Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

  7.7.2

  Tommy Hunter, nowadays it seems to me, was as great and as good as anyone could get. Which made it all the more regrettable that Ronnie had nothing to say to him, nothing to ask, not even the eminently practical questions he might have asked, given his own more-than-likely future, such as: “What is it like in prison?” Neither did Ronnie enquire about his mother, what she had been like. (Fearless, Tommy could have told him, the most fearless shoplifter he’d ever seen.) Nor did he offer his father any of his own experiences, or those of his sister. He could not imagine that anyone, even a parent, could have been interested in the good and the bad and the ugly of his memories of fostering, of his likes and dislikes in the fields of art and sport, for example. So atomised were father and son that they had no words to say even on the fluctuating fortunes of football teams, of manufactured celebrities and the like. So, bereft of even generic expressions of preference, leave alone the properly emotional revelations that Hollywood or its satellites would lead you to expect might have been occasioned by so unlikely a familial reunion, Ronnie could have quite truthfully answered (as indeed he did later, when it was all over, and he was being debriefed by DS “Danny” Boyle in the course of the latter’s frenetic labouring to make something meaningful and advantageous to his career and to justice out of the whole wretched business) to the question, “What did you and your dad talk about after he kidnapped you?” — nothing.

  7.8

  Anyway, they parked expensively in Crieff and went into Miller’s Outdoor Shop to try and get Ronnie something that Hunter called “suitable”.

  Ronnie would not normally have been seen dead in any of the pacamac big-booted self-coloured shite they sold in there … the waterproof trousers and windbreakers and fuck off is that actually a HAT? Hunter had insisted, however, and had further diminished his stash by eighty-nine quid for a pair of jeans, two T-shirts and a green padded jacket that seriously wasn’t Ronnie’s style. They glared at each other like fathers and sons have always done throughout the ages all the way through the process, and were thus unremarked by the bejumpered middle-aged Staffordshire shopkeepers you inexplicably get in emporiums up there. The whole process of remodelling his son so that he looked like “some kind of a cunt” took almost twenty precious minutes.

  7.8.1

  Hunter was learning what may be a universal rule of parenthood that only immediate friction is expressible, that other matters of infinitely more weight will always be left till far too late, if ever referred to at all. Or maybe that’s just in Scotland. I am nothing if not parochial.

  7.8.1.1

  £24,687.04

  7.9

  This was around about the same time that Padraic, poor Poor Egg, finally succeeded in flagging down some daytripper and got himself to the police station in nearby Callander, across the road from its excellent second-hand bookshop, where the proprietor will tell you of his summer spent as the house guest of Robert Graves on Majorca if you ask him. Padraic was in no mood to cooperate with anyone Scottish by then, and it was therefore some two and half hours before Frank and Joe saw him naked on the roof of the building in silent and eloquent protest against all that had happened to him and indeed had happened to anybody else at the hands of Ireland’s Presbyterian cousins.

  7.9.1

  It took about an hour until even the news of Padraic’s release from Hunter’s grip was transmitted to Superintendent Bellamy, who then had to consider the news that Hunter was definitely out of town before deciding what to tell his increasingly bumptious subordinate, “Danny” Boyle, whose presence of mind in getting himself first to the crime scene of the kidnap and hence into leading the investigation officially had rendered more tricky than ever his removal from that into which he had no business poking his long neb.

  7.9.2

  The crucial further information that Mr Macreesh might have been able to pass on, that is, as to Hunter’s immediate destination, both Bellamy and Frank Wheen missed for another hour and a half after that (due to Poor Egg’s protest as aforesaid), which proved to be a gnat’s bawhair too long to be useful to either of the interested parties. This information, which Bellamy and the Wheens did not learn till they themselves had got to Callander, as DS Boyle later testified at the enquiry, was never given to Boyle at any time at all, which was very naughty of Superintendent Bellamy. Very naughty indeed. And was featured as one among many other more serious naughtinesses that came to light in the course of the year-long later investigation Boyle led into Frank Wheen’s affairs and Frank’s own network of relationships with the highheedyins and officialdom of Oor Wee Toon and its environs.

  7.9.2.1

  That was all to follow. For the moment it was Eleanor who took Bellamy’s call. Frank was well into his bath time by then. Confirming his already hostile opinion of her, she deigned to tell the policeman haughtily that he would need to call her husband back if he was going to be so obtuse as to withhold from her information vital to her household. Bellamy gave her his mobile number and after thinking for a moment about what a poisonous, stuck-up bitch she was, stepped out of his office.

  7.9.2

  Bellamy looked at “Danny” Boyle and at Maggie across the open-plan work environment, at the two of them with their heads together, animatedly cross-checking and comparing, speculating and hypothesising happily like a pair of pretend police off the telly. And the Superintendent wondered whether there was still a decent package available for voluntary redundancy in this day and age. Bellamy was deciding in his own slow way that playing both ends against the middle might prove to be the best policy in the meantime, but that the only really happy way forward was the way out. And it was this intuition that caused him now to put another nail in Frank’s coffin and, without thinking it through properly, his own. That is, he went to talk to DS Boyle. For the first time that anyone could remember, he walked across the room to ask “Danny”, nicely, quietly, if he had a minute.

  “Danny” responded to this gesture of trust, this openness with predictable aggression, with peremptory demands that a forensic team look into whose sick it was that was all over Agnes MacHutcheon’s carpet; that the sequential banknotes that he’d found on Agnes’s floor and in the till of the Wallace Arms be traced back to their point of issue; that someone talk to the tailor who Mr Greenock Morton had telephoned and see if they’d been paid the same way and could offer a description of the clothes Hunter had bought; that a warrant be applied for to look into Frank Wheen’s business records … in short that all manner of expensive specialists be hired from the internal investigators’ marketplace, and finally that all known criminal associates of the Wheens (and here he passed a list under Bellamy’s nose that had Jack Webster’s name right at the top of it) should be brought in for questioning and compared to the location of the Glasgow call box the same Mr Greenock Morton had contacted. And Bellamy could plead departmental poverty if he liked, “Danny” told him, he was a terrier, he wasn’t letting go this time.

  “You’re right,” Bellamy told him. “This might open everything right up. This business with Tommy Hunter could be a blessing in disguise.” Boyle froze in mid-harangue, suspecting that he was being outmanoeuvred — which, of course (temporarily and provisionally), he was.

  “I’m taking this to Division,” Bellamy told him. “I’m setting up a task force. It’s about time we took another look at Mr Wheen. And I’m suggesting you to take the lead on it.” He went on, before Boyle had time to think. “First, we need Mr Hunter’s cooperation. I imagine he has a tale or two to tell.”

  “Aye, he …” Boyle managed before his superior confidently steamed straight over him. “I want you and Maggie on the road,” he told him. “Hunter is heading somewhere with that boy and the best lead we have is probably going to come from a name on that list. I want you out there talking to people. I’ll get the ball rolling here and pass on anything I get at this end.”

  “Danny’s heading up a task force?” Maggie gurgled on her paralysed idol’s behalf.


  “Not up to me,” Bellamy smiled. “See what Division says. But that’ll be my recommendation. I’m proud of you Danny,” he added improbably, believing his own bullshit for a moment, actually quite moved by it.

  And before Boyle could think of anything to say, Bellamy had turned and walked away complacently.

  Hardly daring to believe it, Maggie turned to “Danny”.

  “What do you think?” she asked him. But he wasn’t ready to think anything yet. He looked right through her, not breathing.

  7.9.3

  At that moment that Joe was just minutes from pulling up the gravelled path to Frank’s house, a devilish joy at the wee present he was secreting for his brother in the boot of Frank’s expensive car warming his atrophied heart.

  7.9.3.1

  Having already passed Superintendent Bellamy’s message on to the prune-like Frank, Eleanor was mixing a jug of non-alcoholic Pimm’s.

  7.9.3.1.1

  Frank was still in the bath.

  7.9.1.2

  All of the above took place before one o’clock, by which time all manner of things had been happening, not the least which was that Hunter had met his daughter Janette again.

  7.9.4

  Back at 10.20, Janette, nineteen years old, another Pisces like Frank, was standing on the western shore of Loch Rannoch, her booted feet luxuriating in their grip upon the shale, staring at a swathe of pale blue sky meeting the black and green of the forests and the mountains, while the sound of a tractor on a forestry path, a mile distant, buzzed across the air, the loch gently lapping on the shingle, its surface a mirroring, blue miracle of cold perfection. Like metal, she thought to herself, metal with a freezing point miles below zero, thick water, syrup, quicksilver.

  Janette was dressed just right for the weather, warm padded boots lined with yellow wool she’d found in a thrift shop in Pitlochry, an island-made jumper from the same source that smelled subtly of peat smoke when it rained … a pair of old jeans and a dark blue schoolie’s rain jacket, her tout ensemble redolent of contentment, of fitting in, of being at home, of being happy in herself, as unlikely as that may seem in the familial and narrative context of hysteria into which she was shortly to be thrust. But Janette had parlayed her distressing experiences and memories into a journey towards herself, into somehow finding the hope in herself that her “self” was a place worth looking for. Her search was unhurried, not a quest haunted by loss or guilt or mortality in the way her father’s was. Call her Ishmael, if you like, but this child of exile, though as abandoned as her brother, felt, in contrast to the former’s grumpy hopelessness, at least at that moment, sufficient unto herself to surrender to what was around her, unthreatened by the songs of birds.

  Janette, just nineteen two weeks ago, her thin brown hair blowing in the wind across the water, eyes open, felt no threat in the landscape, and actually wanted to understand everything, wanted to see the world, wanted to be more than she was. She was confident of becoming, given time, a person of some consequence, and not just because some parent or college or boyfriend said that she was. Her soul open to the elements, to the threads of richness in the smells and sounds the wind happened to send her, Janette Hunter, last seen aged five crying in the back of a broken-down car not too far from here, as it happens, without even glancing at her watch, knew exactly how long it would take her to get back to the hotel to start changing the rooms at checkout time, and that she had two more inexpressibly precious minutes to breathe and hear and see.

  Look at this place, she said to herself, not for the first time. Just look.

  The wind freshened, just perceptibly, and Janette looked up, feeling a tiny, almost weightless drop of rain from the one dark cloud overhead. She turned to go to back to work as the waters of the loch began to receive the cloud’s tribute, and almost silently, almost invisibly, the raindrops stirred the placid water into circles.

  7.9.4.1

  The same rain had obscured the Sma Glen just as her father and brother drove into it from Gilmerton. By this time, Hunter had fallen back on mockery and wind-up as the default strategy for talking to teenagers, and Ronnie had this potentially glamorous adult pegged as just another self-deluding wanker with a mission to “engage” him. They missed the best of the scenery what with the low cloud and everything, but neither of them was looking at the scenery by then. Because they’d already picked up the hitcher.

  8.0

  Her wardrobe was a patina of cultural misdirection. So that when they’d first pulled over at that viewing spot near the Auld Stane Brig, Ronnie had asked his Dad “Yer no gonnae pick up a Paki, ur ye?”

  There was just something about the sight of her, Hunter might have said. That she was stood there in the rain, the rain not touching her, like she was under an invisible umbrella. She was bright. Maybe she reminded him of something, intimated something. Maybe he was just attracted to shiny things.

  A Palestinian scarf, a Laura Ashley skirt over purple leggings, a long coat of stars and a sacking bag stitched with symbols of the Lakota, straight brown hair in a bob cut, she swung out of the ether and into the back seat like the universe, a puff of Chance by Chanel and a soft South London voice, light brown skin and deep brown eyes, she told them Aberfeldy would be cosmic. She said her name was Denise.

  Hunter became animated. Possibly just because she was young and female and she had a husky laugh. It had been awhile. Ronnie became catatonic for exactly the same reasons. She made the both of them feel more Scottish. That is to say, she confronted them with the fact of there being alternative possibilities to being Scottish. Could there really be a world where such un-Scottish creatures could exist? Might it even be this one? How is one supposed to deal with that?

  Denise talked a lot in her husky voice, leaning between them, about a land occupation up north she thought she might get into, on an estate that had been intended to offer a hideously expensive Highland hideaway for the jet set but that had now been taken over by activists and squatters protesting about Scotland’s uniquely iniquitous pattern of land ownership, then she talked about her father who’d fucked off back to Barbados first chance he got, she didn’t even blame him any more with the racism he’d had to deal with from her mother’s family, then she talked about her teacher training at Southwark College at the Elephant and Castle, and how that had been bullshit, and that she really liked kids but remembered just in time that she didn’t like teachers and she didn’t want to be one, then she talked about a camel festival she’d attended in Rajasthan and the red walls of Delhi and the observatory at Jaipur.

  Hunter responded … well … by turning himself into a cartoon Scotsman, actually, rolling his “r”s, rasping the “ch” in “loch” and “Kinloch” and “Rannoch” like some emphysemic nutter in a kilt. He was play-acting. He was flirting. He was trying to be funny.

  “Wir gaun tae Kinloccchhh Rannoccchh by Loccchhh Rannoccchhh tae visit Ronnie’s sister. Then wir gaun on holly day.”

  Ronnie went redder and redder. Like a tandoori lobster.

  Denise looked at the little ponds among the rocks as they reached the peak of the Ochils and said that she liked it up here. It felt like it was sort of, well, protected. Like it was safe up here. You know? She didn’t articulate further what she thought it was safe from.

  Hunter told her that he’d been to London a couple of times, and Denise asked Ronnie if he’d ever been. Ronnie made a sort of horsey noise and the tips of his ears went purple, which for a not-quite-sixteen-year-old boy from the West of Scotland passes for an articulate reply. Denise enjoyed it anyway. She gave them her full throated laugh again. Her eyes flickered knowingly between the two of them, and she offered Hunter an unspoken conspiratorial moment. That it was cute the way that his son was so shy, and that he himself was quite fanciable in a beaten-up old man kind of way. Hunter remembered that feeling of being flirted with gratitude, remembered that girls did that sometimes, made you a gift like that. It was good for him to remember — if one could forget the goal-or
iented aspects of sexuality, and experience flirtation not as semaphore, but rather as an affirmation that life went on and was well worth living — and that this in itself was not nothing.

  “Ah steyed in Camberwell the wan time,” he said, and she said that was just up the road from Peckham where she was from. And he said he’d not got out much. Which was true. He didn’t elaborate that he his fellow squaddies had done a dismal round of West End titty bars the first time, and he had stayed by himself in a pub in Brixton getting paralysed the second, miserable for reasons he had been too young to identify.

  He told her he liked her clothes. And she said “Thank you” in the delicious way she’d come across by accident when she’d had a cold.

  She enjoyed the attention, of course she did. And he was using her, of course he was. As practice for talking to Janice when the time came. When the time came that he had to talk to Janice again. Or not. Which I’ll come to.

  8.0.1

  It’s only twenty minutes from the Auld Stane Brig in the Sma Glen to the Auld Stane Brig across the Tay outside of Aberfeldy, a bizarre, single-lane, rather dramatically spired structure over which you drive into the town with its Birks and restored cinema and the Watermill, a rather good if slightly expensive coffee and cake and bookshop … which was where Denise was heading with her flurry of bags and scarfs, to keep out of the rain. They dropped her at the lights on the High Street, and she was gone, easily accepting their brief acquaintance as just another happy thing in a happy life.

  8.1

  Hunter waved as they drove away, taking the road along towards the Loch, then making a right turn up to Fortingall with its ancient Yew. Observing that Ronnie was still rotating the colour of his face from puce to yellow and back to ashen, Hunter asked Ronnie a question about Denise, interested in his response.