The Accidental Recluse

by Tom McCulloch

I pretended an interest for a surprisingly long time. I’d drop ambiguous hints about returning as CEO. I insisted that my opinion was sought for every Breda Pictures productions then rarely offered it. I demanded that board papers I didn’t read were Fed-Exed to me, sometimes phoning into conferences where I never spoke. My final involvement could only have been my last. I flew to London and insisted on chairing the most excruciating of board meetings, where they stared at me as if I was Alexander Selkirk, suddenly re-appeared for Sunday lunch.

  I veered off agenda. I had a magnificent idea for a new film. I was so impatient to tell them. The Bruce. Months and months of ten-hour shifts on a little Shinto island where my dead brother Duke grinned from his altar with such encouragement, with thumbs up, as if yes, Johnny, yes, here’s the film to better A Man’s a Man. All of them, they’d get it too, when I explained.

  So I did. At length.

  Afterwards, into the great and perplexed silence, strode deadpan Fatty Ashcroft. ‘Well, it’s quite the story, Johnny, quite the tale. No-one can accuse you of losing the plot, dear boy.’

  * * *

  It was the most beautiful of May days, I remember, when Fatty telephoned Shuzenji to tell me that the board had unanimously voted to replace me as CEO. I asked Akira to bring a bottle and two glasses.

  ‘I have been retired,’ I told him.

  ‘No. You have been given the gift of time.’

  I looked across to the little island with the hidden shrine. I was forty-nine and Akira was right, there was nothing but time, all the sweet and sour tomorrows and tomorrows that I would turn my back on as I faced, instead, all those yesterdays. Time passed was still time, but a gift?

  I raised a glass. Akira followed suit.

  Seventeen

  The Mirrie Dancers are leaving the stage, creeping black from east and west. I offer the bottle to Lewis. He’s no drinker, I see how his face puckers. I wonder if he’s humouring me. As the last of the lights fade we walk back across the beach. He giggles a little when he stumbles on the sand.

  The rain is heavy by the time we get back to the caravan. We huddle in a loaded silence by the gas heater. I know he wants to ask me more about his film. He breaks the tension by announcing he’s hungry.

  He makes instant noodles and babbles as he slurps. Camping trips with his dad. They’d play rummy, stuck in the tent while it rained. Once there was a thunderstorm, his dad terrifying him by warning him not to touch the poles in case they were struck by lightning. Their best trip was to Loch Monar. They camped out for three days. He wrote a story about it that was published in the school magazine, with a horsefly called Bigfoot and two men in a rowing boat.

  ‘My dad wrote then. Poems. He never told anyone, I mean, you just didn’t . . . The film, I made it for him.’

  ‘So you said.’ My tone is sharp. I refuse the comparison I am being forced to make between this heroic father-figure and the fedora-wearing ghost sitting in the corner looking shifty.

  ‘Those memories. Do you trust them?’

  He looks surprised. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I never have. Like I said, all those people we are in a life, they all look back in different ways. How do you decide which one’s doing the remembering? What makes you think their memory is the right one?’

  ‘Instinct.’

  ‘Or maybe you just decide this is what I am going to think and stick with it.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘There’s no truth in it.’

  ‘Maybe, but there’s peace. I don’t want to think about what my dad became. I want him as he was. I want him to watch The Shinigami and tell me “that’s great, Lewis, I’m proud of you”.’

  I think of those endless JJ and the Duke or Breda Boys rehearsals, the old man’s hair-trigger temper. I cannot feel Lewis’s deep content as he wakes in a tent to a smiling father and a cup of tea.

  ‘Just fuckin’ get it right this time.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s all I got from my dad.’

  ‘I still need him, you know. After all these years.’

  I can’t imagine this. It is extraordinary to the point of idiocy. A pitying affection for Lewis sweeps through me once more. It is still there as I help him to bed, much later. He is asleep in seconds.

  I watch him for a while then sit down. ‘Well, son, your film really is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. That’s why it’s perfect, it fits the story. I always was a bit hand-held, know what I mean? Never had that Steadicam view.’ I take off Lewis’s shoes and pull the duvet across him. I pat his hand. ‘I’m proud of you.’And I go back through to the lounge to watch the film again.

  * * *

  Are you impressed, dear Duke? Not with the aesthetic, forget all of that. What I mean is what Lewis knows. It is extraordinary to see them all laid out, all these scenes we have watched and re-watched.

  Everything memorable comes in threes. Like those jokes about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman. Just enough detail to be satisfying. Can you imagine the Four Little Pigs or the Four Billy Goats Gruff? It would get tedious. It’s why no-one likes singing Ten Green Bottles.

  Lewis is also working to the law of three, although I suspect this is more by accident than design.

  The first involves a ramshackle reconstruction. It is the day you died, Duke. The scene starts with old Simon monologuing in his chair. We cut to the actor playing young Simon, a pock-marked kid who can’t stop blinking, panicked Morse Code repeating what am I doing, what am I doing?

  What he is doing is birdwatching, striding across a hillside under summer-blue skies. This is intercut, incongruously, with stock footage of an eagle wheeling over a snowy moor. Next is a long shot from Ben Chorain, down towards our cottage. Simon lifts his binoculars to a close-up of a man in a dressing gown going into the byre. Another man hurries after him and we cut to an extreme close-up of Simon’s face, an exaggerated frown. Then back to old Simon, decrepit but animated: ‘There’s no way he could have died before JJ got in there, no bloody way.’

  So what really happened inside the barn? asks the voiceover. The answer offered is a silent, lingering shot of the Sound of Skerray, time and space to come to the inevitable conclusion that Johnny Jackson, somehow, details sketchy, had something to do with his brother’s death. What can you say, Duke? The evidence of old, half-daft Simon Warner is incontrovertible . . .

  The second disclosure is just as dramatic. This I knew nothing about. Lewis truly has done his research.

  We begin with a close-up of the cover of the Inveran High School magazine, 1966. Two hands appear in shot, turning the pages and holding the magazine open at The Local Hero at Home. There’s a photo of you, Duke, not one of your best. You’re sitting in the front row of an empty Inveran Empire, a scatter of papers at your feet. The pupil, Mhairi Archibald, must have interviewed you while you were organising the Billy Jackson memorial concert that never was.

  Below the photo is a transcript of the Q&A. We hear two voices reading an extract. Bizarrely, the voice reading Mhairi’s questions is male. I suspect the reappearance of the pock-marked kid . . . The other is Lewis’s, channelling his inner Duke. Undoubtedly, his dad also told him he was good at impressions. I have a mental image of Charlie the Chimp slapping a hand over his eyes.

  ‘What’s next for Duke Jackson? Any scoop you can give me?’

  ‘You’ve got a future ahead of you, doll. I can just imagine you door-stepping me.’

  ‘Not even a little hint?’

  ‘Well, seeing as you asked so nicely, I’ve just finished a script. It’s called “A Man’s a Man” and it’s about Robert Burns.’

  Cue the screaming organ keys.

  Think how different my life would have been had this interview been uncovered before? It’s amazing it wasn’t, given the media typhoon that followed your death. Take solace, Duke, that your last interview was with one of the Inveran schoolgirls through which you once cut such a swathe.

  Yet it is the shock of Lewis�
��s final disclosure which makes the whole so much more powerful than the sum of the three parts. I know, Duke, you’re as sick of it as I am. All these effects and their causes, who knows where they actually lead back to. But let’s load the old film one more time, the rasp of your boot on a toppling chair, a frantic coupling beside the Craigie Falls, three Chinese sailors tumbling in the Sound of Skerray. Who knows, who cares; spin the bottle . . .

  It is near the end of the film.

  We are told that Anna and I have moved to Shuzenji, Japan. There follows an interminable montage of clichés; snow monkeys in hot pools, plum blossom, doe-eyed girls giving the peace sign . . . Then, accompanied by Lewis’s solemn voiceover, we see the photo which flashed round the world, briefly, after Anna died. A journalist with a telephoto lens has caught me sitting on the little island where I found her. I am wearing a black yukata with my head in my hands.

  A sudden heart attack, the story went.

  We cut to a beach now quite familiar to me, Edmonton Bay, the sand stretching in that long, elegant half-circle. The camera tracks in on a sheet of paper held down by pebbles. It is printed in kanji.

  Yet the death certificate tells us something different. ‘Multiple drug toxicity – alcohol and codeine. Event of undetermined intent.’

  Should it shock me, to hear this stated so bluntly after so long? I feel only hollow. On-screen, the death certificate breaks free in the wind and tumbles into a glooming sky, fading from sight. It is a near-perfect image. It is how I have always thought of Anna. Perhaps Lewis is a genius after all.

  I realise I am crying. I find myself stumbling through to Lewis’s bedroom, shaking him roughly until he wakes, disorientation becoming alarm as he quickly sits up. ‘I watched him,’ I am saying. ‘I watched him. It was less than a second.’ I start repeating it. ‘It was less than a second.’

  * * *

  I wake just after seven. Somehow, I have managed to get from my last remembered location, the sofa, to my bed. My trousers are down at my knees and I have one shoe on and one off, as if I couldn’t be bothered any more, or had simply passed out. I have a vague memory of shouting at Lewis.

  Like a guilty tolling, my heart gives a hard thump. Another warning. I see my blood cells as old men on Zimmers, shuffling round my calcified arteries. One by one they do not waken. It’s easy to age. Just let it happen – although first you must accept there’s no choice. It is much more difficult to be young. Yet the sense of compulsion fades, the pressing need to do something.

  I watch the vaguest of light swelling round the edges of the curtain. A similar lightness grows within myself. I decide I will make porridge, stand in the little kitchenette as my reflection in the window fades, the darkness lifting, stirring the pot as my mother did every morning forever . . .

  I find no oats. Instead, I borrow Lewis’s jacket from the rack beside the door and go outside. A cold but gentle wind is blowing in from the north-east, the waves a soft running and the tide in.

  I find a flattish black rock by the shore and sit for a long time. The only sign of my hangover is a press of melancholy. I glance back at the caravan. The light is on in the lounge and I have the most insistent vision. I am living there all by myself. I am sitting on the sofa looking out at the sea, the light, the way it shifts from washed-out translucence to the most incredible depth.

  Perhaps this is where I have always belonged. For a moment, the ryokan at Shuzenji is so utterly irreconcilable I am almost embarrassed. To live in Japan seems like a rejection of myself. I have wasted years staring into bamboo and hinoki green when all I’ve ever needed is leaden grey.

  As grey as Lewis’s face.

  He is walking along the track towards me, wearing a waterproof so incredibly yellow it can only be making his hangover worse. He sits down beside me and wraps his arms around his knees.

  ‘I’m not a drinker.’

  ‘You surprise me. You know what I want to do?’

  He takes a moment, as if making sure he won’t throw up when he opens his mouth. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Go fishing.’

  He’s surprised. ‘I thought you wanted to go home?’

  ‘Have you got a boat?’

  ‘In the shed.’

  ‘Then let’s go.’

  The thought tips him over the edge. Quickly, he scrambles to his feet but only gets a few feet before he is noisily sick. When he turns back to me he looks sheepish, but brighter. ‘I think I’m feeling a bit—’

  Again, he doubles-over, retching.

  It is an hour before Lewis feels up to it. We cross to the shed opposite the caravan. It is rotting, collapsing, despite being built against the slope on the western side in a hopeful attempt to avoid the elements.

  With some difficulty, we open the warped door. Inside, on a trailer, is a white painted, wooden rowing boat. An outboard motor is mounted at the stern but this is a day for the oars, the grey now cleared to a blue so resonant it almost rings, so cold the world seems frozen in place. We wheel the trailer to the shore, careful on the slope. The Land Rover will be needed to pull it back up.

  ‘I’ve not been out in the boat since my dad died. We bought it at the same time as the caravan. I had this idea that it would give him something to do. We went out once, I think. Didn’t catch a thing.’

  ‘Did he enjoy it?’

  ‘He didn’t enjoy anything much by the end, Johnny.’

  It is the first time he’s used my first name. I sit in the boat as he pushes it further into the shallows before jumping in. In his yellow waterproof, knitted hat and wellies, he is completely at home, pulling the oars with ease. I look round and realise I have no idea what the parts of a boat are called. Again, I feel that desire to stay, to have Lewis tell me all he knows about boats.

  I tell him he looks the part.

  He smiles. ‘Maybe it’s a genetic memory.’ He points with his chin. ‘I could tie those in my sleep.’

  On the bottom of the boat, the line of hooks is hidden among brightly coloured feathers. You were useless at tying a line, Duke, a bumble of thumbs. I had to do it half the time, yet you were the one taken fishing by the old man. Bit rough for wee boys, son. When I was finally deemed big enough I refused; to accept was somehow to forgive all those humiliations. There is no warmth in my memories of boats, I have no desire to tarnish Lewis’s by telling of mine.

  After a while, he looks around, as if checking his bearings, then pulls in the oars. He sits down beside me, hands me the fishing rod and throws the darrow line over the side. He returns to his seat and starts to row again, more gently. I hold the rod horizontal, feeling the slight drag of the line in the green-black water, the tip of the rod quivering slightly with each pull on the oars.

  ‘I’m sorry about last night,’ I say.

  ‘You were drunk.’

  I stare at him until he looks away. ‘I watched the film again.’

  He sniffs. He’s not going to ask what I think. He’s trying to convince me he isn’t bothered any more.

  ‘Do you really think I had something to do with Duke’s death?’

  ‘I told you, I’m not interested in judgement.’

  ‘But you’re right.’

  He pulls hard on the oars as he stares at me.

  ‘You need a re-edit. I gave you the central scene, JJ returning to where his brother died. Re-enact it. Get that daftie of an actor back. I’ll do an interview. Know what I’ll tell you? That some seconds are longer than others. That I walked in there, saw Duke hanging like a fuckin’ puppet and I hesitated, I hesitated. Simon’s right, there’s no way he could have died unless I did something. But he’s wrong at the same time. Because I didn’t do anything, just for that moment. And that’s the moment he died. That second could have been a day. That’s when he died.’

  ‘You can’t know that.’

  ‘Sometimes you just do. What can I say,’ and I tap the back of my shoulder. ‘Call it a hunch.’

  ‘No.’ He’s adamant, shaking his head. ‘I’m not havin
g that.’

  I have no idea why this should matter to him. ‘What are you going to do with it anyway?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The film. You could make a fortune.’

  He stops rowing and leans forward on his knees, the oars lifting into the air, dripping. The boat glides. I have the strongest feeling that when it comes to a halt we will simply sink like a stone.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? You think this is all about getting back at you.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to shove you over the side?’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘See, when I started making that film, I had all these ideas. I was going to send it everywhere, TV, newspapers. It’d be a sensation. I might even get an Oscar. Like you, think of the irony. Best Documentary.’

  I look away.

  ‘I know, it’s pathetic. I’m just a ghost, people look right through me.’ He drops the oars back into the water. ‘You, though. I wanted you to know me like I know you. I wanted you to see me.’

  ‘I see you, son. I see you.’

  He rows further west. There is very little between us and Canada but sea. The space is unnerving. I almost cry out when I feel a tug on the rod. The brief vibration is instantly familiar, even though I have not been fishing since I was a boy, the rocks off the Albannach Road. Now a stronger vibration.

  ‘We’ve hit them,’ says Lewis. ‘Get them in and cast out again.’

  I do as I’m told, reeling in the line in the way so easily remembered, a few turns with the rod almost horizontal then lifting it steadily to near-vertical, a beating in my chest that is nothing to do with my failing heart but only excitement. I pull gasping mackerel from the hooks and lay them glistening in the plastic box Lewis has given me. Otherwise, he doesn’t help, just watches with an assessing look. When the last fish has been unhooked I throw the line back over the side.

  Over the next twenty minutes I haul in three more catches. At least fifteen fish are dying in the box.