Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

  The instantaneous transformations of quantum physics make sense, they tell me, within a universe whose dimensions and duration are zero in all directions, so most of the universe doesn’t exist at all in any of our terms, and everything we experience, in any way, all four dimensions of it, are a freak of nature.

  And if our experiencing the existence of space and matter and energy and time is an anomaly, then what can you say about solar systems on the relatively empty edges of galactic arms where the rocky planets are on the inside, and the gas giants are further out, for fuck’s sake! That’s unusual to the point of being downright bonkers, apparently, cosmologically speaking.

  … and once you start factoring this being a rocky planet with a molten iron core and magnetic field at the right distance from the right kind of star to keep liquid the water that accidentally arrived here on a comet at exactly the right time, the water carrying some complex carbon molecules and remaining in the narrow temperature range where there can be such a thing as liquid water … for 3.8 billion years continuously, for fuck’s sake …

  … then factor in Jupiter being there like a gravitational hoover of the dangerous, planet-forming and destroying shite that’s still whizzing around out there, and then add in that some agglomeration of the chemicals off the comet, possibly in a suboceanic volcanic vent, somehow became capable of ingestion and expulsion of other elements … and then of reproduction, fuck’s sake, leave alone reproduction with mistakes in duplication that sometimes turn out to be advantageous thus getting the whole preposterous business of evolution going …

  Then our being here at all is every bit as miraculous as anyone could wish for, and God, far from not playing dice, as Einstein put it, turns out to be dice …

  Nothing can ever be anything other than surprising and wondrous, can it? Even the existence of the Pet Shop Boys is inevitable by comparison.

  6.0.1

  None of this miraculous series of accidents was much joy to Ronnie as he awoke that unlikely morning in a location of unlikely beauty in an ice-sculpted corner of the unlikeliest possible world. He was well beyond surprise by then and had never learned to wonder. Like most of us, he took for granted that survival is best served by pretending that you know what’s going on, when, frankly, he and we might find that confessing our incoherent, babbling idiocy might be a more pragmatic and honest response to the raw statistics of life.

  Hunter and Son were parked by a loch of spooky stillness in achingly lovely predawn light, in a golden hour of as yet sunless loveliness, soft gold on the hills and heather, an unspeakably subtle arrangement of greens and browns and purples washed in the glowing cold. Ronnie heard the breeze caress the leaves of a nearby oak into whispering song, a skylark crying at the gorgeous possibilities of day. He was still handcuffed to the passenger door. He watched his father pissing in the long yellow grass. He sat up.

  Ronnie saw his social worker too, released obviously, drinking steaming tomato soup from a plastic beaker, sitting on a tuffet. He could hear that his father was talking to Mr Macreesh, the unhappy fellow, but didn’t care to search out words in the sounds that wafted towards him and away from him with the vagaries of the open air. What he did see and hear, oddly, was the ease with which the men were talking, or at least, his father was. Hunter was talking and moving easily as if he belonged here. With all the wind and sunlight and birds and shit.

  Ronnie’s neck was sore. He’d slept through the uncomfortable aftershock of his abduction, dropping off quite soon into his ordeal, oddly, though he’d not reflect on that. He stretched, as best he could, to get the crumples out of his limbs and back. He froze as his father turned and closed his eyes, pretending to still be asleep. He didn’t want to be involved in whatever conversation was going on.

  Hunter looked away, and Ronnie felt in his jeans pocket for the rolled-up card that Frank Wheen had given him, then said “Fuck” quietly to himself as he remembered that his phone was on his bedside table.

  What Ronnie didn’t know yet, of course, was that this table was smoke-blackened by now, and his phone a lump of melted solenoids and plastic from which even mazuma-mobile. com would find it hard to extract the minerals.

  6.0.1.1

  Thing is, about our actions and inactions in the world, given that it does exist, is that they are consequential. Events in time imply progression and duration, however unreliably. They start stories, steer them … sometimes end them. Which is why, like Ronnie, we should sometimes avoid them.

  6.0.2

  For example, the rest of the world reasoned that Hunter must have had a story in mind. The forcible abduction of his son from the institutionalised indifference of society must have been part of a plan and had to be interpreted as the inciting incident of some premeditated narrative or other that it was now imperative for the likes of Frank Wheen and Joseph Wheen and DS “Danny” Boyle to read and to anticipate. So there were several conversations being had that morning, whose chronology was also impelled by the need for close reading.

  6.0.2.1

  First, an anonymous report of a fire at the Dryry Street hostel was placed at 3.19 on Wednesday morning. The last rain had already done most of the work of extinguishing the blaze by the time bright-red engines got there that morning, waking every bugger up in the whole scheme in the process, escorted as they customarily were to that uncivilised locality by the happy overtime earners of the boys in blue, among whom was the insomniac, self-lacerating DS “Danny” Boyle, his encyclopaedic paranoia having reminded him that Ronnie Hunter was one of the inmates of this latest local asset of collective provision to be stripped, burned and abandoned to the heat death of the universe.

  Boyle learned quickly that Ronnie was missing, of course, but so what? So were most of the rest of them. But one small boy who had remained near the smoking ruins of what was, after all, where he had lived, did confirm to him that an incident had taken place the previous night – before the fire – that was itself of no little note; that is that Ronnie and Macreesh had been kidnapped by a masked man with a gun who said he was Ronnie’s father. Boyle nearly exploded with long-repressed excitement. His lips started forming soundless words, his fingers fell to drumming on his trouser leg, his mind to racing.

  Tommy Hunter had came hame, Boyle realised, and the pot of slow corruption that he’d boiled in all these years had suddenly, finally, been stirred. Tommy Hunter had retrieved his son, but he had also kidnapped a social worker. Boyle didn’t know why, and for now, he didn’t care. A crime had been committed. A line had been crossed. He had a finger in the pie and there was nothing that fat cunt Bellamy could do about it.

  One thing nagged at Boyle a little … puzzlement and the solving of clues being his spiritual meat and drink … that the man described by the little ones as Ronnie’s mental dad, had been, according to those same wee witnesses, possessed of a charcoal grey suit, as well as weaponry and transport. These were not items with which one customarily emerged from custody. So, Boyle reasoned, Tommy had to have a made a connection somewhere, and had to have some financial resources available to him. How and who could that have been?

  Pondering these questions, DS “Danny” Boyle turned to look into space, his mind already floating out there, at 4.46, whereupon his happy peepers fell upon the haggard shape of Frank Wheen, who was stood there in the dawn, still with his jammies on under his camel-hair coat, shoes on and no socks, looking like he was the one who was suddenly homeless, looking like an irreparable catastrophe, like a motorbike on a blind corner had, without any provocation and entirely out of nowhere, smacked him one in the BMW. There was Frank Wheen of all people looking bewildered and insulted by what had just happened to him, like a stockbroker in a road accident. There was Frank fucking Wheen staring at the ashes of a social work hostel as if it was his own house that had fallen on him.

  Boyle whooped. He actually whooped with joy at the sight of the disaster written all over Frank’s face. Frank turned at the sound and saw his Nemesis grinning at him in the se
mi-darkness, and then Frank turned on his heel and went back to his Beamer driving off before that grinning fuck could make his morning worse.

  As for Boyle, he now found himself in possession of the biggest, hardest boner his trousers had ever known. He had to go and sit down in his own car to hide it. Near delirious, his thoughts turned obscurely to Maggie Singleton and he had to go home to calm himself down before heading bright and early into the office.

  Elspeth Dewar, who you’ll remember was the subject of Hunter’s first visit (see 2.1), was in turn awoken by her doorbell at ten minutes after six, and wasn’t happy about it, let me tell you, and even went so far as to initially deny Frank entry. Now, for Frank, who knew that his reputation as implacable was the foundation of his name, took this as a further slight, and, unwilling to be so impugned, lowered himself further into the abyss by telling her loudly and in some detail what his brother Joe might do to her son Donald should she not see fit to reconsider, and by seven, weeping and terrified, her son Donald confined to the toilet, Elspeth had furnished Frank with an exhaustively detailed, if for the moment unenlightening, account of her encounter with Hunter two days earlier. After he’d struck her a few times, steeling himself against nausea, she’d even told him about the money, though you can be sure he didn’t share that particular nuance of their pickle with his brother Joe when, on exiting the house, he called Joe from his slumbers at a quarter to eight. To add money to Tommy’s disruption of the universe would have been precipitate. It would have meant abandoning what little leverage he may have been able to bring to bear on the situation. Not that he wasn’t aware that his situation basically was that of a man flapping his arms around having already fallen off a cliff. He had found himself, even when he’d backhanded Elspeth a couple of times, sick and shaking. He was unwilling or unable to rouse the proper cruel spirit in himself, and he felt dyspeptic and old as he drove home.

  By that same time, Boyle and Maggie “Single” Singleton were already together in the office, having pulled the old files from the robbery in the woods, and, over coffee and brioches that Maggie had brought in for them, were looking, among other things, for the last known address of Hunter’s daughter Janette, who, Boyle was certain, was next on Hunter’s list. Wherever she was, that was where Hunter was going next. (Boyle, being a creature of purpose and intention, read purpose and intention into everything … it was another face of his psychology.) They didn’t find an address. But they did have the record of where that postcard (you remember that postcard?) had come from, and they both thought that might count for something.

  Even though they were as yet nonplussed as to exactly what to do next. Boyle was jubilant that morning, though unwashed, and Maggie, who was washed, very much so, ached with longing for him, and caught, maybe, just maybe, a hint of warmth from him, a hint of encouragement, of a positive attitude towards life, which she took almost as a promise, that once this was over, once this was done, once justice had been thoroughly, punishingly served, then she’d finally get her turn. He seemed to perceive her anew this morning, the curves and tightnesses of her, the little sounds and shapes her uniform made upon her hips and breasts. Once, she even thought she heard him smelling her as she bent across his desk to shift a glossy.

  Anyway, like I said before, just after eight, Frank turned up at Joe’s room in the nursing home and gave him his car keys, telling him that Hunter had somehow got a gun and had acquired transport, and left it to his brother to make the enquiries in the underworld (to which environment he recognised now more than ever that he was ill-adapted due to his years of complacency and near-legality) as to where these items might have come from. He’d get a taxi in town and borrow Eleanor’s car if he needed to and she wasn’t using it. He did not tell Joe that he himself had seen and been seen at the ruins of the hostel by DS “Danny” Boyle, and that therefore said official might well already be pursuing a parallel investigation. He knew he had to rely on Bellamy, Boyle’s superior, to impede Boyle’s enthusiasm. His brother Joe’s enthusiasm, he knew, was his problem.

  As if to prove that middle-sized minds think alike, Boyle and Maggie were just getting around to considering popping in to see Agnes after investigating a reported disturbance involving Ronnie Hunter at the Keys Pub and Pool Room last night as Frank himself got a cab to Agnes’s house before nine, rapping angrily on the drunken old bitch’s door and getting no reply though she had to be in at that hour. He tried to look in through the window, but saw nothing of any help to him. He caught himself then thinking that Joe would just have kicked the door in, and that thought of their reversed superiority enraged him yet further and he felt as hopeless and wretched as his brother, in their youth, had so often made him feel.

  Frank’s mind went numb and his eyes stung, his chest constricted. He leaned his skull on the closed door. He closed his eyes and memory filled him. His body was invaded by the sensations of childhood. The fears and the pain that Joe had inflicted on his body and all the pain and fear of the mind that he had inflicted on his brother in revenge ever since they were in long pants were bottled together inside him. He was filled by his whole past all at once. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t even come close to thinking. He wished he hadn’t given up smoking.

  There was nothing he could do but follow through this stupid story he was trapped in. Demeaned and made ridiculous by the banality, Frank found he couldn’t even bear the thought of going home, of facing Eleanor, her furniture and aspirations. His children. His children! That lovely girl with her already assured entrée to some lovely universities … that boy, that inexplicable wee boy who never left his bedroom except to collect food and defecate as far as he could tell … these creatures were all aliens to him now, and unspeakably precious in their fading away from him. He couldn’t face them any more because his intuition told him that even Elspeth Dewar’s moment of defying him that morning had been an instance of incremental decay of his substance.

  He was going to have to break into a house. For the first time since he’d been fifteen years old … he … Frank Wheen … Rotarian and pillar of the community … was going to have to break into some stinking old bitch’s house.

  Slipping, as the poet said, is Crash’s Law.

  As Frank reeled in the tumult of his collapsing certainties, Boyle and Maggie were telephonically checking hotels for unusual guests, and turned up almost immediate trumps at the Wallace. “Mr Greenock Morton? Paid in cash? Fuck’s SAKE!” said DS Boyle, and got his coat, and actually smiled and winked, actually flashed Maggie an actual glimpse of his perfect teeth. Her insides sprang into warm, juicy life. She could hardly believe her joy.

  So the universe is made and unmade in us.

  It would take Joe another hour or so to locate and trap Jack Webster, and it was three hours after that before the Stirlingshire police found Padraic Macreesh wandering in shock on the road between Callander and the Port of Menteith. Frank, for reasons so shocking that we’ll go not go into them until the next chapter, had spent most of that time in the bath at home, mechanically draining the cold water and topping up the hot, almost catatonic, and had slowly become a prune, purple and wrinkly on the outside, with a stone in the middle.

  Joe came to pick him up around two in the afternoon.

  Meanwhile, back in time, at 6.37 a.m., Hunter had opened the passenger door to unlock Ronnie’s handcuffs.

  6.0.3

  “Huv a stretch,” he told his son, and opening the back door retrieved a Morrison’s bag from the passenger shelf. “There’s rolls and sandwiches in there,” he told Ronnie. “I didn’t know what ye liked so I got some different wans. Yer pal’s already had the egg mayonnaise. D’ye want some soup?”

  Ronnie stood and stared at him, blinking. “I’ll get us a primus stove when I get the chance,” his father told him. “Then we’ll have a proper picnic.” Hunter tutted. “C’maun, Ronnie, get yer legs working. Ye’ll need to get yer circulation gaun.”

  Hunter stopped talking, his head inclined, as if forgivingly disa
ppointed at the inertia of teenagers. As if he was copying something he’d seen of fatherhood in some heart-warming American bollocks or other on the telly on a Sunday afternoon, forgetting, apparently, that this particular teenager had just been kidnapped at gunpoint by his own father — a man who, the boy had reasonable grounds to believe, had murdered his mother. That he himself was the kidnapper and the possibly homicidal parent in question seemed also to have slipped Hunter’s mind. By the look and the sound of him, Hunter was now inhabiting, at some mad second hand, another genre of movie altogether. Something from the forties, maybe. Like Ronnie was Mickey Rooney in an Andy Hardy flick … and he was the Judge.

  “D’ye not want any breakfast?” Hunter glanced at Padraic for adult solidarity and put the bag of sandwiches on t he roof of the car. “Whenever ye get hungry,” he said indulgently.

  “Get tae fuck,” Ronnie told him, having had some experience of the admonitions of foster parents, of cunts who presumed to know what was good for you, what you needed, what was best. Who wanted to make you happy, the cunts. He was reassured and relocated, in fact, by Hunter’s solicitude, at being begged at by an adult for approval once again. They had all been the same, even the sadists and the molesters. All of them had wanted to be loved.

  So Ronnie waited, knowing that he didn’t have to say or do anything, that saying and doing was an adult’s role, and grew steadily more sure of himself, sure that he could force Hunter into speaking again, into making him another offer he could then witheringly refuse.

  “D’ye want me tae talk tae ye? D’ye want tae know what happened tae me? D’ye want me tae tell ye about it?”

  Well ahead on points, his kidnapper clearly out of his depth, Ronnie pulled a non sequitur from his repertoire

  “I huvnae goat ma fuckin clathes or nothin.”