Scotland Before the Bomb

by M. J. Nicholls

  QUENTIN

  “Thank you for this opportunity.”

  “Please mouth some reasons, Quentin.”

  “I have plans for a trilateral corporate immersion to rival the invention of Las Vegas. I have the blueprints to turn Banff into the first casino country, with over seventy-nine hotel-casinos across the landscape. Of course, when I say “landscape”, I am imagining a more illuminated terrain than the barren verdant surroundings at present: for this plan to attract visitors, we will have to flatten several of these mountains and hills, and replace them with accessible pavements and roads, and bright neon lights. And those interminable winds and rains will need to be replaced with permanent sunshine, so we will need to enclose Banff inside a large indoor complex and install powerful halogen lighting overhead which we can rise and dim in tune with the solar cycle. Inside, our casinos will offer the finest in financial speculation activities, with tables and slot machines, complimentary drinks and snacks for the service users, and will be manned by expert croupiers and serving staff. That is one other thing: the current inhabitants might wish to seek accommodation elsewhere, or train to work in our properties, as their drab villages would not be in keeping with our brand’s look. I am not calling this a second Highland Clearance, however, these Highlanders will need to clear out if our plans are to be realised. Their removal must be discreet. Our investors so far are Barron Trump, Thomas Farage, and Euan Blair, who are keen to begin the construction as soon as possible. I know you have seven weeks left, but I would appreciate you signing off on this so we can start now.”

  “Fuck off, Quentin.”

  “I will be Heavenly Ruler, you can’t stop me.”

  “We’ll see.”

  ANNA

  “Hello, mother.”

  “Please make vocal emissions, Anna.”

  “Hmm. I suppose we could remove that tax on childless couples that is forcing some people to have kids against their will . . . is that a workable idea? No, all right. Stupid Anna. Hmm. How about we invest in infrastructure and housing rather than repairing the castles and large sailing boats . . . no, another howler. Sorry, I am not an expert at this. Improving the local schools by coughing up for new books, uniforms, and healthier meals . . . mum, don’t make that face. You asked me to come up with things. Here’s another probably stupid idea. Working to rid our hospitals of rats and other infestations? No. Fine. Encouraging non-septuagenarian folk artists to perform here so the young have something to do . . . no? Fine. Closing those slaughterhouses that contravene all animal rights laws in the universe? No. Fine. Appearing more likeable in public speeches, not referring to the electorate as “incestuous yokels” off-camera? No, not a winner? Look, mum, this is your thing. I have no idea. I’m off to the shop to pick up some tofu and yoghurt. Do you want another bottle of pineappleade?”

  “Yes please. And a Twirl.”

  “My legitimate and adopted children, I have heard your respective arguments, and have considered carefully who among you will be my successor. After much deliberation, I have decided to appoint as the next Heavenly Ruler of the Hallowed Nation of Banff this Twirl bar. As you can see, these two sticks of chocolate with a wavy layer above and a solid layer below inside a purple and yellow wrapper is ecstatic at being elected to this post. Look. Yippie! Yippie! See how it leaps up and down between my two fingers! From now on, you will defer to the Twirl in all matters, and anyone who makes any attempt to cross the leader will face the meat cleaver. Goodbye, my children. I will be dying in that room over there. Please do not enter the room until I am in bag bound for the crematorium.”

  [From the official McCulloch transcripts, Banff Archives, 2028.]

  “Tickertape of Misery”

  [FIFE]

  THE TICKERTAPE WAS a rolling list of reasons to be miserable, compulsorily inserted into the eyeballs of every Fife citizen, running along the bottom of their eyelines at all times. The reasons for this remarkable phenomenon are unknown, however, historians have speculated it was a popular innovation, championed as being completely in keeping with the spirit of the Fife people. Below is an excerpt from five minutes of the tape. —Ed.

  . . . the carpet bombing of Kosovo; palmreaders who are able to make a living; Fiona Dolman’s Hello! photographs featuring the actress posed pregnant in her capacious living room; the inhabitants of Abercrombie; the 4.32pm phone call from an accident claim operative in Mumbai; the music award Gordon Lightfoot refused until presented in person by Bob Dylan; failing to acquire an apple at the relevant moment; remembering the Alamo when about to tuck into an expensive steak dinner; receiving a used book through the mail with page corners creased; the ongoing unpopularity of Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs; conversations on topics that hold no interest to you conducted in your living room; Lennon’s murder; pricks in their homes being pricks to their families; Lenin’s murders; when your long-anticipated supper is scuppered by a spontaneous microwave explosion; the inhabitants of Balmullo; receiving no response to your postal marriage proposal to Georgina Howie; the replacement of chalk boards with digital screens; the remastered back catalogue of U2 with bonus tracks; a stupid woman who makes noises with her mouth in rooms; picturing the mangled corpse of a child while unwrapping a Creme Egg; arriving at an abandoned train station covered in litter and weeds and not Bermuda; people who believe it is their biological imperative to breed and propagate the species; the inhabitants of Crosshill; another minute that passes wherein David Cameron remains unfamiliar with the teachings of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard; sex that ends with a burst retina; remembering that David Foster Wallace is no longer alive when about to make love to Gina McKee; the refused kiss and permanent farewell at the end of an exciting date; the realisation in one’s mid-twenties that sex can be routine; your postmodern inability to say ‘I love you’ in a sincere way; having to struggle for years to secure an occupation you hate, then sitting on a hedgehog on your first day; how man is rendered a drooling slave to money from birth, and woman is simply marvellous; the Q+A section of an author appearance; the realisation in one’s mid-forties that sex from now on will only be routine; the student who is able to produce A+ papers with little effort; the refusal of publishers to publish a novel called The League of Unbedded Freaks; the inhabitants of Dairsie; the failure to appreciate a beautiful sunset because you are worried about not making the rent; remembering humans are programmed to be cunts to one another; sex that ends with a partial decapitation; the moment you observe the person who will unselfconsciously dominate the conversation for the whole evening and that no one will have the courage to tell him to belt up; everyone else’s artistic interests and their failure to appreciate yours; that one friend who refuses to take your advice and read a Rikki Ducornet novel in spite of three recommendations; the sort of misanthrope whose waspish refusal of the human race bespeaks of an enormous self-regard and who comes across a bigger prick than the people he loathes; the interstices in a day when one aimlessly mooches around the property, checking the fridge or walking in and out of rooms in the hope of selecting something useful to occupy the next few hours; pricks in their offices making millions being utter pricks; walking hand in hand with one’s precious firstborn in a beautiful park on a warm April morning then remembering that Louise Mensch exists; having to stand in a long line at the burger restaurant, never taking one of the numerous opportunities to exit the premises, then ordering the fattiest, sugariest meal and stuffing one’s pathetic face with the purchase; the inhabitants of East Neuk; returning home after an unsuccessful date to the fact that you are of no interest or consequence to that other person; the autoplay function on YouTube; that nice so-and-so who manages to make reasonable and considered statements at all times and comes across like the most level-headed individual in the room; my girlfriend’s seriously below par attempt at a Turkish pide; having to maintain a positive mental attitude when everything is a cold bowl of horse piss; pricks who sneer at the ukelele; sex that ends with a faint whiff of naphthene; when your partner suggests intr
oducing food into the bedroom, then produces ketchup, onion rings, and chopped liver; when your mother chooses to watch the film with you two minutes into the rimming sequence; taking a coach trip to the breathtaking town of Oxford and a punt along the Thames with your sensationally attractive lover, hoping the precious moments will never end, then remembering Piers Morgan is still breathing; the inhabitants of Forgan; stepping into a puddle that is deeper than you thought then losing your balance completely, causing you topple into the road and have your left arm crushed by a minibus; failing to purchase a pea at the relevant moment; remembering that somewhere a child is starving during a performance of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut; all the shit that kills people for no fucking reason; a swear box at a Conservative conference; people who claim to understand mental illness yet loosely fling terms like “crazy” or “mental” into the conversational mix; the suicides of Ann Quin and B.S. Johnson; not having the patience to sit through a Sigur Ros album; waking up in your sweaty bed as an irredeemable blockhead for the 10,000th time; the inhabitants of Gowkhall; having to watch a crown bowls tournament with your Uncle Bill instead of having sex with Iman; those bastard-ass volcanoes that like to erupt and boil peasant villages with burning lava; the non-existence of a credible Scottish avant-garde; having your woes dismissed as irrelevant in the face of starvation and war by someone in a Volkswagen; a twelve-year-old at a bus stop who thinks Beyonce played loudly from their tinny phone speaker will somehow entertain everyone; the failure to really relax at your grandmother’s wake; an hotel on the Austrian border that replenishes your towels only sporadically; an inner-city rap trio called Blud Bruvvas whose rhymes reach for a cleverness they fail to deliver; your ex-wife’s Facebook invitation to an open-air production of Medea; the inhabitants of Hillend; a man about to squash a frog under his clodhopper who considers the morality of such an action and crushes the frog anyway; the lack of media coverage of the male malabar pied hornbill’s shameful mistreatment of their wives; a dentist from Luxembourg who fails to state that he is from Luxembourg at every opportunity; a comprehensively fumigated loft that still yields the odd cheeky roach from time to time; a bag of crisps with a half a pantaloon inside; the fifteenth story in Nicholas Royle’s collection Mortality; a lemming who refuses to deviate from his fictional cliff-leaping imperative; sex that ends with a rendition of ‘O Canada!’; the inhabitants of Isle of May; a signposted stone circle nine miles away that consists of two rocks with illegible carvings and a random boulder at the other end of the field; having to wrap your sweater and coat around your waist when the sun insists on appearing contrary to all weather predictions; a soup tureen with only enough volume for four servings; a man who chooses to donate none of his £60,000 winnings to starving infants, and instead erects a platinum-plated plaque outside his house that reads GET HUMPED STARVING INFANTS; an unseasonably warm wedding day, when sweat visibly oozes from the bride’s armpits; the actress you loved in that series who appears a year later with notable botox; the begging messages that precede the inevitable paywalling of your favourite news websites; an argument that peters out yet remains unresolved, and later explodes into violent recriminations after a placidly eaten herring and potato supper; realising you are painfully unattractive, and that the world of sexy people will forever remain closed to you; your father’s fascination with war graves; promising to teach a fatherless child to work a yoyo, then noting too late that your string manipulation technique is woefully below par; a lodestar that leads you to a peat bog; the achingly unconcise history of tyranny and bloodshed; council regulation 1/2005 banning the use of boomboxes in storage containers; the itch in one’s lower abdomen that cannot be scratched without written medical permission; the fact other people’s breeding habits impinge on one’s casual trips to popular parks and forests; that cast-iron fact that whatever choice one makes in life, the results will always prove inadequate; a mathematics teacher who simply won’t expend another mote of energy in helping Terence Farnaby comprehend the difference between indices and surds; the ocean when she sucks up the nice people; the inhabitants of Jamestown; a contortionist who won’t fold herself into a suitcase at a shindig; a romantic walk around the pond with your paramour, stopping to look at the chicks and make various cute cooing sounds, and the sudden assault from a flock of seagulls who savagely maul and devour the chicks as their parents flap and squawk in a frenzy, and the horrific silence once the terrible carnage is over, with the sight of blood and feathers before you in a crazy splatter, and the moment of consolation and sadness for the lost chicks, and your retreat from the park in a miserable state, and the knowledge this episode might have ruined your relationship, your paramour forever associating your love with the savage killing of these chicks, and the termination of your relationship that soon follows, and the fact you have now chosen to devote your life to the systematic annihilation of all seagulls in the world, and that you travel from coast to coast poisoning seagulls, and that you have become known as that lunatic in a beanie who travels from coast to coast poisoning seagulls when you used to have a paramour; the inhabitants of Kinghorn; a serial killer whose murders were so textbook no filmmaker could make a watchable hourlong featurette from the material; sex that ends with the ritual sacrifice of a pilchard; your wife and her snooty nose; the lost art of concentrating on one thing at a time; the realisation that the first twenty years of existence shape the rest of your meaningless life; pricks in their pompous wagons; sex with the person you feared from childhood you would end up with and who you settled for because you are resigned to the inevitable; the oatcake; a libertarian discourse over a lobster lunch; having to explain to people that your novel will not be written in the manner they are expecting and that they will probably find the finished work baffling; pricks who are never kicked against; the rooms where people plan the monetisation of a murdered celeb; only having enough cash to buy six books in the used bookshop; when you are about to tuck into a footlong with sweet potato fries in a Morningside eatery and remember that human beings are a repulsive race of venal murdering vermin; realising you are painfully attractive, and that everyone wants to maul and hump you, and will only speak to you to realise that objective; ten thousand knives when all you need is a spoon; everyone who is better than you at everything; the continual striving for a better and bigger life when the one you have is as perfectly irrelevant as anyone else’s; the inhabitants of Lochgelly; the library not having multiple copies of every Thomas Hardy novel on their shelves; the last twelve tweets you wrote; the sodium ions one pisses with hypernatremia; the entries in an interminable list that the author hasn’t weeded because he believes that he should let some of the inferior ones stand; sex that ends; the fruit ‘n’ nut option; meeting the man of my dreams, and meeting his beautiful knife; a stage production that combines Greek drama and dinosaurs called Oedipus T-Rex; your kid and her snotty nose; a pub quizmaster who refuses to read out your hilarious team name; an office worker who says “I don’t mind staying behind and doing that huge pile of paperwork for no extra pay”; schoolteachers who surf the net for alternate careers in the middle of lessons; all the tweets you have ever written and will write in the future; the inhabitants of Milton of Balgonie; your coalman and his sooty nose; realising you are neither painfully attractive nor painfully unattractive, and that your romantic life will remain of a pedestrian nature; when your father criticises your 55-page novella as “not your strongest work”; the pop-up menu; the solar eclipse that never eclipses; a softshoe groover who calls you “sweetums”, treats you to a milkshake with chocolate sprinkles, kisses you behind the diner as the Statler Brothers jive from the jukebox, then says “I gotta split, baby”; a quincunx at an inappropriate moment; a subcutaneous itch that requires the removal of one’s skin, and the problem of returning the skin to the flesh without incurring expense; the years spanning 620,000,000 BCE to 2018 AD; the inhabitants of Newmills; writing contests that charge £25 to enter and reward the most emotionally written and not the most skilfully written story; missi
ng the postman because Miele are singing sweet Gallic melodies in your earphones; having carefully avoided uttering clichés your entire life, then having to unleash a plethora of the wretched shits to save your relationship; that moment, usually when you are fourteen years old, when you notice how constrained and unfree you are in the world, and have been since birth, and that no amount of toil or sweat will ever remove you from your prison of the everyday; my unemployment and poverty at the time of writing this; the inhabitants of Oakley; your success and financial security at the time of reading this; the simultaneous need for attention and praise and the hatred of being seen or heard or paid attention to; thinking in your bedroom you are hot stuff on the literary scene and not being reviewed in The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, or really any literary publication whatsoever; a multimillionaire who ascribes his success to hard work and not the two million inheritance; trouble’s braids; a recorder solo heard through a wall at 3.55p.m.; the semicolon abuser; those who still hyphenate landline; the inhabitants of Pittenweem; the working classes and the middle classes and the upper classes and the sort of pricks who separate people into classes; the question ‘How would you like to work for a global business process outsourcing organisation?’; mischief’s beads; a recorder solo heard at any time; trying to write comic prose when there is nothing remotely funny about the endless vacuum of misery and hatred swallowing up the planet; anyone who smacks a plastic ball with a metal stick into holes on private land; when crazy clown time is cancelled; an opaline kiss on a crumbling balconie; the cold touch of your loss adjustor’s fingers up a windy knoll on an October morn; pretending to be happy in Collessie; the inhabitants of Rosyth; a series of crisp packets at the Antonine Wall, left there as if to celebrate the world of careless consumerist trash and to spit on the poetry of history; new novelist award schemes tailored towards the most commercially viable manuscripts; anything lavender-scented in any room; the sticky drizzle that appears when you have made the long-delayed decision to take a walk; a partially deaf neighbour into acid funk; a really bad earwax build-up while fighting in the Crusades; a higher plasma sodium ion concentration than normal; a Shropshire ladette; pandemonium’s necklace; the kind of cock who pays £18.99 for a pizza; any pupil made to thumb the poetry of Carol Anne Duffy; the inhabitants of Saline; anything helmed by an “authority figure”; your boss’s absailing anecdotes and their spin-off self-published volumes; the seminary you were pushed into as a young lad, where you read ardently on secular humanism, and had to contrive a form of irreligious religiosity to keep your sanity, and your first four baffling sermons as a parish priest, where you incorporated teachings from the Book of Exodus alongside sayings from Galileo and Felix Adler, and skirted around the business of asking your parishoners to worship a God of sorts, and asked them instead to send “positive vibes” to “whatever”, and the subsequent confusion that followed, where people began to wonder if there was a God above, and your desperate attempts not to blurt “nah”, and your waffle about “open-mindedness is a virtue” and how “thought is a vent to divinity”, which no one understood, and your letter from the archdiocese who expressed “concerns” that your teachings were not “on the same page as Christ’s”, and your struggle to retain your convictions versus your reluctance to lose the cozy parish cottage, and your inevitable defrocking after a sermon praising Darwin to the skies and listing in detail all the places evolutionarily the Book of Genesis made no scientific sense, and your return to your parents’ home, and your descent into sloth; the inhabitants of Tayport; knowing there is no point and having to contrive a point and wondering if that point is better or worse than someone else’s point and worrying that your point is inferior to their point and hating them intensely for their point which is probably not any better than your point and knowing that they despise you for the same reason; any Star Wars reference at any time, including those made at Star Wars conferences and movie screenings; the inhabitants of Upper Largo; having to produce evidence that you once unpeeled an onion blindfolded; a single battered penis in an abandoned Glasgow chippy; the polarity of induced voltage in Faraday’s Law; an audio sample of an overweight man struggling to winch himself from a bubble bath; the inhabitants of Wormit; the light, the light, the light, the repugnant, omniluminescent, ever-beaming fucking light . . .