365

by James Robertson

  ‘This is you trying to prove a point, isn’t it?’ Jill said. He nodded minutely. She sighed, opened her purse and placed a pound in the upturned palm.

  Alex made a whirring noise in his throat and began to move like a mechanical toy. He pocketed the coin, bowed stiffly to Jill and mimed gratitude before extending the hand and becoming a human statue again.

  ‘I see,’ Jill said. ‘Street theatre, is it?’ Another nod. ‘Well, I’m away to John Lewis. I’ll phone you in an hour.’

  A minute earlier he’d been complaining about not being able to move for the bloody Fringe, the rich kids up from Cambridge with their so-called bloody comedy shows, the bloody dawdling tourists and the bloody street performers. Now he’d decided to be one.

  She could hear him already. ‘Easy peasy.’ Even if he didn’t earn a penny he’d go to a bank and swap a tenner for mixed coins just so he could say to her, ‘Look, money for old rope.’ She could read him like a book.

  Well, he’d be paying for the coffee.

  3 August

  Nightmares

  When I was five or six, I dreamed repeatedly of being in a church with my mother. It was not a church either of us had entered before, either in the dream or in reality. The building stretched up into utter darkness: the roof was too far away to be seen. Sets of arched double doors, massively tall, far bigger than the height of any normal person, were set on each side of the pulpit. The pulpit too was of a stupendous size.

  Nobody but us appeared to be in this church. We were waiting, presumably, for a service to begin. Beside the pew in which we sat was a great stone pillar with a board on it displaying the numbers of the hymns that would be sung if the service ever happened.

  I wanted to leave. My mother whispered that we had to stay. I could tell that she wanted to leave too. Like me, she was afraid of something. I was afraid of the gloom, the shadowy emptiness and those great double doors through which some unimaginably large being might come. It seemed to me that she was afraid of something else.

  I always woke up before anybody or anything came through the doors. Sometimes I woke crying, and she would be there. Sometimes I did not cry, and she did not come.

  To learn that it was better not to cry was a hard lesson, but I learned it.

  Another recurring nightmare, which I had when a few years older, involved me being on the deck of an old sailing ship – a pirate ship perhaps – which was travelling over a sickly, smooth, black sea towards black rocks. There was no wind in the sails yet the ship rushed towards its destruction at an evil speed. There was a wheel but it resisted all my efforts to turn it and alter the ship’s course. All I could do was prepare for the impact.

  Afterwards, the rocks were covered with small black pieces of wreckage like burst balloons.

  There was no sign of me. It was my dream, but I had vanished from it.

  Nobody came, because by then I was a big boy.

  4 August

  Wait

  You pull in to a passing place to let the van by. Impatient bastard. Sure, probably he has twenty more drops to make before he can knock off, and the distances between drops will be big around here and some of the addresses not that easy to find. No doubt he doesn’t need to be stuck behind you, but you certainly don’t need him tailgating you on this twisting single-track road. And wouldn’t you think, with the road, and the weather, and the views at every turn, he might just ease his foot off the pedal, think to himself, Well, these parcels will get where they’re going sooner or later, so why not make it later? No, it doesn’t work like that. You wish it did, for his sake if for nobody else’s. Nobody else would be the worse for it.

  You are about to pull out again when you catch yourself about to pull out. Wait a minute. You apply the handbrake, lower the window, switch off the engine. The tide is in, the loch full, blue and beautiful. Two horses in a field to your left, cows and sheep dotted across the fields to your right, down to the sea, as if the hand of some celestial modeller had placed them just so on the green slopes. Across the loch, three or four low houses, stone-built, small-windowed, one at least with a corrugated-tin roof. They shimmer in the sun, floating just above the water, like ghosts of houses.

  You sit and watch for as long as it takes to sit and watch. A bee drones by. You scribble down a few words, a net to catch the moment. You know that you won’t really catch it.

  Sometimes a day cracks open like this. It reveals another day, as a rose opens to reveal another folded layer of rose. Those houses will never again haunt the loch like that. Those animals will never occupy the fields in that same patternless pattern. You will never pull into this passing place and let the window down to this particular moment. The van driver and his urgency are gone. Let them go further. Wait another minute. Wait.

  5 August

  Sympathy

  for Pat, Anne and Angus

  The hills above Glen Loth seem low and round and gentle seen from the coast, especially on a fine summer’s day. But there is wild country up there. In bad weather a man could quickly become confused and disorientated, and not easily find his way home again.

  There was a minister of Loth, Robert Robertson, of whom it is written that ‘it was during Mr Robertson’s time, and from the parish of Loth, that the last unfortunate victim suffered for witchcraft, being burned to death at Dornoch’. That was in 1727. Her name was Janet Horne. The story of her and her daughter, who only narrowly avoided the fate of her mother, is well known. But it is Robert Robertson who concerns me here.

  He did not condemn the poor woman – that was the work of the sheriff-depute of Sutherland – but did he judge her? It is hard to believe he played no role at all. Did he question her accusers? Remonstrate with them? With whom did he sympathise, her or them?

  He had a cousin, Francis, minister of the neighbouring parish of Clyne, and they must have been of similar age, because they gained their degrees in the same year, 1710. Did Francis and Robert speak on the matter? Was it out of their hands? Could they not have done something to stop what happened? She was strangled to death and burned in a barrel, for Christ’s sake. Did they condone or condemn it? Or did they say nothing?

  I thought of these things today in the graveyard at Clyne, overlooking Brora and the sea, with the hills of Loth to the north, benign and richly clad in heather. We were burying Jack, who’d led a good life and a long one, and it seemed a fine place to leave him in the sunshine, with not a bit of wind or rain to disturb him. A world away from the accusation and condemnation of a demented old woman. This is something, anyway, to be thankful for.

  They were my ancestors, Francis and Robert. And Robert had a younger brother, James, of whom all that is known is that he was ‘bred to the sea’.

  6 August

  The Noise from Loth

  Those hills are not so benign. An old book records that when John, sixth Earl of Sutherland, was travelling with his retinue in the year 1602, his harper, one Donald Maclean, ‘perished in the Glen of Loth from a sudden snow storm’.

  I am thinking of Janet Horne, who came from these parts, and was the last ‘witch’ to be executed in Scotland. Mr James Fraser, minister of Alness, writes in April 1727 to his friend Mr Robert Wodrow, minister of Eastwood: ‘Since I saw you in Edinburgh in May last, there has been great noise of witchcraft in the parish of Loth, by which the minister is said to have suffered. He is not yet recovered; however, the thing has been examined into, and the women were, I know, before the presbytery.’

  Two years before Janet Horne was tested and found to be a servant of Satan – because, among other signs, she stumbled over the opening words when asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer in her native Gaelic – yet another Church of Scotland minister, Francis Hutcheson, was in Dublin writing treatises on Beauty, Order, Harmony and Design and on Moral Good and Evil. Two years after Janet’s execution, Hutcheson became Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University. He was an intellectual precursor to what became known as the Scottish Enlightenment. ‘That action is
best,’ he wrote, ‘which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers; and that, worst, which, in like manner, occasions misery.’

  Two hundred miles to the north, the superstitious and sanctimonious majority would have condemned Hutcheson’s view that humans can distinguish between virtue and vice without reference to, or even knowledge of, God. But though the action of burning Janet in a barrel might have pleased them, surely it cannot have made them happy.

  And what of the minister of Loth? He is not yet recovered. Perhaps he never did mend, for he died thirteen years later, still in his forties. Did he carry Janet’s mischief to the grave? Did he feel it crumbling his bones? Did the noise from Loth ring in his ears, even as he left this world and stepped, in assurance or in fear, into the next?

  7 August

  A Lament for Janet Horne

  Ah, Janet, did you not do those things? Look at the fire they are building, Janet. When you tripped on the words, when you said ‘wert’ instead of ‘art’, did you not think how that would sound to their hungry ears? Thy Father who wert in Heaven, Janet? Oh, they knew who you meant, they knew the one you worshipped.

  And your daughter’s strange hands and strange feet, did you not think how these might one day appear to their eyes, and what stories they would make of them? And if she, too, should bear a child with those same deformities, did you believe that that would save you? That your neighbours would say, ‘Well, we were wrong after all, those were not the marks of the Devil on her’? Did you not hear them instead confirmed in their cruel faith? That the child bears the sin of the mother and of the mother’s mother, even unto death?

  Did you not maim your own daughter, Janet, when you had your master shoe her like a pony? Did you not ride her to your sisters, to dance and froth in your hellish ecstasies? Come now, Janet, tell them what you did. This will not go away by their words, not now. Only you can bring it to an end.

  Look at the fire they are building, Janet. A small fire it is. You will not feel it. They will choke you off before it touches you.

  The great fire comes after, Janet. ‘God have mercy on you,’ they will say, ‘for we cannot. It is not in our gift to be merciful.’

  Where will they take you, Janet? To the square in front of the old bishop’s palace? Or out of the town, to a place down by the dunes, where the stench of your burning will blow away to sea? They may watch the flames, Janet, but later they will not want you in their noses.

  The flames of superstition are dying, Janet, but not soon enough for you. Your fate is to be the last of your kind, whatever your kind was.

  God forbid that they should ever think you have come back again.

  8 August

  The Mannie

  Lift your eyes to the hills and there is the statue. The ‘Mannie’ is the local name for it. A useful term, familiar and playfully derogatory, for cutting down to size one hundred feet of sandstone; for levelling a duke, a man folk would once hardly have dared look in the face.

  The Mannie was erected to the Duke’s memory after his death. But what is that memory, and whose?

  He was a hard-headed but benevolent landowner, who saw that life as it was lived by the people of the glens and straths was unsustainable; that they were impoverished and starving and too numerous; and so he relocated them to the coasts, or encouraged them to emigrate, and made the interior a vast pasture for sheep, in part to pay for these improvements.

  Or.

  He was a cold, greedy man, indifferent to the sorrows of the people, whom he cleared by force and fire, destroying their way of life – their world, in effect – for profit. And he did this by proxy, setting cruel and rapacious factors to the task, so that they, not he, would be the chief villains of the play.

  You can see the Mannie for miles around. He dominates the landscape as once the Duke did. There have been attempts to blow him up, dislodge, demolish or topple him. The plinth has had a few insults sprayed upon it. So far, he has survived.

  The original Duke is long gone.

  If you stand underneath and look up at the Mannie with the clouds racing over his head, you might think he is perpetually falling.

  Knock him down or blow him up, and in a generation the arguments will be over. Good man, wicked man, nobody will care. Maybe that would be a relief.

  But when the Mannie goes, the story will go. And if the story goes, the memory too will go. And when the memory has gone, the people will be empty shells. They will have no language of anger or dissent. They will find new names for names they cannot pronounce. They will not be of the land, only on it. And this will be the final act of clearance.

  9 August

  If No Death

  ‘If there was no death, would there be war?’ a small boy asked.

  The teacher turned and looked along the rows of desks to see which small boy had spoken. The room was full of small boys, twenty-four of them. The one who had posed the question should have raised his hand before speaking, but nobody’s hand was raised. At the moment the question was asked the teacher had had his back to the class as he wrote names and dates on the board. Although he knew his pupils well, he had not recognised the voice.

  ‘Who asked that question?’

  Nobody admitted responsibility.

  ‘It is an interesting question,’ the teacher said. ‘Let us examine it.’

  He wrote on the board: IF NO DEATH, WOULD THERE BE WAR?

  The small boys stared blankly. They are so young, he thought.

  Could any one of them have asked such a question? Had he really heard it?

  ‘What is war for?’ he prompted. ‘Is it not to gain something? Land, or wealth, or power over others? How do you succeed in gaining power over others?’

  A hand went up.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘By killing them.’

  ‘But if you kill someone, you can no longer have power over them.’

  ‘But you have power over their friends. You can make them think you will kill them too, if they don’t surrender.’

  Another hand went up.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘But if people couldn’t die, then why try to kill them?’

  Another hand, another voice: ‘You could put them in prison and never let them out. That would be the next worst thing to killing them.’

  Another voice: ‘But how would you keep them in prison? If they couldn’t be killed they would find a way out and you couldn’t stop them.’

  Another voice: ‘If you weren’t afraid of death then there’d be nothing to be afraid of. Not hunger, disease, cold, danger. Nothing.’

  ‘You could do anything you liked and nobody could stop you.’

  The teacher saw the excitement in their young faces. For a moment they had forgotten reality. He felt almost that they might rush from the classroom, intoxicated by this new sense of liberation.

  It was his sad job to destroy their delusions.

  10 August

  Milk

  You descended a curved flight of stairs to the school dining-room, in the basement. The stairs had rubber treads on them, a precaution against slipping. Ninety small boys and various adults – teachers, cooks, cleaners – went up and down them several times a day, so this made sense. There was a banister too, but to hold on to this was considered, among the boys, a sign of weakness.

  At morning break the ninety boys queued on the stairs, then shuffled into the dining-room to a table on which were stacked three crates containing small bottles of milk. Each bottle contained one-third of a pint. You took a bottle and a straw and pierced the bottle’s foil cap with the straw. In winter the milk was cold, sometimes containing ice. This was tolerable. On hot summer days the milk was warm, yellow and sickly, and great resolve was required to drain the bottle. The ninety boys walked in single file round the dining-room’s perimeter, between the wall and the tables at which, two hours later, they would sit to eat dinner. By the time you returned to the starting-point you were supposed to have finished your milk. You showed a teache
r or prefect your empty bottle before depositing it in one of the crates and throwing the straw into a waste bucket. Sometimes you might get away with leaving the last quarter-inch of frozen or cheesy milk. More often you would have to suck until the straw noisily declared that the bottle was completely empty.

  The milk ritual was a torment for many boys.

  A horizontal black line ran round the wall, halfway up. Below the line the plaster was painted a dark reddish colour, above it the plaster was off-white, not unlike the colour of the milk in summer. Above the line was a row of photographs of past rugby and cricket teams: squads of small boys, trying to look stern or fierce, who had in their time undergone similar rituals.

  As you walked you saw how much they resembled you, although they were men now. Some perhaps were dead.

  They watched you sucking your daily ration of milk. They understood, even if they were ghosts.

  11 August

  The Corpse

  Gary and Hannah made the discovery when they were renovating their first home, a 1950s three-bedroom semi-detached in a quiet city suburb. First they found the sealed cupboard under the stairs: this was a bonus, as they needed all the storage space they could get. Then they prised open the door and found the corpse. Thankfully things had progressed far beyond the decomposition stage: only a skeleton, clad in a few shreds of dark suit, remained. A wisp or two of silk around the cervical vertebrae indicated that the skeleton had once sported a tie.

  The police were relaxed about the matter, especially when they saw where the corpse was located and how it was dressed.

  ‘We get a lot of these,’ the lead detective told the anxious couple, ‘especially in houses of this vintage. No, the circumstances are not suspicious. What we have here is a classic example of the forgotten bank manager.