The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  ‘Does that inspire you?’ I asked Bougas.

  ‘I see rocks and water, Nelson. And tourist attractions. Hikers queuing to disembark. We’re not Romantic poets.’

  He shifted on the bench and nodded back toward the interior of the boat. ‘I’ll tell you what inspires me. On the next deck down, they have a shop and in that shop there is a sign which reads: “We are committed to quality”. I had to say to them: why are you merely committed to quality? Why not “fanatical about quality”? I took out my pen and made a new sign for them: “We’re so obsessed about quality that we sit in an armchair every night sharpening a knife in case quality cheats on us.” Not bad, but it needed something snappier. Why not simply, “Degrading ourselves for you”? A little white sign above every shop in every provincial shit hole which reads “Wasting our lives embodying a value rendered meaningless by its ubiquity FOR YOU.” I’d buy. First in the queue.

  ‘So, no, I am indifferent to nature. Consumerism inspires me. It’s my playground.’

  We disembarked at Craignure and made our way to the village pub where Bougas whiffled down a couple of single malts. I wanted to breathe in the space and time of the Hebrides. Where I saw a rural idyll, Bougas saw only inconvenience. He didn’t like to be anywhere where you couldn’t stick out a hand and get a cab to take you away. Eventually a car pootered down from Tobermory to drive us around the southern coast of Mull, the journey broken only by the odd stray sheep and Bougas’ intermittent baiting of the driver about the number of no-smoking signs in his car: there were four. After an hour we were dropped off at Fionnphort, a staging post for the small ferry over to the isle of Iona, our final destination. After exhausting the vending machine in the ticket office, Bougas declared that this village made Craignure look like Babylon. I mooched around on the beach, careful not to step in the legions of beached jellyfish.

  Down in the narrow sound, fishing boats meditated at anchor. The silence was prehistoric.

  Hermes Spence was gathering his court together again. I didn’t know why; I knew nothing more than the symbol the driver had held up at the airport, the same sigil embossed on my invitation. There had been no briefing, no suggestions for preliminary research. My off-hand inquiries to Bougas about the purpose of this mystery tour were met only with the assurance that it was big: ‘it has to be’. Nor did he clarify why Hermes was stuck out on this remote rock. For all his years hiding from the recession, Iona was still an unusual choice for a player like Spence. Beneath immense banks of dark cloud, the isle was slight and unassuming, a kerb of rock surrounded by the wind and water.

  On Iona, Bougas and I shivered on the jetty with our bags. There was no sign of a reception party. The village was a line of whitewashed and grey cottages with rain-spattered conservatories. Our fellow passengers were mainly Catholic pilgrims, moving reverentially past us. Bougas and I fell in step with them, making our way up the small street to the Argyll hotel. It was fashioned out of the isle’s distinctive pink rock, its bricks marbled with mortar.

  After checking in, we slipped out and went for a walk along the Street of the Dead, its flagstones treacherous with rain. Low-lying and exposed, this was a landscape would not long escape a rising sea – one freak oscillation of the tide and a giant wave would smother it.

  Iona Abbey bored Bougas. Only its well-tended gardens pricked his interest. Beside astonishing blue and purple-haired thistles, he spied opium poppies swaying alluringly in the sea wind, their heads green and ripe. He caressed one and showed it to me – the provocative bulbous tip of a Martian phallus. Then he slit it with his penknife, gathered the viscous sap on the lip of his index finger and sucked it down greedily.

  Rising beyond the abbey was Iona’s sole peak. We staggered up a couple of hundred feet, Bougas’ complaints assessed by the sheep dutifully grazing at evenly spaced intervals on the trail. He questioned the stiff wind and unrelenting rock, and critiqued the appeal of nature. He showed me where the water was spilling into his loafers. Swiftly, a cloud swaddled the hilltop and pressed its rain upon us. When the cloud sped on, revealing the extent of Iona’s modesty – three miles long, one mile wide, a few sandy coves, the ruins of a nunnery, a youth hostel – he abandoned the climb.

  ‘We should be in Soho.’ Hands on his thighs, bent forward and panting, he was showing the wear and tear of a day on the sauce. ‘Sometimes I wonder if Hermes is going too far with the Christianity. I understand it makes sound business sense, in this climate, to hold breakfast prayer meetings and network at AA. But I resent coming out to this whoreless, neutered rock.’

  ‘It doesn’t inspire you,’ I said, referring back to our earlier conversation.

  He gestured back to the abbey and its Christian community. A chapel full of banners against poverty, magazines about Africa with cover lines selling famine and drought.

  ‘It’s a sexless god-bothering vegetarian enclave,’ continued Bougas. ‘There is bromide in the communion wine and valium in the host. Not that the women inspire much stirring of the libido. I see wide-hipped pastors saying grace before serving vegetable stew for twelve. Only one thing I don’t understand about these women. They don’t drink, they don’t eat meat – so how do they get so bovine? They say they want to heal the world – I say they just want to eat it. Save the whale? Reader, I married it. And then there are the men, those beanpole ascetics with enormous dormant members. I imagine it’s full of accountants who saw the light after their first nervous breakdown and now fill in the rest of their lives with watercolours in the day and weeping in the evening.’

  Bougas did a little jig of frustration, balling his fists in his curls and stamping his feet.

  ‘For god’s sake, don’t you even have a joint on you? Look at me! I’m foaming at the mouth!’

  He refused to walk any further and insisted on returning to the hotel so that he could make a call to rustle up supplies. I let him go. I wanted to explore further. There was a road out to the north beach.

  Intrigued by the prospect of solitude, I headed away from the town. Lambs raced to watch me through the fence. The farmer drove by on his tractor with the grim expression of the only realist on the isle. The road ended at his farm gate. This was a more solitary path. Hood up against the raw sea wind, I skirted the highland cattle grazing on the machair, the grasses that grew upon the shoreland dunes. Unlike the bleak peat lands of Mull, the machair was fertile, a meadow beside the sea. Resting on sand, this rare grassland is very prone to erosion; the coastline shifts and mutates accordingly. The machair lay upon the sand like a tablecloth upon a table. The earth was uncertain beneath my feet.

  The north beach was deserted. Fierce waves broke upon the sands. A liverish boulder, fresh with sheen and striped with meaty horizons, made me gasp: have giants had their guts drawn and discarded on this beach? The sandstone, moulded into organic knobbles and curves, was livid, heaving, pulsing. I needed to urinate, and sheltered by an enormous heart-and-lung rock formation, I pissed messily into a crosswind. I washed my hands in a pool of saltwater then returned to the beach prepared to explore further, only to see, in the distance, a figure watching me. Wearing a cowl and habit, this man or woman struck me as outsized. I couldn’t be sure across such a distance but the figure was almost seven foot tall. It clambered up a hillock looking down upon the beach. The wind caught its hood and yanked it back, briefly revealing a head with no jaw, none of the angles of a human skull, just a smooth brown oval. I felt an echo within me, an intimation of a state of mind I had not experienced for some time. Hallucination. Time stops, the moment elongates, fear stretches and yawns. The figure pulled its hood back over its head and stumbled out of view. Did I really just see that? There was a pilgrim’s path on the island, and a monastic retreat; perhaps an eccentric individual, starved of society, was intrigued by me but lacked the confidence or the manners to introduce themselves. But what about their head, their smooth oval head? I walked quickly back across the beach, skirting away from the shore, where the waves broke with such intensity it
was as if they were trying to communicate something to me, an urgent warning in a language I did not understand.

  When I returned to the hotel, I headed directly to the conservatory and spent the afternoon browsing shelves of worn paperbacks while working my way from left to right through their selection of single malts. I did not tell anyone about the figure I had glimpsed on the north shore and concentrated on cladding my mind with alcohol.

  Every half hour, the ferry deposited more members of Spence’s court on Iona, each of whom tentatively poked their head around the lounge of the Argyll – only to have Bougas leap upon them, press a drink in their hand and enquire as to whether they had brought any drugs. So many familiar faces: Morton Eakins, wearing a cable-knit white sweater and clutching a glass of milk; Jonathan Stoker Snr and Jonathan Stoker Jnr, a captain of industry from St Albans and his adoptive son, the capitalist realists of the court. Whether it was selling St Moritz fags in Lagos or horse-trading out in the Argentinean pampas, the Stokers could always turn a profit. Lavishly varnished and newly fitted out with the latest in cosmetic surgery, Stoker Snr worked the room with much greater confidence than his son; by contrast, Stoker Jnr was bleached by long days worrying over the white glare of a screen. It didn’t take long for his father to gladhand his way around to where I was sitting.

  ‘Are you still doing that filthy magazine?’ His cheekbones were new, round and burnished like doorknobs. His tan was that of a man who spends most of the year on a golf course lobbying.

  ‘No.’ I explained that I was working on something new. He listened right up to the point at which I used the phrase ‘artistic integrity’ then he burst out laughing.

  ‘I liked your dirty magazine better.’ He tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention and then hitched the crotch of his trousers up tight, revealing the outline of two large oval testicles. ‘Look at these, I’ve just had them put in. Pig’s balls. Specially bred to match my tissue. I’ve got hog testosterone running through my veins now. Very experimental, very underground, but next year every old bastard will have a pair. It’s twenty-four-hour Viagra. You want to get back into porno, my son. OAP porno.’

  ‘Dad,’ said Jonathan Stoker Jnr, exasperated. But his father wasn’t finished yet.

  ‘After the operation, I went to the Caribbean to recover. I nearly started a black wing of the family out there.’

  Stoker Snr was an unreconstructed dealmaker, a long luncher, a big desker. It was typical of Hermes Spence to have collected such an antique talent, bringing nous and know-how to a court that erred toward the flaky. When times were hard, Stoker Snr volunteered to hand out the P45s. He paced the office, squinting furiously at the staff as if they were piles of burning money which needed extinguishing.

  I asked the Stokers if they had seen the elusive Hermes. Silently they checked with one another and agreed not to tell me whatever they knew.

  Just then, the women of the court arrived. Stoker Snr turned briskly from our conversation and headed over to where two of Spence’s former mistresses and his marketing manager were telling the story of their Chinook flight over the Highlands. Stoker Snr stood a little way back, laughing with them until a natural pause appeared, allowing him to introduce himself. New balls or not, he was out of his league. The manager, Alex Drown, was a fearsome apparatchik and enforcer of Spence’s vision. More than any of us, Alex Drown thrived in the years that Spence was away. Freed from his cult of personality she did very well in large corporates and had even yoked a suitable executive to her life project, ensuring brisk matrimonials, property acquisition and insemination. The other two women, Janis and Christine, who shared a discreetly ill-defined relationship with Hermes Spence, registered unease at the approach of Stoker Snr. There was something palpably wrong with his flesh. The clay was still wet. Wearing a black polo-neck sweater pulled tight over lozenge-shaped pectoral implants and tucked into black Armani jeans, Stoker showed off his recently acquired torso. The nipped waist was strangely feminine.

  Bougas rescued the women from his lechery, and escorted them to my table. I knew Janis because she had once posed for the magazine. Diffident and with a nice line in sarcasm, there was something of the bawd about her. The other woman, Christine, was a doeish ex-model who was a vital part of the cast when it came to pitching for new business.

  I asked both women why they had come all this way at Spence’s request.

  ‘Curiosity,’ demurred Christine.

  ‘Boredom,’ laughed Janis.

  ‘Opportunity,’ interrupted Bougas, his eyes lit up.

  ‘What is this trip about?’ Janis rounded on the consultant. ‘You must know. You always knew everything.’

  It was clear that his ignorance on this matter pained Bougas. ‘Hermes must have new backers. He has come back into the game for something major. The new Ford. The new IBM. The new Microsoft. The new Google.’

  I was sceptical and Bougas glimpsed that scepticism.

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ he said.

  I was indignant. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘You raised your eyebrows. Don’t listen to his eyebrows. This man spent the end of the Nineties preparing for the end of the world. How many times did you tell me’ – and now Bougas mimicked my know-nothing world weariness – ‘it’s all about to collapse. Savings and loans. The Indonesia crisis, the rouble devaluation, the millennium bug.’

  ‘I was right though. It was a bubble and it burst.’

  ‘Eventually. Everyone is right eventually.’

  And so the evening wore on. Stoker Snr dipped into our conversation now and again just to check that neither Christine nor Janis had changed their opinion of him. The court gave up speculating as to why they had all been gathered together, preferring to renew old acquaintanceships and old habits. The hotel bowed and bucked under the weight of our revelry. The bar was bribed into staying open and resolutions were made to watch the dawn break over this remote shore. Janis even proposed a wager – that she could persuade Jonathan Stoker Snr to show us his new balls.

  ‘The new opportunities are in transplants.’ Stoker discoursed blearily over a bottle of Talisker. ‘Xenotransplantation, to be specific, the swapping of vital organs between man and beast. My son and I do not share genetic material as he is a foundling so I cannot ransack his body for the parts I need to keep going. Fortunately, in a secret warehouse somewhere in the dark zone, there is a transgenic pig with my name on it. Before the operation, they took me down there to show me its balls. I had to wear a big white suit. The pigs are kept in a pathogen-free environment because of all the immune suppressants pumped into them. There were two dozen pigs in the warehouse, each suspended from the ceiling by steel tentacles. Pigs are very susceptible to overheating. They don’t sweat, that’s why they roll in mud to cool down. To keep the animals calm, each pig wears a skintight virtual reality suit and goggles, their little legs pawing away on a treadmill. I was shown the outline of my new balls through the black VR suit. Did you know the Latin name for the domestic pig is sus scrota?’

  Laying her cigarette aside, Janis put her hand on Stoker Snr’s thigh and said, ‘Show them to me.’

  He stood back from our table, unbuckled his belt and stepped out of his trousers. He was wearing Sloggis. Then he wasn’t.

  ‘As you can see, I got them to make a few other improvements while they were down there. The skin on my scrotum had sagged so I got a new sack too. The hairs haven’t really taken hold yet.’ He pinched the balls so that they bulged against the new skin, which had the spring and texture of a squash ball. ‘They’re clearly bigger than a man’s balls. They put some extra into my cock as well. The swelling took a while to come down. Isn’t it superb?’

  ‘It’s awesome, Jonathan.’ Janis swooned theatrically. ‘Do you shoot pig’s sperm too?’

  ‘I do. Lots of it. Also when I get a surge of testosterone, I want to rut like a pig. I want to nuzzle with my snout intensely and then mount.’ He snorted and rooted in her lap and got a hard slap for his
boorishness. Stoker Snr stepped back into his trousers and demanded I pour him another two fingers of malt, which he downed with adolescent bravado.

  Without the benefit of stimulants, I waned soon after midnight and went outside for some air. A mist settled over the island. Visibility and audibility were down to ten feet which made me intimate with every step I took. I fancied myself in a simulation that was filling in reality as I moved, the mist signalling the limits of the processing power. Pick up the pace and I might fall off the edge of reality itself and find myself marooned in un-space.

  I walked away from the safety of the village just to see what it felt like. Scary.

  In the ruins of the nunnery, a tongue of sea mist curled its way around the rotting molars of stone. I took a piss against a wall in defiance of the fear. My back was exposed to the night. This game of scaring myself took on a different turn. Quite unbidden, my hackles rose, a temperature fall in the microclimate of my body. I felt a sudden absence of sensation. A heartbeat there, and finally there again signalling cardiac arrhythmia, freewheeling in the gear change between fight and flight. A fear learnt in the womb. Gestating, I listened to the way my mother hesitated and hummed and hawed against any rash action, and while she slept I eavesdropped on her nightmares, her unconscious torturing her with visions of choking children, immolated husbands and herself, unable to breathe, asthmatic, expiring in front of her family. This was the defining aspect of my character. My fear. My cowardice. Sucked in through the umbilical cord, it enters the body through the belly. The yellow belly.

  Two light footsteps behind me. The being I saw on the beach. Seven foot tall in a monk’s habit. The smell of an old football, of cracked damp hide. Its face was a smooth padded oval with two blue eyes set in it and watching me with bovine placidity.

  Needless to say, by the time I mustered the courage to turn around and confirm my worst fears, there was nothing there.