The Words of the Mouth

by Ronald Smith

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  I bought a dilapidated flat in the High Street in Edinburgh for only £400, because. the building had a demolition order on it. It had one window which was touched by the sun only on the longest day of the year; only on the summer solstice would direct sunlight shine briefly through it.

  At that time the Council was using its powers of compulsory purchase to buy people's flats and force them to move out into dismal council estates; then the Council would do up the flats and sell them to wealthy people.

  I wanted to modernize the flat, but I couldn't get the Council to pass the plans. I tried everything I knew, even camping in the local authority's office, but I could make no progress. I went to see my friend Joey Buchanan who had an awful father he hated, a corrupt architect who erected shopping centre monstrosities in Dundee and Edinburgh while sailing untouched through a series of career-devastating political scandals which had jailed or disgraced some of his associates. He told me to ask one of his father's architects to help.

  "I've got this terrible problem; I can't get the plans for my house

  through,” I said to him.

  "No problem," he said,

  “I can't pay you any money."

  "Don't worry, I don't want any money," he reassured me. He made a phone call - one call - and two days later the plans were passed.

  Once I got my plans through, I talked to all the other tenants and told them what I had done, so they bought their flats, too, and submitted plans for doing them up. That is today one of the very few buildings in the High Street where the original local Edinburgh people still live.

  Joey was a really great friend who stayed with me in the flat for a while. He had beady eyes and a thin moustache, and went about barefoot, usually dressed in a see-through gown and a mongolian hat. I thought he looked like Ghengiz Khan. His talk was full of catch-phrases which he'd invent, like 'Paisley it' (far out), or 'up your nostrils' which he said to everybody.

  He would never comb his hair except with his fingers; as he was going bald, hair would come out and he would shake it distastefully from his fingertips, somehow without shedding his aura of languid elegance.

  He was a very talented silversmith who pioneered the fashion for reproduction Celtic jewelry, and his originals are still some of the finest specimens ever made.

  He lived in a castle in a highland glen, north of Blairgowrie, nicknamed 'Little Balmoral' because it had been designed by the same architect as had Queen Victoria's castle.

  Dalnaglo was a secluded retreat surrounded by bleak, lonely hills. There was a huge standing stone nearby, where you could look down the glen and see for a vast distance with what seemed like empty space below because the ground fell away so sharply. It was, he claimed, an accursed spot where he had once heard the banshee, and had been the site of human sacrifices in byegone days. He called it the place of the black moon. Oddly, it was inhabited by a breed of black rabbits peculiar to the area

  Under his tutelage, the castle became a commune where huge parties were

  held, wild scenes with dope and hallucinatory drugs, and freaks wandering .about out of their skulls - an archetypal sixties infestation. There were demon drink mixtures, black magic brews that punched out the back of your head. Some of his guests once included Hailie Selassie's bodyguards, and Rastafarians, whom nobody had heard of at that time. The Dundee mafia, tried to get in on the act and sell drugs to his guests, but Ghengiz chased them off the estate by firing a shotgun over their heads. He did the same to some tax and excise people who came to investigate his business.

  He kept a lot of legal guns in the house, but I heard he looked after a secret weapons stash belonging to the Scottish Liberation Army; they had whole bunkers full of rifles, grenades and bazookas. This armoury had been collected at the end of World War II; and the SLA quartermaster , who knew of its hiding places, had been mysteriously killed by an eastern bloc interceptor as he was flying behind the Iron Curtain to pick up more weapons.

  His son wanted to join the Hell's Angels in Fife, but they wouldn't admit him unless he gave them something for his initiation. He found a secret drawer in his father's desk which revealed the whereabouts of one of the gun stashes, removed a revolver, and took it to the next Hell's Angels meeting. He slammed the gun on the table, saying "There's a gun for everybody if I can ride with you."

  Armed to the teeth, they had a big shootout down in England with a rival bike club, and as a result the police began trying to find the source of their guns. The SLA secretly hid them in the castle grounds, with Joey's connivance.

  Joey drove about in a very fast black Jaguar, which only ever had about five bob's worth of petrol in it. Once I was in the Jag with him and we were going to deliver a few ounces of dope to some Glasgow friends. We got the directions completely wrong and found ourselves in a really rough Edinburgh housing scheme called Craigmillar.

  The. Jag stalled right in front of a police station which had a wire mesh fence around it and had been boarded up like a Belfast RUC outpost because there had been riots outside.

  We began to push the car, but it was very hard work. Joey said, "Go and ask the police to bloody give us a shove."

  I was dressed in a matador's jacket, knickerbockers, striped socks, and a pointed Russian hat on my head.

  "For fuck's sake, Joey..." I began.

  "Don't be so bloody paranoid',"

  "I am not paranoid," I retorted, and stormed into the police station. I walked up to the counter.

  All the policemen stopped whatever they were doing and looked at me in disbelief, taking in the details of my odd costume.

  “Our car's broken down outside; can you give us a push, please?" They just looked at me. Finally, the guy behind the counter said sarcastically, "What's your name then?"

  I said the first thing that came to my mind - "Riddle" - and it was a riddle.

  He replied knowingly, "I've heard that name before."

  "You have not," I retorted, with an amused show of indignation.

  "Oh, yes 1 have."

  "You haven't."

  "I have."

  "Are you going to give us a push, then? No? Well, then," and I walked out.

  A favourite game of his was to cruise around Edinburgh at about two a.m., looking for a cop on the beat. When he found one, strolling down the empty pavement unselfconsciously, he would drive slowly up from behind so the policeman would be aware of the car's presence just enough to realise that it was a black Jaguar - the police had identical cars at that time - and assume it was his superior keeping an eye on him. He would start noticing everything, testing doors, looking in windows, everything except what was most obvious: two long-haired lunatics smoking a joint just behind him. He would become more and more tense as the Jaguar shadowed him until, when he was almost at breaking point, with a scorch of black rubber and a laugh, Joey would accelerate down the street too quickly for his license number to be read.

  We would sometimes drive up to the entrance to Edinburgh Castle, park next to the sentries and start smoking a joint, while fantasizing loudly how we would capture it and hold it against the authorities.

  He was totally outrageous. Once he saw two drug squad detectives across the road, at a time when he had a lot of dope in his pockets. He rushed across and accosted them, demanding aggressively, "Why the hell are you scroungers following me around? Why don't you get an honest job?"

  I tried to learn from how Joey behaved, and not let things slip as he did. I decided I was never going to be caught out as he was. He blew out a whole cooperative venture simply through being careless. He used to barter his silver jewelry, so as not to use money at all, and get involved with incredible forgeries. But it all collapsed and he fell from the sky like Icarus

  He was busted for a colossal tax bill and thrown into Perth Prison, His wife told me the bail was £300, a very high sum for a tax offence in Scots Law. I knew that in Scotland you have to put cash on the table for bail, so I went around Edinburgh and raised the mon
ey from friends.

  I put on a suit and a smart school tie which I had borrowed, but left on my silver boots. Ghengiz and I used to spray our boots with silver aerosol paint which looked really chic until it wore off. I put £200 in one boot and £100 in the other.

  I drove up to Perth in an unlicensed car. I didn't have a license, either, for that matter. His wife and four kids were with me, and there was a quarter pound of dope in the glove compartment.

  Entering the Procurator-Fiscal’s office alongside the River Tay, I said, "I've just flown in from Australia and I've just heard my best friend Joey Buchanan is in custody, I don't carry cash around with me, but I do have collateral: a flat in London, a yacht. How much is the bail?"

  "The bail is £300, in cash."

  "Only £300? Just one minute; I'll have to consult my bank manager,"

  I put one foot , encased in the silver boot, on his desk and pulled out £200, He stared blankly at the wad,

  "One moment, and I'll consult the other bank manager," and I stood the other foot on his desk, withdrawing the £100. I tossed the pile of banknotes onto the table.

  "When can I get him out?"

  "You can't get him out until six p.m."

  "I must get him out now," I insisted.

  So the Fiscal wrote a letter to the Governor of Perth Prison authorising his immediate release. I asked him to phone the Prison and let them know we were coming.

  We sped down the road to the Prison, and I went through the gate in the high stone walls, into the main hall. There were about forty blue-uniformed screws standing around, all looking at me with hostile faces, I gave my letter to one of them and he took it over to an office where a guy glanced at it, then stared at me as if he wanted never to forget my face. He handed the letter to another screw who also gave me a good look before walking away.

  Then Joey was brought in, looking very relieved. Outside, he said to me, "Ah, Will, they were just about to start beating me up when that letter arrived,"

  After dropping off Baba and the kids at the castle, and picking up his car, we were driving along the Dundee road back towards Perth at about 100 mph. when we saw that we were being followed by a SAAB which then overtook us and slowed down to take a look inside. There were three guys in it, and I noticed they had two mirrors in the front for viewing people behind. Then their car accelerated rapidly and shot off, leaving us standing. Those must be really heavy special cops, I thought; that car should only do 100.

  Just then Joey slammed his foot on the juice and the Jag went WHAP!- right up their arse. They tried going faster, but he stayed right on their tail, about two feet away. We hit 140 and they couldn't go any faster. I was playing the guitar and smoking a joint, grinning and laughing. It was a bright and. cloudless summer day and there were patches of mist lying in the valley, and on the road ahead was a layer of mist about one hundred yards thick. Almost instantly we were into it, totally without vision while travelling at an horrendous speed, which is the most terrifying situation a driver can be in.

  He snapped on the headlights. The three men in the SAAB were visibly agitated by the two maniacs behind them. We shot through the mist and out into the clear sunlight, still bumper to bumper, the landscape blurring past. Another band of mist appeared and we were through it before we noticed anything,

  Joey followed them right up to Perth before he slowed down and let them pull away.

  He was in a bad state of mind after that. He had a nervous collapse, a total paranoid breakdown. He began saying that he was going to be killed, and talked of suicide. The police came to the castle and took all his guns away from him. There were rumours of intruders with binoculars on the grounds, and the castle was probably under surveillance.

  Then he was found outside, lying dead from a gunshot wound. There was a gun beside him nobody had ever seen before, according to his gunsmith, and a friend who was familiar with all his firearms.

  The police said he had shot himself. They reported that he had broken into a cottage and stolen the pistol, not knowing of the secret armoury he had hidden in the castle. But Joey did everything with finesse; he would have chosen a clean shot from a small-calibre gun, not a massive slug that tore his head off.

  If a person commits suicide, there is a public inquest; but only a private inquest was held which returned an open verdict.

  Unknown to anybody, Joey had apparently insured himself a year previously, and although insurance companies don't pay up in cases of suicide, the insurance was quietly paid.

  His ashes were taken by a friend up to the Stone of Justice, an enormous rocking stone high up on the hill which had blood rivulets cut into it, the place he believed to be damned.

  As I was walking alone across the moor just before I heard of his death, I was gripped by a godforsaken pang of loneliness. I felt the sky had fallen in and I was gazing, utterly appalled, out into Eternity; there was nothing between it and me, and it stretched on and on, forever.

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