And the Land Lay Still (10 page)

There was this other door out of the kitchen, not the one he came in by, so away he goes through it and down the passage, and the first door he comes to he chaps and he goes in. It’s a dark room with the curtains pulled, just a chink of light coming in, and in the corner of the room is a big old armchair, with someone sitting in it. So he goes up to her, it’s an auld, auld woman, even wee-er than Aunt Greta, all runkled and shrunken, staring at him through a pair of glasses thick as bottles, her eyes are all screwed up but she can see him all right in the darkness. ‘Who are you,’ she says, ‘and what do you want?’ So he goes through the same thing, telling her about Jean’s story and how Aunt Greta had sent him through because she didn’t know the end of the story, and the auld woman gives a frown that ripples her forehead up like a beach when the tide goes out and she says, ‘Well, I never heard the end of that story either, but if you go further down the passage there’s another room where my auld mither bides, she’s an invalid in her bed but she kens all the stories, she’ll maybe can help you.’ So away he goes to the next room, there’s an iron bedstead heaped up with blankets and it’s very dark but he can just make out, in the middle of the bed, a tiny body, all grey skin and sticking-out bones, almost like a skeleton and barely three foot long, and with just wee scraps of white hair on the skull. The boy’s awfie feart by this stage but he’s come this far so he leans over and clears his throat, gives a wee cough, and these vicious wee eyes open in the skull and a voice that seems to come from the depths of the blankets croaks, ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ He tells this strange, half-dead creature the whole thing and she lies there staring at him hatefully and then she says, ‘I never heard the end of
that
story. If you want to ken the end of
that
one you’ll need to go next door and ask my auld mither, she’s asleep in the kist at the end of the bed.’ And he goes to the next room and in there it’s just an iron bedstead, no blankets, no pillows, no mattress, just the old bed with the springs, as if somebody used to sleep there but they’ve died or gone away or something, and the laddie looks in the gloom and right enough there’s an old kist at the end of the bed, so he goes to lift up the lid, it’s like a coffin, and inside there’s this wee cot, with a creature no bigger than a doll lying in it, and if the last one was thin, well, the flesh on this one is stretched so tight you can actually see the bones through it, and under the bones the vital
organs working away. And the student is terrified but he can’t turn back now so he leans right in and calls out and at once these two piercing eyes are staring out at him. ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ It’s as if the voice is coming from a hole in the floor. He starts to explain but she cuts him off after just a few seconds. ‘How would I ken the end of that story? You’ll need to ask my auld mither and you’ll be lucky if you get an answer at all she’s that auld and crabbit.’ He asks her where he can find her and she says, ‘Lift out the shoebox that’s lying at the other end of the kist, she’s in there.’ So he finds this shoebox, just a simple cardboard shoebox, and he takes it out and slowly, oh so slowly, he removes the lid. At first he thinks there’s nothing there, there’s just a lot of auld yellowish cotton wool. And then to his horror he sees that there are three things lying on the cotton wool: an ear, an eye and a mouth. That’s all, just an ear, an eye and a mouth. And the eye is staring at him with a venomous look, and the mouth says, ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ so he leans right down and puts his own lips to the lug and tells his story, starting with Jean telling him to go through to her Aunt Greta, but after a sentence or two the mouth interrupts. ‘No,’ it says, ‘begin at the beginning.’ So he goes further back, to when he arrived at the house that evening, but the mouth says, ‘No, further. Begin at the beginning.’ So he goes back to when he first started at the university and what he was studying, but the mouth breaks in again, ‘No, before that.’ So he goes back to his childhood, and then to his earliest memories, and then to his parents, and how they met, and where they came from, and who
their
parents were, and his great-grandparents, he goes back as far as he can in his family history, and when he’s run out of ancestors the mouth says, ‘And what happened before
that
?’ and he finds he’s telling the lug everything he knows about history and prehistory and geology until he finally runs out of words. He’s exhausted and close to greeting, and the mouth says, ‘And what happened before
that
?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘And
I
don’t know how the story
ends
!’ the mouth shrieks, and it starts to cackle, and the eye never blinks, just stares at him all the while the mouth is cackling, and at that his nerves are in tatters, he can’t stand it any more, he shoves the lid back on the shoebox and throws it in the kist and slams the kist shut and rushes out of that room and down the passage with that
horrible laugh in his ears and he runs out of the house and back on to the street and, do you know, Jean said, that young laddie has never shown his face in this house again.

§

Mike did. He turned up regularly, sometimes alone, sometimes with other stray seekers after traditions in which they wished to be included. Jean and the Old Town seemed to go together. She was part of the magic of the city, a benevolent spider at its heart, fascinating, witchlike, imperishable.

Even the journey you had to make to visit her was something of an otherworldly experience. It took Mike two or three shots before he felt confident of the way. Her house was hidden, deep in where the tourists didn’t penetrate. It was a flat but it had a door all to itself and, though there must have been neighbours above and to either side of her, you never heard or saw them. You reached the door via a close, a courtyard, another close and a stone stair, and you never seemed to arrive there twice by quite the same route. The noise of traffic and people died away as you made your way from the street, and it was as if you were also stepping out of the moment, going a long way back in time or maybe forward. And the door was dark and low and no matter how many times you’d rung the bell before it always seemed, as you waited to be let in, that it could only open on to a cramped, narrow place, two or three rooms at most. But the house was larger somehow on the inside than on the outside, as if over the centuries it had grown tired of being constrained by the stone walls and had shouldered and stretched itself into more comfortable dimensions. There was a big hallway and a passage that led to three bedrooms. There was a kitchen with a range and a dresser filled with plates and dishes, pots and glassware, and a pine table that could seat twelve. There was a bathroom, panelled from floor to ceiling in dark wood, with an enormous bath resting on clawed feet right in the middle, a sink you could have washed a large dog in, and a toilet with an overhead cistern that whistled and spluttered like a toothless man in his sleep. And then there was the ‘front room’, which actually was at the back, looking out over a jumble of slates, skylights, lum-pots, crow steps and TV aerials to Salisbury Crags, through three windows under each of
which sat a cast-iron radiator with ribs like tubas. The house lived under layers of dust and piles of books, papers, clothes, records and anything else Jean couldn’t be bothered to put away, but ‘If I can look out on that view,’ she used to say, ‘I know I’m still here. I know I’m still in the world.’ It was a weird observation, but in that secret, misshapen house, where time and location seemed habitually distorted, it more or less made sense.

As Angus had promised, there was always something going on at Jean’s, always one or two familiar faces, and always one or two new ones. Walter Fleming might be there, or some other performer; and sometimes they would bring others from elsewhere: a Cape Breton fiddler, a Nigerian poet – once, an Egyptian oud player who appeared unannounced, played and smiled without cease for two hours and was never seen by anybody again. And, as well as such entertainment, there was talk: talk of literature, history, art, music, travel and – more than anything – political talk. Mike had never come across such enthusiasm for political debate, especially when it revolved around questions of national identity and self-determination. There was none of Greatcoat’s dismissiveness when it came to these matters. Arguments were plentiful – often conducted at maximum volume and with the most outrageous insults traded between otherwise perfectly good friends – and occasionally they degenerated into brief, ridiculous fights, but for most of the people who came to Jean’s the ‘Scottish question’ was as integral to their political thinking as any other issue. They were in the world, they were of the world, that’s what they thought and felt.

Mike was in the habit of taking his camera with him wherever he went, and he began to take photographs of the drinking, the smoking, the singing, the arguing, the hugging and the kissing. Nobody seemed to object to him doing this.

One night he was astonished to see Duffelcoat from Sandy Bell’s hunched up against one of the radiators, just behind an easygoing pair of students he knew slightly, who’d formed a vaguely nationalistic whisky-drinking club called the Clan Alba Society. Mike didn’t recognise him at first because he’d taken the duffelcoat off. The man caught his eye and nodded, with that same calculating look he’d had in the pub, then leaned back into the Clan Alba boys’ conversation as if he were part of it. There was something disconcerting about the
watchful, sharp eyes, the paunch, the thick but unfashionably short hair, the nervousness that was also somehow cynicism, the grey trousers, collared shirt and V-necked green pullover: he looked too old and too young simultaneously, and he sent out some kind of signal that he didn’t want his picture taken, and Mike didn’t take it. There were lots of misfits at Jean’s, but Duffelcoat didn’t even fit among the misfits.

There was a Highland crew, mostly female. They were from various different places – Skye, Inverness, Dingwall, Brora – but they had a camaraderie and a fierce loyalty to one another that impressed Mike. The ones from Sutherland were themselves impressed that Mike had not only heard of places like Kinlochbervie and Tongue but had actually been in them. Some of the girls had sung in school choirs at the Mod; they could still sing the songs even though most of them didn’t speak Gaelic. And they were all full of a play that had been touring the village halls earlier that year, which seemed to have entered their collective consciousness:
The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil
. This stirred something in his memory, he recalled posters stuck up on noticeboards that summer, but he and Angus hadn’t been to see it. How could you have missed it? they berated him, it was brilliant. Some of them had seen it three times. It was about the destruction of Gaelic culture after the Battle of Culloden, the clearing of people from the glens to make way for sheep, the evil factor Patrick Sellar and the big landowners he worked for like the Duke of Sutherland, the huge estates they had for deer stalking and grouse shooting and salmon fishing, and now the North Sea was full of oil and
that
was going to be exploited too, only by the Americans this time, and would the
real
people of the Highlands reap anything but a fraction of the rewards? Would they buggery! The play had been put on by a theatre company called 7:84. ‘What?’ ‘7:84.’ ‘Why’s it called that?’ ‘Because 7 per cent of the population owns 84 per cent of the country’s wealth! Do you not know
any
thing, Mike?’ they screamed, half-angry and half-laughing at his naivety. ‘Not much,’ he said, and took a photograph of them screaming at him.

There was one girl, as bright and bubbly as he was shy and withdrawn, a real beauty, Catriona MacKay from Inverness. He liked her more than the others. She loved to get drunk, and he didn’t
mind joining her, although it took a lot less alcohol to put him on the floor than it did her. That autumn they spent more and more time together, at Jean’s and elsewhere. Sisterly, brotherly love, or the love of two drinking cronies, but with the promise of something else in it …

His digs weren’t working out and Jean took pity on him and occasionally let him sleep in one of her spare rooms when he couldn’t face going back. Mrs Petrie, his landlady, was well into her seventies and her ability to cope with life was sinking under the weight of her years just as her house – the lower half of a crumbling Victorian villa – seemed to be sinking under the ever-lengthening list of repairs both it and the upper level needed. The rent was cheap but there were reasons: the sheets were damp and the rooms cold, and there was only ever lukewarm water for the bath. Mrs Petrie provided a breakfast of cornflakes, thin blue milk and suspect, cardboardy toast that he got into the habit of scraping with his knife in case of mould. The butter was rancid, the cutlery was greasy and the dining room smelled of mice. There was another lodger, a medical student called Eric Hodge. They had to be out of the place by nine in the morning and weren’t supposed to come back before five, and although they each had a Yale key for the front door Mrs Petrie had a security chain that went on at eleven every night. Fortunately, by creeping down next-door’s drive, climbing over the wrought-iron fence and through Eric’s bedroom window, using a knife they kept in the garden for the purpose of unsnecking the catch, they could come and go as they wished, but it wasn’t convenient. Mrs Petrie was deaf, dirty and obstinate, and whatever pity they might have felt for her was erased by hatred of her petty tyrannies.

On the weekend the clocks went back, when they should have had an extra hour in bed, Mrs Petrie put
her
clock forward and roused them for breakfast at six-thirty. She refused to believe them when they protested, and when they made her listen to the seven-o’clock news on the radio she accused them of conspiring to send her mad and have her locked up. Eric the medic said that could easily be arranged. She shut herself in her room and the two of them started to look elsewhere for accommodation. Mike half-hoped that Jean might take them in but she said no, the only permanent resident of her house was herself, that was how it had always been and
that was how she preferred it. By the end of November Eric and Mike had found a two-bedroom flat near Tollcross.