Scotland Before the Bomb

by M. J. Nicholls

  THE LACONIC CHARACTER

  B., a curt man, ate an egg.

  THE SYMPATHETIC CHARACTER

  In the fictional village of Echt, Annie Lettuce was the inhabitant most likely to elicit sympathy. Her husband had consumed six ciders and steered his removal van over a steep cape, causing nine months of coma vigil and eventual snuff. During this time, she had miscarried her firstborn. These events sealed her status as the Sympathetic Character. For a year, she maintained a mourning face, and endured the kindly simpers, the careful words, the outpourings from other poor sods whose sufferings were not as significant, and sat in her living room eating prawn crackers and putting on mounds of pounds. She went to the pub more, leading people to speculate she was becoming an alcoholic. One night, she met the new barman Scurf.

  “These people want me to become a bloated old spinster trapped in memories of her dead husband and unborn child,” she said to him after two daiquiris.

  “Wow. Quite an opener.”

  “For a few months, I was hooked on the sympathy. People were so nice to me. It helped with the endless sucking aching fucking misery, leeching on me from morn to nicht. It then twigged. I was a watermark for suffering. These people wanted me steeped tit-deep in weeping woefulness. Because, hey, they might have it tough, but at least they’re not that snivelling heap of a human being over there. I mean me.”

  “I see your point.”

  “Your face is seriously something I’d like to lick. When’s your shift over?”

  Annie Lettuce rode Scurf for two hours, and thereafter, rode him for two hours every other night for three weeks until he collapsed crying in defeat and returned to his mum’s house in Dunecht. She committed herself to a programme of excessive sexual pandemonium: mounting the man at the mountain bike shop, humping the haberdasher on a hillside, screwing the salesman in his Sierra, nailing the nice chap from the nature reserve in a nook. Actions she considered essential for busting free her prison of pain were seen in the village as further cries for help, and the sympathy for her skyrocketed. Even the sneering librarians who loathed the village felt their ice-packed exteriors loosen in a simper of understanding.

  THE LIKEABLE CHARACTER

  Victor was in the shed hiding from his wife’s persistent reminders that washboards were for unlikeable morons, and that men stroking them in public were contemptible sissies, when the package containing a washboard arrived. He hacked open the cardboard and ogled his authentic musical brass washboard shipped from Melbourne. The thimbles had been included for free. He emailed the musicians from Dunecht—Alexei the ukulele player and Phil the fiddler— a picture of his washboard prefaced by six ecstatic grinning emoticons, and fingered the instrument with tender tip-taps.

  “This feels right,” he said to the lawn mower. The idea was to form a New Orleans busker band like Yes Ma’am or The Blair Street Mugwumps and perform in pubs or pound the pavements in cities. The addition of a cowbell and woodblocks at the washboard’s base would enhance the percussive clout of the instrument, with perhaps the daring surplus of a cymbal, but these were things to be considered later.

  As he practised on the sly, meeting Alexei and Phil in a school music room in Dunecht for improvised skiffle-making merriment, his self-satisfaction increased to noticeable levels. Passengers on the trains observed a shift in his manner from pleasant to overly chipper, and residents commented on the public whistling and semi-skipping stride, like a bad actor hamming the part of a ‘happy’ person. His likeability, as Alison predicted, was already being compromised. Refusing to swallow his lie about a pub bowling team, she inspected the shed and found a thimble sitting atop a paint can.

  “Show me your fingertips,” she said to him when he walked in at midnight after an evening of vigorous frottoir abuse.

  “I bowl hard,” he said. She noted the hard skin and evidence of dried blood consistent with washboard attack.

  “You lie hard. You are scraping our lives away, all for the illusion of purpose that a mid-life skiffle trio brings. If you persist in fingering this metal in private, I will have no choice but to file for divorce and evict you from your children’s lives.” Victor staggered to the sofa for a night of soulgazing. He was the Likeable Character. He had one function: to be likeable, and his interest in music tolerated by people in pubs, tolerated by harassed shoppers on high streets, and tolerated by the musicians who can’t write their own songs, was sending him on a hoedown to characterly oblivion.

  THE LACONIC CHARACTER

  B., in church, took a wife.

  THE OBSCURE CHARACTER

  —Tell me, Carter, have the screen transmissions of Alex Van Warmerdam ever throbbed upon thine hazelnut orbs?

  —No sir, I am a greengrocer. I favour the tomato and the parsnip.

  —I have, for the last nine weeks, slipped into a slit not unlike the audiovisual slits inhabited by the cinematic personae in the surreal features from the Dutch filmmaker whose name I spoke in the opening clause.

  —I favour the cauliflower.

  —Now, Carter, I moved to the fictional village of Echt in March. The last time we exchanged nouns was when I ordered that kayak of sprouts. I ate them in one sitting to help in the war against pancreatic cancer.

  —Five thousand sprouts, sir.

  —That is correct. I was not to realise that Echt was an inexact replica of the incomplete Dutch new town as shown in De Noorderlingen (The Northerners): a single street in a sandbox, like a set in the rotting lot of some forgotten western. The characters in that transmission: a sex-crazed butcher whose celibate wife is stricken with an inexplicable sickness, a postman taken to steam-opening letters with a kettle secreted in the neighbouring woods, an impotent huntsman with a penchant for blasting trespassers, a 12-year-old obsessed with the Belgian Congo, and more bewildering sorts of Dutch sorts.

  —Peculiar.

  —I have since become a connoisseur of the oeuvre of Warmerdam. There are nine carnivals of mischief and chaos to peruse. Among them the warped fable De Jurk (The Dress), a haunting rumination on capitalist possession in which a leaf-patterned frock spells sour consequences for each wearer. In De Laatste Dagen Van Emma Blank (The Last Days of Emma Blank), an acidic and tragicomic marvel, a moribund woman makes her relatives act as servants in order to apportion her estate. And there’s Abel, a black farce in which a manchild tries to snip flies in half with a pair of scissors.

  —Halt! Are these visual divertissements available for commercial purchase?

  —Several. The slow creeping oddness of Borgman and the unconventional hitman thriller Schneider v. Bax. I favour the metafictional larks of Ober (Waiter), in which a brooding “modern character” bickers with his creator over the script’s atrocious plotlines and botched relationships. And Kleine Teun (Little Tony), where an alphabet tutor is embroiled in a love triangle in order to secure a sprog. These capsule puffs are meagre when confronted with the screen fact of the wonder of the what.

  —MP4s, mon ami?

  —I will return with a USB. For now, perhaps a carrot?

  —Twelve or sixteen?

  —Five carrot.

  —Here.

  —Yes.

  THE ANGRY CHARACTER

  “There is no reason to be calm and content,” said Lee, the Angry Character, to Charlene, his lover who was leaving. “The sprouts have been burned and the leaders are self-adoring despots with missile silos on their lawns and the rain is hammering the roof hour after hour and the cat is choking on a furball and these trousers have seven separate holes and the sun never shines on the lost and hopeless and the laughter is bitter not carefree and the beans have burned on the bottom of the pan and the critics serve the companies and the internet is not radicalising the right people and all cute little pandas are becoming extinct and there is still no complete PJ Harvey B-Sides album commercially available and one coherent thought per week is an achievement in this fact-packed era and the lies pile up like horse manure on the public consciousness and the toothbrush cup is caked
in permanent mould.”

  “Where’s my mobile?” Charlene asked.

  “There is no mobile because the chickens have been strangled and the spinal caries are more painful than ever and the best in show is a rancid pug and the scoutmaster votes UKIP and the pubs never have music I like and the men are smug self-regarding wits who like their faces and Leonard Cohen is no longer fucking alive and there are more misspelled words than there are words and the laptop keeps crashing before I can save things and the teenagers across the street might never realise that their rebellion is corporate-sponsored and the ladle has partial burning from that aborted chilli and Auntie Marie has to lift crates at the age of 69 to survive and coastal erosion is still a serious agricultural potato and the sound of silence is never available and the electric toothbrush needs charging every after brush.”

  “Lee, I need to catch the bus. It’s been . . .”

  No end to the sentence was required. Lee completed it once she’d scrammed. “A time of splatting tomatoes against the wall. A time of expensive and ultimately pointless reconstructive surgery. A time of lips being bitten and blood snaking down chins. A time of pirouetting around the point like talentless prancers. A time of dredging merriment from the foulest wells. A time of sealing up hopes like hated wives in drywall. A time of blowing experimental jazz sax into each other’s lugs.”

  THE LIKEABLE CHARACTER

  Victor was no longer a man married to a wife. She removed the children from his zone of skiffle to a permanent huff in her parents home in Dunecht. He had refined an acceptable scrape on his washboard and was awaiting the pub performance like a peak-time child an upcoming Santa Conference in Lapland. He had coutured The Dun ‘n’ Echt Players (their name) for minimum annoyance and maximum likeability: their smocks were hewn in inoffensive acrylic in tepid reds and blues, and their clodhoppers were commercial and unamerican. The on-stage banter would trade on common clashes between Dunners and Echters: how Dunners import seven tonnes of oranges per annum, how Echters support Norwegian football team SK Brann because King Magnus VII stopped in Echt for water in 1332, how Dunners close their shops at 1.45pm, how Echters censor BBC4 on their satellites, how Dunners conclude their colloquies with Nipponese nods, how Echters curse in front of their children, and so on. Victor would keep his expression neutral while frotting on stage.

  The Idle Stevedore was the pub. The whole village, minus the bedridden and clinically repulsed, were in attendance. The band stepped onstage and opened their set with ‘Wabash Cannonball’, the A.P. Carter standard. The crowd reacted with polite tolerance for the first song. Halfway through the second, ‘Rag Mama Rag’, the crowd clenched their toes, realising the whole two-hour set would sound the same, and the first bud of hate blossomed in their hearts. As the folk merriment continued, Alexei and Phil became uncomfortable at the forced applause and open stares of contempt into fifth and sixth beers, and announced the seventh song would be their last. Victor, exhilarated and blind to the crowd’s hate, piped up that they had fifteen planned. “Come on, let’s keep this momentum up!” he said. That utterance stripped the last vestige of Victor’s likeability, making him the most hated man to ever open his mouth in the village. All because of a cheap imported washboard.

  THE INAPPROPRIATE CHARACTER

  “Is it wrong to have the hots for your mum in photos taken before you were born?” Max asked the photo of his mum. He regarded the young visage of his twenty-two-year-old mother: a visage nothing like the sixty-three-year-old visage of his current mother’s visage. He pondered on this for an hour. Towards the end of this hour, an erection materialised in his underwear. This was a new development. “Is this erection an excitement at the taboo, or a proper arousal at thoughts of my young mother’s visage?” There was no way of answering this. The erection was the problem and the erection needed a solution. He retired to the bed to remove the erection with masturbation. Once complete, he pondered on the shame and the pleasure. He had masturbated with the image of his twenty-two-year-old mother in mind: however, this might have been part of the taboo, and not an indication of a yearning to possess the body of his younger mother. Aside from constructing a time-machine, there was no means to separate the truth from the taboo. He chose to keep the picture and masturbate to the image from time to time: after a week or so, the erections subsided. He was none the wiser.

  THE LACONIC CHARACTER

  B., at last, had a bath.

  THE SYMPATHETIC CHARACTER

  Annie continued her exploration of male torsos on ill-lit commons and car bonnets. The unbridled freedom she indulged in was sealing her into an unexpected tomb of misperception. This became apparent when she performed coitus at an unusual elevation on the bonnet of a funeral car parked in the graveyard. The mourners showed not the expected shock that Annie had predicted (seeing her sex partner was the bereaved husband): mere compassion sparkled in their lugubrious oculi. Some even placed an understanding hand on her naked shoulder to indicate: “You are trapped in an uzumaki of madness. Your cerebrum is a Nanking of shredded thoughts.” In fact, she wanted to scream: “No! I have at last been released from the insistent fronds of wallow. These illicit romps showcase a fresh Annie Lettuce, not the so-called ‘Iceberg Lettuce’ that wags have been caricaturing.”

  In other words, happiness was seeping back into Annie’s life. She dedicated each sexual moment to her lost husband. She was considering a two-day trip to North Berwick with the most agile of her lovers. She thought about working for a living again without picturing herself in a hot bath with slit wrists. To help kill the village-wide sympathy, wafting round her like a hippo’s cologne, she applied for the post of traffic warden. Sneaking up on cars emergency parked for desperate loo visits, to collect infirm relatives, or to pick up small children, and slapping penalties on them in a black uniform would correct her character. Unfortunately, most employers in the village, while understanding of her problems, were not so understanding as to employ her, for fear her unhinged past might repeat itself all over their balance sheets.

  THE_______CHARACTER

  Chester entered a room. The sort of room Chester entered was unclear since Chester lacked a label. If Chester was the amusing character, he might enter a pub and reel off several zingers to local zinger-lovers. If Chester was the insane character, he might enter a room in his mind while in reality standing in an irrigation ditch. Since Chester lacked a label, the room Chester entered will remain undefined. “Does anyone have a label I can borrow?” Chester asked. There was either no one there, someone there, or more than one someone there. As it happened, a man was present. “Keep this on the QT,” the man said (a cipher like Chester), “by the river at midnight labels are on sale. Be careful. You might not inherit a label you can handle.” Chester nodded and exited the room. He suspected this unlabelled man once had a label that had backfired from the implied caution in his toneless voice. He waited until midnight. He displayed no traits and carried out no actions until the label-seller arrived. An excessive man with nine chins, four stomachs, twelve noses, and two tails approached Chester in a bounding slouch. “Looking for a label?” he asked in a loud hushed miserable ecstatic tone. “You might not like what you receive. As you can see, I am incubating a motley of undesirable labels.” Chester said nothing. “You label-less kids are some talkers. You ever thought about carving a label for yourselves?” Chester said nothing. “Right. You might end up the label-carving character. I see. Now, I have activated the label randomiser. Once you have your label, you will pay me £250 within four weeks. In the event your label renders you incapable of making money, please sign this life insurance policy.” Chester signed. In several seconds, the label-seller had vanished and the time was 7.30am. He awoke by the river as The Unlabelled Character. “What the fuck?!” he shouted. “I already was the unlabelled character!” This was untrue. No label had been assigned to his character. ‘Unlabelled’ was in itself a label. He was a complete blank. He had now inherited a label in the form of ‘unlabelled’, with
all the consequences and traits this label might imply. “Fuck this shit!” he shouted and ran along the riverbank in search of the vanished label-seller.

  THE (NON-) BLOGGING CHARACTER

  Damon considered the nothing he had written. He had spent two hours not writing the follow-up post to his controversial one-liner: ‘The most authentic form of self-loathing blog is never written’. He could either return to the non-blogger community, and risk the wrath of their ranks, or make a textual stand. At two minutes before midnight he wrote ‘Boo!’ in the text box and posted a titleless post.

  “The self-loathing blogger community left their warm excreta in the comments again,” he said to his mother. “ShutUpNow said: ‘This infantile provocation of our community, from which you have been forever banned, merely shows a pathetic need to reconnect with us. You can scream nothing from the rooftops, not write a million non-books, or vanish from the net entirely: there is no way back.” Kwi_8 said: “Fail. Your pathetic poke is as meaningless as the rest of the claver clogging up the net. A perfect illustration of our vitality.” Moe_Ack said: “I would block this blog from the universe if I had God’s IP address.”

  “Tetchy bissoms,” his mother said.

  “I have an agenda. I will write. I will write words until those word-hating halfwits acknowledge that words are better than non-words.”