And the Land Lay Still (35 page)

PART THREE

All these fucking conversations in your head. Single-sided, a lot of them. One-versations. Nobody talking back, or you to yourself. Years, decades of dialogue, monologue. Thousands, tens of thousands of words. Millions. And who gives a fuck? You don’t yourself but that doesn’t stop the words battering round the inner wall of your skull.

Aye you do.

It would be good to have someone to talk to.

Croick, maybe. Even Canterbury. Somebody who actually understands where you’re coming from. But Croick’s dead and Canterbury’s God knows where. In some care home for the politically deranged maybe. Or a cottage in rural Britannia pruning his roses. Never knew exactly how old either of them were, but Canterbury must be close to ninety if he’s not beyond it. If he isn’t dead too.

Ach he’ll be dead, surely?

Lots of other people are definitely still alive but you can’t speak to lots of other people. You’re a ghost. You made yourself a ghost some time ago. You’re on the other side of an invisible something. People see you but they don’t speak to you, and you can’t speak to them.

Maybe they don’t even see you.

Aye they do. The guy in the café saw you. You read the signs. The glance. The frown. The second glance. The guy didn’t place you, not then, but he will have by now. The memory will have come back. Or not. It doesn’t for everybody.

It does for you, Peter Bond. The memory always comes back. You’ve that kind of brain. Full of filing cabinets. That’s what the inside of your head’s like. A dome like the old British Library’s and round the walls shelves and shelves of reference books, and corridors leading off lined with stacks, the stacks laden with cardboard folders, box files, arch files, and rooms off the corridors crammed with grey steel cabinets. Every document catalogued
and retrievable. You can retrieve anything. Could. Not so good now. You’re like a computer but you don’t imagine your head as a computer because you’re from a pre-computer age; you can visualise card indexes not gigabytes – how the fuck do you visualise a gigabyte? – you were born in an age of small libraries in small towns and bigger libraries in bigger towns and huge libraries in cities and that’s what you are, a walking library, that’s how you grew up, how you were trained, how you were and are and will be till the doors close and the lights go out for the last time.

Which, the way you’re feeling, might not be that far off.

All the more reason why it would be good to have someone to talk to.

And maybe that’s what Croick thought, away back then. That time he summoned you. Maybe that was all he wanted. He’d run out of time, and he wanted to talk, and you were the only one even vaguely approaching the idea of a friend he had left.

That was in the days when you still had a telephone. Well, you still have a telephone but it’s been dead for years. Another reason for the one-versations. No bastard ever calls you because your phone’s been cut off by the bastard phone company.

But Croick called you. Because you were the only one he had left. He called you because he wanted to get it all off his chest, out of his system, before the lights went out.

Wait a minute. Who’s putting the lights out? Who’s closing the doors? And who’s this coming at you? Wait a fucking minute. Some kind of uniform. A security guard. What the fuck is a security guard doing in your head? In
your
head? And why doesn’t he have a face? STAY BACK, YA CUNT!

All right, all right, calm down. Deep breaths. Nobody there after all. Just yourself. Empty room, empty corridors. Everything as it should be. Apart from one thing. One particular door at the end of one particular corridor. Security-locked. Sign on it saying
NO ENTRY, AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY
. Stuff in there you should have access to but never did, too late now. In your own fucking head. Somebody put the bodies in and sealed the door and now you’re like Bluebeard’s wife, you want the key but you don’t, you want to know but you don’t, you can’t face it, you can’t face it, you can’t face it.

Get a grip, Peter. Behave yourself. Aye, right. Just sit in the corner like a good auld boy and read the papers. That’s it, that’s it. Deep breaths. Now. Let’s try again.

He placed the guy in the café at once. Pendreich, Michael. Photographer. Did some of the covers for
Root & Branch
. Devo-porn. Twenty-five issues, 1984 to 1989 or thereabouts. Provided a lot of the photographs. Did some of the cartoons too. All donated freely to the cause. Peter recognised him instantly.

What else does he know about him? Father: Angus, also a photographer, a better one, more successful anyway. Much more. Died two or three years ago, a few more-or-less respectful obits. Aye, Peter still reads the papers and he still reads between the lines. So. Michael Pendreich: soft-left, soft-nationalist, presumably still is but who knows, we’re not what we were.
Self-determination
: that was the catch-all term folk like Pendreich used, trying to be as inclusive as they could. Let the people decide how far they want to travel: a worthy and reasonable enough sentiment, if you think the people give a damn. Peter first clocked him years before as a student, in Sandy Bell’s, then hanging out at Jean Barbour’s place. Then later, in his journalist phase, he saw Pendreich from time to time, this meeting, that march. You take care, Peter wanted to say to him. Maybe he did say it to him and doesn’t remember because although he never forgets a face he often forgets an incident. You take care, you’re being watched. He didn’t know if it was true because by then it wasn’t himself doing the watching, but he knew it was more than likely.

In the self-determination wars Pendreich was only ever a foot soldier not a strategist, indian not chief. That was the thing about Scotland back then, nobody wanted to be a chief. Still true today. You can see it as healthy or limiting. The downside of ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’: if I try to be a chief some other bastard will take the feet from under me. The sliding tackle of the Democratic Intellect.

There’s intellect and intelligence and then there’s Intelligence. Peter’s stock-in-trade, or used to be. God, how Intelligence hates having to deal with indians. It prefers chiefs, ringleaders. It struggles with decent, ordinary human beings who become political radicals
not because they’re either very political or very radical but simply because they’ve had enough: it means they can’t so easily be victimised, demonised, isolated, framed, entrapped, beaten up, imprisoned or otherwise neutralised. Decent? Does he really mean decent? Aye, he does, certainly in comparison with some of the shites on the other side, his side as was. Decent and thrawn. They just dig in their heels, these people. Doesn’t matter what the cause is. Take that Jim Swire whose daughter was killed in the Lockerbie bombing. Jesus, Intelligence loathed him. Like a terrier he was, just got gripped on with his teeth and wouldn’t let go, and it was clear as day to everyone that
he
was a decent man with nothing to gain but the truth and what he was getting was evasion and obstruction and downright fucking lies and he was never going to be satisfied with that. No, no. Pick a self-promoting radical any day if you want a victim or a demon. Pick a George Galloway or a Peter Tatchell. Oh aye, something else about Pendreich: he’s gay.

Otherwise neutralised
. Very good. Like
extraordinary rendition, collateral damage
. One of
those
phrases.

When Peter saw him in the café he thought, now there’s somebody I could have a dialogue with. Some shared ground, some mutual acquaintances. We could talk about the old days. But he didn’t go over. He went on reading his
Scotsman
, initiating imaginary conversations as his coffee got cold, and ten minutes later Pendreich stood up and left.

He might have followed him but he doesn’t maintain much of a pace these days and Pendreich looked fit. Anyway, what would have been the point? It’s not as if the guy has anything to hide, or Peter has anything to find out. Those days are over, if they ever existed.

It’s not as if he has a job any more. A
role
. Freelance, floating or otherwise. There’ll be somebody out there, trying to fuck things up Croick-style, trying to drag the process out, but it isn’t Peter.

How far apart people’s lives are, and yet how closely they miss each other. How small an adjustment would have left you leading another man’s life, and him leading yours.

He paid the waitress at the till. She was glad to see the back of him. He knows he’s deteriorating fast, on the edge of being completely unacceptable in public places. He’s not yet quite so
far gone that he doesn’t wash his clothes, there’s a launderette where he takes everything, wouldn’t mind getting in the big machine himself sometimes, nevertheless he’s not the favourite client of Edinburgh teashops, no sir. It’s not happened yet, not that he can remember anyway, but the day is coming when he’ll be ejected before he’s even managed to spot a vacant seat.

On the way back to the flat he had a pint in Maggie Dickson’s, and in a shop on Bread Street he bought a bottle of cheap whisky to replace the one he finished the night before.

The flat is a midden. The kitchen trails dirty plates and coffee mugs and biscuit crumbs into the living room which spills newspapers and books and pens and folders into the tiny passage and along it in one direction to the front door where the junk mail lies and in the other to the bathroom and the bedroom. The bathroom is sticky and foul and foreign, he goes in there as seldom as possible, to do the basics, to shit and pee and occasionally puke. Sometimes to clean himself up a bit. Standing room only in the bath, Christ you wouldn’t want to sit down in it, there’s a shower over it and a shower curtain with a slimy hem and if you’re not too fussy about the soles of your feet it’s tolerable. Silverfish everywhere. Resilient wee fuckers. Then there’s the bedroom: a dark, bio-hazardous hole he ends up in sometimes when he doesn’t fall asleep in a chair. If he wakes up in his bed he wonders how the fuck he got there. Welcome to the Hotel Caledonia.

This is the wreckage he lives among: the wreckage of an edifice he tried to construct for more than forty years, but which was crumbling almost from the outset, was mothballed in the late 1970s, suffered a serious structural failure in the mid-1980s and collapsed more or less completely in the spring of 1997. It’s a fitting monument to his own wrecked life. In modern-art terms, a kind of un-installation made up of unfound objects. If his name was Tracey Emin he’d be a genius. A rich fucking genius too. He scrabbles around on the debris, vaguely trying to piece it together again even though there’s now no point. He could clear it out but he doesn’t. That would mean clearing out his entire adult life.

What makes him shudder, what makes him so disappointed in himself, what makes him sit there on the stale settee with the
whisky on the table in front of him, him staring at it, it staring at him just sitting there like Alice in fucking Wonderland saying drink me drink me, what makes him pick the bottle up, its lovely cool familiar glassiness, what makes him turn the metal cap, feeling the retaining seal give a little, letting go, turning it again, letting go, testing himself, resisting, testing, ah fuck it turning the cap completely, the click of release, the beautiful fumes, lifting the lovely weight of the full bottle, pouring the first glassful, glug glug glug, what makes him do this night after night isn’t the fact that he’s been taken for a total ride, that he’s been fooled and used and discarded. It’s the fact that he conspired to allow it to happen, that he pretty much knew all along, even as it was happening, that he didn’t have the guts to call time, walk away, blow the whistle, whatever phrase you want to apply he simply didn’t do it. He can hear a voice, from years back, sounds like his father:
Ye’ve let yersel doon, son.
That’s it, he let himself down and this is him not letting himself get back up again because that’s how he deals with it. Or doesn’t deal with it. He is sixty-eight years old, for fuck’s sake. One minute you’re listening to ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados, the next you’re a pensioned-off drunk in a stinking flat in a run-down street that you, ya shaky auld cunt, to quote a youth he accidentally nudged when crossing it recently, should be afraid to go out in at night. But that’s one thing at least: he isn’t afraid of the dark or what might lie in wait outside. The stuff that unnerves him is right there with him in the flat.

Actually, in retrospect maybe he bought two bottles.

So, if he’s a ghost. How would that have happened? Ex-spook becomes ghost. One thing he knows from his life in the shadows is how people fade in and out. They matter, they don’t matter, they’re tailed, they’re not tailed, somebody cares, nobody cares. Other people remember them, forget them. Over time this has an effect: their existence starts to break up, like a bad TV picture or a dodgy phone connection. We’re not talking here about climbers going missing in a blizzard, fishermen lost at sea. We’re not talking about the ones search-and-rescue operations are launched for. We mean the many others who go, eventually, unnoticed and
unlooked for. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re away themselves. They just fade and flicker until they disappear altogether. Ghosts, right enough. Thousands of them every year. They’re here, then they’re not. Stories without endings. Like a book you can’t be bothered finishing. So why wouldn’t it have happened to him? He’s been half-absent for decades anyway. All it would take is a few stumbles further into the darkness. And let’s face it, Peter stumbles from time to time. So aye, why not him? Why wouldn’t he already have joined the spectral crowd? And who else is out there? Lucy Eddelstane? Aye, she’ll be wandering the lost zone somewhere, no map or compass. Must be. He recognised a kindred spirit when he slept with one. But she’s gone, long gone. They passed like ghost ships in the night.

Who knows though? If he sticks around long enough their paths might cross again. Oh he would love that. Sweet bitter Lucy!

He might even bump – can ghosts bump? – into Mad Uncle Jack, a ghost now for more than fifty years.