The Stillman

by Tom McCulloch

  The last few years have been a struggle. I feel I am caught in a holding pattern, like a plane. Down I swing, round those concentric circles until it is my turn at the bottom of the stack, running on fumes. Just let death come quickly. Let that final moment be right here, up with the jumbled rooftops on my thousand-mile balcony. I am running out of patience, I cannot understand the happiness and zest for life I see around me. It nauseates me.

  What a misanthrope I am!

  What a facade I have built and sold all these years. My colleagues think me the life and soul of the party. They know I drink but when you couple it with eccentricity then you are not pitied for such obvious weakness but rather admired. You become a ‘character’.

  There was a man in the town where I grew up, Daft Ally. A raging alcoholic, handy with the fists on his crestfallen wife. But Ally wore a red fedora and this was enough to take the edge off, to make almost a sentimental excuse of such a horrible man. He too was a ‘character’. We need their existence as a reassuring reminder of our own normality, mundanity and bland conformity.

  Are you like me? Do you only allow certain very-well chosen friends to glimpse the non-public? I have two friends like that. Leonardo is one, my philosophical sounding post, a man for the strategic overview of the absurdities of this existence. The other is Adelina. She is young enough to be my daughter and please do not patronise me by seeing in her the projection of the daughter I always wanted.

  While she is my necessary naivety it would be trite to say that she reminds me of myself. I do not have the temperament to exaggerate similarities. To see your self in another is like wandering across a mine-field. You are liable to blow everything out of all proportion in a desperate attempt to re-live lost memories. Adelina, she bruises so easily. Her story would break your heart.

  I apologise for these asides. I must better hold your attention if I am to continue to indulge the delusion that you are still reading.

  Tell me, how well have I tackled the subject of John Tannehill? Was the lead-in too involved, perhaps I should have broached the subject sooner? I only wanted you to have an understanding of the context, not to be excused but to offer the beginnings of an explanation. John had to be introduced, he had to grow in your imagination. To state straight-away that he may be your father would have been far too shocking. My intention was to give you the opportunity to develop a growing sense of him, certain character traits revealed, his weaknesses and his gifts. He can never be whole, I know, but who can be when edited and abstracted by words?

  My enduring hope is that I have been able to present enough of John Tannehill to allow the shock of the revelation to be mitigated, for you to reflect on John as somewhat known, slightly less of a stranger.

  You must not blame Edward. As far as he has ever been concerned you are his son. He is a good man. Why would I have risked a switch in his attitude towards you by stirring up the embers of repressed doubt? A choice revelation can corrupt even the best.

  There was no certainty in any case, I had no proof. All I could offer was the fact that I wanted to believe your father was John. And while there is cruelty in most truths there is even more in a suggestion that cannot be proved. Even I am not capable of that. This is why I suspect that you will not raise the subject either. He is an old man now, why send him to his grave with such a trauma?

  ‘What about my ignorance?’ you shout, ‘why did my sociopathic mother deign to enlighten me?’ Indeed, you too could have been maintained in ignorance. But your right is so much stronger than Edward’s. A better question would be why I have chosen to tell you now. I do not know, maybe it is simply death again, my closeness to it risking my disappearing without telling you. I imagine you pondering some emotional or physical trait which cannot be found in your father, something which has always triggered a vague unease. It was the slightest possibility of such moments which made up my mind.

  John is long dead now. I do not suppose this surprises you. He died in a fly-blown hotel room in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1974, his heart long weakened by heroin. I woke up beside him and cried for a year.

  We had talked about you so much. He said he would wait until you turned eighteen and then make contact. Not that John would ever have done this. ‘I don’t want to ruin two lives’, he said, meaning yours and Edward’s. John is another you must not blame. I thought him so worldly but he was an innocent, too fragile for this life. I loved him. I mothered him. There is a hidden part of every woman which wants to mother her lover, don’t let the feminists tell you otherwise.

  We imagined a life with you, we carried you with us from Alexandria to Tangiers, New York to Guadalajara. As the years passed we wondered about the person you were becoming, the world you may change. We imagined so many futures for you and were so jealous of Edward. Not that John was bitter. He was a dreamer, a wonderful father only in his fantasies. No, I am the only person you should blame.

  Does it help to know that I never allowed myself to consider what kind of mother I would have made? I abdicated that right at Waverley Station, 1962. We get through them, do we not, life’s traumas?

  * * *

  My wife mobilised Malky after the Crisis Summit in the kitchen. Any chance he could pick us up in the Land Rover tomorrow evening and take us down to ‘Columba’s View’, the purpose-built wedding venue that opened in the village a few years back. Amber had loved it from the start and I suspect it was the irresistible appeal of Columba’s View rather than the Hollywood dream-life with Peter the Chip that put the afterburners on her wedding fantasies.

  The Land Rover appears out of the snowy mist like Scatman Crothers snowcat in The Shining. The thought of a crazed Jack Nicholson leaping out from behind a bush and planting an axe in Peter’s skull is warmly cheering on such a cold night. We all cram in, me, my father, Amber, my wife, the Boy, Peter, and Vari from next door who’s agreed to stand-in for the Registrar who can’t make it because of the snow but who reluctantly, self-importantly, this is a bit irregular, agreed to email over her script so we can run through it in her absence.

  ‘St. Columba didn’t come anywhere near here,’ says the Boy.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ says Amber.

  ‘True though. He travelled everywhere by boat, and always on the west coast.’

  ‘So what. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Matters to me. Heritage and history are a lot of shite if you just make it all up.’

  I’m again startled by the Boy’s insight. I haven’t had a conversation with him for months. Who knows what knowledge he might have soaked up? The wee weirdo might be an unknown Einstein in our midst. Is it better to have a happy idiot for a son, or a tortured genius?

  ‘I just got another one, Mum.’

  ‘Barry?’

  ‘Oh God, what if he turns up!’

  ‘Mad Bazza?’ says the Boy.

  ‘Shut UP!’

  ‘What’s this,’ I say.

  Peter shifts in his seat, tries not to catch anyone’s eye. My wife tells me that Barry McGill, Amber’s long-time ex-boyfriend, has finished his latest tour in Helmand, found out about the wedding and started bombarding her with texts. I always loved you Amber . . . how can you betray me . . . He was always a strange boy, scary eyes like Ray Liotta. Even as I’m reassuring Amber that it’ll be fine I’m seeing Mad Bazza gliding across the snow like some special forces nutter, making his way to Columba’s View, floating on the night like a Taliban compound.

  Old Abe lets us in, once a cooper at the distillery and now the perma-scowled superintendent of the wedding venue. He leads us from the main building across the bridge to the little island with the conservatory-type structure where they have the ceremonies. Inside, the lights illuminate one by one in an elegant spiral from a central point in the low domed ceiling. Outside, the floodlight beams merge into the snow, no sign of the view that so appealed to the ancient saint, the meadow that slopes down to the river, the mountains beyond. We stand in semi-circular space surrounded by our disembodied reflections in the
six feet high windows, my wife moving us like chess pieces on the black and white tiled floor.

  My father sits in a chair by the sleek, black granite bar, Abe next to him in mirrored pose, hands clasped on top of their walking sticks. He looks tiny in his ancient duffel coat. I remember when he filled it, chest puffed to a world faced down. Abe cracks a painful-looking smile and shares something with my father, who bends his head to catch what’s being said.

  He looks bemused as he straightens up, then bends down again as if waiting for Abe’s repetition that doesn’t come. The detachment quickly returns. Is he thinking of my mother in her blue dress? That’s what we’re supposed to do at these moments, isn’t it? How else are we expected to find any kind of interest in the situation unless through selfish comparison with our own lives? When I catch my wife’s eye I find no remembered affection, just the usual suspicion that we’ve each been replaced by imposters who mean as little to one another as the broken, snow-fuzzed reflections represent true images of ourselves.

  Vari’s no good at the registrar role, she must have a reading age of five. Amber gets upset, convinced its going to be a disaster and Vari’s apologizing and saying third time lucky, I promise but we all know it won’t be, can’t be. Again I take Amber’s arm in mine, my wife telling us to slow down a bit and now we’re out of step and doing a strange bumpy walk across the floor and we’re almost back in time when the Boy turns Somewhere Over the Rainbow off too soon and now Amber really is crying. Peter just stares, he looks as bemused as my father and I wonder if their personalities have quietly merged on a deep subconscious plane.

  ‘We’ll get through it,’ says my wife, and gives Amber a hug.

  ‘Will we?’

  ‘Of course we will darling, we always do!’

  My mother finished her latest missive with the same sentiment. We get through them, do we not, life’s traumas? It’s shocking to realise how alike my mother and my wife are. That same intense practicality and one-track mind, the bloody-minded belief that once, just once, they’ll bend the world to their will. Ah well, ‘tis said that sons end up marrying women who remind them of blah blah blah. But it’s strange, the more credulous would say profound, to think that even though I’ve never known my mother my wife can be so similar. They’d have got on like a house on fire. I can just see her sitting beside my dozing father, another figure in this sagging tableau, where everyone holds their stage-managed position, their breath, the only movement the floodlit flurrying snow. I know for sure that she’ll haunt me, the ghost of someone I only came to know after death. I have no idea which has more repercussions, this imagined haunting or the bona fide one awaiting me when the snow stops.

  The next day the blizzard does, of course, stop. There’s no need for the contingencies that have been readied anyway, Malky bribed with a bottle in case the Land Rover’s needed again, a lake of venison stew made and frozen, spare suits checked and passed for wearability.

  I wait for Adelina. I try not to think of her letters. I’m edgier with every passing car, every arrival that might be her. My wife and Amber escape for the Hen Day. I watch them from the bedroom window and I’m still standing there an hour later. Two days until the wedding. One more shift and I’m on leave, my wife and I heading to the Costa Blanca after the happy nuptials for a week’s holiday neither of us want. A second honeymoon, she said. I had to admire her willingness, although it sounded more like a question she wasn’t sure about asking.

  I’ve been given a list of things to do, including cleaning the house. When I questioned why I was told just do it, people might come round. But why would they when we’ll be seeing and feeding the buggers at the wedding? At least I don’t have the chore of looking after the old man. Maggie’s made it through the snow and I won’t have to cancel my shift.

  It passes too quickly. Many find it unbelievable I take so much enjoyment in working the stills after all this time. It’s the contrast between the ever-shifting soundscapes and the never-changed process. Imagine I told Rankin that, held a hand in front of my face and rubbed my fingers, like a flouncy art-critic looking for the right words? I wouldn’t be trusted again, how could a man who likes his job, who finds pleasure in it, ever be trusted? But there’s always something. Today it was the dappled stains on the wall running the length of the Stillhouse. Eight hours I wandered back and fore, conjuring shapes from the grubby marks, wondering when they happened, what they meant, if they’d emerged over time like liver spots.

  She’s there when I come off shift.

  I pause beside the Dark Grains Plant on the other side of the bridge from my house. Seeing her opens the floodgates, the content of the letters I’ve spent the last few days holding back now rushing over me, an amorphous whole, without detail, the collective crushing weight of emotional failure, failure now demanding anger, anger to overwhelm everything else.

  She’s standing by the garden gate. Behind her the living room window glows in the failing light, maybe a shape moving behind the net curtains. It could be Maggie, wondering who’s standing out there in the cold, too uncertain of her authority to go out and ask what she wants. Des is walking a bit ahead of me and gives Adelina a stare as he passes and looks back at me. She’s moving from foot to foot, thumping her arms against her sides. When she sees me coming she suddenly stops and takes off her Davy Crockett. She smiles, but only briefly.

  I can’t bring myself to cross the bridge. I stare at the walls of the Dark Grains Plant. More stains, that alcoholicy mould again. The Angel’s Share Fungus, I finally looked it up, can’t remember the botanical name, black and creeping and if I stand here long enough I’ll see it move, fingering out and writing my name, some message, wisdom on these disconsolate walls.

  The amorphous jumble of distillery noises becomes distinct, louder, the thrum of the Stillhouse and the machine room whine. The fizz from the pipe taking the draff from Mashroom to the Dark Grains Plant swells to a white rush. She’s still there on the edge of sound, unmoved. I look to the sky, as if the blizzard might suddenly return and again delay the unavoidable.

  Everything in every life is ever-approaching, some situations as inevitable as the Reaper’s rap on the midnight door. To mention death isn’t overly dramatic. After all, Cuba has irrevocably passed. Adelina and I are dead. She knows it too, I’ve seen it in her dark eyes. My unwillingness to come to terms with the loss could be the very reason I’ve avoided her. Those memories, I was once so careful with them. I told myself when I came back that I didn’t want over-familiarity to give way to corruption. In truth I don’t mind embellishment, selective forgetting, all the unconscious stratagems that bring our lives a little bit more drama.

  So how will I remember this moment? Adelina, I’m angry with her for making absolutes of those memories when I thought they’d be ever-living, as untrustworthy as any other story.

  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

  Adelina stood naked in the little bathroom. Through the doorway I lay on my mother’s bed. She looked at her reflection in the mirror, turning her head from one side to the other, comparing the profiles, leaning forward and tracing the lines on her forehead. She let her hands wander across her body, lightly pinching the skin here and there, testing the elasticity.

  Did she always do this when drunk? She smiled at me, her gaze moving to the jewellery box on the bedside table. A questioning raise of the eyebrows, a swirl of the drink in her hand.

  My mother had some lovely pieces, delicate threaded bead necklaces, painted wood, silver and pewter bracelets, two endless-knot Buddhist pendants in turquoise and coral that she must have picked up when she taught in Kathmandu. Adelina placed the turquoise pendant round her neck, stepping back for a better view in the mirror. It suited her, hanging between her smallish breasts, still quite pert, not bad for a thirty-five year old. She trailed her fingers slowly across her chest, lingering on the nipples with little circles until they swelled, moving on to the pendant, maybe brass, copper, tracing the knot round and round.


  Adelina sat down beside me and cradled my head. I moved round and placed my mouth over her nipple, my tongue tracing little light circles, as her fingers had. I began sucking her, greedily, like a child. She tried to push me away but I kept my mouth where it was, my hand moving roughly between her thighs. But her gaze was empty when I pushed her back on the bed. She understood the significance and would still let me do this. I didn’t take my eyes off my mother’s pendant as I fucked her, trying to ignore the part of me that wanted to hurt her.

  Afterwards we lay sweating. The floor fan thrummed, moved slightly from side to side on its wobbly legs. Beyond the balcony the unseen moon lightened Havana’s night to cemetery grey.

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘We sleep.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then it will be day.’

  ‘You know what I mean Adelina.’

  She pulled her legs up to her chest and seemed to have no intention of answering.

  ‘My flight’s at 2 o’clock the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘I am on holiday. I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Come with me?’

  ‘To the airport. Don’t worry, I don’t mean I’m taking the flight!’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘I know.’

  She didn’t turn round when I placed a hand on her shoulder. I pushed back a treasonous swell of sadness, rising from the place that wanted her to pour out every futile word.

  ‘You can keep it, if you like, the pendant. You can have all her jewellery, I don’t know what to do with it.’

  ‘Is there nothing you want?’

  ‘Why?’ I rolled away and reached for the bottle, pouring myself a large, straight ron. ‘I had no memories of her to begin with, nothing except one photograph. Why would I want that to change?’

  ‘Will you take the photos?’