Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

“Was that not helpful, Superintendent?” he asked.

  Oh yes. Oh yes it was, thought Bellamy to himself and very much gave no indication of the thrill of power in knowledge that he had over that nasty, arrogant man in the car with his nasty idiot brother over there. Bellamy was making plans even as he straightened and looked around the car park to the fields and hills beyond. And none of those plans were intended to be of any benefit to Frank Wheen.

  10.6.3

  Bellamy now looked over at Frank and shook his head sadly, as if Lawrence had told him nothing that could help them.

  10.7

  “Fuck,” said Frank, and Joe chuntered his unhappy wee laugh again.

  “What the fuck are you laughing at?” asked Frank.

  “Nothin,” said Joe. “Wouldn’t you like tae know?” he added. Maddeningly.

  Bellamy was walking over to the car. Frank prepared himself for him.

  “Think he’s gonnae look in the boot?” asked Joe. Not paying any mind, Frank was already opening his window so Bellamy could update him.

  “Sorry, gentlemen,” Bellamy was saying. “There’s no new information. I’d suggest there really isn’t anything useful to be done here. You’d be better heading back.”

  “So what are you gonnae do?” asked Frank.

  “Procedure, Mr Wheen. We have a good description of the car. It’s bound to get spotted. For the moment, I think we should use our local resources to identify known contacts. We know he spoke to someone at a Glasgow payphone before he left the Wallace Arms. Carntyne. A little cross-checking around that location using your sources and ours might well turn up something.”

  Joe burped one of his wee laughs out.

  “But in the meantime,” Bellamy went on, “leave it in our hands. Be sure we’ll be in touch if we turn up anything.”

  Bellamy smiled tightly at Frank, and glanced briefly at Joe with ill-guarded contempt, then put his hat on and went back to his own car to alert certain trusted cohorts by CB radio to the lead he’d now withheld from the Wheens. He hoped he’d done enough to send them home to be dependent on what he chose to tell them. But Bellamy had not reckoned with the information that Joe was about to enjoy sharing with his smarter, younger brother.

  For now, Joe, in response to Bellamy’s patronage, let a single obscenity escape him.

  “Cunt,” he said. “If he thinks he’s gonna turn up Jack Webster in fuckin Carntyne, he’s got another think coming.”

  10.7.1

  Frank looked at his brother, awful suspicion tingling in his toes, and working its way upwards towards his medulla oblongata.

  “What do you mean?”

  Joe shrugged.

  “What happened with Jack?” Frank insisted.

  “Well you know how it is, Frank,” Joe said, wise in the ways of the world. “He didnae want to talk to me.”

  Joe grinned.

  “Where is he?” asked Frank, his stomach turning to an icy lump on top of his intestines.

  “He’s in the boot,” said Joe, with studied, simple brutality. He then added, innocently employing the heavy mockery so ingrained in his nature, “D’ye want me tae show him to yer mates?”

  Shockingly, he opened the passenger door suddenly, and thirty highly trained firearms officers turned their heads automatically towards the sudden sound.

  10.7.2

  Joe enjoyed watching Frank’s colour changing from red to white to red and back to white again as he slowly closed the door and Frank wordlessly started the engine, not knowing what else he was supposed to do, not knowing where he might be going, especially as he knew that the unholy thing he wanted to get away from was in the car with him. But Frank didn’t know yet how else the last act of his tragedy was supposed to start.

  10.7.2

  “Course, he talked tae me eventually,” said Joe before Frank could get the car moving. “Told me a lot of things.”

  Joe smiled like the masterful bad guy in the substandard movie he had always dreamed he was.

  “He told me Tommy had money. Tommy paid him in cash for a motor and a gun.”

  Good taste and a proper regard for dramatic tension would have stopped Joe right there, leaving the next question unasked and hanging there between them like a bad smell. But taste and dramaturgy were not in Joe’s range of aptitudes. So he probably said something obvious like, “Where’d Tommy get fucking money, Frank? It couldn’t have been from you. You’re fucking skint all the time. At least that’s what you always tell me!”

  Frank must have stared at him then. The unattended engine flooded and cut out.

  10.7.2.1

  Of course, there are those who think that Frank must have known about poor Jack all along – DS “Danny” Boyle later certainly proceeded on that assumption. But I think that something like the above conversation probably took place and precipitated the Wheens’ otherwise unexplained departure from the entourage of Superintendent Bellamy. Of course, I wasn’t with them in the car, but given that it was from the car park of the hotel that Frank and Joe disappeared off the public radar for the next twelve hours or so until their dramatic reappearance at the gates of the Ossian’s View Estate, I am confident that my account is reliable (see op. cit. 12.4.2.2 passim).

  10.7.2.2

  You fuck, thought Frank to himself, feeling sick. What have you done to me?

  He turned the ignition key again and let out the clutch too fast. The car jumped like there was a learner driver at the wheel.

  “Drive slowly, Frank …” Joe cautioned. “You wouldn’t want tae crash in front of these cunts.”

  Frank gagged, he nearly threw up … and Joe’s soul knew the highest, deepest pleasure of its unlamented time on earth.

  11.0

  Still as one, for the first and possibly last time, the Hunter family stood that night in the doorway of normality. Hesitating on the threshold of a family diner, they breathed it in, the kaleidoscopic smells of it – chip fat and piri-piri chicken, lager and Irn-Bru.

  11.0.1

  The family restaurant that served the campsite they had chosen as well as the B&Bs of the locality, The Jaco-Bite, doubled as a cabaret venue for local and touring talent. The band onstage tonight, the Ted McPherson Experience, was already playing a disconcerting series of medleys of eighties cover versions on guitar, keyboards and drums, all of which climaxed with an eight-minute “Don’t You Want Me?” by The Human League. To which question the answer was “Almost certainly not”.

  11.0.1.1

  On the cliff edge of this mirrorball-and-spotlit all-you-can-eat dining experience, Ronnie and his father balked at the sight of all those other people, and Janette smoothly took over the practicalities, having already made the decision that she was going to put her father straight about a couple of things while she had the protection of being in a public place. She inwardly prepared herself for revelations and admonitions as she chatted easily with the waitress, who was called Elaine, who had spotted a table about to open.

  11.0.1.1.1

  Janette may well have known Elaine at least by sight. Though it’s crowded, the Scottish catering community is nonetheless tight-knit, and itinerant though its members tend to be, they do form a bit of a clique. They recognise each other by the behaviours they have learned, the specialised social reflexes they have assimilated, the shared culture they inhabit. They are a fellowship, like sailors and chemists. They exchange practical information, too, about good employers and bad, and the story about Mr Lawrence and Janette’s knickers may well have been like an Icelandic Saga to them for all I know.

  11.0.1.1.1.1

  Prisoners are clannish like that. Prostitutes and professional mercenary soldiers and dentists are hugger-mugger in like fashion. Parents of young children and pensioners are fraternities and sororities. Even dog owners and joggers that meet only in the park of a morning are like that. Everyone, the possible singularity of Tommy Hunter being excepted, is like that. We are social animals, like everyone says, but not in the way that everyone means it (as i
f it were a surprise that we are not purely auto-directed windowless monads), but in the very genetic and epigenetic bone.

  11.0.1.1.1.2

  We are not, we are never, alone. It is at least arguable that we can only legitimately consider ourselves to be “individuals” in as much that none of us share exactly the same nest of composite collective identities with anyone else. We all of us inhabit multiple communities, culturally and occupationally. Our uniqueness, far from being essential to us, or based on any intrinsic difference from anyone we happen to bump into, is purely a Venn diagram function of social happenstance. What makes you “you” and not “me”, is that our composites of samenesses, our mixtures of relatedness to others are accidentally and invariably slightly different from each other’s. Our accidents are individual, but our essences are identical, I think. We are only marginally and circumstantially ourselves. The only existential uniqueness to which any of us can legitimately lay claim with any weight of evidence (through our ancestors’ and cousins’ looping chains of bases) is that we all, like daffodils and Labradors, belong to the “class of things that are not dead,” itself a vanishingly small subset of actually existing stuff.

  11.0.1.1.1.2.1

  The primal, protozoan bacterial soup from which we emerged and to which we will return is where we still live, mostly, materially considered. We still belong to the bacterial world, to most intents and purposes. It is only our temporary consciousness, our having self-contained bodies and minds to wander about and do stuff in, for an eye-blink of time, that deceives us into thinking it is only when we have lives that we are alive. In fact, from the point of view of life as such, we are effectively immortal, the stuff we’re made of having been alive since life began, and likewise remaining so, long after a small and inessential bit of us is dead or is not playing temporary host to consciousness, whatever that may mean, any more. In common with all living things with more than one cell, we animals and plants are a rampantly florid eukaryote disease of limited duration, and as such, have perversely yet compellingly been evolving for the half a billion years as superficially autonomous organisms who are actually as close to each other as are bananas in a bunch.

  11.0.1.1.1.2.1.1

  Bananas included.

  11.0.1.2

  Most of us recognise each other, we living things, in our degrees of separation and in our ultimate unity, and that we have meanwhile evolved in emotional as well as physical landscapes we are shaped by, whatever else is our inheritance. We are temporarily and only contingently “ourselves” very much in the short term and in the meantime, as it were. Our knowing this about ourselves, as we all do, as we always have, and our not being very happy about the idea of death, is just one example of evolution teasing us with the theory of forever while confining us to a limited tenancy in ourselves as ourselves. Bananas don’t, so far as we know, have this problem.

  Our being doomed to inhabit “reality” as two entirely distinct locations all the time has had both happy and unhappy sequels, among which we might count inventing religion and culture and right and wrong as being the very least of the compensations that we felt we owed ourselves. Being capable both of conceiving of the infinite and the eternal, while all too aware that we ourselves are neither of those things, we occupy the universe with the deepest imaginable insight, yes … but aware at the same time that this insight is entirely inappropriate to our mortality. This paradox is just another bloody thing we have to put up with, it seems, several thousand years’ worth of pen scratching by the cleverest people we’ve got making next to no headway in squaring the circle, let alone in adapting our behaviour to the realities of both our human and our extra-human natures. No philosophy or religion has altered the base reality that we all live in two worlds at once but that we are evolved to cope in only one place at a time, and even then are only really happy with living when we can do so without thinking about it, with the concomitant outcome being that we are as habitually and roundly defeated by the slightest change of air as might be a pit pony on a Ferris wheel. Some of us are like landed fish when we have to buy a pair of shoes.

  11.0.2

  Hence, Ronnie’s vague unease at how well his sister and his father were getting on had become a prickly brittleness in him even before they started eating. This kind of jealous vulnerability was hardly new territory for him. Every good thing that had ever happened to him had been so unreliable that none of it had ever really made him happy. But, complex of deprivations and improvisations though he was, he lacked real experience of familial complexity.

  11.0.2.1

  Lonely boys are very simple in some ways, like happy boys are simple in others. We are all distinguished very early on in our learned responses to things like knowledge, insult and fear. According to nurture, we each become wise in some ways, and remain infants in others.

  11.0.2.2

  Ronnie, who was well capable of handling himself in situations (of confrontation with authority, for example) that would render most adults into blubbering wreckages, was well out of his depth with the kind of negotiations with loved ones that are already second nature to comfortable children by the time they reach double digits. For Ronnie, emotional vulnerability of any sort had always been a crime that was to be immediately punished in others, and for which one expected immediate punishment. Consequently, since he was bright (though God forbid he’d ever let you see that) policemen and educators and social workers had found in Ronnie a kung fu master of defensive evasion, angry irony and cheek.

  But even in this short time today of his being, once again, somebody’s child, there had flowered within him all unheralded — as well as unwanted and confusing — a need and capacity for love that was crippling him with awareness of his own infantilism in this specialised regard. Unguarded because of his inexperience, at this moment Ronnie was openness itself to hurt as well as joy, and he hated feeling like that without having the geographical knowledge of his own hinterland that would tell him what it was he hated and what he might do about it. Consequently, the only therapeutic remedy that occurred to him for feeling bad was to make somebody else feel worse.

  11.0.2.3

  His father had already turned down a game of pool with him while they were waiting to order and now Hunter and Janette were back going on about something to do with what she wanted to do with her life. Hunter was leaning in to hear her over the noise of the PA system. The noise of the band meant that Ronnie couldn’t really hear what Hunter and Janette were saying to each other, and even the fistfuls of coated crispy fries he was eating didn’t do much to reconcile him to their isolating him like this. Isolation, his haunting core reality, ate at him faster than he ate the chips. It was testament to Hunter’s inexperience as a parent and to Janette’s preoccupation with what she was about to tell her father and how she was going to do it, that meant that neither of them noticed the slow build-up of Ronnie’s misery.

  11.0.2.3.1

  They did nothing but talk, these two, about nothing. And it was me he kidnapped first!!

  11.0.2.3.2

  Ronnie took his ego in his hands and decided to intervene and tugged at Hunter’s sleeve, and was enraged by the wee patient smile Hunter gave him as he asked him “What?”

  “Do ye want tae play that game of pool now?”

  “No,” said Tommy pressing a coin into his hand. “On you go and fuck up the locals.”

  Ronnie looked down in contempt at the 50p his father had just handed him.

  “They take pounds!”

  Hunter dug for the change, and ended up handing Ronnie a fiver.

  “Don’t spend that all at once,” he cautioned and turned back to his daughter.

  Ronnie felt tears he didn’t want to explain to himself pricking at the back of his eyes. Like a man dying of thirst in the desert who has been given a sip of water, only to have the cup removed almost before he’s registered the taste, Ronnie found that his jealousy was as disproportionate as his need for love, once awakened, had proved to be. He wa
s voracious now in his hunger for the food he had never tasted, that he had never trusted the world enough to admit that he even wanted from it. He had opened himself unconsciously to his father, and now his father, all unwary, was closing him down.

  11.0.2.2.4

  On his way to the bar, Ronnie saw that the pool table was being used by two snotty children in bright T-shirts decorated with anthropomorphic animals, laughing at their own incompetence in a way that completely wasn’t as fucked up as he was. As he took the change and turned to watch them as they rushed back to the loving arms of their loving parents, Ronnie’s mood had sunk from sullen to murderous.

  11.1

  All unaware of the churning turbulence inside his son, Hunter was indulging himself in the calm surface, and for all he knew, depths, of his daughter. She knocked him out. He was stunned and delighted by her wit, her poise, her obvious intelligence. He wanted to know her secret. How was it possible to live in this terrible world that well?

  11.1.2

  Janette, appearances suggesting she was making the best of her ambiguous situation, was now about to tell her father as much of the truth as she thought he could deal with for the moment, or as much of the truth as she felt she needed to tell him, yes, for reasons of conscience as well as immediate utility. Old-fashioned in this way, she felt she owed him something. Why did she feel this? Was she simply being controlling? Had Ronnie known that word, he would certainly have said so.

  11.1.2.1

  She had accompanied them, yes, on an impulse, but having acted impulsively she was now thinking systematically, balancing contingencies … if this then this … This capacity for forethought, for the future being, for her, a region of thinkable alternatives, distinguished her from her male relatives, one of whom, her father, acted on impulse but always returned to the tramlines he had set himself, and the other of whom, Ronnie, alike acted on his own testosterone-complected version of impulse, but had not, unlike his father, a governing objective to which to return after whatever disaster he’d just brought about. Janette had possible futures to Hunter’s one possible future. Both were rich compared to Ronnie, whose best version of the future was a present tense that was pretty much dreadful going on forever.