Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

The picturesque Perthshire village of Kinloch Rannoch. Day trippers and tourists happily explore its range of amenities, with the notable exception of the Bide a Wee Hotel, where MRS MARGARET LAWRENCE is at reception, greeting some lamentably rare customers: a grinning middle-aged Scotsman in a suit, and a sullen teenage boy in a T-shirt and jeans from the back pocket of which he hasn’t yet removed the price tag. Mrs Lawrence is the wife of the manager we encountered earlier (see 8.3). She is a round, floral woman from Oldham originally.

  HUNTER

  (smiling, finding that he is getting back the hang of this human contact business a bit now he’s on holiday)

  Can we get a room?

  MRS LAWRENCE

  (pushing her luck, hoping he’s bringing in a bus party)

  Lunch for two as well, is it, Mister …?

  HUNTER

  (echoing her accent a bit, not entirely consciously, perhaps) Is Janette ’unter still working ’ere?

  MRS LAWRENCE

  (pleased, overall, that the world is such a small place, if also slightly disappointed that these guests aren’t here for her cooking — after all she tries so hard)

  Do you know JANETTE, then?

  HUNTER

  (leaning forward, winning a confidence, in an old lag’s fashion, by giving a confidence)

  I’m her father. This is Ronnie, her wee brother … and it’s her BIRTHDAY, ye see … so we thought we’d give her a surprise and pay her a wee visit …

  He practically pours his criminal charm on the desk.

  MRS LAWRENCE

  (moving to the end of the desk, slightly disappointed that it’s that girl, who she doesn’t entirely trust for a reason she can’t bring herself to fathom, who has brought these good people here, but responding to his charm’s libation like a woman in the desert)

  For heaven’s sake, let me let her know you’re here …

  HUNTER

  (still leaning forward, his hand, startlingly, reaching out for hers)

  Oh, no, you’re not to worry, that’s fine … we want to SURPRISE her.

  MRS LAWRENCE

  Oh. Might you give me a credit card to secure the accommodation?

  HUNTER

  (his smile fixed and disconcerting)

  Would cash in advance be okay?

  Ronnie looks dubiously at Hunter. Who still smiles warmly at his hostess. Who looks back at him with her face frozen in a funny position.

  9.1.1

  £24,607.04

  CUT TO:

  9.1.1

  INT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – STAIRCASE – DAY

  A few moments later. Rather deafened by a spirited pipe-and-drum rendition of “Loch Lomond”, Ronnie and Hunter go up the tartan stairs past the second-hand prints of second-hand sentiment, Hunter carrying the carpet bag.

  HUNTER

  (pleased at having met his daughter’s protectress, and that this party seems to be a cosy, decent, sort despite a slightly strange sense of decoration. Is that framed photograph there really of First World War Prussian Uhlans on a tea break in Belgium in 1914? Are there corpses of nuns and spitted babies lurking just out of shot?)

  What a NICE lady!

  RONNIE

  (without reflection, irony or any modicum of taste)

  Ah thought she was a fat boot.

  HUNTER

  (a fond and conventional admonition, educationally intended to encourage the good in his younger child)

  Politeness doesnae hurt, Ronnie.

  CUT TO:

  9.1.2

  EXT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – BACKYARD – DAY

  Mrs Lawrence has brought HER HUSBAND a cup of tea out to the yard where he had been thinking about having a smoke of his pipe. She has just told him whose father has just arrived. His face has gone as white as a sheet. His trusty briar hangs forgotten in his hand, loose tobacco leaves spilling to the concrete.

  LAWRENCE

  (pushing the words through his tangle of fear, guilt and remembered concupiscence)

  Her father? Janet’s father?

  MRS LAWRENCE

  (puzzled)

  Yes, Bob.

  LAWRENCE

  (trying to be casual, forehead beading, his penis unaccountably tumescing)

  What’s he WANT?

  MRS LAWRENCE

  (simply)

  It’s her birthday.

  LAWRENCE

  (as if he didn’t know that bottoms had birthdays)

  Her birthday?

  MRS LAWRENCE

  (bewildered and slightly ashamed of the ways of men, though without specific evidence or cause)

  He seemed very friendly.

  LAWRENCE

  (turbulence escaping his intestine and venting from his colon in a slow, thin ripple of hot, potent gas)

  ’Scuse me, love …

  He goes indoors.

  MRS LAWRENCE

  Shall I leave your tea for you?

  There is no reply. It being a shame to waste tea, sniffing vaguely, she drinks from his cup, smacking her lips at the sugar she doesn’t take any more, but he still does, the silly beggar. Well, that’s what men are. They never go to the doctor. One day she’ll find him on the floor of the kitchen, lips blue and tongue protruding … or maybe he’ll just not get up one morning, but sleep in forever and ever. He’d like that. She’d like that. Her eyes glaze over peacefully.

  CUT TO:

  9.2.3

  INT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – BEDROOM – DAY

  Ronnie and Hunter are now in a twin room in the hotel, furnished in heavy brown of assorted shades and periods, with uneven floorboards — in short, a room in the same uncertain taste as the hotel as a whole. The stuff in it could keep you awake at night speculating on its provenance. Hunter puts his bag on the bed. Ronnie shuts the door.

  RONNIE

  Dad …?

  HUNTER

  (suppressing the urge to whirl round and hug him … years of suffering dropping away, of loneliness … years of empty wishing … For Ronnie, who had been too young to call him anything the last time he saw him — his lost son — has just called him “Dad” for the very first time)

  Uh huh?

  RONNIE

  (charmless, insensitive, greedy, inevitable)

  Can I see that money again?

  HUNTER

  (a little hurt)

  No. Ah shouldnae have shown it tae ye at all.

  Ronnie has picked the gun up from the bed.

  Ye gonnae shoot me now?

  RONNIE

  Naw. It’s no loaded.

  Ronnie sniggers, turns and aims the gun out of the window.

  (gun noise)

  Pcheuw!

  We follow his gaze out of the window, where he is pretending to shoot hippies and sheep.

  Pcheuw! Fuck ye …

  Hunter snatches the gun from him. Ronnie turns to protest.

  Hi!

  HUNTER

  (struggling, as he has since their reunion, with an impersonation of fatherliness for which he has no personal model and which is therefore reliant on the most tawdry and sentimental of cinematic clichés on the one hand, and his instinctual and not to say personally violent sensitivity to this latest slight to his feelings on the other, thus suffering a double repression, tightening yet further the internal knots which seem sometimes to be all that is real about him)

  Ye kin play wi it later.

  RONNIE

  (brattish in a learned manner, also at second-hand, pouts and walks past him towards the bedroom door, tossing the pistol on the bed as he goes)

  Donwannit …

  He reaches for the door handle, a simple glass sphere of Caithness Crystal.

  HUNTER

  (as a stern father, finding himself playing the role in response to Ronnie’s impersonation of adolescent strop, and perhaps in unconscious homage to the early filmography of Sandy Mackendrick, late of Canada, Scotland and California, and thus, to the Komik, Katholic Kontortions of Compton MacKenzie’s postmodern tartanry)

  You stay
where you are, my laddie!

  Ronnie opens the door. Turns to point a dirty fingernail at the gun on the bed.

  RONNIE

  Tellt ye. That’s no loaded.

  He goes out and shuts the door.

  HUNTER

  Ronnie!

  Hunter starts to hurriedly repack the bag, but runs out before he’s finished, leaving envelopes revealed, and calling again for Ronnie, setting up the forthcoming change of POV.

  CUT TO:

  9.3

  INT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – CORRIDOR – DAY

  JANETTE, all unaware of her family’s proximity, is hoovering, humming to herself. She now becomes aware she is being watched, and looks up. It’s Mr Lawrence. It’s not the first time she’s looked up, or round, or down, and seen him staring at her with his mouth open, his tongue flopped supine on his bottom teeth, like a tired dog. She smiles tightly in anticipation of his furtive familiarities, having developed a nose for the complex odours of male wrongness at various junctures of her orphaned experience of her guilty and complacent nation which continually congratulates itself on its social conscience while as consistently crapping on its less fortunate citizens.

  JANETTE

  (over the noise of the hoover, posing a challenge to the Foley artist were anybody ever to actually make a film of this)

  Mister Lawrence?

  LAWRENCE

  (likewise over the hoover noise, but at a reverse angle, thus putting the putative engineer of the soundtrack further on his mettle)

  Ye’ve not told him, have ye?

  JANETTE

  (not hearing, and maybe not the only one, if post-production standards decline yet further into institutional indifference)

  What?

  She turns off the hoover and looks at her employer as the noise spirals down. He’s even redder in the face than usual. His eyes are begging her for mercy. She looks away from them, and notes with astonishment that his trousers have made a tent to stand at right angles to the swell of his belly, and that a cheeky little patch of sparkly damp has formed at its apex.

  LAWRENCE

  (breathless at his own tension, blood pressure far too high, beating at his neck and temples)

  You’ve not been saying anything to your Dad, have you?

  JANETTE

  (genuinely mystified, or playing the line as if genuinely mystified, who can tell the heart of maidens?)

  What? What are ye talkin about?

  Before Lawrence can reply, Janette is arrested by the sight of her brother, impossibly, her brother (!) I mean fucking Ronnie (!) approaching her up the corridor. Lawrence turns to look at what she’s looking at. He sees Ronnie too, blanches, and then bolts around a corner.

  (to Ronnie)

  What the f …

  Cutting herself off, she glances behind her at where the hell Lawrence went, then back to Ronnie, and starts again.

  What the fuck are you …?

  Ronnie walks straight past her, cutting off her question as if she’d been nagging him for hours the way in his imagination that she always did, his older sister, who he hasn’t seen a lot of since she turned sixteen and escaped the compulsory attention of the state, having acted in the preceding period as a kind of parental locum, perhaps even later as a motherly interior voice arguing in favour of him looking after himself and minding out what he smokes.

  JANETTE

  (pursuing him, grabbing at his arm)

  RONNIE!

  RONNIE

  (as if, as above, he heard her voice every day and that she was constantly making unreasonable demands of his time and behaviour, which even may have been true in a Jiminy Cricket kind of way — had she been present to him as the personification of his superego — which she may well have been for all I know)

  Ach, fuck … get tae fuck, will ye?

  He shakes her off and keeps walking.

  Don’t tell me what tae dae.

  JANETTE

  (still following him, and still straightforwardly in search of useful information)

  How’d you get here?

  RONNIE

  (pulling away still)

  Ah wuz kidnapped …

  JANETTE

  (disappointed at so transparently spurious a defensive witticism, ignoring it, letting him walk away from her as punishment for his banality, and yet, in contradiction, persisting with her enquiry, more gently)

  Ronnie! Answer me …

  HUNTER

  (from behind her, OOV — if this was a movie we’d see him out of focus over her shoulder)

  Janette …

  Janette spins to see Hunter, in full-colour high definition, standing behind her. Her father! A man she’s not seen since she was five years old, who she recognises only from old photographs — looking at her anxiously, beseechingly. An unreadable, impossible complex of emotions start as a hot flush somewhere near the bottom of her feet, rising rapidly up her body like the way the mercury shoots up a thermometer in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and explodes out of the top of her head in a nimbus of perspiration.

  JANETTE

  Aw, Fuck!

  She shakes her head, dispersing the halo of her sweat.

  Aw, Fuck.

  (to Ronnie, who has stopped to observe their reunion)

  Fuck.

  She pulls the hoover up the corridor towards Ronnie, and takes the nozzle of the hoover and WHACKS Ronnie with it on the top of his skull. Ronnie yelps in fright at his big sister.

  JANETTE

  (demanding of Ronnie)

  What the FUCK do you think you’re DOIN?

  RONNIE

  (pathetic, hardly even objecting to this mistreatment, perhaps nostalgic for the renewed attention of an elder sibling)

  Hi …

  JANETTE

  (beating at him with something of the repetitive determination and force shown by her late and unlamented great grandmother in chastising Janette’s equally absent maternal figure)

  Bringing him HERE?

  HUNTER

  (trying to intervene, but hamstrung by the emotion that he is experiencing in seeing her again, recognisably his own wee girl, recognisably her mother’s daughter from the crown of her dark hair to her having to stand on her tiptoes like that to keep whacking at her brother)

  Janette …

  CUT TO:

  9.3.1

  INT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – STAIRCASE – DAY

  Lawrence is hiding on the stairs, listening to the commotion from above and round the corner. Mrs Lawrence appears below him, startling him.

  MRS LAWRENCE

  What’s the MARRER with ye, Bob?

  CUT TO:

  9.3.1.1

  INT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – CORRIDOR – DAY

  Janette, Ronnie and Hunter are now standing in a Mexican stand-off, the two male figures wary of the female at the triangle’s apex who holds them off, pointing the nozzle of the hoover attachment like a gun, alternately covering them both as she retreats.

  JANETTE

  Keep the fuck away fae me!

  HUNTER

  I just want tae talk tae ye …

  Janette throws the hoover nozzle at Ronnie and runs.

  Janette!

  Pursuing, Hunter trips over Ronnie and the machine as Ronnie too starts forward. They go down together in a clattering tangle of limbs and cleaning equipment.

  CUT TO:

  9.3.1.2

  Janette, pelting down the corridor. She runs into the solid figure of Mrs Lawrence, coming from the stairs out of shot.

  MRS LAWRENCE

  Here here here. Now, what’s all this about?

  JANETTE

  (pointing back to where Hunter and Ronnie are just rounding the corner behind her)

  Get them oot ae here!

  MRS LAWRENCE

  Janette … That’s your father … and that’s your little brother.

  Ronnie and Hunter arrive.

  JANETTE

  (helpless now, anger spent, unprotected by its energy)

  I
know who they are … get them OOT …

  MRS LAWRENCE

  Janette! They’re here for your birthday

  JANETTE

  (hesitating slightly before saying)

  It’s not my …

  HUNTER

  (overlapping, interrupting her, appealing to Mrs Lawrence)

  Janette … I’m sorry …

  Hearing that word, Janette is suddenly calm. Face red, tears still in her eyes, but with a voice like an angry Goddess, she echoes it.

  JANETTE

  “Sorry?”

  As if he was hearing the word for the first time too, or as if he were hearing it properly, Hunter acknowledges her acknowledgement of his apology. He nods and hangs his head. She considers him a moment, then speaks from the depths of her experience, whatever that experience was, but it wasn’t good by the sound of it.

  JANETTE

  You’ve got nae idea.

  Lawrence himself, still nervous, appears. The following dialogue overlaps.

  LAWRENCE

  Mister Hunter … is it? I’m Bob Lawrence.

  HUNTER

  (to Janette, ignoring him, finding himself ambushed by his own emotion, his own strength of feeling at what he is coming to understand is the critical juncture of his Quixotic enterprise of family reunion)

  I want to make it up tae ye …

  JANETTE

  (to Mrs Lawrence)

  I DON’T want to talk to these people …

  LAWRENCE

  (concurring entirely with the idea of Janette and her bottom not communicating with these interlopers in any way)

  Mister Hunter …

  HUNTER

  (desperate, not even sure he can talk, but knowing he must try)

  Janette … just let me …

  JANETTE

  (to Hunter)

  Please … Christ … can’t ye hear me? Just leave.

  LAWRENCE

  Mister Hunter … if Janet doesn’t want …

  HUNTER

  … fourteen years …

  9.3.1.2.1

  And he feels it. Suddenly. Cumulatively. All he lost. Every dawn. Every endured day, every thankless, restless night. He understands too, I think, dimly, that he has been hiding all these years from the depth, from the reality, of his own hurt. He has been wrapping himself in purpose as a shield against the emptiness. He has been covering an open wound. And now that the project of anticipation that had sustained him through those howling, vacuous years is actually at the point of fulfilment, it is also at the point of hazard. He had blinded himself to how bad his situation, their situation, really was. And now, in her eyes, he can see it. Right now, he sees too, it might all fall to pieces. The recognition of his danger, of just how much he now depends on this young woman who he scarcely knows … strike that … that he doesn’t know at all … is overwhelming. He had had a role for her all mapped out in his head, but now that he recognises her independence, he has also got to understand that at this moment he is entirely dependent on her, on whatever kindness or reason or sentiment she has in her for him, on whatever emotion she feels for him, on whatever love she can find or that he can earn from her. And that he has no way to know or influence anything about her. He is achingly projecting his love, of course, and his need, but he cannot anticipate her response. He does not know how to deserve her. He is entirely in her hands.