These Demented Lands

by Alan Warner

  ‘So. Mr Brotherhood’s lair.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  He went, ‘Just beyond those trees.’

  I stood, leaving the knapsack, then ambled over to the larch trees. Below me lay the wide waters of the Sound; the graveyard surrounded by the rivulets of the river outflow; the bright green of the airstrip threshold; the grass runway behind the pine plantation; the Big Road and, there, in among the pines, the roofs and angles of The Drome Hotel and outhouses.

  I sauntered back to the wee camp. The Devil’s Advocate was breaking off specks of loaf and tossing them in front of him. As I got closer the fat man turned to me and mouthed shushness. I spotted the robin redbreast bobbing on the mossy log and saw the two total black beads of its eyes.

  The Devil’s Advocate goes, ‘They say the robin tried to remove the crown of thorns from Christ’s head; the blood stained the bird’s chest.’

  I went, ‘Is that right? You couldn’t spare some of that loaf could you?’

  He looked at me closely and held out the bread so’s the robin redbreast dove off thanklessly, ducking and rising away over tubular hulks of mossed-out tree trunks long-fallen on the spongy hillside.

  ‘Ta.’ I screwed off a chunk of bakery loaf and held out the remaining back to him. He lowered those eyes, the whites so clear you’d think he had make-up round the skin. He looked back at my must’ve-been-black eyes; narrowed his own.

  ‘You don’t look well.’

  ‘I’ll be fine when I get to the hotel.’ I saw him look me up and down and somehow, I knew he knew right there and then.

  ‘Sit down here by the fire.’ He stood and shifted off the log that he’d cleared the moss from and must’ve been sat on so much the wood was dry and smooth. I put my arse on it and bit away the rest of the loaf.

  ‘I’ve tinned soup, tinned peaches cold down in the burn there. Join me?’

  I nodded quick.

  He walked towards the rushing sound of the river then turned back to look at me. ‘The Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. Peter. Chapter 3. Verse 18.’

  ‘Mmm. Uh-huh,’ I nodded, chomping on the bread.

  Split-second he sunk beneath the hill buff I whipped round and stuck my head in the tent. It smelled of sweat, there were lots books, a big crumpled-up sleeping bag in the strange blue light caused by the tent fabric. A big backpack leaned against the zipper door. I fiddled with the side pockets, looked back over my shoulder and tried another then scuffled forwards, keeping muddy boots off things. As a pillow, he was using a rolled-up towel that was damp; I reached in for a wallet and moment I touched it I knew what it was.

  When he rolled back up the hill I saw him spit the butt of a fag out then wave the cans joyously.

  ‘Brotherhood who owns The Drome, there seems to be a lot of crap talked about him,’ I says.

  ‘John Brotherhood.’ He nodded, pretending to chew something, swinging round and dumping more branches on the fire, letting twigs brush against my feet threateningly. ‘You’ve changed your jacket,’ he smiled.

  ‘This is my old favourite. Yon other one, I got after the wee ferry sunk. We all got free clothes from the Chandlers there. You should’ve seen it. How did you get ashore safe?’

  ‘It was a miracle,’ he smirked, both dirty hands held up. He produced a cigar from inside his cassocky thing, kneeled and, twirling the cigar, heated it on the new flames. ‘You always warm a good cigar so it bums evenly and . . .’ he nicked the end with good white teeth then, looking vulnerable, he trembled on his knees holding the cigar in his mouth, ‘You must never let the flame you light with touch the cigar, or you can ruin the whole flavour; you light a cigar on the heat that rises above the flame. Listening?’ he says, outright scary now.

  ‘Know what kind of cigarettes James Bond smokes?’

  ‘Sure. What makes you mention James Bond?’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Chesterfields.’

  ‘Is James Bond a saint?’

  He’d got the cigar lit and laughed out really loud at me, ‘A confessor if ever there was one! Dear, he might be the only one we’ve got on this earth.’

  ‘You really do what the Harbour guy says back at the sinking? Eh . . . says you were a decider, who should be saint and that.’

  ‘Thats exactly what I do.’

  I nodded. There was silence. We stared at each, then I broke it by reaching in and taking out the penknife. ‘It’s got a can opener.’

  ‘I’ve got my own.’ He took out a knife and started digging in to the can top. ‘I was in Mexico recently.’

  ‘Oh aye?’

  ‘Yes. There had been reports of a miracle. I was sent to investigate. A rural area. The face of Christ was appearing as an apparition on the outside wall of a little chapel. I arrived there on a Sunday to find the crowds gathered and on their knees before the south wall and I could see it too . . .’

  ‘You could see?’

  ‘Oh yes. I saw it. The face of the Saviour: the beard, the cheekbones from Golgotha. So I waited until midnight; myself and the priest went out with buckets and water, swept down the whitewash on the wall . . .’

  ‘And . . .’

  ‘It became evident the local farmers had been praying to a poster for a 1973 Willie Nelson concert in the next big town.’

  I looked at him and burst out in the hysterics. He smiled, then laughed too. He tipped the soup into a very new-looking pan with wee fold-out handle, wrapped his hand in a cloth then held the pan in the flames. ‘Look,’ he nodded.

  The sun was well down the far end of the Sound, the mountains sloping out of the shores on each side; along the ridge of the next hill, across the river, fairly sloping down to the verge of the big road, moved the figure, silhouette cut out against the light to the behind. The legs feeling their way, they juttered forward gingerly; arms shakily erect, holding the wide, flapping piece of whateverness above, held there cause too big for under-arm. He moved on, casting his own shadow over the dead bracken spreads; if you had to imagine the right music for the sight of him moving across the skylines it might be Stone Temple Pilots doing Big Empty offof The Crow soundtrack or if you had to choose a Verve song you’d obviously go for something offof the first album, Slide Away would be best.

  The Devil’s Advocate went, ‘A resident from The Drome Hotel.’

  ‘Friend of Brotherhood’s?’ I squinted into the afternoon.

  ‘From what I’ve heard. Those are bits of two aircraft that crashed on the airfield ten years ago. This one here, who collects all the pieces, arrived a few months ago from the Department of Transport. Apparently they’ve re-opened the case. He’s living in the hotel amongst all those horrible couples, investigating why the two planes collided; just little planes but two men were killed.’

  I took the soup and ate it out the pan with a spoon. It was too hot, though, so I rested it on my knees and watched the figure of The Aircrash Investigator with his burden, vanishing among the hillshadow. I says, ‘In the nineteen-seventies, was it guns and stuff Brotherhood was selling way over in other countries?’

  ‘Yes. And unrepentantly from that school that if he didn’t sell the goodies to them the next man would. I used to know young Brotherhood. He once told me of some war – there were so many – and the airforce managed to get fuel but they had no weapons left at all: no rockets, no bombs, not even bullets for machine guns. Brotherhood presumed there would be no airforce attacks but there were: the jets came in low and very fast over civilian villages. The pilots emptied bags of rusty nails out the open cockpits. “Nails travelling at 300 m.p.h. can make quite a decoration on a child’s body,” those were Brotherhood’s words. It’s unusual. He never shows any feelings yet it was clear the day made a hefty impression on him. He said that was when he understood the Devil had won the struggle one day no one noticed; we’re just under the impression the struggle still goes on. For him that was the day he realised all men dream of the nuclear explosion when they make love and secretly crave the destruction
of their own children out of curiosity. Love was a petty illusion and he made it his business to show love existed nowhere in the world. That is why he set up this ludicrous honeymoon hotel; he likes the vulgarity of it and amuses himself searching for the proof he always finds, showing none of the couples is truly in love . . .’

  ‘But love does exist; only yesterday . . .’

  ‘I wish you could prove it to Brotherhood. He’s a man who will not allow himself a single illusion.’

  ‘I can’t imagine your calling impresses him much then.’

  He chuckled, ‘He’s no fan of me. You think I work with illusions? Think what happened after they put your man up on that cross?’

  ‘He’s never helped me once,’ I goes, then went beetroot as I suddenly realised the soup was finished and I’d already stolen from this man. He took back and handed me the opened peaches.

  ‘Watch you don’t cut your tongue.’

  ‘I’ve never tasted anything so sweet,’ I smiled at him. He nodded and carried on smoking his cigar.

  ‘What are you? Some kind of a drifter?’ he goes.

  ‘I been travelling here and there,’ I says. ‘You’re no going to tell me I should be settled.’

  ‘That’s a matter for your . . .’ he blew out a splut of smoky laugh.

  I gulped and nodded, trying to swallow the peaches down. I says, ‘Tell us another Brotherhood story then I’m off to kiss the shite’s arse.’

  ‘Look. I don’t know your game down there but you don’t strike me as the typical treasure hunter.’

  ‘What do you mean, sunken treasure like yon Argonaut’s hunting?’

  ‘Mmm. No . . .’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘What’s your business down there?’

  ‘Personal.’

  ‘You could step into crossfire.’

  ‘There’s no need to go the all-dramatic on me.’

  ‘Brotherhood’ll chew you up: a girl looks like you,’ he laughed; shook his head, ‘I’m crazy to even consider letting you go down that hill.’

  I stood quick, picked up the kit-bag, holding it up to my chest, the side with the patch on it facing away from me. The Devil’s Advocate stayed put as I started to stroll away from the fire.

  ‘On you go. I can’t help it, I just thought you were more than another who wanders these demented lands in days of the end.’

  ‘Aye, but its always the days of the end for yous bible-bashers; thats all we’ve ever heard from you.’

  ‘If you think about it, girl, every day is the end for someone and will be here soon enough for you.’

  ‘Lighten up, man,’ I says as I crested 96-Metre Hill. ‘Thanks for the food.’

  I kept on down that wide slope in the failing light; only later I would see that the one known as The Devil’s Advocate had turned back to his tent, checked under the pillow and saw what he’d suspected; let out his wholesome laugh. He could easy have shouted, started running down the hill and caught me before I’d crossed the first of the barbed-wire fences, but I was believing myself off, striding into the duskness, the kit-bag pushed out before me like a pregnancy, knowing all the time how

  [Editor’s note: three words

  illegible; possibly Villian once says]

  SECOND MANUSCRIPT

  Part One

  Saturday the Fourteenth

  I WAS IN the Observation Lounge above the grass runway and I saw her figure hugging a kitbag on 96-Metre Hill to the south of the hotel and airstrip. She appeared beside the stunted larch: the larch on which, reposing, but ruined by hoody crows and hostile weather, the pilot’s corpse had been found ten years before.

  That evening on which she appeared was clear and bitter cold. The convoy (some cars with headlights already on) from the vehicle ferry had already moved along the big road on the shoreline towards The Outer Rim.

  I had an unobstructed view of her distant figure moving downhill off the slopes, striding through the gloaming of dying sun that lit the tangled spreads of fallen bracken alternately rust then scarlet in colour; the inverted stalks washed and battered to an earth that would be a hard grid of frost under the coming dark.

  For an instant, above the shoreline, the newcomer’s figure was silhouetted along with the farthest larch-outcrops that are scattered on the bare hills above the hotel and airstrip. The silver-grey light on the water of the so-called bay stopped sparkling. The sun moved down behind the snow-capped mountains that form the far shores of the Mainland along the fjord-like Sound.

  She came down onto the shoreline close to the chapel ruins and graveyard where the remains of the pilot lay buried. The light was failing badly when she next materialised on the hotel side of the pine plantation that obscured the far end of the runway and its southern threshold, above which the aluminium folded together ten years ago in the darkness. She must have traversed the machair which, in the coming flush we dared call Spring, would blot with pure white daisies: an expanse that would turn pink as a cold cloud passed over and the sensitive under-petals, that looked as if they’d had a little burgundy spilled on them, turned up in resignation. She used the roadbridge to cross the river which was in spate, pulling down tonnes of freezing water from the Interior and spilling them out in the hazed whorls of the sandy seaweed delta below the graveyard. Then I saw something.

  Brotherhood heard my quiet laugh as he stood behind the Observation Lounge bar, drying a glass. He had on his dinner suit and bow-tie. The couple from number 6, sitting by the log fire, looked over in unison. It was so dark in the lounge by then I could only make out the man’s eye sockets and was sure he was wearing a jet-black boilersuit below his neck.

  Brotherhood sauntered to the wide panorama windows and lifted the binoculars from the peeling varnish of the sill to his face. In the middle distance the small, black aircraft-shape silently ascended again above the dark pines then swooped with a wobbling, dreamy, stilted manner, like a hallucination: unnatural, not moving like a Real Thing, it came worrying down towards the walking figure until, this time, she chickened out and threw herself forward onto the sheer black of the cold ground. It was Chef Macbeth at the top of the airstrip, hiding at the fringes of the plantation, flying his radio-controlled model before dinners started. Brotherhood and I both laughed as the lithe figure stood up from the spoor of dark ground and moved towards us. The radio-controlled aircraft was over the spruces and gone.

  Out on the Oyster Skerries the shipping lane auto-beacon began its eleven-second semaphore. Polaris, the North Star, flickered weakly above the waters of the Sound, sliding past, silently and ever-wide as some lugubrious Mississippi.

  When the young woman’s boots crunched on the buff gravel chips below, two things happened: weak, buttermilky moon reflected on the shoulder and arm of her black leather jacket and all the televisions suddenly switched back on as the signal came alive from up in the mountains where the aerial is. Brotherhood silenced them, his arm held out like a fascist salute.

  As the girl moved round to the outside lamp by the corner of the building, I leaned back in the best armchair, away from my reflection on the black glass. I drained my whisky, letting the ice cubes rest against my lip, then I set the glass down.

  ‘Well, well, well, real guest!’ Brotherhood tossed the dish towel on the bar-top and moved down the spiral staircase to the reception area below.

  I heard the front door open to admit the newcomer, then it opened a second time: Chef Macbeth with his aircraft under an arm, heading for the kitchens. I listened: no confrontation to help pass the evening.

  I walked behind the bar and poured myself a large Linkwood fifteen-year-old, while there was still ice in my glass; I slopped in water from the decanter. Ignoring the stares from the number 6s I took up position on a bar-stool so we would be out of earshot when Brotherhood returned.

  I heard the firedoors swing, then a few minutes later the different squeaking of them opening into the lobby. Brotherhood circled up the staircase, winked, swung behind the bar and carelessly ti
pped the neck of the Linkwood into his tumbler, gloshing a fair splurt over the edges which he ignored as he bit down the raw whisky, leaned over past the single beer pump, ‘Fucking gorgeous, she could shove my toothbrush up her arse as far as it would go and I’d brush after breakfast and last thing at night. About twenty-four or five, seems to have come a long way over rough country. Where on earth’s she wandered from to this place?’ He paused then, concentrating; whispered, ‘The wet lower material of her trousers was dappled with the burned golds of dead bracken. The arm of her leather jacket was streaked with mud and she was out of breath; she had a kitbag, held in a weird way . . .’

  ‘What room did you put her in?’

  ‘As I was SAYING,’ (the number 6s gaped over), ‘She held it out in front of her . . .’

  ‘Maybe the straps bust?’

  ‘So she had to look over it, the top of the kit-bag, and with her hair pinned up like that she seems even taller; she put down the kit-bag carefully, she said, “Do you have any vacancies?” I paused, surveyed her, then made a right show of removing the register and flicking through it,’ Brotherhood grabbed the bar menu and acted out the mocking turning of pages. He paused at desserts, looked at me from behind the menu. He stared at the sleeve of the cheap, functional outdoor jacket I bought in that Chandlers on the jetty at Ferry Slipway, one of two identical, even the same colour, the cleanness, the purity of first days, my chunky new clothes, the incredible spirit of hotel rooms – monastic, assaulted daily by Chef Macbeth’s fateful cauliflower and perpetual potatoes.

  Brotherhood said, ‘I deliberately stared at the mud on her jacket sleeve in the hope it would unnerve her, but . . . made of sterner stuff this one.’ He snapped the menu shut. “How many would the room be for?” “One,” she said. “And for how many nights?” “I don’t know. Three?” the little soul said.’

  ‘Three! What one have you put her in?’

  ‘“We. Are all. Fuuuullll. Up!”’ Brotherhood leaned his chin on the bar-top then straightened up to full height. ‘She just stared at me. Fantastic, cause she knew I was lying and she would huff to go walking back out into that night; then, perfect timing, Chef Macbeth appeared, walking in backwards wearing that silly flying helmet, the big plane tipped up and held under his arm. Macbeth stared right over her shoulder at me, then laughed.’ Brotherhood lowered his voice, ‘she did not even turn round to look at Macbeth, just giving me the vicious eye on this room item. Single-mindedness. That’s my kind of lass.’ (The word said in that false way of those who have lost the accent and try to reclaim it.) Brotherhood smiled, ‘So there’s Chef Macbeth laughing out loud at the girl’s shoulders. He’s an illiterate runt but then you just had to hand it to him – give him his due. Anyway he cleared off to the kitchen with his toy aeroplane. I leaned to her a bit, breathing in gentle through my nose but I couldn’t get any smell, no BO, no perfumes, nothing. I said, “I could give you a double room,” sort of leered it. “That would be good,” she came back with, completely deadpan, trying to make it as insincere as she possibly could.’