Scotland Before the Bomb

by M. J. Nicholls

  Her username became clear when I lobbed an interrogative in her ear. Hunched over in her black raincoat, she responded with tuts and shrugs, taking the hand I offered to help her up—support her undernourished frame required. She slugged along the street with sublime indifference to my presence, and offered a tour.

  “That’s a thing over there,” she said. It was the first inapposite sight: a pterosaur-themed bouncy castle where the unstimulated children were stood staring into space, sleeping, or lying down with their eyes wide.

  “No shops?” I asked.

  “Owners can’t . . . ” She trailed off, lacking the impetus to complete her own sentence. I tried to peek a look at her face hidden within the tight hood.

  I found Tchuh’s complete lack of interest in me or anything around her one of those irresistible characteristics that made no logical sense and stirred up immense erotic longing. She walked a few steps, sat on an excessive amount of benches for twenty minutes saying nothing, then resumed her commentary. I started to observe more contrived merriment as per the in-flight brochure around the miserable shopfronts.

  “A man coughed up his pelvis over there,” she remarked.

  “Right.”

  “A man swallowed his own lips there.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “My cousin had a fatal haemorrhage behind that portaloo.”

  “Oh!”

  “I lost a comb in that drain.”

  “What’s wrong with this place?” I asked. Tchuh shrugged and poked at a bright red machine of the sweet-dispensing sort. She hit a button labelled Tramadol, inserted a card, and popped the two pills she was offered.

  “I need a snooze,” she said, and walked into a building sunken on the right side. I followed her in, uninvited. She occupied a bin with a mattress: trash was piled up on the floor, mould clung to the filth-caked walls, and enterprising bacteria were making new extinction poxes in the carpet. She flopped on the mattress and fell asleep. I heard rats scuttling under one particularly impressive mound and made that painful choice on botched first dates to take the first bus very far away from the other person.

  I walked towards the station. To the broad canvas of misery had been added weird upbeat strokes: to the slumped bodies on benches, party hats and streamers; to the paint-cracked lampposts, balloons and bows; to the concrete pavements, hopscotch and murals; to the shopfronts, posters with smiling emoticons; to the street corners, cuddlecore buskers; to the piles of rubbish in side streets, kaleidoscopic backlighting; to the ruins of burned cars, tarpaulin illustrated with characters from Disney’s The Jungle Book; to the empty parks, bouncy castles and paddling pools. Before I had time to formulate a hypothesis, I spied a smiling man carrying a boombox playing Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’. He approached a man slumped on a park bench and squirted him with a trick flower in his pocket. The wet-faced man burst into tears.

  “What’s with this place?” I asked the boomboxed one.

  “Hello! I’m the President,” he said. A most agreeable handshake was offered. He explained to me that prior to his presidency, Berwick was the most depressing nation to live in in the cosmos, and that the suicide rate had risen to half the population. He was elected to try to improve the morale of the place, and came up with the popular pledge of providing antidepressants on street corners. This secured him 100% of the votes. He introduced various other measures, such as painting houses yellow, pink and blue to make people cheerier, and making Happy Meals free on the NHS. These attempts to raise cheer, so flagrant as they were, merely deepened the place’s utter misery, especially as many of them were sponsored by McDonald’s, so the populace preferred to stay indoors.

  “I have since upped my attack on the downtrodden of this notorious Frownland,” he said.

  “If I may venture a hypothesis,” I ventured to venture.

  “Please.”

  “Perhaps these overly overt measures, such as the skyplane spelling out S-M-I-L-E, the enforced clown shoes policy, the piping in of canned laughter into homes, and the hyenas on nitrous oxide roaming the streets, are strengthening the residents’ sorrow. I might recommend spending the budget on improving the infrastructure of the nation so the populace have things to aspire to except lives of unemployment and ballooning body fat on these indiscriminately dispensed street corner pharmaceuticals.”

  “You speak with elegance. However, since I am pocketing the largest portion of the budget myself, to spend on these things would prevent the second pool room and the construction of my recording studio.”

  “I see. But even corruption would work better with a satisfied population. No one will be working in this town soon. You will have a nation of immobile, pill-popping obese depressives watching daytime TV, at work on elaborate suicides at variance with their motivation levels. Your funds will equal nil. You need to motivate them to at least perform menial mind-numbing tasks for years and years, or your trousered millions will vanish. I would be willing to partner up for a cut of the scooped moolah.”

  “Deal.”

  I began by obliterating the sham jocosity: stabbing the bouncy castles, tearing up the emoticon posters, and stripping the populace of their clown shoes. Ten minutes or so later, people melted back to work. I watched as unwashed sacks served in supermarkets, charity shops, bookmakers, and pubs like robots. The populace had returned to functional misery, in contrast to the careless suicidal inactive misery as before. I invited Tchuh for a coffee, and spoke to her about my new plan to reinvigorate the nation by ousting the President. She snorted from inside her asphyxiating black cagoule.

  “No. It won’t work. The problem is this: motivated people are scumbags. Those who have ambitions ruin life for those who float along in clouds of indifference and self-hatred like me. We need to purge the ambitious from our land. All we can hope for is a republic of unenthusiastic and sarcastic drifters, with no one on a higher footing than anyone else, then we can crawl towards something like bitter tolerance of life.”

  “What next?”

  “Kill the President. Round up the population and deport those with ambitions.”

  Because I wanted to have sex with Tchuh, and my train was not for another two hours, I helped her in rounding up and screening the populace. To coax them out we shouted “Xanax brownies!” and the people arrived in their pyjamas and pants. We split them into two queues and asked them about their ambitions. Bianca Angle had plans to open up a little cake shop someday; Bill Fructus was teaching himself Greek and Latin; Matt Busby wanted to evolve the yoyo beyond the rising and falling string motion; Carol Orton hoped to complete Swann’s Way; Braun Brocc intended to break the world record for the most thimbles on a mantelpiece; Simon Axle wished to own a cerise Mini one afternoon; Alexis Poonboog wished to convince his neighbour to return his ‘World’s Friskiest Chef’ apron; Fern Hat hoped to learn the oboe or harmonium, he wasn’t sure which; Desmond Grackle had plans to locate his missing socks; Tiff Lock wanted to unclog the bits of carrot, pasta and sweetcorn from her sink drain. These ambitious dreamers were put to one side for deportation.

  Once nudged on the bus, and after Tchuh shot the President in the heart and head with a bolt gun, the town became a standard lifeless boring functional backwater zone of dismay with a mocking clocktower. “See, freed from the menace of envy, and placed on the same existential slagheap, the country can limp along with a permanent scornful grimace, and a bitter putdown on its chapped lips,” Tchuh said. I leaned in to kiss her at an awkward angle, and ended up sucking on her chin.

  “You see how man’s ambitious intentions leave him sucking on a stranger’s chin and retreating in painful humiliation!” she crowed. At that point, I should have taken the 6.40 train. Instead, I went to her flat and had an extremely uncomfortable and passionless sexual encounter on her crumb-coated stinkmound of a mattress. Her orgasm was the most sarcastic I have ever heard.

  [‘The Courting of Tchuh’, Yanick Frish, in Big Book of Dating Disasters, p.2326, ITV4Books, 2055.]


  “Kibbitz from the Kibbutz”

  [ABERDEEN]

  ACROSS MY LONG CAREER exploring the influence of Woody Allen’s work in cinema and other artforms around the world, I have never encountered anything as unusual as what I witnessed in the land of Aberdeen. One eventide, the former Prime Minister of Aberdeen tweeted (after six scotches) the Democratic Republic of Congo: ‘You pathetic losers. You ain’t have no missiles, bitches. Bring it on.’ This was a mistake. At the time, the Congo had bought sixteen M56 missiles from the American President’s new weapons hotline, and had a leader who had read Gravity’s Rainbow, The King James Bible, and Sunset Song. As a consequence, he felt a full missile assault was the appropriate retaliation for such a provocative tweet. A creaking came across the sky, and the sixteen M56s blew Aberdeen to smithereens—neighbouring countries named the ex-region ‘Smitherdeen’. No noise was heard from the place for scores. There had been around one hundred survivors. Stunned and with no knowledge of their previous existence, the survivors stumbled upon one of the few intact items among the smithers: a 40-disc boxset of Woody Allen’s movies, including some from the lamentable post-2000 era. A TV & DVD player was also conveniently intact and the remaining Smitherdonians sat around for weeks on end watching the films in a loop and formed a civilisation. This, completely modelled on Woody’s movies, was barely functioning. Most of the population, far too neurotic, nervous, and obsessed with their wives’ or husbands’ affairs, were malnourished and dependent on the stronger “characters” to survive. Below are two verbatim transcriptions of conversations between various citizens of this strange Woody Allenville I recorded while on my trip.

  PROBLEMS AROUND CHILDBEARING

  “I’m not sure, Max. I spoke to my analyst and he says I should take up meditation. And I want to explore my poetry, you know. I was thinking about experimenting with the sonnet form. The last few couplets I carved on those rocks by the trees over there were inspired by Keats and Shelley, and were well-reviewed.”

  “But we have to breed, you know? We need to have small pink mammals to pass on all our frustrations and disappointments and sexual dysfunctions. That’s what normal people do, you know? My analyst told me I should love myself more and stop masturbating. I told him the two went hand in hand.”

  “Look, Max, I’m not kidding! I’m inspired by the metaphysical poets, you know, like Andrew Marvell. I think I have a kind of metaphysical synaesthesia, you know, like that thing Etel Adnan said: ‘Colours exist for me as entities in themselves, as metaphysical ghosts.’ ”

  “You should make an appointment with your optician for a séance.”

  “You’re not taking this seriously!”

  “What? I am, I am, it’s that you’re talking crazy, one minute you’re talking about wanting a baby, the next you’re the reincarnation of John Donne and seeing metaphysical beings in the Pantone colour chart. We’re primitive people here, we’re supposed to have unprotected sex in the mud like beasts. I’m meant to spend all day hunting in the woods for meat then impregnate you several times in the knish when I come home.”

  “Yeah, but you haven’t caught a single thing in a week. I’m starving.”

  “I told you, I’m not a natural hunter. I have bad reflexes. I once got trampled by two guys pushing a horse.”

  “Huh.”

  CHOOSING A MATE

  “I love Maria, you know, only I’m not sure she’s right for me.”

  “What are you talking about, you guys are great together! She’s a hypochondriac amnesiac, and you’re a surgeon and an interminable bore. There’s never been a better match.”

  “Thanks for that. No, it’s becoming too . . . smothering. She spends hours picking berries then refuses to eat them in case she swallows poisonous insects. All she does is sit around sucking acorns and complaining she’s putting on weight.”

  “Come on, she has some nice qualities. She washes your clothes in private, at least. Diane finds the most crowded spot she can and beats my underpants against a rock. Sometimes I’m still wearing them at the time. She’s driving me nuts. She’s obsessed with inventing fire. I keep saying to her, honey, what’s wrong with keeping warm in a hollowed-out bear carcass? I think she looks down on me.”

  “That’s what I love about Mimi. She has a pioneering spirit. Diane couldn’t invent fire. She’d stub a nail rubbing two twigs together and spend a week lying on her deathbed dictating her final letters to her analyst.”

  “Have you seen Ricki? I think she’s fantastic. Girl with the long blonde tresses. She’s like Adam’s Eve, but less obnoxious and with a bigger wardrobe. She would caress the serpent across her knee, and the serpent would turn into a saint under the touch of her sweet little fingers.”

  “Sounds like you’re pretty hot on this girl.”

  “She’s the divine personification of beauty on this earth. Her beauty is an eternal joy, its loveliness will never pass into nothingness. I never put anyone on a pedestal, in fact I put my wife under a pedestal, but she is up there with the most beautiful creatures who ever walked this planet. I really want to screw her.”

  “Get in line. You’re tenth behind Darryl, Alan, Peter, Oliver, Charlie, Bob, Sergei, Alex, Harry and Steve.”

  “You’re kidding? She’s sleeping with Steve? I couldn’t care less if she slept with the whole forest, but that pretentious hack? Oh God! Why does the woman of my dreams have to be a nymphomaniac with a penchant for bearded shmendriks?”

  [‘Kibbitz from the Kibbutz: Allen in Aberdeen’, in Woody Allen: A Legacy, Scott Beauchomp, p.349-352, Drooping Parabola Books, 2029.]

  “The Literary Utopia”

  [WIGTOWN]

  YOU MIGHT NOT REMEMBER what was Wigtown. Before the bomb, if I might make a titular nod, Wigtown was a flocculent coastal marshland where the committed contingent of Scotland’s literati crammed five to a Volkswagen along the A714 to read their notable works to middle-class housewives using culture to supplement sex, and voracious networkers convinced a welltimed epigram in the ear of a harrassed editor might whisk them into a makebelieve land of publishing prestige, where the internship would morph into a full-time editorial assistant post, and where that manuscript on their USB might find itself inserted into next year’s fiction list. This swift slap of delusion was known as the Wigtown Book Festival. For one week per annum, writers, interns, students, and a fistful of influential people stared into the harsh scowl of the Irish Sea, making vague mental plans about opening bookshops stocking the titles slimly omitted from the other seven shops, performing at semi-attended events with recyclable first-time novelists, earnest unrufflable poets, and caffeine-crazed ex-journalists with a new look at an old war, before returning to the cities and their unemployment, their rejected manuscripts, their endless job applications, and the premise of arriving somewhere in an industry with no actual destination.

  Moved by the recent colonisation of Edinburgh by the Festival, two multimillionaires with literary pretentions purchased Wigtown with the intention of turning it into a utopia for writers and readers. Driscoll Apron, cap-a-pie in a striped blazer and slacks, a man squeezed from a tube of aquamint toothpaste, pumped six hundred million into the flavourless strip of B&Bs, bookshops, and war memorials. Robin Cooper, cap-a-pie in Harris tweed blazer and slacks, a man flanneled into his clothes, invested two hundred million from his cap and pie empires, in the hope of being internationally recognised for his memoirs in the millinery and meat pastry trades. The two wasted no time in erecting fifteen towerblock apartments where the working writers would live, receive a living wage, and have the peace and time to write their works.

  Driscoll wrote a series about rural PI The Stranraer Swift, the first books published by flagship house, Headpiece Publishing. These execrable firstdrafts, cranked onto a laptop in Driscoll’s spare time, a series of pastramiknuckled crime bromides, were polished up, or in most cases, rewritten by ghostwriter Martin Goshawk, and treated to a 5,000,000 print run. Robin Cooper’s millinery memoir, Wear the Fox Cap!!!, was a
readable romp in the realm of female caps, too obsessed by the gradients of the peak and the impact of fabrics on hair frizz to merit fanfare. His meat pastry memoir, The Pie: A Life, however, was a scintillating insight into the production of the pie. Cooper was respected for having a spark of talent, and Driscoll tolerated since he was bankrolling 33,220 writers.

  The beneficiaries, from published talents with broadsheet plaudits to new writers fumbling towards coherence, were to commingle in harmonious wonder, helping each other to make heavenly art. The publishing houses would release the best material into the ninety-nine new bookshops, to sit on shelves largely unread by the handful of readers in the country, and await the reviews from the seven magazines devoted to reviewing new works. The reviewers were also paid for their efforts, however, for their own safety, were isolated from the community in a heavily guarded compound. It was suggested that paid readers were brought in so the books were appreciated more, however, the writers considered this an affront to their talents, that their readers would require a fee to appreciate such brilliance. If I might be permitted a textual breather, let me drop this asterisk of intermission.

  Of course, Driscoll and Cooper knew nothing of writers. Those who wrote terrible manuscripts were receiving the same wage as those composing talentastic masterpieces, except for the occasional royalty received. The writers who spent little time writing and more time loafing were receiving the same wage as those tearing their hair out over each clause. Frustrations between these two camps became a thing. Driscoll and Robin bent to the pressure to impose sanctions. These began with annual checks on writers’ outputs. Those who failed to produce a satisfactory number of words had their living wage reduced. Those who failed to show improvement had their living wage reduced. Those who had written nothing because of block or lack of ideas had their living wage reduced.