by Michel Faber
The news from June Laboyer-Suk, when the artists met up again, was bad. International electronic transactions in foreign currency were not the order of the day here, and it might be up to thirty-six hours before the money came through. There were no car-hire companies. Between them, Nick Kline, June Laboyer-Suk and Gerrit Plank had enough British money to bus all five artists to Inverness and accommodate them in a cheap hotel for one night, but this would not solve the problem of air fares back to the States. Possibly the wiring of money from the USA could have been achieved faster through an Inverness branch of the bank, but in her relief at getting through to her agent June had specified Tain as the point of contact, and now Tina was in Ansafone mode again. Gail Freleng’s Ansafone, strangely enough, was still giving the message that she was not in the office right now.
Gerrit Plank’s agent, whom Gerrit had telephoned himself, had been philosophical about his client’s plight.
‘These things happen,’ he’d said.
‘I hadn’t actually heard of them before,’ Gerrit replied.
‘A lot of things don’t get publicised.’
Gerrit’s agent suggested that Gerrit get himself down to Glasgow, where there was a gallery owner who owed them $3000, or approximately £1900. The gallery owner could either pay Gerrit’s fare back to the USA or give him free accommodation, maybe even a studio. In three weeks, Gerrit’s agent would be in Amsterdam arranging a Plank retrospective there; Gerrit could catch a ferry to Holland then. There was no use wasting money.
Fay Barratt didn’t have an agent anymore, after David had left her, so she was dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Whether Morton Krauss had an agent or not was a matter of legal debate, since he and Konigsberg were still involved in litigation and the hearing for the counter-suit was not until November.
‘It looks like the best thing all round is for us to stay here until my agent wires the money through,’ announced June Laboyer-Suk. ‘I’ve found a Bed & Breakfast on the edge of town which will put four of us up in two rooms for a special rate. I’ll write the address down for you. The lady’s name is Mrs McAlister. She asks us not to turn up after eleven because her husband’s on special sleeping tablets that wear off after midnight. Also she says the dog is nervous too.’
‘Wait just a second,’ interjected Fay. ‘You said “four of us”. Does that mean one of us is out in the cold?’ In Fay’s world, of course, there was always someone out in the cold, the weakest, most vulnerable one: Fay Barratt. One of her best-known paintings, in fact, was called Out in the Cold, and it depicted a dead (drowned?) naked woman curled up in foetal position inside a toilet bowl.
‘Gerrit here doesn’t believe in hotels,’ explained June. ‘Or debt. He’s bought himself a sleeping bag, and he wants to say goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ said Gerrit, and, with a minimal flourish of his military-green bundle of independence, he strode off down the road.
‘Even if it takes the full thirty-six hours for the money to get here and be cleared,’ continued June Laboyer-Suk. ‘Nick and I have enough between us to pay for two nights’ accommodation, so we’re going to be okay.’
Morton Krauss was glad something was being organised, cash-wise, but the thought of spending two days and nights in what he called The Town that Time Forgot was almost too much to bear. Judging Fay Barratt to be the closest to himself in personal values, he muttered his frustrations to her as the group were parting ways again.
‘I can’t stand it,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing here, nothing. No nightclubs, no pizza joints, no movie house …’
‘It’s not so bad,’ demurred Fay half-heartedly. ‘It’s pretty. The air is clean. The people seem friendly.’
‘Friendly?’ scoffed Morton. ‘They’re just going through the motions, Fay. Stepford Wives-burg, that’s what this is. Robot City. People here – they’re so hung up, so stiff. I tell ya, I’m going crazy without the street culture of New York – the blacks, the Hispanics, the gangs, the ghettoblasters, people leaping around, rollerblading, singing, yelling, hustling …’
Fay cast her mind back to New York for her own experience of these things, but her apartment was in Queens and anyway she didn’t get out much, spending most of her time painting and watching TV.
‘Come on, Morton,’ she challenged. ‘I bet you don’t do any of that stuff yourself. You probably just stand and watch.’
‘Get real, babe,’ he protested. ‘In my neighbourhood, a white guy can’t afford to stand and watch. You keep moving or you get wasted.’
‘Sounds just wonderful.’
‘I don’t think of it as good or bad. I need it for my work. I thrive on the tension!’
‘Well, you’re tense now,’ Fay pointed out. ‘So thrive!’
It was this exchange with Fay that convinced Morton he had no allies. He was stuck at the end of the world among people of unlike mind. He had better try to phone Charles again.
At five o’clock, Tain closed down, at the beginning of a long, luminous twilight. Motley bands of teenagers loitered near the fast-food shop, smoking cigarettes and swearing ostentatiously. They were complaining about exactly the same things Morton Krauss had complained about, but with Scottish accents.
‘There’s fuck-all to do here,’ they said.
‘Can’t wait to get out of this fuckin’ hole,’ they said.
‘Dingwall might be getting a Burger King,’ they said.
In the distance behind them, the surface of the Dornoch Firth turned gold and hundreds of sea birds wheeled over the ancient rooftops. June and Fay were standing on the edge of town, looking down at the ruined graveyard. They could see Nick Kline perfectly clearly, though he was hundreds of yards away; the clear air and uncluttered landscape seemed to foreshorten perspective like a medieval altarpiece.
‘He’s not moving at all,’ said Fay.
‘He looks happy, though,’ said June.
Nick was sitting among the stones, facing out into the fields. He’d been there for hours.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ said Fay.
‘O?,’ said June. ‘But not to where Nick is. He’s enjoying being there alone.’
The two women set off together without another word, down the steep road leading back towards Inver. A few steps took them beyond Tain’s abrupt outer limits into open pasture; scale shifted almost instantly to dwarf the two women against the hills. They themselves were aware of being dwarfed, of their aerial-view tinyness, and it made them feel queerly less alone, more genuinely companions. To someone catching sight of them from a far-off hilltop, they would appear that way: not adjacent by chance, the way they must have been last night at JFK, but together by choice.
June looked at Fay as they walked, noted she had a widow’s peak of fine grey hair under the dark-brown dye, a scar like a ghostly knife-slash on her long neck, a beautiful mouth and yearning eyes. Fay was marvelling at the almost supernatural clarity of everything in the early twilight: the way every pebble on the road, every clump of grass seemed distinct as if outlined with black, as if the entire landscape were a vast painting executed with impossible skill. Then she looked aside at June, and saw the same degree of detail in her face, all the wrinkles present and future, the mischievous humanity, the imperfectly suppressed idealism, the pain of too much energy.
These were small and subtle intimacies, but there was more. They were also noticing at exactly the same time the mountainous silence, the undivided sky, and their own bodies’ common response to these things. It was as if their brainwaves and bloodstreams were releasing contamination invisibly, all the effluvia of New York’s lethal atmosphere, the noise of traffic and TV and ten million angry people, all of it expressed into a pathetic little cloud of ions, disappearing into the immense sky.
After walking for an hour or so, they passed a field which had been ploughed dark brown. Sheep stood ankle-deep in outsize turnips, munching the glowing white pulp. Their fleeces were luminescent. June and Fay stopped for a while, looking.
Two other people walked by, on their way up to Tain, a young mother and her daughter. The little girl ran up to the barbed-wire fence and plucked a wisp of fleece from it.
‘You’ve collected loads of these already,’ chided the mother, adding the fleece to the bulging pocket of her lilac anorak. ‘What are you going to make out of them?’
‘A sheep, of course,’ said the little girl.
This little interaction got June Laboyer-Suk thinking, as she and Fay continued to stare into the fields. She hadn’t thought about art since early this morning, but now she began to have an idea for a new show, called ‘Reconstruction’ … no, ‘Reclamation’ … no, ‘Reconstitution of a sheep’. She would collect all the different cuts of lamb from a butcher, and put them together again, with sheepskin car-seat covers and lambswool slippers wrapped around them. Or maybe it would be better just to lay the bits out loose, with a text inviting the audience to assemble them. More confrontational that way. She could probably dispense with the text as well. Leave it to a critic to spell out. She’d have to be careful – a lot of stuff had been done already with dead meat – she’d have to avoid comparisons with the ‘stinking-carcass-in-your-face’ brigade. Maybe get the meat coated in plastic … liquid perspex … neutral to the touch … like Lego for kids to assemble … DIY kits …
Her thoughts were interrupted by the conspicuously unnatural sound of Fay weeping.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
‘I’ll never be a painter,’ mourned Fay, staring into the phenomenal sunset. ‘Never in a million years.’
June turned back to the sheep, at a loss for what to do or say.
‘Baaaaahh!’ said one of the sheep, and June realised all at once that her idea for the ‘Reconstitution’ show was much less interesting than the fact that these animals were here alive, a different species from her, existing on a part of the planet she might easily never have seen: an alternative centre of the world.
‘Come on,’ she said, folding one arm around Fay’s shoulders. ‘Let’s go and get something to eat.’
An hour later they were sitting in a hotel, marvelling at the inedibility of Scottish food and pining for New York.
Next morning, there was good news at the bank. The transaction which the bank manager had warned June could not simply be ‘rushed through’ had been rushed through; an irregularity for which the manager seemed almost to be apologising. The money had arrived. One day and night in the Scottish Highlands was all they were going to have after all. A bus would take them to Inverness in an hour; they would reach Edinburgh by evening.
June and Fay had had a really good night’s sleep, each having a room to herself at the Bed & Breakfast: Morton and Nick had never shown up. The men reappeared next morning, smelling of alcohol and (in Morton’s case) sheep-shit. Nick explained that he had walked all the way back to the Inver Inn, ‘for stovies’. Stovies, he declared with an authority unusual for him, were easily the most vile food he’d ever tasted. But the people of Inver were real friendly and he might go back there again today, if there was time, even though it was raining just now. There was one lady there in particular, a woman whose husband had left her with a young daughter, who seemed to really like him. She had a big dilapidated farmhouse near Loch Eye with all this really neat metal junk lying around the yard.
‘It’s got possibilities,’ he said.
‘Shall I try phoning your agent one more time?’ suggested June.
‘You do that. You do that,’ murmured Nick, deep in thought.
June watched him wandering off, then went to the phone box and dialled the number.
‘Gail Freleng here.’
‘June Laboyer-Suk here, in Tain, Scotland.’
‘I know. Miss Golem has helped me with some of my enquiries. Is my client with you?’
‘Er … no. He’s gone for a long walk.’
‘He’s been taken for a ride, Ms Suk. You all have. As soon as your plane took off, the Alternative Centre of the World stopped answering my faxes. Of course I investigated. The brochures were fakes. The office that sent them was in a building due for demolition. There is no Alternative Centre of the World.’
‘We already figured that out.’
‘Excuse me for boring you. Are you in a position to say if my client can return to Edinburgh by six forty-five p.m. tomorrow evening, that is Wednesday twelfth?’
‘I guess so. I don’t see why not.’
‘Good. A business-class ticket is reserved for him at the British Airways desk. Please make sure my client understands that this ticket is valid for tomorrow Wednesday twelfth and tomorrow Wednesday twelfth only.’
‘Well, I’ll tell him …’
‘Fine. I understand Miss Golem is handling the arrangements for your own return.’
‘Would you happen to know …?’
‘I’ve been too busy to assess her progress, Ms Suk. I suggest you call her.’
‘Not a problem, Ms Freleng. Shall I give Nick your love? Best wishes?’
‘… Just the information will do fine. Have a nice day.’
By the time the Inverness bus was idling in front of the post office, June and Fay had managed to get the gist of Morton’s night, and had persuaded him that he would be refused a seat on the bus if he didn’t seal his malodorous jacket in a plastic bag. To save him from shivering in the wet breeze, they had followed the advice of some helpful people in the queue and dashed into the St Duthus charity shop, where they bought Morton another jacket for £1.85, a glossy purple one with I LAWN BOWLS emblazoned on the back.
As far as Morton’s night went, the gist of it was this: Morton had been unaware that in the Scottish Highlands, the word ‘crack’ meant an enjoyable social experience, not smokeable cocaine. Standing in a telephone booth yesterday afternoon, making another attempt to phone Charles in Newcastle, Morton had overheard some teenagers agreeing to meet each other that night at the village hall in Balintore because, they said, there would be ‘plenty of good crack’ there. Was he hearing them right? Yes, definitely: one of them said it again: ‘The crack’s brilliant down there.’
So, that evening, Henry the taxi driver had driven Morton to Balintore and dropped him off at the village hall, where there was a ceilidh in full swing. Rosy-cheeked girls in Highland dress were doing the fling, a rock band called the Reelin’ Creels were playing raucous versions of old Scottish tunes, and everyone was well on the way to dancing and drinking themselves into a stupor. Morton just sat there for hours waiting for a dealer to appear and offer him something.
‘You should have got drunk, instead,’ said Fay, making conversation across the aisle of the bus while they waited to see if Nick would show up.
‘I did get drunk,’ he retorted. ‘I got so drunk I spent the night sleeping in a field. I got so drunk I lost my camera. My special one with the telephoto lens. The film had all the pictures for my new show on it.’
‘Pictures of what?’
‘Sheep.’
‘Well, can’t you take more pictures of sheep?’
‘Through the fuckin’ bus window?’
A Japanese tourist, seated next to Morton, was alerted by this camera talk, and called Morton’s attention to his Minolta compact.
‘State o’ ze art,’ he beamed.
‘Real impressive, pal,’ grimaced Morton.
Encouraged, the Japanese tourist set out to reassure Morton that it was possible, after all, to take good pictures through bus windows, as long as we don’t try to do it with a normal, run-of-the-mill camera.
‘Noh-mal camerah …’ – he mimed taking a photo through the glass – ‘picture of self only … self in glass.’ He tapped the window, the reflection of his own knuckles. ‘Tzis camerah … press button … camerah look through glass … Picture of world outsigh!’
‘I’ll try and get one of those,’ promised Morton.
On time, the bus pulled away from Tain, without Nick Kline. Morton was nodding off next to the Japanese tourist, who was still pushing bu
ttons on the magic camera and explaining how close you could get to the flowers. Fay was leafing through her copy of The Glory of the Highlands. June Laboyer-Suk just settled back and looked through the window, which was just as well, or they might all have missed the extraordinary sight, just outside Alness, of a huge broken slab of concrete freshly painted orange, and daubed with the indigo message
ARTIST GLASGOW
There was no one underneath the arrow anymore.
SOME RAIN MUST FALL
Michel Faber’s stories first came to prominence in 1996 when ‘Fish’ won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday short story competition; in 1997 he also won the Neil Gunn prize and in 1998, the title story of this collection was overall winner of the Ian St James award. His novel, Under the Skin, published in 2000, received outstanding reviews and has been sold to eleven prestigious publishers abroad.
Dutch by birth, Faber grew up in two Australian cities and has lived for the past seven years in a remote cottage in Ross-shire. Since studying English Literature and learning to read Anglo-Saxon, he has worked as a nurse, a pickle-packer, a cleaner and a guinea pig for medical research. Canongate has published two of his books – Some Rain Must Fall and Under the Skin. He is currently working on his second novel.
Further praise for Some Rain Must Fall:
‘For sheer inventiveness and endless variety, [this] collection takes the prize.’ The Independent
‘… the author’s lightness of touch, sense of humour and capacity for wonder conspires to give far more than mere angst … the texture has substance.’ The Spectator