the hill. The air tasted wholly new. Thunder way off now and then, diminishing.
At the second cattle-grid our father waved us down. Spoke a few words with my mother through the driver’s window and walked down the track with the jeep at his heel, as though he were leading an animal to a ring. In the yard the headlights cut a swathe through the dusk and the house and my mother cut the engine and the swathe remained.
We slept all together in the jeep with the windows cracked. When I woke word had got around: the yard was full of vehicles, men standing hip-handed, dogs sniffing nimble in the ruins. Someone coughed a chainsaw into life. The tree had fallen through the back of the house so that its crown lay before us, spilling down into the yard. From high branches of other trees the birds called in the day.
We stayed two months in a borrowed cottage and a few more after the rebuild, long enough to know it was time to go. What we salvaged was packed and what was lost was lost forever. We never saw the painting again. I remember that the four hands of the two clocks told two different times, like siblings caught in a lie and I remember an embedded portrait of a stiff man in his red coat. On our last morning I watched the yard for a time. Whorls in the dirt, footprints and furniture and two big white Sprinters. A little breeze which shifted the rope swing now and then. The beech wore new leaves and a fissure, already ageless, where lightning had passed. It was a day in spring.