“But it’s pish. I’ve been staunin’ on sticks aw fuckin’ day, an’ they don’t even brek, never mind snap. They just sink intae the grun, or they just bend or kinna roll roon. You’ve really got to put some effort intae it to get the fuckin’ things tae brek, you know? Like, you’ve got to fuckin’ concentrate. If your mind’s elsewhere – like the daft bastart’s ayeways is in the films – then you’ve absolutely nae chance of a result. And see when you do actually get wan tae brek? Listen.”
He placed a stick against the protruding root of a tree and trod purposefully upon it. There was a a dull, unobtrusive crunching sound.
“See? Snap? Mair like a fuckin’ click. Like brekkin’ the lead aff a pencil. Piece o’ nonsense, so it is.”
Paul just shook his head and followed on. This was quintessential Spammy. He’d say bog-all about anything for hours, no matter what or how important the conversation around him was. Then he’d rant on passionately about something that would re-define the extremities covered by the term “inconsequential”.
Their journey had proceeded to an intermittent soundtrack of clicks and (dare he say it) snaps, amidst many thuds of failure, until Paul got fed up and told him to chuck it.
“I accept your point, Spammy, but eh, nonetheless, like, we are still technically on the run from the law. You know, meant to be hidin’, like? Keepin’ quiet?”
“But that’s what I’m sayin’. I am bein’ quiet. Naebody can hear us.”
Paul stopped, looking up into the branches above for a moment to stem the building charge of exasperation.
“Fine, Spammy,” he sighed. “But think how sadly ironic it would be, havin’ so vividly demonstrated your argument, if the sound of you staunin’ on a stick did give us away.”
“Aye but it . . .”
“Well how about the sound of a stick gettin’ shoved up your arse?”
Paul still wasn’t sure why Spammy had become involved.
It wasn’t the kind of thing you asked him, either. You could ask, but the answer would be perplexingly nonsensical, and he’d give you that amused look that said he couldn’t believe you were stupid enough not to anticipate the consequences of such a foolhardy enquiry.
But what was in it for him? Oh, they all thought they might make some money, sure – at least it was what they kept telling themselves to help them get through the Kafkaesque nightmare – but it seemed absurd that that could be it. Spammy didn’t seem to bother much about money. When he had any to spare he never fucking bought anything, except extra hash “for a rainy day” (and given the West of Scotland’s prevailing levels of precipitation, opportunities for its consumption tended to present themselves fairly quickly). If someone gave him several grand for nothing Spammy wouldn’t say no, Paul was fairly sure, fairly, but whatever dreams or aspirations he wasn’t talking about, cash didn’t seem to be something he lusted after. And the word career was quite definitely not in Spammy’s lexicon. He did wee odd jobs, fixing videos and tellies for people, occasionally doing maintenance stints at local recording studios, but he seemed more motivated by an obligation to help out whoever needed his services than for the payment they handed over. It was almost incidental, like he needed to be reminded to take it. Look, Spammy, money. Remember? Stuff you buy drugs with. – Oh right!
See, ironically, out of the four of them in this sad wee fiasco, Spammy was the one who had skills and knowledge that would be considered viable in today’s labour market, or whatever you wanted to call it. Paul’s dad and Bob’s abilities were long redundant, and his own were, eh, “not vocationally defined”. No-one had use for what they could do, whatever they could do. Plenty of people could use what Spammy could do, though, but the applications they had in mind were, in Spammy’s view, “not sufficiently inspirational or satisfying”, which roughly translated to a complete fucking waste of time. There was also the potential obstacle of no-one in their right mind giving him a job after they saw what he looked like, but Paul wasn’t sure that hurdle had ever even been reached.
Spammy liked to portray himself as the classic college drop-out, but was extremely vague and cagey about the details of his dalliances with Paisley Tech, like it was not so much an alma mater as a bit of a loose tart that he didn’t want people to know he had shagged. Paul had got drunk in the flat one night with one of Spammy’s dangerous girlfriends, the man himself missing in action since a trip that afternoon to Cappielow, lair of the Inverclyde Shite (sorry, Greenock Morton, and formerly just Morton, a calculated name-change like Windscale to Sellafield). Such tangential associates were the best (if not often the only) sources of information about what was or had been going on in his flatmate’s life.
Her name was Fiona, an equally spidery creature with scary hair and make-up like something out of a silent movie, most of which looked like it had been applied in the dark. She was becoming increasingly dischuffed with Spammy’s evasive or just plain bewildering behaviour, acutely so that evening. This wasn’t because he had failed to show up at the pub. That usually happened. She would then arrive at the flat, shout at him for five minutes as he came round from his slumbers or continued tinkering with some pile of exposed and worryingly sparking electronic circuitry, and then fail to talk him into leaving the building. After that they’d get pissed or stoned and retire to Spammy’s room. Half an hour later there’d be more shouting as she protested about his preferred response to her undressing and turning the light off – sleeping – and then finally huffy silence or Fiona’s breathy orgasmic noises, depending on how much Spammy had smoked.
But that evening Spammy hadn’t even been at the flat, negotiating the return bus journey to Greenock having apparently proven too much of a challenge. Paul had been slightly worried that his flatmate might have fallen prey to some of the local wildlife, the Mortonsupporterus vulgaris extremis, but either Fiona didn’t share his concern or the thought of it was not entirely disagreeable. She seemed happy enough for Paul to be a substitute companion in her familiar Saturday-night routine, and they had made inroads into a bottle of Grouse together, watching shite telly because Spammy had left the stereo partially dismantled. Paul had eased off his own consumption as his suspicion grew that Fiona intended to use him as a stand-in for all four acts, so to speak, and had turned the conversation to the subject of Spammy in an attempt to cool her ardour. This worked, in as much as it put her in an extremely bad mood, and set her off into drunken and incoherent stream-of-consciousness Spam-hate, certain snippets of which shed a stroboscopic light on the man in question.
“Drop-out? First bloke to drop out of Paisley Tech with a degree in electronic engineering.” . . . “Bloody waster would have companies queuin’ up to give him a job if he’d just get his act together. Have a haircut. Have a bloody bath.” . . . “Classic student that never grew up. Got used to dossin’ aboot, livin’ aff tins of beans an’ haggis suppers, lookin’ like an advert for Man at Oxfam. I know Spammy’s not easily bored, but he’s got to get fed up with this eventually. You cannae do it your whole life.”
Well, maybe you couldn’t, Paul had thought, but if anyone was ever born to have a crack at testing the theory, it was Spammy.
“Remember, I’m no gaun doon there as their prisoner, Tam. I’m gaun there as your emissary.”
He had needed to be physically pushed by Bob to begin his retreat into the woods. Tam felt more like he was abandoning his friend than just taking a different path, but he knew the guilt was really just anger and frustration in a guise of humility. It was still hard to leave, nonetheless, knowing what awaited Bob, lame and isolated on a grey roadway, with the ire and retribution of a vengeful nation out looking for its stray scapegoats.
It was a strange kind of parting, a parting very like death. Like Tam was at Bob’s bedside as he slipped away. Bob was going now, and although Tam knew it wouldn’t, couldn’t be too long before the same happened to him, the point of the exercise was still to put that off for as long as possible. Knowing capture was inevitable was like knowing death w
as inevitable. It made no difference. If it did, they all might as well commit sidey-ways on the spot.
And much as he would miss him, he couldn’t tell Bob he hoped to see him again soon, as they both knew that quite the opposite was true. It was a regretful farewell that both parties nonetheless hoped was final.
Tam paused against a tree, taking some of the weight from his legs and regaining his breath after a swift and strenuous ascent. He had no idea when Bob would be found, but he needed to get as far away from him as possible in the time before it happened. He had told himself not to look back, because if he glanced once, he’d be glancing every ten yards, and he had to keep his eyes on the ground before him, and on the trees and bushes ahead.
However, he couldn’t resist one last look, just to see whether Bob had made it to the road yet. He leaned around the tree and strained his vision, but he had stopped on a part of the slope where a veinous spur rose to one side of him, obscuring his view down into the valley. Tam took another few breaths and set off again at a light jog, veering his course to the right to reach the brow of the spur another hundred yards on. He dropped to his knees and crept forward, keeping his body close to a tree and his movements slow. He could see the road in two places, either side of a bend where it skirted a rocky hillock like a big toe sticking out from the green sleeping bag of the mountain.
Jesus.
This was it.
He could see Bob, sitting patiently by the roadside on a fencepost, his now familiar stick still present in his hand. Calm and relaxed, like he was just out enjoying the unexpected gift of autumn sunshine. And out of Bob’s sight, heading his way in swift, purposeful strides, were two figures in camouflage fatigues, breaking into a run as they approached the bend. Tam wanted to close his eyes, told himself he should be using these vital moments to get deeper, further, higher, but he couldn’t move any more than he could stop looking.
The figures were out of sight now, obscured from Tam’s line of vision for a few seconds as they rounded the outcrop. Bob was able to see them before Tam. He shuffled down off the fencepost and hobbled out into the road, holding on to the stick with one hand, his other raised in surrender.
Then as the figures drew nearer, now visible to Tam again, Bob’s free hand slowly dropped, as if in uncertainty, and he gripped the staff with it also. Bob turned and began desperately to run, the hard thumps of the staff hitting the road rising to Tam’s ears after a few moments’ delay, as Bob lurched and stumbled erratically away from the approaching men.
Tam watched in confusion as the pursuers broke into a sprint and, rather than seize Bob as they reached him, passed on the outside and continued ahead a couple of yards. They stopped and turned to face him as he staggered helplessly towards them, carried forward by the momentum of his last lunging, hopping pace. The smaller of the two held something out at arm’s length.
Tam saw Bob’s head whip backwards as if suddenly pulled by a rope.
The report of the shot reached his ears a second later.
EIGHT
Ken leaned over the desk to peer closer at the computer screen, where the same graphic appeared three times: once in colour, once in black and white and once in miniature. He took his glasses off and focused on the images again, feeling the first heralds of a headache that would be marching in mob-handed and boisterous as the day wore on. He hated bloody computers, and had ample evidence of reciprocation. Put simply, he resented their presence in the building – nay, the business – and they in turn had been campaigning concertedly for years to get him sacked.
Once upon a time the backbench had very much the final say on what actually appeared in the paper. Now it was these wee plastic bastards, which seemed to decide for themselves whether they were going to follow your suggestions for what should be on each page, and tended to change their minds or chuck in idiosyncratic alterations after you had pushed the button to send the plates to film. Swapping pictures was a big favourite, and not just ones on the same page. With all of the scans swimming around in the same digital-electronic tank, the DTP system had a terrifying tendency to fish out the wrong one when you went to press, and as the on-screen preview picture was a separate file, What You See was not necessarily What You Get. Ken would have written off the fuck-ups as pure technological accidents if they hadn’t evidenced a suspiciously consistent sense of humour.
Caption: “EVIL AND DEPRAVED – Rosemary West was told she would never leave prison after being found guilty on ten counts of murder.”
Picture: The Queen Mother.
Caption: “SACRED VOWS – Father Shaw insists there are practical alternatives to divorce.”
Picture: OJ Simpson.
Caption: “NATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT – The country’s reputation on the world stage suffered further due to an appalling lack of self-control from Ferguson.” As in Duncan.
Picture: Sarah.
Bastards.
He rubbed his eyes and sighed as the pony-tailed graphic artist, Keith, magnified the four-colour version of the image until it filled the screen on its own. This was the second time he had found himself staring dumbfoundedly at it.
“Look, can I not just get a picture of it on a bit of fuckin’ paper?” he had asked earlier, after the pixels had glared back angrily at his strained and complaining retinas.
“No problem,” Keith said, and proceeded to print out a colour laser-copy of his creation, which he handed to Ken after it was excreted from the fag-burnt, moulded fibreglass anus of the printer-cum-photocopier.
On it there was a blurry and smudged stramash of colours, visible only when the sheet was tilted at an angle that didn’t reflect the strip-lighting off its glossy sheen and into the lenses of his specs.
“Bugger it,” he had declared, scrunching up the print-out and bouncing it off the head of Keith’s assistant, an exasperatingly sloth-like creature whose name he couldn’t remember as he had only ever heard him referred to around the newsdesk as Lump. Lump didn’t move, didn’t even react. Lump evidently didn’t have reflexes. And possibly not a spinal cord either.
“Ach, give us another wee look at it on-screen,” he sighed.
This was bloody hopeless. Apart from the fact that the graphic was presented in a colour-scheme Quentin Crisp would have said no to, there was a rather inappropriate Fred Quimby kind of feel to the icons within it, and he half-expected to see little birds tweeting around the heads of the figures lying in front of the upturned prison bus.
What was even worse was that the manhunt could end at any time, and it was at least eight hours before the first edition of this shite went to bed; eighteen hours before most folk were looking at it next to the coffee and toast. He had said as much in protest, when that pompous fanny of an assistant editor suggested the graphic in the first place, but had been over-ruled with a pile of mince about “reader accessibility” and “leading the eye into the story”.
“If they want to look at cartoons they can buy the fuckin’ Beano,” he consumingly wanted to say, but had to bite his tongue, as his jacket was already on a shaky nail, and that skinny wee shite was dying to be the one who gave it the decisive shoogle.
The whole Voss thing had been such an awkward beast to wrestle, and this latest twist was threatening to throw off his grip altogether. Some might have imagined a story like this was a newspaperman’s dream, especially with it growing and running on so expansively, but Ken wasn’t enjoying it one bit. Oh sure, it meant you didn’t have to waste much time deciding what to lead with on the front, and with it all happening up here there was no room for the usual debate over the comparative merits of some local brouhaha against a “national” story that the London papers would be going big on. But the downer with something as toweringly huge as this was that it was never quite yours. You had to queue up with everyone else to get your share, and although there was plenty to go round, well, that in itself was the problem. You sent a couple of hacks to go and collect your wee slice of what the polis were handing out, but tasty as it was, everyon
e else had got the same, and the cops weren’t letting anyone near the pie itself. So you sold your dish to the punter on the strength of your trimmings, rather than the meat. Big background pieces on page two, life of Voss, facts about the four suspects. Sidebar on reaction to events, local angle, national angle, quotes both from political heid bummers and ground level- maybe some wee wummin whose daughter’s a cleaner at Craigurquhart. Comment pieces from the picture-byline-status columnists. Plus the obligatory what’s-the-world-coming-to hand-wringing article to satisfy the Presbyterian and Catholic needs for assurance that society is indeed gathering speed on its plummet into irreversible moral decline.
And the sad thing was that it worked. It sold papers. Even this fucking stupid bus-crash graphic would do exactly what that hand-knitted plamff had said. It would catch the eye. It would attract readers, because they’d have already seen the pictures on TV, and if the other papers carried agency shots of the wreck, TheSaltire would stand out because it was offering something colourful and new.
Ken took a seat between Keith and Lump and stared blankly at the screen, stroking his beard with one hand to give the impression that he was pondering the image, when in fact he was blurring his vision and letting his mind wander.
Ken had been at The Saltire for nearly forty years, from a fourteen-year-old copy boy to news editor, a position he had held – more or less – for over a decade. There had been an interruption to that tenure when he was appointed deputy editor six years back, at a time when his full editorship seemed inevitable. However, widespread realisation of the haplessness of his replacement on the newsdesk coincided with a realisation of his own. People had always said that if you cut Ken, he would bleed ink, and in those short months away from the coalface, he discovered that it was true. The power, the prestige, the kudos and the cash had always seemed so attractive from below, but once they were within his grasp he understood that what really mattered was doing what you were best at and what you enjoyed.
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