Scotland Before the Bomb
Page 3
[From The Big Book of 1001 Failed Schemes, Peter Weep and Walter Pepp, Eds, 2047, Hahaha! Books.]
“The Last Man in Skye”
[ISLE OF SKYE]
JANUARY 25
I amble across a lumpen knoll. I swerve the terrace, the lime-bird, the stag-beetled recrudescence, and the twig. A curled corner of Cutter and the Clan peeps into my perceptory, I bag the fragment. The swirling opera singer reappears in a lamé waistcoat with a seeping viscus in a plastic container. I emit words from my sound-hole, I re-emit words from my sound-hole, I stop emitting words from my sound-hole. The day drops.
JANUARY 29
In a fever, I hear the strains of ‘Abhainn an T-Sluaigh’. I see Casio chords like the spooked face of the re-animator. I see intermittent timpani fills like the beasting vision of an unlaunched missile. I see the lilting Gaelic vox like an alphabet inked in the nihilistic night. I waft towards a crateload of sold notions and upcount the stock-take. You allow sweet pencil shavings to fall into my ears, and for that I am thankful.
FEBRUARY 5
Before the twigs, the twigs, the twigs, the twigs, I observe cold cattle. One bovine bump, two bovine bumps, and a third. I picture the screaming in that mattress, and raise a colder compress to my temples which are, of course, not there. “Might we open our clavicles to the accommodate the night?” I ask. The response, that is now patent pending, is worth reciting word for word.
FEBRUARY 9
A faded sticker that reads “Reduced” is found on a fragment. I lick The Big Wheel. The posit tastes like seven bags of rice in the pouches of a sclerotic kangaroo. “Kerry, was that you, in the mosque, limping towards a shard of someone’s metaphor?” I ask the kopje. The sun looms over towards the sky, almost as if a bald man had forgotten his cane and impressed upon a wall. We pray, and why not.
FEBRUARY 19
Is that you, Donnie Munro? Is that the skitter-skatter of an ovoid plane, landing in a strop of hot noodle? Is that you, Calum MacDonald? Is that the arched lemon pie, as seen on TV’s Hot Lime Dinners? Is that you, Blair Douglas? Is that a sense of polity, viewed from the half-blind mind of a mud-caked villager? Is that you, Rory MacDonald? Is that a raw snip of tennis on the low pitch? Is that you, Bruce Guthro? Is that the cauterised dream clipped from the wing of a TB-ridden tinkerbell? Is that you, Peter Wishart?
MARCH 3
I return to the backend. The crabs retreat. I nuzzle the CD shard In Search of Angels.
MARCH 5
Overhead, the bolt hole closes, and opens. “Hmm,” I think in words, “I will need a pontificate to urge this scenario across.” I sometimes eat the remnants of former afternoons. I won’t spring a plate of pesto upon thee. Gone, along the perforations, are the scissors that lifted us to victory, some long pint of wonder ago.
MARCH 26
“I was a walnut,” a voice remarked. This has nothing of significance. On an escarpment, the bust modulation in ‘Alba’. “I might opine,” I opined. “That was a cult vestige,” a remark voiced. This has something of insignificance. “I opined that I might,” the walnut revoiced. That was a lot of ballyhoo.
APRIL 2
I lump across a stumbled knoll. Smells like January, tastes like Saturday. In the wrap, a song. ‘Cutter’. Look, we aren’t here to accuse each other of mutual fragmentation. A clinamen wraps things up.
APRIL 5
Memories of violence. Memories of the expendable, unlovable other. This swarm of hot mess. The aftermath of a lightning stroke. We roll across the turpentine hills, swatting the demons. I love the soup, I love things. If we were a braver man, you might believe in the refrigerated middle. As this stands, I can only swim.
APRIL 18
The lute, the fiddle, the croaking whore of time. We will never complete the set. These fragments of Celtic MOR. These shards of trad-pop. These songs never to be re-sung. In lucid moments, this pain is the most. I span evermore into the internment of the colloquial insane, and make a nest there, with painless feathers.
APRIL 30
YOU SEE? “I was at a loss,” the gain said. “I never gainsaid,” the loss gained. How we curl into our darkened wings. How the sharp tip of Gabriel’s sword perforates our limbs. How like atoms we are, in a spinning lager. Cross-pollinating ourselves, with the exuberance of bumblebees, our sacs stuffed. How the seedbed accumulates small, fervid eclectic shocks. “I gained a loss,” the never said. I SEE!
MAY 5
Swishing kestrels care not. Yes, we see. The opal crescent unfurled and along the translucent tongue was the picture, ‘Cnoc Na Feille’. Placed into a burlap satchel, the mother was not concerned with the haircut motes. Drachma alterations, please. One: a cold press. Two: a building semi-erect. Three: an oubliette omelette. Four: fairweather exaggeration. Five: a sestina on twelve breads. Six: the hour, sliced.
MAY 17
Is there anyone, mortal or flautist, who communicated like a salamander? In the curt half-light, a slowly inflating yoghurt. Is this the epicentre of our pain? Is there anyone, mortal or piper, who blew their stacks like a lemon? In the unforeseen chancre, a lummox of sorrow evaporates. Is there anyone, mortal or harpist, who could equivocate with the shoulders of a multicoloured priest? Is that the bus?
MAY 30
So, in the flaming hour, I notice. I up and notice, and I insert the fragments into a rowboat. I hum the last note of music, and prod. The melodies float to sea. The songs and sounds are silent. I listen to the birds. I listen to the waves. I listen to the wind. A serenity, a heavenly serenity, invades my soul, and I stagger towards something like clarity.
[From Diary of the Last Man in Skye, Author Unknown, Graham Butters (ed.), Historicoloco Press, Manchester, 2059.]
“Festival ∞”
[EDINBURGH]
I RETURNED TO RECLAIM a stapler I had left on the News Steps twelve years ago. Stepping from the train at Waverley, a tall and flexible blonde chap said: “Have you a marble in your eyes?” He produced from under his right lid a pebble and offered it to me, cackling in a backflip retreat. The Mystical Marauders, a troupe of trapeze artists, tumblers, and beaming circus performers, were at work in the station. I had made a point of arriving in late September to avoid the festival and the clean-up, and was most irritated at this extravaganza of commuter torture. At the station concourse, a tightrope walker was showing off, and assorted fire-eaters, lion-tamers, and pole-spinners were performing at full pelt. I noticed people at the ticket office throwing their money into a upturned bowler hat and receiving tickets from a mime, who fattened the queue by pretending to be trapped in a box before handing them over. I inched forward at the exit, bunched together with harassed travellers and people shoving flyers into my face, muttering “free show”, until it became apparent that there were only about two people trying to move forward, and the crowd was composed entirely of flyering nuisances, imposing their loss-making productions on us. I copied the man in front, and climbed over a pile of lapsed flyerers, who had collapsed into a breathless heap, some probably expiring below the mound.
On Waverley Bridge, I stopped the other man. “Is the festival running for two months this year?” I asked. He replied curtly, “Edinburgh is the festival.” I would learn later that several years earlier, on August 31st, a band of enraged performers, having sunk thousands into their failed shows, staged a coup on the city, inciting the hundreds of comedians, actors, writers, and entertainers to violent revolt, refusing to leave the former capital until the ill-bred public had acknowledged their brilliance and let them turn a profit. In the meantime, I walked towards the News Steps, passing the beggars who were actors (one lunatic was performing the Lucky monologue from Waiting for Godot), the human statues (one man was meta-miming the statue of Walter Scott), and performance artists with various parts of their anatomy nailgunned to the pavement. There, I encountered another impediment. On each step was a comedian, reciting their routines to the middle side of the step. Each step was roped off with a bouncer-cum-ticket collector on the right side.
The first performer was Gordon Harriet, a nervous Welshman who mispronounced every second word. His bouncer informed me the price of admission to the middle of the step to listen to Gordon perform the show thirty centimetres away from me was £10.
“I only want to advance one step. Are you telling me that each step will cost a tenner?” I asked.
“My show is only £7.50, and I have rude balloon animals!” Step 2 said.
“Only £6 for mine, with a free sticker with my catchphrase on, ‘Syrupy virtues, m’lud!”’ Step 3 said.
“I’m the anti-comedian’s comedian’s auntie. Only £4 for me!” Step 4 said.
“I’m £11.50. But it is two hours of non-stop laughters and a moving song at the end, inspired by recent events in Yemen,” Step 5 said.
“Are you intending to pay, sir?” Gordon’s bouncer asked. My stapler having been left on the fourth set of steps, I calculated that to reach that level would cost between £250-350, depending on the prices set. I might also have to suffer a heckle from each of the performers for “walking up” on their shows, and I loathed being the person singled out for attention. I would have to contrive another method of stapler retrieval.
Curiosity compelled me around the city, first to the castle. Here, writers from the book festival had holed themselves up, reactivating the cannons and threatening a bloodbath if anyone came near. This hadn’t stopped the American tourists, who had camped outside in the belief that the Queen opened the castle whenever she felt like it. Over a loudspeaker, poets recited their terse elegies on topical themes, novelists read amusing scenes from their crime capers, their eye-opening memoirs, and first novels about the war and families and wartime families at war, to an uninterested audience. These were punctuated by the public executions of critics who had been rounded up across the city. A gallows had been erected overlooking Princes Street Gardens, where sanguine writers read out their negative reviews, invited the critics to respond, and let the rope take their necks before a regretful oral noise could be made. I was horrified to see the corpses of Joyce McMullane and Stuart Snelly being pecked clean by pigeons, the latter for a criticism of Liam McEwen’s “recycled tropes.”
On Princes Street, the usual parade of hoopla took place, except inside shops performers lurked in ambush. In the coffeehouses, baristas were free to showcase their talents, reeling off soliloquies, hopping about in suits of armour, and singing a capella renditions of Kraftwerk. In the clothes shops, clown assistants would squirt water from their bowties when you inquired about a loosefitting pair of slacks. In the police stations, officers would refuse help until the victim watched an agitprop reworking of The Threepenny Opera. In the hospitals, surgeons would perform operations while making incisive observations on the clangbirdishness of modern technology. I could tell that the citizens, with their crushed expressions, had been pummelled into submission over the years by the relentless fighting spirit of these performers, hoping to be spotted by any talent-scouts in the vicinity (no talent-scouts remained in the city, the festival having been technically over for two and half years), and that many people had lost their livelihoods. In fact, thousands had to pretend to be struggling actors in order to blend into the fabric of the new Edinburgh. And the fact that performers had made so many people unemployed meant no one had the funds to see their shows, making the possibility of profit impossible. I could see this place had become an unbearable living hell.
Down Fleshmarket Close, I was pulled into an alley and held at knifepoint. “What skill?” my attacker barked. “Nothing . . . I’m here visiting,” I said. He released me. “Hop it,” he said. “Why the knife attack?” I asked. “We’re the Critic’s Biteback. We’re working in tandem with the People’s Revolt to take the city. Are you interested in becoming a member?” At that point, he produced a flyer, the seventy-fifth I had taken that morning, and I skimmed their manifesto. Their main mode of attack was to surround a performer at night and bludgeon them with bad reviews then escort the broken and weeping person to the London train or the North Bridge, whatever option they preferred.
“I need a stapler reclaiming from the News Steps, perhaps I could help,” I said.
“A tough one. But I have an idea. Listen.” He unravelled his plan for me to distract the performers on the steps, while he crouched in the foliage and whispered excerpts from their negative reviews through a microphone. I would pretend not to hear anything and the frail comedian’s egos would explode.
Back to Gordon Harriet. “Listen, I feel terrible for walking off like that,” I said. From the bushes: tiresome, incoherent taff-chaff. “I would like to hear more about your confessional show, Cardifferent.” Obsessed with masturbation and leering at girls in the audience. “Growing up weird in Cardiff must have been hilarious.” Relies on spent Welsh stereotypes, and reduces the audience to yawns. “So what was that ticket price, £10?” Harriet’s lip quivered. He dropped the mic and muttered “I have to . . .”, howling as he ran towards the 12:52 to Crewe for the connecting train to Cardiff. And on to Step 2: this talentless bore wilts like the unfunny balloon penises he ties on stage. And Step 3: a diabolic diabetic sentences us to an hour of boredom. And Step 4: the comedian’s auntie would be funnier. And Step 5: the laughters never start, the torture never stops. And in this manner, we sent the chuckle-meisters and their bouncers packing. The hardest to crack was Alan Bongo, with whom we had to resort to personal attacks. We remarked that his wife had a flat face, and that was done.
I found the stapler untouched on the original step. I produced a sheet of paper from my satchel to test. “Some bastard’s stolen the staples,” I said. “The former capital is seething hotbed of criminal stink.” I punched a man named Tristan on a pogo stick to relieve the stress. A gang of pogoing students followed in pursuit, hopping their Oxford revue show All About That Bounce around the streets. I lost them at the station, where The Mighty Marauders set upon them with their circus ways, trapping them with ropes and hanging them above Platform 11. It was time to leave this place. I would seek staples elsewhere. I scattered coins indiscriminately to please the artists, and in this way, arrived at the safety of my train. I smiled at the mimes pretending to be snorkellers, and pushed a few pence out the window to say “yes, thank you, I am most amused by your rubbery faces.” I strongly hope the Critic’s Biteback and People’s Revolt work in tandem to expunge these attention-seeking vermin and return Edinburgh to its proud tradition of completely ignoring all these wretched people for a month.
[From Staplers I Have Known, Francis Blackmoor, Virginal Books, 2034, p.2325.]
“The Republic of Hugh”
[MORAY]
Official Senyru* for the Republic of Hugh
In this Republic
there is one Official Man.
His name is Hugh Galt!
Hugh! Hugh!
Our spectacular
Boss Man: seven feet in height—
unlimited might!
Hug Hugh!
Love him and lick him!
Kiss and touch and fellate him!
Hug Hugh for all time!
His Trade
Carpets, rugs, and mats:
no inch of flooring is left
unclad in Hugh’s pelt
*A senryu is the nonpastoral version of the Japanese verse form the haiku, with the syllable pattern 5-7-5. —Ed.
His Pate
Short-cropped with cow-lick
regal brown with silver sheen:
follicular bliss!
His Gait
A faultless stride:
two shapely legs in concord
with the Hughniverse
His Mate
Her soft swanlike neck,
sunbed-bronzed, her piercing eyes
that say “I love Hugh!”
His Voice
A booming rasping
throatful of magnificent
hollers, bellows, shouts, and screams!
His Body
An impressive sphere,
BMI
of thirty-five
and stately waddle!
His Demeanour
He towers above:
a stern face upon which we
stare in blissful fear!
His Temperament
Torrential rage!
No time for buffoons or fools!
Or blacks or the blind!
His Male Enemies
A man once remarked:
“Hugh is a fat balding c***.”
He was beheaded.
His Female Enemies
A woman once said:
“Hugh is an angry turnip.”
She was massacred.
His Essence
Heavenly onion
mixed with camphor and petrol
is the scent of Hugh
His Facial Hair
A short strip of black
across one cheek and a tuft
of white on the chin!
His Apparel
Unwashed brown blazer,
chequered blue shirt and bowtie:
GAZE UPON HIS CLOTHES!
His Second Mate
Bigger bosom and
a more bronzed complexion:
hotter than she before!
Our Purpose
Twelve hours cutting
fabrics for the Republic:
we cherish our work!
Our Duties
To absorb ourselves
into one thriving corpus
known as the YouHugh
Our Freedoms
We are free to love!
To laugh and love and pleasure
that one Great Man: Hugh!
Our Music
Mick Hucknall’s songbook
comprehensively explored