THE LAST GANSEY

by Celia Macmahon

The wings of the sabbath have just closed. It is five minutes past midnight on Monday April 30th, 2001, and Annie Macdonald is selecting four double-pointed needles to cast on the ribbing of the last gansey that she will ever knit. She knows it will be the last, because when it is finished she intends to die: to allow her life currents to ebb down deep within until she simply fades away. She knows she has the power to do this, for she saw both her father and mother do exactly the same thing. Her parents were also ninety-seven and in remarkable health for their age, the Handy clan being noted for its longevity. However, the eyes do not seem to last the distance, for her father went blind in his final years. Calum 'Handy' Macdonald could have made his century, but he could no longer face life without sight. At the end, all he could see was the moving pendulum of the handsome clock that some sea-faring relative brought back from Boston long ago, and he would sit for hours staring at it - the one sight left to him in a darkened world - although it was probably more in his imagination than in his eyes. When he died, ending a marriage of seventy-four years, Ishbal Handy simply said, "I won't be long after." She died within the month.

That clock now stands on the mantel of the "sheltered house" in Marabay that Annie now occupies. It still keeps almost perfect time, and its pendulum acts like a metronome for Annie's fingers as her steel needles set up a counter-rhythm.

Annie is a miracle according to her doctor. Her heart is as steady as the mantel clock; her breathing easy and unobstructed, and her joints free from arthritis. She feels sure she could receive her telegram from the Queen, but her right eye is almost useless, and she can detect her left going down the same road towards the land of grey shapes and half-shadows in which she knows she cannot live. Meanwhile, she will knit this last gansey, not quickly, not slowly, but steadily and patiently and perfectly, as she has knitted many others down the years.

How many? Hundreds certainly, but it is impossible to know the exact number. Many are still worn by relatives and friends across the world; each one knitted without pattern or tape-measure, yet exactly fitting the person for whom it was made. They are made to fit in more ways than size, for Annie is an excellent judge of character and often allows herself a wry joke. Her thirteen-year old grand-niece Marina Mackenzie thinks her shocking pink gansey is 'cool' but has scarcely noticed the delicate dandelion flowerhead pattern on the gusset under each armhole, just as her own beauty is kept hidden under a display of toughness and bravado. Her grand-nephew Iain 'Hasty' Macdonald has noticed the wings on the navy gansey that he sometimes wears with his faded jeans and black leather bike jacket, but he has no idea they represent the restlessness that Annie can see in his soul.

If she thinks hard then she can remember some of her past works, but none clearer than the very first. The first masterwork that is; not the first garment, for there were inferior practice pieces along the road to the perfection she achieved at the age of fourteen. It was made in the usual indigo seaman's iron for her brother Calum, nine years old; heir to the family croft and bearer of the family name. He put it on and was made to stand still while their mother studied it from every angle. Ishbal Handy - the most expert knitter in Marabay and for miles around - made no comment, for she was a woman of few words and there was no need. The gansey spoke for itself. She simply embraced her eldest daughter, kissed her, and treated her as a grown woman from then onwards. It was a rite of passage more significant than her first period.

Now, with the hour late but still not tired; with the cream worsted inching steadily through her fingers, Annie Macdonald works around the ribbing of the last gansey. The gansey in which she will be buried and stand before her maker. The gansey that will say everything that needs to be said about her life, although no-one will understand its meaning apart from her and the Lord. The clock and Annie Macdonald's needles continue their steady tick as she knits on and plans what she will portray.

In a central front panel there will be an anchor. There are many anchor patterns used in gansey knitting, but this one will be of Annie's own devising, and one that she has never used before. It is not elaborate, but a simple anchor with honesty, strength and grace. It can well stand for her father ­ a fisherman and crofter all his working life, and active right up until blindness overtakes him. The sea is ever in his veins, but no, the anchor is not for him. It is for her mother, Ishbal Macdonald, née Macaulay, who never sets foot in a boat in the whole of her ninety-eight years and who never once leaves the island of her birth. She is always there for whenever her children need her, and never once does she fail. Her words are few, but she is the central fixed point in Annie's life: an anchor forged from tempered steel, firmly embedded and utterly reliable.

On either side of the anchor will be two panels of cornsheaf cable. An incident known as The Angels and the Corn is an indelible part of her family's lore, but there are other reasons why Annie will use the corn as an image for her father. Calum Handy Macdonald is in his lifetime, the most energetic provider in the whole of Marabay. Annie pictures him still in his seaboots, carrying a creel of fish up from the pier: the pick of the main catch. The assorted fish are vibrant with colour and the clean tang of an unpolluted sea. They seem to burst from the creel with the same life and energy that bursts from her father. The staff of life ­ the very stuff of existence. Yes Da. For you, the corn. The needles click and in Annie Macdonald's mind, the pictures unfold.

The panel containing the lone gull will sit just above the anchor. It will be highly stylised, with symmetrical outspread wings that reach out, just as her sister Morag would reach out to touch things incredible or intangible. Morag Macdonald - ever the gull. To fly is her life’s ambition. To soar up from Marabay and fly to far-off lands, to the moon, to the stars. They are sisters of the soul as well as of the blood, and although Morag is the younger by fourteen months, she is the leader of their expeditions into the unknown. The box bed in which they sleep together at nights can be a flying machine or a ship: it can be a swaying camel or the howdah on the back of an Indian elephant. The moorland behind Marabay can be the continent of Africa or the Pacific Ocean, but more often than not it is America.

"Think of when we go to America Annie. It is the place for us, for we can be anything we want to be. There are huge cities where we can be fine ladies, and when we tire of that, we can go west and be cowboys. We can see indians and wild animals. Imagine - we can become immensely rich and travel with princesses and kings."

The dreams of America persist well into their teens, long after the girlhood games have been left behind. Persist in fact, right up until Morag contracts meningitis at the age of fifteen. The course of the disease is swift and sudden. One day Morag is her usual self and her vitality and spirit burn strongly. The next she is prostrate and can barely move, except to turn the pages of a cherished little book depicting the wonders of the world. The next day she is unconscious and at nightfall she slips away like a boat on a calm, dark sea. She is buried in Marabay cemetery wearing the gansey that Annie knitted for her. The whole family sleepwalk through the days, bereft of speech and direction. Calum Macdonald loses himself in his bible while Ishbal keeps house quietly and mechanically.

It is at this point that Annie loses her temper for the one and only time in her life. Loses it to the extent that she is at odds with everyone and everything, including her parents, her sisters and her baby brother. She is sullen and morose one minute, and violently abusive the next, refusing to take part in family worship and refusing to go to church.

"There is no Lord," she screams at her mother, who bears the brunt of most of these outbursts. Ishbal Handy bears them in silence, ignoring Annie and leaving her ravings to dissipate into the walls and rafters. The fits of rage fade away over a period of weeks as Annie retreats to a place deep within herself where pain and loss are meaningless sensations. Her body is in the world but her mind has started on a journey, destination unknown. She eats little, speaks less, and walks compulsively across beach and moor and clifftop until movement becomes her rationale and the sole point of her existence. She drifts ghostlike through the landscape, and as the days pass, both her weight and her self-awareness dwindle until she looks and feels no more substantial than the breeze.

This period of near-madness lasts for three months and ends on a day when Annie is walking on the high cliffs of Ard Marabay. She stands amongst the low, ancient stones known as The Temple and stares at the horizon with empty eyes. The sea is a pale, unbroken sheen of silver blue, meeting a sky of the same colour in a faint line. The line fades away and sky merges with sea, smoothly and seamlessly, until it is impossible to distinguish between air and water. Annie feels a jolt as if she has been pushed off balance; then a pang of nausea, and suddenly the world is not the same. She finds herself in a capsule of translucent blue which seems to stretch off to either side and all around her; even behind her back where the moorland should be. It shimmers with static energy; cold yet gently burning every nerve in her body; remote yet part of her flesh and blood; passive but brimming with quiet power. Above all, amidst the strange normality, she has the overwhelming feeling that her journey is over and she is coming home. Annie has no idea how long she remains in this state. It could be seconds or hours. All she knows is that when the horizon reappears, and the stones and moorland reassert themselves with a faint but almost audible rush of air, she finds herself running immediately. Running towards the village to throw her arms around her mother, her sisters, around anyone she meets along the way, to tell them that the world is spinning and that if something is not meant to be, then it is not meant to be, for this is what she has been told, not in words but in a way more wonderful.

"We are indeed in His hands," she wants to shout to the whole island. Ishbal Handy accepts her daughters cùram in the same way that she accepted her abuse - in silence and tenderness.

As Annie knits on and plans the last gansey, it does not occur to her for even a second to include a symbol for the unshakeable faith that has been with her since that day, for there is no need to tell what is manifestly obvious.

To be continued...