‘She’s too fat.’ Then he runs to the stairs and starts shouting. ‘Who ate all the pies, who ate all the pies?’
My wife’s face is back in an instant. ‘You, back to your room. Now. Jim, why can’t you keep your mouth shut?’
No point answering. No point protesting. The afternoon feels suddenly heavy and I decide to escape. The Boy’s evaporated. At times he’s almost soundless. Maybe my wife’s right and there is something wrong with him. She looks at me with loathing when I come downstairs. Amber’s still sniffling away in the bathroom. I pop my head round the living-room door and see who must be the dress-fitter sitting on the couch. She’s trying to figure out what she should do, pretending to read one of my wife’s magazines, trying to not to be there at all.
Peter’s the last person I expect when I open the back door. He looks excited, expectant.
‘Well?’
‘Eh?’
‘How’s it going in there?’
‘Fine.’
‘Does she look good?’
‘Looks fine.’
‘She’d look beautiful in a sack,’ he grins.
I hesitate for a moment, looking for the piss-take. ‘What are you doing here Peter, isn’t it bad luck or something?’
‘You believe in all that shite? I just wanted a peek but they’ve shut the living room curtains. Must’ve known I’d sneak along!’
‘I’ll see you later Peter, just going for a walk.’
‘Mind if I come along?’
I do but he comes anyway.
We head up the hill running parallel to the house, following the single-track as it swings towards the village, three miles away. No tyre-marks, just the criss-crossings of deer and hare. We follow the forestry track into the woods. The pines and spruce are packed so dense that even after so much snow there are occasional patches of brown needly ground under some.
It takes twenty minutes before the burbling begins. Like he was being respectful. Now and then I glance at his big nose. Sometimes a line of snot hangs there, would it freeze if he left it alone? Like an icicle, a snoticle. He’s telling me that all he wants to do is make Amber happy, that he knows what some people say about him but he’s really a changed man since he met her. That’s good, I say, and uh-huh. He’s looking for reassurance, desperately hoping that I’m going to say something like sure son, you’ll make a fine husband and son-in-law. I don’t, naturally, and he gets increasingly nervous. He should understand that this is what a father must do, reserve his judgement. He must be able to project himself into my position and understand the wariness. He must come to understand my ambiguity.
We head onto the moor. A hare bolts out from under my feet and I watch its zigzag escape into the milky void. The wind skries, conjures up a blinding spindrift. I take care not to reveal to Peter my delight in these moments. We take shelter in a decrepit grouse hide, sitting in silence.
‘I really do mean it Jim.’
I decide to take pity. ‘I know you do.’
His hug is unexpected. Like his relief has suddenly overflowed into this inappropriate show of affection. I let him hold me for a couple of seconds. Fat snowflakes settle on the sleeves of my waterproof jacket. What would it be like to die out here on the moor, behind this misty curtain with the afternoon light fading faster and faster? My last thoughts would be about my warm breath in the cold air, how it fogs less and less as my body heat gives gradually out.
But I forget. Peter’s here. No chance of a dignified end with Pete around. He’d have me on my back, pumping my chest and giving me the kiss of life. You must be a bit confused when you come back from the brink of death, a tad disoriented to say the least. What would you make of coming round to your daughter’s red faced fiancé straddling and snogging you?
He’s saying something about climbers being killed in the mountains. They didn’t have the proper gear, froze to death twenty minutes from the car park. Can you believe it? Couple of fuckin idiots. . . . The more I ignore him the more panicked he gets, one of those people who fill gaps in conversation with any old crap. Every time I see Peter he’s moaning about something, an old fart before his time. Soon he’ll start on about his ailments, how he’s struggling by. He’ll become like Luis the building superintendent back in Cuba. Why did he insist on showing us his swollen, scabby feet before he let us into my mother’s apartment?
* * *
The temperature rises. For a day or so the snow holds out. I hear it first, a slow dripping from the gutters. Then the burn, rising in volume as melt-water swells. Peaty water eats away at overhangs of ice which detach soundlessly. The snow-plough carves black scars into the white.
Then the crows appear. I see the first on the wooden platform of the bird feeder in the garden. It’s so ravenous it doesn’t even look at me as I stand there watching it peck furiously at the withered nuts. Something on the fringe about crows, the blue-oily feathers that catch the light. It clambers skywards and gives a harsh scrawk, proper crow vernacular, what the fuck are you looking at? I follow it to the top of the dark grains plant. There’s a whole murder crowding up there, silhouetted against the silvered sky, still others above the Stillhouse.
The temperature drops, freezes everything solid. Five days the crows remain. I pass under their monitoring gaze as I walk between my house and the Stillhouse. We start discussing them, surprise giving way to a vague unease. Malky says he chased off half a dozen ripping at his bin bags. Camp Gary says he flung a stick and was chased by a whole gang. Clawed in the fuckin head, he says, but who’s going to believe Gary? No-one remembers so many crows and it’s inevitable that we’ll talk about them for years. It’ll be called the Winter of Crows. Remember the Winter of Crows? Must’ve been the weather. We’ll all have our stories and we’ll all remember differently. Must’ve been a coupla hundred of them, eh?
But I’ll remember more, black huddles along telephone wires and rooftops, squatting on our shed roof. I hear them cackling in the dark as I gather logs, see them briefly in headlight beams of the new-model Audis sweeping down from the distillery offices and past me.
The heads I glimpse in the green-lit front seats are darkly identical, once the glow of a cigar, maybe a turning face. The emergency board meeting called in response to the 19 to 5 vote in favour of a strike must be over. Jack will be on the phones. The laughter from the shed roof suddenly swells, like what difference can it possibly make? Then a low ruuush ruuush that takes a moment to grasp. The beat of wings, the crows on the move into black magic night.
In the tea-hut on Monday morning I think about passing on what I know. How the crows followed the suits out of the distillery. How their cries had merged with the low roar of high-powered engines. How all had gradually faded into silence. But I don’t. The supernatural runs close enough to the surface in this place without encouraging it. That’d be an omen, lucky or otherwise, and I can’t be bothered with all the frowns and questions and incredulous looks and are you sure it wasn’t one of your weird films? Instead I listen to the crow stories, the speculation about what the management is going to do and the endless football banter, waiting for Rankin to pop his head round the door so I can take over in the Stillhouse.
The atmosphere changes immediately when Slinky appears at the door. He’s got a big red zit in the middle of his forehead. It’s almost boil-like and he knows we’re all staring at it. This is guaranteed to unnerve him. Slinky’s too vain to realise that his ever-immaculate appearance only provokes mistrust. He’s avoided, like late-winter ice on Lochan Dubh.
‘Morning boys.’
A couple of grunted hellos.
‘Robert’s on his way.’ Slinky waits for someone to look at him. ‘He wants to pass on what was said at the board meeting.’
I swear there’s a little gleam in Slinky’s eyes. He backs out of the door, deferential, and if he was wearing a cap he’d probably be doffing it to the tubby, red-faced man who comes into the tea-hut. Robert Burns (no joke) started with me in the warehouses years ago when we w
ere both 18. If you want an identikit ‘Good German’ for a war movie then Rab’s your man. He’s got the proper buzz cut and the gloomy jowls, the darting gaze of a man permanently in the midst of an existential dilemma. But he’s a decent man, whatever that means.
‘All right lads. How’s it going? See those crows finally fucked off.’
The response is better this time, Rab’s got the respect Slinky can only dream about. He’s worked himself up, see?
‘Not going to piss you about lads. The board was pretty disappointed with the strike vote. I was too, as you know. But that’s your right, I know that. I can understand why you’re angry. These are tough times. Not just here but all over. No one likes to be constantly wondering if their job’s going down the shitter.’
It’s an act, of course, the concerned manager keeping it real. Slinky’s letting the side down. He’s barely able to contain his contempt, impatiently fidgeting, waiting for Rab to get to the point.
‘I want you to know that I did my best to keep your interests to the fore during the meeting. And I’ll be brutally honest with you, we talked short-time, we talked about redundancies, but we also talked about substantial investment from the corporate centre. All options were on the table. And nothing was decided. But I tell you boys, the strike’s not in your interests. We’d like a delegation from the workforce to negotiate directly with representatives from the board. All the options. But you’ve got to call the strike off. You’ve got to take this – ’
‘Where’s Jack?’ asks Camp Gary.
‘He’s due on at 8.15, shouldn’t he be here?’
Slinky’s smirking now. It’s only 7.55, Jack’s probably still driving.
‘But he’s not here, is he? You should be taking this up with him Rab, he’s the shop steward,’ says Malky.
Rab gives his glasses a dainty polish and settles them back on his neb. ‘I thought I’d come straight to you boys, you don’t need Jack to be holding your hands, do you? It’s not my fault he’s not here.’
‘You should’ve waited,’ says Camp Gary.
And then Jack appears. ‘Bloody right you should’ve waited. I’m the designated liaison. This is bang out of order!’
Jack’s always been one conspiracy theory away from David Icke but this might have him buying the turquoise shell-suit. He shoves past Slinky who shoves back. Then Camp Gary steps forward and shoves Slinky, who looks genuinely scared. Before you can say righteous motherfucker they’re on the floor and Slinky’s got a cut above the right eye.
No-one says anything. It’s like an intense fight scene in a Jack Palance flick, the seen-it-all-before cynics looking blithely on, the way it’s always been boys, the way to settle things. There’s even snow beginning to fall beyond the cooperage doors, a script you wouldn’t believe, big flakes blowing around the two men wrestling on the wet floor, breathing hard, their feet kicking up water. Rab and Jack have disappeared and I wonder briefly where they are. It’s just me and Malky watching the silent fight, then Rankin appears at the Filling Store door on the far side of the cooperage. He’s got this big, shit-eating grin as he leans against the wall and lights a rollie. A fine idea. I roll myself a fat one and hand the baccy to Malky.
All day long I’m sought out. Did you see the fight then? They know I did, of course. Who started it Jim, what do you think’ll happen next? I have no answers to these questions and my lack of interest disappoints some people and annoys others. So little happens round here they can’t understand why I don’t want to talk about it. I’d rather listen to the pot stills. You get more sense from them. Each one’s an individual, always something different to consider.
Today there’s a pissed off fizzzz in number two spirit, a cool huuum in four. Imagine how the tastes would differ if the spirit from each still was separately matured instead of being mixed together? Imagine the taste of different emotions; anger, happiness, uncertainty, singularities that everyone can identify with, none of that ‘hints of fig and banana’ or ‘choco-peaty top note’ pish. The taste of fifteen year-old contempt, that’s what I want.
Camp Gary appears at lunchtime. He’s got a cut above his lip; see that, it’s like a little ‘z’, like Zorro! He’s been on a celebratory tour, showing off his wound in the cooperage, visitor centre, warehouses . . . An easy win, I can’t think of anyone apart from Stan who likes Slinky. And no-one likes Stan either. Gary takes the laptop from me before I can complain.
‘Have a read of that.’
‘What?’ He’s opened the website of The Sun.
‘My stars, Libra. ‘‘Today you will be the centre of attention. People will seek you out to congratulate you and it will seem like you can do no wrong. Today is a day you will feel rightly invincible.’’ What do think of that eh?’
‘Amazing.’
‘I’ve been wanting to hit that little fucker for years and all this time it was written in the stars.’
When Gary leaves I read my own horoscope, Taurus. With your antenna on red alert right now you’re suspicious of your family when their stories don’t add up. Try not to jump to conclusions because their secret may involve a nice surprise. If I had coffee to splutter it would’ve just been spluttered all over the laptop. Babs Cainer was on fire today, first Camp Gary and now me. My wife has a near-religious devotion to Ms Cainer’s delusions and if I mention this there’ll be a triumphant I told you so! But I’m a fair man, mostly, sometimes even charlatans deserve their due. Another email arrived late last night. I haven’t read it. But when the universe, the stars goddammit, tell you to do something I suppose you have to listen.
I settle back on the chair and click to My Documents, where I’ve saved Helen’s Journal 4.
Havana, Cuba, 9/4/1999
‘You can’t run forever!’ Because running is running away and running away is bad. That is what they say, yes? Like all such platitudes it is nonsense. You can keep on running for as long as you like. That is the key, the liking. As long as you enjoy running then you are going to keep doing it and why not? Only when you stop enjoying it does the switch flick, the running become a bad thing.
You can’t, you shouldn’t . . . wherever you go the Morality Police are at your elbows (keep them sharp!). Once or twice I have watched people change in front of my eyes, people I respected, the decision arrived at in the middle of our conversation (maybe it’s me!). Out comes the permanent marker and the arbitrary stop line. It is like a religious conversion, stripping away remembrance of all things past. They refuse, suddenly, to see the series of decisions that led them to here, to this point. If they had not made their own choices, if they had not decided to run, then they would not have even arrived at where they are now, they would still be in the same boa constrictor-like town or village they were born in. Those are the ones I distrust the most, the ones with cold bunker eyes too scared to ever leave.
Look at it this way, if it had not been for John Tannehill then I would not be here now. What’s this, who is this John Tannehill I hear you ask? I will come to him soon enough. Two more shots and I would have been straight off on that tangent. Luckily I am relatively sober. It has been raining, you see, and I feel cleansed.
This isn’t the kind of cold, morose rain that you are imagining and I remember. This is the hurricane’s rain, hard and warm. I run to the balcony when the first thunder comes, I love to watch the sky darken, the street below me emptying, the chatter and shouts as people make a dash for shelter. Leonardo always comes to the door of the café and looks up, gesticulates for me to get back inside, ‘la lluvia,’ he shouts, ‘la lluvia!’ I feel like Christ, I am Christ when I take my clothes off and spread my arms wide and lean back, face to the angry sky, those drops heavier, heavier on my face, my chest.
There is no feeling like the tranquil aftermath. Stripped bare and cleansed, the mind clear. It is the only clarity I get these days and in those moments it is always John Tannehill I see. As he is meant to be seen, not as I will remember him half a bottle later.
As I say, I will com
e to him soon enough. It is hard to keep the thread of these words. How I have managed to keep teaching for so many years. My pupils must be completely bewildered. I pass them all but God only knows if they take away more than a smattering of English.
Let us back up a little. I was talking about choices. My first major one was my flee from the Northlands. A flee it most certainly was, I did not mention that I had been targeted by the local bank manager, a fastidious forty year-old with a bald head and tiny cock (my apologies, but one must call a spade a spade, or a tiny cock a tiny cock), who was desperate to get married. But if I had not run away then you would not be reading this now because I would not have met your father. Ergo, the running away was not a ‘bad thing’.
However, I have lately been wondering about the greyness that surrounds ‘choice’. What if our life’s outcomes really are as pre-programmed as the priapic bishops claim and we are ever-destined to meet who we are ever-supposed to, regardless of context? Like an ongoing, interlinked re-working of an incredibly complicated pattern. Perhaps if I had chosen to stay in my hometown your father Edward would have made a decision to move there, or maybe he would even have lived there to begin with. Or vice versa, or both. In any case a rearrangement would have somehow happened, placing Edward and me in the same context at the same time so we could meet each other.
Maybe the older I get the more I believe that. I am not stupid, I realise it is the proximity of death, searching for patterns, meaning, hoping we’re not just making it up as we go along. I have spent far too much time in Catholic countries. Some people think God is dead in Cuba, but I have never been anywhere he is closer.
An old woman gets religion, what a bore! Even if I had come up with a wise new universal truth you would have dismissed it out of hand as egotistical nonsense, the same old reconstituted crap. Are there any original thoughts left? Thousands of years we’ve been bumbling around, the narrative possibilities must be exhausted by now. Here I am holding forth like everyone else who thinks they have got something important to say. I don’t, I am silently screaming like the rest of us, hoping someone might decide to listen.
The Stillman Page 8