by David Wood
Chapter 2
The hills behind the town were fading softly from brightest green to watery yellow as the chill days of autumn crept closer. A smattering of bulbous chestnuts had been precipitated on last night’s winds, the mahogany interiors peeping tantalizing from their green overcoats. The avenue of elms was getting down to the serious business of shoring up for winter, the tips of their leaves just barely beginning to curl and brown. Over to the west the rain clouds were beginning to gather on the hilltops, the gray tresses falling to caress the barren windswept peaks.
Down near the town it was still dry, the clouds seemingly pasted to the blue stone of the sky and a cool breeze was the only thing to disturb the long grass on the roadside.
Thin plumes of smoke rose from the houses in the valley, rising almost straight from their source and all was silent and calm.
Sandy had been born and brought up in this town. Seventy years and more and a lot of living had passed since then. He had never regretted leaving, but he felt something turn over in the pit of his stomach as he got his first sight of the town.
No matter how long he’d been away, there were still plenty of sights to stir his memories.
Life had been hard then...no, more than hard...it had been well-nigh impossible. He was sent down the pits as early as possible...a thin, almost frail figure, white arms chipping away at the black walls, nothing else to do but listen to the wheezing breath of the older men. He had only been saved from living his life out in the dark by the onset of the Second World War. At the time he had been grateful for the chance to escape...war was just about the only way for a lad to get out of the town even then.
Ten years he had been in the Navy, first on the Atlantic run to New York, then down to the Suez area, and after the war patrolling the South Pacific. In all that time he had never been home.
His first homecoming had been for his mothers’ funeral. He had missed his fathers’ during the war, which had been no great pity as far as he was concerned, and after his mother had been put in the ground he had taken to the roads to walk the length and breadth of Scotland. Now, all these years later, he was still doing it.
Coming over the hill and finally seeing the whole town spread out beneath him, Sandy was shocked by the changes that had taken place since his last visit ten years ago. The twin ranks of chimneys and the smoke-blackened sheds of the steel works...a landmark as old as Sandy himself...had almost gone. Only one chimney, without its previously omnipresent plume remained, jutting starkly out of a landscape of what were euphemistically called ‘small business units’.
Sandy had encountered this too often on his travels...the bustling life work of thousands of men steadily eroded until all that remained were storehouses for luxury goods, timber yards and makeshift repair shops. They almost seemed to have been designed to turn tatty as soon as the first winter hit.
The fifties-built housing scheme at the front of the hill had been topped with ‘private luxury bungalows with stunning scenic views of the pastoral valley’...little boxes that in ten years’ time would be uninhabitable due to damp and soil erosion.
On the far side of the valley, from horizon to horizon in a thin line of gray, ran the new bypass, a ten-meter wide strip of wasteland populated with heavy goods lorries on their way from the west coast harbors to Glasgow with their daily load of consumer goods.
The only thing that pleased Sandy about this view was its sharp clarity. A clear, blue-sparkled skyline now replaced the gray fog that used to hang over the town.
It was obvious that since the closure of the steelworks some five years ago the quality of the air had changed for the better, but a braying laugh from the golf course on his left only served to reinforce the fact that this was no longer a working man’s town.
Sandy had walked this road many times in his youth. Over the hill to the sea to watch the fishermen bringing in their catches and then back, stopping at the old pub on the moors for a pint or two before strolling back to the town in the moonlight or, as was more often the case, in the rain.
The sight of these hills had always held a fascination for him, their rounded sensuous features drawing him forwards, funneling him through the valley into the town.
He had reached the outskirts of town. The golf course had invested in a clubhouse. More pleasures for the elite who could afford the club’s extortionate fees and who could put up with the cliquishness – he thought, when he noticed, for only the third time in his life, the black sleeting rain slanting down onto the bone-dry road in front of him.
The black rain was something that Sandy had managed to explain away as pure coincidence after his original sightings had never been repeated
The previous occasions had both happened during his time in the Navy.
The first time had been at Southampton Docks. He’d been standing on the quayside watching the fleet come in when the black rain started. At first he’d thought there was something in his eye but no amount of rubbing or teasing had altered the view. The rain, looking just like oil falling from the sky, surrounded one of the destroyers just coming in. The sighting lasted for a minute or so, but Sandy immediately knew that something would happen to the boat.
He couldn’t tell how he knew but it felt as if someone was walking over his grave.
He’d later found out that the ship had lost ten of her crew in battle two weeks after his vision.
The second time he didn’t like to think about, even all these years later. He’d been drinking with a group of shipmates in Australia on the night before they were due to leave. The black rain had come down again, indoors in the bar. Sandy got the shakes, so much so that the Medical Officer who happened to be in the bar at the time pronounced him unfit for the trip. He had raved and screamed.
The whole bar and probably half of Sydney had heard him tell the men that they were going to their deaths. Of course they had done just that, and that was the end of Sandy’s career in the Navy.
As he walked past the first tee of the golf course he realized that if past experiences were to prove any guide, death would be following him into this town.
It was not going to be a happy homecoming after all.
The sight that met him when he reached the High Street only laid another burden on his already heavy heart.
The evidence of unemployment was everywhere in the town center. The main crossroads had, at its center, an area of grass and long wooden benches swarming with aimless people, a large proportion of who seemed to be already, at eleven in the morning, under the influence of alcohol. As if to reinforce this, most of the men suddenly ambled across the road and into the nearest public house.
The local co-op, once a large thriving furniture store, now had seventy per cent of its windows boarded up, and the rest were plastered with three-foot posters proclaiming SALE NOW ON.
Even here in this scene of urban decay, Sandy could still see the black rain hanging in the air ahead of him. This was the first time a sighting has lasted longer than a few minutes. A warning, an omen, or merely a sight defect? Whatever the cause Sandy Brown was a very frightened old man.
Seven thirty a.m. on a cold autumn morning. The sight of his face in the mirror always brought home to Brian Baillie how much he had deteriorated with time.
Wrinkles had firmly established themselves in the corners of his eyes, far too firmly to be passed off as laughter lines. Hair at temples and forelock were graying slightly, but the thing which always annoyed him more than any other was how gray his beard had become.
The beard had been his pride and joy since university days and had gone through many mutations of shape. As some people have worry beads, Brian had a beard, pulled and twisted into strange tufts of varying lengths.
None of the changes had been so drastic as that of the last year though. His beard, from a sleek black vibrant extension of his face, had become a limp, pale gray collection of separate hairs. This morning as on many others previously, he toyed with the idea of shaving it off, but he was af
raid that the chin underneath would be in no fit state to see the world.
He had left university seven years ago with a degree in Botany...a failed zoologist as his girlfriend at the time had so wittily observed...and no idea as to what to do next. He drifted into teacher training college more to avoid unemployment than through any vocational urge. Once finished there, he found, as if by magic, that a place teaching biology had become available in his hometown. He took the job, promising himself that it was only for a couple of years then onwards and upwards to somewhere.
The where he never quite figured out and, five years later he was still in the same place.
Surprisingly, to himself anyway, he enjoyed his work. He hadn’t fallen prey to the world-weary cynicism of the older teachers and hoped he never would. Just before she left him his girlfriend had observed that, as his mental age was the same as most of his pupils why shouldn’t he have a rapport with them?
There, he’d done it again, started thinking about her. Hangovers seemed to bring it on the most, probably because that was when he felt sorriest for himself.
“Ho hum,” he said to the girlie-calendar on the wall behind him. As usual this month’s model didn’t reply but just talking to her always perked him up. The wonder of self-hypnosis, he told himself as he left the small bathroom.
The letterbox in the front door behind him clattered just as he turned away from the bathroom, frightening him into a small yelp of surprise. The voice of the postman carried through the door.
“Morning Mr. Baillie, bills again this morning.”
And there were bills.
Gas and telephone on the same day? Shit! Time to increase the overdraft again.
There was also advertising, exhorting the benefits of life insurance, ladies handbags, the Socialist Workers Party and the forthcoming jumble sale at St Patricks’ primary school.
Mentally noting the date of the sale, always good for second-hand paperbacks, he consigned everything except his newspaper and the bills into the large black plastic bag, ready and waiting to be taken out of the bin. Some time.
The bus was late so Brian had plenty of time to ponder on why he queued at the stop every morning rather than drive himself. He supposed that he wanted to mix with people and not sit locked in his car, removed from the hubbub of life.
Once he got on the bus the drone of conversation from behind him made him think, not for the first time, that maybe he should get his car out of the garage more often.
The woman was, as usual, using her time on the bus as a sounding board for her conversations of the day.
“Is this weather not just terrible, all this rain and wind? I don’t think we’ve had three good days together all summer. I hope the autumn’s a wee bit better. It’ll have to be, or else none of the vegetables will come up. When I was younger it was never as wet as this. Personally I think it's them atomic bomb tests that’s done it.”
She stopped to catch breath.
“Are you listening to me?”
Her husband, engrossed in his morning newspaper grunted a reply but she took it for assent and, almost without a break, started again.
“Auld Missus Dunlop died last night, Margaret down at the shop was telling me, just dropped off during Coronation Street. Well she had a good innings anyway, eighty-five she was, and never missed a night at the bingo. Never missed Coronation Street either for that matter. I suppose she must have died happy.”
Next to her, her husband grunted again but this time Brian guessed he’d had enough for one morning. He stood up, grunted one last time and made his way down the bus.
She wasn’t finished yet though. Brian had discovered over the last six months that she always wanted the last word.
“And don’t you be going into that pub on the way home. If you’re not in by six o’clock you won’t get any tea.”
This elicited just one more grunt from the small man before he left the bus, leaving Brian undisturbed to catch up on Saturday’s football results. He often used his fifteen minutes on the bus to read his newspaper, but today he found it difficult to concentrate.
The headlines didn’t make it any easier. Yesterday it had been cattle mutilations...today it was an escaped psychopath…KERR ON THE RUN, the headline shouted in bold type…more titillation for the bored masses. His attention wavered, mostly due to his hangover but also partly due to his dreams of the night before.
His dreams of late had been troubled, not just populated with current acquaintances, but with friends and relatives both alive and dead.
He spent his dream-time wandering through strange scenes, like one-act plays but with no posh BBC type linkman to tell him what was happening, no titles to let him know who the cast were.
He felt vaguely aware that he was not sleeping too well. He had dim memories of half waking most nights, punching his pillow into submission. Once or twice he’d woken to voices, shouting almost, before he realized that it was him that was making the noises. Along with that, his sheets and duvet seemed to do a lot of traveling during the nights.
Last night had been particularly harrowing, as the dreams had concerned his late father.
Tom Baillie had been a large man. His face, round, white and smooth creased into a patchwork of large irregular shapes when he smiled, his eyes all but obscured by rising cheekbones meeting falling epicanthic folds.
This transformation paled when compared to that when he opened his mouth, tossed back his head and laughed, a great hearty bellow from the region of his stomach.
He could be imagined at a medieval banquet, calling for more ale, bashing a pewter mug on the table while cradling a wench or two in the crook of one massive arm.
At least, that was how Brian remembered him. In his dream however, the laughter had been harsher, eyes blinking pig-like from a red face with an expression more suited to a Roman Emperor attending a slaughter. All sense of humor had left this man, leaving behind a sly predatory cunning, laughing at others trouble.
Brian could still remember the dreams’ mocking laughter and wondered, not for the first time, if he wasn’t perhaps working himself too hard.
The school, although only fifteen years old, looked like it was in a state of terminal decay.
Large swathes of the walls were liberally daubed with graffiti, windows were broken and holes had been punched into the concrete with a wide variety of blunt instruments. It had been built to replace three separate local schools, becoming a catchment area for children from almost a ten-mile radius.
Brian remembered the day it had opened up. It had been his first day as a third-year pupil, the year where you have to make decisions that could affect the rest of your life. He could remember that time clearly.
The previous year he had done well in both sciences and languages and had to decide between them soon. He wavered between the two, some days wanting to be a scientist, to discover the secret of old age perhaps or a cure for the common cold. Alternatively he could stick with the languages and become a politician capable of uniting the world. To say that he’d been an idealist would be a bit like saying that Jesus Christ was religious.
Back then the place had the antiseptic feel of a hospital but it hadn’t taken fifteen hundred kids long to turn it into something which more resembled a bomb site.
The brush of a football against his leg brought him back to the present. A small group of boys ran past him, screaming, chasing a ball that was little bigger than an orange.
Elsewhere in the playground small knots of pupils had formed...the same groups of like minds that formed in schools everywhere.
Brian knew that there would be other small knots in places he couldn’t see...the smokers, the shy, and, worst of all, the solvent abusers. He said a silent prayer that the really heavy drugs hadn’t found their way to this part of Scotland yet...the glue sniffers were bad enough.
Brian remembered his own ‘experiments’ during his late school days and early on at university. The time spent watching his face melting in a larg
e bathroom mirror…petrol pumps which had to be pounded into submission with fence-posts before they had a chance to terrorize the countryside and, even less coherent than that, the white stag on the hill with the cold blue eyes, disdainfully watching him trip and tumble on his way home from ‘magic mushroom’ hunting.
Was glue sniffing like that?
He had always considered his drug taking as experiences, broadening his understanding of the world around him. The kids at the school with their faces pushed into old polythene bags seemed content only with contraction, shutting out everything but the buzz from the glue.
On one occasion he had caught three glue sniffers in the act. After relieving them of bottles and plastic bags, and after several threats of bodily violence, he had asked them why they did it.
The only coherent reply had been brief.
“Well, it makes ye forget, ye know, makes all this shit go away for a while.”
While not condoning their action, Brian could see their point. Fifteen and sixteen-year-old kids, kept at school against their wishes and with little prospect of a job when they eventually left, could see little hope ahead in their future. Apathy had become the order of the day.
He had to push past a recalcitrant knot of sullen girls to get to the main corridor. They shouldn’t have been there, but he just didn’t have the energy to move them on.
The teachers’ coffee room was noisier than most of the classrooms, the bulk of the chatter being generated by a knot of modern language teachers congregated around the only kettle. The rest of the room was gainfully employed infusing their bodies with the days’ first dose of nicotine.
Brian managed to wrest the most comfortable chair from the fat tabby cat sleeping there and took out his Guardian newspaper. He knew that the ‘blue rinse set’ had him marked down as a left wing reactionary so reading the Guardian merely reinforced their view.