by Peter Arnott
Startled at himself, Frank vividly remembered next him being wee-er still, keeping away from that house like his mammy had told him, walking quickly past that door, though sometimes glimpsing Janice, the wee girl who never went to school, staring out of the ground-floor window with grey-ringed eyes of hunger and depravity. He shuddered now, nearly forty years later, forgetting the growing stink, and in order to escape the intrusions of his own unconscious, walked into the front room.
Instantly, the smell that had been bothering him got much, much worse, and there was nothing he could do about that, now he saw where it came from.
Frank saw Agnes rooted to her armchair, smiling at him, her penultimate breaths gurgling past the filth in her throat, a set of broken dentures halfway out of her moving mouth, her tongue clucking dryly, her spit all mud, her eyes staring …
… and there had been the sound of that breathing, Frank remembered in the bath, his eyes shut, as submerged as he could be in the perfumed bubbles, there had been the sound of that breathing … and the smell had been everywhere, in everything … cut into his skin, searing his brain like fire up his nostrils, clinging to his hair, it was still in his eyes and mouth and fingernails no matter how much bubble bath he used … and he shut his eyes and saw again that greeny-yellow puddle of acrid awfulness that Agnes’d released from her bowels … all round her feet and all around her bony arse …
… and her arm had been extended towards him, holding him out a white envelope … a last gift, a last revenge …
His vomiting had been pure reflex, spraying through the web of his quickly lifted fingers, as reflexive and unconscious as Agnes beating at Janice’s legs on the street had been all those years ago. As automatic as Agnes, he’d snatched the open envelope from her claw, seeing her name in Tommy’s emphatic capitals written there. He knew he’d never be clean again, never escape the sight and smell of her, he saw the money … and heard through the whisper of the notes he fanned the rasp as Agnes rattled her last curse at him and then froze, just as she was, arm still outstretched, talons still clutching, in an instantaneous rigor mortis and a last globule of something falling out of her nose. He dropped the money in the slowly spreading pond.
He had run, actually ran. He knew he’d never tell anyone about it. They’d never understand, for one thing. For another thing, to put the experience into words would have preserved its memory. So he didn’t want to do anything like think that she was probably still like that and would be frozen in his mind’s eye till the day he succumbed to Alzheimer’s or died. He didn’t want to think about it. On his way out of her front door he had wondered, uselessly, if he’d touched anything, his animal evidence already being all over the floor along with hers.
That’s why Frank was still in the bath, listening to the gutter rumble of his brother’s voice downstairs talking words he couldn’t hear, not even daring to think.
7.1
There is another conversation you do need to know about before we get further into police procedure, or fraternal relations within the criminal demi-monde, or even explore any further the dance of intergenerational male bonding in contemporary Scotland as exemplified by Ronnie and his father. It’s painful for me to have to tell you about it. But here goes anyway.
7.1.1
Joe Wheen had been washing his sore hands in the kitchen of Jack Webster’s wee flat in Dennistoun at around a 10.45 when his phone vibrated and sang at him from Jack’s bedside table. Stepping through the still fresh cloud of gun smoke and disintegrated eider feathers, and over the shattered corpse of his old pal and confederate, Jack Webster, Joe answered his phone and spoke to his brother with an uncanny calm. Together they discussed the testimony that Mrs Elspeth Dewar had provided as to the repentant nature of her interview with Tommy, and Frank, who had not long since left Agnes’s house and was trying, vainly, to erase the memory of what he’d just seen … to get that smell out of his nose and that rattle out of his ears … fought against his own panic, fought to keep it out of his voice, fought to imitate the strength and calm he heard in his brother’s voice, and promised that he would check in again with Superintendent Bellamy to see if he had heard anything new. Joe then reported that Jack Webster had confirmed that he had indeed been the source of the weapon and of the transport Tommy’d used for his abduction of his son. Jack had also said that Tommy’d told him that he was uninterested in a return to professional criminal activity and had expressed simply the wish to go on holiday, which expedition seemed now to include his son Ronnie, and presumably also his daughter Janette, now living in Northern parts unknown. The brothers arranged to meet back at Frank’s house at midday, and that they would head out in pursuit of Tommy Hunter after lunch.
7.1.2
Joe could tell when Frank got off the phone that his younger brother had been pleased with him. Information had been both lucidly and logically exchanged. He had also known that Frank had been lying to him and he was grimly satisfied that he had been able to conceal his own feelings from Frank so that the lying cunt wouldn’t know what hit him when it hit him later on.
7.1.2.1
Among the things that Joe had not told Frank, any more than Frank had told him about Agnes, were that Jack, before Joe killed him (which he hadn’t told Frank) had told Joe that Tommy had paid him in cash. Joe had requisitioned the envelope and its contents that Jack had showed him, you bet he had. But in my view, it must have been Jack who had then set what passed for Joe’s mind working on the interesting question of who or what could possibly have been the source of Tommy’s nest egg. And that with Jack’s help, Joe had put two and two together and had come up with Frank.
7.1.2.1.1
Not that it really matters whether or not it was Jack that put him on to this idea … possibly to deflect the tidal wave of violence Joe was crashing over him at the time. (He was no more successful than Canute.) Nor does it really matter whether or not it was actually Frank, who, for reasons of self-protection or in settlement of a debt of honour (!) had fulfilled the terms of the original deal and bestowed a quarter share of the proceeds from the robbery fourteen-odd years ago on Tommy now as a reward for his silence or as an admonition for him to get to fuck. What mattered was that Joe (I believe) now had the idea in his head, or in his heart or in his bowels or wherever it was he nursed his wrath to keep it warm, that his brother Frank had given that lunatic fuck that money instead of giving it to him, who really needed it.
7.1.2.2
Aye, ya cunt, thought Joe about his brother, as he pocketed his phone and looked down on the ruin of Jack Webster. Be fucking happy.
7.1.3
This brings me to what is perhaps the most intractable question in our whole study, one that I can no longer avoid exploring for the next page or so. I beg you to forgive me, but I really can’t go on till I address the question: can or should we distinguish between the conduct of Tommy Hunter and that of Joseph Wheen?
Both used violence to achieve their aims, whatever those aims were. Indeed, challenged as we all are about Hunter’s ontology, no two Hunter scholars I’ve ever met have ever entirely agreed as to exactly what Joe’s motivation was in murdering Jack Webster that morning, in shooting him repeatedly the way he did, muffling the rounds through a succession of pillows, the folded duvet from Jack’s bed and a cuddly toy Scottie dog. It may have been a fantasy of vengeance that Joe was indulging, for example.
But Hunter, though he hadn’t murdered anybody for some years, had also forcibly involved a third party, Padraic Macreesh, in whatever fantasy he was pursuing. He had quite deliberately terrorised an innocent, good man, as Joe had Jack. The fact that he acted in the name of redemption and had compensated the social worker with Heinz Tomato Soup and a thousand pounds may well be evidence of something, but it’s hardly of moral rectitude. Hunter had been, even he would have admitted, distinctly unkind to Poor Egg.
7.3.1
Are we to allow sentiment to skew our judgement? Or snobbery? Can we be permitted, really, to dismiss Joe’s behaviour as ent
irely predictable thuggery, simply because Hunter handed out little packets of financial penance after he did bad things? Can eccentricity stand as a defence of barbarism?
7.4
Joe murdered Jack and thereby ruined both his own and his brother’s life. Can we really suppose from that being the consequence of his action that that’s why he did it? That Joe was angry enough with his brother to have actually killed a third party as a rehearsal, as it were? That it was really his brother that Joseph had dragged through the doorway, forced on to the bed, and shot?
7.4.1
When Joe killed Jack, it seems that the murder weapon was inadvertently provided to the murderer by the murderee. Jack often had weapons for resale about the place. I think, then, we can rule out premeditation without having to stray into the “you say potato” territory of psychological profiling. Jack, poor proxy, had just happened to have a gun about the place. Joe shot him because a) he could and b) he found that he wanted to. That is about as deep as we can reasonably get down that particular rabbit hole. The violence itself had been its own reward, a positive step of self-improvement. Joe just liked being that guy.
7.5
My provisional distinction between the two men is hermeneutic, then, rather than phenomenological. Violence was, to Hunter, like the money, a strategic means for the accomplishment of a goal. For Joe, the commission of violence was an end in itself. The terrible harm that it was to do to his brother was a happy consequence of the murder, but not a cause.
7.5.1
Violence simplifies a complicated world, which explains its popularity among film producers, dictators and criminals. If you kill people, you don’t have to talk to them. Your side of the argument becomes definitive. The argument has been won by death. By which all arguments are ultimately resolved.
7.5.2
For both of them, violence could temporarily silence both the voices inside them and those that opposed them in the outside world. But for Tommy Hunter, the violence his very existence implied was a confirmation of his solitude, of his already established silence. Joe wanted to make some noise. The difference between the actions each man took may well be limited to this nuance, but of what other than nuance can morality consist in a godless universe?
7.5.2.1
Discuss that one, why don’t you?
7.6
See 0.0, above et passim.
7.7
Through that lovely, crisp spring morning, while all this ugly stuff was happening, Hunter drove with Ronnie into the glories of the landscape. He could feel his chest fill with the empty light and peace of it. From where they’d parked earlier, the map told him Kinloch Rannoch could be reached either by way of the motorway via Stirling, Perth and Pitlochry, or by the scenic route through Crieff or Lochearnhead. Hunter chose, happily, the Crieff road that would allow them a glimpse of the Sma Glen, then through Aberfeldy and over Schiehallion to Glen Rannoch, that place beloved of God, where the black woods meet the still waters, and the ghosts of stags clatter amid the birks through which the clans had marched to Killiecrankie.
It was a beautiful morning for the contemplation of history, for appreciating the complex sequence of accidents meeting desire. The roads wound through sheep and sward; trees dotted the horizons. Grey and brown mountains soared at every side.
“We’ll need tae stop at the shops,” Hunter told Ronnie. “Get ye somethin to wear.”
Ronnie, having subsided from his temporary sociability, was playing with his fingers, picking the skin off.
“D’ye want some music on or somethin?” Hunter asked him. “There’s CDs in the glove compartment.” But Ronnie didn’t seem to be interested in music any more than he was in history or the aesthetics of landscape. Hunter tried anyway. “Talk to me, son. Tell me what yer thinkin.”
He was rewarded by a turn of Ronnie’s head at least.
“Is it really for me?” Ronnie asked him. “I mean, half ae it.”
“Aye … well … it’s for you and yer mum and Janette. There have been some expenses, obviously.”
“My mum?”
Tommy reached into his inside pocket and handed the postcard to Ronnie, who took it, confused.
“There’s nothin oan it,” he pointed out.
“My name’s oan it. That’s yer Mum’s writin.”
Ronnie accepted this, not having the expressive equipment to interrogate it. He may well have been mulling over the notion that his mother was alive, that he had now been as precipitately parented as he had once been orphaned, but you’d not have known it to look at him.
“Look at the view,” advised his father. “I’d forgotten the sky up here.” He hesitated, and decided, for the first time in a very long time, to say something emotional.
“I was inside for ages. The light in there made everything kinda green. Not good green like this. Like sick. I had a lot of time tae think. I made a lot of mistakes when I was your age. I want you and your sister tae dae better than that.”
He fell silent. Ronnie gave him no indication that he had understood or even heard him.
7.7.1
They drove in silence through Muthill, the road winding past the pub and the post office. They had to drive slowly. There were children in the narrow, medieval street. There were parents in the houses or at work who loved them and looked out for them. There were retired people with careers and lives to look back on. There was a church where they gathered and sang. A graveyard where their memories were tended. There were trees and gardens. It was startling. Unbelievable. But it passed for normality here on earth. Neither Hunter nor Ronnie had anything to say about it as they turned on to the long straight road into the valley towards Crieff.
“This road is maybe Roman,” said Tommy, trying again with the “inform, educate and entertain” meme that he’d inherited as a cultural notion of pater-familiarity from the century before last. But such was the profundity of Ronnie’s deprivation, so naked his poverty of mind and body and spirit, that he still said nothing, owning no reference points to make sense of this or any other information, education or entertainment offered to him, not even owning his own ignorance.
7.7.1.1
Hunter, with his half-remembered gobbets of school, came from a different generation after all. It was only after Tommy’s school days that the old ways of authoritarian hypocrisy had finally run out of steam, exhausted by not having an empire to play with any more, then to be further eviscerated by the mockery of the hip and self-satisfied. Once upon a time, within Tommy’s cultural memory, the powers that be had also aspired to be the great and the good as well as the rich and the powerful, telling everybody what to do and why they should do it, imbuing them with only a handful of permitted ideas and a narrow, moralistic set of values to be sure, but at least telling them something. They may have been hypocrites, but it is at least arguable that hypocrisy serves society better than the open nihilism that mocks the very idea.
7.7.1.2
Once upon a time, after all, a mass workforce had been required by the economy, and a conscriptable proletariat had been required by the military. In short, it had been in the interests of those in power that the populace at large be at least barely literate, numerate, and acculturated to some notion or other of the common good. Not any more.
The population didn’t need to be workers or soldiers now. The base requirement demanded of them was that they should buy things, that money should pass through them like pipes on its way to the Cayman Islands where it properly belonged. There is no requirement on consumers, welfare recipients and otherwise, that they are able to recognise the difference between fact and fiction or right and wrong, or that they should be capable of informed choice within a moral framework. Rather the reverse in fact. The more selfish, isolated, narrow and stupid people are, the better it is for the stock market. Rather in the same way that battery farms require that the blobs of fishfed feathers that are stuffed into them be only genetically speaking “chickens”, a human economy based on credit and imagi
natively crooked investment packages has no use for any more than rudimentary human animals to keep the capital flowing.
7.7.1.2.1
Since the great and the good, in consequence first of their moral decline in the face of their own absurdity (in the seventies) and the sudden opportunity to make some serious cash (sometime around the mid-eighties), had long ago decided, well before the turn of the millennium, that getting rich was definitely more fun than pretending to give a fuck, the likes of Ronnie had been utterly abandoned (or “set free” according to the advertisements). Abandoned to the freedom of utterly uneducated desires, those desires in turn had been left to the whims of hatchet-hearted entrepreneurs, men who were properly evil, to nurture, define and fulfil.
7.7.1.2.2
So, even with his background of abuse and violence and the army and prison behind him, Tommy, at forty-three years old, with no paper qualifications for anything but mayhem, was Doctor Fucking Bronowski by comparison with Ronnie. The only pleasures Ronnie understood were narcotic. The only joy was to be found outside of himself. The only beauty was pornographic. The only understanding he had was that understanding anything was inevitably painful. In himself, perhaps, Hunter knew that whatever crimes he had committed, and had been committed on his kind, Ronnie and HIS kind, for all of their PlayStations and availability of hallucinogens of one kind and another, were victims of something far worse, of a neglect so deep and contemptuous that it made of them paupers of the spirit more helpless than any kid off the telly in Ethiopia.
7.7.1.2.1
We’ve been experimenting as a civilisation with being cultureless, self-directed monads, the hegemony of individual taste as our only moral and aesthetic compass. And the glutinous inarticulacy and undirected resentment of our society is the result, both for those with the comforts money buys and for those without. Tommy Hunter, with his diminishing hourglass of cash, and his limited conversation, was soon to be as inconsequential as any other non-participant in credit and consumption. He had only a closing window of financially defined significance left to him. It was his intention, before this window closed, to make what restitution he could for his own negative contribution to the human condition. The nobility of this, of what I take to be his purpose in dedicating what little remained to him of meaningful time to his destroyed, fragmentary family, makes me love him.