The Accidental Recluse

by Tom McCulloch

  ‘That’s no way to talk about JJ!’

  ‘Na, he’s moved on from monkeys. He’s more the wee dug these days, sniffing around yon Anna.’

  ‘His brother’s wife. Man, ahd be beelin. What’s Duke got to say?’

  ‘Duke? You could shag his missus in front of him an he widnae notice.’

  ‘Poor man’s losing his mind and his brother’s swanning around playing daddy.’

  ‘Maybe he is daddy.’

  I listened for a while longer then stepped out of the booth. Four pairs of eyes turned to me with a shifty mix of embarrassment and amusement. I walked to the bar and slapped down a pound note.

  ‘I reckon it’s my round, eh?’

  I left the Queens in a fury. It was a time for absolutes, I decided, fuck this ridiculous, neither-nor existence. I hurried to Anna’s. We had to get out of this place, start again, just the three of us, somewhere no-one gawked as if we were the matinee down at The Ritz. I was certain she would agree, a confidence that came crashing down like midwinter surf when I turned into Sandford Street. In the distance, she was holding hands with Duke as they pushed Erin’s pram.

  It was a few days before Christmas 1966. I had been back in Inveran for a matter of weeks that suddenly felt like years.

  At The Clachan, sometime later, drunk for only the second time in my life, I made another decision. I left immediately, walking in driving sleet to the promenade. I was sober, sure I was, just the wind making me bob and weave like the red and green festive lights strung between the lamp-posts, tinkling with every gust, an enchantment leading me to the car, Hansel in the grimmest of fairy tales.

  I made it back home, nose to windscreen all along the single-track road, rising waves on the Sound throwing spray across the windscreen. Twice I slammed on the brakes, skidding once on the slick road and just stopping before the ditch, the headlights illuminating a sheep in the rain, staring with such optimism that I leaned on the horn until it clambered to its feet and trotted off.

  With the wind, Duke didn’t hear the car drive into the yard. I stood at the kitchen window and watched him. He was sitting at the table, on the phone, firelight playing on his smiling face. I pictured Anna in her mother’s front room; a whisper and her own smile, tolerant. He put down the phone and blew out his cheeks, the man who knew how close he had come.

  As soon as he heard the kitchen door open, he sprung to his feet and rushed over. ‘I’m sorry, JJ.’

  I just shrugged.

  ‘For everything. No little bro anymore. I’m the little bro. You’re the big brother. You’ve been there for her.’

  ‘Sure, Duke.’

  He looked sheepish. Then a careful smile. ‘I saw them today. I met my daughter. Properly met her. Just woke up this morning and knew I had to. The pressure had gone, you know? I’m sorry. I just panicked.’

  ‘You ran away.’

  He winced. ‘Yeah. Ran away. Not any more. That’s gone. All gone. We’re heading back to London on Thursday.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Start again.’ He grabbed my shoulders. Ever the glittery eyes. ‘The world forgives. I’m proof and I’m gonna say it.’ He let go of my shoulders and rushed to the door. ‘I’m gonna bloody shout it!’

  He did. He stripped to his pants and stood in the yard, half-lit by the spilling kitchen light, the rain exploding in the mud as he shouted his apologies into the storm, over and over again. He looked almost exultant when he came back inside, face flushed and a self-righteous grin.

  I told him I had slept with Anna.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Up at the waterfall. Right cold, but we didn’t notice it.’ Then I went up to my bedroom.

  He appeared a few moments later. ‘The fuck are you talking about? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?’

  ‘Phone her.’

  ‘You’ve got problems, tell you.’

  ‘Phone her!’

  ‘Piss off.’ He slammed the door.

  For a long time, there was only rain, and then sleep. I was wakened by shouting downstairs and the slam of another door. When I woke again a pale, hesitant light was creeping into the room. The previous night seemed so distant and improbable, a story I had once been told.

  I couldn’t find him. No sign he’d slept in his bed. In the kitchen, last night’s bottle was empty. The rain was still falling, squally bursts against the kitchen window. I stood at the sink, sipping a glass of water and looking out, the muddy yard and the hillside only blurred impressions. I must have been staring at the shape on the hill path for a long time before I realised it was moving.

  I only recognised it as Duke when he reached the gate at the top of the yard. His Hefner-esque, maroon bathrobe was tied loosely at the waist and flapped in the wind, revealing those ubiquitous pinstripe pyjamas, the designer named Cardin I was supposed to know.

  I was sick in the sink then. As I hunched over, spitting and retching, I waited for the back door to open.

  When he didn’t appear, I went outside. I found him in the byre.

  In the dull light, my first thought was confusion, how his pinstriped body could hover in space with no apparent means of suspension. Then I saw the cord from the bathrobe tied around a roof beam. His chin was pressed chin down to the chest, arms hanging limp and his tightly bunched fists an appalling white in the darkness, as if the bones were about to burst through. One foot was bare, the green Wellington boot lying on the ground beside an overturned chair.

  Those observations have always troubled me, less their essential horror than the passage of time that my noticing them represented. A second, was it even as much as that, a second’s delay between seeing and doing that might have made a difference, one, two beats more to stop looking and start running, grabbing Duke by the thighs and lifting, taking his weight, releasing the pressure on his neck, cursing his ballooning weight and shouting up into the popping eyes peering down at me, Duke, c’mon Duke, over and over and what to do next as I held his thighs and turned, turned, his body like a marionette, looking around and remembering the tool shelves on the wall by the window, shouting an apology as I gently let go of his legs and rushed over, finding an old Stanley knife and apologising again as I stood up the chair and sliced the cord from the roof beam, Duke landing so unnaturally that I knew it was too late.

  I removed the cord from his neck with some trouble. I sat on the chair and stared at him. I cursed him before I let myself cry then knelt beside him and stroked his stupid, stupid head. Minutes passed. I think I was waiting to see if he moved. I tried to prise his fingers out of their awful white fists and gave up, looking up at the wooden beam and the cord I had cut. I remembered a morning in another lifetime, a monkey sitting up there, grinning, I was sure it was grinning.

  * * *

  I called the ambulance some time later. By then I had found a script called A Man’s a Man in his room. A set of storyboard pictures too, in a portfolio bag stencilled at the clasp with ‘DJ’ in gold letters. I remembered him sitting in the front row of The Empire, slipping sheets of paper out of sight.

  * * *

  We walk with our past. Or maybe it walks with us, I don’t know. There are times the boundary between now and then seems gossamer-thin, as if the after-trails of the most vivid dream has extended into the waking day. You have the most powerful certainty that all those people are going to come through the door, one by one, gently admonishing you for thinking they had gone at all.

  I saw them all, in the days that followed, my father sitting across the table, the catch of firelight on amber as he poured the whisky. My mother, quiet in the rocker with the darning needle and the disapproving glances. My grandparents, as silent as the land they had worked for decades, still coming and going to the rhythm that had perplexed me as a young child and still did.

  And Duke. Capering on the shore as the dusk fell. Up in the top pasture, a Spitfire with arms outstretched. Such an achingly innocent presence, unsettling me, who I tried and failed to ignore.

  In contr
ast, Anna wore her grief peacefully.

  A dignified thank you for those who came to the cottage in a steady stream. Few stayed long, as if afraid the presence of death might somehow taint them. Soon enough it would be their turn to take the handshakes and offer the whisky, or even sit up with the body, a tradition that seemed less a mark of respect than notice being served that one day it would be you. Anna had passed on that particular trauma and had Duke taken to Fettercairn and Son’s in Inveran.

  I watched her, the working up to strength with each knock on the door, the slow sink of her shoulders when they left, up and down, like a summer swell on the Sound. I was a near-mute presence by contrast, a catatonic con man determined to deceive myself: nothing I could have done . . .

  ‘Are you sure you’re ok?’ Anna asked, a dozen times a day, troubled on my behalf for the trauma of having found him. Concerned that I had barely talked about it, a hand on my cheek.

  My remorse pushed her away. I could barely look at her, a distancing she put down – I saw it in her sympathetic smile – to my grief. In the end I told her, viciously, to leave me alone and stop blaming me for what happened. She’d suggested nothing of the sort but I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t admit that Duke had told her he knew about us. I thought she was punishing me.

  She went back to her mother’s. With Anna gone, the mourners stopped coming. I sat alone with the ghosts. Three days later, old Fettercairn knocked on the door to take me to the funeral. A pale, pinched face and ice-blue eyes, a suitably eerie presence for the Reaper’s lieutenant. There was the coffin in the back of the hearse, ‘Duke’ spelled out in a corny floral arrangement.

  Anna’s choice. The sentimentality surprised me, and it was there again, after the service. The mourners had left for the wake in The Clachan. She was standing alone by the wall that marked the seawards extremity of the cemetery, staring up at dozens of gulls soaring in flawless blue.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to fly. Imagine I woke up and they had grown overnight, my wings. Where would I fly to?’

  She turned with such exquisite puzzlement but didn’t seem, somehow, to actually register my presence. It was all she said to me that day, if it was even me she had been talking to. Those birds. I would see so many more, watching her watching them as she waited to soar up, up and away.

  Her avoidance of me at the wake was also oddly passive, making it altogether more distancing, amplifying my coldness to the point of absurdity. Days passed and my guilt began to verge on panic. I was terrified to talk to her but phoned once, immediately hanging up. Instead I waited, pathetically, for her to come and offer forgiveness in return for an apology I hadn’t offered.

  Had she done so, I would have struggled to explain the script and storyboard scattered across the kitchen table and floor. I’m sure she would have recognised Duke’s handwriting straightaway.

  A Man’s a Man.

  I was astounded my brother had crafted something so delicately complex and beautiful. His grin of one-upmanship followed me to the bottom of every bottle. He’d written the script out longhand, and when I finally decided what I was going to do, it took me two weeks to type it up and re-draw the storyboard in my own hand. After I had finished I burned the originals.

  Then I called Leonid. ‘I’ve written a film. It’s based on the life of Robert Burns.’

  ‘You kept that quiet.’

  I spent two more days typing up a copy and when Leo eventually got back to me it was by telegram.

  Where have you been hiding this stop made some enquiries Warners maybe interested stop what is the problem with your telephone stop.

  The problem was it was lying in the yard where I had hurled it, furious with the way it never rang. If still connected there would likely have been warning of the man who had materialised when I came out of the byre one morning, a hatchet in my hand from chopping kindling.

  ‘Mr Jackson. There you are.’

  His features, somehow squeezed into too small an area of his face, were crinkled in exasperation. I considered hurling the axe at him, Tonto-like, a slow-motion end over end, a comic dooiing as it quivered in the centre of his forehead. This was Don Heelpen, though I didn’t yet know it, award-winning interviewer for The Observer. The article would be called The Accidental Recluse.

  Not a bad title that.

  Johnny Jackson stands in front of his cottage and tells me about the weather. He gestures seawards and says, ‘It’s out there, under the waves’, the ship that gave him and his troubled brother the famous name, The Breda Boys. Behind him is the barn where he found Duke. Three months on, Johnny’s taking his time.

  Don stayed two days.

  There was something compellingly sympathetic about his squashed appearance and odd mix of hipster speak and clipped Oxbridge. My ego too was keen that he stayed. Not only did Don like my films – I truly do dig them, dear boy – I was also pleased by how my exile had become a minor cause célèbre if only, I wasn’t that vain, as a curious epilogue to the tragedy of my brother.

  Johnny doesn’t go into town. He says he is ‘all out of platitudes’. He can spend hours with such distance you wonder if he is there at all. Yet mention film and he’ll talk all night. I have been instructed in the art of lighting at 3am, watched a framing masterclass demonstrated by two raised hands, thumbs and forefingers making a square, like a camera lens . . .

  When a copy of the interview arrived later I recalled only vague outlines of those scenes. I didn’t recognise this Johnny Jackson at all. I’d never been so interesting. The persona Don created followed me around for years, less a memory of the word than the image, I think. Those accompanying black-and-white photos appeared in more and more publications, especially after the success of A Man’s a Man: a shot from behind as I stare, wild-haired, at Ben Chorain; an expectant look over my shoulder from my chair in the empty living room; a full-face close-up, I’m frowning, a tumbler of whisky at my lips . . . In most I wear an old Aran jumper. Don Heelpen, he made me seem damaged, and people are always attracted to someone else’s damage.

  He dragged me up the mountain behind his cottage to watch the sun rise. ‘A man’s a man’, he yelled to the breaking light, thrusting a hip flask my way. ‘To toast what’s gone and all it keeps giving’ . . .

  The day I read the interview I took a long walk to Esha Bay. I had a bottle I thought I should have rather than wanted. I drank it. I lay back on the wet sand and watched the scud of clouds that each took on the shape of Duke, a whole column of him marching across the sky, oblivious in the crash of the surf to my shouted apologies and my anger, such anger. I thought about Don’s image of me and about my brother, the life spent in the skin of someone he’d been told he was. I realised that I had no remaining tethers. I had become the dust of an old byre.

  That same afternoon, I retrieved the phone from the yard and plugged it in, calling Leonid to say I’d be back in London in a few days. Then I decided to burn down the byre. I had siphoned a few litres of petrol from the old Morris and was about to start dousing the inside of the barn when I realised that any exorcism would need so much more than a ceremonial torching.

  When I got back to the cottage, Anna was sitting at the table, Erin on her lap. I smelled petrol and perfume.

  ‘You’re the talk of the town. You know what they call you?’

  ‘I can’t say I do.’

  ‘The Hermit.’

  ‘You surprise me.’

  ‘Someone came up to me and said I don’t need to worry with a man like that to look out for me.’

  I blushed. She’s got the strength of the sea. I’ll shelter her when she wants me to and let her be when she’s had enough. This, at least, needed no embellishment. I remember how Don raised a glass . . .

  I sat down opposite her. I watched Erin look at me then back up to her mum.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Anna said.

  ‘I’m doing ok. You?’

  ‘I tried to phone you. But I couldn’t. I don’t know why I pushed you away like that.
’

  ‘I get it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I waited for more. For her to acknowledge that Duke had told her he knew about us.

  ‘I know. It was such an awful shock. Who knows how anyone is going to react. We lash out, we hurt each other.’

  I saw now that she was slightly drunk. A glittering in her eyes. She’d driven over like that, with the little one.

  ‘I feel so guilty, Anna.’

  ‘There’s nothing you could have done.’

  I slept with Anna. I heard the words and closed my eyes, briefly, but enough to see myself enter the byre. Those short seconds between thought and action. ‘There’s so much I could have done.’

  ‘You know what, just don’t!’

  She seemed furious. I said nothing. I had no idea if my silence would antagonise her even more.

  ‘Don’t be a bloody victim. I’m not having it so why the hell should you? I’m not going to push this pram back and forward in Inveran forever. I don’t want men assessing my heartbreak, old biddies and their kindness.’

  ‘They’re just being kind.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. You don’t have a clue. Holed up in the middle of nowhere like some eccentric. Get yourself to town for ten minutes and see if you think the same. See how they look at you.’

  The fierceness held for a few moments longer before fading. ‘Why are you even here?’

  ‘I live here.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘No, no I don’t.’

  ‘You. I’m here because of you.’

  In the silence that followed I poured us another drink. I watched little Erin, so emptily staring.

  ‘Well, here I am,’ she finally said, a tired affection in her eyes. ‘Guess we might as well elope.’

  She was joking, of course, but I couldn’t help the lurch in my stomach. ‘What would the old biddies say to that?’

  She giggled but her face immediately clouded. ‘I’m glad he didn’t know about us. I think. What about you? Part of me wonders if it might have helped. Christ’s sake, who knows. I don’t know.’