Scotland Before the Bomb

by M. J. Nicholls

  DAFYD CILL: I am a man. The camel is in you.

  AISLING STITCH: There was one with seven humps. Not one, or two, but six plus one. It was taxidermied when Bill Molten halted its waddle.

  SKIP MONOTONE: They say it is easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than for a camel to enter heaven. I say, there are plenty of camels in heaven.

  GIL CREDENZA: We lived there, we rode those. I can’t say more, or perhaps I won’t.

  AL BLUNT: Why, you ask me, why’d the people of Ayr, that crusty enclave of semi-perverted pimps and schemers, that smelly bolthole of narcoleptic spinnakers, that mouldy beachfront of swallowed Anubises, mount their bactrians and dromedaries, and clop along the pavements to their occupations, their homesteads, their parks and their barrooms? Oh, little man, if those notions were nations, how many worlds would we conquer!

  PRINGLE HALT: Hic!

  JEREMIAH GALLOWAY: Dan lost the patent.

  PHYLLIS MARROW: You invent things. Sicut camelus et in mente. You cannot fathom. Sicut camelus et est ens rationis.

  IAIN DIMBULB: Oh! Australian camel. Oh! Somalian camel. Oh! Djibouti camel. Oh! Saudi Arabian camel. Oh! Egyptian camel. Oh! Syrian camel. Oh! Libyan camel. Oh! Sicilian camel. Oh! Ethiopian camel. Oh! Bavarian camel.

  Oh! Sudanese camel. Oh! Norwegian camel. Oh! Kazakhstan camel. Oh! Iraqi camel.

  JAY SKEDADDLE: I’d sing more about more of this land. But all God’s camels ain’t free.

  FITZ SEAGULL: You might have concluded something.

  KELVIN LUBE: Ice pop?

  NAOMI PROVINDER: Goodo.

  [‘Interviews with Immigrants from Ayr’, from The Chicago Mental Asylum Almanack, Greg Trey & Kathleen Watts (Eds.), p.45-46, CMA Books, 2049.]

  “ ”

  [ROXBURGH]

  *

  *Nothing of interest has been recorded here. —Ed.

  “The Mnemoshop”

  [PEEBLES]

  BRIAR STREET had a beige aura. Something beige was brimming in the vacant shopfront. Shane the Bookie was taking wagers on what beige-blasted business might caulk the run-down flier-stuffed hole at Briar’s core. The obvious flutter was a new coffee and overpriced Danish pastries place with fatuous chairs and colourful curtains (at 2:1), or a transnational fast food shop selling pizzas, kebabs, paella, hot dogs, and curries (at 4:1). Riskier bets included a charity shop specialising exclusively in cardigans and soiled Mills and Boons (8:1), and a second cornershop beside the pre-existing cornershop selling sim cards, fireworks, and two-litre Coke bottles (16:1). Aaron worked opposite. He held implements in his right hand for six hours and placed rotten teeth and finished fillings into a small box beneath a blood-smeared marble sink. He was sometimes called upon to hold the suction pump in the hygienist’s absence, and console traumatised children after their oral ordeals.

  As October arrived, draping a damp cardigan over the beige aura, the building was almost complete. The shopfront was black with blue swirl patterns, random runic characters, and the title in Trebuchet MS: THE MNEMOSHOP. The subtitle “Priced Memories” used a handwritten script, lightening the impact of the alien coinage. The Peebles locals arrived in their flannelled hoards to snoop around the weirdness and make sarcastic pronouncements on the business, hoping to drive the visitors out in under a week. Margo said: “Bet these are Poles. I never met a Pole I couldn’t kick.” Fran said: “Bet these are Irans. Hiding nuclear machine bombs under their skirts.” George said: “This seems an intriguing venture, although I doubt its longevity in this institutionally racist backwater.”

  The Mnemoshop bought and sold memories. If residents sought to unburden themselves of unpleasant recollections, for a flat rate of £15, the self-titled Mnemomaster would remove the painful moments using a beam of strobe light flashed into the ear, and replace them with bought memories from a nameless donor. The Mnemoshop had a catalogue of memories for sale too, if the shopper wished to add to their store of Good Times, or take a specific incident into their own recall for personal reasons. Carl Morris was the Mnemomaster, an ex-crim with a farmhand’s build and the defensive stance of a man expecting to be attacked or imprisoned within the next four minutes. He welcomed his customers as a nightclub bouncer on his third warning might welcome a slobbering drunk into his premises at two in the morning. He pointed to the catalogues and muttered prices.

  For the core population of Peebles, there was room for forgetting. Fran had the paternal thwack of a 30cm ruler across her bum after meals and bathroom trips, causing severe malnourishment and bladder damage, to forget. Margo had the pleasure of serving as the human percussion in her brother’s pro-IRA ska outfit D: Éireann, receiving severe solos across her thighs and ribs, and hard fills upon her knees, to forget. George had Fran and Margo’s violent racist agenda as a lazy smokescreen for their unaddressed familial tortures, resulting in flare-ups of brick-flinging and spit-slinging at public meetings and the streets whenever a suspected Pole or Iranian appeared in their line of sight, to forget. The Mnemomaster had chosen the perfect venue to set up his business.

  Aaron had suffered at the hands of his ex-girlfriend Sophie. He had been repulsed and attracted to her in equal and baffling measures. She meted out small torments such as lining his blazers with mustard or tearing the final pages out his favourite books. Afterwards she would lavish affection on him in the form of love trinkets or pillow talk about his being the sexiest and most competent dental assistant in the Peebles region. There were hundreds of memories to which he was attracted and repulsed in equal and baffling measures that required replacing with a basket of kittens or cruises to the Côte d’Azur. He spent £5 on something frivolous. Once the memories were transmitted into the “neural cortices of the brainsphere”, each took two days to settle into the subconscious.

  As he was disposing of an abraded bicuspid (worn down with Coke and its assorted products), a strong impression of meeting the late actor Bob Hoskins came to mind. Bob said: “Hang in there, mate. I was 33 before Alf Hunt in On the Move. The parts will come.” The Mnemowner said: “Thanks Bob. I portray a scrubbing brush in the upcoming Fairy commercial. Next stop, Tinseltown!” And a firm handshake and supportive smile from the bald East End actor. Aaron lost concentration for the rest of that afternoon, dropping the suction pump into the spit-sink and spilling a boxload of diseased molars across the purple linoleum. Having this alien moment in his recall was unsettling. For £20, he had the memory removed. The Mnemomaster said: “Got to insert a replacement. You can’t leave gaps. Causes brain damage. Severe. Like drooling-on-your-shoes severe.”

  At a formal dinner for dental assistants in the Peebles region, during a mini-bowl of carrot and coriander soup and Frank Thornton’s hilarious annual address (in which he cracked on the profession’s high suicide rate), Aaron had a clear impression of the time an old man in a Pringle sweater leaned over and planted an affectionate bedtime kiss on his silver-permed female locks, and the feeling of deep satisfaction that followed. He lost his appetite. He was experiencing a counterfeit emotion as a result of this memory, feeling fondness for an old man in a Pringle sweater he had never met. During the main course (a molar-shaped mash castle with a bacon portcullis), Aaron made frenzied conversation as the old man kissed and rekissed his silver-permed female locks.

  Over the coming weeks, The Mnemoshop set about fleecing the residents and upsetting the intricacies of their collective recall. Those keen to erase bad memories auctioned off their subconsciouses and snapped up pleasant memories from nameless or named Mnemowners. Jim had sold his bad childhood and spent over £1000 on a sequence of bus trips to Airdrie and Caldercruix with a crinkle-nosed librarian stepmother. Rather than working to improve Jim’s demeanour, the memories left him confused as to his identity, making him an even crabbier person than previous. Nigel bought whatever adequate childhood scraps were cheapest and erased his time being dragged around pubs with his red-nosed librarian stepfather. He recalled the time he was a giggling teenage girl riding a pony, a cheeky preschooler
leaping into a paddling pool, a Chinese girl scoring a perfect 100 on her maths test, a ginger student making an intelligent remark in a tutorial, a shy kid hitting a perfect strike at the bowling alley, and so on. The profusion of Nigel-free memories made him envious of the people he never was and the memories on which he was leeching. This worsened to such a degree, these memories became unwanted intruders, deepening his depression and self-hatred.

  Simon had erased the bad memories of his marriage, ill-equipping him for the trials up ahead and beginning anew the long series of aggros, recriminations, and slow-burning disappointments. Linda had inherited an inappropriate sexual memory of a cousin and couldn’t speak to that cousin again. Peter had sold important recollections of how to perform certain operations and had to quit being a doctor. Jess had wiped the memory of her social work clients’ pasts, and as a consequence lost their trust and respect, and had to build up the rapports again. Aaron reached snapping point with his Sophie torments—torn between his loathing of her sickness and his deep love for her deep love (of him)—and decided to have a gradual full-scale Sophie removal treatment.

  He paid to have the time Sophie set fire to his tie (while in Burger King) removed. He hadn’t banked on the Mnemomaster’s moral scuzziness—a memory Sophie had sold the previous week was hand-picked and inserted into his recall. During an episode of Call the Midwife, he recalled from Sophie’s perspective the time he fell face-first on the pavement, breaking his nose upon impact. She had darted around the corner and burst into laughter, tweeting a pic of his writhing body to her Aaron_Hurt account, where she listed all the moments of pain inflicted in a sequence of ecstatic tweets. This was not surprising to Aaron at first. He knew she derived pleasure from his physical sufferings—a short-lived attempt to introduce punching and slapping into their sex routines was all the proof he needed that Sophie was a sadomasochist with a downright criminal lust for violence.

  He had paid a wallet-tightening amount to expunge Sophie, only to end up with a deeper Sophie reinforcement. And this worsened with the next five purchases. He traded Sophie’s “asphalt lasagne surprise” for when she found amusing a hot coffee spillage on his penis; the time he skied into a pinewood for her squeezing him so hard some sick came up; the time she shaved his head while sleeping for her version of the public rape-call debacle on the train to Arbroath. Fresh and more disturbing perspectives on their overlong and sore relationship. He sold the bad memory of their breakup, in return received the bad memory of Sophie meeting him for the first time. He sold the good memory of their first date, in return received the good memory of Sophie breaking up with him. The whole relationship had been a platform for her to indulge her crazed fantasies. The love trinkets and pillow talk were pleas to keep him around long enough for her to fling more buckets of cold water into his bath, increase the static in his cardigans with a van de Graff generator, and so on.

  The Mnemomaster had turned Peebles into a self-hating mnemotrap where the residents fought for better, happier memories, and to absorb entire pasts into their own minds, escape the build-up of implanted falsehoods, and return to their old selves. He sunk his funds into constructing a mail order side-business, sending subscribers flashes of light in envelopes, in part to decrease the crowds, in part to help his expansion into other parts of the nation. Aaron went begging to have his memories returned to their original state. “I’m afraid that doesn’t work,” Carl said. “You can’t erase the memory of having had and experienced those memories. And you can’t erase the memory of having ever come into this shop in the first place. Once you erased that memory, you would ask where you were, and even if I refused to tell you, you would find out through someone else, or by reading the sign on your way out. You would have to move away from here, pay for one month’s memories to be erased in a private location, and even then, you would learn about my business as I expand into the continent. You would also end up so baffled as to why those other memories were in your mind, and probably suffer a nervous breakdown. I can’t be held responsible.”

  Aaron persisted. “I want to reinstate the old memories.” Carl shook his large red head and folded his arms, exposing his Ronnie Biggs tattoo. “No can do. You have sold them off to other people. I have a list here of who, but I charge a £20 flat rate to reveal each person. You will have to negotiate a price between each user for buying them back. I charge £30 each for the procedure to reinstate the memories. You will have to pay extra to replace the memory you are reinstating from each user’s brain.”

  A protest movement formed in the old outbuilding where Harold used to keep four tethered dachshunds. The bummed consumers shared tales of woe. Most of them had tried to recapture their old memories. The Mnemowners were often uncooperative about returns. Andrew Dunlop was obliging and returned the time a hat trick was scored for no charge. Harold Munro was generous and sold the time a litter lout was chastised for £100. Lisa Wilson liked the time a beehive was disturbed to steal unstung a lick of honey, and refused to sell it back for less than £1000. Oliver Jones loved the moment a rude bus conductor was humiliated with the utmost verbal precision so much he refused to acknowledge it was the Mnemowner’s. Masochists who had purchased bad memories refused to relent unless a worse memory was implanted gratis into their self-destructive heads.

  Aaron worked on a concoction involving silicone and milk that when inserted via pipette up the nostrils added extra slivers of forgetfulness to the brain. The siloxane particles contained chemicals that caused the right amount of brain damage required to erase the Mnemomuddles, diluted with UHT milk to lessen the side effects (mild paranoid schizophrenia and measles). He imported nine tonnes of silicone from private surgeons and raided the local Lidl for nine hundred pints of milk. After his dental assistant duties were complete, he would create the pipettes in the outbuilding and sell each at £10, a rate far lower than the Mnemoshop’s products, until the town regained a form of mental equilibrium over a long and agonising series of months. I bought a pipette myself, and consumed its contents five minutes ago. As far I can make out, the pipette has had no

  [‘The Mnemoshop’, Roland Cullen, posted through the editor’s letterbox with the note ‘shit for your Peebles chapter, bro’, Jan 13, 2110.]

  “The Smog”

  [STIRLING]

  → The second thing the smog stole was our language. Our inhalers allowed us forty-nine breaths per puff, and extraneous speech seriously reduced the amount of air we could store in our lungs. Since the smog thickened, a citywide depression had taken hold, and people weren’t talking much anyway.

  → In the days of free oxygen I had used words sparingly, so I was equipped for the rationing process. I had to watch close friends—talkers, writers, people who thrived on the spoken word—struggling to hold their tongues in public, reduced to exchanging factual information. A harsh education.

  → My friend Elaine, a fast-talker who could clock up to three-hundred words per minute, suffered the most, since she filled her sentences with “warm-up” words and repetitions, such as “no but you see thing is listen you see the thing is no but the thing is . . . ”

  → She had to learn to internalise her stumbling starts and cut to the chase, not an easy task for someone whose natural style is unfocused rambling. I confess I took pleasure in the silencing of others: loquacious relatives, tedious colleagues, artless pedants. The silence, for a while, was refreshing.

  → But soon, conversation broke down into a boring exchange of formalities and pleasantries. In a large group, saying hello to everyone would use up essential breaths, forcing people to sit around waiting for their next inhaler puff before conversation could begin. These conversations were limited to, mainly, life updates.

  → When we met, we learned to cope by speaking to each other on our portable laptops, where we could indulge in the throwaway chats so important to our old lives. Slow typers made for less stimulating interaction, the same way slow talkers used to. We adapted to this reality.

  → Because our lan
guage, over time, went unspoken, and a shorthand typing style became popular, large portions of our vocabularies became irrelevant, and a stigma of “indulgence” was attached to those who wrote or spoke “tendollar” words. You ran the risk of seeming foolhardy, or greedy. We evolved language.

  → And this process of shorthand, over time, will lead to the simplification of literature, less pleasure in language for its own sake, and a worship of economy, slender-syllabled phrases and a limitless number of ways to express the commonplaces we will come to accept as profundity, or truth.

  [‘Sarah’s Story’, from On the Dissolution of Language, Graeme Derrido, OUP, 2045, p.199-200.]

  “The Courting of Tchuh”

  [BERWICK]

  I MET TCHUH on a hookup site. She remarked that Radiohead’s last album Dyspeptic Gondola (twelve hours of car horns over a cappella renditions of Avril Lavigne) was fucking marvellous, and that the haters were halfwitted purulent slavering mutt-creatures. I thought this a sound basis for meeting up at nine the next morning. I took the plane to her country, an unusual place formerly called Berwick, renamed Smile! Be Happy! :) in 2047. In the brochure, I read it was the first nation to feature a smiley emoticon in its name, and was known as “The Land of Ceaseless Chuckles”. I am a man of caustic opinions and entrenched scepticism. I reacted to this with the expression of a first-time lemon-sucker.

  Fortunately, when I arrived in the town of Coldstream I encountered a scene of spectacular drabness: a plateau of infinite rictus with a rusted populace moving from slum to slum with the speed of an asthmatic tortoise; an endless horizon of boarded shopfronts and wafting trash heaps; a fleet of tumbrils carting lifeless blinking bodies to an unknown interzone; the sort of wan light that makes reading or looking at things a chore; the unrelenting pelt of November rainfall in permanent flow; the aura of a wartime town in readiness for another onslaught of brutal bomb and missile strikes; and the sunset of a minor planet inching further into the lightless void of the cosmos. I saw Tchuh on a bench.