Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

  Hunter drew his muscular, skinny frame close to a wall and didn’t breathe. This was obviously fat boy’s corner, and Hunter smiled to himself at his son’s patience, then changed his mind about Ronnie’s motivation for keeping company with such an obvious loser, and wondered, heart sinking, if it was loneliness that kept his son there to listen to the latest on something called YouTube, and he felt a strange pang of something that might have resembled shame or sympathy or guilt, and found that he too was growing impatient. He was on the point of interrupting when a shift in Ronnie’s weight from one foot to the other told the fat boy that was that, and the fat boy left, presumably to go back to the parental home, whatever that might be like.

  5.3.3

  So Hunter and Ronnie, staggered by Hunter’s surveillance technique, went together deeper into the scheme, into the desert of home. As they walked, Hunter dodged, and Ronnie tapped a rhythm on walls and railings with his bottle of caffeinated wine.

  5.3.3.1

  Ronnie turned the corner of the fence around his socially provided address, and Hunter, clocking the telltale green paintwork of collectivist days of yore, sped his pace and called to his son, his own face catching the downlighting of a flickering sodium lantern to some advantage, like Harry Lime in a doorway in Vienna.

  “Ronnie,” he said.

  5.4

  Ronnie turned around, showing no surprise, no fear, no welcome. His eyes were still shaded as Hunter took his own heart in his hands and told his son who he was.

  “I’m your father, Ronnie.”

  He waited for an acknowledgement. And, eventually, Ronnie looked down at the darkening, wettening pavement, and said nothing. For a moment Hunter doubted that he’d spoken out loud at all, thought that the words he’d practised for so long had been lost in the rain somehow.

  “I’m your father, Ronnie,” he repeated, just to be sure he’d been heard.

  “I heard ye,” Ronnie noted, not looking at him, his body language cryptic. There was, mebbe, a new, jangled brightness to his tone. But now Ronnie was silent again, weight on his left leg, slowly swivelling his right foot on the ball of his heel. The concerned parent in Hunter wondered whether his boy was shy. But an older instinct told him that this guarded non-response to the appearance of a long-lost parent was a tactical opacity.

  “Have you heard something?” he asked his son. “Has somebody been talking tae ye?”

  “I thought you were a poof,” Ronnie offered him, flicking him momentary eye contact from under his hair.

  “Would ye like to go on holiday?” Hunter said.

  Ronnie huffed a kind of laugh at the unexpectedness of this, weighing the bottle in the air now, testing the heft of it.

  “Holiday?” he said, and swung at his father.

  Hunter had anticipated the attack just enough to turn and bow his head, so that the bottle hit his shoulder blade as well as his skull, the impact sending the weapon spinning out of Ronnie’s hand to smash on the pavement, adding a little poison to the rain that was falling quite hard now, as Hunter crouched in a posture to protect his head, throat, balls and kidneys from permanent damage, and Ronnie whaled on him silently, betraying a lack of art in the random order of his kicks and punches. Hunter took a bruising, right enough, but even as he went down, he could tell that his son, for all of his experience of the care system, had not grown up much of a fighter, that he was wasting energy on anger, that he’d be exhausted soon, bored even, if Hunter just went limp and rolled with it, confident that it was only if he left himself exposed in a vital area that the boy might actually do him harm of any more severity than his own penitence already demanded that he suffer. He didn’t move when Ronnie stopped kicking him and stepped back for the valediction. Ronnie’s voice was breathless, the air in his lungs heaving past premature smoke damage.

  “You tryin tae make a cunt ae me? Ur ye?”

  Last kick coming at the head, Hunter turtled it into his shoulders and just caught the edge of Ronnie’s shoe. The pain was purple as his retinas were shaken.

  5.4.1

  Hunter lay there for another full minute after Ronnie had gone, tasting his own blood, concentrating on each area of hurt in turn, assessing it. His suit was fucked, but he had another just like it. He was fine. He sat up on the soaking street, and felt the cool water in his arse crack.

  Meanwhile, Ronnie, a bit nervously, was ringing the doorbell over and over at the hostel further up Dryry Street, muttering to himself for Macreesh to hurry up and push the fucking door entry button, ya dick-brained Irish fuck, ye.

  “Hello?” crackled the friendly doorkeep of the Western World.

  “It’s Ronnie,” Ronnie said, and waited for the opening buzzer and pushed, with one glance back into the street. He saw Nothing. No one.

  5.5

  “Close the door, Ronnie,” said his social worker with patient admonition. Ronnie, hands in pocket to conceal his skinned knuckles, used his foot. The iron door crashed and shook the whole place.

  “For goodness SAKE!” said Macreesh, as Ronnie ignored him and walked past without a glance. Ronnie reached his dorm room door and opened it and shut it behind him almost in one movement.

  “That’s two demerits,” Macreesh told his disappearing back. Macreesh tutted, something heroic in his insistence on thinking the best of everyone, in thinking that no one is without hope, in believing that things could change for the better.

  That’s what a hero is. One who still hopes, despite everything we all know to be true, and acts according to his hope and not his fear.

  5.6

  Frank and Joe, meanwhile, heroes to no one, not even to themselves, were sharing an overpriced drink at the Golf Club with Superintendent Bellamy, and in that Leisure Centre for the Suburban Bourgeoisie, Joe stuck out like a burglar’s turd on the Axminster. He’d probably turned over half of these cunts in his time, he mused to himself sourly, doctors and lawyers and accountants and marketing men and therapists and the rest of their inexplicable, hateful breed.

  Joe was not relaxed in this milieu.

  Frank, who had persuaded himself that he was, was trying not to notice the sarcasm and condescension in the eye contacts he momentarily connected to, but was no happier at the flushed jollity of the Superintendent, who with a blithe disregard for the evidence remarkable even in a senior policeman, was telling the Wheens again and again that there was nothing to be worried about.

  “If he doesn’t report for probation tomorrow at 11.30, the Glasgow cops will pick him up. They’ve got his address, his description. You’re worrying over nothing.”

  Bellamy looked at their angry, scared faces, and felt a certain professional pride at seeing the Wheen brothers reduced to this state of anxiety, like everyone else he ever spoke to on police business.

  “You’ve done the right thing talking to Ronnie … and his social worker. And to me.” He gracefully allowed them that, enjoying himself. Having achieved no change of expression or diminished the angry tension in their faces, the policeman wittered on like a patronising arsehole: “I have to account for every hour of every officer’s time, Frank. You can’t expect me to send any of my men to go looking for any old lag, let alone make a request to another force, when there’s nothing we know of he’s actually done.”

  “If he cuts ma fuckin throat, will ye be interested then?” offered Joe, unasked, hands clasped, legs apart, his balls sweating with hatred.

  Repressing the response that he’d be delighted more than interested at that eventuality Bellamy reached out his hand and patted Joe’s knee in a palliative gesture of utter contempt. Joe stared at the hand disbelieving.

  “I know it’s uncomfortable,” he sympathised, “but the past is the past, Mister Wheen. I don’t think any of us want to revisit it … even Tommy Hunter.”

  He looked at Frank meaningfully like some wanker off the television and sat back having delivered this cosy threat. Bellamy looked over to the bar past Joe’s shoulder, where DS Boyle nursed a whisky and stared at their
conclave with a hatred almost equal to Joe’s written unsubtly all over his own righteous mug.

  5.6.1

  The Jesuits had done a job on “Danny” Boyle all right. If he hadn’t been so angry all the time, he might have kept going with his studies and been a priest. As it was, he turned away from the Gomorrah of corruption that he saw personified in the Wheen brothers drinking with his senior officer to his own companion that evening, DC Maggie “Single” Singleton, and said it made him sick. She told him that she knew it did. She had long ago conjoined his Catholic discontent to her guilty Presbyterian conscience. She adored him. She wanted to help him. She had often told him so in her imagination if never in those spoken words.

  “If I could just get something on that … those …” he said, and turned away again, obsessing, unable to speak the intensity of his thought. The arrogance of it, of those criminals being publicly associated with HIS …

  “I know … I know …” she told him.

  “What are they talking about?” he asked the universe rhetorically, not looking at her yet. His not knowing the answer to things was always a personal affront to the tenacious DS “Danny” Boyle.

  “I know … I know …” she said again, meaning only that she felt his pain. He looked at her then, his eyes and face exhausted by his years of unrewarded righteousness and perpetual discouragement. She smiled at him sadly, unworthy, she knew, of his love.

  She was thinking as ever about that longed-for night when she would take him in her arms and legs, that night which had to come soon, or she would dry up like a purse. He was wasting his life and hers on this fretting. She knew that. He was eating himself when he should have been eating her, her white flesh offered like cake to that strong mouth, to those dark eyes and bitten fingers. She longed for him to turn his rage on her, so he could churn her into butter. He turned to her, not seeing her melting for him.

  “There’s something going on,” he said. “There’s something going on.”

  Nothing. There was nothing going on, Maggie moaned to herself in secret. She dropped her eyes, her pheromones flagging for the moment. Boyle looked back at Bellamy, and his boss stared evenly, complacently back at him.

  “One day,” he promised himself out loud. “One day, you’ll fuck up. And I’ll be waiting.”

  He looked at the bar and drank his Glenmorangie, bitterness swallowing the absurdity of his rhetoric. Maggie looked him, and wondered who’d be waiting longer.

  “I’ll help you,” she told him, all procedure. “I’ll draw the files.”

  “You’re a good girl, Maggie,” he said unnecessarily. She already knew what a good girl she was.

  5.7

  Around about then, four miles away and at the other side of the universe, Hunter, having dumped one suit and changed into the other, drew the Jag to a silent halt on Dryry Street outside of Bruar House. He put his left hand on the passenger seat. The handcuffs went in his pocket. He put on the ski mask. He turned off the engine and picked up the gun.

  It was raining hard now. That would kill the noise, if there was noise. Sheets of it drummed on the roof and the wind whipped it at the windshield. No moon. Like that other night of no moon fourteen years ago, he might have remembered. He opened the car door and stepped out. The portent of what he was about to do throbbed in his bruises. He shut the car door and started walking slowly. He wiped the wet hair from his eyes and rang the front doorbell. He couldn’t hear Macreesh’s patient tutting as he approached the door. Just the rain.

  CUT TO:

  5.7.1

  INT. BRUAR HOUSE – NIGHT

  The buzzer is sounding. MACREESH is getting into a dressing gown, heading for the door. Several of his young, restless charges already have their heads outside their doors, bugging him, saying “Who is it?”

  MACREESH

  (walking towards door)

  I’ll just see, shall I?

  (opening door)

  Now who …?

  Hunter’s gun comes through the door first, the barrel going right up Macreesh’s nose. Hunter backs him inside, bleeding into his ski mask. The younger children scream.

  What?

  HUNTER

  (absurdly, to Macreesh)

  Don’t worry.

  HUNTER

  (to the rest of the kids, or those who remain)

  Get back in your rooms.

  SMALL BOY

  Shoot him, Mister.

  Hunter’s eyes drift to Macreesh’s eyes quizzically.

  HUNTER

  Tell them.

  MACREESH

  (to the kids)

  Get back in.

  No one moves. Hip to the nuance of the scene suddenly, Macreesh puts his hands up.

  MACREESH

  (to Hunter)

  What do you want?

  Through his mask, Hunter sees Ronnie (partially clothed, having pulled his jeans on) in a doorway. He pushes Macreesh back in that direction, not giving away his destination. He goes past Ronnie before shooting out a hand to grab his boy’s T-shirt.

  HUNTER

  Come on, you.

  RONNIE

  (resisting helplessly, wondering briefly why if this cunt has got a grip like this, why didn’t the cunt defend himself the last time)

  Get tae fuck.

  He smacks at Hunter’s hand. Might as well smack at a building.

  HUNTER

  (strictly)

  Ronnie … do as yer told.

  Ronnie stares at the eyes in the mask. They stare back. Not to be argued with.

  MACREESH

  Ronnie … do you know this man?

  RONNIE

  (swatting with both hands now at the good left arm that’s near enough lifting him off his feet, thinking dizzily: Christ, this cunt is STRONG …)

  He says he’s ma stupid fuckin faither.

  MACREESH

  (to Hunter, scolding gently)

  Mr. Hunter! Really, now …

  Hunter points the gun at Macreesh again.

  HUNTER

  You’re comin as well. I’m takin both of ye.

  MACREESH

  (there being nothing in the handbooks to cover this contingency)

  Me?

  RONNIE

  I’m not goin anywhere wi you.

  The small boy is now tugging at Hunter’s sleeve.

  SMALL BOY

  Mister …

  HUNTER

  (ignoring the child)

  Ronnie …

  RONNIE

  No fuckin way …

  MACREESH

  Mister Hunter …

  SMALL BOY

  (still tugging)

  Mister …

  HUNTER

  (finally, to boy)

  What?

  SMALL BOY

  Can I come too?

  Hunter looks at the boy for a moment. Tousles his hair. Then looks at Ronnie and Macreesh.

  HUNTER

  (explaining)

  It’s just these two.

  RONNIE

  Away and shite.

  The kids are starting to gather again, heads poking out of doorways. Hunter looks round. This is beginning to go wrong.

  HUNTER

  (in frustration fires a single deafening shot into the floor)

  Will you DO …

  HUNTER

  (firing another shot)

  … as you are TOLD?

  The kids scream and run, some into their rooms, some out of the front door. The three of them are suddenly alone in a corridor of acrid blue smoke.

  Please?

  CUT TO:

  5.7.2

  EXT. BRUAR HOUSE – NIGHT

  Hunter hustles his captives out to his car. He pushes Macreesh against the car boot.

  RONNIE

  (reasonably under the circumstances)

  I huvnae even goat ma shoes oan!

  HUNTER

  (to Ronnie)

  In. Ye’ve seen a car before.

  As Ronnie gets into the passenger seat, Hunter li
fts the lid of the prepared, open boot.

  Sorry. Come on.

  MACREESH

  (looking to see there is a blanket, a thermos and sandwiches in there, thoughtfully provided)

  Please God. Please God.

  HUNTER

  (looking up to rainy, empty heaven)

  I’m tryin, brother.

  Hunter manhandles the babbling good man into the boot of the Jag, and shuts him in. Now there is only the sound of the rain. He looks up to see Ronnie open the car door, and try to get away. He lunges forward, grabs Ronnie.

  RONNIE

  Ay ya, ay ya, ya fucker …

  HUNTER

  Behave yer self.

  He turns Ronnie’s wrist behind him, and reaches over him to pull the handcuffs from his pocket. He cuffs Ronnie’s hand, then attaches the other stell band to the interior of the car door, while Ronnie yells his protest.

  Hunter gets into the car beside his son. He takes off the mask and starts the engine. They set off. Ronnie is keeping up a barrage of abuse.

  RONNIE

  (delivered in a monotonal screech, the following a representative sample only)

  No fuckin way you’re dead I’m fuckin connected ya piece a shite ye …

  Hunter rams down his foot to engage the brand-new brake pads and the car goes from sixty to nought in two seconds. He jams the gun up Ronnie’s nose.

  HUNTER

  I ruined your whole LIFE, didn’t ah?

  Ronnie has his eyes closed, expecting to get shot. Nothing happens. He opens his eyes.

  I apologise. Okay? I’m really sorry.

  Hunter starts the engine. He pulls the car away from the kerb. Ronnie is looking for something to say. Hunter lets him look for it. They turn left and set off towards the north.

  RONNIE

  Where are you takin me?

  HUNTER

  I told ye once.

  They drive on in silence. After a while, the lights of the town are gone and they are in country dark, enfolding.

  6.0

  Leave alone intelligent life, from what the cosmologists are saying at the moment, it does seem that matter itself, and energy and space and time as well, is actually not what the universe is made of, mostly; that we can’t actually see or feel or interact in any way with most of the stuff that is, because it’s wrapped around and inside what exists.