The Accidental Recluse

by Tom McCulloch

  Step into cold and near dark.

  The rain is shocking. Instant goose bumps and sobriety was I not sipping a tumbler of twenty-five-year-old-something as I walk carefully along the treacherous wooden decking. Below me, rain fusses the dark pond. I step down a short flight of wooden stairs onto a gravel path that snakes steeply down to the water through a beautifully arranged scatter of rocks and boulders.

  Midway down is another path, leading along to an onsen that has been built into the bank. Tiled in black slate, the oval bath is half-enclosed by a mirrored wall inset with subdued stud lighting.

  I know the view that I cannot see intimately, the pond, the trees on the hillside beyond. I wash myself before bathing in the habitual Japanese manner, savouring the alternating cold rain and hot water I pour over myself from a small jug filled from a tap in the bank. When I finish, I open a small wooden cabinet on the edge of the bath and make a selection on the iPod dock. Ellington kicks in. I crank the volume until the white-lit onsen is drowned in sound.

  The American girl at the party was pretty, wasn’t she, Duke? What would she think now, watching me clamber into the bath? Brittle bones and booze. My heart hammers. The specialist called it a cardiomyopathy, left ventricular swelling and reduced pumping capacity. ‘Think of your heart as a deflating rugby ball,’ he said, smiling brightly as if he looks forward to saying that.

  Yet it makes sense; I have felt slightly deflated for years. Right now I am empty of air altogether, flopped on the rim of the bath, arse in the air and saggy old balls almost dragging on the tiles.

  I turn and swing my right leg over. Now I have one leg in the water and one on the tiles. I wait for my heart to slow before swinging over my left leg. Both of them immediately slip, plunging me under the hot water. I struggle up, gasping and laughing. Then a quick ta-daaaa, arms out wide for the audience, befuddled Tommy Cooper and another ‘trick’ gone disastrously wrong.

  Ah, Tommy, a genius.

  All we mustered, Duke, was a monkey. But take away the ‘k’ and at least we managed some of that.

  Yes, I know. It was a chimp . . .

  I am now facing the wrong way, towards the curving mirrors instead of open space. The man in the mirror disgusts me. I give him the V-sign and wish I’d got into the onsen the other way around. To turn now would involve complicated watery manoeuvres of which I am wholly incapable.

  Hear that, Duke? Reflections in D.

  A drift of lonely old piano, lost notes in the steaming darkness. Bicycle, limousine or shinkansen, we make those journeys and all our stories are eventually told. We start as soon as we speak and there’s always some sucker willing to listen to the same old tales over and over. It’s the auto in biography.

  I’m coming home, Duke. Old Sam Beckett looking back from the mirror, he’s coming to see you.

  Who would you have become? I picture you Orson Welles huge, bald as the old man. It was happening as early as 1952. You inherited so much from him, you poor bastard. Read all about it in chapter six of my autobio-graphy where the ghostwriter’s words are particularly eloquent, I feel. His handling of your viciousness is as resonant as the lonely note Ellington is now holding.

  The Reflections end. In the silent seconds before the next track, I feel your breath, Duke, on my neck.

  I lie back in the water and close my eyes. Instantly, the world begins to spin, so I open them again. Alcoholism, of course, was a genetic trait that our father so generously bequeathed to both of us.

  Yet I will rise to the occasion once more. I am, as you know, a professional. Tomorrow, before I get on the plane, I will do two things. First, a long shiatsu massage, soft fingers on my old bones. The background music will be meditative; sounds of the koto, clarinet and shakuhachi. Then I will eat kaiseki at that elegant little place in Shibuya, contemplating the art in each delicate dish as I sit in my yukata and look out on a tiny courtyard of dwarf cypress and tinkling water.

  And I will remember how in this moment I saw my father’s grinning face as his once-famous, seventy-five-year-old son leaned over the side of the bath and sent a jet of vomit into the darkness.

  * * *

  My first awakening is to laughter. Echoing belly laughs in an empty black cavern. There is a dream I won’t recall except one image shining bright and oversized. That famous logo, the black-and-white outline of a monkey’s head and the words Breda Inc. underneath, slowly fading back to black . . .

  My second awakening is to pale dawn grey in the window. Rain is silently angling, green foliage beyond.

  My third is a slow rising from somewhere impossibly distant. My heart feels sluggish. Taste of sour dirt. I lift my hands, cover my face as the headache detonates. Exploding rainbows.

  I feel sick.

  Today is my birthday.

  I can’t remember much about the night before. The onsen in the rain, that’s about it. My mother flashes. You’ll catch your death. Like the time in Cuba when I sat naked in the deluge with a bottle of Havana Club and Anna said exactly the same words. Once more, I survived. I guess I must be lucky, although I did catch a horrible virus-cold that made me deaf in one ear.

  Akira has left three pills and a glass of water on the bedside table. Lifting the glass, I study the back of my hand. It’s hairy, mottled with liver spots. I think of dead flies with their legs sticking up.

  ‘Happy birthday, hairy hands.’

  They too are seventy-five years old today. That said, my first proper awareness of myself happened around the age of four or five. So I’m only really about seventy, which makes me feel a bit better.

  I put down the glass and lift my hands in front of my face. Through the bars of my skinny fingers the window becomes brighter, the swelling sun making shadow-blocks of my palms and hiding their erratic, winding lines. Indeed, I have no desire to relive all those fortunes told.

  I drop my hands and stare out the window. From my bed I can’t see the decking and the pond separating the ryokan from a near-vertical, wooded hillside. The perspective is deceptive, my gaze immediately moving into the cypress, the trees seeming so much closer than they actually are.

  Soon my niece will come and get me. I will go home for the final time. My ambivalence seems overdone. The greenery gives a shiver. First breath of the day. I notice that I have been holding my own.

  Erin arrives at exactly seven. Six feet tall, immaculately dressed in a black trouser suit and open-necked white blouse.

  Coming from a long line of short arses it amazes me how this giraffelike creature came about. Even as a newborn she was oddly elongated, tightly swaddled in her mother’s arms like a length of guttering.

  She stands awhile in the sliding doorway, a box in her hand, my birthday present. I look up from the tatami floor, where I sit at a low lacquered table. Although she looms over me, it is actually me in the position of superiority. The white and fluffy guest slippers are chosen for that express purpose. As I look away to pour a cup of coffee she glances sourly down at them.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ she says.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Her knees fold almost to her chest as she sits down in the chair opposite me. Like an insect. She hands me the beautifully wrapped box which I place on the table. We both look at it for a while.

  ‘We missed you last night. It was a great shame.’

  ‘Who missed me?’

  ‘The people at your party. Your friends.’

  ‘My friends?’

  ‘Why did you just leave like that?’

  ‘My friends?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But they weren’t my friends.’

  She shifts. She’s getting annoyed. She has no idea who my friends are. I have no idea who my friends are.

  ‘It was a great shame,’ she repeats.

  ‘Nothing to be done.’

  ‘You did well with the monkey.’

  ‘Chimpanzee.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was a chimpanzee.’

  ‘Ok. Chimp.’

/>   ‘A chimpanzee is different from a monkey. It’s a Great Ape.’

  She seems confused but quickly recovers. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you. I have some calls to make.’

  Her phone is already in her hand as she awkwardly unfolds herself from the low chair. She hates Japan. She was made for the biggest of canvases: LA. The City of Angels, although I never once saw one.

  Akira has already packed for me. I don’t bother to check the selection of underwear, suits and shirts he has expertly fitted into seven pieces of Louis Vuitton. Akira knows. This is something else my niece dislikes him for.

  He has left one piece for me to pack, a thin, black artist’s portfolio case. Yours, Duke. Stencilled ‘DJ’.

  I take the bag to the other side of my sparse, immaculately neat and tidy bedroom and slide open a door to a small office with one window, high up on the wall. Years ago, I could spend twelve hours a day in here. Seeking the lost magic of A Man’s a Man. Or just seeking something to do.

  This is where I wrote the script for The Bruce and designed the storyboards. When I gave the originals to Erin about a year ago I made copies and re-commenced my never-ending revisions.

  On three sides of the room are long, angled drawing desks. Desks and floor are cluttered. Blank sheets, half-started sketches, dozens of balls of crumpled paper. There are empty glasses and at least five plates, a half-eaten sandwich, and is that cake? When did I eat cake? But there in a little circular clearing on the floor is indeed half a slice of what looks like fruit cake.

  Yes, figures . . .

  On three walls stretch neat rows of numbered black-and-white drawings. Dozens of them. I notice a section where some drawings have been removed. These nine drawings are arranged on the floor as the borders of the little clearing. I have made some corrections in red felt tip.

  Script or storyboard, I veer from one to the other. At the moment, it is the images. I will present them, eventually and still unsatisfied, to the Great Director I can’t stand, who won’t even look at them.

  I untack the drawings from the wall and put them into the thin portfolio bag, the nine loose ones on top to re-consider on the plane. Robert the Bruce smiles out from his portrait on the central desk, the famous one with the skullcap and the axe. He seems more bored than usual.

  Rest assured, King Bobby, that closure is almost here. Beginnings, as you know, are so much easier than endings. I do feel a somewhat reluctant relief in having a stranger finish what I haven’t managed in decades. Maybe that’s who your gormless face has been pining for all these years.

  Erin is in the living room. She talks loudly on her phone, legs folded underneath her on the semi-circular white leather sofa, every inch the tycoon I have created. She holds up a hand and rolls her eyes, mouthing a name I am supposed to recognise that will explain her exasperation. I don’t have a clue who she is talking about, and cross over to the sliding windows and outside.

  It’s not that I doubt my affection for her. Yet its depth has always troubled me. She is a child of privilege, and compulsions that yell Asperger’s. Take the pre-teen mania with short-wave radio. I had a small cabin built at the bottom of the Wendlebury Manor garden, which she insisted, for some reason, had to look like a Yukon trading post. She’d sit there for hours, turning the dial a Hertz at a time, noting the stations in a leather logbook. I’d see the yellow glow from the top windows. I still remember the names: World Harvest Radio, HCJB Quito, Super Power KUSW . . .

  Football came soon after. An obsession that only a girl could bring to such a masculine game. Not that she ever played. She simply recorded. It wasn’t enough to read the statistics in the newspapers; she had to copy them into another logbook, as if she didn’t quite trust them. Then animals. Pets of all kinds.

  ‘Finally.’ Her appearance startles me. She peers into the rain, chin in the air, moving her face left then right, as if checking herself in a mirror only she can see. She is still holding her phone. I feel a slight annoyance that her footprints have messed up the pristine shininess of the wet decking.

  ‘That man can go on.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Peterson?’

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘The lawyer. Peterson? You met him last night.’

  ‘Peterson?’

  ‘Yes. Peterson.’

  She is looking at me with impatience. It is my age she despises. She always has.

  ‘I suppose we should go then.’

  ‘I suppose we should.’

  I look around the room, as if suspecting I won’t be back and want to retain as many details as I can. None of them will stick, crowded out by all the others to which I now must return.

  Four

  Fat Jack booked us at The Empire several more times in 1954. At the same time the old man tried to get JJ and the Duke signed. He eventually came back from another trip to Glasgow with a contract from the Galts Agency. This meant regular work, two weeks in one theatre then on to the next, if only the ‘number threes’ circuit, outposts like Motherwell, Hamilton and Paisley.

  A Galts contract also brought the summer seaside gigs. Fourteen-odd weeks guaranteed money.

  You worked for it.

  Twice nightly shows and a change of programme twice a week. Fourteen acts per programme and a small cast meant you’d done half a dozen turns before taking the stage in your own right.

  We started in July 1954 at the Beach Pavilion, Leven. Fourth on the bill. We finished in the same place.

  Back home, Fat Jack had a ‘wee proposition for us’. We were crammed into his tiny backstage office.

  ‘That being . . . ?’ the old man asked.

  ‘Headline tour.’

  Duke and I exchanged glances.

  ‘Sounds intriguing,’ said our father. ‘Doesn’t it sound intriguing, boys?’

  ‘Indeed it is.’ When Jack spun back around in his chair he had three cigars in his pudgy hand. He raised the other, rubbing his fingers together and frowning, the MC searching for the right words.

  ‘To Barra and Beyond.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The islands boys. The western lands. Gonna take some culture to those teuchters.’

  ‘The islands?’

  ‘A December tour. You’ll hop from place to place on the mail steamers.’

  ‘Mail steamers?’

  ‘There’s no competition. They don’t do panto. Too pagan for them.’

  ‘I was thinking about the sea,’ said Duke. ‘The Minch.’

  ‘Well, boy, those island lassies are surely lonely. One thing you can guarantee is plenty of Minch.’

  * * *

  ‘Pay the dues,’ the old man said. We paid them all winter, Castlebay to Portree, Stornoway to Ullapool. ‘Play every stage like it’s the Palladium.’ When we finally did play the Palladium it wasn’t filled with whisky-pissed fishers and crofters. Fat Jack had tapped an unknown market. There was decent money here. So we paid more dues the following winter, headliners in The Stornoway Way.

  It was quite the ramshackle bill.

  A Harry Lauder wannabe, a magician and a couple of catastrophic comedians, on up to number two, an ageing husband and wife dance team, Brigitte and Paulo (actually Mary and Watty McPhail). They didn’t make it back in 1955, Brigitte rupturing groin and career when she attempted the splits in Benbecula village hall. A ventriloquist replaced them, Swanney and Magoo, a naughty schoolboy dummy with a tendency to explode into foul-mouthed tirades depending on how drunk Swanney was. Magoo never made it home, hurled into the Minch on the run home, Swanney laughing as he bobbed off into the blue yonder. He really did hate that dummy.

  ‘These are the lands of the sheep shagger,’ Duke told me, mock-serious. ‘Be careful.’ But he was the pretty boy who needed to keep a wary eye, not for lonely farmers but enraged boyfriends. I watched this with a studied perplexity, barely able to look at a girl. Every encounter was gruesome, the treacherous w
ay my mouth went AWOL, my words randomly re-arranging.

  ‘How do you manage it?’

  We were in our room at the Marine Hotel, Kyle. It was 10am, Duke already with a drink to hand.

  ‘How do you get so many?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Duke. ‘It just kind of happens. Few drinks and . . . ’

  ‘Easy as that, eh?’

  ‘I don’t want to let anyone down. The girls, it’s what they expect. Same as they expect your greeting face.’

  ‘My heart bleeds.’

  ‘Piss off. You just hang about in the background, pretending to be invisible. It’s me picking up the slack. No bugger wants to talk to you so where’s old Duke? Duke’ll smile. Duke’ll give us a laugh.’

  ‘I’m not having a go at you.’

  ‘I feel like I’m being crushed, sometimes. Tight, in the chest. All these people and sometimes I could cry.’

  It was almost shocking. I’d glimpsed this anxiety, now and then, but he’d never talked about it.

  Almost immediately, it vanished.

  He jumped up. The Duke was back. Lopsided smile and lazy blue eyes like he’d just fallen out of bed. He stared at me, took a slow drag of his cigarette and winked. ‘I go through the same patter every evening, darling, so trust me, I’m not gonna give you any. You’re gorgeous. That’s all that needs to be said.’ Then he slumped back down on the bed, the smile disappearing. ‘Give it a go, some such shite. Telling you, it works wonders for old Jekyll and Hyde here.’

  I preferred Jekyll. The good doctor had the smile which sold the tat.

  My merchandising ideas had been well received. Signed photographs and photo opportunities. Postcards of stills from our most popular sketches. I even arranged a special performance at Portree hospital with a journalist in tow. I wondered if I might have a flair for this kind of thing.

  ‘An entreprenoor, eh, you must’ve got that from your mum.’

  Money was the one responsibility the old man gave to me. He knew if he wanted to make any poppy then an attitude almost conscientious in its recklessness just wasn’t going to cut it.