by James Meek
‘My brother was into being part of the ruling class,’ said Dougie. ‘I was never into that. I’m more like a man of the people. No offence, but you make your choices. My family’s part of the whole colonial set-up here.’
‘Is there a colonial set-up here?’
‘Oh aye. I’m no saying anything against them, they’re good people. And you’re a good person, I can see that. I’m no like a revolutionary or a nationalist or anything, I’m no bright enough for that. I’m just saying Alex the genius and the prophet Matthew and the folks: I’m no the equal of them, and they’re no the equal of me. There’s places I go that they can’t, and vice versa.’
‘What sorts of places can you go to that they can’t?’ asked Bec.
‘Bad places,’ said Dougie. ‘Are you sure you’re no wanting a fag?’
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Bec. She’d quit when she was twenty.
‘You want one,’ said Dougie. He slipped a cigarette between her lips and lit it and Bec took a couple of draws.
A car turned into the drive and she dropped the cigarette and put her foot over it. For no reason she could understand she felt as if she’d done something wrong that she didn’t want Alex to know about.
‘He’s been a postman in Glasgow for fifteen years, but he started speaking like that as soon as he moved there,’ said Alex later. ‘It’s artificial. He put it on and it stuck.’
Alex hadn’t told Bec that he’d cleared his brother’s debts and saved him from having his flat repossessed. She didn’t seem interested in how much money Alex had. When he moved in with her he offered to pay rent; she grinned and said ‘All right.’
He hadn’t meant to make his brother a gift of the money, and when, after two refusals, Dougie accepted it, he promised to pay it back. Now Alex saw how unlikely it was that Dougie would ever be able to do that on a postman’s salary, with two young children by two different, estranged mothers, both of whom were supposed to be getting maintenance from him. Alex knew he could tell Dougie not to worry, turn it into a gift. Sometimes he thought he would. But then what would stop Dougie going back to the bookies, the loan sharks and the dodgy schemes? So the debt lingered, its existence known to no one except the creditor and the debtor.
Throughout the evening meal Dougie caught Bec’s eye, trying to make her laugh. When Bec and Alex went to bed Dougie winked at them and started singing Get It On, emphasising bang a gong by miming ski poles and rocking his head as if it were loose.
Later, Bec came out of the bathroom in a t-shirt and stood over the naked Alex. He raised his hand and touched her. Bec lifted the truncheon and felt its weight and length. She’d never had anything inside her except men and her own fingers; never bought a toy, afraid it might diminish the real thing, for which her friends teased her. The truncheon was smooth, heavy, made of some black hardwood.
‘Am I competing with that?’ said Alex.
‘Oh now,’ said Bec, putting it down and taking Alex in her hand. ‘It’s a cold, dead, nasty thing, and you’re alive.’
Later they lay naked and contrariwise on top of the covers, almost falling off the bed, Alex with his tongue between Bec’s legs and Bec with his cock between her lips, and the door opened. They heard a girl’s voice say ‘Sorry!’ and the door closed. Between the opening and the closing of the door it seemed to Bec that there was a long pause, as if whatever shock Rose had experienced at seeing her uncle and acting-aunt in a mutually devouring six and nine in her grandparents’ guest room was overmastered by curiosity.
47
Next morning, as a birthday treat, Lewis was left alone in the attic while the others went mushroom hunting. It was February, but mild, and Maureen said she knew a place where blewits had appeared the week before. They walked into the woods with Erasmus galloping ahead, Maureen walking arm-in-arm with her brother-in-law. A lukewarm white sun made the moisture glint in the mud on the track and layers of decayed brown leaves squelched under their feet like seaweed. Dougie clipped a leash on the dog and the two of them dragged each other forward; Dougie hoisting Erasmus off scented fascinations in the undergrowth, Erasmus jerking him violently ahead in revenge.
Alex trudged alongside man and dog, cast into gloom, for some reason, by the sight that morning of Bec’s still-sealed bottle of anti-parasitics in her open toilet bag.
‘Like old times, eh,’ said Dougie. ‘You and me out with Uncle Harry. Hot on the trail of the secrets of the universe.’
‘Harry won’t be coming here after this. We’re Harry now, you and me and Matthew. Where’s the new young Alex and Dougie?’
‘Christ, a new young Dougie, that’d bum my betters out.’
‘You couldn’t bring your kids here, I haven’t got any, and Matthew’s teaching his that God made the Earth in seven days. It’s like the Enlightenment’s coming to an end, right here in Brechin.’
‘It’s incredible,’ said Dougie.
‘Yes,’ said Alex, with passion.
‘It’s incredible how you sound like Harry.’
Rose matched Bec’s pace and the two of them fell out of earshot of the others. Rose’s hair was tucked into a snood and she was wearing a long dress under her waterproof jacket. Her costume made her look, thought Bec, like a young Hasidic Jewish woman. Up ahead, she saw the brothers talking, Dougie struggling to control Erasmus. She saw Alex’s hands come up and describe a circle in the air and his mouth opening and closing.
And the human cell is like a world in itself … she subtitled.
‘I saw you and Uncle Alex last night,’ said Rose without looking at Bec, her balled fists pushing her pockets out.
‘Did you?’ said Bec. ‘I thought I heard someone come in.’
‘I opened the wrong door by mistake. Aren’t you afraid you’ll go to hell?’ Rose turned. Her eyes were narrow with anxiety.
‘Why should I go to hell?’ said Bec.
‘For fornicating with Uncle Alex.’ Rose stopped and faced Bec. There was something knowingly provocative about her. ‘I see why you and Uncle Alex got together,’ she said. ‘You’ve got this idea there’s no good and evil, it’s all oh it depends how you look at it, bleh bleh bleh. I don’t understand how you could have been out in the world and got by so long without getting into trouble. The Evil One must have something terrible planned for you.’
‘There’s no Evil One,’ said Bec.
‘Huh! I’ve seen him.’
‘Really?’
‘In dreams, I mean,’ said Rose hastily, as if apologising for implying that she knew a celebrity personally. ‘He’s big as a house, with eyes like traffic lights stuck on red and claws like knives and a necklace made from skulls of little kids.’ Her eyes were fixed on the middle distance and the words flowed easily. ‘There’s no other way to stop people sinning and being cruel and messing stuff up. They’re too greedy and nasty to do what God tells them if they aren’t afraid of hell. You should be afraid. If you go to hell when you die they cut your fingers and toes off one by one, and they take your skin off with a rusty knife, and they lower you into a lake of boiling salt –’
‘Rose, stop,’ said Bec, putting her hands on her shoulders and shaking her gently. Rose stopped talking and marched on up the track with her head and shoulders bowed. Bec walked beside her, trying to remember if she listened to her mother when she was sixteen. And if not, what did bringing up children mean?
‘Anyway, you had a good long look,’ she said. ‘It must have been an interesting sight.’
‘He’s a lot older than you,’ said Rose absently.
‘Do you think seven years is a lot?’
‘Yeah!’ said Rose, spreading the vowels over three notes, up-down-up. She was jolly for a second and gloomy again. ‘Why do they always want to put it in your mouth?’
‘It’s a good question,’ said Bec. ‘And why do we let them?’
‘We want them to be happy,’ said Rose in a small voice, and asked Bec hurriedly when her first time was.
‘I was fourteen and he was seven
teen,’ said Bec. ‘I let him take my clothes off one night in a paddock in Spain. He kept saying he was going to show me something and there I was, starkers, still waiting for it. He wasn’t too bright. I think the thing he wanted to show me was my own nakedness, because he wanted to see it so much. It didn’t occur to him that I might want to see him naked. It was a bit of a fumble. It happened. It was a first time.’ She waited, then said: ‘What about you?’
Rose gave no hint that she’d considered answering the question. ‘It’s a shame you and Uncle Alex are going to burn in hell fire for eternity,’ she said. ‘Maybe if you repented and accepted Jesus as your saviour you’d get off.’
‘Where did you learn this way of speaking?’
‘Bible camp,’ said Rose. She stopped, leaned in close to Bec and whispered: ‘I’ve got a boyfriend, but you mustn’t tell anyone.’ She gripped Bec’s forearm, her eyes widened and she said through her teeth: ‘You’ve got to promise.’
Ahead of them Dougie leaned out of the trees, waved, pointed and disappeared. A moment later Erasmus charged out and led them through patches of nettles to a grove of ash and oak. Maureen was darting round the base of trees, plucking out fungi and putting them in a basket.
Dougie squatted contemplatively in front of a fat purple mushroom with his eyes half-shut, a cigarette high in the corner of his mouth as if his lip had snagged on a fixture.
‘What d’you say this is called?’ he said.
‘Blewit,’ said Maureen.
‘Blewit. That’s the mushroom of my life,’ said Dougie, plucking it.
Maureen told him not to smoke around the mushrooms. Dougie tossed his find into her basket and with sudden boylike effort scrambled up a shallow bank, spraying dirt from the soles of his city shoes, to where Alex was easing Harry into a sitting position on a rug he’d laid on a fallen tree. ‘Hey Uncle Harry,’ he shouted, ‘tell us again how Charlie Darwin got all those animals into the ark?’
‘If you’d paid attention like Alex when we were in these woods thirty years ago you might be where he is now instead of delivering catalogues for a living.’
‘Never had the geek gene, Uncle Harry,’ said Dougie. ‘I do Christmas cards as well.’
The men’s voices sounded thin and clear among the trees. Alex called to Bec that he was coming down to show her how mushrooms should be hunted.
‘We’ll just leave you the poisonous ones,’ Bec called back. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were pink in the cold and vapour puffed from between her lips as she spoke. Alex became aware of the smell of moss and mulch and wet bark in the raw, damp air, the questing busyness of Rose among the tree roots, thought of the warmth of Bec close in his arms that morning, and was ashamed of his pessimism.
‘If you find any magic ones, they’re mine,’ said Dougie. Alex watched Bec turn her eyes to him.
Harry said to Dougie: ‘You couldn’t prise even one of your daughters away from her mother for your father’s birthday?’
Dougie threw his cigarette down and stuck his hands in the pockets of the old parka he’d borrowed from Lewis. ‘The old man doesn’t care, he just wants left alone.’
‘Did you actually try?’ said Alex.
‘Sorry, Einstein,’ said Dougie. ‘Couldn’t order up a kid for you. Maybe try organising one of your own next time.’
The women had been discussing the provenance of an ear-like fungus Rose had found growing on an oak tree and didn’t hear the conversation around the log. Bec heard a swish of foliage and Alex came up to her, looking pale and furious, and said there was something he’d forgotten to do. He had to go back to the house. She asked if she should go with him and he said that there was no need, he’d see her later; and he was off.
Dougie was looking uneasily down at them from the log, fresh cigarette twitching in his fingers.
‘Did you say something to your brother?’ said Maureen.
‘No,’ said Dougie. Harry turned to him and raised his eyebrows and Dougie said: ‘We were talking about kids. He might have got the wrong end of the stick. Why does anyone listen to what I say? I’ll go after him.’ He went off after his brother, and once he was out of the wood, two miles from the house, realised that the rest of the day would go better if he took time out to sit in Caffè Nero in Brechin with a whisky miniature slipped into a black coffee. He cut across the fields towards town.
In the wood, Bec, Rose and Maureen worked among the lichen and leaf mould, feeling with their fingers for the cool plush of mushroom caps. The mushrooms parted from the earth with a snap like a single hair pulled out.
Bec knew how many girlfriends Alex had brought to meet his parents before Maria; and perhaps Maureen had been fond of Maria. What were parents supposed to do, after all, when their son brought home half a dozen women over twenty years, introducing each one as the woman he loved? It was easy to decide that they weren’t supposed to do anything, that they were to be really cool about it. But it was the mother who ended up stripping the bed and washing the sheets when the latest woman had gone. If Maria wasn’t The One, they might reasonably think, why should Bec be?
‘I’m in love with your son,’ she said to Maureen.
‘Good,’ said Maureen, turning to her seriously and nodding once, as if Bec were a child who’d just come and told her she’d tidied her room without being asked. Bec felt the particular sense of foolishness you feel when you hear a profound, difficult, rare truth, one you’ve come to by yourself, echo in the mouths of others as a commonplace thing.
Maureen looked up over Bec’s shoulder, with a smile unmistakeably kept fresh from when she and the beneficiary had been younger. ‘Are you all right, Harry?’ she called. Bec had forgotten he was there, uncharacteristically quiet on his log. The focused warmth in Maureen’s voice, when she had been so reserved, nudged Bec into outsiderdom.
‘Do you remember that old ash? The freak of nature?’ said Harry. ‘Is it still there?’
‘Let’s go and see,’ said Maureen, putting down her basket and going up to him. When Bec next glanced up the two them had gone.
As Bec filled the last box and stashed it in a rucksack Erasmus started barking. Rose laughed and said he’d found a squirrel. Bec saw the dog under a pine tree deeper in the wood, up on his hind legs with his forepaws against the trunk, head wagging as he watched something moving in the branches. She told Rose she was going to find Harry and Maureen and climbed up the bank.
Beyond the fallen tree were clumps of holly bushes. In the distance Bec could hear running water and without thinking she began to move silently, as her father had taught her. At the edge of the second line of holly the ground fell away in a gentle slope scattered with young birches, the mossy ground thinly sprinkled with their leaves. At the foot of the slope were two ash trees joined by a thick branch that had somehow fused, and close by were Harry and Maureen, not moving, their arms round each other. Harry sat hunched on a stump and Maureen stood with her shoulders bowed, her lips pressed hard against the sparse stubble on Harry’s head.
Bec went back to where she’d left the rucksack.
‘They’re coming,’ she said to Rose. ‘Let’s go on ahead.’
Back at the house, she found Alex in the bedroom, sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, staring at her bottle of anti-parasitic pills.
‘I went crazy,’ said Alex. ‘I was angry.’
‘I saw that.’
He told her what had passed between him and Dougie. ‘I came back here sure I was going to do something radical about these pills,’ he said. ‘I thought I could break them open and put some in your food.’
‘What an interesting idea.’
‘I thought I could grind them up in my mum’s food processor. I got as far as the kitchen, and wondering what blade to use, and then I started thinking that perhaps it wasn’t the best course of action.’
Bec took the bottle. The seal was intact. She twisted the cap off, pulled off the foil, shook a couple of pink and black capsules onto her palm, rolled them like dic
e, put them in her mouth and swallowed them. She shrugged. ‘There,’ she said. ‘You see?’
At noon, Dougie slipped into the house, smelling of cigarettes and breath-freshening mints, and soon afterwards, a seven-seater people carrier rolled up to disgorge the Lancashire Comries. The children rushed through the porch and when Lettie came in a few minutes later she saw Harry in a chair in the hallway, jacket hanging off his ribs, mouth stretched back in a lipless smile, his arms round Leah and Chris, murmuring to them. Lettie called to her children and they stepped away from Harry guiltily and she commanded them to go and play in the garden.
‘My dear, we were talking about the seaside,’ said Harry. ‘What harm can I do now? Down in my plot the worms have got their bibs on.’
‘I haven’t seen you for ages,’ Lettie said to Harry. She turned her child so that his head was over her shoulder, away from his grandfather.
‘This must be little Gideon,’ said Harry. ‘Let’s have a look at the chap.’
‘Oh, he likes it up here. How are you feeling?’
Harry laughed wheezily. ‘Bit worse than chicken pox.’
‘I’m sorry to see you suffer like this.’
‘That’s nice of you.’
Lettie spoke slowly and carefully through the wobble in her voice. ‘I pray for you every night. I want you to get well. You take advantage of Matthew’s love. You can’t just take the grandchildren and throw the parents away.’
‘My wish for the children to entertain the notion of God as wonderful myth isn’t the reason you hate me.’
‘I don’t hate you at all.’
‘You hate me because I’m not leaving you the house. You’d find a way to let me spend time with the kids if I changed the will.’
‘Which you’re not going to do.’