by Will Self
‘It is.’ Bill replied curtly – and then, feeling he had been too curt, ‘I've had a clear run all the way from Bighouse; not so much as a shower.’
‘Well, they say the gales will be up again tonight . . .’ He picked up a half-pint glass from the draining board beneath the bar and began, idly, yet with skill, to wipe it. Bill walked to the bar, and the absurdity took his cue: ‘What'll you be having then?’ Up close Bill saw brown crap on the man's teeth, and lines of burst blood vessels, like purple crow's feet around his eyes.
Bill sighed – no need to account for his choices with this one: ‘Is that a Campbelltown there?’ He stabbed a finger towards the bottles of malt brooding on the shelves.
The absurdity got the bottle down without further ado. ‘This is the fifteen-year-old?’ His tone indicated that this was a request.
‘A double,’ said Bill.
Bill had brought yesterday's paper with him from the car, but he didn't bother to open it. He knocked back the whisky, and then chased it with a bottle of Orkney Dark Island. The whisky gouged more warmth into his belly, and the ale filled his head with peat and heather. Really, Bill thought, the two together summed up the far north. He was sitting back on the banquette, his feet propped on a low stool. His back and shoulders were grasped by the thick leather of his jacket. It was an old leather jacket, of forties cut. Bill had had it for years. It reminded him of a jacket he'd once seen Jack Kerouac wearing in a photograph. He liked the red quilted lining; and he especially liked the label on the inside of the collar that proclaimed: ‘Genuine Leather, Made from a Quarter of a Horse’. Bill used to show this to young women, who found it amusing . . . seductive. Bill used to rub saddle soap into the thing, but recently had found he couldn't really be bothered, even though the leather was cracking around the elbows.
While Bill had been drinking, the absurdity was pottering around the vicinity of the bar, but now the pint glass was empty, and plonked back on the bar mat, he was nowhere to be seen. Bill pictured him, padding along the chilly corridors of the old granite hotel, like a cut-rate, pocket-sized laird. Impatiently, he rang a small bell – and the ginger moustache appeared instantly, directly in front of him, hoisted by its owner through the cellar hatch, like some hairy standard of rebellion.
‘Sir?’ came from behind the whiskers.
‘The damage?’ Bill countered.
‘That'll be . . .’ He turned to the cash register and played a chord. ‘. . . Four pounds and seventy-eight pence.’ While Bill fought with his jeans for the cash, the absurdity had produced – from somewhere – a printed card. This he handed to Bill in exchange for the money, saying, ‘You wouldn't mind, would you, filling out this card. It's a sort of survey we're doing, y'know, marketing and such, trying to find out who our clientele are . . .’ He trailed off.
Bill looked at the card: ‘Where did you first hear about us? 1. In the media 2. Personal recommendation 3. As part of a package holiday . . .’
‘Of course,’ he told the deluded hotelier, ‘but if you don't m.ind I'll fill it out later and post it, I'm. in a bit of a hurry.’
‘Not at all, not at all – here's an addressed envelope for you. Make it easier.’
As he marched across the car-park to the car, Bill crumpled the card and the envelope into a ball and tossed it into a convenient bin. He also abandoned himself to unnecessarily carping laughter – the idea that this isolated spot would ever attract anything much besides passing trade, and the occasional shooting, fishing and drinking crew was as ridiculous as the ginger moustache.
Feeling the wind rising at his back impressed further how far Lybster was from anywhere – save the North Sea. Bill took off his jacket and chucked it on the back seat of the car. Then he swung himself into the front. He rammed the key into the ignition, turned it, and the car thrummed and pulsed into life. The CD chirruped – then some John Cage came on. With another negligent circling of his hand, Bill scraped the big saloon around a hundred and eighty degrees, and shot back up on to the A9, this time heading south.
For the next hour, until he saw the hitchhiker, Bill drove hard. There was something about the man in the pub at Lybster, the whole episode in fact, that unsettled him. There was that, and there was the sense that as the car plunged south – switch-backing over spurs, and charging down hillsides – it was taking Bill out of the underimagined world and into the world that was all too clearly conceived of, fixed in its nature, hammered into banality by mass comprehension.
Not that you'd know it thus far: the road still leaping and twisting every few yards, the gradients often one in ten or better. In mist, or rain – which was almost always – the A9 was simply and superficially dangerous, but shorn of its grey fleece it became almost frolicsome. So Bill thought, chucking the car in and out of the bends.
In rain you had little opportunity to pass even a car, let alone any of the grumbling lorries that laboured up this route to the far north; and there were many of these. It could slow the whole trip if you got caught behind one. Slow it up by as much as a half again. Even in fair conditions the only way to pass their caravans – they tended to travel in naturally occurring clutches, equally spaced – was to get up to about ninety on the straight, then strip-the-steel-willow of the oncoming traffic and the lorries themselves.
It was exhilarating – this headlong plunge down the exposed cranium of Britain. After twenty miles or so Bill had a spectacular view clear across the Moray Firth to the Grampians. The mountains pushed apart land, sea and sky with nonchalant grandeur; their peaks stark white, their flanks hazed white and blue and azure. Not that he looked at them, he looked at the driving, snatching shards of scenery in the jagged saccades his eyes made from speedometer to road, to rearview mirror, to wing mirrors, and back, over and over, each glance accompanied with a head jerk, as if he were some automated Hasidic Jew, praying as he went.
In a way Bill was praying. In the concentration on braking and accelerating, and at these speeds essentially toying with life and death – others’ as well as his own – he finally achieved the dharmic state he had been seeking all morning: an absorption of his own being into the very act of driving that exactly matched his body's absorption into the fabric of the car; a biomechanical union that made eyes windscreens, wheels legs, turbo-charger flight mechanism. Or was it the other way round?
The wands of memories interleaved themselves with the sprigs of scenery, and then the whole hedge of impressions was further shaped and moulded by the music which poured from all four corners, before being flattened by the mantra of impulsion. Last night at the pub – the local doctor, Bohm, drunk – mouthing off about miracle cures for dipsomania – psychedelic drug rituals in West Africa, mystical twaddle – the walk home in the stiff wind, rain so hard it gave his cheeks and forehead little knouts. Now, on the road ahead, a passing opportunity, slow-moving old Ford Sierra, ahead of it two lorries and another two cars slightly further on, doing about sixty – a good seven hundred metres to the next bend. A bend beyond that allowed a view of more open road, but what of the hidden stretch? Calculate how much there was. Count: one, two, three seconds. Chance it. Rearview, Bam! Accelerator floored, wheel wrenched, back pressed back into seat. Leather smell. Vague awareness of oceanic chords playing – perhaps Richard Strauss. Indicator popping and tocking. Past the Ford. Past the first lorry. Up to eighty now. Bam! Shift rammed into third. Eighty now, nearing the bouncing butt of the second lorry. Fuuuck! There was a car. Now about a hundred metres off. Moving fast. Deathly fast. Check wing mirror. Dance the one-step of shock. Slide between the two lorries. Receive a fusillade of flashing and honking. Then – Bam! Back out again. Two hundred metres left of the straight – no view of the next stretch, just green tussocks, grey-green wall, strident black-and-white cow – keep it in third, will it back up . . . eighty . . . ninety . . . the ton. Fifty metres left – and the second lorry was cleared, evacuated, left behind as surely as a shit in a toilet in a motorway service centre. Left behind like the past, like failure, l
ike regret.
Bill felt this marvellous sense of freedom and release as he cheated death and unslipped the surly gravity of the lumpen lorries. He felt it ten times between Borgue and Helmsdale, fifteen between Helmsdale and Brora, then more and more as the road opened up and the hills retreated from the road, leaving it to flow and wiggle, rather than twist and turn.
A glimpse of Langwell House, gothic on its promontory, as he zigzagged through Berriedale; a proscenium framed shot of Dunrobin Castle as he wheeled past its gates and cantered down into the long spare main street of Golspie. And still the sun fell down, and still the road glimmered, and still Bill thought – or perhaps only thought he thought – of nothing. Past the Highland Knitwear Centre. How many sweaters had Bill bought in a lifetime of blandishment? Too many perhaps. One purple cable knit at this very shop – for a girl called Allegra. A diminutive blonde – too young for Bill. Then twenty-two to his thirty-five. She was all chubby bits, a dinky little love handle, who when stoned on dope became psychotic, fanatically washing her hands in the air like some method-trained obsessive. Bill had to talk her down every time it happened – and he didn't like taking his work to bed with him.
She gave head like a courtesan – like a goddess of fellation. She pushed down the prepuce with her lips, while her tongue darted round the root of his glans. One of her childlike hands delved in the lips of cloth that sagged open over his crotch, seeking out the root of him, juggling the balls of him. And this as the car motored along the banks of the Cromarty Firth, past the outcropping of cranes and davits at Invergordon. Even at the time Bill had recognised the automotive blow job as a disturbing concomitant to Allegra's manic laving. It was her way of placing him back under her control; he might have the steering wheel – but she was steering him, gnawing the joy stick.
It was Allegra's first and last trip to Orkney with Bill. Their relationship didn't so much split up as shatter some weeks later, when, at a dinner party given by middle-aged friends of Bill's, Allegra, drunk, had screamed, ‘Why doesn't he tell you all that he loves going down on women, but can't stand to have them go down on him!’ then thrown her vodka tonic in Bill's face, then attempted to ram the solid after the liquid. A lunge that Bill deflected, so that the crystal shattered on impact against the invitation-encrusted mantelpiece. The friends had plenty to talk about after Allegra and Bill had left.
As the car tick-tocked along the bleak street, Bill imagined the grey houses to either side populated with his past courtesans, his myriad lovers. It would be like some Felliniesque dream sequence. No, come to think of it, better to house the past lovers – there had to be at least a hundred of them – in Dunrobin Castle itself. It was so big there would be a room each for the more mature, and convenient dormitories for the young girls. Bill smiled at the thought of this perverse seraglio. But hadn't Fellini been right? Wasn't this the only possible psychic solution to the sense of hideous abandonment that the practice of serial monogamy imparted? To get them all in one place. It wasn't that Bill wanted them all sexually available quite the reverse. But he wanted them in a context that made what existed between him and them, if not exactly important, at any rate viable. He wanted to feel that it had all mattered, that it wasn't simply animal couplings, mechanistic jerkings, now forgotten, now dust.
Taken with the fantasy, Bill allowed it to occupy him as he pressured the big car through the long avenue of trees that led from Golspie to Loch Fleet. Dunrobin Castle populated by all of his lovers, all of the women he'd ever had sexual relations with. The younger ones would handle the bulk of the domestic work. There was Jane, who was a professional cook, she could run the kitchens, with the assistance of Gwen, Polly and Susie. There would be enough women in their twenties to handle all the skivvying, leaving the more mature women free to spend their time in idle conversation and hobby-style activities. Why, come to think of it, there was even a landscape gardener in Bill's poking portfolio; perhaps there was a case for not simply maintaining the grounds of the castle, but redesigning them?
Even as Bill entertained this notion of a comforting castle, cracks began to appear in its facade. All of his former lovers . . . That meant not just Allegra, coming at him time after time with vitrified daggers, during the fatal attraction of cocktail hour, but other, still more unstable lovers, howling and wafting around halls and stairways. Worse than that, it meant his ex-wife; where would she come to roost? No doubt in an outhouse, from where, on dark nights, the sounds of screamed imprecations could be heard, blown in with the wind, and echoing around the drawing room where the others sat sewing, and Bill himself grimaced over another whisky.
And if there was to be room for the ex-wife, there would have to be room for other unsavoury characters as well. Despite himself, Bill urged the conceit to its baleful conclusion. The tarts – there would be room at Dunrobin for the tarts, the brasses, the whores. Bill imagined trying to keep them out – this delegation of tarts. Meeting them at the gates of the Castle and attempting to turn them back. ‘But you fucked us!’ their spokesmadam would abjure him. ‘We demand room in the Castle!’ He would have no choice but to admit them – and then the fragile concord of the seraglio would be shattered. The other lovers might have been prepared to accept sorority as a substitute for monogamy, but the tarts? Never. The tarts would swear and drink. They would smoke crack in the billiard room, and shoot smack in the butler's pantry. They would seduce the younger lovers and outrage the older. On cold nights Bill would find himself desperately stuffing his head beneath covers, beneath pillows, trying to shut out the sounds of their wassailing, as they plaited with the moan and screech of the wind.
On the long straight that bounced up the other side of the loch, Bill clocked the signs requesting assistance from the coastguard in the fight against drug smugglers: If You See Anything Suspicious . . . The image of gracious polygamy faded and was replaced by one of Bill beachcombing, prodding at shells with a piece of driftwood, his jacket collar turned up, its points sharp against his chilled ears. The oiled tip of his makeshift shovel turns up a corner of blue plastic bag. He delves further. Six rectangular blocks, each sealed in blue plastic and heavily bound with gaffer tape are revealed to be neatly buried. Bill smiles and gets out his penknife . . .
Another sign whipped by at the top of the rise: Unmarked Police Cars Operating . . . Spoilsports. No seraglio and now no mother lode of Mama Coca; no white rails for the wheels of the big car to lock on to; no propulsive, cardiac compression to take Bill's heart into closer harmony with the rev counter . . . He hunkered down once more, gripped the steering wheel tighter, concentrated on the metallic rasp of John Lee Hooker's guitar, which ripped up the interior of the car. Then came the roadworks. Then came the hitchhiker.
Bill braked, and looked for somewhere to pull over. About fifty metres further on there was a break in the earth-soft verge where blue-grey gravel puddled on to the roadway. Bill aimed for it, indicated, and then crunched the car to a halt. In the rearview mirror he could see the hitchhiker running towards the car, his pack bouncing, his poncho flapping, an expression of gap-toothed desperation on his face, as if he were absolutely certain that this offer of a lift was a taunt or a hoax, and that as soon as he was level with the car Bill would drive off guffawing.
The hitchhiker yanked the car door open and the fresh air and moisture and sunlight streamed in. ‘Thanks, mate –’ He was clearly going to converse.
‘Get in!’ Bill snapped. ‘I can't stop here for long.’ He gestured at the roadway, where the cars were having to pull over the centre line in order to pass. The hitchhiker threw himself into the front passenger seat of the car, his pack still on. Bill glanced in the rearview, indicated, lazily circled the wheel to the right, and rejoined the traffic.
For some seconds neither said anything. Bill pretended to concentrate on the driving and observed his captive out of the corner of his eye. The hitchhiker sat, his face almost against the windscreen, the backpack – which Bill now saw had a tent bag and roll of sleeping bag tied
to it – was like a whole, upper-body splint, designed so as to force its wearer into closer contemplation of the road. A Futurist's corset.
‘I'll stop as soon as I can,’ Bill said, ‘and we can put that in the back.’
The hitchhiker said, ‘Thanks very much.’
He was – Bill guessed – in his late twenties or early thirties. His accent was Caithness, the sharp elements of a Scottish brogue, softened and eroded by a glacial covering of Scandinavian syllables. His black, collar-length hair was roughly cut. He wore the yellow nylon poncho, and under it a never-fashionable, fake sheepskin-lined denim jacket. From behind the distempered non-wool, poked the collar of a tartan shirt. The hitchhiker's breath smelt foully of stale whisky. His eyes were bivouacked in purple bags, secured by purple veins. He was unshaven. His teeth were furred. He had an impressive infection in the dimple of his strong chin – he wasn't bad-looking.
‘Are you going far?’ he asked.
‘All the way,’ Bill smiled, ‘to London, that is.’
The hitchhiker grinned, and attempted – insofar as the pack allowed him – to settle more securely in his seat. It was the last question he asked Bill for the whole journey.
They were across the Cromarty Firth causeway and on the Black Isle before Bill found a proper layby to stop in. They both got out of the car and Bill rearranged the things on the back seat so that the hitchhiker could stash his pack. They were rolling again in a couple of minutes. Bill pushed the car up to seventy and then idled there, the index finger and thumb of his right hand holding the lower edge of the steering wheel as if it were some delicate surgical instrument. The rain ceased and the roadway shone once more. The muted CD played the current single by a hip guitar band. The hitchhiker drummed chipped, dirty nails on frayed, dirty denim.
‘So,’ said Bill after a while, ‘where are you headed?’
‘I'm going all the way too.’ He hunched round to face Bill, as if they were casual drinkers striking up a conversation at the bar of the car's dashboard, ‘I stop in Poole, Dorset, but I've a mate in Glasgow I want to see for tonight.’