Woodlouse

By Hamish Gray

In Woodlouse, language becomes both inheritance and loss. A Scottish student discovers that his voice — once rich with Scots words and rhythms — has begun to erode amid the genteel cadence of Oxford. Through a single moment of recognition, a small creature becomes emblem, memory, and mirror.

The wood is rotten, that’s the crux of it. You prop your bike against the fence and roll up your shirt sleeves. Bloody warped all over. You set your shoulder to the gate. Trouble is, every summer it begins to putrefy, and every winter it freezes back over. Never gets a full solid year to just dribble away into sorry compost and be done with it. You turn the handle and shove; the metal base threatens to loosen itself from the wood, but eventually the gate gives way and your route out the back garden is free. Success. You go to extricate your bike, but feel a tickling on your wrist. A small, pill-shaped creature is wandering up towards the roll of your sleeve. You flick your wrist, – “woodlouse!” you gasp. The bug falls to the ground and lies on its back, tiny legs beseeching until it rights itself and scuttles off to a crack in the paving. Where could it have come from? Peering at the fence post, you see a small hole, formerly hidden when the gate was closed, but now clearly visible and crawling with woodlice. You shiver, then clip on your helmet. You barge your shoulder into the gate to close it, and soon you’re gliding down a side street and emerging onto the main road. It isn’t until you slow at the lights on the bridge, Thames’ water burbling along beneath you, that the thought strikes.

Woodlouse? You think to yourself, pushing off as the light turns green.

Never in your life had you called them woodlice. Slaters was the Scottish way. Perhaps you’ve lived in Oxford too long. You swerve around an emerging bus. But not long enough to start dropping your Scots, surely? The thought disturbs you. It’s true your friends had joked about getting anglicised when told of your plans for a DPhil down south. They’d said you’d come back calling goonies dressing gowns and nebs noses, but they’d only been teasing you. These words are instinctual; would you start to lose them, too? You pedal up an incline. Have you lost them already? The possibility is discomfiting, like there’s someone else’s tongue in your mouth. Sweat collects on your fringe under the padding of your helmet. Summer is a warm, warm affair this close to the continent, but it never usually bothers you too much, given how well you can tan. Today though, today the heat is overpowering.

The worst thing is, it was your grandad who first gave you slater. That and, “the de’ils lugwermers,” since, according to him, Satan wore woodlice as earrings. Always had stories behind his words that man, but it’s been two months since he passed away and he took his stories with him. Would he recognise your voice now, you wonder, after years of dining at high table with Classics professors? By the time you’d gone up to see him last, you hadn’t visited home since Christmas, and he wasn’t exactly compos mentis. You realise, with a start, that you haven’t actually cried since the funeral, as if when he was being lowered into the ground all your grief had snuck out from under your coat to join him, and perhaps your Scots had gone along too, perhaps each handful of soil tossed on top of the coffin had been one of the words he’d given to you – dreich, scunnert, een, skelp.

You manoeuvre round a clump of tourists – huffing in irritation – and drift to a halt by the central library. Its windows are high and reflective, giving it a blank, disinterested look. Unclipping your helmet, you peel the padding from your head and feel your hair, damp and prickling, bristle when exposed to a sudden breeze. You draw your reader’s card as you approach the entrance.

There’s still your other grandfather, of course, your Granper, although the jury’s out on if he counts. He left your grandmother not long after your mum was born, a bit of a rash decision that got the two of them off to a bad start. There’d been stirrings since then of course, he had reached out when you were a child, and you remember a period of time when contact was quite regular, but that surely hadn’t lasted more than a year. Although you do have fond memories of him trying to teach you a little Kreol Morisien, his native language. Every second Friday, your mum would drive you to his bungalow and he’d serve up a nice rougaille or cari, and talk you through the words. He’d once shown you a picture of his mother, an older woman with kind eyes, smiling uncertainly at the camera and sitting with her wrists crossed on a bench. She’d been dressed in a purple and maroon sari with drooping bangles round her wrists. You’d scoured her face to find a recognisable feature – your sister’s nose or your mother’s chin, and you thought you could see a touch of resemblance, if you squinted. Honestly, you’re not sure why you’d stopped going. Probably not for any grand reason, it’s likely it had simply begun to feel like a chore, like going to Cub Scouts, and if there’s anything children hate it’s their chores. You had friends to hang out with, and an Xbox to play on.

In-between stacks of shelves you find an empty desk to set your bag down. You lay out your laptop and open up a Word document. On the edge of the desk, creeping towards your left arm, a strip of light shines from the Diocletian windows. You dread its heat reaching you; air conditioning in the library was sub-par to say the least. Your shirt is already sticking to your underarms from the cycle, now the material is practically translucent. Oh well, at least there’s no one close by to catch a whiff. You type away for a while, then stop.

Underarms? That’s wrong, you should have thought oxters. Have you used a single Scots word by instinct today? It’s hard keeping track of these things. You rub the back of your neck. You’re not even replacing the words you know, just subtracting from them. Soon your voice will be indistinguishable from the ‘Queen’s English.’ You’re Starbucking yourself. You shudder, stroke the keys on your laptop, then take out your phone and open WhatsApp.

Bonzour, Granper. Ki manyer? (Hello, Grandad. How are you?)

Before even a few minutes have passed, you receive a reply:

Bonzour, garson. Mo bien, mersi. Plis kontan aster mo pe tand de twa. E tomem? (Hello, son. I’m well. Happier now I’m hearing from you. And yourself?)

You tell him how you’ve been doing, and ask a little more about his life. It really has been a while. He’d gotten his own little family a while back, once he’d realised there was no hope of rejoining the first, and it’s nice to hear they’re getting on well. The light from the window is slipping up your back now, warming your shirt. Eventually, you steer the conversation to this morning’s incident:

…and that’s why I was wondering (you’ve exhausted your Kreol at this point) if you could tell me the Mauritian word for woodlouse?

It’s a solid idea; instead of losing your words, add to them. You watch your phone for Granper’s reply. Until now they’ve come swiftly, but this time there’s a pause. Just as you think he might be struggling to remember, your phone lights up.

Pou mwa, to anvi aprann mo-la? (From me, you want to know the word?)

There is another, brief pause. Then a series of laughing emojis.

Se rendre, garson. (Give it up, boy.) Se rendre. (Give it up.)

Then he stops replying, and your phone shows him to be offline, as if he wants to be left alone with his laughter.