There were seven or eight of them, and they had come to celebrate. It was understood that, even should the Tories get back in overall, they would be annihilated in Scotland. This would force a constitutional crisis. But only a few hours had passed since the polls had closed and already Scotland was snatching ifs and buts from the jaws of certainty. Kate’s act of frustration at least put an end to the agony of watching any more results. After another couple of drinks the TV began to look good – much better than it ever had done – and even the next day, clearing up the cans and plates and the powdered glass of the screen from the carpet, neither Robert nor Kate wanted to disturb the bottle. It was a monument to the moment when they left the politicians behind; a regrettable but glorious moment to be forever relived. Every time they looked at the neck of the bottle sticking out of the hole they were reminded of the Minister’s exploding face.
Kate was reading a passage in a history book about the execution of Mary Stewart. She had learned to think of her by that name, it made her more human somehow. Kate wasn’t into royalty:
Then her dressing of lawn falling off from her head, it appeared as grey as one of three score and ten years old, polled very short, her face in a moment by so much altered from the form she had when she was alive, as few could remember her by her dead face. Her lips stirred up and down for a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off.
Then Mr Dean said with a loud voice, ‘So perish all the Queen’s enemies …’
It was a different world, of course it was. It was four centuries ago and these people were the most important people in the land. And yet that was all they were, just people. The game they played – treaties, alliances, invasions, marriages, plots, executions – was a game of chess with human beings for the pieces. Queens, castles, clerics and knights, and, somewhere else, in a separate world again, cities full of pawns, a countryside dotted with pawn peasants.
For some days after the election Kate went around the flat muttering, ‘Hopeless, hopeless. Guns and bombs, guns and bombs, that’s all there is to it.’ But she’d already had her act of violence. And Robert, too, simply shook his head and headed off to the republic of the mind. The politicians could follow when they were ready. Robert was there, and Kate a lot of the time, and also many of their friends, although they didn’t always know it.
Sometimes, before she got there herself, Kate would realise he was in the room but absent from it. If the telly hadn’t had a bottle in its face they would have been watching the news, or some other useless programme. As it was, they’d be sitting – reading, maybe – and his book would fall aside onto the arm of the chair. Then she’d see the change in his face.
‘Is that you away again?’
‘Aye.’ His voice sounded distant.
‘Where is it you go to?’
‘Och, just away. I just think what a waste of time it is, having to wait to be a normal country, having to waste all this energy identifying ourselves. So I bugger off anyway. To the Scottish republic of the mind.’
She thought about that. It sounded not a bad idea at all.
‘Oh, aye, what’s it like there? Is it any better than the Scottish province of the body?’ So Robert could tell she was probably almost there herself, coming out with a remark like that.
‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘It’s brilliant.’
It might have been a drug, it might have been something you scored in pub toilets, but it wasn’t. It was better than that, and it didn’t fuck you up either. It didn’t make your nose cave in or give you monsters in the shadows or even just a rotten head; in fact it was an antidote to the postelection hangover. One day everybody was going to be there. The last folk off the last bus would be the political parties claiming they’d just wanted to make sure nobody got left behind.
It was more than some utopian fantasy about society. It filled the gap between actuality and possibilities of all kinds. Somebody once said that the art of life lay in recognising the luminous moment. Robert wasn’t certain about what that meant, what that moment might be, but he had some ideas. The novelist Neil Gunn had this concept – the atom of delight – a state of contentment and completeness – ‘I came upon myself sitting there.’ The republic was something like that, except it was constant, and for everybody. It was a state of being in which all the people understood themselves, and what they were doing, and why they were where they were. The more often you got there, the longer you stayed. And this was the secret of it – it didn’t depend on the politicians at all. It didn’t need constitutions and laws, but simple self-determination. It was as if every individual made their own Declaration of Arbroath. It was like going up to the mountain, and coming down whole.
Robert could remember with startling clarity the first real moment between him and Kate. This was a different kind, though, a moment shared between two people only. They’d known each other for months but up till then nothing had happened between them. Afterwards they discovered that they had each thought they were unnoticed by the other. They were in a crowd in some bar, surrounded by friends, and finding themselves pushed closer and somehow isolated from everybody else, they both became suddenly aware of their togetherness. It was as if all the people in the bar withdrew some distance, leaving them in a space of their own, although the fact was that the elbows and arms still jostled and squeezed around them. They kissed. Everybody might have been watching but they wouldn’t have seen that kiss. It was beyond the din and heat of the bar. The kiss was loaded with possibilities. It was what had carried them forward to where they were now, two years later. They were still unwrapping the possibilities it had contained.
That was just one moment. It meant everything, Robert was certain – it and other moments that stood out of daily life like islands in a loch. How, if they meant less than everything, did they return over and over to him? He knew that in ten or twenty or thirty years they would still be as clear and miraculous as they were now, as they had been when they first took place. He gathered them like the jewels of life.
He understood that he had a religious frame of mind. He was not church-going, he was past that, although he didn’t mock it as he once had. He was in his thirties and sometimes he thought he would like to go to church again, but it wasn’t for him. On the odd occasions when he did enter a church – at weddings, at funerals – he sat upright and watched, and knew he wasn’t a part of it. From his place in the pew he confronted the pulpit, the communion table. He was not being irreverent. It was a throwback, maybe, to his upbringing, to the Presbyterian in him, to a grim determination to meet God halfway, open-eyed, on equal terms.
And yet he was religious. Or, rather, he understood what religion was. He understood that its purpose was to explain. He knew he was a speck of dust, almost nothing, and yet he saw himself in relation to everything. He could be himself and yet be outwith himself. Christ was man and God. That was him too – dust and life, nothing and everything. There was something in that universal relationship that made him sick with excitement. He could see how a man like the ecologist John Muir could take the best from his father’s harsh, rigid creed and turn it into a celebration of existence, a hymn of joy. He believed that Muir must have had these moments too. In fact, a man who would climb a tree in a storm, to see what it was like to be a tree in a storm, probably had them all the time.
Kate met him at the door of the flat one Tuesday evening. ‘Your mum phoned,’ she said. He knew at once that it was his father, that his father was dead. Kate hugged him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was this afternoon. Your mum’s just back from the hospital.’
They’d been waiting for the phone call for days. They’d been waiting for the days of waiting for months. Only two weeks ago they’d seen him, apparently recovering, but Robert knew, from what his dad had said before, that death wasn’t far away. Just around the time of the election he’d been found to have cancer. He’d gone out to vote with a vengeance – ‘One last push for independence!’ he joked, knowing that that wasn’t going to
happen but sure, like them, that something must give in Scotland. He didn’t have the pleasure of seeing that, Robert thought. He went in and out of hospital, had days of slipping down and days of holding fast, then decided not to fight it any longer, that he wanted only to have some peace and to be free of pain. That was what he had told Robert. ‘It’s time to go,’ he said. ‘Your mother doesn’t think so because I’m only sixty-six, but it is.’ And now he was gone.
‘Are you okay?’ Kate asked him. She let go and stepped back. He nodded. ‘Aye, I’m fine. How’s my mum?’
‘She’s all right, I think.’ He had sisters. They were with her. He picked up the phone and dialled, and spoke to them each in turn. The funeral was to be on the Friday. Robert would drive up there in the morning.
‘Look,’ he said to Kate, ‘I’m all right, but would you mind holding the fort? Folk’ll be phoning and I don’t think I can handle it. I want to go out for a bit.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Will you come back, or will I meet you?’
He thought of a quiet bar a couple of streets away. ‘Let’s meet at the Ruthven. Say, in a couple of hours?’
He’d intended to go for a walk before having a drink – it was May, and the days were long and dry – but his way took him past the Ruthven anyway and he thought, to hell with it, I’ll have several drinks. On my own. A wake without the body.
He’d cut back on the beer of late because he was getting a bit of a belly, but he wanted a long drink. A long drink and a short – a half and a half. He was thirty-one ordering an old man’s tipple. He heard John Lee Hooker’s raucous voice somewhere in his head belting out, ‘One Bourbon, one Scotch, one beer.’ There were occasions, it seemed, when drinking was the best possible thing you could be doing.
There was an older man sitting next to him at the bar, a folded newspaper in front of him. They were both away with their thoughts. This was good: there was no necessity for small talk. But after about twenty minutes, when he was into the next set of drinks, the man said, ‘I’ll just say one thing, friend, and then I’ll not bother you. Just one thing. See this privatising the water, it makes me boak. It makes me want to join the tartan army or something.’
Robert gave him a grin. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘They’d privatise the air if they could bottle it.’
‘That’s all I wanted to say,’ said the man. ‘I’ll not bother you anymore.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Robert. ‘I don’t mind if you want to talk.’ It was true. He’d come in thinking he was going to do some thinking, but that wasn’t how thinking happened. Not about your father who was dead. You had to come upon it, or it came upon you, more subtly than that.
The man was probably in his fifties. His jacket had seen better days. So had his trainers. His hair was thin and straggly and his face thin and tired-looking. But he had very bright blue eyes. They were what people would remember about him.
‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘we’re powerless because there’s too many issues. If water was the only thing on the agenda they wouldn’t have a chance. Or if it was just about having our own parliament – if that was the only issue we’d have it by now. But it’s not, we keep having to try to get Labour in down there as well, to, like, minimise the damage. Ken what I mean?’
‘Aye,’ said Robert. He was thinking how nobody ever assumed their neighbour was a Tory in a public house in Scotland. ‘But self-government is the one unifying issue. If we had the parliament we could deal with all the other issues the way we wanted.’
‘Maybe, maybe,’ said the other guy. ‘But it’s hard, isn’t it? I keep thinking I’m going to stop doing it, vote Labour I mean, but then the next election comes along and there’s all these other things you want to vote on. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for it – a Scottish parliament – but you can’t isolate it like that. Sorry.’ Scuse me if you’re SNP or anything.’
‘You’ve put it in a nutshell,’ said Robert. ‘And you’re right. But self-government’s the key, it’s getting there that’s the problem. I’m a tactician myself. I vote for whichever party’s got the best chance of beating the Tory. Sooner or later we’ll get what we want by default.’
‘So you’d not call yourself a nationalist?’
‘My dad’s a nationalist. That’s as close as I get. He’s on the thinking wing of the party, though, always has been. Understands what folk like yourself are saying. Me, I’m on the thinking wing of the people.’
‘Aye, right enough, most folk don’t think much about it at all. And why should they? Seeing the politicians making such an arse of it.’
‘You’re a man after my own heart,’ said Robert. To prove it, he bought the guy a drink. He was aware that his dad had come into the conversation. He should tell the guy he was dead. It didn’t matter, but he should. He would, later.
‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘after the last disaster, I’ve kind of given up on the political parties. I’ve kind of just gone ahead, myself and a few others. As far as possible I live life as if the republic’s here already.’
‘That can’t be very far,’ said the guy. ‘Or very possible. Bit of a pipedream that, I would say.’
‘Well, it is of course, but I don’t see what else to do. I mean, if your mind’s already arrived there, if you’re psychologically and emotionally and culturally in that other place, it’s just tearing yourself apart getting frustrated about the fact that the actuality is different. So, I know what you’re saying, but it seems to me, if the attitude is there, the rest will follow.’
The guy nodded. ‘I understand. But there’s folk out there with fungus on the walls and no job and their benefit getting cut and fuck knows what else – I don’t think your wee nirvana’s going to help them much.’
‘Neither are the politicians. Politics has failed these people. Completely passed them by. They can forget about politics because the political system as presently constituted has forgotten about them. And maybe I am indulging in a bit of fantasy, but we can’t all be Tommy Sheridan.’
‘He’s as bad as the rest of them,’ said the guy.
‘I’d have voted for him if I stayed in Pollok,’ said Robert. ‘At least he shakes the complacent bastards up a bit.’
The guy bought them another round. Robert could understand why the auld fellows bought halfs and halfs. It got you fucking steaming. No doubt he would pay for it the morrow though.
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ said the guy, ‘this water thing, this is the last straw. They may not call it privatisation, but they’ll try to sell it somehow, through the back door. I mean, how can you own it, for God’s sake? It falls out the fucking sky!’
‘ “One does not sell the earth on which the people walk.” Crazy Horse said that. You know, Crazy Horse, Sioux chief?’
‘One does not sell the water in which the fish swim. I said that. That’s how poaching’s all right by me – and everybody else I ken. You can’t own the water so you can’t own the fish that swim in it. Would you not say?’
‘I would,’ said Robert. They drank to the fish that were nobody’s, and pulled their stools closer. Robert got another round in.
At some point in the evening he looked at his watch. He had an idea that Kate was coming to meet him. He still hadn’t managed to tell the guy about his father.
‘One day,’ he said, ‘we’ll get what we want.’
‘Aye, will we? I feel, personally, I feel time is passing us by. Suddenly you realise you’re getting old and there’s a chance you might not see it in your lifetime, ken?’
‘See what?’ Robert asked.
‘Anything,’ said the guy. ‘See anything you want to see. I’m not talking just politics. I’m not meaning home rule or independence or whatever. I mean, bigger than that. Everybody should see something in their lifetime that they’ll never ever forget. That they’re a part of. That nobody can take away from them.’
We’re a nation of philosophers, Robert thought. That’s what we are, at the end of the day. A nation of fucking philo
sophers.
‘The big things in life,’ said the guy. ‘Life and death and that.’ And Robert remembered his father.
‘I haven’t told you,’ he said. ‘There’s something I haven’t told you.’
‘Me too,’ said the guy. His bright blue eyes were brighter still.
‘It’s about my dad,’ said Robert. ‘Mind I said about my dad earlier, about him being a nationalist?’
‘You’re beautiful,’ said the guy.
‘Eh?’ said Robert. ‘No, about my dad.’
‘You’re beautiful. I’ll just say that. The most beautiful bloke I’ve ever seen.’
‘What?’
The guy’s blue eyes were full of tears.
‘Do you want to come back with me?’ he said. ‘Do you want to come back home with me?’
‘Oh, God,’ said Robert. ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, mate. I didn’t even know what you were talking about. No, I’m sorry. I’m not that way, you know? I’m sorry.’
The guy looked like he’d heard it before. His face, briefly animated, became tired again.
‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘Sorry to bother you. Don’t fucking, don’t fucking hate me, eh?’
‘Naw,’ said Robert. ‘Course not. Christ, we’ve just had this conversation. We agree about everything. I’m just not into it, that’s all. You know, with another man. I’m sorry.’
‘I’m no a poof,’ said the guy. ‘Folk always think you’re a poof. It’s just how I am. I’m a human being.’ He made as if to move away.
‘It’s all right,’ Robert said. ‘I’m not offended. You don’t have to go, for fuck’s sake. Please don’t feel you have to go.’
He shook his head. He was such a fool sometimes. So blind not to see what the guy was wanting. And yet it wasn’t just that. They’d had this long talk. They’d understood each other in other ways.
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