by Peter Arnott
Ya wee shite. That’s a good bag.
RONNIE
Where IS it? Ya BASTARD.
Hunter holds up his injured hand. He passes out, his head lolling backwards as he sits back on his heels in the water. The moon bathes the tableau of the three of them in the stream.
CUT TO:
EXT. CAMPSITE – NIGHT
Some minutes later, Ronnie and Janette emerge from the woods, supporting Hunter between them. Hunter’s injured hand is tied grotesquely to his neck with his tie. All three of them are soaking wet and covered in his blood. They walk through the campsite. Other holidaymakers, woken and alarmed by the gunfire, stare at them as they approach. Janette has the carpet bag in her hand.
JANETTE
Were ye gonnae LEAVE me, ya wee bastard. Fuck off and leave me wi NOTHIN, was that yer fuckin plan.
RONNIE
I’d have fuckin made it if it wasnae fer you, ya bitch. You and him coulda just kept fuckin TALKIN about shite.
(to an onlooker)
What are you lookin at?
They reach the van and dump Hunter through the still open door on to the floor. Ronnie gets in to pull him.
JANETTE
Tie his arm up tae something … Ronnie glares at her. She slides the door shut, and walks round the van to get into the driver’s seat.
CUT TO:
INT. VAN – NIGHT
Janette sees that Hunter is still on the floor.
JANETTE
Tie his arm up tae somethin, or he’ll DIE!
RONNIE
He’s your fuckin pal, YOU tie him up!
JANETTE
I’ve got tae DRIVE.
RONNIE
I don’t CARE.
JANETTE
HE knows where the money is, right? If he dies, he’ll no be able tae tell ye where he planked it. Right?
Petulantly, Ronnie does what he’s told, tying Hunter’s injured hand up to the door handle. Janette looks out at the rain. She needs to decide where they’re going now. But she has always known, maybe, that one way or another, she’d be asking the Indians for help. Her decision is made. She starts the van.
12.4
A good thing too. Because just as Janette started the van’s engine, Frank and Joe, with Joe at the wheel of Frank’s Beamer, were pulling up to the entrance of the caravan park. They, like the Hunters, were not enamoured of nature’s delights at this moment. They’d ended up just putting Jack back in the boot, vaguely planning some way where they could maybe put the blame on Tommy for his murder (and Frank was running through desperate scenarios by now, I imagine, where he could blame Tommy for Joe’s death too, and kill Tommy in “self-defence” so Tommy couldn’t tell anyone what had really happened), but in truth they were pretty much helpless, hopeless, wet, cold and clueless by this point. So that when the Hiace van drove past them heading east towards the A86, it took them both a moment to register Ronnie’s face in the windscreen lit for second in the full beam of their fog lamps.
12.4.1
The chase wasn’t long. As Janette told Ronnie even before she’d understood that they were being followed, the land occupation that she’d thought her mother might be part of was taking place only minutes up the road. The situation there, which we’ll explore in more detail later, was fairly stable. There had been a brief flurry of activity when it had begun the month before, and catching the powers that be unaware, being organised on Facebook with no mention of Islam under the flash mob code name of Wovoka, and what with taking place on a massive private estate to which there was no access by public road, it had been a few days before law and order had recovered its poise and it had already been too late to just send the heavies in before anybody noticed. The place was regularly featured on TV before you knew it. Indeed, had any of our little cast of characters been at all attuned to the right kind of social networking activity, it would have been clearly obvious right from the beginning of this story that this was where it was all going to end.
12.4.1.1
It must be explained that, although there was only one narrow private road into the estate, infiltration had been very easy for the protestors to achieve on foot, and by way of the railway station anomalously nearby this haven for the rich in the wilderness, and as no one was trying to leave, this being an occupation, and no one had tried to get in for a couple of weeks, the entranceway to the estate was relatively lightly guarded, especially at this time of night.
12.4.2
In any case, Frank and Joe argued between them as to whether or not this was indeed the Hunters’ van they were following, and concluding that it probably was (who else would be LEAVING a campsite at midnight other than fugitives), they then fought about tactics, as to whether they should content themselves with following the Hunters … knowing nothing about how heavily armed they might be, for example … and call in police reinforcements, or whether, for fuck’s sake, Frank, we’re already so far past legality that we can’t even see it if we look behind us. Let’s drive the cunts off the road and fucking finish this.
12.4.2.1
Whatever the strategy was, Janette, having seen that they were being followed, was now flooring the van while Ronnie shouted at her to go faster … which brought the wretched junk heap up to nearly sixty. Hunter, in the back, tied up and tourniqueted, but still bleeding profusely, seemed to be singing something about a Dixie Chicken. It was also roughly at this point that Ronnie found the money stuffed into the glove compartment and began putting it all back in the bag.
12.4.2.2
Frank and Joe were still tailgating the van and loudly debating as to whether they should come alongside the thing and open fire, when Janette saw in the light of her fog lamps, a few hundred yards ahead of her (guarded by a few sleepy representatives of the shadowy security firm hired by the Estate’s equally shadowy owners), what she thought she might be looking for, that is, a row of Indian tepees established along the roadside by supporters of the main protest which was taking place in the Estate itself, and she had turned hard left into the lightly patrolled entrance way to the Ossian Viewpoint Estate and past the security men before Frank and Joe knew what was happening. As a consequence of which, though he hit the brakes pretty hard, Joe was a long way past the unmarked turnoff into the private road before he managed to bring the Beamer to a screaming, smoking halt that left the car nose first in a ditch with the transmission entirely wrecked and Frank suffering from whiplash. Joe got out of the car as the security men ran towards them having noticed that the impact of the crash had sprung the boot open revealing the shattered muddy remains of their old chum. Dazed, he ran round to the back of the car and tried in vain to shut the trunk as Frank turned his sore neck to see that however badly he’d thought his day had been going up till now, it was about to get catastrophically worse. He scrambled out of the car and yelled to his brother, “Run, you stupid cunt!”
12.4.2.2
He and Joe, all traces of civilised living now shed from them, plunged off the public road into the private darkness of the Ossian’s Viewpoint Estate, running, stumbling, weeping, laughing.
12.4.2.3
“Where the fuck are we going?” Ronnie asked his sister as Hunter, his tied arm dislocated by the sharp turn, blessedly lapsed into an unconsciousness he’d not wake from for fourteen hours. While Janette, for her part, weeping herself in fear, but being pumped with adrenalin, just about kept the van on the unlit private road, keeping her eyes on the distant but now approaching council fires of the Lakota.
12.5
And the clouds were gone. And the full moon sailed in the sky.
13.0
You’re just going to have to take my word for most of this.
13.1
To Tommy Hunter, on his back in his sleep, a voice comes. It’s male, American, a little nasal. Midwestern but hard to pin down to any place special. Intoning, yes, but studied in its not wishing to make a big deal of what it tells; bashful to intrude, even. Flat and uninflected, it’s a young v
oice from when the world was young, impossibly young, it’s impossible that anyone ever was that young.
Tommy swims upwards through black cotton towards consciousness. His eyes flicker open, and he misses the next few words, staring as he does, firstly, at a timbered, low ceiling of some antiquity (white, paper peeling, in need of paint, with a patch of damp in the corner) and then, coming into focus in the foreground, at two craggy, friendly looking, late-middle-aged, early old-aged faces that now hove into view from the left and right sides of his perspective, peering down at him into the well of his sight. He notes sleepily their weathered skin and brown eyes, and he reliably intuits, even through his fog of fever, their amused, ironic benevolence — surely our best hope from the company of strangers. He notices almost incidentally that they are both wearing the full facial paint and feathered head-dresses of medicine men of the Hunkpapa Sioux in time of war.
“Is he awake?” asks the slightly taller one, the more authoritative in his bearing as a head man of the Lakota.
“His eyes are open, ya dick!” says the other, his disrespect for his chieftain clearly tolerated between the two, perhaps even acting as a signifier of this cultural element of the tribal ethic as a whole.
“But can he hear us?” insists the first among equals. “Cunts can’t hear ye sometimes.” The smaller man shrugs, not caring much, enjoying the poem. His leader leans down closer to Tommy, looming, till Tommy feels his tobacco breath, the red and white stripes on his face catching some light source Tommy can’t see. “Can ye hear us, big man?” he asks Tommy slowly, old pipe smoke in a stale haze around his words. Reminded suddenly of the grandfather he hasn’t thought about in years, whose loss at an early age precipitated his own plummet into delinquency, Tommy tries to reply in the affirmative, but his tongue is heavy in the mud of his mouth, and he is already slipping back into sleep, comforted at clearly being in the care of experts.
He starts up out of the darkness again, as he feels himself being shaken back awake.
“Ho!” says his secondary attendant, demanding his attention and respect for the other man, who now introduces himself with the appropriate ceremonial form.
“I am known as Short Bull,” he says, “cos ah’m no big and ah talk shite.”
Short Bull’s eyes keek owre tae Tommy’s right at the smaller but no less smiley face of his sidekick, who introduces himself thusly also.
“I’m called Kicking Bear, eh? Cos I like tae get naked when I’m huving a boogie,” says the other, smaller man, with an upward inflection at the end of the sentence that even to Tommy’s uneducated ear is clearly an Edinburgh accent. Strangely enough it is the incongruity between the Scottish accents of these Indians rather than that these apparent redskins have Scottish accents at all that makes him wonder fleetingly, “Who are these guys?” before returning to his simple, laudable acceptance that the present, however weird it gets, is real. He is reassured. Soothed, even.
Tommy’s eyes start shutting again.
“Wir gonnae hivtae call you ‘Stuck Pig’,” says Short Bull, fading out at last, “cos you were bleeding like a fucker last night.”
Tommy sees no more for the moment, but he is aware once again, as he falls back into the comforting swell of blackness, of the recorded, ancient voice of a young Bob Dylan reciting his “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie” at Carnegie Hall way back in 1964, at the other end of space and time.
13.1.1
Short Bull straightened his back and punched Kicking Bear on the shoulder.
“Ho!” said Kicking Bear again, rubbing at his doeskin tunic.
“It might be fucking your fault,” Short Bull told him. “Not everyone likes Bob Dylan.”
Kicking Bear tchached contemptuously at the very idea — to his way of thinking, there was no sound on earth more congenial with which to return to consciousness than a bootleg recording of the individual approach to key changes of that small Jewish genius of the Northern Plains.
13.2
Kicking Bear’s monomania on the subject of singer-songwriting was only an aspect of the kinetic certainty that had brought him and his friend so far since their enforced redundancy at the shared age of fifty some twelve years back from the then downsizing (and now entirely shut) engineering works where they had both turned their tools ever since their Bonanza and High Chaparral-soaked boyhood. They had jointly brought the focus and energy and love of doing things well that had distinguished and sustained them as craftsmen to bear on their Scottish yearning for all things American and for the Wild West in particular: a yearning that had begun as a merely vicarious participation in what had always seemed a more abundant life but that had now vivified into something far more transformative and full-time with the advent of the Internet. These two redundant pipefitters had become amateurs in the best sense, in that they were now well-informed self-educated enthusiasts for the history, culture and contemporary resonances of the alliance of Plains tribes known as the Sioux. The friends had always, sentimentally speaking, been on the winning side at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (as the White Eyes called it) or the Fight at the Greasy Grass (as the blood brothers had now learned to say), delighted at the alliterative immediacy and pragmatic concrete poetry of the appellation of that last gasp of elegiac victory in the long sad story of aboriginal defeat to which they felt drawn with an irresistible historical sympathy. The twain had become proper experts now in the culture whose deep complexities and ethical structures had only become capable of acknowledgment by the Palefaces in the literal moment of their destruction some years later just down the road from the Black Hills at the little creek called Wounded Knee.
They had progressed from some fairly serious collecting of artefacts to latching onto the craze for historical reconstruction that has crossed the Atlantic of late. The highlight of their mere pageantry had been a nearly full-scale re-enactment of a Santee raid on Fort Ridgely which they’d held on the banks of Loch Lomond that had even been filmed for the telly! And why would they have wanted to just go home after something like that? Now Short Bull and Kicking Bear, completists that they were, had eschewed the obvious options of merely doing Red Indian versions of re-enacted Bannockburns over and over again on consecutive weekends, and had instead jumped in at the deep end, improbably and fully identifying, as Scots, with that other lost nation, the Indian nation. So instead of going back to their families and their disappointments, they, like Sitting Bull before them, had headed north to another country, one where they hoped that the banal blandishments of the White Man’s consumerism couldn’t reach them. And every day they had separated themselves from the consensual numbness that had exploited and robbed and lied to them all of their lives, the more certain they had become in their chosenness. These genial and determined eccentrics, first in their reconstructions, and then in a series of land occupations of disputed territories of Scotland, had been progressively joined and confirmed in their reinvention of themselves by a growing multitude drawn from other generations of the discarded, the bored and the optimistic. Just as the two of them (once their identity as working men had been stripped away from them like skin being flayed from a captive) had longed for another way to be themselves, so had those others who were likewise insulted by the crass bullshit of these last, stupefied days of the enlightenment project and had now joined them, feathered Quixotes all, in search of El Dorado.
They had reinvented themselves as the future of the human race, as noble savages, rebels, internal exiles, self-defining, the last free people of the world. They might be, to outside eyes, a loose collective of anarchists, environmentalists, dropouts, lunatics and ne’er-do-wells. To themselves they were freedom and hope itself. They lived in light. They had acquired clarity and all they had sacrificed in exchange was “security”, that most profound and seductive snare of death’s dark kingdom. Now there were nearly two hundred of them who had escaped from the allures of equilibrium, a wandering band of nostalgists for the future — a future that had seemed cancelled by the sheer unimag
inative moral idiocy of the present’s propertarians, but that they had now recovered with a naivety at which others might scoff, but without which, we’d all be living in caves or concentration camps. They, like the Covenanters or the Amish of old, had set themselves free from the preterite sphere of Old Corruption, and it was merely a matter of timing that the coming moment of their sacrificial apotheosis at the hands of that rude and rejected power should coincide with the arrival among them of Stuck Pig, as they would call Tommy Hunter for the short remainder of the space and time that his Great Spirit coincided temporarily with theirs.
They were used to vilification in the public prints, of course, but were, that morning, on the BBC and Sky, unhappily concerned at now being referred to with the same mixture of awe and contempt that the telly usually reserves for suicide bombers. They, like the Salafists, were now seen to be placing their faith in themselves above the laws of property and clearly could not be allowed to persist in such perversity. Tommy’s arrival with his family in a now crashed and useless camper van (and the coincident discovery of Jack Webster’s multiply shot and muddy corpse in the boot of Frank Wheen’s car, even though it plainly had nothing to do with the Indians) had brought public concern to a head, it seemed. The call to “do something” was being heard throughout the land.
Having been watching the telly earlier on, Short Bull and Kicking Bear (who barely even answered to Douglas and Alec any more) both knew that catastrophe was upon them and left Tommy to go and prepare their people for the consummation of the Ghost Dance. It was time to get the bulletproof shirts on.
13.2.1
In like contrast with Tommy’s wounded stupor, for the other characters in our little passion play, things were moving towards crisis point at a likewise rapid clip.
The looming apocalypse, for Danny Boyle and Maggie Singleton, had begun with renewed joy as the erotic possibilities of uncomplicated happiness had further unfolded themselves to them twice that morning in ways that quite frankly startled both of them. They were in such a state of stunned ecstasy even after they’d enjoyed a shower together that they only slowly became aware of the appalled news broadcast from the mainland of the hideous discovery made at the gates of the Ossian’s Viewpoint Occupation and didn’t understand the direct import of that news until the repetition of looped images inherent in the twenty-four-hour news cycle finally broke through to Maggie, as they drank their fruit juice and dragged their eyes from each other’s elated, stupefied faces towards the world, or at least towards the television.