by Michel Faber
‘Yeah?’ said Morton to himself when he’d finished reading his letter. ‘Well, fuck you!’
‘Baah!’ responded a nearby sheep.
A minute’s silence followed, as if to commemorate their official status as suckers. In the far distance they could see a military jet climbing into the clouds.
‘Somebody should call Gail – I’ll give you her number,’ said Nick Kline. ‘She’ll know what to do.’
All five of the artists struck off in different directions to look for a telephone booth, but the village of Inver did not appear to have such a thing. Behind the village hall, which was closed and offered Bingo, there was an expanse of shallow water and wasteland. Swans sailed in the deeper parts, and a small tethered rowing-boat fidgeted in the shifting sands. To the left, a sign said SCHOOL, but nothing resembling a school could be seen: no basketball courts, no car-parks, no crowds of teenagers, no cops. The air was so quiet they could hear the swans rustling their wings. To the right, Inver’s street had a narrow strip of rocky beach on one side, houses on the other – modern little bungalows, not picturesque old cottages.
‘Someone in one of those houses may have a phone – that’s if there’s any telephone connections at all,’ said Fay Barratt doubtfully, wondering whether she should knock on some doors and try to win the sympathy of the natives. The problem was that that sort of thing was best done when she had only herself to plead for – all these other artists were just a millstone round her neck. Besides, she was only confident of getting her way with fellow Americans – years ago in France she had gone spectacularly to pieces in a railway station café and no one had taken any notice of her except a Polish upholsterer with no money.
‘I see telephone wires,’ observed Gerrit Plank. ‘Everywhere.’ He pointed upwards with one eyebrow and one finger, a calm and economical gesture.
‘We’re missing someone,’ said June Laboyer-Suk. ‘The installation guy.’ She wasn’t talking about telephones now: Nick Kline was nowhere to be seen.
‘Village of the fuckin’ Damned!’ concluded Morton Krauss. ‘Texas fuckin’ Chainsaw Massacre!’
Nick Kline was, in fact, inside the Inver pub, sipping a beer. He had no intention of asking anyone anything, except for more beer, and the publican accepted this, having recognised him instantly as a serious drinker with a deep, undiscussable pain.
As he sat at one of the tables in the Inver Inn, Nick studied the menu on the wall, wondering if he was hungry enough to risk something that wasn’t the pastrami-and-pickle-on-rye he was used to having every day at Juanita’s Bar & Grill. Alone of all the artists, he had plenty of Scottish money on him, organised by Gail Freleng and the First National Bank, but his problem was that he couldn’t guess what ‘stovies’ were. He was pretty sure he didn’t want a Scotch pie (68p), a beef-or cheeseburger (£1.20), a smoked sausage (£1.70), lasagne or chicken curry (£1.85). That only left ‘stovies’ (£1.70).
Nick sipped his beer some more, half closing his eyes. Maybe somebody in the pub would start talking about stovies some time soon, in such a way as to reveal what they were.
The pub was bright and unpretentious, with decor reminiscent of a Boy Scout hall. A pool table and a pinball machine stood waiting to be touched. There were no other customers except for one old man whose dog slept at his slippered feet. Behind the counter, hemmed in by inverted whisky bottles, ornamental coasters and foil-wrapped crisps, the publican cleaned glasses and his wife made racing bets over the telephone.
‘Number 5: Captain’s Guess,’ she said. ‘Number 6: Eve’s Pet. Fifty pence each way.’
Nick noted the strangeness of her accent, wondered how long he would be in Scotland. Somebody else would have to call Gail: he didn’t like talking on the phone. If nobody called Gail, she would probably find him anyway: she always did. But if he waited too long, he might run out of money.
‘That Fiona’s a nice wifey – you know, the niece of that joiner from Kildary.’
‘Pettigrew.’
‘Aye, Pettigrew.’
No one seemed about to raise the subject of stovies, and Nick had almost finished his beer. On the wall opposite him there was a petition pinned up, saying, ‘We the undersigned demand that the government reduce British beer tax’. It was signed by eight people so far, all from Inver. It occurred to Nick that he could sign it too, since beer was something he believed in. On the other hand, Gail always told him never to sign anything without consulting her. He really ought to call her. The telephone was free now.
‘Excuse me,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Another beer, please.’
A little while later, three young men in overalls walked into the pub, followed by the four other artists. Nick wondered if any of them would remember his suggestion that Gail Freleng should be phoned, but instead they started asking questions about public transport – well, the women did, anyway. The little guy with the long greasy hair just stood there, whispering to the big Dutch guy, and the big Dutch guy was frowning with the effort of trying not to listen.
‘You’ve just missed the bus,’ the barman said. ‘It was going to Portmahomack anyway – opposite direction to where you’re wanting to go.’
‘Won’t it come back?’ asked Fay Barratt.
‘Well … yes and no,’ replied the barman. ‘On the way back it takes a different road, past New Geanies, Mackays, Loch Eye …’
‘When’s the next bus that stops here?’
‘School bus, about half past four.’
This answer evidently did not please the artists, and after a brief exchange of murmured opinions they seemed about to leave. Nick Kline got up hastily and paid for his drinks, resolving to stick with the others now in case they ended up some place where Gail could be phoned. Morton Krauss, who had a policy of never travelling with foreign currency or, indeed, more than about $5 American, observed Nick Kline’s handling of the strange-coloured banknotes with interest.
‘We were worried about you, pal,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d got yourself lost.’
‘I was just … here,’ said Nick, fumbling the strange golden change into his pocket.
‘Stovie and pint, please,’ said one of the overalled men as Nick followed his fellow artists out of the pub.
After half an hour or so, it began to look as if June Laboyer-Suk’s plan to hail a taxi at the side of the road might be impractical. One red Toyota fuelled by adolescent testosterone, one Volkswagen van full of children and one tractor with mysterious attachments had passed by. Overhead, a jet plane screeched back and forth like a giant insect, worrying at the bombing range near-by. Machine-gun fire rattled dully across the boglands.
‘We maybe should have asked at the inn,’ said Nick. In his mind he could see the three overalled men sitting at the bar, eating piping-hot stovies – though he couldn’t picture the stovies themselves, of course.
‘I’m not going back there,’ declared Fay. ‘Bunch of dumb-assed yokels.’
‘What about you, Gerrit?’ suggested June Laboyer-Suk. Her pronunciation of his name was precise; she had even, when they’d been talking earlier, managed to remember what kind of art he produced. Nevertheless, he was unmoved.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
‘Dumb-assed yokels, huh?’
The sarcasm seemed to perplex him. ‘I couldn’t make such a judgement,’ he frowned. ‘I know nothing about these people. I just don’t like going backwards once I have made a decision to go forwards.’
June Laboyer-Suk looked to Nick Kline, but he had wandered off a few yards, apparently to study a squashed rabbit on the road. She looked briefly to Morton Krauss, considered him for a fraction of a second, then walked over to Nick.
‘Nice rabbit,’ he commented, pointing it out to her. She looked down at the perfectly squashed pelt.
‘Maybe you should take it back to the States with you,’ said June, wondering if maybe this Kline guy was ‘challenged’ in some way.
Nick shook his head. ‘I go
t in trouble once in Fiji. At the airport. Customs. I had a heap of squashed frogs in my suitcase. They were dry as autumn leaves. I showed the customs people how dry they were. It didn’t make any difference.’
‘Gee, that’s a pity,’ said June. ‘Listen, we’d better go back into that village together.’
‘You and me?’ He blushed. ‘What do you need me for?’
June sighed and hugged the padded shoulders of her leather jacket in frustration.
‘Come on, Nick: in a tiny village, in the middle of nowhere, you want me, a lone woman, to walk into a bar full of strange men? I could get raped, murdered, dumped in a field – nobody would know.’
‘So how will being with me help?’
‘This is a very sexist society, can’t you tell? If a woman’s alone, they think she’s easy. If there’s a guy with her, they think she belongs to him.’
‘Well … OK … as long as I don’t have to do anything.’
So June and Nick walked back into the village, and a while later they returned. The stovies were all gone, but Nick had bought himself a smoked sausage, which he’d already had to throw into a field on the way back to the roadside. First of all the artists, he had lost his innocence about Scottish take-away food. June had asked for something vegetarian and had been offered a packet of potato crisps; she’d declined, confident there would be a health-food restaurant nearby.
‘There’s no taxi companies here,’ she told the others. ‘What you do is, you phone a guy called Henry, and he drives you to the nearest town for four pounds.’
‘So …’ began Fay.
‘So I’ve already phoned Henry’s wife, and she says he’ll come soon.’
Henry did indeed come soon, his last fare having been nothing more than the delivery of roast chicken to some dedicated pool-players in a local hotel. He delivered the artists into the Royal Burgh of Tain, a small town near the shore of the Dornoch Firth. Tain was pretty much closed for lunch when they arrived. The travel agency, tucked away above the pharmacy, was closed for the rest of the day.
‘Fuckin’ neanderthals,’ fumed Morton Krauss, squinting in the sunlight reflecting off the sea.
Tain was built on high ground, with panoramic views not only of the sea but of miles of farmland. Near and far there were sheep, nibbling the grass at the edge of the road, their faces Ektachrome vivid in the sun; sheep milling about in the middle distance; more sheep dotting the unkempt horizon. The artists had never seen so many sheep; indeed, Morton Krauss had never seen any sheep, except in other people’s photographs.
Morton had his own camera with him, mounted with the world’s most powerful telephoto lens. Peering through the viewfinder, he could be eyeball to eyeball with a black-faced sheep, or get a fix on the licorice torrent of turd-balls falling out of its asshole. He glimpsed the murky genesis of a new photographic exhibition, his follow-up to ‘Fistfucks’ – naked guys – no, naked babes – shitty-assed sheep with black faces – horns – the whole black stud/white virgin bit – he could do the sheep here, the girls back in New York – sandwiched negatives, cut-ups, whatever was easiest – or Kozinski could print them for him …
Somewhere behind his left shoulder, the other artists were discussing the immediate future. He didn’t need to know what they were planning, since he had borrowed £20 from Nick Kline. That would probably last until he could get more sent to him from Charles in Newcastle; then again, the fact that Kline had lent him this much already probably meant he’d buy Morton any necessary bus or train tickets. Even better would be if the bus and the train proved to be a no-go; then somebody would end up hiring a car and he could just go along for the ride.
Eventually, the artists reached the limit of what they could finalise, given that Tain’s four banks were still shut for lunch and that both Gail Freleng and Tina Golem (June Laboyer-Suk’s agent) were in Ansafone mode. Predictably, none of the artists possessed an internationally valid credit card except June Laboyer-Suk, and she had left hers behind in the States, packed away in a bundle of other stuff from the ‘Trust’ exhibition. She had known from the outset that she didn’t have her credit card with her, but had argued herself out of going back to the gallery to look for it because the invitation from the Alternative Centre of the World had taken such pains to stress that everything would be provided.
As for the others, Nick Kline didn’t need a credit card because he had Gail Freleng, Fay Barratt and Morton Krauss had once had credit cards but weren’t allowed them anymore, and Gerrit Plank was ideologically opposed to credit.
All things considered, it was agreed there was no point in the artists sticking together every minute. They would explore Tain individually, and meet in front of the post office in an hour or so. By that time, refreshed, with a clearer sense of priorities, they could exchange whatever they had managed to learn about how they might get back to New York.
Nick Kline, knowing that Gail Freleng never left her answering machine uncleared for longer than a few hours, parted company from the others in a state of perfect serenity. It was as if some tide of trouble had rolled dangerously close to him and then had gone out again, never reaching the rock on which he was standing. Now, free to roam, he had his eye on an ancient-looking graveyard down near the firth; there were stone steps and a narrow path from the High Street right through the fields down to those ruins, nothing could be simpler.
Gerrit Plank disappeared into a church, where he sat quietly in the warmth as if praying. He didn’t even have to look at his watch, because on one of the walls there was a clock much larger than his own.
June and Fay, having forged a rudimentary intimacy from needing a female toilet, found one together, and sat in adjacent cubicles, listening to each other piss. Earlier on, Fay had shown June her letter from ‘An Art Lover’, in order to vent her wounded feelings about its accusations. She had, she said, sweated blood and tears over the painting singled out for derision, You may as well have this, too. Its apparently crude technique was totally deliberate, she said, suggesting the rawness of the emotion and the unresolved pain and confusion of women who did not have a voice. Even the clogging of the paint was to show physically the frustration of impotence. June Laboyer-Suk had tried her best to comfort Fay, even though she was fundamentally indifferent to painting, whether good or bad. Coming from a circle of powerful, successful women and thoroughly feminised men, she did her best to respect Fay’s rage, but the respect felt sort of … anthropological. And sitting in the toilet cubicle next door, June couldn’t help thinking that the sound of Fay’s pissing was exactly what she would have expected: forced, fitful, hitting the bowl at an acutely deflected angle. Fay, for her part, simply couldn’t believe how much piss June Laboyer-Suk seemed to have inside her: it went on forever. There must be parts of her missing, to have room for so much.
Still together back in the High Street, June and Fay ran into Morton, who had found a sort of mini-supermarket open and was brandishing his booty.
‘Look what I got!’ he grinned, happy for the first time since leaving New York. Out of his white plastic bag, bulging with milk, canned beer and cigarettes, he whipped a packet of Kellogg’s Variety, eight tiny boxes of different cereals shrink-wrapped together.
‘Want some?’ he crowed, as if he were offering high-quality cocaine.
‘We don’t have any bowls,’ June pointed out.
‘We don’t need any,’ beamed Morton, tearing the cellophane off the cereal boxlets. ‘I have these all the time. Theboxes kinda turn into bowls. The cardboard’s got kinda … kinda …’ He punched the air inarticulately.
‘Perforations?’ suggested June Laboyer-Suk.
‘Yeah. Each little box is like a total art statement. It’s like the total opposite of eating at the family dinner table, or a restaurant. It’s more than just anti-social, it’s … it’s …’
‘Sub-social?’
‘It’s … beyond social.’
Enthusiastically, Morton poked at one of the packets with the handle of a spoon, s
earching for the familiar perforations.
‘Fuck!’ he announced in incensed bewilderment. ‘There’s no … there’s no little holes!’
‘Well, Morton,’ smiled June Laboyer-Suk, ‘we are in a different country.’
‘They shouldn’t fuck around with the cereal packets,’ he retorted.
‘The Scottish maybe don’t think they need perforations in their cereal packets,’ Fay chipped in.
Morton was offended, as if morally, by this insinuation. ‘Some things,’ he declared, ‘should be like …’
‘Universal?’
‘Yeah.’ Profoundly crestfallen, he replaced the cereal packets in the plastic bag and slouched away.
‘I’m surprised he had a spoon, actually,’ said June.
‘He probably needs it for melting heroin in,’ said Fay.
This slur on Morton Krauss’s drug life was undeserved, as he had not regularly taken heroin, at least intravenously, since the early 1980s. He always carried a spoon around with him, and a can opener, because he had a weakness for cold cocktail frankfurters and tubs of ‘gourmet’ ice cream. He had never melted heroin in a spoon anyway: other people had done it for him, with heroin they had bought. An inveterate needle-sharer in the pre-AIDS days, and as promiscuous as opportunity allowed, Morton had somehow never become HIV-positive, a stroke of luck that chagrined art speculators who had bought up lots of Morton Krauss works in anticipation of his death. A recent interview with Morton in an art magazine had captioned his photograph with the quote: ‘HIV-positive? I’m a negative kind of guy.’
Morton was indeed a negative kind of guy, and he found plenty in Tain to be negative about. The mini-supermarket suggested he buy himself a bowl for 10p at the St Duthus charity shop rather than giving him a refund on his Kellogg’s Variety, and they had never heard of peanut-butter chocolates. When the other shops finally opened, none of them had anything that Morton wanted. The streets were full of pudgy young women in lilac anoraks with babies and toddlers, and old people who looked like the Queen of England on a rainy day. At one point, a group of teenage schoolchildren converged on the Café Volante, the local fast-food shop, and Morton hung around near them for a while, but nobody offered to sell him drugs of any kind. Instead, the kids ate pale-yellow batter in various shapes and agreed that Mr McLeod was ‘fuckin’ mental’.