Gaineamh Castle, home of the Urvills once again, stands amongst the alders, rowans and oaks that cover the northern flanks of the Cnoc na Moine, due south of the carbuncular outcrop that supports the First Millennium fort of Dunadd, and a little north-west of the farm rejoicing in the name of Dunamuck. The castle, a moderately large example of the Scottish Z-plan type, with cannon-shaped stone waterspouts, has a fine view through the trees and across the parkland and fields to the town of Gallanach, which spreads round the deep waters of Inner Loch Crinan like some slow but determined beach-head of architecture somehow landed from the sea.
The sound of gravel crunching beneath a car tyre has always meant something special to me; at once comforting and exciting. Of course the one time I tried to explain this to my father he suggested that what it really signified was the easy rolling pressure the middle and upper classes thought it was their right to exert upon the multitudinous base of the workers. I have to confess that the entire counter-revolution in world affairs has come as something of a personal relief to me, making my dad seem no longer quite so remorselessly well-clued-up, but rather — if anything, any more — just quaint. It would have been sweet to tackle him on that subject at the time, especially given that Gorby's unleashed restructuring had just resulted in the spectacular and literal deconstruction of one of the age's most resonantly symbolic icons, but at the time we weren't talking.
"Prentice," rumbled the slightly bloated Urvill of Urvill, taking my hand and briefly shaking it, as if weighing my mitt. I felt for a moment the way a young bull ought to feel when the man from McDonalds slaps its haunch… but then probably doesn't. "So very sorry." Fergus Urvill said. I wondered whether he was referring to Grandma Margot's death itself, her detonation, or Doctor Fyfe's apparent attempt to up-stage the old girl. Uncle Fergus let my hand go. "And how are your studies going?"
"Oh, just fine," I said.
"Good, good."
"And the twins; are they both well?" I asked.
"Fine, fine," Fergus nodded, presumably allocating his two daughters a word each in his reply. Ferg's gaze went smoothly to my Aunt Antonia; I took the hint, and (like Margot) passed on. "Antonia," I heard behind me. "So very sorry…»
Helen and Diana, Uncle Ferg's two lusciously lissom daughters, sadly couldn't be here; Diana spent most of her time either in Cambridge or the least touristy part of Hawaii, which is the bit thirty kilometres away from the beaches — four of them vertically — at the Mauna Kea observatory, studying the infra-red. Helen, on the other hand, worked for a bank in Switzerland, dealing with the ultra-rich.
"Prentice, are you all right?" My mother took me in her arms, held me to her black coat. Still splashing on the No. 5, by the smell of it. Her green eyes looked bright. My father had been at the head of the reception line; I had ignored him and the compliment had been returned.
"I'm fine," I told her.
"No, but are you really?" She squeezed my hands.
"Yes; I'm really really fine."
"Come and see us, please." She hugged me again, said quietly, "Prentice, this is silly. Make it up with your father. For me."
"Mum, please," I said, feeling like everybody was looking at us. "I'll see you later, okay?" I said, and pulled away.
I walked into the hall, taking off my jacket, blinking hard and sniffing. Coming from cold into warmth always does this to me.
The entrance hall of Gaineamh Castle sports the business end of a dozen or so beheaded male red deers, perched so high up on the oak-panelled walls that attempting to utilise them for their only conceivable practical purpose in such a location — hanging coats, scarves, jackets, etc. on their impressively branched antlers — only exposes them as the venue for a kind of non-returnable sport rather than a sensible amenity. Rather more prosaic brass hooks, like smooth unsuitable claws beneath the glass-eyed stares of the stags, accepted our garments in their stead. My much be-zippered black leather pretend-biker's jacket seemed a little out of place amongst the sober wools and furs; Verity's snow-white skiing jacket looked… well, just sublime. I stood and stared at it for a second or two longer than was probably fit; but it really did seem to glow in the dark company. I sighed, and decided to keep my white silk Mobius scarf on.
I entered the hammer-beamed Solar of the castle; the great hall was filled with a quietly chattering crowd of McHoans, Urvills and others, all nibbling canapes and vol-au-vants, and sipping whisky and sherries. I suspect my grandmother would have preferred pan-loaf sarnies and maybe a few slices of ham-and-egg pie, but it had, I suppose, been a kind gesture of the Urvill to ask us back here, and one should not carp. Somehow the McHoan home, still bearing the scars of grandma's sudden, unorthodox and vertical re-entry into the conservatory following her abortive attempt to de-moss the gutters, seemed unfitting as our post-cremation retreat.
There! I caught sight of Verity, standing looking out of one of the Solar's tall mullioned windows, the wide grey light of this chill November day soft upon her skin. I stopped and looked at her, a hollowness in my chest as though my heart had become a vacuum pump.
Verity: conceived beneath a tree two millennia old and born to the flare and snap of human lightning. Emerging to emergency, making her entrance, and duly entrancing.
Whistling or humming the first phrase of Deacon Blue's Born In A Storm whenever I saw her had become a sort of ritual with me, a little personal theme in the life lived as movie, existence as opera. See Verity; play them tunes. It was in itself a way of possessing her.
I hesitated, thought about going over to her, then decided I'd best get a drink first, and started towards the sideboard with the glasses and bottles, before I realised that offering to refresh Verity's glass would be as good a way as any of getting talking to her. I turned again. And almost collided with my Uncle Hamish.
"Prentice," he said, in tones of great import and sobriety. He put one hand on my shoulder and we turned away from the window where Verity stood, and away from the drinks, to walk up the length of the hall towards the stained-glass height of the gable-end window. "Your grandmother has gone to a better place, Prentice," Uncle Hamish told me. I looked back at the vision of wonderfulness that was Verity, then glanced at my uncle.
"Yes, Uncle Hamish."
Dad called Uncle Hamish "The Tree" because he was very tall, moved in a rather awkward way — as though made out of something less flexible than the standard issue of bone, sinew, muscle and flesh — and (so he claimed, at any rate) because he had seen him act in a school play once, and he had been very, well, wooden. "Anyway," my dad had insisted when he'd originally confided this private piece of nomenclature, only half a decade earlier, on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday, when we'd got drunk together for the first time, "he just lumbers about!"
"She was a good woman, and did little that was bad and much that was good, so I'm sure she has gone to a reward rather than a punishment, living amongst our anti-creates."
I nodded, and as we strolled amongst them, looked around at the various members of my family, the McGuskies (Grandma Margot's maiden-family) the Urvill clan, and sundry worthies from Gallanach, Lochgilphead and Lochgair, and pondered, not for the first time, what on Earth (or anywhere else for that matter) had given Uncle Hamish the idea for his bizarre, home-made religion. I really didn't want to go into all this right now, and anyway found the whole subject a little awkward, because I wasn't actually quite as gung-ho for Hamish's personal theology as he seemed to think I was.
"She was always very kind to me," I told him.
"And therefore your anti-create will be kind to her," Uncle Hamish said, still with one hand on my shoulder, as we stopped and looked up at the stained-glass monstrosity at the far end of the hall. This showed in graphic form the story of the Urvills from about the time of the Norman conquest, when the family of Urveille, from Octeville in Cotentin, had crossed into England, percolated northwards, swirled briefly around Dunfermline and Edinburgh, and finally come to rest — perhaps afflicted by some maritime memory of their ancestral lands on the seam of the Manche — in what had been the very epicentre of the ancient Scots kingdom of Dalriada, losing only a few relatives and a couple of letters on the way. Swearing allegiance to David I, here they have stayed, to mingle their blood with that of the Picts, the Scots, the Angles, the Britons and the Vikings who have all variously settled, colonised, raided and exploited this part of Argyll, or maybe just arrived at one time and forgotten to leave again.
The peregrinations and subsequent local achievements of the clan Urvill make interesting history, and would make fascinating viewing if the giant window telling the tale wasn't so badly done. The fashionable but untalented son of one of the previous head Urvill's school pals had been commissioned to execute the work, and had taken the brief all too literally. Deadly dull and eye-squintingly garish at the same time, the stained glass window made me want to grit my teeth.
"Yes, I'm sure you're right, uncle," I lied.
"Of course I am, Prentice," he nodded slowly. Uncle Hamish is balding, but of the school that believes long wisps of hair grown on one side of the head and then combed delicately across the pate to the other edge look better than naked sin exposed to the elements. I watched the coloured light from the stained glass window slide over shiny skin and hardly less luminescent oiled hair, and thought what a prat he looked. I inadvertently found myself humming the appropriate piece of music from the Hamlet cigar adds and thinking of Gregor Fisher.
"Will you join me in worship this evening, Prentice?"
Oh shit, I thought. "Perhaps not, actually, uncle," I said, in tones I hoped sounded regretful. "Have to pop down the Jac to talk to a girl about a Jacuzzi. Probably go straight from here." Another lie.
Uncle Hamish looked at me, the grain-like lines on his forehead bunching and tangling, his brown eyes like knots. "A jacuzzi, Prentice?" He pronounced the word the way the lead in a Jacobean tragedy might pronounce the name of the character who has been his nemesis.
"Yes. A Jacuzzi."
That's a form of bath, isn't it?"
"It is."
"Not meeting this young lady in a bath, are you, Prentice?" Uncle Hamish's lips twisted slowly into what was probably meant to be a smile.
"I don't believe the facilities of the Jacobite Bar run to such a thing, uncle," I told him. "They've only recently got round to installing hot water in the gents. The relevant jacuzzi is in Berlin."
"The German city?"
I thought about this. Could I have mis-heard Ash and she have been talking about the briefly famous chart-topping band of the same name? I thought not. "Yes, uncle; the city. Where the wall was."
"I see," Uncle Hamish nodded. "Berlin." He stared up at the violently clashing leaden imagery of the great stained-glass window. "Isn't that where Ilsa is?"
I frowned. "Aunt Ilsa? No, she's in Patagonia, isn't she? Incommunicado."
Uncle Hamish looked suitably confused as he contemplated the garish gable glass. Then he nodded. "Ah yes. Of course." He looked back down at me. "However. Shall we see you for supper, Prentice?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "Just as likely to end up with a kebab, I imagine. Or a fish supper."
"Well, you have your key with you?"
"Oh yes. Thanks. And I'll be… you know; quiet, when I come in."
"Right." Uncle Hamish gazed back up at the crass glass. "Right. We'll probably be off in a half-hour or so; let us know if you do want a lift."
"Surely."
"Right you are, then." Uncle Hamish nodded, turned, then looked back with an intensely puzzled expression. "Did I hear somebody say mother exploded?"
I nodded. "Pacemaker. That's what Doctor Fyfe was rushing to tell us; told dad in the ambulance. But it was too late by then, of course."
Uncle Hamish looked more baffled than ever, but nodded eventually and said, "Of course," and walked off over the parquet with a startlingly tree-like creaking noise which I realised — with a small but welcome surprise — was issuing from his black brogues.
I made straight for the sideboard with the drinks, but a quick inspection of the casement of the relevant window on my way there revealed that Verity the Comely had gone.
Fortingall is a modest hamlet in the hills north of Loch Tay, and it was there in the winter of 1969 that my Aunt Charlotte was determined to consummate her marriage. Specifically, she wanted to be impregnated beneath the ancient yew tree that lies in an enclosure within the graveyard of the small church there; she was convinced that the tree — two thousand years old, according to reliable estimates — must be suffused with a magical Life Force.
It was a dark and stormy night (no; really), the grass under the ancient, straggling, gnarled yew was sodden, and so she and her husband, Steve, had to settle for a knee-trembler while Charlotte held onto one of the overhanging boughs, but it was there and then — despite the effects of gravity — that the gracile and quiveringly prepossessing Verity was conceived, one loud night under an ink black sky obscuring a white full moon, at an hour when all decent folk where in their beds and even the indecent ones were in somebody's, in a quaint little Perthshire village, back in the fag end of the dear old daft old hippy days.
So my aunt says, and frankly I believe her; anybody wacko enough ever to have bought the idea that there was some sort of weird cosmic energy beaming out of a geriatric shrub in a back-end-of-nowhere Scottish graveyard on a wet Monday night probably hasn't the wit to lie about it.
"Naw, she's great, I mean really really great. I'm in love. I love her; I'm hers. Verity; take me; put me out of my misery. O God…»
I was drunk. It was getting on towards midnight in the Jacobite bar and at my normal rate of drinking that meant I'd had about ten pints of export. Ash and Dean Watt, and another couple of old pals, Andy Langton and Lizzie Polland, had all drunk about the same as I had, but then they'd been home for their tea and they hadn't been swilling back the Urvill's whisky for a significant part of the afternoon.
"So have you told her, Prentice?" Ash said, putting down another set of pints on the pocked copper table we were hunched around.
"Ah, Ash," I said, slapping the table. "I admire a woman who can carry three pints at the same time."
"I said, have you told this lassie you love her, Prentice?" Ash said, sitting down. She took a bottle of strong cider from one breast pocket of her navy shirt, and a glass of whisky from the other.
"Wow!" I said. "Ash! I mean, like; wow! Wicked." I shook my head, took up my old pint and finished it.
"Answer the lassie," Dean said, nudging me.
"No, I haven't," I confessed.
"Ya coward," said Lizzie.
"I'll tell her for you if you like," Droid offered (there is an entire generation of Andrews with the shared nickname of Droid, post Star Wars).
"Na," I said. "But she is just fabulous. I mean —»
"Why not tell her?" Liz asked.
"I'm shy," I sighed, hand on heart, eyes heaven-ward, lashes fluttering.
"Get out a here."
"So tell her," Ash said.
"Also," I sighed. "She's got a boyfriend."
"Ah-ha," Ash said, looking at her pint.
I waved one hand dismissively. "But he's a wanker."
"That's all right, then," Liz said.
I frowned. "Actually, that's the only flaw Verity seems to have; her lousy taste in men."
"So you are in with a chance then?" Liz said brightly.
"Yeah," I said. "I think she's going to chuck him."
"Prentice," Ash insisted, tapping the table. "Tell her."
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because I wouldn't know how to," I protested. "I've never told anybody I love them before. I mean, how do you? The words sound so corny, so devalued. It's so… it's just such a cliche."
Ash looked scornful. "What rubbish."
"Well, smarty-pants," I said, leaning over to her. "Have you ever told anybody you love them?"
"Hundreds of times, darling." Ash said in a deep voice, pouting. Dean guffawed. Ash drank from her pint, then shook her head. "Well, actually, no."
"Ha!" I said.
Ash leaned over to me, her long nose almost touching mine. "Tell the girl, you idiot."
"I can't," I said, sitting back. "I just can't. She's too perfect."
"What?" Ash frowned.
"Infallible. Too perfect; ideal."
"Sounds like misogynist romantic shite to rne," snorted Liz, who's always taken a hard line on such things.
"It is," I admitted. "But she's just incredible. D'you know where she was conceived?"
Dean and Ash exchanged looks; Andy spluttered into his beer while Lizzie rolled her eyes. "Aw yeah," Dean said, nodding and looking quite serious. "Doesn't everybody?"
I was shocked, and almost cut short my next gulp of beer. "You don't really, do you?"
"Course not, Prentice," Ash said shaking her head. Her long fair hair spilled from over one shoulder. "What diff —»
"Aw, it's just incredible," I told them. "Her mum told me; Aunt Charlotte. Bit of a nutter, but okay. I mean totally aff her heid really, but anyway — " I took another gulp of beer, " — she had this thing about psychic energy or some crap like that… and about Scottish history —»
"Aw; runs in the family, does it, Prentice?" Dean asked.
"Naw; she's not a McHoan… anyway; she'd married this English guy called Walker and they hadn't consummated the marriage, right, not on their wedding night; she wanted to wait, and when they did get it together she made sure it was in this wee village called Fortingall, right? Near Loch Tay. Thing is, she'd heard something about Fortingall being where Pontius Pilate —»
"Wait a minute," Dean said. "How long was it between them getting married and them humping?"
"Eh?" I scratched my head. "I don't know; a day or two. Oh! I mean, they'd done it before, like. It wasn't their first time or anything. It was just Aunt Charlotte's idea that it'd be more special if they hadn't done it for a while, and then did it under this tree. But they had been fucking before. I mean; good grief, this is the love generation we're talking about here."
"Right," Dean said, apparently mollified.
"Anyway; Fortingall is where some people say Pontius Pilate was born, and —»
"Whit?" Andy said, wiping his beard. "Away ye go."
"So they say," I insisted. "His dad was in the… shit… the seventh legion? The ninth? Damn… " I scratched my head again, looked down at my trainers (and thought with some relief that at least tonight I would not have the long struggle to undo the buckles and untie and then loosen the laces on the Docs, which were my usual drinking gear these days). "Or was it the seventh legion?" I pondered, still staring at my Nikes.
"Never mind if it was the fuckin" foreign legion," Droid said, exasperated. "You're no trying to tell us Pontius fucking Pilate was born in Scotland!"
"Well maybe!" I said, spreading my arms wide and almost spilling Ash's whisky. "His dad was in the legion stationed there! Apparently! I mean, the Romans had a military camp and Pontius Pilate's pa was stationed there, maybe, and so young Pontius could have been born there! Why not?"
"You're making this up," laughed Ash. "You're just like your dad; I remember those stories on a Sunday afternoon."
"I am not like ma dad!" I yelled.
"Hey, shoosh," Lizzie said.
"Well, I'm not! I'm telling the truth!"
"Aye, well," Ash said. "Maybe. People get born in funny places. David Byrne was born in Dumbarton."
"Anyway; Pontius Pi —»
"Whit?" Dean grimaced. The guy that wrote Tutti frutti?
"Listen; Pontius —»
"Na; that was John Byrne," Lizzie said. "David Byrne; the guy in Talking Heads, ya heidbanger."
"Look, anyway, forget Ponti —»
"Anyway, it was Little Richard."
"Will you shut up? This isn't about Pon —»
"What? In Talking Heads?"
"Shut up! I'm telling you; Po —»
"Na; that wrote Tutti Frutti."
"I give in," I said, sitting back. I sighed, supped my export.
"Aye, the song; but no the film."
"It wasnae a fillum; it was a series."
"Ah know, you knew what ah meant."
"I hate these drunken, rambling conversations," I breathed.
"Aye, but I've heard worse." Ash nodded.
"Anyway, it wasnae fillum at all; it was video."
"It was naawwwt!" Dean drawled scornfully. "Ye could see it was fillum! What sort a telly have you got?"
I crossed my legs, crossed my arms and swivelled to look at Ash. I rubbed my rather greasy face and focused on her. "Hi. Come here often?"
Ashley pursed her lips and studied the ceiling. "Just the once," she said, frowning at me. "In the toilets." She gathered my shirt lapels in her fist and pulled me close to her face. "So who talked?"
"Fnarr fnarr," I breathed over her. Ash's face wrinkled, quite attractively, actually. But then it was late.
"Hi youse," a deep voice said, bending over us. "Yer oan."
"On what?" I asked the very large fellow with very long hair who had spoken.
"The pool table; PM and AW; that's youse, is it no?"
"Shit, aye, right enough."
Ash and I went to play pool.
I'd been just about to ask her about the jacuzzi in Berlin, but now didn't seem like the right time.
Uncle Fergus had the observatory built back in 1974 (when the heavenly Verity was four). The idea was two-fold. First of all — according to my father — Fergus wanted a bigger and better telescope than he had. Dad had a three-inch refractor in a shed in the garden at Lochgair. Fergus ordered a six-inch reflector. Also, it was a business sample. The lenses and mirror were to be made in the new Specialist Glass Division of the Gallanach Glass Works, the Urvill-owned factory which even yet provides the town with a significant proportion of its employment. Not only, therefore, would Uncle Fergus have a fascinating and unique additional feature for his not-long restored castle, it would be both an advertisement for his Glass Works and tax-deductible!
The fact the telescope was a wee bit close to Gallanach itself, and so possibly prone to light pollution from the town's sodium vapour lamps, was less of a problem than it might appear; with Uncle Fergus's connections he could have the offending lamps shaded at the council's expense. So Uncle Fergus was prepared if necessary — and only selectively, of course — to dim his home town.
(His niece had already bettered that; when the diminutive, bloody and bawling form of Verity Walker had appeared on the scene, the lights had actually gone out.)
I'd met the sublime Verity for the first time in some years in the observatory, one coal-sack-black moonless night in 1986, a few days before I left to go to University, when I was already full of the exhilaration and fear of departure and independence, and the whole huge world seemed to be opening up before me, like some infinite blossom of opportunity and glamour. The twins had taken to having star-gazing parties in the cold, cramped hemisphere which protruded from the summit of the compact castle, and I'd arrived late after being out on the hill with little brother James during the afternoon and then suffering a delayed tea because some friends of dad's had showed up unannounced and had to be catered for.
"Aye, it's yourself, Prentice," boomed Mrs McSpadden, informatively. "And how are you?" Mrs McSpadden was the Urvill's housekeeper; a rotundly buxom lady of perpetual middle-age with a big baw-face that gave the impression of being freshly scrubbed. She had a very loud voice and dad always told people that she hailed from Fife. A ringing noise in one's ears after a close encounter with the lady tended to enforce the impression this was literally true. "The rest are up there. Will you take this tray up? There's coffee in these pots; you just turn the wee spot to the front here, ken, and — " She lifted the corner of a heavy napkin smothering a very large plate. " — there's hot sausage rolls under here."
"Right, thanks," I said, lifting the tray. I'd come in through the castle kitchen; entering through the main door after it had been shut for the night could be a performance. I made for the stairs.
"Here, Prentice; take this scarf up to Miss Helen," Mrs McSpadden said, flourishing the article. "That lassie'll catch her death of cold up there one night, so she will."
I bowed my head so that Mrs S could put the scarf over my neck.
"And mind them there's plenty of bread, and some chicken in the fridge, and cheese, and plenty of soup forbye, if you get hungry again."
"Right, thanks," I repeated, and jogged carefully upstairs.
"Anybody got any roach paper?"
I squeezed into the brightly-lit dome of the observatory; it was about three metres in diameter, made from aluminium, the telescope took up a lot of it, and it was cold, despite a wee two-bar electric heater. A modestly proportioned ghetto-blaster was playing something by the Cocteau Twins. Diana and Helen, bundled in enormous Mongolian quilted jackets, were crouched round a small table with Darren Watt, playing cards. My elder brother, Lewis, was at the telescope. We all said our hellos. This is cousin Verity. Remember her?" Helen said, as she draped the scarf I'd brought her over Darren's head. Helen pointed at a cloud of smoke, and as it blew towards me and cleared I saw her.
There was a sort of cubby-hole in the non-rotating part of the observatory, built into the attic of the castle's main block. It was just a long cupboard really, but you could coorie down into it to make more space in the dome proper. Verity Walker was lying in a sleeping bag there, only her upper half protruding into the dome; she was smoking one joint and rolling another, on the cover of a pictorial atlas of the universe. "Evening," she said. "Got any roach paper?"
"Yeah; hi," I said. I put the tray down, searched my pockets, pulled out some stuff. The last time I'd seen Verity Walker, maybe five or six years earlier, she'd been a scrawny tyke with a mouth full of orthodontic brace-work and a serious Shakin" Stevens habit. Now — once seen through the smoke — she had short, pure blonde hair, and a delicate, almost elfin face which tapered to an exquisite chin that looked like it had been made to be grasped lightly in three fingers and pulled closer to your lips… well, to my lips, anyway. Her eyes were the blue of old sea-ice, and when I saw her complexion all I could think was: Wow; Lloyd Cole city! Because she had perfect skin.
That'll do." She took something from my hand. "Thanks."
"Hey! That's a library ticket!" I grabbed it back. "Here." I handed her half a book token my mother had given me.
"Thanks." She started cutting it with a little pair of scissors.
"It's just a tokin" token," I told her, squatting down beside her.
She grunted with laughter, and my heart performed manoeuvres that the connecting plumbing makes topologically impossible.
"All set for the big move, bro?" Lewis grinned down from the wee seat under the eye-piece of the telescope. He reached over to the table where I'd set the tray down and started pouring coffee into the mugs. My big brother has always seemed more than two years older than me; a little taller than my 1.85, and a little more thick-set, he looked bigger still at the time thanks to a beard of the burst-sofa persuasion. Back then, it was his turn to be in disgrace with my father, because he'd just dropped out of University.
"Yeah, all set," I told him. "Found a place to stay." I nodded at the telescope. "Anything interesting tonight?"
"Got it on the Pleiades just now. Take a look."
We took turns star-gazing, playing cards, crouching round the little electric heater, and constructing joints. I'd brought a half bottle of whisky, and the twins had some brandy, which we used to beef up the coffee. The munchies struck again an hour or so after we'd polished off the last of the sausage rolls; the twins mounted an expedition into the depths of the castle in search of the mythical Soup Dragon (we spoke in Clanger while they were gone) and returned with a steaming tureen and a half-dozen bowls.
"Where're you staying in Glasgow, Prentice?" Darren Watt asked.
"Hyndland," I said, slurping my soup. "Lauderdale Gardens."
"Ah, that's no far from us. Going to be around on the thirtieth? We're having a party."
"Oh, ah, yeah; probably." (Actually, I'd been going to come home that weekend, but I could juggle things.)
"Ah well, come along; should be fun."
Thanks."
Darren Watt was in his last year at Art School and — for me, at least — had been the epitome of cool since New Year two years earlier. After the bells, mum had driven Lewis and me into Gallanach; we went to a party Droid and his chums were giving. Darren had been there; blond, lean, drop-dead bone structure, and exuding style. I'd admired the looped silk scarf he'd worn over a red velvet jacket that would have looked silly on most people but in which he looked totally poised. He'd given me the scarf, and — when I'd tried to demur — explained he was growing bored with it; better it went to somebody who would appreciate it, though he hoped I'd hand it on too, if I ever tired of it.
So I took it. It was just an ordinary silk scarf, given a half twist and the ends carefully sewn together, but that, of course, made it a Mobius scarf, the very idea of which I just thought was wonderful. I thought Darren was pretty wonderful, too, and for a while wondered if maybe I was gay, too, but decided against it. In fact, a large part of the attraction of an invite to a party at Darren's place was due to the fact his flat-mates were three salivatingly attractive and reputedly enthusiastically heterosexual female arts students (I'd met them when he'd brought them to Gallanach on a day trip the previous year).
"You still making models of these wave-powered hoodjie-ma-flips?" I asked him, finishing my soup. Darren was wiping his plate with a bit of bread, and I found myself copying him.
"Aye," he said, looking thoughtful. "Looks like I've found a sponsor for the real thing, too."
"What? Really?"
Darren grinned. "Big cement company's interested; talking about a serious money grant."
"Wow! Congratulations."
For the last eighteen months or so, Darren had been making these tenth-scale wood and plastic models of sculptures he wanted to build full size in concrete and steel one day. The idea was to construct these things on a beach; he'd need planning permission, ots of money, and waves. The sculptures were wave-powered mobiles and fountains. When a wave struck them a giant wheel would revolve, or air would be forced through pipes, producing weird, chest-shaking, cathedral-demolishing bass notes and uncanny howls and moans, or the water in the waves themselves would be channelled, funnelled, and emerge in a whale-like spout of spray, bursting from the top or sides of the sculpture. They sounded great, perfectly feasible, and I wanted to see one work, so this was good news.
I went downstairs for a pee, and came back to a good-natured but confused argument. "What do you mean, no it doesn't?" Verity said from her sleeping-bagged cubby-hole.
"I mean, what is sound?" Lewis said. "The definition is; what we hear. So if there's nobody there to hear it…»
"Sounds a bit anthro-thingy to me," Helen Urvill said, from the card table.
"But how can it fall without making a sound?" Verity protested. "That's crazy."
I leaned over to Darren, who was sitting looking amused. "We talking trees falling in forests?" I asked. He nodded.
"You're not listening — " Lewis told Verity.
"Maybe you're not making a sound."
"Shut up, Prentice," Lewis said, without bothering to look at me. "What I'm saying is, What is a sound? If you define it as —»
"Yeah," interrupted Verity. "But if the tree hits the ground that must make the air move. I've stood near a tree when it's felled; you feel the ground shake. Doesn't the ground shake either, when there's nobody there? The air has to move; there must be… movement, in the air; its molecules, I mean…»
"Compression waves," I provided, nodding to Verity, and thinking about Darren's wave-powered organ-pipe coast sculptures.
"Yeah; producing compression waves," Verity said, with an acknowledging wave at me (oh, my heart leapt!). "Which birds and animals and insects can hear —»
"Ah!" Lewis said. "Supposing there aren't —»
Well, it got silly after that, dissolving into the polemical equivalent of white noise, but I liked the robustly common-sensical line Verity was taking. And when she was talking, of course, I got to stare at her without anybody thinking it odd. It was wonderful. I was falling in love with her. Beauty and brains. Wow!
More sounds, more spliffs, more star-gazing. Lewis did his impression of a radio being tuned through various wavelengths; fingers at his lips to produce the impressively authentic between-stations noises, then suddenly putting on silly voices to impersonate a news reader, compere, quiz contestant, singer…»
rrrrsssshhhh… reports that the London chapter of the Zoroastrians have fire-bombed the offices of the Sun newspaper for blasphemy… zzzoooowwwaaanngggg… athangyou, athangyou, laze an ge'men, andenow, please put your hands together for the Siamese Twins… rrrraaasshhhwwwaaaassshhhaaa… uh, can you eat it, Bob? Ah, no, you can't. I'm afraid the answer is; a Pot Nooddle… bllbllbllbl… Hey hey, we're the junkies!… zpt!"
And so on. We laughed, we drank more coffee, and we smoked.
The gear was black and powerful like the night; the hollow aluminium skull of the observatory tracked the "scope's single eye slowly over the rolling web of stars, or — hand-cranked — swivelled the universe about our one fixed point. Soon my head was spinning, too. The music machine played away — far away — and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked. The stars shone on in mysterious galactic harmonies, constellations like symphonies of ancient, trembling light; Lewis told weird and creepy stories and bizarrely apposite jokes, and the twins — hunkered over the little card-table in their quilted jackets, their night-black hair straight and shining and framing their broad-boned beautiful faces — looked like proud Mongolian princesses, calmly contemplating creation from the nbbed dome of some fume-filled yurt, midnight-pitched on the endless rolling Asian steppe.
Verity Walker — professed sceptic though she was — read my palm, her touch like warm velvet, her voice like the spoken ocean and in her eyes each iris like a blue-white sun stationed a billion light years off. She told me I'd be sad and I'd be happy and I'd be bad and I'd be good, and I believed all of it and why not, and she told me the last part in Clanger, the tin-whistle pretend language from one of the children's programmes we'd all watched as youngsters, and she was trying to keep a straight face, and Lew and Dar and Di and Hel were snorting with laughter and even I was grinning, but I'd been singing happily along to the Cocteau Twins" other-worldly words for the past hour, and I knew exactly what she said even though she might not have known herself, and fell completely in love with her iris-blue eyes and her wheat-crop hair and her peat-dark voice and the peach-skin fuzz of infinitesimally fine hairs on her creamy skin.
"What was all that stuff about Pontius Pilate, anyway?" Ash said.
«Aw…» I waved my hand. "Too complicated."
Ash and I stood on a low little mound overlooking what had been the Slate Mine wharf, at the north-west limit of Gallanach where the Kilmartin Burn flows out of the hills, meanders without conviction, then widens to form part of Gallanach Bay before finally decanting into the deeper waters of Inner Loch Crinan. Here was where the docks had been, when the settlement had exported first coal then slate then sand and glass, before the railway arrived and a subtle Victorian form of gentrification had set in the shape of the railway pier, the Steam Packet Hotel and the clutch of sea-facing villas (only the fishing fleet had remained constant, sporadically crowded amongst its inner harbour in the stony lap of the old town, swelling, dying, burgeoning again, then falling away once more, shrinking like the holes in its nets).
Ashley had dragged me out here, now in the wee small hours of what had become a clear night with the stars steady and sharp in the grip of this November darkness, after the Jacobite Bar and after we'd trooped (victorious at pool, by the way) back to Lizzie and Droid's flat via McGreedy's (actually McCreadie's Fast Food Emporium), and after consuming our fish/pie/black pudding suppers and after a cup of tea and a J or two, and after we'd got back to the Watt family home in the Rowanfield council estate only to discover that Mrs Watt was still up, watching all-night TV (does Casey Casen never sit down in that chair?), and made us more tea, and after a last wee numbrero sombrero in Dean's room.
"I'm going for a walk, guys, okay?" Ash had announced, coming back from the toilet, cistern flushing somewhere in the background, pulling her coat back on.
I'd suddenly got paranoid that I had over-stayed my welcome and — in some dopey, drunken excess of stupidity — missed lots of hints. I looked at my watch, handed the remains of the J to Dean. "Aye, I'd better be off too."
"I wasn't trying to get rid of you," Ash said, as she closed the front door after us. I'd said goodbye to Mrs Watt; Ash had said she would be back in quarter of an hour or so.
"Shit. I thought maybe I was being thick-skinned," I said as we walked the short path to a wee garden gate in the low hedge.
"That'll be the day, Prentice," Ash laughed.
"You really going to walk at this time of night?" I looked up; the night was clear now, and colder. I pulled on my gloves. My breath was the only cloud.
"Nostalgia," Ash said, stopping on the pavement. "Last visit to somewhere I used to go a lot when I was a wean."
"Wow, really? How far is it? Can I come?" I have a fascination with places people think powerful or important. If I hadn't been still fairly drunk I'd have been a lot more subtle about asking to accompany Ash, but, well, there you are.
Happily, she just laughed quietly, turned on her heel and said, "Aye; come on; isn't far."
So here we stood, on the wee mound only five minutes from the Watt house, down Bruce Street, through a snicket, across the Oban road and over the weedy waste ground where the dock buildings stood, long ago.
The dock-side was maybe ten metres away; the skeletal remains of a crane stood lop-sided a little way along the cancered tarmac, its foundations betrayed by rotten wooden piling splaying out from the side of the wharf like broken black bones. Mud glistened in the moonlight. The sea was a taste, and a distant glittering that all but disappeared if you looked at it straight. Ash seemed lost in thought, staring away to the west. I shivered, un-studded the wide lapels of the fake biker's jacket and pulled the zip up to my right shoulder so that my chin was encased.
"Mind if I ask what we're doing here?" I asked. Behind and to our left, the lights of Gallanach were steady orange, like all British towns, forever warning the inhabitants to proceed with caution.
Ash sighed, her head dropped a little. She nodded down, at the ground we stood upon. "Thought you might know what this is, Prentice."
I looked down. "It's a wee lump of ground," I said. Ash looked at me. "All right," I said, making a flapping action with my elbows (I'd have spread my hands out wide, but I wanted to keep them in my pockets, even with my gloves on). "I don't know. What is it?"
Ash bent down, and I saw one pale hand at first stroke the grass, and then dig down, delving into the soil itself. She squatted like that for a moment, then pulled her hand free, rose, brushing earth from her long white fingers.
This is the Ballast-Mound, the World-Hill, Prentice," she said, and I could just make out her small thin smile by the light of the gibbous moon. "When the ships came here, from all over the world, for whatever it was they were shipping from here at the time, they would sometimes arrive unladen, just ballast in them; you know?"
She looked at me. I nodded. "Ballast; yeah, I know what ballast is; stops ships doing a Herald of Free Enterprise."
"Just rocks, picked up from wherever the ship last set sail from," Ash said, looking to the west again. "But when it got here they didn't need it, so they dumped it —»
"Here?" I breathed, looking at the modest mound with new respect. "Always here?"
"That's what my grampa told me, when I was a bairn," Ash said. "He used to work in the docks. Rolling barrels, catching slings, loading sacks and crates in the holds; drove a crane, later." (Ashley pronounced the word "cran', in the appropriate Clyde-side manner.) I stood amazed; I wasn't supposed to be getting ashamed at my lack of historical knowledge until Monday, back at Uni.
"'Hen, he'd say, 'There's aw ra wurld unner yon tarp a grass.»
I watched from one side as Ashley smiled, remembering. "I never forgot that; I'd come out here by myself when I was a kid, just to sit here and think I was sitting on rocks that had once been a bit of China, or Brazil, or Australia or America…»
Ash squatted down, resting on her heels, but I was whispering, "… Or India," to myself just then, and for one long, swim-headed instant my veins seemed to run with ocean-blood, dark and carrying as the black water sucking at the edges of the tumbledown wharf beneath us. I thought, God, how we are connected to the world! and suddenly found myself thinking about Uncle Rory again; our family connection to the rest of the globe, our wanderer on the planet. I stared up at the broken face of moon, dizzy with wonder and a hunger to know.
When he was younger than I am now, my Uncle Rory went on what was supposed to be a World Trip. He got as far as India. Fell in love with the place; went walk-about, circulating; to Kashmir from Delhi, then along the hem of the Himalayas, crossing the Ganga at Patna — asleep on the train — then zig-zagging from country to coast and back again, but always heading or trying to head south, collecting names and steam trains and friends and horrors and adventures, then at the very hanging tip of the subcontinent, from the last stone at low tide on Cape Comorin one slack dog-day; reversing; heading north and west, still swinging from interior to coast, writing it all down in a series of school exercise books, rejoicing in the wild civility of that ocean of people, the vast ruins and fierce geography of the place, its accrescent layers of antiquity and bureaucracy, the bizarre images and boggling scale of it; recording his passage through the cities and the towns and villages, over the mountains and across the plains and the rivers, through places I had heard of, like Srinagar and Lucknow, through places whose names had become almost banal through their association with curries, like Madras and Bombay, but also through places he cheerfully confessed he'd visited for their names as much as anything else: Alleppey and Deolali, Cuttack and Calicut, Vadodara and Trivandrum, Surendranagar and Tonk… but all the while looking and listening and questioning and arguing and reeling with it all, making crazed comparisons with Britain and Scotland; hitching and riding and swimming and walking and when he was beyond the reach of money, doing tricks with cards and rupees for his supper, and then reaching Delhi again, then Agra, and a trek from an ashram to the great Ganga, head fuddled by sun and strangeness to see the great river at last, and then the long drift on a barge down to the Farakka Barrage a train to Calcutta and a plane to Heathrow, half dead with hepatitis and incipient malnutrition.
In London, after a month in hospital, he typed it all out, got his friends in the squat where he lived to read it, called it The Deccan Traps And Other Unlikely Destinations, and sent it to a publisher.
It very nearly sank without trace, but then it was serialised in a Sunday newspaper, and suddenly, with no more warning or apparent cause than that, Traps just was the rage, and he was there.
I read the book when 1 was thirteen, and again tour years later, when I understood it better. It was hard to be objective — still is — but I think it is a good book; gauche and naïve in places, but startling; vivacious. He went with his eyes open, and, not having taken a camera, just tried to record everything on the pages of those cheap exercise books, straining to make it real for himself, as though he could not believe he had seen and heard and experienced what he had until it was fixed somewhere other than in his stunned brain, and so he could describe walking towards the Taj Mahal — ho-hum, thinks the reader, immediately in the realm of the tacky postcard — and still give you a wholly fresh impression of the exact scale and actual presence of that white tomb; delicate but powerful, compact and yet boundlessly imposing.
Epic grace. With those two words he encapsulated it, and you knew exactly what he meant.
And so our Rory became famous, at that moment on the very lip of the escarpment of his fame, the rosy cliffs forever at his back as he wandered on.
Ash squatted down, resting on her heels. She tore a piece of grass from the mound, ran it through her fingers. "And I'd come here when my daddy-paddy was beating the living shit out of my mum, and sometimes us too." She looked up at me. "Stop me if you've heard this one before, Prentice."
I hunkered down too, shaking my head as much to clear it as to deny. "Well, not exactly, but I knew it wasn't all sweetness and light, chez Watt."
"Fuckin right it wasn't," Ash said, and sounded bitter. The blade or grass ran through her fingers, was turned round, passed through again. She looked up, shrugged. "Anyway, sometimes I came out here just because the house smelled of chip-fat or the telly was too loud, just to remind myself there was more to the world than 47 Bruce Street and endless arguments about fag money and which one of us got a new pair of shoes."
"Aye, well," I said, at a loss really to know what to say. Maybe I get uncomfortable being reminded there are worse backgrounds than coming from a family of mostly amiable over-achievers.
"Anyway," she said again. They're levelling the lot tomorrow." Ash looked back over her shoulder. I followed her gaze. "That's what all that plant's for."
I remembered the Triffid jokes we used to make about Heavy Plant Crossing, and only then saw the dim outlines of a couple of bulldozers and a JCB, a little way off down the piece of waste ground.
"Aw, shit," I said, eloquently.
"An exclusive marina development with attractive fishing-village-style one- and two-bedroom flats with dedicated moorings, double garages and free membership of the private health club," Ash said, in a Kelvinside accent.
"Fffuck," I shook my head.
"What the hell," Ashley said, rising. "I suppose the Glasgow middle classes have to go somewhere after they've braved the treacherous waters of the Crinan canal." She gave her hands one final dust. "Hope they're happy there."
We turned to leave the mound, me and the Ash, then I grabbed her arm. "Hi." She turned to me. "Berlin," I said. The jacuzzi; I just remembered."
"Oh yeah." She started walking down the slope, back to the weeds, the junk and the ankle-high remains of old brick walls. I followed her. "I was in Frankfurt," she said. "Seeing this friend from college? We heard things were happening in Berlin so we hitched and trained it; met up with… Well, it's a long story, but I ended up in this fancy hotel, in the swimming pool; and had a big whirlpool bath in a wee sort of island at one end, and this drunken English guy was trying hard to chat me up, and making fun of my accent and —»
"Cheeky basturt," I said as we got to the main road.
We waited while a couple of cars sped north out of town.
That's what I thought," Ashley nodded, as we crossed the road. "Anyway, when I told him where I came from he started saying he knew the place well and he'd been shooting here, and fishing, and knew the laird and —»
"Do we have a laird?" I didn't know. Perhaps he meant Uncle Fergus."
"Maybe, though when I asked him that he got cagey and said no… but the point is he was acting all mysterious about something, and he'd already said there was somebody here who was having the wool pulled over their eyes, and had been for a long time, and he thought their name was… " Ash stopped at the snicket that led up to Bruce Street. My route back to Uncle Hamish's house went straight along the main road.
I looked up the wee path, lit by a single yellow street lamp, half way up. Then I looked back into Ashley Watt's eyes.
"Not McHoan, by any chance?" I asked.
"Yep," Ash nodded.
"Hmm," I said. Because McHoans are fairly thin on the ground around here. Or anywhere, for that matter.
"Who was this guy?"
"Journalist. There to cover the big knock-down."
"What was his name?"
"Rudolph something, I think somebody called him. He wouldn't say."
"You might have used your feminine wiles."
"Well, at the time they were more or less fully employed on a systems analyst from Texas with shoulders wide as the prairie sky and a gold company Amex card, to be perfectly honest, Prentice." Ash smiled sweetly.
I shook my head. "Saucy bitch."
Ash grabbed my balls through my 501s and squeezed gently. My breath baled out.
"Language, Prentice," she said, then released, covered my mouth with hers, wiped my teeth with her tongue, then swivelled, walked away.
"Wow," I said. The old testes were complaining, but only slightly. I cleared my throat. "Night, Ashley," I said, cool as I could.
Ash turned, grinning, then reached into her big, naval-looking jacket with the brass buttons and fished something out; threw it.
I caught the projectile; a little lump of grey concrete, smooth and dark on one side.
"Die Mauer," she said, walking backwards. "Actually from the section near the Brandenburg Gate where it said, 'Viele viele bunte Smarties!. The red paint on one surface used to be in the middle of the dot in the last 'i'. Bit of the world that used to be between Germanics." She waved. "Night, Prentice."
I looked at the grainy chunk of concrete in my hand. "Wow," I breathed. Ash's fair hair flared briefly under the street light, then dimmed as she walked away. "Wow!"