by Stewart Home
Alan was delighted that I recognised McCrum’s name and between shovelling forkfuls of fry-up into his gob, he whooped out a hundred and one put-downs of the would-be author. According to Alan, McCrum was a time-server and this was patently evident from his first book In the Secret State. Nominally a thriller, the work is really about office politics and how one gets ahead in a bureaucracy. Typically, Alan observed, McCrum mistook position for power and singularly failed to understand that bureaucrats are simply acting out a script. For someone to exercise power they must necessarily be in a position to effect change. A literary editor or spook who merely acts out the decision-making process in ritual form, reproducing already established patterns of behaviour, has very little real power. McCrum was Alan’s best example. When McCrum had been a literary editor at Faber and Faber he’d patently failed to break the mould of what had been published before he got there. Of course, given McCrum’s connections, he was able to get his books published and favourably reviewed, but he could not be described as influential. He was every inch the bureaucrat and would never be an opinion shaper.
Alan was still talking about McCrum’s first book as he bundled Dudley into the car and we made our way to the Brandsbutt symbol stone. This was located in a housing estate very close to Safeway. At one time there had been a stone circle abutting the Brandsbutt stone but that had been destroyed long ago. Dudley was wheeled out of the car and we took a few photos. I thought Alan might move on to the subject of Kevin Callan’s 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, but he had yet to exhaust the subject of Robert McCrum. As we got into the car Alan made a series of jokes about the Byron complex that McCrum was alleged to suffer from. Of course, like Byron, the hero of In the Secret State has a limp but Alan cackled, the thing that really hobbled in this novel was the prose.
At this point we were neither following Callan’s route nor that of the Stone Circle Trail. Alan was chuckling about the many clangers in McCrum’s first book. Specifically he was in hysterics about the fact that McCrum quite earnestly used a character’s rereading of Carlyle as evidence that this stereotype loved history, blissfully unaware that no one who knew the first thing about the subject would treat the author of The French Revolution and History of Frederick the Great as a serious historian, particularly when it was the flaws in the latter work that made it one of Hitler’s favourite books. Once we’d reached the village of Daviot, Alan pulled up in a car park by a scout hut. A short walk through some trees brought us to Loanhead of Daviot stone circle. Immediately in front of us was a recumbent stone with two flankers and eight others making up the circle with a kerbed ring cairn inside. Just to the east was an enclosed Bronze-Age cremation cemetery. All of this was set on a gentle slope with the countryside to the north spread out before us.
Alan threw Dudley down on the recumbent stone and the dummy announced languidly that he was tired and wished Alan and me to dance and play before him. We waltzed around the stone circle and simultaneously removed our clothes. Alan pushed his legs between my thighs and in this way our genitals and bottoms were paraded before Dudley in the lewdest possible fashion. As we went on we grew more excited, smacking each other’s rumps until Alan grew bold enough to pull some hairs out of my cunt. Then he kissed my sex better, licked it copiously and before long we were fucking.
The ground was rough. Alan got up and dislodging Dudley from his resting place, reclined on the recumbent stone. I bent over Alan, petting his prick and smiling as it stood up stiffly. It was about this time that I spotted two girls of my age watching us from the edge of the wood. I winked at them as I drew down the soft foreskin and uncovered Alan’s large swelling head, red and shining like a ripe plum. Alan, who had also spotted our two admirers, directed me to sit on his face and called the girls over saying he’d like them to play with his prick and arse. I clambered onto the recumbent stone and knelt with my knees on each side of Alan’s shoulders so that I could place my cunt full on his mouth. One of the girls lay between Alan’s legs and lifting them up, pressed back his hams and thus gained access to his upturned derrière, into which she thrust her wet tongue as far as she could. The other held Alan’s prick in her mouth but without frigging it, which, I observed, she carefully avoided as she sucked the head and gently stirred the balls.
We carried on in this way for quite some time, the sun beating down upon us, until Alan and I had simultaneous orgasms. The two girls had yet to come, so Alan and I jumped down from the recumbent and they leant back against it as we hitched up their skirts, pulled down their knickers and got to work with our tongues. Once our new friends had enjoyed orgasms, we all adjusted our clothing and got into the car. We dropped the girls in Inverurie, then made our way back past Safeway to the Easter Aquhorthies stone circle. Fortunately the route was signposted since we had to make our way up a single-track road for the best part of a mile. There was an old 2CV occupying one of the spaces in the minuscule Easter Aquhorthies car park when we arrived. We hauled Dudley out of the back seat and made our way up a track, forked right and quickly found ourselves at the stanes. I’ve forgotten what Alan told me about McCrum’s second novel A Loss of Heart as we walked back to the circle.
A 40-something hippie mama was doing a lap of the circle, placing her hands on each stone, closing her eyes and hoping to feel the energies. A considerably straighter-looking man was attempting to keep two children entertained. As soon as the bairns clocked Dudley they wanted to play with the dummy. Alan did a bit of ventriloquism, getting Dudley to explain that he liked to slit the throats of youngsters and fry up their kidneys. The kids were enthralled, their father was grateful to get a break and their mother was so consumed by her quest for mystic energies that she ignored patter that in different circumstances she may have considered offensive.
Taking his leave from the dysfunctional family, Alan returned to the subject of Robert McCrum. He began talking about the literary time-server’s third novel The Fabulous Englishman. Alan tittered that in this work McCrum’s literary powers extended no further than describing an Austrian train station as typically Austrian and the air on a station platform as carrying the smells of a train station. When Alan told me this I thought he was exaggerating McCrum’s hack style. However, when I eventually tracked down a paperback copy of the novel I found these extremely literal descriptions on pages 66 and 67 exactly as Alan had assured me I would. Mercifully, McCrum avoided the accusation that he did not know his material by making his main character a failed novelist. As we bypassed Inverurie town centre, Alan observed that being a dedicated bureaucrat McCrum not only succeeded in getting this novel published, he even received puffs in the press for his brilliant descriptions. I wondered why McCrum bothered, since most of those who read the book must have done so for the cheap laughs to be had at his expense. It was the McGonagall syndrome all over again.
By the time we reached the Aberdeen side of Inverurie, Alan had exhausted Robert McCrum’s prose as an object of ridicule. He was kept busy justifying his deviation from the route described by K. L. Callan in 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess. Alan claimed that we’d needed a decent breakfast and having headed out to the Safeway café it had made sense to reorder the first day of the journey described in Callan’s book. Alan’s reasoning was that we were merely attempting to test the credibility of Callan’s claims by carting a dummy weighted with bricks around the Gordon District Stone Circle Trail, we weren’t trying to recreate the journey Callan described.
Broomend of Crichie doesn’t look like much now but a few thousand years ago it was probably the most important ritual centre in what subsequently became known as north-east Scotland. We swung left by a petrol station and parked the car behind it. We climbed over a gate and across an overgrown field. I couldn’t see the stones but Alan led me straight to them. I didn’t clock the ditched henge in the field until we got right up to it. Long grass covered the dip and the weed growth was even more luxuriant around the remains of the stone circle. Only two of the original stones remained and the
y’d been disturbed. A Pictish symbol stone had been moved from its original position 150 yards away and placed alongside these stanes when a 19th-century railway line was being laid. There were entrances to the henge from the north and south and lines of standing stones had once led from these to other circles long since destroyed.
Alan plonked Dudley down beside the symbol stone and took a photograph of the dummy. Then he picked me up and pulled me against him while simultaneously steadying himself against one of the other stones. Alan forced one of his knees between my legs and lifting my skirt proceeded to yank down my panties. I leant back against Alan and spread my legs so that he could rub my clit. Soon he was working one of his fingers in and out of my moist chink. I pushed myself upwards and worked my hands behind my back. I fumbled for a few seconds but before long I’d undone my partner’s belt, unzipped his flies and pushed his pants down around his ankles. Alan removed his finger from my hole and I guided his prick up the moist passage. I had Alan pressed back against the stone and worked his meat at my own pace. Alan was caught between a rock and a hard place. When he came it was because I wanted him to shoot his hot spunk into my steaming cunt. We had a simultaneous orgasm and afterwards, while I was still speared on Alan’s semi-flaccid dick, he used his ventriloquist’s skills to transform Dudley into a voyeur who thanked us profusely for fulfilling his deepest fantasy.
After adjusting our clothing we got back into the car and headed down the A96 to Kintore. We parked in the centre of the village, right by the kirkyard. I stood with one arm around Dudley as I leant against the side of the symbol stone in Kintore churchyard while Alan took a snapshot. Alan carried Dudley around to the other side of the stone, where he handed me the camera so that I could take a picture of the two of them holding hands. After this we got back in the car and made our way to the standing stones near the west gate of Dunecht House. These stanes provided a backdrop for more photographs. At some point before we parked the car to one side of Midmar Kirk, Alan began talking about Nicholas Royle. I recognised the name as that of an anthologist and critic. Alan said he couldn’t fault my knowledge as far as it went but that Royle’s other skills had clearly been honed by his extensive output of fiction. In many ways Royle was working a similar territory to Conrad Williams, making good use of an intimate knowledge of both literary and genre fiction. Alan certainly rated Royle’s first novel Counterparts, which boasted a schizophrenic narration that could only be read as a full-frontal assault on the bourgeois subject.
Midmar was unlike any of the stone circles I’d seen so far, not only was it situated next to a church but a graveyard had been built around it. A very well-maintained lawn was laid out inside the circle of stones and the resultant over-definition made me think of it as a hyperrealist recreation of an ancient monument. The fact that the recumbent and its two flankers were massive added to the impression that Midmar was nothing other than an overblown simulation. Finally, the grading of the stones was simply wrong, indicating that at some point they’d been disturbed and whoever had restored them had done so incorrectly. Once we’d placed ourselves on the lawn inside this circle, my companions began babbling about assorted Aberdeenshire antiquities. I don’t remember exactly what Dudley said but the gist of it may be gained from some automatic writing I recently made after shoving a vibrator into my cunt as a means of opening my body up to psychic influences and subtle messages.
‘The worship of rude stones, as representing or containing a deity is supposed to have come from the fall of meteoric showers, which the ancients naturally regarded with deep wonder, and imagined to be representatives sent down from heaven to man. Of the continuity of religious worship at these dedicated spots, through all the developments of paganism and through the most absurd development of all, from paganism to Christianity, there cannot really be any valid doubt. If the outlying stone is due SW, and if the normal line from the centre of the recumbent stone is due north-east, the magician looking along that line will see the sun rise at midsummer, whether he stands at the outlying stone or at the middle of the recumbent stone. The circles were clocks and the magician had his way of making his announcements of the passage of time by night without making any noise or waking any one of his community, he simply burnt a handful of dry grass. Likewise, the Gaelic clachan (church) means “stones”. Kirk was so called because it was the one stone building in the neighbourhood. But local enquiries show that in many parts the question “are you going to kirk?” is put in the term “are you going to the stones?”’
Of course, modern research suggests that the chief alignments of recumbent stone circles are lunar rather than solar, and Alan was not slow to highlight other peculiarities in Dudley’s pronouncements. After trashing the views expressed by his dummy, Alan pointed out the Sunhoney stone circle on farmland about a mile away. Rather than offering clues to the identity of the lost tribe, a number of seekers had concluded that this site was the scene of macabre occult practices. On 3 June 1944 John Foster Forbes took his scryer Miss Iris Campbell to the monument to make a psychometric reading, the results of this bizarre session are recorded in the former’s Giants of Britain, a masterpiece of crank research. Forbes and Campbell are not the only nutters to conclude these eldritch stones mutely signal some unspeakable evil. Hippie headcase Paul Screeton in the book Quicksilver Heritage claimed that black magic has been practised at the site in recent years and found the circle so unpleasant that he says in print he would not like to revisit it.
When Alan told me this I knew instinctively where everything we were doing together would end. After we’d taken some pictures of Dudley sprawled on the lawn enclosed by the Midmar stone circle, Alan suggested we make our way to Sunhoney. I insisted we wait, we were not ready, for the time being we should stick to the trail K. L. Callan had laid out for us in 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess. Cullerlie was our next destination, some lowlying stanes set amid rich farmland and built without a recumbent. The circle contained a number of tiny ring cairns. Alan leant Dudley against one of the eight stones that constituted the main attraction and took a photograph. After checking his watch Alan said we had to split. We headed back to Aberdeen along the A944. When we pulled up in Union Grove my friend Rita was walking away from Alan’s flat. My companion leapt out of his car and went chasing after her. I ducked into the stairwell to retrieve the books I’d left there but they’d gone. By the time I got back onto the street, Rita was touching Alan’s arse as he locked his car. I told Alan I’d see him in the morning and went home. I was more than happy about the fact that Rita had shown up so unexpectedly, I wanted some time on my own to read Christopher Burns and a whole bunch of other things.
SEVEN
I DREAMT I stood on the summit of a precipice, whose downward height no eye could measure, but for the fearful waves of a fiery ocean that lashed, and blazed, and roared at its bottom, sending its burning spray far up, so as to drench my dreaming self in sulphurous rain. The whole glowing ocean below was alive – every billow bore an agonising soul that rose like a wreck or a putrid curse on the waves of earth’s ocean – uttered a shriek as it burst against that adamantine precipice – sank – and rose again to repeat the tremendous experiment! Every billow of fire was thus instinct with immortal and agonising existence – each was freighted with a soul that rose on the burning wave in torturing hope, burst on the rock in despair, added its eternal shriek to the roar of that fiery ocean, and sunk to rise again – in vain – and forever!
Suddenly I felt myself flung halfway down the precipice. I stood, in my dream, tottering on a crag midway down the precipice – I looked upwards, but the upper air showed only blackness unshadowed and impenetrable – but, blacker than that blackness, I could distinguish the giant outstretched arm of Dudley that held me as in sport on the ridge of that infernal precipice, while another, that seemed in its motions to hold fearful and invisible conjunction with the arm that grasped me, as if both belonged not to Dudley but some being too vast and horrible even for the imagery of a dream
to shape, pointed upwards to a dial-plate fixed on the top of that precipice, and which the flashes of that ocean made fearfully conspicuous. I saw Dudley’s mysterious single hand revolve – I saw it reach the appointed number of 69 – I shrieked in my dream, and, with that strong impulse often felt in sleep, burst from the arm that held me, to arrest the motion of the hand.
In the effort I fell and, falling, grasped at aught that might save me. My fall seemed perpendicular – there was nothing to save me – the rock was smooth as ice – the ocean of fire broke at its foot! Suddenly a group of figures appeared, ascending as I fell. I grasped at them successively – first Dudley, then Alan – Rita – Jill – Karen – Hannah – Suzy – Michael – all passed me – to each I seemed in my slumber to cling in order to break my fall – all ascended the precipice. I caught at each in my downward flight, but all forsook me and ascended.
My last despairing reverted glance was fixed on the dial of sexual variations – the upraised black arm seemed to push forward the hand – 0 then 1 then 69 – it was stuck fast at the oral fixation stage – I was a baby – I fell – I sank – I blazed – I shrieked! The burning waves boomed over my sinking head, and the dial of sexual variations boomed out my dreadful secrets – ‘Anna had sex with a ventriloquist’s dummy!’ – and the waves of the burning ocean answered, as they lashed the adamantine rock – ‘Anna’s desires are an ocean, an illusion, and now she will make love to herself, to me, the sea!’8 At this, I awoke. The entry bell was ringing. It was Karen, one of my friends from college. I buzzed her in to the tenement.