This was Robert’s idea. After the pre-wedding dinner, we were escorted out by a weary barman, the last to leave, and nothing much happened between us, I do clearly recall all the nothing that went on between Robert and me: but I did give him my number and he did ring me the following week.
“Who?”
“Robert . . . Gardener. From the . . .”
“That meal, yes . . . Yes?”
I was still in bed, which makes for a nice unease in these situations: there is always something horizontal in your tone that gives you away and you may occasionally wonder whether this is, in fact, what you want. Then again, he was given away before me—his own voice losing a note when I didn’t recognise his name at once, then settling, opening, as we calmed and warmed. I could hear we were calming and warming: people forget that the telephone lets you hear everything—all the information around the words, their external music, and every noise that works beneath each voice—as devices, they are merciless.
“You didn’t lose my number, then.”
“No, I wouldn’t do that.”
Which was being very frank for this early in a chat—so he was doing the frank thing, the disarming thing, the one which suggests you are safe with me and is therefore dangerous.
“You could lose it if you wanted.” Not that I don’t like danger—it puts that spike of brandy in the blood.
“But I didn’t—want.”
A slight breathlessness now on both our parts, because this was turning into exercise: from a standing start, we were having to perform, be convincingly witty, flirtatious and carefree and demonstrably likely to be a good date, trying to catch each other’s rhythm and pass it back. Not that we weren’t also liking the good strain of something which did tend to suggest there was pleasantly harder work to come. With any luck.
“What are you doing this afternoon?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . .” In my experience, I have quite a small allowance of luck, relatively. “Saturday things.”
He murmured a laugh at that, although it wasn’t funny. Apparently he was one for the nervous laugh.
“What? What’s the matter?” Not that there’s anything wrong with being given a nervous laugh—it arrives with a sense of its owner’s breath and the heat of their throat. I myself don’t laugh nervously half enough, which is a shame, because it’s useful.
“Nothing’s the matter. What Saturday things have you got on?”
I, of course, had nothing on—in any sense. And I, of course, wondered if he’d guessed, would have preferred it if he’d guessed. And this, in its turn, coloured my reply, licked around its tone without further effort on my part. “Well, there’s a charity gravel collection at two o’clock. And then I have to finish plaiting my wicker man.” It didn’t matter what I said.
“Chippings for Needy Nippers?—it’s a great cause.” Or what he answered.
The two of us doubling meanings where there were none, making them shine. “Everyone makes an effort when they know it’s for waifs and strays.”
“And which do you favour? Waifs?”
“No, I always go for strays.”
“That’s very commendable—or if you’d like, you could come out with me.”
“I could . . .” And then we found the pause. “I could do that.” Met each other inside it. “Yes, I could.”
“You’re sure you want to?”
“I am sure.” Another, nicely chafing silence and then I heard myself repeat, “Yes. I am sure.”
“Okay, then.”
“That was easy.”
“Sometimes it is.”
Which was a lie—it never is.
And, true to form, when we met up in Union Street, we went wrong. For a start, he didn’t look the same, I couldn’t tell you why: there was simply a type of ugliness in him that I hadn’t seen before. For his part, he glanced at me edgily with the kind of concern you’d reserve for an unstable building, or bottled specimens of rare deformities. (I am many things, but not deformed.) We walked behind the back of the cathedral in helpless silence: now and again jarring arms together lightly the way people do when they are unable to reach each other’s step.
He stopped, a seagull kiting down the sky ahead of us and then folding to drop, and I wondered if Robert had some fondness for—or phobia of—seagulls. That wouldn’t be a good sign, either way. But then the gull wagged off and Robert sighed, “Look, I’m not being interesting. And this is . . . either we can keep walking and it won’t get any better, or you can come for a drive with me and I’ll . . . there’s somewhere you’d enjoy. I think.”
“You’re going to drive off with me.”
“I promise not to kill you.” Again the nervous laugh.
“Well, that’s all right, then.”
“Not even injure you.”
“I’ve studied self-defence.” This was another lie, I had always intended to study self-defence, but had never found the time. “I wouldn’t let you injure me.”
“Good . . . tell you what, if we nip back through the shopping mall, we’ll be filmed on their CCTV—that way, I’ll be caught almost immediately and arrested when they discover your torso abandoned in a drain.”
“A loch, please. Not a drain.”
“Of course—only the best for Hannah. A loch. A nice, romantic loch.”
He could remember my name. “Say that again.”
“A nice, romantic loch.”
“The first bit.”
“Of course—only the best for Hannah.”
And no one had ever suggested anything close to that. So I went with Robert Gardener and I got into his car and he drove me clear across the country, to the Shawfield Greyhound Track.
Which is quite unforgivable.
Although, by the time we got here, he was forgiven. I allowed him to be redeemed, because of the tapes. Almost as soon as the car was in motion, Robert was scrabbling riskily in the glove compartment among a dozen or so cassettes, the road ahead careering towards us, shivering beneath and then streaming away, as if he had very little to do with our progress—which was the case.
“Ah, I see . . . you’re not going to kill me, you’re going to kill us both. My murder-suicide pact was meant to be next week.”
“It’s fine . . . it’s . . . okay.” He slapped in a tape, then finally patted his free hand down on the wheel again and paid attention to the windscreen. I prepared myself for the usual talk about how Nancy Griffith is really sexy and genuinely talented and bright, or how Neil Young is really sexy and genuinely talented and bright—depending on the hopelessness of the speaker’s middle age—or else the speech intended to convey that I am still young/hip/sexy/genuinely talented and bright enough to thoroughly understand garage/progressive jazz/Radiohead/Christ knows what kind of Mongolian throat music . . . because ninety-nine in every hundred men never, ever can just listen to music.
And then a noise shook through his speakers which made him the one in the hundred: that opening, ghastly chord, clattering down emphatically and sustaining: tra-daaaa. It was Jimmy Shand: Jimmy Shand and his band: the Auchtermuchty Sound.
“Oh, my God.” What else could I say?—being suddenly plunged back into a thousand wet afternoons in the gym hall and the smell of rubber soles and Precambrian sweat and thumping through the Canadian Barn Dance, the Lancers, Strip the Willow, the Dashing White Sergeant, the Eightsome Reel, the endless skip-change-of-step and right hand after left and breathe in and breathe out to the stone-steady rhythm of Shand’s accordions, their mad and wailing and perversely attractive drone.
“Yes, isn’t it.”
“I mean . . . Oh, my God.”
“ ‘The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen.’ ”
“You are insane.”
“But you know you’re in safe hands now—no one could ever be murdered in time to Jimmy Shand.”
“Jesus . . .” It was becoming shamefully impossible not to tap my feet. “Christ. Completely insane.”
“I did hear once that they held soot
hing country-dance sessions in Carstairs State Hospital.”
“And so the tunes make you homesick.”
“Timesick.” He grinned, “Aren’t you?” seeing that he was right and laughing out loud: a good, hot sound, that fumbled quickly under the opening notes of “The Bluebell Polka” . . . Tra-daaa. “Mm?”
“If you wore a coloured sash over your shoulder, you were an honorary boy . . . week after week, sash and then no sash. Except for the girl with the incipient moustache—she always had a sash—you know how girls are, unpleasant . . .”
“Well, I had to dance with real boys, that’s much worse.”
“And in the end they put you all together: co-educational for the full experience: Christmas party, Queen Victoria’s birthday, some other notable date: and everything gets embarrassed and nobody has a clue who should be leading and it all goes to hell.”
“Well, everyone knows the accordion is Satan’s favourite instrument.”
“And you know why Calvinists never have sex standing up.”
“Because people will think they are dancing.”
Which is my favourite joke, its punchline delivered without pause, clean on the beat, Robert simply rattling on after, as if he’d done nothing special, as if no one would ever be tempted to assess compatibility on the strength of seven words set out precisely when they should be.
“I have Over the Hills and Far Away too, that’s one of his finest albums, we can play it next.” I could feel that his accelerator foot was gently keeping time. “Ah, yes . . . an extensive body of work.” This Robert beside me, this Robert Gardener, who knew my punchline and was not irritating me, and was not giving rise to any thirst, only a rush, the regular forward pulse of an open rush. And this was his pine-tree air freshener, swinging from the rear-view mirror, and his clean, little footwell carpets and his book of British road maps in the door pocket and this was, as you might say, his distinctly anal-retentive, second-hand Volvo— but, then again, I hate messy interiors, messy cars most of all—and the whole of this was, on every side of me, Robert’s—an expression of him— while I was unstoppably thinking
Jimmy bloody Shand—how many generations of us danced to him at school before anything else?—toddlers practically, but already fixed in our timetables, ready at least once a week to be all of a piece and out and jumping to that rhythm, practising the pace of an uneasy heart, the perfect tempo—we’d later learn—for unhurried sex. And how many Scots have made all their love to this one unacknowledged accompaniment, folded somewhere deep in their reptile brain: the back and forth and slip and rise of the Auchtermuchty Sound?
“What are you thinking?” Robert patting the steering wheel: a formal kind of set to his head, the shoulders raised as if he were ducking out from under something and didn’t quite expect to make it. “You can tell me . . . I’m taking all my medication and I’m very stable now. What are you thinking?”
About how I fuck—about how you must, too. “Oh, ahhm . . . that when Thatcher wrecked our education system, she also really messed up our beat.”
“No need to bring her into this—we were having a nice day. Anything else?”
“Watching the ceilidhs on telly with my dad.”
“In the good old days, when we hadn’t got a clue and thought we ought to like them.”
“But we did like them.”
“Of course.”
My father had a weakness for Shand—the famous band composed, as far as I could see, entirely of dead, old men in extraordinary jackets and the dancers—who were of both sexes but I can only visualise the men— spines bullet-straight, neat in precisely rolled shirtsleeves, darting about with great seriousness and violently short haircuts and potentially—but never, ever actually—reckless kilts.
“My favourite was ‘Donald, Where’s Yer Troosers.’ ” This was my lie, which anticipated his, was hoping for it happily.
“Or there was always the unforgettably moving ‘Stop Yer Tickling, Jock.’ ”
Lying together is good.
“It’s a wonder we’re alive.”
But that’s not a lie, it’s always true: it is a wonder.
“It isn’t a wonder, it’s a bloody miracle.”
Robert is placing what he claims is a fifty-pence bet with the gaggle of ancient, deaf bookies to one side of the track. I prefer the rather clinical young women at the windows for the Tote: they seem to be judgemental, almost scolding, which pleases me.
Over by the kennels, the next dogs are led out: Hanover Racer leaping and lunging in a way I feel sure should attract inexperienced punters like myself. I am moved to back her but, sadly, have a prior commitment to Clune Tune, a passive, camel-coloured effort, currently urinating copiously.
“Would you like a pie?” Robert returned and standing softly at my shoulder, the breath that carried his question still loitering in the cold and adding to the generally misty silver of the floodlit air. “Or something . . .”
“Probably something.”
“Come on, then.”
The track’s public bar is headachy with cheap tobacco and the tang of cooked fish—which is unnerving because fish is neither cooked nor served within the grounds. Robert is taller than almost everyone— although he is not tall—but he is also visibly softer and moves in the wrong way, has a certain carelessness. His hair has this knack of standing out at the sides of his head, permanently ruffled, which seems rash in our present context.
“What probable something do you want?” And, before I can answer, “But I’ve got to drive us back, so I can’t join you. Have to be sensible— my licence is currently delicate—points, you know . . . incidents . . .” This news solidifying in my stomach like a tiny, lead handicap weight. I don’t want to drink alone.
That is, I don’t mind it on principle, but I don’t want to do it right now.
Because this is complicated: if I really do want to fuck him, and I really do, then I really do have to be more liquid than I am. In preparation for real physical contact, I have to be freed and insulated and warmed and fortified and these qualities only come to me, or indeed anyone else, when they’ve had a drink. Because I am experienced in drink, I can judge very accurately how much of it doing things to Robert would require.
But if I drink enough to ease out the actions I might want, then I may not remember what some of those actions were: in fact, it’s quite possible I won’t remember anything, and this time I would like to. I would like to be there and store every move in safe keeping and know about each one in detail tomorrow morning and thereafter. I would, to be truthful, prefer if this wasn’t fucking and was more like something else, something humane.
On the other hand, if I drink and he doesn’t then I will have started to travel and he will just stay where he is. I will leave him and be alone, drinking alone. There have even been occasions when this makes me silly and embarrassments take place. He wouldn’t like that. Nor would I.
“Hannah?”
“A Scotch and ginger beer.”
“A what?”
“Because when it tastes crap I won’t have any more. As you can’t join me . . .”
“I would like to, but—”
“You can’t.” I sound sulky. He pads towards the bar, apparently without having noticed.
I glance along the figures at the counter: a) five foot three and clinically depressive, b) five foot one and with a facial scar, c) Robert, d) perfectly normal and eating a pie while winking at a pair of ladies tucked up in the corner and staring at him, but making no other visible response. In light of the current competition, my companion for the evening looks highly promising.
Actually, Robert’s promise is—even as I study him—cramping between my kidneys and prickling, here and there, with a warm effect which precipitates swallowing and a careful maintenance of stillness, because if I move in this condition I will not be responsible and will want to change things: our angles, temperatures, levels of contentment, states of dress: although there is no chance of my succeeding
in any of this, because I am drinking on my own.
I couldn’t really take full account of him face on, close to—but, at this remove, he becomes less overwhelming, more accessible and easy to peruse: the aforementioned ruffling over his ears, the life in the movements of his back and that suggestion of his hips beneath his jacket (lousy grey jacket), the unloading and reloading of weight from foot to foot, the forces at work in the muscles from ankle to thigh, all closely reflected by his jeans. He should never wear thick jeans, never anything immobile and
There is no point to this—none at all. Why fix on his hands and interrogate and pry—what would be their strength, the fingers’ true circumference, how would they fit—making guesses until I taste salt when nothing will come of this?
“Here’s your poison.” Robert’s hand more three-dimensional than it should be when it sets down my glass full of fizzy, gingered whisky. “So . . . cheers.” And he waves his own bottle of water in my direction as he sits, as if I needed another reminder of his unalterable state.
“Cheers, yes.” And, by this time, I don’t want the drink: I need it, the whole deep lunge of it, rolling down.
“That looks good. You’re making me jealous.”
“I don’t mean to.” Not jealous enough. I haul away the last sip and fold my arms against the lack of anything to hold.
“Shall I get you another?” Nothing accusatory in the question, no more than a fond amusement, which is a good start—fond amusement can be built upon during an evening and grow towards great joint endeavours. If we both take a drink.
There is a mildly communicative silence and I realise Robert is waiting for an answer and for me to face him. I have changed and he is curious, checking to see why. I tilt my head towards him and have only the wrong kind of smile, I can sense it clamping across and mingling self-pity and a heavy effort to look cheerful with a tedious jag of passive-aggressive pique. There isn’t a thing I can do to halt it. I try to save my situation by working on my eyes, keeping them warm and amiable. Still, I notice that he has to flinch.
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