69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess (8 page)

By the time we got back to the car, Alan was talking about a novel called
The Hackman Blues
by Ken Bruen. While Alan thought the book was competently executed, he wasn’t interested in getting inside the mind of a psychotic criminal, particularly when the first-person narrator manages to constitute himself as a centred subject despite the fact that he’d been medicalised in a way that makes it clear he was highly resistant to bourgeois norms. A dog howled at the moon and Alan mentioned his real beef about Bruen’s book. The narrator, who has zero taste when it comes to booze, at one point orders a Glenfiddich because he thinks it makes him sound as if he knows his stuff. Alan would have taken an Islay any day of the week. I think it was there and then in the car, as Alan ranted about Ken Bruen, that I decided I’d devote my middle years to a militant campaign aimed at the liberation of prostitutes.

Alan didn’t bother asking the farmer’s permission, we just motored straight back to the Granite City. We weren’t travelling far, seven or so miles, and as he drove Alan told me about a book he’d read by a guy called Peter Mason called
The Brown Dog Affair.
It was a true and historical account of a monument to a vivisected dog put up in London in 1906. The statue was considered provocative by reactionaries and its erection led to riots on the part of medical students the following year. I couldn’t really fathom Alan’s enthusiasm for the book and I still can’t although I have this self-published curiosity in front of me as I write. From the heights of Portlethen the Granite City was spread beneath us like silver on white linen. The view reminded Alan of a book he’d once read called
A Grain of Truth: A Scottish Journalist Remembers
by Jack Webster. Alan chuckled about this old hack going completely over the top as he described returning from Glasgow to his native Aberdeenshire.

That evening we ate at Pacific Winds, which advertised itself as the most elegant and spacious restaurant in Aberdeen. Chinese and Thai cuisine, telephone 01224 572362, 25 Crown Terrace, open seven days, lunch 12–2pm, evening 5.30–11pm. All major credit cards accepted. We both ate cashew-nut stir-fry under an enchanted moon. Even more than the food, I savoured the welcome of courteous service. Alan showed me a used copy of T. S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets
between the starter and the main course. I remember reading the hand-written inscription on the blank pages at the back of the book for the first time in Pacific Winds, I’ve read it many times since: ‘18th July 1961. This evening we sat on a semi-circular red sand bin at Aldgate bus station waiting for a Green Line coach. We read, Love . . . ceases . . .’ I spilt coffee on the book several years ago and most of the quoted lines of poetry became unreadable due to smudging.

As we relished the pleasure of exceptional dishes and a soothing atmosphere of soft music, I still retained sufficient use of my critical faculties to realise that there was nothing startlingly original about Alan’s claim that T. S. Eliot was a reactionary. Likewise, it wasn’t difficult to see why Alan felt he’d been raped when bourgeois culture had been forced upon him during the course of lessons at the London secondary school he’d attended. Alan felt it was wrong to repress memories of abuse, he wanted to understand what had happened to him, why he’d been the only boy in his class to make it all the way to university. Alan had been raped by those who’d forced him to constitute himself as a bourgeois subject but his tormentors had been similarly abused.

That night, or one night before or after it, I refused to let Alan into my bedsit. I was embarrassed. I wanted to hide the evidence of abuse. Alan didn’t know I’d been buying up his unwanted books as he flogged them to the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. I got into the habit of taking the books to the shop for him. Actually, I’d just take his fraying carrier bags straight to my place. Cut out the middle man. I was a gender bender. Adopting a bourgeois sensibility not only made me a centred subject, I was simultaneously coded white and male. As a teenage girl I’d had a fetish for snakes but Alan gave me a fetish for books. I liked the smell of them, old and musty, I liked to cup them in my hands as I took a shit. I no longer let Alan come around to my place. The shelves in his pad were emptying. He was beginning to tear out the wood and metal brackets supporting them. I took the shelving when I could. Reerected it in my bedsit. Books were piling up on the floor. Towers of books were piled up against the walls. There were books jammed under my bed. I wanted to possess Alan by possessing everything he’d ever read.

That night I curled up with a copy of
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader,
edited with introductions by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. I fell asleep reading an essay by Theodor W. Adorno entitled ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’. I was neglecting my studies, I preferred to read Alan’s books.
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader
was a compromise. It had belonged to Alan but would help me with my course work. The green spine was faded and badly scored. I bought the tome for £5.95 from the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. The price was pencilled onto the flyleaf. The original price sticker was still on the back, £6.60 Net BASIL BLACKWELL. I was certain Alan hadn’t bought the book new and wondered how much he’d paid for it.

I slept uneasily. I dreamt that the towers of books piled up around me came crashing down onto the bed, crushing me. I died and Dudley strode into the ruins of my room dressed in a fireman’s uniform. The dummy sifted purposely through the wreckage, eventually locating my body under multiple copies of
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess.
Then Dudley sodomised me. After shooting his load into my rotting rectum, he took a big bite out of my buttock. The dummy became increasingly excited as he slapped my dead flesh and called me hundreds of insulting names. Slut. Harlot. Trollop. Arsewipe. Turd burglar. Shirt lifter. Brown nose. Dudley spread me across the bed, carefully parting my legs as he did so. Then he took a straw from behind his left ear and shoved it inside me. The dummy pushed the straw into my bladder and sucked out urine. He was taking the piss. Being inanimate himself, Dudley thought it was funny that I was dead.

FIVE

I DON
’
T
remember when I woke up or where I met Alan. However, I do know that I’d been up to his flat on Union Grove before we drove out to the Maiden Stone at Bennachie. Alan was angry that I hadn’t let him sleep with me the night before. I was embarrassed, my bedsit was overflowing with the books he’d been selling. At first I’d just been buying them from the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. Then I’d hit on the idea of offering to take them up to the secondhand shop on my way to the university. I’d bung Alan a bit of cash and simply take his books back to my pad on King Street. This made things easier all round, except that I didn’t want Alan to know I had all his old books – which meant I could no longer allow him to visit me at my bedsit.

Perhaps we didn’t drive straight out to the Maiden Stone, we may have visited some stone circles first. It’s hard to put everything back together in the correct order. I’d not had much sleep. I’d sat up most of the night before reading through some of Alan’s old books. Thinking back through everything, we probably went to Archaeolink at Oyne first. I wanted a coffee on the way so Alan suggested we get cappuccinos in the Safeway café on the edge of Inverurie, quite close to the well-preserved Easter Aquhorthies stone circle. I thought a coffee would wake me up but I didn’t want to go to a supermarket for my breakfast, so I made Alan drive me out to Archaeolink. We didn’t have to pay the admission charge since we weren’t there to see the reconstructions of Iron-Age life. I got angry with Alan since he insisted on seating Dudley at our table.

After Archaeolink we headed for the Maiden Stone. Alan took a photograph of me standing in front of the easterly side of the stone. I took a picture of him and Dudley from the western side. Portraits done, we got back in the car and drove to Esson’s Car Park which abuts the Bennachie Centre with its toilets and wide range of interpretative material about the mountain. Personally, I don’t understand why this facility doesn’t include a café. Anyway, we took the steep and direct route to Mither Tap with Dudley strapped to Alan’s back. The first part of the ascent is a relatively gentle forest walk and as we wended our way through the pines, Alan discoursed on the relative merits of Grampian Region as opposed to the Highlands proper. Aberdeenshire had plenty of rich farmland, as well as mountains and forests. Where it differed from the western side of Scotland was in its relatively small number of lochs. While the sea was never far away, the mountains didn’t interact with water or rise sheer from it in the spectacular fashion that made the Highlands and Islands such a tourist trap.

The scenery of Grampian and the Hebrides present some remarkable contrasts. Every observant traveller in the Western Isles will readily acknowledge that the beauty of their rugged shores is greatly enhanced by the sea and its surroundings. In this aspect both Sutherland and the Hebrides outdo even the peaks of Switzerland. Grand as are the snow-clad peaks of the Alps, the absence of the ocean in the land of John Calvin cannot fail to be regarded as a serious want by anyone who has been accustomed to watch the various aspects of that wondrous element. While Aberdeenshire was blessed with the picturesque influence of the sea on its eastern shore, it lacked the illimitable effect found in the west of Scotland where mountains rose sheer from the water. The sublime charm of the scenery of the Western Isles is founded on the three greatest powers in nature – the sky, the sea and the mountains.

The west of Scotland and the Hebrides had held pride of place in the imagination of the tourist and the bohemian since the roads to the isles had been opened up in the 18th century. Among the earliest published works to kindle this interest were Martin Martin’s
Voyage To St Kilda
and
A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland.
The former was first published in 1697 and the latter in 1703. As Dudley explained to me while we gazed down at the countryside spread beneath us from the heights of Mither Tap, Martin has traditionally been credited with inspiring Boswell and Johnson to make their much-celebrated tour of Scotland. However, Dudley hastened to add, the influence of works such as Thomas Pennant’s
A Tour Of Scotland in 1769
is often underestimated. Like Pennant, Boswell and Johnson visited Aberdeen but their recorded impressions of the town are supercilious indeed when contrasted with those of the Welshman who visited it four years before them.

‘Aberdeen, a fine city, lying on a small bay formed by the Dee, deep enough for ships of two hundred tons. The town is about two miles in circumference, and contains thirteen thousand souls, and about three thousand in the suburbs; but the whole number of inhabitants between the bridges Dee and Don, which includes both the Aberdeens, and the interjacent houses, or hamlets, is estimated at twenty thousand. It once enjoyed a good share of the tobacco trade, but was at length forced to resign it to Glasgow, which was so much more conveniently situated for it. At present, its imports are from the Baltic, and a few merchants trade to the West Indies and North America. Its exports are stockings, thread, salmon, and oatmeal: the first is a most important article, as appears by the following state of it. For this manufacture, 20,800 pounds worth of wool is annually imported, and 1600 pounds worth of oil.

‘Of this wool is annually made 69,333 pairs of stockings, worth, at an average, one pound and ten shillings per dozen. These are made by the country people, in almost all parts of this great county, who get four shillings per dozen for spinning and fourteen shillings per dozen for knitting; so that there is annually paid sixty-two thousand three hundred and twenty-nine pounds and fourteen shillings. And besides this there is about two thousand pounds value of stockings manufactured from the wool of the county, which encourages the breed of sheep much; for even as high as Invercauld, the farmer sells his sheep at twelve shillings apiece, and keeps them till they are four or five years old, for the sake of the wool. About two hundred combers are also employed constantly. Thread manufacture is another considerable article, tho’ trifling in comparison of the woollen.’

While Johnson praised Pennant as the best traveller to Scotland he had ever read, in naming the journal he kept of his tour of 1773
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
, he helped set the fashion that has held steady from the romantics to modern-day hippies for favouring the Highlands over the more densely populated north-east coastal strip. Boswell, who accompanied Johnson on the jaunt, called his impressions of the trip
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.
Once the sights of tourists bound for Scotland were fixed firmly to the west, travellers had little incentive to journey to the north-east. Both Sarah Murray, author of
A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland
, and Dorothy Wordsworth, who compiled a journal entitled
Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803
, left Aberdeen off their itinerary. Johnson’s approach was more caustic.

‘To write of the cities of our own island with the solemnity of geographical description, as if we had been cast upon a newly discovered coast, has the appearance of very frivolous ostentation; yet as Scotland is little known to the greater part of those who may read those observations, it is not superfluous to relate that under the name of Aberdeen are comprised two towns, standing about a mile distant from each other, but governed, I think, by the same magistrates. Old Aberdeen is the ancient episcopal city in which are still to be seen the remains of the cathedral. It has the appearance of a town in decay, having been situated in times when commerce was yet unstudied, with very little attention to the commodities of the harbour. New Aberdeen has all the bustle of prosperous trade, and all the shew of increasing opulence. It is built by the waterside. The houses are large and lofty, and the streets spacious and clean. They build almost wholly with the granite used in the new pavement of the streets of London, which is well known not to want hardness, yet they shape it easily. It is beautiful and must be very lasting. What particular parts of commerce are chiefly exercised by the merchants of Aberdeen I have not inquired. The manufacture which forces itself up a stranger’s eye is that of knit-stockings, on which the women of the lower class are visibly employed. In each of these towns there is a college, or in stricter language a university; for in both there are professors of the same parts of learning, and the colleges hold their sessions and confer degrees separately, with total independence of one on the other.’