69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess

by Stewart Home

  It is this cultural cross-fertilisation worked through in the common tongue that marks the working class as the progenitors of all the riches of mankind. The voice of the proletariat corrects and redresses the imbalances of bourgeois history, a long-pent-up vigour rushing into expression. It may be melancholy, but it is the matchless, quiet sadness of nature, the deep communion of the mind over which has been thrown for centuries the hypnotic spell of loneliness, the sublimity of silence, the potent lure of quiet places, breeding deep thought untainted by the idealist distortions of bourgeois life. Now that Alan had merged within me his poisoned lance was no longer a threat. I would never meet him again. We would never part. It was only by embracing the gross matter of my body and the wastes it produced that I was able to comprehend my historically determined place in our world.

  It was with a sense of wholeness and unity that I trudged alone, but not alone, back to the car. As I made my way through Grimond I picked up a hitch-hiker, who told me his name was Callum and that he was studying geology at Glasgow University. As we talked the shore began to grow bold and rocky, and indented in a strange manner with small and deep creeks, or rather immense and horrible chasms. I suggested we get out of the car and take a walk since no one interested in geology should simply pass by the Bullers of Buchan. This famous landmark is a vast hollow in a rock, projecting into the sea, open at top, with a communication to the sea through a noble natural arch, through which boats can pass, and lie secure in this natural harbour. There is a path round the top, but in some parts so narrow that the traveller must walk hand in hand with fear, as the depth is about 30 fathoms, with water on both sides, being bounded on the north and south with small creeks.

  Near this is a great insulated rock, divided by a narrow and very deep chasm from the land. This rock is pierced through midway between the water and the top, and in great storms the waves rush through it with a vast noise and impetuosity. On the sides, as well as those of the adjacent cliffs, breed multitudes of kittiwakes. The young are a local delicacy, being served up a little before dinner, to whet the appetite, but, from the rank smell and taste, seem as if they are more likely to have a contrary effect. I was once told of an honest gentleman who set down for the first time to this appetiser, but after demolishing six with much impatience declared that he had eaten half a dozen and did not find himself a bit more hungry than before he began.

  I told Callum we should have sex on the edge of the cliff and then roll ourselves off it if we achieved a simultaneous orgasm. Callum didn’t think this was a good idea since it looked like it was coming on to rain again and the ground was already sodden. He proposed we go to my car and make love on the back seat. His suggestion struck me as a typically male fantasy and I scotched it, saying that if we were not going to have sex under the open skies and within earshot of the roaring waves, then we might as well head back to my pad in Aberdeen where we could fuck in comfort. This scenario was quite acceptable to the hitch-hiker, so we returned to the car. Callum attempted to engage me in conversation but his talk bored me, so it was in silence that we drove down King Street, up Union Street and along to Union Grove.

  Callum wanted to use the toilet when we got back to the flat. The bulb had gone and I didn’t have a spare, so I took the bulb from the light in the hall and transferred it to my windowless bathroom. As my guest relieved himself I stripped. I allowed Callum to take me in his arms and push his roving hand up between my easily separated thighs, where he explored with lecherous fingers the secret charms of my ripe unctuous quim and laid bare the hidden beauties that clustered around the junction of my fleshy thighs. I reclined on the sofa and spread myself open to afford Callum the fullest gratification by a near inspection of the gradually swelling mound and full voluptuous lips of my well-garnished cunt.

  While my guest stood over me I unbuttoned his Levi’s, pulled up his shirt and drew forth his rod. I took it coaxingly in my well-practised hand and with a stimulating touch passed my fingers gently up and down the shaft and over its pendant head. Then, leaning towards it, I took it into my warm mouth and played around its top and neck with my pliant tongue, while with soft suction I compressed my lips as I moved my head back and forward over it. I played gently with Callum’s cock until at last he could no longer stand my soft caresses and plunged his burning tool into my maidenhead. He came quickly taking little care over my pleasure since relief from the boiling tension inside him was the only thing on his mind. After Callum had come I made him tongue my quim so that I too might be afforded respite from the passions that churned within me.

  The strip light in the kitchen needed replacing and once it got dark it became impossible to cook. Instead Callum and I wandered up Union Grove to The Déjà Vu. The establishment had recently been converted from a conventional café to a bistro. In the process the prices had doubled. I had tapas, Callum ate a fish dish, we went dutch on the bill. Callum wanted to spend the night at my pad but I told him to dream on and gave him instructions for getting to the youth hostel. Once I hit the sack I dreamt I was a ventriloquist’s dummy dreaming I was a woman. I give my dreams as dreams and it is up to the reader to discover whether I reason better when I am asleep, or whether these nightmares are but a fiction and all along the Afro-Celtic social ‘body’ was wide awake.

  ELEVEN

  I LET Anna sleep on since she was only hindering my research into K. L. Callan’s 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess. Besides, I was getting more than a little sick of the conversations she was having with an imaginary friend called Alan. Let me tell you it’s no easy thing being a ventriloquist’s dummy and the way I was being made to muff-dive every spoilt college girl who got a thrill from molesting inanimate objects was getting on my wick. Anyway, there wasn’t much I could do in the house. The sky was overcast and even the light bulb in the toilet had gone. I’d have strained my eyes attempting to read without illumination.

  I got into the car. One of Anna’s college friends was asleep on the back seat. Nancy woke when I started the engine. She immediately began complaining about the fact that she had an essay to write on Father and Son by Edmund Gosse. I sympathised, the book was tiresome. Years ago an English teacher who dabbled in amateur dramatics had attempted to interest a class of thick rich kids in this work by having me discuss it with him. I’ve always found accounts of childhood in autobiographies inordinately depressing since kids have so little control over their lives. I mentioned The Grass Arena by John Healy as an example of this. The early sections of the book, Healy’s childhood and time in the army, are tedious. As the book progresses the sense of narrative disintegrates. Instead of a plot Healy offers a series of routines whose random appearance resembles the non-linear structure used by Burroughs for The Naked Lunch. Nancy didn’t reply or even ask me where we were going. She didn’t seem bothered. Not even after we’d passed through Cults and Peterculter. So I just keep talking.

  It was a shame that Faber and Faber thought Healy’s anti-narrative required a preface from Colin MacCabe. The introduction was quite obviously there for the benefit of middle-brow readers who needed reassurance that in consuming the autobiography of a wino they weren’t suffering a lapse of taste. Healy’s form suited his descriptions of alcoholic derangement and while his redemption through chess was cheesy in the extreme, once he’d used the game to get off the booze the sudden shift to life on an Indian ashram was a masterfully unsettling stroke. Surreal in much the same way that Bill Drummond’s account of a train journey across India in Annual Report to the Mavericks, Writers and Film Festival unfolded with the iron logic of a dream. Drummond tearing each page from a book of Ted Hughes poems as he read it, and making these lyrics into paper planes that he threw from a train window.

  My conversation flowed and we sped through Banchory to Aboyne. I parked beside the graveyard, pleased that the rain was easing off. We walked up a forest track and found Image Wood stone circle easily enough. It was situated in the trees at the edge of a field. Very close to where a flock of sheep were g
razing. There were five stout stones. Three jammed together. Two slightly apart. I didn’t think much of the site, although the confusion over whether it was 3000 years old or merely a folly erected in the 18th or 19th century appealed to my sense of the absurd. I took a photograph in which the trunk of a felled tree doubles up as an outlying stone. We left shortly after we’d arrived, having found the site singularly lacking in ambience.

  We’d travelled as far west as we were going and I turned east off the service road onto the A93. I retraced the route I’d taken to Aboyne as far as the turn off to Glassel. I parked opposite Glassel House and we walked west along a forest footpath to a burn. The circle was marked on my OS map as being close to the water and somewhere to our south. Locating stones on Forestry Commission land can be a time-consuming business, since it is difficult to orientate oneself by landmarks and the monuments are hidden amongst trees. We walked down a riverside path but after a few minutes we doubled back and worked our way through the trees. There was quite a wind blowing and several pieces of uprooted timber were swaying precariously in the breeze. It took us about five minutes to find the circle. It was in a clearing at the edge of the forest and our goal was illuminated by a burst of sunlight moments after we’d located the stones.

  Nancy suggested we have sex and I had to explain that being a ventriloquist’s dummy I didn’t have a tadger. She said not to worry, then she lay down in the middle of the circle and proceeded to masturbate while I watched. As she adjusted her clothing, Nancy said her orgasm had been extremely intense so she figured the stones must be sited on a very powerful ley line. I told her better was to come since most of the remaining circles I wished to visit that day were recumbents and they’d give her an even bigger thrill. There was a path leading in the direction of the car and it brought us out onto the track we’d taken earlier about 100 yards from where I’d parked. As we sped through Banchory and then onto some back roads at Strachan I mentioned Memoirs of a Sword Swallower by Daniel Mannix as an example of an excellent, if obviously unreliable, autobiography.

  We talked about Trocchi briefly. Nancy asked me if I’d ever read The Blue Suit by Richard Rayner. I’d found both the narrative and the prose tedious in the extreme. Mannered middle-brow bollocks. The skinhead novels that Canadian hack James Moffatt wrote under the name Richard Allen are mentioned twice, and on the second occasion Rayner gets the name wrong and renders it Martin Allen. Besides, even Rayner’s literary tastes betrayed him. Hemingway, Camus and Anthony Burgess. The same went for philosophy, where Rayner was given to name-checking Bertrand Russell. An unforgivable sin. Likewise, Rayner’s interest in John Aubrey was as a biographer, whereas I knew that Aubrey’s Brief Lives could have been much improved by being made briefer. Of course, Aubrey could not be ignored but what required confrontation was his work as an antiquarian. It was Aubrey who had first floated the absurd theory that stone circles were Druid temples. It was to be regretted that having engaged James Garden in correspondence about the recumbent circles of Aberdeenshire, Aubrey diverted the theology professor into countering his Druid hobbyhorse at the expense of a detailed description of these megalithic sites.

  My discourse was interrupted by our arrival at Nine Stanes, also known as Garrol Wood. The site was on Forestry Commission land but, being located very close to the roadside, it is easy to find. We picked our way through the long grass to the stones and sat down on the recumbent. I explained to Nancy that the earlier recumbent circles tended to consist of twelve stones, while later ones such as this contained only nine. We didn’t hang about long, since there were still a good many more sites to be visited that day. Doubling back, but only as far as the first turning, we found Esslie the Greater in a boggy field. Just up the road in the next field was Esslie the Lesser, smashed up and overgrown. Our next stop was Cairnfauld, where I parked the car at the top of a muddy farm track. We walked down the lane and since crops were growing in the first field, we cut uphill through the second, which was covered in grass. At the brow of the hill we slipped into a waterlogged and heavily furrowed field, where we were confronted by the stones.

  I took one look at the ruined monument and turned around. On our way down the hill Nancy asked me how I’d got interested in stone circles. I decided to use a bit of discretion and made no mention of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess. Instead I bamboozled my companion by mentioning my ongoing research into Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair. When we got back to the car I pulled an omnibus edition of the work from the glove compartment. This was a 1998 edition put out by Penguin for Lomond Books that I’d picked up for a quid in a remainder bookshop. I pointed out the passages I’d highlighted on pages 23, 26, 43, 52, 54, 55, 89, 97, 104, 140, 158, 182, 191, 192, 193, 203, 275, 300 and 332, all of which concerned stone circles. Nancy being Nancy asked me why I’d also highlighted a sentence on page 55 in which a gravestone is described as having a skull and crossbones and an hourglass engraved on it. She became quite indignant when I explained that this was a Masonic grave, claiming that I had no proof!

  I started the car and laughed about the blurb on the back of A Scots Quair. This claimed that Grassic Gibbon had been compared to Joyce. Unless the comparison was unfavourable it seemed unlikely. The Aberdeenshire scribbler was no modernist and while Joyce was first and foremost a craftsman, the latter’s obsession with technique forced him to adopt a progressive world outlook even if he did so without applying conscious thought to the implications of his project. Grassic Gibbon’s work was an anachronism, harking back as it did to the output of 19th-century Scots vernacular writers such as William Alexander.11 Of course, the stones Grassic Gibbon describes as standing beside Blawearie Loch are fictional but they stand in well enough for all the stone circles of Grampian Region. In the course of ‘Sunset Song’, the first book in Gibbon’s trilogy, the stones are initially identified with the Druids, then brought up in a sermon, before being converted into a war memorial. The minister of Gibbon’s fictitious Kinraddie even holds a service at the simultaneously old and new war memorial. A symbolic representation of the ongoing desecration of pagan shrines by Christians.

  We were speeding south-west on the Slug Road towards Stonehaven at the time I said this to Nancy. I had to admit that ‘Sunset Song’ was almost competent as a pastiche of the Victorian novel but since the trilogy had been written in the early 1930s there was no way of avoiding the fact that aesthetically it was every bit as reactionary as Gibbon’s reprehensible Stalinist politics. ‘Cloud Howe’ and ‘Grey Granite’, the other novels that made up the Scots Quair trilogy, demonstrated that like all forms of nostalgia Gibbon’s literary revisionism operated according to a law of diminishing returns. Likewise, this clown’s metaphorical use of the stanes in ‘Sunset Song’ would have worked far better if he’d avoided erroneously identifying them with the Druids. Since Gibbon wished to document the end of the old agricultural modes of life that began with the Bronze-Age farmers who erected the first standing stones, he’d have done better not to link these monuments with a religion that didn’t exist when they were built. Despite being a cornball cliché, the symbolic use of Bennachie as a marker at the end of ‘Grey Granite’ at least had the merit of being considerably more astute than Gibbon’s use of stone circles.

  As we got out of the car at the bottom of the lane leading up to West Raedykes farm, I thought it pertinent to mention that Nan Shepherd – another Aberdeenshire author active at the same time as Gibbon – opened her first novel The Quarry Wood with Martha Ironside playing on a great cairn of stones. There was a mist where we’d parked and it thickened as we marched up to the farmhouse. The track was muddy and at one point, on a corner where the ground around was absolutely sodden, it had been overlaid with concrete. Lights were on in the farmhouse but we didn’t bother knocking at the door to ask permission to go up to the circles beyond it. The fog was getting thicker and you could barely see the farm buildings from halfway up the field behind them. We were still moving up hill and from this point on there were b
oulders strewn all around us. We examined clumps of bushes and stones and it took us 15 minutes to find the line of ring cairns.

  The fog became so thick that it was difficult to see more than a few feet ahead. I had no sense of the landscape in which the stanes stood. I might as well have been looking at an archaeological recreation in a museum. I told Nancy we should head back down the hill. She said she wanted to look at the Roman fort that lay just across from the stone circles. I told her she was welcome to do so, but I was going back to the car. Nancy saw sense and followed me. Although I had an OS map it didn’t do me much good because I couldn’t see anything in the fog. I kept silent about the fact that I’d left my compass in the car and strode off in what I hoped was the right direction, with Nancy struggling to keep up. My bearings were off and I corrected them when I spotted a couple of poles to my right which had been that side of us on our way up. Having got down to the farmhouse, it was simply a matter of following the lane until we reached my Fiesta.