Republics of the Mind

by James Robertson

  For Michael Marra,

  who really knows how to make less more

  Acknowledgements

  The first eleven stories in this collection were originally published in The Ragged Man’s Complaint by B&W Publishing in 1993. They reappear here with some minor editorial and orthographical changes.

  The remaining stories have either not been published before or have appeared in earlier forms in a number of different outlets.

  Acknowledgements are due to the following:

  ‘The Dictionary’ was first published in an earlier form in Stepping into the Avalanche (Brownsbank Press, Biggar 2003).

  ‘Don’t Start Me Talkin’ (I’ll Tell Everything I Know)’ was first published in an earlier form in Friends and Kangaroos: New Writing Scotland 17 (ASLS 1999).

  ‘Old Mortality’ was first published in The Sunday Herald in October 2006.

  ‘MacTaggart’s Shed’ was first published in Stuart Kelly (ed.), Headshook (Hachette Scotland 2009).

  ‘The Future According to Luke’ was originally commissioned by the Edinburgh International Book Festival with the support of Creative Scotland and the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Giraffe

  The Plagues

  Screen Lives

  The Jonah

  The Claw

  Bastards

  Facing It

  What Love Is

  Tilt

  Republic of the Mind

  Pretending to Sleep

  Opportunities

  The Shelf

  The Dictionary

  The Dayshift

  Don’t Start Me Talkin’ (I’ll Tell Everything I Know)

  Willie Masson’s Miracle

  The Rock Cake Incident

  Old Mortality

  MacTaggart’s Shed

  The Future According to Luke

  Sixes and Sevens

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Giraffe

  The day Eilidh died. It started with a hangover and got worse. That’s how Jimmy Sanderson minds it.

  He minds doing the meat-run that day, feeling like shite, him and Eck down at the mink farm loading up the dead beasts. ‘There’s a wee treat for the cats in the horsebox,’ Murray had said, but he hadn’t said what. Jimmy can still picture himself, clear as anything, flicking up the snecks to let down the back of the box. It was full of horses’ heads – twenty or thirty of them – and pathetic wee bundles of dead lambs in plastic bags.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Eck.

  It was May, and very hot. The heads had been lying for days and some of the eyes were out on their stalks. Up until that moment Jimmy’d always thought that only happened in cartoons.

  Still feeling rough with the drink, he grabbed a couple of heads by the lugs and swung them up into the meat-trailer where they landed with a thud. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘May as well get this ower wi.’

  After a few seconds Eck stamped out his fag and joined him. ‘Need tae pit these oot o sight,’ he said. ‘Where the punters canna see them.’

  First there was the hangover, then getting a roasting from Murray for being late in, then the meat-run with those heads from the knackers, then Eilidh dying. And the dead monkey, don’t forget the dead monkey. That was a lot of bad things for one day, even for the Park.

  Jimmy had been out on the bevvy with Eck the night before and he’d stayed over at Eck’s because he couldn’t ride his bike home in the state he was in. Eck’s ma was supposed to wake them at half-seven but she must have been drunker than both of them because she never did; the first thing Jimmy knew about the morning was the sun hitting him in the eyes through a gap in the living-room curtains and himself swimming off the couch with a full bladder and a burst skull. Eck’s ma was still snoring when they left the house ten minutes after they should have been at work. Jimmy got the bike started (at least he’d had the sense to leave it at Eck’s before they hit the pubs) and Eck jumped on behind and somehow Jimmy managed to get them to the Park without putting the bike in the sheuch, the bevvy sloshing around in his head every time they leaned into a curve.

  They were only half an hour late but Murray gave them a bollocking just the same. ‘This isna a fuckin holiday camp by the way.’ Jimmy was going to say, ‘Well, it is, kinda,’ but thought better of it. ‘I’m dockin an hour aff your wages, the pair o yous,’ said Murray. ‘Ye’re lucky ye’re no gettin your books.’ He’d already sent Dave Maxton to let out the giraffes and camels. That would be all that he’d done, you could bet on it. Maxton was one lazy bad bastard. Jimmy and Eck got given the meat-run, which didn’t exactly help the queasy feeling in Jimmy’s belly. A couple of sheep for the tigers, an old cow and some heads for the female lions, some more heads and the lambs for the males. Eck had gutted the big beasts the day before, but Murray had forgotten to tell him about the stuff in the horsebox till that morning. Jimmy said, ‘Are we gonnae huv tae gut the lambs an aw?’ but Eck shook his head. ‘They can hae the fuckin lot.’ In the lion sections they dropped the heads behind fallen tree-trunks so as not to upset the public when they drove by.

  They were back at the office an hour later, waiting on orders, which was when Murray exploded off the phone about the monkey. The second one in a week. Apparently it was lying on the hard shoulder of the motorway, about four miles across country from the Park. ‘That’s quite a hike for a wee Injun bandit in hostile fermin territory,’ Eck commented. (He was a great man for the Westerns.) Some concerned motorist had phoned in to complain. Murray was not a happy man.

  ‘How dae the fuckers get oot, that’s whit I want tae ken. We’ve been roon that perimeter fence three fuckin times. An how come they ayewis end up on the fuckin roads? I mean, could they no jist disappear intae the hills or somethin, for fuck’s sake?’

  It was embarrassing. For the Park, that is. Personally, it didn’t put Jimmy up nor down. He wasn’t even that bothered about the thing getting squashed; truth was, he wasn’t fond of the monkeys and his head was killing him.

  ‘It must be a hole but,’ said Eck. ‘There’s nae wey these monkeys can get ower the tap, no wi the electric strands and the wey it angles in.’

  Murray gave him a look. ‘I don’t need you tae tell me that,’ he said. That wasn’t what was bothering him, it was the publicity.

  ‘I’m jist sayin,’ said Eck.

  ‘Aye, aw right,’ said Murray. ‘Away and check the bloody fence again. Jimmy, you go doon an kick Dave Maxton’s erse. I better go and pick the bugger up afore the Salvation Army get on the phone.’

  As Murray drove away, the first cars of the day were just going through the lock-gates into the tiger section. Jimmy headed off to the giraffe-house to see what Maxton hadn’t got up to, and to have a look at Eilidh.

  Rhesus monkeys. The Park only had them because they were easier to manage than the baboons. The baboons were before Jimmy’s time, and they’d had to go. They were maladjusted. They systematically ripped people’s cars to pieces. They weren’t intimidated by human beings or human devices at all. Somebody had to stand at the section exit with a long bamboo pole and knock them off from under the cars to stop them escaping. After closing time they went over the fence anyway – using the shock from the electrified strands to give themselves an extra boost – and roamed through the woods at the back of the Park, jumping out at evening joggers and strollers. Drunk men arrived home to their wives with tales of hairy old Satanists scampering naked through the undergrowth. The baboons came back to the Park before dawn so that they wouldn’t miss out on any food that was going. The final straw was when half the troop turned up at a funera
l in the nearest village. Uninvited. Whenever Jimmy thought of that it was the uninvited bit that made him laugh. He could see the baboons sitting po-faced and blue-arsed on the gravestones, wearing tall black hats and stroking their chins, being cold-shouldered by the other mourners. The local paper had made a fuss and they’d had to go, back to Africa or Longleat or wherever they’d come from.

  But then, as Eck said, nobody could be sure they’d caught them all. Baboons weren’t daft – some of them might have opted to stay out. They might be out there yet.

  It was a rat that killed Eilidh, Jimmy’s pretty sure of it. Not in the long term of course. He has a theory about that too, about captivity and exploitation and living conditions. But in the short term, as an immediate cause of death, he’d put his money on a rat.

  She didn’t mind about the rats if she had company. She could deal with them if the other giraffes were in the stall with her. But in the period before her death she’d been on her own a lot. They’d had to keep her in the yard, or sometimes in the stall, when the others went out each morning. Some days the vet was coming to see her, or she had to be put in the crush to get the wound treated, or she was stumbling around so much she was a danger to herself and to the people having their picnics. Towards the end it was the smell of the wound as much as anything. Murray had enough complaints on his hands what with the squashed monkeys. Some do-gooder was always trying to spot animals in poor condition. So Eilidh was stuck inside all day, stretching her neck out into the sunlight through the top half-doors, on her own, not coping with the rats. She was a sad case.

  Nobody knew quite how the wound on her front left leg had started, but probably it was from a sharp point on one of the fences. Jimmy felt a bit guilty because he should have spotted it sooner. Either the metal was rusty or the wound had got septic some other way, but before long it was weeping and expanding in a big oval patch that Eilidh made worse by rubbing it against the trees and fences all day. Murray and Jimmy got her into the crush and cleaned it up and sprayed it with purple disinfectant but it didn’t improve. Then she started limping with it.

  The vet came and told them to treat it daily. It fell to Jimmy to organise this. It would take two or three of them to coax her into the crush, tempting her with food and prodding her in the oxters with the bamboo poles, but after a while she associated the crush with the pain of disinfecting the wound and it became harder to get her in. Food no longer tempted her as she was eating virtually nothing. She became more and more difficult; you couldn’t help getting impatient with her.

  Maxton said the only thing the animals understood was pain, if you hit the bastards hard enough they would do what you wanted. He demonstrated this by giving the male camel a flying kick in the bollocks to prove he could get it into its shed at night when nobody else could. The camel went – spitting and gurgling, but it went. Maxton also tried his theory out on Stumpy, a wee elephant without its tail that had been dumped on the Park from one of the Company’s places in England. Maxton regularly battered Stumpy across the head and trunk with an old table-leg, to show who was boss. It worked. Whenever he saw Maxton coming, Stumpy backed into a corner of the yard, watching him warily.

  ‘That’s great, Dave,’ said Jimmy. ‘If the rest o us take turns tae beat him senseless he’ll respect us all.’

  ‘He’s fuckin dangerous,’ Maxton retorted. ‘Ye’ve tae fuckin watch him.’

  ‘Aye, nae fuckin wunner,’ said Jimmy. One of his fantasies was that Stumpy would grow tusks overnight and staple the bastard to a tree. Around that time he hated having his day off if Maxton was working it, he didn’t like to think what he might be doing to Eilidh. It was a relief coming back and finding her still limping and thrawn, still stinking of gangrene.

  One morning – this was a week or so before she died – Jimmy was up on the walk in the giraffe-house checking the feed in the troughs. Eilidh didn’t hear him coming. Even before he reached the stall he could tell something was wrong. Up there he was on a level with Eilidh’s head, but she didn’t notice him at all. She was wedged into one corner, her flanks quivering, her big soft eyes fixed in terror on the opposite corner of the stall, where a huge wet rat was scuffling around in the straw. The rat wasn’t paying Eilidh a blind bit of notice. One well-aimed kick from her would have splattered it all over the walls. But she couldn’t move. Jimmy’d seen her nervous often enough – the giraffes were skeerie, easily spooked – but he’d never seen fear like that in her before. That’s how, later, he was certain it was a rat, maybe even the same rat, that finished her off.

  There were two stalls, each big enough to take four giraffes at night. One of the things that had to be done every second day was move Eilidh from one stall to the other so they could be mucked out. For several days before she died Jimmy had tried to shift her and failed, she was getting that stubborn. So this morning he arrived at the giraffe-house with his head pounding, knowing she would have to be moved. Maxton was propped up on some sacks of feed in the store-room, drinking tea and smoking. ‘Did ye shift Eilidh?’ He might as well have asked if he’d been up Ben Ledi before breakfast, the look Maxton gave him.

  ‘Did I fuck. Fuckin bitch willna fuckin shift.’ Jimmy had a sore head, he wasn’t in the mood to take Maxton on. He was trouble, everybody knew that. Of course he hadn’t mucked out the empty stall either. Jimmy just went on and did it himself.

  It was while he was in there that the crash came in the other stall. A terrible thumping crash followed by a scrabbling, thrashing sound. He tried to jump up onto the walk from the floor but it was too high, so he had to run all the way back across the yard and in through the store-room. Maxton was still lounging around. ‘Whit’s the fuckin hurry?’

  When Jimmy got to Eilidh’s stall it was almost over. She was backed into that same corner, but this time she’d gone down with all her legs tangled up underneath her. When she saw the rat she must have slipped in her panic on the sharn that hadn’t been mucked out, and she was too weak to stop herself falling. She was struggling to keep her neck upright against the wall, but it was no good, what strength she had was going into the useless flailing of her legs. Jimmy couldn’t get near her. For all that she was weakened and timid she still had enough power in those legs to kill him if she connected a kick. He couldn’t even reach over to support her head, and all the time he could hear her breathing becoming more desperate. The giraffes were odd like that. They never made a noise, and they could only sit down with a special folding arrangement of the legs. Any other way and they couldn’t get up again, and what was more the length of their necks made it impossible for them to breathe properly if they weren’t upright. He shouted on Maxton to get Murray on the radio but then he minded he was away for the dead monkey, out of range, so all he could do was hunker down on the walk and watch the life ebb out of Eilidh. That’s how he sees it now: sitting watching her, thinking, ‘This is a crime, this is not the way a giraffe should die.’ But she died anyway. He never even saw the rat, but for days after that if he caught one in the open he would go after it with a spade and batter it to bits.

  Maxton appeared on the walk beside him. He took a drag on his cigarette and flicked ash in the direction of Eilidh’s corpse. ‘Aboot fuckin time,’ he said. ‘Least we’ll no hae tae bother wi thon fuckin crush ony mair.’ Maxton hadn’t helped with the crush for a week at least. Jimmy pushed past him.

  ‘Fuck off, Maxton. Jist fuck off, right?’ He went out into the fresh air. Behind him he heard Maxton saying, ‘Away and fuckin greet then.’

  Jimmy thought only people in the Sunday Post were called Eck until he met Eck Galbraith. His ma in a moment of insanity (not the first or last by a long stroke, according to Eck) had named him and his twin brother Hector and Lysander, and they’d had to go through life disguising themselves as Eck and Sandy.

  Eck had been at the Park longer than Murray, and even though Murray was the boss, Eck had a way of getting round him. He could give him lip and get away with it when anybody else would have got a smac
k in the face. It was as if he had something on Murray. He always managed to get the easy work, or at least the work that was most out of the way and least supervised. Like, for example, he’d persuaded Murray that he knew all about butchering and could therefore be entrusted with preparing the meat for the cats. This was crap – he’d never cut up anything bigger than an ashet pie – but he learned by trial and error before Murray was wise to him, and nobody else got near the meat-room after that. Also he was one of the few workers whose driving licences were still unmarked, so he could be allowed out on the public roads with a tractor and trailer, going round the neighbouring farms to pick up the cheap cows, sheep, horses and other corpses that the Park fed to its beasts.

  Eck was left pretty much to his own devices, and early on Jimmy had seen it was a good ploy to get in with him and get a share in some of the cushy numbers. Not that he minded working with the giraffes and camels. They were easy, most of the time. But it was good to get away from the crowds once in a while, down the back road to the old mink farm which was where all the fruit, feed, hay and straw was stored. The stink of bananas down there – he couldn’t eat a banana for years after he worked at the Park. Next to the stores was the meat-room, where Eck got to practise with his big knives, gutting the beasts and freezing what couldn’t be used straightaway. The freezer was something out of a horror picture: whole beasts – mostly sheep – gutted and flung on the heap where they froze with their legs all twisted and sticking out at grotesque angles. Nobody was quite sure if everything in there was 100 per cent safe, so they tended to use fresh meat whenever possible. So long as the vet had given it the nod. No point in introducing foot-and-mouth or something into the Scottish lion population. (This was years ago, of course. Mad cow disease wasn’t even invented in these days.)

  Eck knew everything there was to know about working in the Park. When Jimmy first started, Eck filled him in on all the characters. He warned him about Dave Maxton. ‘That bastart’s gonnae end up back in the jyle.’ Then there was old John, one of the gatekeepers, who’d been three years in a POW camp in the war and had never got over it. He used to shout abuse and wave his shotgun around at any carload of Japanese that came through. But they couldn’t understand what he was on about, they probably thought he was part of the show. Another old guy, Wull Telfer, used to take the chimp island boat across the artificial river and set snares for rabbits on the edge of the farmland there. Sometimes he’d take one of the Park’s guns, load up with his own cartridges, and try for a pheasant or two. A fierce auld bugger, was Wull. But when he got home on a Friday he had to hand over his wage packet unopened or his wife would batter him, and if he wanted a smoke he had to get out of the house and do it in the toolshed.