Strip the Willow

by John Aberdein

  – Another Snoopy, she said, when they went through.

  – We’re just finishing, said a Marge Simpson.

  – So when the text comes through, said Darth Vader, pour real fast for five minutes. Spirits. That’ll get them excited. No champagne, the corks take too long. Just max the value that hits the floor: rum, voddy, special brandies. And malts, of course.

  – If we want to align our action with a Scottish Republic— said Bugs Bunny.

  – Okay, said Darth. Agreed, max on the malts.

  – No, said Bugs, the opposite, surely!

  – Hold it, said Iris, this is not an issue. Each group can pour as they see fit. Get the aisles awash pronto. Alarm the manager, get him phoning for help, but don’t harm the staff if they try to restrain you. Encourage other shoppers to join in—

  – Tell them it’s a stunt for Candid Camera, said Marge Simpson. Or Liver Concern.

  – How about just tell them it’s the start of a revolution? said Iris. Else it’s all part of the general heehaw, and we gain nothing.

  – Yeah, yeah, with you— said Marge.

  – Spot on, said Bugs.

  – Now the clowns, said Iris. The clowns don’t want to be compromised. They’re fresh from Faslane. The clowns are in it for the long haul.

  – Bloody clowns, said Darth Vader.

  – What’s it about? said Peem, when the others had melted back into the café scene, and Charlie had been invited through to the kitchen.

  – Don’t completely know, said Iris. None of us has got an overall picture. These three were spokes-persons. Literally, spokes-persons, each linking direct to a small group. There’s probably thirty groups – within a broad plan, they choose their own targets. I’m one of ten, I think, holes in the hub. Only tomorrow do we roll out the whole wheel. Or try to—

  – Sounds great, said Peem.

  – All the time, absolutely, we have to keep our lines tight, we’re not up against mugs. So what have you two been up to?

  a non-love letter

  Alison had a thousand things to attend to in the run-up to May 1st. She could have done with a few more reliable colleagues in truth, but she flew around, her mobile red-hot. Otto was being a pain, trying to make out GrottoLotto was named after him. Gwen was still not responding to texts.

  Gwen may have felt she was being pestered by her mother, fussed-over, spied-on. Well, the last was true, but from a very different quarter, Alison knew. Though as far as she was aware texts could not be intercepted by the authorities, or by any of those who arrogated authority to themselves, whereas all voice-calls, terrestrial or celestial, terrorist or humdrum, were liable to be tapped, listened to, logged and recorded. And it was unlikely that LeopCorp didn’t have access to that kind of stuff.

  But from Gwen still, not even a text.

  Anyway, take a deep breath, thought Alison. All of the Gwen stuff paled into horrible insignificance – horrible yes, but insignificant – beside what she herself had learned the previous evening.

  Sifting at home through a bundle of unopened and tossed-aside correspondence, she had come on a buff envelope. And it wasn’t a bill or a circular from the Council, or anything Revenueish.

  It was from the Health Board. It was, in effect, though wholly benign on the surface, a non-love letter from the very distant past. She hadn’t stopped weeping till after one o’clock. Her face was still red in the morning.

  the queen of newt was blamed and removed

  Gwen had taken the job with open eyes. As far as her employer went, she was an Under Information Officer. She was a kind of researcher, with restricted access. She was a species of gofer, but not allowed out. She composed messages, yet was not allowed to send them. Partly because she was not allowed out, she had had to apply together with a partner, who was similarly confined.

  Gwen had had little to do, when she was off duty, apart from keep her orange blouses clean and ironed. Bill told her who Luna was. She saw her at the end of a corridor once. Gwen tried to explore. There was a Vision Mixing room, but it seemed to be always locked. She spent her time reading.

  She and Bill were given their own accommodation, in a back turret, facing east. It was a one year contract, very good money, with no living expenses, and would enable a couple, if the market remained passably stable, to put together the readies for a 5% deposit on a house. With houses costing a lung or half a liver, their temporary loss of all freedoms was supposed to be worth it.

  Bill’s job was that of APT, Assistant Principal Taster, and he was ushered into the Leopard’s presence nightly, blindfold, and required to sample each meat at the point of the Principal Taster’s fork. His interview had been almost entirely silent, apart from the inevitable gnashing Bill made as he chewed his way through two-inch cubes of seared veal, scorched venison and flash-fried seal.

  The Leopard mainly just drank during the day, water and juices; the occasional nibble of specially-sourced crisps, salt and emu, gnu and onion. Bill had to taste these too. The main meal was eaten at night. The Leopard had lived in many uncongenial places – Australia, Chicago, Singapore, Kampala – at his father’s behest, and had dined exclusively on local meats.

  There was a mobile barbecue always available for North Turret, with a self-filtering cowl. After darkness had fallen, the barbecue was taken up to the Fastness in the lift, already fired. Whatever the plat de la nuit might be, its choicest chunks would be barely introduced to the glowing embers.

  At meat-time, the Leopard was at his most charming. He would pace round the room stroking the fangs and snouts of the dozen leopard heads mounted on the walls.

  Tonight the starter was Capercaillie and Blackcock Kidneys. With kidneys, Bill knew, there was always the strong chance of a dash of piss. Piss the Leopard might not like. Piss he might associate with poison. Bill gave the kidneys the thumbs-down. They were flung out the lower half of the slit window, to bounce amongst the pie-dogs of Leopardeen’s Castlegate.

  The alternative starter was announced as Urban Fox. A lot of foxes ran about the Links these days, not far from the sea, between the HyperMall and Jumbo Arcade. Bill was afraid they might taste overpoweringly of Kentucky fried chicken, but there was barely a nuance. He passed the Urban Fox, and the Leopard was soon munching in.

  Entrée was Cairngorm Reindeer. There was never much fat on one of these, roaming the plateaux, choosing their moss, tinkling their bells obligingly so the harvester’s rifle could zero in. Bill chewed and chewed. The Leopard was mainly afraid of quick and violent poisons. After ten minutes of Bill’s chomping, the Leopard got torn in too.

  Dessert in Australia had often been platypus, in Singapore, snake, and in Kampala, chimp, but here in northern clime the Leopard was reduced to Queen of Newt Pudding. Bill was prepared to find the taste of newt dull, but, as he prised his slightly rubbery portion off the fork, he was pleasantly surprised.

  He was less pleasantly surprised when his blindfold slipped a little. He blinked at the nine flickering monitors, over the hunched and munching Leopard’s shoulder.

  Particularly one monitor. He could see a woman, in her bedroom, thick hair wild across the pillow. It was their bedroom, and Gwen was reading late, the latest Rosa Luxemburg tome, waiting for him. Then she got up for a snack or a leak, and stretched her legs towards the camera. It was abundantly clear she had nothing on. Towards just one of the cameras. There was a clutch of screens, displaying their sweet pre-marital bed ambushed from a splay of angles.

  Bill spat out.

  The Queen of Newt was blamed and removed. They had to open a tin of monkey.

  freedom is always the freedom of dissenters

  Gwen was reading one of her favourite passages from her favourite revolutionary.

  Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party, is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. The essence of political freedom depends not on the fanatics of justice, but rather on all the invigorating, beneficial, and deterrent effects
of dissenters. If freedom becomes synonomous with privilege, the workings of political freedom are broken.

  Bill came in the bedroom door, looked round their room swift and strange, came across and whispered, and told her what he had seen.

  ocean roulette

  So, year by year, from bigger and bigger wheelhouses, set on higher and higher bridges, Spermy had looked out with his searchlight over wider and wider undulant rings of coloured buoys, marking the utmost perimeter of his net. White buoys marked the wide wings of the net, pink marked smaller mesh, while between the two red buoys hung the dense, black mesh of the reinforced bag, the heart of the purse. Here the herring or mackerel would be corralled and held in not too agitated readiness to be vacuumed aboard into chilled tanks of brine.

  As Spermy watched, from the canted window of the high wheelhouse, and as the purse block began its inexorable work of tautening and retrieving the net, here and there a buoy would twitch or duck as a sweep of anxious, panicking herring sought to find gaps in the shuttling curtain. None existed. And as Spermy observed, and as he considered the information relayed by sensors, he was privileged to be able to adjust his effort to baffle the blind, collective dash of the fish. These days there was no risk of a wrongful encirclement of some clogging, time-wasting species like spurdog or sprat. The modern sonar could pick out a single fish at 200 fathoms, declare the species, its likely size and probable birthday. No longer was fishing a dicey do, ocean roulette. And the good thing was, his son was sitting in the pair boat a hundred yards off, nothing but nav lights on, heaving up and down, waiting to take his share of the load.

  Because with all the different information, and differential pull, adjusted for the swell of sea in its larger motion, and for lurching peaks and sudden holes in a cross sea, it was a pretty sure thing, heavy odds, a dead cert, that soon it would not just be a kaleidoscope of buoys bobbing on the surface. Nor would it be only the standard choleric jostlement of gulls. Nor merely a submarine impatience of larger snouts and jaws. There would be a kything, a serious agitation. Then the first fish would break the surface and – thrashing its tail – freak out. Two hours later the Girl Julie and the Spare Me V would be full to the brim. A further million or two herring, mad on adrenalin, scaling themselves and prone to disease, might have to be released, twindling through the water column in spasm and shock.

  It was on exactly such a night, when both fine boats were full – nudging deep noses a mile apart through an oily pleasant sea, nearing the market in Skagen – that the bombshell was released.

  may 1

  core business

  Spermy was never a hesitater. He was not known to vacillate. No shadow fell across his decision-making. If he ever had an Oxford Dictionary in any of his series of six cabins or staterooms, propping one end of his diligent collection of scud DVDs, then the word procrastination might as well have been Tipp-Exed out.

  Close as he was to the market in Skagen, as soon as he was radioed by his wife with the news he had been shafted by Rookie Marr, Spermy swung the head of the Girl Julie for Leopardeen. Spare Me V, after a fierce harangue on Channel 12, went hard over on her rudder and, gunwales streaming, followed suit. It was a minute past midnight. Spermy made rapid calculations.

  Not that there was a herring market at all in Leopardeen; there was hardly even an outlet for white fish these days. Nae fish market worth a docken, as the grizzled locals, the pierhead parliament, the weary bodachs in the Shack, proclaimed. It was all oil now, the Harbour, and oil boats, with bluff noses and flat arses, for portering mud and pipes.

  Spermy phoned up Frankie Leiper of Leiper Lorries.

  – Fit kind o time’s this tae phone a man? said Frankie.

  – Aabody doesna sit on their dowp aa day, Frankie. I’m needin lorries aff ye.

  – Thocht ye were landin in Denmark?

  – Aye, weel ye ken fit thocht did. Damn little, an never got peyed.

  – I can gie ye fower, six at maist. I’m oot on contract.

  – Mak it a coupla dizzen an we’re talkin, Frankie. Nivver mind if yir ither jobs get shoved tae the side. These fish o mine are specials. But they winna be gaain nae distance, dinna fret. Yir drivers will be hame an hosed inside the hour.

  – Ye’re some fuckin boy, Jed. A coupla dizzen lorries oot o thin air?

  – That’s it, said Spermy. Five on the nail.

  – Fifteen, said Frankie.

  – Ten in yir haun, said Spermy.

  – Grand?

  – Fit in hell else? said Spermy.

  – Grand, said Frankie.

  – Mak sure that it is, said Spermy. I’m oot aff Denmark. I’ll be in at ten o the nicht.

  It was easier for Spermy when the Swinks had pitched their long-held fishing-boat portfolio over to LeopCorp. Otherwise there had always been that scunnersome family complication with Julie, William II being her only brother.

  The Swinks had sold on. But now so had LeopCorp, sold him out straight, sold the boat from under him. Streamlining the core business was LeopCorp’s story.

  If Spermy and son were to try to land in Denmark, both boats would be impounded.

  He was nothing to LeopCorp. Fair enough, LeopCorp was nothing to him.

  And Rookie Marr was as good as finished.

  an equal opportunities selection

  Lucy spent the early part of May Day supervising the putting-up of memorials. There were at least two aspects that needed careful handling.

  One was that not everyone gladly consented to having a blue plaque mounted proud on their house wall. There could be ticklish conflicts of belief and prejudice.

  The other was the wording on the plaque itself. You could get very few words on a round blue plaque, bearing in mind the need for the name, plus the start and stop dates of the celebrated one. There had been trouble before when one former Communist activist and Spanish Civil War International Brigade veteran was labelled simply Radical. Granted that pruned the number of letters somewhat but, after all, a radical could be a mixture of mercies. Good grief, thought Lucy, the Leopard is hardly conservative in his approach.

  As she travelled about the town, in the areas that weren’t newly no-go, Lucy could sense it coming. Down in Union Terrace Gardens, the civic grass had been turned into a police horse paddock. The horses were tail-swishing, skittish, one was skittery. They knew there was something up.

  Up above the paddock, just below His Majesty’s Theatre and along from the William Wallace statue, was the famous civic coat-of-arms, displayed on a steep bank. The coat-of-arms with the leopards. It was done in heraldic grade geraniums, pelargoniums and small French marigolds.

  And, of necessity, it was being adjusted slightly.

  A pair of leopards rampant – dexter, sinister – had always been what were technically called supporters on the coat-of-arms. In Crusader days it was believed that while Muslim and Christian were mutually exclusive species, Lion and Leopard were both so fierce, proud, dominant, they were basically the same beast. The Leopard’s intrinsic spottiness, though, might have been the basis of a knock-down offer. So the old heraldic beasts were ideal for Leopardeen, their wavy tongues thrust out at the public. Swink handled dexter. Rookie was more the sinister side.

  Only the associated motto presented a problem.

  When the city was still grinding along as Aberdeen, Uberdeen even, fair enough, the motto Bon Accord was an understandable aspiration. But now that it was Leopardeen, things had to change.

  Bon Accord was also the name of a major mall, so there was no level plaza, as Swink succinctly remarked. As regards motto, therefore, they had to institute an annual toss-up, between the five malls.

  Bon Accord. St Nicholas. Trinity. HyperMall. Sonsy Quines.

  The duty squad of three gardeners for Union Terrace Gardens had been instructed as to the result, and were now tossing flowers off the back of a lorry, hoicking last-minute plastic trays from the Hazlehead nursery down the brae, and bending to trowel them in. The winning motto was being embell
ished in an equal opportunities selection of white, pink and yellow petunias, and chocolate pansies.

  Sonsy Quines. Not many folk knew the meaning, Lucy guessed. Though she knew a woman who would.

  destiny in the air

  The day before, Peem had gone back to Maciek’s flat after the masked encounter in the Shack, but the Poles were up to something, and he had to hunt half of Torry to find him. Hunting half of Torry, he noted plenty other activity, definitely a buzz. He had seen black bags being bundled into tenements, with coloured garments sticking out, feathery boas trailing. He had seen vanloads of long, sawn sticks of wood. There were young sentries at the corners of streets, casual, never off their phones, and police cars cruising.

  And now this morning, he’d witnessed a couple of brutal arrests. A bloke with his arm twisted right up his back, thrown into the back of a van. A woman in flip-flops being dragged along the pavement just outside his pad, on her bare heels. It was getting tense.

  As someone who had cultivated an ability to be at the arse end of nowhere during world events, who had been holed up in a clinic during the Tet offensive, had stumbled about in dank groves rather than march on Grosvenor Square, had been intimated his classification as soft-in-the-head at the heights of the Sorbonne, and had done sod-all in the slightest to hinder Swink and Co, Peem had a sense of the long-awaited, the long-avoided; a moment in the stream of history, destiny in the air.