Republics of the Mind

by James Robertson

  ‘Maybe we should split up,’ he heard himself say.

  ‘What?’ said Sean.

  ‘I’m just thinking, if we split up there’s mair chance of us getting lifts out of here if anybody does stop. Further up the road too. I mean, if we’re going to get to Kenny in time.’

  Sean looked at him. ‘You want us to split up?’ he said.

  ‘I’m just thinking there’d be more chance, maybe …’

  Sean gobbed on the road again, then he said, ‘It’s me, isn’t it? You don’t think we’re going to get there the pair of us, do you?’

  ‘Well, we shouldn’t have ever come this way in the first place.’

  ‘Aye, you wouldn’t be blaming me if you’d got your fucking hole, would ye?’

  ‘Aye, but I didn’t, did I? In fact, we never even found the women, Sean. All I’m saying is, it’s taken us all day to get from that hotel to this wee village, one lift, and we’re probably cutting our chances in half sticking thegither.’

  ‘There’s only been three cars in the last hour and they were all full. The road’s no exactly been teeming with cars going, sorry lads, only room for one of yous, has it?’

  ‘It’s just with the rucksacks and everything. If we’d gone up the A9 on our own we’d be there by now.’

  ‘You should have thought about that when we set out. It’s no my fucking fault there’s no traffic on the road. Think I’m bad for you or something?’

  ‘Naw. But we’ve no been having much luck the last day or two, have we?’

  ‘Oh, that’s my fault, is it? Think I’m bad luck, ya bastard? Well, I’ll tell you, you’re no Mr Opportunity fucking Knocks yourself.’

  ‘All right,’ said Billy. ‘All right, all right, all right! I’m just getting depressed, that’s all.’

  ‘Join the club,’ said Sean. They stood listening to the rain falling and the total absence of traffic.

  ‘I mean,’ said Billy, ‘I’m no even sure about this job either.’

  Sean came over to him and stood with his face at an angle an inch or two away from Billy’s. ‘Say that again?’ he said.

  Billy shrugged. The movement caused more rain to trickle down his back. This bothered him more than Sean’s aggression, which was all thunder and no lightning anyway.

  ‘Are you saying the job’s no definite?’ Sean wanted to know.

  ‘Naw,’ said Billy, ‘course it is. If we get there in time. That’s no what I mean. I mean, the ethics of it.’

  ‘Aw, no that again,’ said Sean. ‘I thought we’d been through all that.’

  ‘Aye, we have,’ said Billy, ‘but I’m still turning it over. It’s no that simple.’

  ‘It’s this bloody simple,’ said Sean. ‘If we don’t do the work some other cunt will. That’s all there is to it.’

  He stamped his feet up and down the road to get the circulation going. After a couple of minutes he stopped.

  ‘Bugger this,’ he said. ‘I’m freezing to death here. I’m away back for another pot of tea off that nice wee lassie.’

  ‘May as well stick it out now we’re soaked,’ said Billy. ‘Somebody’s got to come by sooner or later.’

  ‘Aye, probably later. Come on, let’s go back and get warmed up.’

  ‘Aye, maybe.’ Billy pulled back his jacket sleeve to check his watch. ‘Look, it’s just gone quarter past four. Give it till half-past and if we’re still here we’ll go back.’

  ‘Christ, the café’ll probably close at half-four. Nothing’s coming, Billy. Let’s go for the tea.’

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here, Sean. There’s a guy coming up the road this minute that’s destined to stop for us. No, I’m wrong, it’s no a guy, it’s this gorgeous oversexed American divorcee on her holidays, looking for some local talent. And her pal. I don’t want to miss the only lift going just for another cup of tea.’

  ‘Well, I’m chancing it. We’ll take it in shifts. Heads I go first, tails you stay, ha ha. Then when I come back you can go. Come and get us if anyone stops, eh?’

  ‘Come on, Sean, you can’t get folk to stop and then say, oh, eh, by the way, could you just back up the road to that wee tea-shop there, my mate’s just finishing his scones. I mean, can you?’

  ‘Well, I’m fucking away. You coming or staying?’

  ‘I’m staying. I’ll wait till half-past.’

  Neither of them would give way. Sean walked off a few yards. Billy tried to put some action into standing his ground. This was the deal, if it was one: Billy would make his point of principle for fifteen minutes, then join Sean in the café. He would make his stand and hope a car wouldn’t come along to put it to the test. Sean slouched off through the rain towards the café.

  * * *

  The ethics of it. The night before, waiting for the women, they’d had this long discussion about the tree felling. It was a programme Billy had seen on the telly that started him off, about this massive Forestry Commission plantation that had been sold off to some pop group or Terry Wogan or someone. It had been planted in the 1950s, according to a plan. The plan was that the trees would be regenerative, if that was the word. You’d harvest them over a period of thirty years or so, so that the next lot would have grown up by the time you’d finished. The crofters in the area could get part-time work every single year for decades, taking out the mature trees in partnership with the Commission. The whole thing was about community involvement.

  ‘Then the Forestry Commission’s forced to sell it off when the trees are about to mature and some rich bastard buys it who never comes near the place and one day his accountant tells him to realise his assets and take the whole fucking lot out. That doesna seem right at all to me.’

  ‘Aw, come on,’ said Sean, ‘don’t get so pious. You’re in it just the same as everyone. You need the work and I need the work, and what’s more, we can do the work. If it wasn’t us it would be someone else.’

  ‘That’s the point, though. It shouldn’t be us. It should be about sustaining the local population, not bringing in the flying squads.’

  ‘The world’s fucking changed, Billy,’ said Sean. ‘You might not like it much, and I might not like it, but it’s changed and you have to change with it. See when they sold off British Telecom and British Gas and that? Did you buy the shares and make a few hundred quid selling them on?’

  ‘No,’ said Billy. ‘That wasna right either. How, did you?’

  ‘No, but no out of principle. I didna have any cash or I would have done. And there was plenty of folk I ken that did.’

  ‘Aye, and what have they got to show for it now? They might have made a few bob but look at how much profit BT makes these days. Hundreds of pounds every bloody second. And how much of that are you and me and anybody else in Hicksville Scotland ever going to see? Not a fucking penny.’

  ‘Well, moaning about the rights and wrongs of it isn’t going to make it better. You had your chance for a slice of the action and you missed it.’

  ‘We both did,’ said Billy. This forestry thing, it was like American mining companies ripping off Indian land for uranium or something. The same idea.

  Sean shrugged. ‘Grab it when you see it,’ he said. ‘Work, women, money. That’s the only way to live these days.’

  Billy and Sean. It sounded like a sectarian stand-up comedy act, and in a way that was exactly what they were. They got on all right, they played off against each other, but Billy wouldn’t have said they’d ever got close. He wouldn’t say that about him and anybody though. Especially not his male friends. You just didn’t do it. The closest you got was kicking a ball about, or on the terracing watching Scotland (at club level it was different teams for him and Sean), or drunk together in the pub. You needed something external like that to be able to show your affection, any warmth. So probably the closeness wasn’t even there if you took away the circumstances. It was all artificially induced. Men were like herds of rutting stags, or tigers wandering about in the jungle. They didn’t much like each other’s company so they
invented sport and pubs to make it bearable. What they really wanted to do was roam around on their own, occasionally home in on unsuspecting women and engage in an elaborate mating ceremony, then fuck off into the jungle again. Or up on the moors or wherever.

  Women now, that was different. Women friends were close to each other. Christ, they wore each other’s clothes and shared their beds and their most intimate secrets and suchlike. He couldn’t imagine what that must be like. It must be great but frightening too. Making yourself so vulnerable. But warm too, when it was working right. And of course a man and a woman could be like that. The man could get a real friend out of his female lover. What did the woman get? She might get a lover out of a male friend but could she get a friend out of her lover? Not according to the accepted wisdom, it seemed.

  Women friends. He had a few. There was Marian that worked behind the bar at his local, but she was every man’s friend. You could talk to Marian about whatever you wanted and she’d listen but that was her job, somehow even though you could have a great crack with her you felt she wouldn’t let you get close to her, she had another life when she came round the bar. Good for her too, you didn’t grudge her that. He was still friendly with a couple of old girlfriends. They were married now, to mates of his, and that was fine, there was no aggro about it, and he could chat to them and dance with them at parties and nobody cared. But there was a line there, a line beyond which the conversation could not go. Partly the line was drawn by himself, but mostly it was there because of conventions. You do not discuss your sexual frustrations with your mate’s wife who happens to be an old flame, for example. Just not the done thing, open to misinterpretation et cetera by all parties concerned. Sometimes – at nights out or weddings, say, especially weddings – he saw the women in wee groups, talking nineteen to the dozen, and even though physically there was no barrier in fact, he knew they were on the far side of the line. He’d look across the dance floor and all he’d see was drunk men standing at the bar together, and single men circling the dancers.

  He was sick of the male thing. If he could do it for another couple of years maybe he could stop, get into his secure place, and start being human. That’s what he felt like, that most of his life he spent not being human, not being himself, but trying to play a role. He looked at a guy like Sean and he thought maybe he should just give in, but it wasn’t good enough. That was his trouble. Nothing was good enough for him. He couldn’t help thinking beyond where he was.

  Jonah in the Bible. Some folk called him Jonas, was that right? He seemed to remember that from somewhere. Anyway, whatever his name was, the thing about him was if he hadn’t run away from God he’d have been all right. It was because he was running away from God that he was jinxed. When the storm blew up the crew knew that meant someone was bad luck, so they drew lots to find out who, and it was Jonah. So they threw him overboard and he got swallowed by the whale. But suppose it hadn’t been him? Suppose it was someone else that was jinxed? He drew the short straw but that wasn’t exactly conclusive evidence. Then he came up with this shite about having displeased God, so they took that as proof and chucked him in the sea. He was Jewish and they weren’t, that was another thing. This business of upsetting his God wouldn’t mean much to them, it wouldn’t be a proper reason for pinning the blame on him, and anyway he’d told them about it before the storm. What if they’d got rid of him and the storm hadn’t died down, would they have drawn lots again, thrown each other in until it stopped? No, that would have made the whole story pointless. The point was, the only thing that made Jonah the Jonah was the story. It had to be him for the story to work.

  There was a swishing sound and a car came into view out of the village, its headlights taking Billy by surprise. However his thumb was experienced, it went out instantly, and as if it exerted some magical influence the car slowed to a halt beside him. Great moments, thought Billy. He still got a thrill when it happened. He stepped over just as the driver was leaning across to open the passenger door.

  ‘How far you going, pal?’

  ‘Inverness,’ said the driver. A man in shirt-sleeves and tie. His jacket was hung on a plastic peg behind him. ‘That any use to you?’

  ‘Aye, brilliant,’ said Billy. ‘Eh, I’ve got a rucksack here, is that all right?’

  ‘Aye,’ said the driver. ‘Just sling it in the boot, there’s plenty room.’ He pressed or pulled some control under the dashboard and the boot sprang open.

  ‘Great,’ said Billy. He looked back down the road for Sean, then at his watch. It was ten to five. Come on, ya bastard, where are you, stuck in the cludgie or something?

  He tried to take his time loading the rucksack into the boot and closing it.

  ‘That you first in the queue, son?’ the driver called. Billy went back to the open door. ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  ‘I’m saying, are you in a queue? I see there’s another rucksack there.’

  ‘Aye, well, actually,’ said Billy, pointing back to the village. ‘Eh, it’s just like, there’s someone else.’

  ‘I can see that. Well, come on, hop in, the seat’s getting wet.’

  ‘Aye, I mean, it’s my mate like. He’s back there at the café.’

  The driver leaned right over again, his face staring up into Billy’s. He was some kind of sales rep, probably. He looked quite a hardman.

  ‘Right, well, I haven’t got all day. I’m doing you a favour, son. Are you coming or not?’

  Billy hesitated again, his hand on the passenger door. There was still no sign of Sean. He’d be chatting up that lassie behind the counter, he knew it, he could just about hear him at it.

  The driver revved his engine. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘You didn’t have your thumb out in the fucking rain for nothing, did ye? Make up your mind, pal.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Billy. From Inverness he could go anywhere. It wasn’t the kind of statement you ever expected to hear – ‘From Inverness you can go anywhere!’ – but it was true. Maybe he’d keep going north, find Kenny, get the job. Or maybe he’d tell him, no, I can’t do it, Kenny, I can’t take part in this massacre, and head off back down the A9. Or just not bother. Aberdeen, maybe. Try to get out on the rigs again. Aberdeen, then Australia. Aye, and maybe it was him after all, he’d get thrown overboard, swallowed by a big fish.

  This was all in a moment. A moment like all these moments in his life when he felt he was being tossed like a coin. For a moment the chances hang spinning in the air, and then you call.

  ‘Right,’ he said to the driver above the noise of the rain. He almost shouted it.

  The Claw

  My grandfather’s hand is turning into a claw. That’s what I’m thinking as I watch it raise the coffee cup. The finger-joints are swollen and the fingers themselves permanently curled, and the tone of the flesh is distorted by bruise-like browns and blues. Liver spots, I think the term is. They come with old age. The grip on my arm when he pulled up out of his chair to greet me was so fierce that it felt like he would never let go. Looking at the hand now, hard and unyielding on the fussy handle of the cup, it seems independent of the rest of him. Evidently the brain is still sending out orders, but between it and the claw everything else is crumbling.

  His upper arms are thin as ropes, his whole structure like some skeletal macramé. He can barely walk across the room even with his sticks or a zimmer. He needs help to get to the bathroom or to the dining room. The latter journey is painfully slow, involving him being loaded into the chairlift at the top of the staircase and helped out of it at the bottom. When the staff are too busy they bring the meals to his room instead. This is happening more and more, I know, because he tells me. ‘They’re keeping me a prisoner here,’ he says loudly, before the woman who brought the tray has closed the door behind her. I laugh in a way that is supposed to sound to her like an apology.

  In addition to the infirmity of his legs, other faults have developed in the last year. He likens himself to a motor car – that’s what he calls it �
� and says that with 98, 000 miles on the clock it’s not surprising that the bodywork is a bit rusty and some things don’t work very well anymore. He’s already had two hip replacement operations and now he says they’re not making the parts for his model, so he won’t be going up on the ramp again, thank you very much.

  Or to put it another way: he says he’s on borrowed time, each year he chalks up beyond the biblical span a debt that God might call in at any moment. He can no longer go to church, of course. The minister comes every so often, and twice a year he receives his own private communion. His faith is unquestionable, but what exactly it is has never been discussed. He would resent even the minister – especially the minister – interfering in that matter.

  His bladder is weak, his bowel easily upset. He can no longer take a bath – he is given one. He is almost totally blind and even with his hearing aid turned up full he is pretty deaf – although everybody says he sees and hears more than he lets on. I find this idea disconcerting, as his knowledge of me is constructed on a set of evasions and unrevealed truths and I wonder if he can hear them in my voice or see them in my smile. When someone has lost the full use of their senses you become careless and drop your guard. But if my grandfather has his suspicions he does not display them. That is not the done thing with him. He’ll wait to be told, and if he’s told nothing he’ll assume there’s a conspiracy and come up with his own theory to fit it.

  He has a very ordered mind, which has always extended to his own presentation. He shaves every morning with an electric shaver and takes a pride in always wearing a collar and tie, and having clean shoes. Not that the shoes can get dirty as he never leaves the home now, not for birthdays or weddings or Christmas or any other family occasion. ‘There’s only one event I can think of that I’ll get out of here for,’ he says. ‘I hope you’ll all attend!’ He has three children, eight grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren and on each of their birthdays a card drops through the letterbox, the envelope addressed in an anonymous hand, his signature scrawled under the greeting. This year he sent mine to my mother as I was in America again, and she forwarded it to me. Various multi-coloured cats in acrobatic poses spelt out the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY. It was months ago but one of the first things he said to me when I got back was, ‘Did you get my card? I sent it to your mother. One of the people here chose it for me. They said it had a lot of cats on it. I hope you don’t dislike cats very much.’ It takes someone born in another century to come out with a sentence like that.