Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

  3.6.1

  The register recorded that he checked out at half past eight. He was at the barbers on Dundas Street before nine, and at Agnes’ door just on quarter to ten.

  4.0

  Having conquered her daily Everest that Tuesday, and having attained the summit of her doorstep through a painful mist, as she now automatically inserted her latchkey, Agnes scarcely saw the hand that took her shopping for her, or the other hand that came around behind her to give her door an encouraging wee push. It wasn’t Sherpa Tenzing, but she couldn’t have been more surprised; it was all so sudden and unexpected, seeing Tommy there again, and seeing him too this morning as she’d never seen him before, not even on his wedding day, scrubbed, suited, his hair just cut, shaved and shiny, smelling of talcum and cologne. He’d never looked so good, bar the shiny scar where he’d cut his throat. So happy to see her. So much the kind of man she might have wished for her granddaughter that he’d walked her into her house before she was fully conscious of his actually being there.

  4.1

  Tommy closed the door behind them and stood in her hallway, filling it with an unaccustomed radiance of prosperity and self-control. Wordlessly, and having looked him just the once in his face, Agnes shuffled mechanically ahead of him towards the kitchen. He followed her slowly with her shopping in one hand and his carpet bag in the other, past the little stacks of bumper crossword collections, bright paper islands in a sea of grey dust.

  “Ah’ll jist pap this in the front room,” he told her, nipping behind her to do so, his carpet bag disturbing the little sandpiles of dead skin on the carpet beside the sofa, making silent little clouds.

  Stepping into the front room, Tommy, knowing he had to, glanced up, seeing as he knew he would, the photo of Janice, when she was aged fourteen in Seamill, still in its silver frame upon the mantle. His hungry little miracle. She smiled at him, enjoying his attention all over again. He turned away it hurt so much.

  When he re-emerged from the front parlour, choking a little, into the hallway, Agnes was still shuffling, just a little further on into the kitchen, head slightly bowed, heading for the kettle. Without turning round, she asserted without interrogation or emotion: “Ye’ll be wanting yer tea in the front room.”

  He stole in front of her with her shopping, it being the work of but a moment to take in the blackened filth around her bath and toilet bowl through the open door of the cludgie; the mingled reeks of old Spam and Tuna and the growing things around the rims of badly washed out tins on the kitchen table and sideboards; the crowns of dirt on the inside and the outside of the tops and the bottoms of the windows; the empty light fittings and the tray with the doily and the teapot and the single cup and saucer — and the work of only another moment to appreciate that for all his years of custodial solitude, he had managed to inhabit the world more fully than this robotic old woman, her brown eyes squinting at him, her face grown into a resigned mask of suffering as she came towards him in the musty stench that seemed all of a piece with the reluctant light that had penetrated this far into the gloom.

  “That’d be nice,” he said, smiling.

  Her face and her movement never paused or altered. “It’ll be through in a minute,” she told him.

  He watched her lift the kettle from the range, then he did what a man was supposed to do. He left her to it, and returned to the sitting room in silence, noting that although things had decayed here, they’d not changed in any other way since he’d first come here (unsuccessfully) to ask Janice out, when they were both just sweet seventeen. He’d stood waiting on this same carpet, looking at these same patterns on the same wallpaper. The same pictures. And of course, that picture, which was still where it was the first time he saw it, and which was the single clearest image he retained in his mind of her face. He looked again at her, in the picture on the mantle, at her aching absence from his life. She was still smiling at him, like she always had, from that picture taken a year or more before he had even existed for her, from within a tiny, fading world of primary colours, in front of sand and windbreakers, on a beach on the Clyde coast sometime in the eighties. She’d already been dark and wicked even then, and there she still was, frozen on a summer beach, still endlessly amused behind the freckles, in a red one-piece swimsuit, goosepimples on her forearms and there, budding beneath the damp fibre, her childish breasts, nipples stiff with cold. He felt himself growing erect even as he mourned his immeasurable loss of life and joy, and spoke quickly through to Agnes in the kitchen, to distract himself from the lost world within the silver frame.

  “I want ta see ma kids, Agnes. That’s what I’m here fer. I want tae dae somethin fur them. If I can.” He listened. Waited. There was a clank of fetched pottery, the low roar of gas and heating water. “Ah know it must have been difficult for ye,” he continued, loudly and deliberately. “I’m grateful tae ye fer aw ye did.” Wandering as he spoke, he counted, beside her armchair, six empty bottles of Smirnoff. Generously, he continued. “I’m no blamin ye fer anything. I’m no saying I didnae dae things wrong masel.” He hesitated. Could she hear him? Could she understand? “Agnes?” He popped his head back through to the kitchen.

  4.1.2

  She was rooting now in the kitchen drawer for some reason, hands blindly searching. He stood in the doorway, watching her, hearing her babble to herself as the water in the kettle rumbled and began to boil. “I want to make things right,” he said, as the kettle began shrieking and Agnes turned, having found the bread knife, the blade catching a little light as she flew towards him in slow motion, her face writhing and tortured, features melting in the heat of rage. She moaned in grief as she tried so very, very hard to kill him, kicking at his shins, a toe breaking on him as he held her by her tiny wrists. Her shoe came off. “Have ye heard from her at all, Agnes?” he asked her, as if she’d offered him a scone.

  She screamed then, finally, ripping it out of herself, the loneliness, born again. “I never hurt her, Agnes,” he tried to tell her over the noise, as if saying her name would calm her. “Mrs MacHutcheon,” he attempted, remembering both her married name and his manners. She screamed and gulped suddenly. Her dentures fell out, shattering, and a breath of hell washed his face.

  “I’ve heard from Janice,” he said, taking advantage of the sudden, comparative silence.

  4.1.2.1

  Her attack slackened for a moment, just long enough for him to gently give her a shake and disarm her without breaking anything else. The knife clattered on the lino. He kept holding her, smiling, full of good intent. Her screaming at him slowly degenerated into a groaning from the diaphragm as she came back to herself and became gradually aware again of pain, not just in her foot, but also in the fossilised muscles she had torn in her frenzy. The floor yawned at her feet, nauseating her.

  “I got a postcard,” he told her, suddenly aware he had to hold her up to keep her from collapsing entirely. He took her childish weight and she hung her arms around his neck, and like lovers, they held each other close as he walked her backwards into the sitting room and sat her in her armchair. He nodded, smiling still, and went through to the kitchen to turn the kettle off. She breathed painfully, chest hurting. Returning, he went on, having taken the postcard from his pocket. “She sent me it,” he said, pushing the yellowed moonscape into her fingers. She held it there, unseeing, spent. “I’m gonnae take the kids up North,” he explained uselessly. She never even looked at him. “Are you okay?” he asked, this latest absurdity finally drawing her attention for the duration of a brief, ironic stare into the face of his impossible innocence.

  He took the postcard from her. “I wanted to look in on ye so I could tell her yer aw right,” he said with renewed confidence, reaching into the carpet bag for a single white envelope inscribed with her name. “This is for your trouble,” he told her, and smiled again as if he’d sold her something. A funeral plan. That’s what rose into her head, and she laughed at him quietly. In her pain and distraction the shock of his presence receded from
her consciousness to regain the mere agony of memory.

  Glad to see she was more cheery, he asked if there was anything he could do. She waved at him vaguely. “I think I might do something about that toilet,” he said, and removed his jacket.

  4.1.2.2

  Agnes was asleep and breathing thinly in her chair an hour and a half later when he left, three thousand pounds lighter, his obligations that much more discharged, to keep his next engagement. He seems to have borrowed a thermos flask to help him with the engagement after next.

  4.1.2.2.1

  £30,611.04

  4.2

  Old Jack Webster was leaning against a gravestone on Kirkyard Hill, dressed too young, mebbe, but was still as charming as he had always been, even when he actually was still young, reluctantly here now to keep an old promise, already regretting it, even before he saw the juggernaut of his mortality bearing down upon him in an off-the-peg suit and carrying a carpet bag.

  “Tommy! How’s the boy?” he attempted. “Been ages. How ye keepin?” He even danced a little, just to show his happiness. He had on a welcoming face. But Tommy Hunter was close now, and he felt himself go pale and sick at being back in that unholy presence. He’d thrown up a lot, Jack, you’ll remember, that time long before, and it was sense memory as well as common sense that garred him grue.

  The wind whistled at him as Tommy Hunter stood and faced him, looking down on him, inscrutable. “Je get everythin ah asked ye fur?” said Tommy among the whistling wind and the dead. “Sure, sure ah did … nae bother,” said Jack, to mollify the blouster.

  4.2.1

  He wasn’t a bad man, Jack. I want that on the record. He always did his best. He always did what he said he’d do. He had a certain sense of honour, even though dealing principally with thieves, and his reliability wasn’t all just market positioning. He had his principles. He looked out for his maw, and his cousins and his nieces and nephews, when he could.

  He couldn’t help one of his eyes being funny. Or that he was only wee. He always had been. He’d never had the option of being intimidating. He hadn’t the furnace of rage in him that Joe Wheen had, or even the slow burn that Frank had, let alone Tommy’s volcanic propensities. He’d always got by on a wink and a smile. He saved up jokes and stories. He was a salesman, born to it. He liked it. He liked people being pleased with the things he got them, being pleased with him. And they were, mostly. People liked Jack Webster. And the truth was that he liked them back. He was a man who was capable of love and of being grateful for love. He even loved Tommy Hunter. He thought of Tommy as a friend. He appreciated his idiosyncrasies. He thought he understood Tommy Hunter, and that he was appreciated and thought of fondly in his turn.

  So that when the first contact between him and Tommy had been made after so many years, fourteen months back, when Tommy had appeared at his shoulder one day in the lunch queue at Shotts Prison, he’d been really, honestly pleased to see him, pleased to know that Tommy was still alive, bursting with joy almost that Tommy wasn’t dead like everybody thought. Tommy had not long been transferred at that point, and Jack had turned to see him with genuine warmth and a sense of rightness, that the only one of the old gang who Jack had always liked, enjoyed and admired, even, had survived against the odds.

  So he had been hurt, then, in the dismal clatter of the prison cafeteria, at Tommy’s emotionless and immediate demand that he get hold of some gear for him when he got out. He’d said yes, of course he would, and he did … he’d got Tommy everything he’d asked for, confirming the matter on their prearranged phone call to the phone box round the corner from his mum’s the day before, but he’d been disappointed nonetheless. Of course he had, he was only human. He’d been hurt at Tommy’s lack of human interest. That all Tommy’d told him after all these years was that when he got out he’d be needing a motor and a shooter and could Jack arrange that for him? “Aye, of course I can, Tommy … God, man, but it’s good to see you,” he’d said, standing there in the queue for prison burgers, where human warmth, being so rare amid the broken souls, was so precious … and he had felt his heart break with an actual snap when Tommy’d turned away from him and walked away to eat alone and look at his postcard without another word.

  And Jack’s heart was broken all over again now, curse it, curse his optimism, as Tommy didn’t (of course not) ask after him or his family, but only asked him for the gear. Just like that. As if it hadn’t been near two years ago since they’d spoken face to face, as if it hadn’t been twelve years before that, as if they hadn’t … as if HE hadn’t … as if all that … it … he … meant nothing to Tommy. And it was as if he meant nothing to himself, to anyone, as if Jack deserved this contempt.

  He felt it, he wondered if he did deserve it, he was hurt and upset. That’s the kind of guy Jack was. He offered love, and felt guilty and weak for his neediness when it was rejected.

  He should have known better, he knew that. But it was to his credit, I’d like to think, that Jack Webster felt the way he did. Just my opinion. But I did want to say.

  4.2.1.1

  So, humble and hurt, Jack handed Hunter a heavy paper poke from which Tommy drew, in full view for fuck’s sake, a Browning Nine Mil, a monster of a gun; fifteen rounds rapid could take the door off a house or the face off an elephant.

  “Hi, Hi, Tommy, Holy Fuck!” said Jack, appalled.

  Hunter stuck the big black beast back into its bag. “Ammo?”

  “Five Hundred,” Jack said, wanting to smoke. “In the motor.”

  “I’m not looking for any trouble, Jack,” said Tommy, implausibly.

  Jeezuz. Was that a fucking THREAT? Or what was it? Jack made like he understood that Tommy’s intentions were obviously entirely conciliatory, despite the hardware he’d just handed over.

  “Naw, Naw!”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yer okay!”

  Jack swivelled his eyes round at his possible escape routes.

  “Course yer not, Tommy,” he said sincerely. “It’s a dangerous world.”

  Hunter looked at him, evenly, as if considering saying something more. Almost as if he thought that Jack might understand if he explained. But then he didn’t.

  The two of them stood there for a moment. Hunter spoke first, almost gently, prompting him.

  “Where’s the motor?”

  Jack, back to business, and cars (which were, along with human relationships, his passion), became almost secure again, dropping into a role that somehow bridged the emotional and the pragmatic — that of a salesman with something good to sell, something that he genuinely thought was good. “Now there I think you’ll be pleased,” he said hopefully.

  And he found himself bowing to Tommy, arm out, palm up. Tommy walked in the direction thus indicated, and Jack straightened, thinking, What the hell is it about this guy anyway? Jack thought about that as he caught up and as they walked up the hill together, like a couple of old pals.

  4.2.1.2

  And the motor was a classic, right enough. The same minute Jack’d saw it, he’d lifted it, sweet as a nut. It had caught Jack’s eye as just the thing for Tommy.

  “1974 Racing Green Mercedes SLC,” he gushed, and ran his hand with a pleased squeak across the finish. “Got a split new V8, reconditioned gearbox, automatic fuel injection, Bosch electronics, CD player, air conditioning, automatic windaes, the lot …” He sniffed back his emotion. “Somebody LOVED this car,” he said, moved at his own pitch. He took a step back, almost tearful, stood tall and pointed. “That,” he concluded with some authority, “is a beautiful thing.”

  “It’s all right,” grudged Tommy.

  Jack bridled. Who did this guy think he WAS? He was a nothing, a con, a lag, breaking his parole, wanting wheels and a shooter for whatever stupid, doomed reason, paying way over the odds, on the nail, on the barrelhead, up front. Cos he fuckin had to. Cos he was a cunt.

  With the generosity of dudgeon, Jack went on, swallowing disappointment, trying to forget who he was talking
to, thinking of the money, but sales pitching to himself, really. Therapeutically.

  “Got ye some vintage sounds in here for no extra charge. Tae go with the period theme. Average White Band, Little Feat, bit ah Graham Parker. Chronologically coordinated wi the motor. Just the old songs. Nothin but the best.”

  Jack dug the keys out from his coat. He tried to reach out emotionally again as he reached the keys over to Tommy’s open hand.

  “So where are ye off tae, then? Cos if yer lookin fer any work …?” He tailed off like a dick. The pale blue eyes bore into him from out of that face, that silence. He could have been speaking Dutch for all the good it was doing either one of them. So he stopped, still holding the keys out, like a statue, Tommy’s hand staying there too, like they were posing for a photograph.

  And as they just stood there, the two of them, Jack thought maybe it was occurring to Tommy too, now, just how far he’d come now from where he’d been. How far away and lost he was. How impossible. Jack looked at him again. Was that a tear? Was that a tear that gleamed in the corner of a granite eye? Or just a trick of the light?

  “Holiday,” said Tommy. “Ah’m gaun on holiday.” He made it sound like he was casually looking for the Grail.

  Tommy held his hand out further for the keys, took them when Jack dropped them, then opened the door. He indicated the poly bag on the passenger seat, seemingly immune to the intoxicating smells of old leather that wafted like complicated wine through Jack’s olfactory organs.

  “Them the shells?”

  “Aye, uh huh,” confirmed Jack. “The handcuffs are in there as well.”

  Hunter tore the bag apart and, putting the cuffs to one side, opened the first box of cartridges, already knowing what happened next.

  Jack, not knowing, not wanting to know, said: “Holiday? Aye. Why not? That’s great. But efter, I mean … I mean, folk are gonnae know yer out, and if yer available … I mean … I could point ye …” he hesitated. Tommy turned in the silence. “What’s yer plans, Tommy? For after ye get back? From yer holiday?”