69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess

by Stewart Home

  Once I’d caught my breath I drove to the Slug Road, then headed south-west towards Stonehaven before swinging north up the A90. Just before Portlethen I took a left and rode the back roads, parking at the top of a lane that led down to a stud farm. We trotted along the farm track and cut across a field. There were two stone circles, Auchquhorthies and Old Bourtreebush close by each other and lying just five miles south of Aberdeen. One of them had two circles of stones, whereof the exterior circle consists of 13 great stones, besides two that are fallen and a broad stone towards the south about three yards high above the ground, the uprights stand between seven and eight paces distant from each other. The diameter is 24 large paces, the interior circle is about eight paces distant from the outer, and the stones of the smaller circle stand about three feet above the ground. Towards the east from this monument at 26 paces distance, there is a big stone fast in the ground and level with it, in which there is a cavity partly natural and partly artificial, that will contain, as I guess, no less than a Scotch gallon of water, and may be supposed to have served for washing the priests, sacrifices and other things esteemed sacred among the heathens.

  Old Bourtreebush stone circle is fully as large and lies about a bowshot distant from Auchquhorthies. It consists of three circles with a common centre. The stones of the greatest circle are about eight feet and those of the two lesser circles about three feet above ground, the innermost circle is three paces in diameter and its stones stand close together. One of the stones of the outer circle on the west side of the monument has a cavity in its top, considerably lower at one side, which could contain an English pint without running over. Another stone of the same circle on the east side has at its top a narrow cavity about three fingers deep, into which is cut a trough one inch thick and two inches broad, with another of the same depth crossing it and runs down the length of the stone a good way. Nancy suggested that we have sex in the circle but once I’d reminded her that I didn’t have a wanger she walked dejectedly back to the car.

  We cut up towards the Dee and, remaining south of this river, visited Clune Hill stone circle, another beautiful recumbent. We parked at a forest gate and a couple of posh girls out riding on their ponies greeted us as we stalked up the hill. Nothing worthy of commemoration took place during this visit or those to various other sites around Insch and Alford. We took in Kinellar Kirk and gazed at the stone in the kirkyard wall that had once been part of a circle now destroyed and replaced by a church. I talked about Oxford and its corrupting influence. One only had to look at a novelist like Simon Mason, who’d been a student at Lady Margaret Hall and gone on to work at the Varsity Press, to know that Oxford must be condemned. Mason’s father might have been a professional footballer but one would never have guessed it from the odious descriptions of Oxford in his mediocre second novel Death of a Fantasist.

  After visiting Tyrebagger Hill we took a wander around the airport and Dyce village. The parish of Dyce lies from five to eight miles north-west of Aberdeen. The origin of its name is unknown. It is bounded by Newhills on the south and south-west, Kinellar on the north-west, Fintray on the north, New Machar and Old Machar on the east. Its length is about six miles, its greatest breadth about three miles. The figure of the parish is nearly oval, slightly curved at the narrower extremity, and lying from north-west to south-east. The north-west, or broader, end of the oval is formed by a low hill called Tyrebagger, which extends downwards to the south-east nearly three miles, or half the extreme length of the parish, after which, rapidly descending, it merges with the adjacent plains.

  Rather than talking to Nancy of geology or zoology, I said that although there were a handful of brilliant English novelists such as the London-based Welshman Iain Sinclair, overall Americans showed a greater aptitude for sculpting our shared language into fresh forms. Nancy told me to shut up, she was bored with my conversation and said that if I couldn’t fuck her, she wanted to murder me. I had to explain that being a ventriloquist’s dummy I was inanimate and that therefore I couldn’t be killed. Nancy rejoined that she might not be able to slay me but she could, at least, give it her best shot. My companion took a gun from her pocket and ordered me back to the car. I was made to open the boot and get into it. I found myself trapped in darkness and thinking of Jennifer Lopez in the film Out of Sight. Actually, I wasn’t so much thinking about Jennifer Lopez as about a specific part of her anatomy. To be more precise I was thinking about her bottom. It was enormous and I didn’t so much like the shots of George Clooney touching it once he’d got Lopez trapped in the trunk of a car, as those scenes after Jennifer was injured when she had on a pair of sports shorts. The film itself was quite forgettable, one of those dot-to-dot crime thrillers adapted from a crummy Elmore Leonard novel. But Jennifer Lopez’s bottom was something else. Art and nature hadn’t combined to produce such pleasing results since the hosing-down sequence at the beginning of the Pamela Anderson vehicle Barb Wire. There isn’t much to do when you’re stuck in the boot of a car, which I guess is why my thoughts were wandering.

  Eventually the car pulled up and when Nancy opened the boot I realised we were at Sunhoney. With a gun at my back Nancy marched me up past the farmhouse to the stone circle. When we stopped she told me to take my pants down. Perhaps I thought breathlessly, Nancy hadn’t believed me when I’d told her I was wadgerless and everything would be okay once she realised I hadn’t lied. Although I’m only a ventriloquist’s dummy, if I were a man I’d be a red-blooded male with a taste for hefty strawberry-blondes like Nancy. It wasn’t that I didn’t find Nancy attractive but when I looked down to where I should have had an erection, there was nothing there. The only things hanging down from the lower parts of my body were my legs. Nancy laughed cruelly and called me a nothing man. Then she told me to take off the rest of my clothes. After this, Nancy nailed me by my hands to one of the many trees that surrounded the stone circle.

  Sunhoney stone circle is beautifully set on a low knoll that is fringed by a ring of trees. It is surrounded on all sides by taller hills that echo its spherical shape. Most of the stones were still standing but the heavily cup-marked recumbent had fallen forward into the circle. Nancy lay back on this great slab of granite and, hitching up her skirt, worked her fingers under the waistband of her white knickers. She stared up at me nailed to the tree as she worked herself into a frenzy, threshing about on that great slab of stone. I didn’t know where to look. I tried focusing on some of the uprights but they seemed so phallic that I shifted my gaze to the ring cairn in the centre of the circle. Unfortunately this feature was quite ruined and hard to make out. Finally I found myself ogling Nancy. She really was magnificent. A big girl with her long red hair splayed behind her shoulders and a hand down her panties. At that moment I deeply regretted the fact that I didn’t have a dick. Although I was the symbolic equivalent of a supine recumbent I found myself identifying with the phallic flankers.

  Once Nancy finished pleasuring herself and had adjusted various pieces of clothing, she took me down from the tree and forced me back into the boot of the car. It was pitch-black and, with nothing to see or do, I found my thoughts returning to Jennifer Lopez’s bottom. I can picture it now, graceful and round, the buttocks filling out her shorts to perfection. When the car stopped and the boot was opened, it was dark outside. It wasn’t until we’d got down to the lake that I realised Nancy had driven me to Loch Skene, the largest single expanse of fresh water in Aberdeenshire. The moon appeared from behind a cloud and the lake was bathed in an eerie glow. Nancy made me stand at the edge of the loch and put the gun to my head. The retort after she pulled the trigger was quite deafening and the bullet buried itself harmlessly in the stuffing that would have been my brains had I not been inanimate.

  Nancy stamped her foot in anger and I laughed. I stopped laughing when she ordered me to get into the water. I protested that I couldn’t swim but Nancy insisted that she already knew this. With the gun trained upon me I waded further and further out into the cool water. I must hav
e been walking on a shelf because suddenly there was nothing beneath my feet and I found myself falling through endless fathoms. Eventually I hit some submerged rocks, from where I could see a wreck resting at the bottom of the loch, amidst the weeds. The ship had all three of her lower masts in, and her lower yards squared. But what caught my eye more than anything else was a great superstructure, which had been built upwards from the rails, almost halfway to the main tops, and this, as I was able to perceive, was supported by ropes let down from the yards. Of what material the superstructure was composed I have no knowledge, for it was so overgrown with weeds – as was as much of the hull that could be seen amidst the luxurious growth of freshwater plants – as to defy my guesses. And because of the growth it came to me that the ship must have been lost to the world a very great time ago. At this realisation I grew full of solemn thoughts, and not even once did I think of Jennifer Lopez’s well-padded arse, for it seemed to me that I had come upon the cemetery of Loch Skene.

  As I was too exhausted from the day’s excitements to make my way towards the strange vessel, I just lay where I’d come to rest at the bottom of the loch, falling presently into a deep sleep. In my slumbers I dreamt that I was a woman dreaming I was a ventriloquist’s dummy. I give my dreams as dreams and I hope it is as dreams that other dreamers will receive them. Hallucinations within the hallucination that was already speech.

  TWELVE

  I AWOKE screaming. My cries echoed around the empty room. I’d sold my books, most of the furniture, there wasn’t even a working light bulb in the flat. I got up from the bare mattress I’d slept upon, slipped into the only jumper and pair of jeans I had. There was nothing to eat in the fridge, in fact there wasn’t even a fridge. I’d flogged it a few days earlier. There wasn’t time to eat in a café, I had an appointment with my tutor. I went out to the car. Someone had broken into it. The side window was smashed, my ventriloquist’s dummy had been stolen. I put my bad dreams down to some psychic alarm that had been triggered by the theft. I cleared the broken glass from the passenger seat, then dived into the Bungalow Shoppe to buy a Mars bar before driving to the university.

  My tutor was worried about me. He said I was bright but insisted I was going off the rails. He described my essays as brilliant and with a flourish of his hand emphasised that this didn’t entitle me to skip lectures. The professor had called my family and learnt I was estranged from them. He’d discovered I hadn’t seen my parents for more than a year and that they were unwilling to visit me unless they received an invitation. My mother had called on me unannounced shortly after I’d started my degree and I’d slammed the front door of my flat in her face. I hadn’t spoken to her since. Since my parents were unwilling to visit, a compromise had been suggested. A friend of my father’s was now living in Aberdeen, my tutor gave me his phone number. I was reluctant to call him but the professor made it clear he expected me to meet up with this man if the matter of my poor attendance was to be overlooked. He’d also booked me an appointment with the college psychologist. I hated shrinks, I’d been sent to several before I left home. They all seemed to think that my sex life was something I ought to share with them. Dirty old men.

  We discussed my dissertation. I wanted to read Camden Girls by Jane Owen, through On The Road and Ulysses. Camden Girls utilised a taken-for-granted model of bourgeois subjectivity, so this would give me the opportunity to address the recuperation of both high modernism and trash by the culture industry. Owen used present-tense stream-of-consciousness to recreate in novel form the concerns of mass-circulation women’s magazines. It didn’t really matter whether or not Owen had read Joyce, because even if she had her consumption of him was obviously filtered through pop culture. Owen had never encountered Joyce in all his originality, nor understood the nature of his break with naturalism and the bourgeois subject. When my tutor attempted to interrupt this speech I told him to forget about Henry Miller.

  I wanted to situate Owen in the context of both Brit pop and Brit art. There were incredible parallels between Camden Girls and 90s art. A recycling of conceptualism which stripped away the political content of its 60s model and replaced this with vapid pop-cultural referents. Popular literature was also a useful sounding board. Read ahistorically, Owen and Kerouac were male and female mirror images of each other. However, for all their weaknesses, Kerouac’s texts were enriched by the tension created from his resistance to the dominant literary styles of 50s America. The same could not be said for Owen. Camden Girls does not resist the reader. Rather than offering a critique of commodification, Owen celebrates capital for its ability to homogenise the vast plurality of world cultures, stripping them of every trace of their social origin before offering them up in sanitised form for consumption by white bourgeois subjects. Books such as Camden Girls always stress the middle-class identity of their central characters.

  My tutor wasn’t very impressed by these ideas. He pulled a few books off a shelf, all women writers. Insanity by Anna Reynolds, Debatable Land by Candia McWilliam, The Rest of Life by Mary Gordon. I was told to go away and look at these works, they were more literary, would make better subjects for my dissertation if I really insisted on doing contemporary fiction. I left, put the car in a garage to have the window repaired, phoned my father’s friend Callum and arranged to meet him in The Grill. I was early, Callum was late. I leafed through the books I’d been given. McWilliam didn’t appeal at all, she was born in Edinburgh and the professor seemed over-keen to get me to read Scottish fiction. Mary Gordon was more compelling than Anna Reynolds. America triumphing yet again over England. The covers of all three books made them look like remainders, the Anna Reynolds design being the most extraordinary. A girl in a black sleeveless dress with her head thrown back, dark red curtains behind her, a perfect cliché. However, the typography was truly shocking, the letter ‘A’ being bigger and thicker than the same sized ‘S’ and ‘N’, which were bigger than the first ‘N’ and second ‘I’, which were bigger than the first ‘I’ and ‘Y’. The letters were like a series of steps, up and down. Down and up. Back and forth. Round and round. Ghastly. Ugly. My eyes took in the type but it became jumbled in my brain. It made me feel sick. I wobbled across the bar. Ordered another gin.

  Callum arrived. He bought me a drink. Gin and it. He got himself a pint of heavy. He was younger than I expected. Mid-30s. He’d worked with my father until a new and better job brought him to the north-east. Callum had an English accent. He explained that he’d been born in London but his family was Scottish, hence his name. He asked me how I was getting along at college. I laughed, then fell silent. Callum said he’d let me into a secret if I promised not to tell my dad. I agreed after pointing out that the promise was superfluous since I wasn’t speaking to my parents. Callum said he’d been sacked from his job. He’d been caught stealing a computer and some cash. He was surviving on his savings. He told me that he found my dad very conservative, that my family weren’t friends, merely acquaintances. I decided that I liked Callum, so I took him back to my flat. He was shocked to see how empty it was, said we’d be more comfortable at his place on King Street. We went. His flat was stuffed with books.

  Callum asked me if I knew anything about the writer Andrew Sinclair. My reply was negative. Callum didn’t much like Sinclair’s best-selling first novel The Breaking of Bumbo, but candidly admitted the prose was both more free-form and free-flowing than in the follow-up My Friend Judas. Sinclair was part of the Angry Young Man syndrome and thus just a big yawn as far as Callum was concerned. A slight semi-autobiographical novel about being in the Guards and an even slighter follow-up about undergraduate life in Cambridge quickly and quietly transformed Sinclair into a forgotten old man of English letters.

  Sinclair, if his autobiography In Love and Anger was to be believed, had been in all the right places at all the right times. He’d been with the Black Panthers in Cuba. It was merely unfortunate that being an establishment man he had nothing interesting to say about this. The Last of the Best: The
Aristocracy of Europe in the Twentieth Century shows Sinclair at his most controversial, where with a delicate sense of irony he suggests that toffs should bring elegance to their passing as they fade from the ranks of the living and into the realm of history. The Need to Give: The Patrons and the Arts was equally turgid if somewhat wider in its historical scope. In this work Sinclair gave art collectors like Charles Saatchi his endorsement. The men he praised had little need of such support. Perhaps Sinclair thought these men were supporting him. By the early 90s Sinclair could still command decent advances even if most of his books were almost instantly remaindered.

  In The Sword and the Grail Sinclair rehashed a vast amount of historical material about the Templars and the fact that he is a direct descendant of Prince Henry St Clair was used to boost his flagging credibility. Unfortunately for Sinclair he wasn’t quite as credulous as most of those who write popular works about monastic military orders and secret societies. Sinclair saw Rosslyn Chapel as being the real treasure of the Templars, not exactly the most sensational of conclusions. That said, The Sword and the Grail appeared to have been Sinclair’s most popular book since The Red and the Blue: Intelligence, Treason and the Universities. According to Callum, Sinclair’s choice of subjects wasn’t nearly as wide-ranging as they at first appeared. From the Cambridge Apostles, who’d refused to admit Sinclair into their ranks, to the key role of Sinclair’s ancestors in the affairs of the Knights Templar was a very short step. If Sinclair didn’t write well, he was at least consistent in writing about himself regardless of whether the result was marketed as fiction or a historical study.

  I asked Callum what he’d been doing since he’d stopped working. He said he was researching recumbent stone circles. He wanted to get a fresh insight into the profusion of megalithic remains scattered across Aberdeenshire. Most people visited clusters of circles, slowly working their way around the different parts of Grampian Region. Callum was visiting them alphabetically by name. That way he was getting to see the stanes in a totally fresh light. He showed me a list of sites he’d compiled: Aikey Brae, Ardlair, Arnhill, Auchlee, Auchmachar, Auchmaliddie, Auchquhorthies, Auld Kirk o’ Tough, Backhill of Drachlaw East and West, Balhalgardy, Balnacraig, Balquhain, Bellman’s Wood, Berrybrae, Binghill, Blue Cairn, Bogton Lhanbryde, Bourtreebush aka Old Bourtreebush, Braehead Leslie, Brandsbutt Inverurie, Broomend of Auchleven, Broomed of Crichie aka Druidsfield, Cairnborrow Gingomyres, Cairnfauld, Cairnhall, Cairnton, Cairnwell, Camp, Candle Hill of Ardoyne aka Hatton of Ardoyne, Candle Hill of Insch, Candle Hill of Rayne aka Old Rayne, Candy, Carlin Stone aka Cairn Riv, Castle Fraser, Chapel o’ Sink and Ark Stone, Clune Hill aka Raes of Clune, Corrie Cairn, Corrstone Wood, Corrydoun, Cortes, Cothiemuir Wood, Craighead, Crookmuir, Cullerlie aka Standing Stones of Echt, Culsalmond, Culsh, Currachs, Deer Park Monnymusk, Doune of Dalmore, Druidsfield, Druidstone, Drumfours Cushnie, Dunnydeer, Dunnydeer North, East Crichie, Easter Aquhorthies, Easter Fornet at Skene, Esslie the Greater, Esslie the Lesser, Forvie Sands, Frendraught, Fullerton, Gask aka Springhill, Gaul Cross, Gaval, Gavenie Braes, Gingomyres, Glassel, Gowk Stane, Gray Stane, Gray Stane Clochforbie, Greystone aka Auld Kirk, Hare Stanes and Woof Stane, Hillhead Bankhead of Clatt, Hill of Fiddes, Huntly, Image Wood, Inchmarlow, Innesmill Urquhart, Inschfield, Jericho-Colpy, Kinellar Kirk, Kirkton of Bourtie, Langstane o’ Aberdeen, Langstane o’ Craigearn, Leys of Dummuie, Loanend aka Hawkhill, Loanhead of Daviot, Loudon Wood, Mains of Hatton, Marionburgh, Marnoch Kirk and Bellman Wood, Melgum, Midmar and Balblair, Mill of Carden, Millplough, Mundurno, Nether Balfour aka Whitefield, Nether Corskie, Nether Coullie, Nether Dumeath, Netherton, New Craig, Nine Stanes (Mulloch) aka Garrol Wood, North Burreldales, North Strone, Old Keig, Old Wester Echt, Peathill, Pinkie Stanes, Pitglassie, Raedykes, Raich, Rothiemay, St Brandan’s Stanes, Sandend, Sheldon, Shethin aka Raxton, Skellmuir Hill, South Fornet, South Leylodge and Leylodge Fetterletter complexes, South Ythsie, Standing Stanes o’ Strathbogie, Stonehead, Strichen, Sunhoney, Sunken Kirk aka Tofthills of Clatt, Tamnagorn, Templand aka Upper Ord, Templestone, Temple Stones, Thorax, Tilquhillie, Tomnaverie, Tuach, Tyrebagger, Upper Auchnagorth, Upper Crichie, Upper Lagmore, Upper Third, Wantonwells, Waulkmill, Wells of Ythan aka Logie Newton, Wheedlemont aka Cailleach, White Cow Wood, Whitehill Wood, White Lady of Tillyfoure aka Whitehill, Witches’ Stones, Yonder Bognie and Westerton