by David Keenan
Alan had become friendly with this Chinese guy from Petersburn. It was through some astrology course that they were both involved in. There was a Chinese takeaway that the father owned in Clarkston and one night there had been a disturbance – I’m not sure what, the details are still vague – but the upshot is that the Chinese guy’s dad had been killed in some kind of incident in the back court. He had been hit with a slab and died on the spot.
Alan called me up. I wasn’t there, he said. But I’m implicated. What do you know? I asked him. What did you see? But he just whimpered and hung up the phone. Then Duncan called me. Alan is in deep shit, he said. I know, I said. I just spoke to him. No, not Alan, he said, you don’t understand, I mean Alan, Alan’s double, the one with the blue hair; our drummer is what I’m talking about. He’s out there running wild.
Someone had given the description of a person with blue hair and who was dressed like a schoolboy fleeing the scene. The band needs to split up, Alan said. We need them to go into hiding. We had a meeting at Duncan’s parents’ house; the four of us sat on the bed with a single bare light bulb illuminating the room and dirty clothes piled everywhere. Duncan’s dad came into the bedroom, he wasn’t quite drunk yet, just moderately sauced, and he asked us about the killing of the Chinese. I heard he was hit over the head with a paving stone, he said. Who is even strong enough to lift one of those, never mind bringing it down on some poor bugger’s skull? We shook our heads and tried to picture the scene and the superhuman effort involved; all except Alan, who just sat there with his head in his hands. Things escalated from there. I demanded to see the dolls, they were kept in boxes in the basement of Findlay and Alan’s house, and I insisted that we break them out and examine them. What for? Duncan asked. Are you looking for bloodstains? Maybe, I said. I might be. He looked at me like he was caught in the teeth of something; like a great mouth had opened up behind him and he had felt that first pressure on his flesh; that frisson just before the tooth penetrates the skin; which is the prerogative of young bodies, I realise now; that expectant shudder where doom itself seems like a fair exchange and more worthy of jaw-dropping awe and complete and utter surrender than total weeping despair. I felt like I was pregnant with every idea in the world and that none of them mattered.
We dug up the bodies – almost literally – and examined them for signs of wrongdoing. Aside from some beer stains and some cigarette burns – not to mention the smell of stale make-up, which rots and stinks like high heaven, believe me – there was no sign of anything untoward. If you were involved, I said to Alan, then you need to confess and stop passing it off on these poor victims, people who can’t even answer back; though really I meant Findlay and Duncan and myself.
I was with him that night, he said. I was with the Chinese boy. But the killing had nothing to do with me. How could you even think that? How would I ever be capable of throwing that stone? You brought the group into it, I said. The drummer was seen fleeing the scene. Now we’re all involved. God knows what I might do next or Duncan or Findlay. Now I can barely sleep for the sake of my shadow.
Then I realised something. Alan’s doll was wearing a California Good Guys sweatshirt.
Wait a fucking minute, I said. Where the hell did he get that? At first no one reacted. What are you talking about? Findlay said. But then it dawned on them. Oh shit, Duncan said, when did you start dressing like that, Alan? That’s not Alan, I said. That’s Lucas from Memorial Device and although I didn’t say it in my terror I was thinking that’s Lucas’s brain right there, oh shit, at this point he’s dreaming the entire thing.
The next thing we knew the police were involved. They interviewed Alan as a witness. The story he gave was that they had been hanging out at the back of the Chinese restaurant; there was a Thursday-night astrology class that they had both attended and with it being so warm, who could forget that summer, they had decided to sit out back in the grass and go over their notes. Some local toughs had turned up; some hoods, basically, and there was some kind of confrontation; it wasn’t clear what sparked it off but eventually one of the hoods picked up a rock and threw it and it missed Alan and his friend but smashed the glass on the back door of the restaurant, at which point Mr Chan appeared and began cursing them and threatening them with a mop. Before anyone knew it Chan’s brothers had arrived alongside more local toughs – gangsters, who knows – till it was like there were two armies lined up on either side with Alan and his friend caught in the middle.
We were in no-man’s land, Alan said. Then what happened? the police asked him. I saw someone pick up a slab, he said. A silhouette, nothing more. And I saw his arms go back and he threw it through the air so that it was spinning like a discus or a piece of shot. And I saw it catch Mr Chan on the side of the head. And I heard a sickening crack. And I saw him fall to the ground. And it looked like his head was caved in. Then what happened? they said. I saw this thing emerge, he said. This guy, this thing; I thought I recognised him. We have a group, we play music, he explained, but it’s like an art thing where we have models on stage miming – well, not exactly miming but pretending to be us, in a way.
What has that got to do with anything? they asked him. That’s the thing, he said. I thought I saw one of the dolls rising up from out of the ground. Like in a vampire movie, the police asked him, like in a zombie flick? Yes, he said, like in a horror movie, and I saw it glide between the two parties; it seemed to be floating, he said. And it was like it was lit up from below. What did it do? the police asked him. Nothing, he said. That’s the whole point. It did nothing. But everyone saw it, he insisted, and when they saw it they fled, screaming. What happened then? they asked him. I watched it for a while, he said, and it kept on moving until it was just a dot on the horizon.
The hoods were never identified; no one would talk. Alan’s friend was too traumatised to be a reliable witness. The Chinese gangs claimed they chased the hoods away themselves. But there were reports from bystanders that a schoolkid with a shock of blue hair had floated across the park and down the glen and disappeared like ball lightning over the horizon.
It was Skidz, Alan had told us as we stood around the box. I saw him, it was Skidz. Who is Skidz? I asked him. Skidz is me, he said, and he started crying again. Skidz is me. We looked at the doll in the box, with its legs folded beneath it, its eyes made up like an Egyptian god, its shock of blue hair.
I never found out how Skidz came to be wearing a jumper from one of Lucas’s dolls; it was all too surreal and complicated and confused and I couldn’t bring myself to ask, that’s presuming there was any truth to be found in the first place. But secretly I think we were all impressed. Alan had come alive; he was an artist where the rest of us were just a bunch of lip-syncers. I looked at my own doll and I had no idea what my name was. We cancelled our upcoming shows. There was some talk of us going on tour with Memorial Device but who knows if that would ever have come to anything. Occasionally I would see Lucas in the city centre in Airdrie or one of the other guys in the band but they never acknowledged me or acted as if they knew who I was. We went back to the life sentence, which is Airdrie, for better or for worse. Duncan’s dad died of heart failure and Duncan lived there with his mother; we lost touch but I heard he still lives there and that there are still no lampshades to be seen anywhere. Findlay became involved in the Church. Sometimes when I was shopping in town I would see him standing at the checkout area in Safeway collecting for charity. He was the kind to talk animatedly and with genuine interest to dotty old dears for hours; what a waste of an intellect. But Alan was the one that got away. He left Airdrie for good. Like Skidz he floated away like a ghost or a UFO to who knows where, but every time I make a withdrawal from Airdrie Savings Bank or check a book out of the library or walk up South Bridge Street in the afternoon with its window displays and boarded-up shops, it’s like I see myself from the outside for a second and I think my own ghost is out there, somewhere, my own dummy, looking down at me with his one eye and shaking his head.
Archie Shepp (on Actuel) – You called me in Airdrie while Memorial Device were on tour and asked me if I wanted you to buy this for me.
Louis Moholo – I bought my own copy of this record so you should have two right now.
Great Society – Found it in Edinburgh at Bruce’s (by myself, same trip as John Fahey, Voice of the Turtle).
Silly Sisters – Found at Virgin in Glasgow.
Big Brother …, Cheap Thrills – Found at Listen in Glasgow.
Steeleye Span – Only fair that I should have at least one. Your decision.
Julie Tippetts, Sunset Glow – We had two copies, remember?
Linda & Sonny Sharrock – Paradise
Morton Feldman – dbl LP
Muhal Richard Abrams – Can’t remember the label, Nessa? I think I am missing another record from this label. Shelley Hirsch is on it?
At least one International Artists record – i.e. Golden Dawn. This is more of a plead. You know I will never find one of these records again and I would never pay £100 for a record.
Don Cherry, Mu Parts 1&2 – Found in 23rd Precinct in Glasgow.
June Tabor – Should be two. I found in Belfast, the other here (I think there is a kitty on the front?).
Miles Davis, On the Corner – Didn’t I find at Bruce’s? Could be wrong.
Anthony Braxton – There were a lot I bought at Virgin, seemed like all I was buying for a while.
Jimmy Giuffre – One of the older recordings. Maybe we found on the trip to Wales. Your decision.
Octavia Butler book – Sorry, just thought of this.
Tim Buckley – I specifically remember finding some in London, i.e. Lorca, Happy Sad. They were in poor condition with promo stickers on front.
12. A Likely Candidate for Sex for Marriage for Kidnap for Another Kind of Future Altogether: Valerie Morris takes Remy to see the gypsies of Calderbank and to get their fortune read when they were nothing but dumb kids.
I moved to Airdrie when I was sixteen years old fresh out of school and with my head full of prophecies some of which were realised some of which came true in ways that I could never have predicted and some of which hang over me still not so much like a sword which any idiot knows is a stand-in for thought, for cogitation, for division essentially but more like an axe, a blunt axe that threatens to pound the future into the shape of the past which is inchoate, a blob, a thing with lots of limbs and tentacles and feet pointing this way and that where if you’re lucky you’re able to extricate a single thread, a lone noodle, a sorry umbilical, a curled pubic hair that might prove that it was yours in the first place.
We went to see a gypsy I remember that much. This was at the Calderbank Gala Day. She was set up at the far end of the football field at the very edge of the village in a field that was only accessible via a narrow pavement next to a busy road where the cars would blow dust up into your face and brambles would get stuck to your tights and where once my grandfather and I had come across enormous footprints in the earth that were the size of Bigfoot or the Abominable Snowman.
Because of various superstitions not to say a collective commitment to the suffering future being the same as the suffering past the gypsies were not allowed to set up inside the village boundaries but had instead been relegated to this borderland which was the only fun in town once a year and where despite the opprobrium of our parents most of the young people ended up by late afternoon where we would make our way past all of the stalls that lined the main street, the Tunnock’s tea cakes, the old whisky barrels piled high with tangerines, the stalls with the model airplanes, the badges, the ice cream cones, the smell of chocolate and cheese and hot dogs and the pale blue skies with little puffs of cloud like the vapour trails of daredevils and the smell of gunpowder in the air and gasoline and open fires and in the distance the hazy points of colour that were young men on motorbikes speeding along the summer hills the sun so close that it would curl your hair and turn it fair and there would be young men breathing fire arranged around the perimeter of the football pitch swallowing petrol and letting the flames dance on their tongues and as you passed them they looked you up and down as if you were a likely candidate, for sex, for marriage, for kidnap, for another kind of future altogether.
Me and Remy had been going to the Gala Day for years but it must have been 1979 in fact I’m sure it was because it was the same year that I volunteered to man an exhibition by ASTRA the Association in Scotland To Research into Astronautics that ran in Airdrie Arts Centre and right now I just looked up the date in a book and it all ties in.
For the past year we had speculated about the fortune teller who sat in a red-and-white-striped box that looked like a Punch & Judy show and whose skin I’m not kidding you was green or almost green and who we used to joke was just a torso, a head and shoulders kept alive by wires and chemicals and of course we were in love back then or as much in love as it’s possible to be at that age and we would challenge each other you know about the extent of our love. Would you love me if I was just a brain in a jar? Remy would ask me. Of course, I would say. I would kiss the jar goodnight and put a blanket over it and have it on my bedside table and fall asleep next to it. But what if I didn’t want to go asleep? he would ask me. What if I wanted to read? I would prop a book up in front of you, I would say, then I would guess how long it took you to read both pages and I would turn it to the next two. But what if you were tired, he would ask me, what if you got the timing wrong? How would I even be able to read in the first place with no eyes in my head? In that case I would read to you, I said, in the hope that you might hear me. They say that hearing is the last to go, he said. But that might be in the presence of ears.
We could see the gypsy looking at us from across the field, The Corpseless Head we called her and we had our dog with us well not our dog exactly but a huge German shepherd called Judy that belonged to someone else in the village but who came to see Remy each day when he was a boy and who would spend the day with him before heading back to his owners for the night and there is a famous picture of us from that day, famous to me anyway, where we are both sitting propped up against the side of a shed with Judy towering over us like a benevolent giant from a children’s novel which might as well have been Anne of Green Gables now for all that time cares.
I think Remy’s father took the picture. He was an oddball alright, quite literally in the end but he didn’t care for village gossip or standard ways of thinking and he was brave to me even though he was weedy and scrawny and his face was permanently screwed up like when he looked at you he was staring straight into the sun and of course years later I read the essay that had got him dismissed, the one about fate, and I thought about that photograph and how it captures a moment and how you can return to it with thought all over again so maybe he was talking sense but I don’t know, photographs will have you believing anything.
I don’t know whose idea it was to have our fortune read. You know how things gradually build up inside your head and things that once seemed frightening become a goad and then a pleasure and then eventually blasé? Back then we were on the tipping point between terror and goad. What a place to be! I wish the adult world was still frightening and unknown. But I can’t even remember what she said now which is ridiculous so I’ve no way of knowing if it came true, which might be for the best, though I think more things came true for Remy than they did for me in the end. I can only remember us making our way towards her crossing this invisible line that separated the gypsies from everyone else and then coming back again. That’s as clear as day. What happened in between is just an empty space in my brain. The only other thing I can remember is that we bought one of those spicy kebabs that they would make from a caravan with a full green pepper on the top and the flatbread packed with meatballs and lettuce and sauce and cheese. I had never bitten a whole pepper in my li
fe and I knew if my dad could only see me, if he could’ve looked down from heaven, he would have shaken his head in protest, which made it taste all the more delicious and painful.
13. Kitty-Catting into the Night Burglarising My Dreams: Johnny McLaughlin meets Big Patty in Airdrie or is it Belfast.
There are two types of people in this world (my dad explained to me), persons and non-persons. And Michael is a non-person. And he’s fly too. When I first met him I could tell by the way he introduced himself, you know, alright pal, all of this stuff, I knew he was a Bengal Lancer right away.
Upstairs we could hear Michael pacing back and forth, crossing the ceiling and turning back, again and again. He’s nervous, my dad said. I don’t blame him. It was like living inside a headache. Michael had been a regular visitor (or a regular hideaway) for years now, coming and spending a week or a month here and there, culminating in a three-month stint in the summer of 1983.
Slowly our routines began to mirror each other. The entrance to the secret annexe was in the corner of my bedroom and I was often woken in the night by the sound of Michael crossing the room to use the toilet (or to head out for a late-night walk). He only left the house at night (for fear of being recognised or captured or assassinated, whatever it was) and as soon as I heard him going down the stairs (slowly, playing each step for maximum portent, or so it seemed, like a cat burglar in reverse, kitty-catting into the night, burglarising my dreams of breaking out myself and making off with them, scot-free) I would climb out of my bed and watch as he made his way down the driveway (now furtive), his thin silhouette giving way to the shadow of the gatepost and the fog and then he was gone (like a pot of ink) into the night. I would lie in bed and imagine his route in my mind, walking it myself in exhaustive detail, picturing the moment where he would stop near a gate on the old Colliertree Road (a gate that led onto a path that opened onto a field, a path that is no longer there) and in the distance the lights of the industrial estate, twinkling on the horizon (like a dream within a dream), and often it was like I crossed a threshold, not between sleep and waking, not between death and life (nothing as dramatic as that), but I would emerge (or more properly submerge) into a place where I was the one that was being walked, where Michael’s walks became forced nocturnal sojourns against my will, where I gave up my mind, or rather my mind was given, given over to the pursuit of a pitiless phantom that was impossible to make out against the dark of my dreams, but who dragged me round the streets at night and made me stare at closed doors and lit-up third-storey windows and smoke cigarettes and be absent from myself for at least a third of the night (which when you add it up is a potential theft of a third of a third of my life, in other words 0.111111111, where the zero is me and the point is the threshold and the ones are the footsteps in the night and when he came back home he would wake me again as he crept through my room, in effect reversing the third of a third that I had spent dreaming, so that it felt more like 111111111.0, with zero as the cupboard, this secret space, the point as the entrance to my parents’ house and the ones as the automatic action of my brain as I dreamed him home, like inverted fish hooks or exclamation marks that refused a point).