Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

  9.5.2.2

  Hunter, still our main subject of enquiry despite the contrary fascinations of his daughter’s motivations, was of course compromised in his erstwhile decisiveness precisely because he had now achieved almost all, or two-thirds anyway, of what he had set out to do. He was now unarguably on holiday with his children. That he had achieved this by means of kidnap and deception was incidental. A good percentage of his dream, long held, had now come true. That he was yet to translate his energy and focus from the instrumentalism of the search to the emotional register of what he was supposed to do now that he’d found sixty-six per cent of what he was looking for, is understandable, predictable and even forgivable.

  His immediate problem now was that Ronnie, although a stranger to him in matters of personal detail, was of a type and genre of individual with which he was familiar from the slammer and from his own past. Janette, on the other hand, a capable and self-organising young woman at ease in social and work situations, was most decidedly a horse of a different colour.

  When dealing with his daughter, Tommy was not in Kansas any more.

  When Hunter looked at Janette as she sat down with him and Ronnie in the Rob Roy lounge, he saw her mother in her. You bet he did. He saw Janice’s wit, her quick intelligence, her sharp temper, and felt her flashing blade of interrogation. But he also saw, I think, something else. That if Ronnie belonged to the world only in so far as even his uncontrolled behaviour was exactly what was expected of him, and if even Hunter, as a criminal lunatic, was only anomalous and disturbing until he could be locked up or otherwise violently disposed of, Janette seemed to belong to the world in the way that we are all theoretically supposed to, but in fact, that very few of us do. She was relatively at home in it. That is, she looked at the world not necessarily as a friendly environment, but one where she felt equipped and confident to make the best of it.

  (That we regard sanity and competence of this order as in any way normal is more of a testament to our need of wish fulfilment than it is to our powers of observation.)

  Hunter, meanwhile, didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t know what to do. He felt tears of regret, of horror at himself, of relief and joy at once, stabbing at the back of his throat. He knew how desperately he needed to tell her things, but he couldn’t speak. So he didn’t say anything. Ronnie wasn’t much for conversation anyway, and Janette was too tangled up in her own angry and guilty complexities to simplify matter with either small talk or profundity

  9.5.2.3

  MRS LAWRENCE

  Leek and potato soup to start?

  There was a heavy silence at the innocent question. And now, for reasons she didn’t yet recognise or acknowledge, even to herself, Janette took over and managed the immediate crisis.

  JANETTE

  No thanks, Mrs Lawrence … we’ll just have two venison sausages and mash and one vegetarian. Thanks.

  9.5.2.3.1

  The preliminaries of ordering over with, they were now left exposed to the silence, to the fourteen and a half years of silence between them.

  9.5.2.3.1.1

  Again it was Janette who, having spoken once, now found herself feeling obliged, unaccountably, to make this family occasion “work”, “go smoothly” and such. She was frankly annoyed at putting this expectation on herself, and wondered whether it was her minimal social conditioning and/or her biological destiny and/or an unworthy access of nostalgia for a past that had never been, that prompted her to give a flying fuck as to how well her “men” behaved in public.

  Somebody had to say something, was as far as she got at the minute. Would we could all get that far so fast!

  9.5.2.3.1.1.1

  She was sitting in her place of employment too, of course, that had to be a factor in her wanting to manage the situation, and she felt again a certain surprisingly conventional sense of duty of showing her family her workplace to advantage, or at least towards compensating for its flaws. Though only nineteen, Janette had been consistently employed in the catering industry since leaving school. So she knew what was good about the Bide a Wee Hotel … (its location) … and what wasn’t … (everything else) … perfectly well. It had been a stop on her journey, that was all … a journey which one day, she hoped, would lead to her running places a damn sight more substantial than this … and glory be to God, without the medley of Victorian tartan tripe that assailed the eyes and ears still all too frequently in places of this kind.

  9.5.2.3.2

  “Did you come far this morning?” she heard herself ask, as if Ronnie and her father were customers she hadn’t met before, which, of course, to all intents and purposes, they were and she hadn’t, so it wasn’t really such a stupid thing to say as it sounded in her ears as soon as she’d said it.

  “We left early,” said Hunter, equally incongruent, employing that understatement he had the habit of employing that I told you about (see 1.3.2.1.1.1).

  “He fuckin kidnapped me!” repeated Ronnie. It was a tribute to how low was the regard his sister held him in, that, once again, she entirely ignored and discounted this both truthful and useful information.

  It was at this point that Mr Lawrence appeared with the sausages.

  9.5.2.3.2.1

  LAWRENCE

  Smoked venison sausages … from our local smokery. World-famous.

  HUNTER

  Thanks, thank you.

  9.5.2.3.2.2

  Lawrence wobbles out, nervously. Occasionally throughout the following, we must imagine him sneaking a look at them from the kitchen. Hunter didn’t see that. Hunter just looked at Janette, who, being a clever and to-thepoint sort, then asked the apparently simple question to which there is never a simple or comprehensive or even reliable answer.

  9.5.3

  “What do you want, Dad?”

  9.5.3.1

  Hunter handed her the white envelope he’d been clutching since before they sat down.

  HUNTER

  Happy Birthday.

  JANETTE

  It’s not my birthday.

  “I’m making up,” he said, which was true in so many ways.

  9.5.3.1.1

  She sighs. She opens the envelope. She sees the two thousand pounds inside, then drops it, horrified and insulted, on the table. Some of the money falls out where Ronnie can see it too.

  HUNTER

  It’s a lot of birthdays.

  Ronnie stares at the money

  JANETTE

  (she shoves it across the table at him)

  I don’t want it.

  RONNIE

  It’s nearly MA birthday. I’ve had a lot of fucking birthdays.

  Janette glares at him. She hardens in her resistance at the sight of her father’s hurt. Damn right this should hurt, she thinks. And doesn’t touch her dinner.

  9.5.3.2

  Now, this refusal must have been, for Hunter, potentially catastrophic. The future on which he had entirely constructed a good deal of his past hinged upon the simple enough — you would have thought — contingency of his being of help and comfort to his children in the future. It had been going not badly with Ronnie, all things considered. But the firmness and apparent equanimity with which Janette had just rejected the money, and thus rejected him, might have been terminal to his hopes. Small wonder he changed the subject, or at least decided to approach the possibility of pursuing his project of familial rapprochement by an alternative sentimental avenue. Her eyes flashed, ready for him.

  9.5.2.1

  HUNTER

  D’ye remember much about yer mother, Janette?

  JANETTE

  (deliberately, her eyes clear, her voice fighting for calm)

  I remember the two of ye screamin aw the time. I remember you gaun aff yer hied when she left ye wance when I was about three and you breakin everything in the house.

  (she turns to Ronnie, who is snarfing down his potato) I remember feedin him out the fridge till the food ran out.

  HUNTER

  Janette …
>
  RONNIE

  (indicates the money, then to Janette, through a mouthful of mash)

  Seriously, can I get it?

  9.5.2.1.1

  Hunter and his daughter look at each other now, and look inward at the same time, reflected one in the other. And she finds herself the stronger of the two.

  JANETTE

  I remember you comin hame just after that. I can see it.

  He knows what she means. But he has never, till this moment, seen himself fully as he was that night through another’s eyes. The experience is shocking.

  HUNTER

  What?

  JANETTE

  Blood. Blood all over ye.

  9.5.2.1.2

  Hunter looks down. He can feel tidal floods inside him, like he’d been injected with something radioactive before going into a CAT scan. It feels like he’s wetting himself, it feels like her vision of him is going right inside of him, washing him, cleaning his blood, maybe killing him.

  RONNIE

  (through a sausage)

  Mum’s blood. Right? Was it Mum’s blood?

  9.5.3

  And Tommy Hunter, whose force of will had carried him through a Sahara of lonely pain and had overcome his emotional inarticulacy by the sheer force of his unquestioning energy, was then in a place he had never dreamed of being. He was at his moment of fulfilment of his lonely dreaming and at the nadir of his loneliness. His dream had come true, and he now found that exactly those qualities that had sustained him for so long in his solitary hell unfitted him entirely for his success as a reuniter of the scintillae of his family. He could see that, however estranged, Ronnie and Janette shared not only a history, a history of unguessed at and probably awful detail … but a present. The two of them were of a kind and that kind did not include him. They thought he’d killed their mother.

  He found himself feeling more helpless and less capable than he had felt since that afternoon when in the exterminating van he had succumbed to the Wheen brothers’ admonitions, and had brought himself to this solitude, a solitude that had served him, that had enabled his survival, but that now seemed more of an affliction than at any time before. He had been living alone in hell till Ronnie and Janette had dropped in, passing through, and had reminded him of where he was by making him aware again of the heaven he had lost, that he had turned his back on. And he knew pain then, Tommy did, in a way he’d forgotten he could feel it.

  9.5.3.1

  The prickling at the back of his eyes pushed past them. Tears, hot and humiliating, fell. He gasped in shock at himself. He hadn’t cried since childhood, the penalty, in the circumstances in which he had been raised, had been swift and punishing for such transgression. All too suddenly he knew now that the real reason that boys don’t cry is not the offence of tears against masculinity, but rather that the tears of another remind us of our own pain. They fill us with the terrible fear that if one of us breaks down and admits the true horror of living, the true helplessness of it, then the rest of us will be forced to look at it too. To hate someone else crying comes from fear of our starting to cry too. I wish we found strength in weeping together for our shared weakness, but we don’t. Not nearly enough, anyway.

  9.5.3.2

  Tommy Hunter wept in front of his children now, and predictably, as they had been raised to, they despised him for it.

  CUT TO:

  9.5.4

  EXT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – BACKYARD – DAY

  Lawrence is sweating as he saws down the barrels on a shotgun. Mrs Lawrence comes out with a cup of tea.

  MRS LAWRENCE

  (handing him the tea)

  Now what do you say?

  LAWRENCE

  Thank you very much.

  MRS LAWRENCE

  It seems a terrible shame to do that t’ that gun.

  LAWRENCE

  Better safe than sorry, Margaret, if we’re going to get proverbial.

  He keeps working.

  CUT TO:

  9.5.5

  INT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – DINING ROOM – DAY

  Hunter has now dissolved into great gulping sobs, his body heaving with the effort of releasing all that regret and self-pity from whatever chamber of the heart in which he’d been hiding it.

  HUNTER

  (howls)

  I love her.

  RONNIE

  Gonnae shut up, Dad.

  Ronnie looks to Janette for help.

  Gonnae make him shut up?

  HUNTER

  I’d never hurt yer MA!

  He still sobs.

  RONNIE

  Shut up, will ye!

  JANETTE

  (fiercely)

  I don’t care. Cry all ye want tae.

  HUNTER

  Believe me.

  JANETTE

  I don’t CARE.

  9.5.5.1

  “I don’t care if ye got raped in the showers,” she might have said to him; “I don’t care if you were on drugs and fuckin suicide watch,” cos I was there TOO. “I was banged up fer something YOU did … and noo yer oot? And yer greetin at me? So fuckin whit? Am I supposed tae light a fuckin firework? I’ve got a job, I’ve got a PLACE here. It’s MINES, it’s got nothin tae do wi you or my MAW, wherever the hell she is. I don’t care if ye buried her or not. Ye buried me.”

  9.5.2

  Hunter, recovering, sniffing, puts the envelope and the money back in his jacket pocket. Ronnie’s face falls. Hunter takes out the postcard and puts it on the table. Janette stares at it. Elsewhere, out of his vision, Mrs Lawrence anxiously looks around the doorjamb. This is not going according to the daytime television plan.

  9.6

  HUNTER

  She sent me a postcard.

  Janette stares at the card, she blinks.

  Yer mother. She sent me this, while I was in prison.

  (he takes her hand)

  Janette, yer mum’s alive and she’s waitin for us … here. Look.

  The blood drains from Janette’s face. Time stops.

  9.6.1

  Suddenly Janette bats the card out of Hunter’s hand. It falls to the floor.

  HUNTER

  (in supplication)

  Come with me. Come with us … We’ll find her. Together.

  JANETTE

  (distraught for reasons we don’t know yet)

  Get up … stand up …

  HUNTER

  Come wi us.

  We hear the lobby phone ringing. It continues throughout:

  9.6.1.1

  Lawrence approaches the table and picks up the card from the floor. He tries to pretend that what is going on in front of him doesn’t really terrify him. He looks at the card.

  LAWRENCE

  Calgary Bay … that’s on the Isle of Mull. Lovely spot, that is.

  (he looks at them, Ronnie chewing and dribbling, Janette and Hunter looking down, hollow with pain, not eating)

  Everything all right, is it?

  Hunter stands, holding his napkin. He snatches the card from Lawrence.

  HUNTER

  (still shaken and tearful)

  No. It’s not all right. I was in Peterheid and the scran was better than this. Yer sausages taste like shite.

  LAWRENCE

  I beg your pardon.

  HUNTER

  Like turds fae a donkey’s arse.

  Phone bell continues.

  CUT TO:

  9.6.2

  INT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – LOBBY – DAY

  Mrs Lawrence answers the phone in the lobby.

  MRS LAWRENCE

  Bide a Wee Hotel …

  (she listens)

  Police? Tommy Hunter? Yes … Mister Hunter’s here …

  CUT TO:

  9.6.2.1

  INT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – DINING ROOM – DAY

  Hunter looks at his children.

  HUNTER

  (to the kids)

  ’Scuse me.

  Janette watches him go, with Lawrence at his heels. Ronnie takes a bit of sausage fr
om Hunter’s plate and puts it in his mouth surreptitiously.

  CUT TO:

  9.6.2.2

  MRS LAWRENCE

  (on the phone)

  Yes, he is here, he arrived today …

  Hunter walks past her into the lobby. Lawrence is following.

  LAWRENCE

  Where are you going, Mister Hunter?

  He catches up and gets between Hunter and the door.

  HUNTER

  I just need a breath a air.

  MRS LAWRENCE

  (watching this, on the phone)

  I think you’d better speak to my husband.

  (to Lawrence)

  That’s the phone, Bob.

  LAWRENCE

  I think it’s quite clear that you’re not welcome here, Mister Hunter.

  MRS LAWRENCE

  Bob …

  LAWRENCE

  I think you should leave now. Before we have any more fuss.

  MRS LAWRENCE

  BOB!

  (mouthing silently)

  It’s important.

  Lawrence turns to his wife, and Hunter walks through the front door.

  LAWRENCE

  What is it?

  MRS LAWRENCE

  (mouthing silently)

  It’s the police …

  She holds out the phone. He takes it gingerly.

  LAWRENCE

  Hello …

  CUT TO:

  9.6.2.2.1

  EXT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – DAY

  Hunter emerges from the hotel, feeling faint, taking great gulps of air. He looks over at a group of hippy types and Indians climbing into a van. He recognises Denise between two middle-aged men in buckskins and full war regalia. Something like recognition penetrates his fog of upset for a moment before dissipating as the Sioux drive off to whatever destination. He watches them drive away, thinking what to do himself, touched by something, he doesn’t know what it is yet.

  (see 13.0)

  CUT TO:

  9.6.2.2.2

  INT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – LOBBY – DAY

  Lawrence is on the phone.

  LAWRENCE

  What am I supposed to do about it?

  CUT TO:

  9.6.2.2.2.1