Raw Spirit (25 page)

‘That’s what it is,’ Dave says from the back seat as we pass near Lochindorb.

‘What’s what it is?’

‘The reason I don’t like this bit of Scotland as much as the west.’

Jim and I look at each other. Jim shrugs. ‘Well, it can’t be too many distilleries.’

‘Not enough water,’ McCartney says emphatically.

I’m confused. ‘What, with the whisky?’

‘No,’ Dave says. ‘Not enough lochs.’

‘Not enough lochs?’

‘Aye. This rolling scenery and rivers stuff is fine, but the coast isn’t indented enough and there should be more lochs.’

‘Sea lochs? Inland lochs?’

‘Both.’

‘He’s got a point,’ Jim says. ‘There is a distinct lack of large bodies of open water in this neck of the woods.’

‘And I’d like more mountains,’ Dave tells us, patently warming to his theme. ‘Proper jaggedy ones.’

I glance at Jim. ‘By God, he’s a hard man to please.’

‘McCartney’s geographical requirements are notoriously severe.’

‘Anything else you’d like?’ I ask. ‘Major island groups, an isthmus or two? Volcanoes?’

‘Na. Just the lochs and mountains would do.’

‘Leave it with us, Dave,’ Jim says.

‘Absolutely. We’ll see what we can do.’

McCartney looks satisfied. ‘Aye, well. In your own time.’

Back to the Poacher’s Bar for the warm evening; more pool, food and drink. But only after a visit to the chalet, and our rapidly increasing stocks of fine whisky. As a result of this I’m in a sort of pleasantly befuddled, slightly giggly mood. I go out to the old-fashioned phonebox to phone home but there’s no answer. Instead of putting the phone down I kind of get fixated on the wee
bee-bop
(pause)
bee-bop
tone the phone makes
just
to tell you it is a pay phone. After a while it starts to sound like it’s actually saying,
fuck off
(pause)
fuck off
and I start to laugh. This gets quite bad, and I have to put the phone down, take a few deep breaths and dry my eyes before going back into the bar for another game of pool. Which I only lose, I’m convinced, because I keep getting little quakey aftershocks of giggles, usually just as I’m taking a shot.

We have fun in the bar. This is our natural habitat, on this side of the bar. The time – the many years – when we were involved with the Clachan Bar in Dornie seems like a long and terrible aberration. Jim ran the place, then Dave – with Dave’s girlfriend Jenny coming through from Aberdeen whenever she could – and even Ann and I took over for a week to give Dave and Jenny some time off. There were high points, but basically it was one long disaster. Somehow between us all we succeeded in investing over a quarter of a million pounds in the place and then selling it for 50 grand. No amount of creative accounting on Earth is going to turn that into anything other than a financial catastrophe. Oh well; we’re all still alive and mostly talking to each other.

We retire to the chalet to test the bamboozling nine-layer game again, drink more wine and whisky, imbibe ourselves silly and play Scrabble.

At some point in the evening Jim comes up with another Mystery Word; an Ashazhosh of our days.

‘Awemsys.’

‘Awemsys?’

‘Did he just say awemsys?’

‘Yes. He just said awemsys. You did, didn’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Just say awemsys.’

‘Oh aye, yeah, that was me.’

‘So?’

‘So what?’

‘So what does it mean?’

‘Yeah, what
does
it mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You said it; you must know what you were trying to say.’

‘I forget.’

‘You
forget
?’

‘Yeah, I forget.’

‘Well try to remember.’

‘Remember what?’

‘Don’t try to be funny.’

The tragic thing is, at one point later on in the wee small hours Dave and I
do
remember what Jim was saying (despite the fact that what he meant to say actually sounded nothing like awemsys), and get that
Ah-hah
moment, and agree we’ve cracked it.
That
was what awemsys was supposed to mean; of course!

… Except by the next morning we’ve forgotten it again.

Head crash: talking on empty
.

(The following was discovered on my laptop’s hard disk. I’m fairly certain this is what was said but I wouldn’t be so confident about ascribing identities. Anyway, I think it sort of mumbles for itself.)

Robin Genius is a genius.

What?

Robin Genius is a genius.

Robin Genius is a genius?

Yes. Robin Genius is a genius! Why? What’s the problem?

Robin Genius is a genius?

Aye!

You meant Robin Williams, didn’t you?

Don’t be too sure. He might mean Robbie Williams.

Now you’re being even more ridiculous than him.

How am I being ridiculous?

You meant Robin Williams, didn’t you? That he’s a genius.

That’s what I said. Robin Genius is a genius.

He said it again.

You said it again.

Robin Williams is a genius?

No!

Yes!

What?

Eh?

What do you mean, No?

What do
you
mean,
Yes
?

I meant, no, that’s not what he said. That was what he thought he’d said, but it wasn’t what he actually said. Not the first couple of times. That’s what I meant. What did you mean?

I meant, yes, he finally got it right.

What the fuck are you two gibbering about?

You, ya numpty. (disparagingly:) Robin fuckin Genius.

Robin who?

Oh, don’t start again.

What’s he on, anyway?

The same as us. (sound of bottle being tapped)

I was afraid of that.

You guys are starting to talk shite. I’d better open another bottle and pour us all a drink.

We’re
starting to –?

Ssh! Let the man concentrate.

… anyway, he’s been rubbish since he went to Hollywood.

In a way I’d like to report that we spent most evenings engaged in deep discussions about the Iraqi War (Part Deux), its provenance, course, likely repercussions and mooted sequels, but by this time there’s little left to say. The war is as good as won, we’re told, with just some mopping up to be done while the search goes on for those fiendishly well-hidden WMDs.

The three of us know each other so well there’s not much chance any one of us going to surprise the other two by saying something like, ‘Oh no, I was all for the war.’ All there’s been are a few, brief, bitter exchanges confirming we each despise the illegitimate, warmongering scumbag bastard who’s in ultimate charge of our armed forces, and that we don’t have a lot of time for Tony Blair either.

We play Dave’s game instead, where the takings and the
victories
are bloodless, and where, as in most games, there are no civilians.

McCartney: the case for madness
.

It took us years to convince Dave he was crazy. Even the driving under the truck thing didn’t count according to him. To this day he claims that driving underneath a 40-tonne truck in a tiny little Fiat X1/9 sports car just to avoid having to abandon an overtaking manoeuvre halfway through was an entirely sensible thing to do. I could rest my case there, but McCartney won’t let me.

The Fiat X1/9 – the baby Ferrari as it was called at the time – was a beautifully balanced if rather underpowered little car with a targa top you could take off and stow in the boot. Dave foolishly let me have a shot of the car one night in darkest Fleet Street, in the old days when they still printed papers there; I had a great time whizzing through the narrow streets, dodging giant lorries loaded with ten-tonne rolls of newsprint.

Dave was driving the car in north London one bright, sunny day in the early eighties, behind a big articulated truck. He started to overtake, then – when he was about midway along the side of the artic – saw a traffic island ahead blocking his route. Now, he had the top off, so he could see that from the top of the Fiat’s A-pillar – in other words the top of the windscreen – to the bottom of the truck’s platform there was a gap of a few inches, and, the X1/9 being quite a small, short car, there was plenty of room between the tractor unit hauling the thing and the double set of axles at the rear. Back then there were no safety barrier rails hanging underneath long trucks to stop cars submarining underneath in a side-on crash and so decapitating their occupants, so Dave just swung the car half-underneath the truck (his side was still in the sunlight), waited for the traffic island to disappear astern, then swung back out again and completed the overtake.

Is there anybody out there reading this who fails to understand
what
an act of utter insanity this really was? It surely can’t just be me. I’ve tackled McCartney on this a dozen times or more and every time Dave protests loudly that it was a perfectly safe and even sensible thing to do. He’s a persuasive arguer as well, the swine, and a few times I’ve almost found myself agreeing with him, but never quite.

‘McCartney,
I’m
fucking crazy, but I’d never do that!’

‘Well, that’s just you being blinkered. It was the rational response at the time.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I could see really clearly there was loads of room, because the roof was off. I probably wouldn’t have done it if there had been somebody else in the passenger’s seat; they might have got upset, but there wasn’t. So I did.’

‘What if the truck driver had seen you?’

‘Maybe he did.’

‘How could he have? If he had he’d have done what any rational person would have done and braked on instinct, panicking because he’s just seen a nutter drive under his truck! You’d have ploughed into the tractor unit’s rear tyres, bounced off again and then the rear trailer axles would have rolled right over you! You’d have been paste!’

‘Aye, but it didn’t happen, did it?’

‘But it could have!’

‘But it didn’t. I don’t know what you’re getting so upset about.’

‘I’m not upset! I just think you’re crazy but you won’t admit it.’

‘It wasn’t crazy; it was a perfectly good bit of overtaking with a sort of wiggle in the middle. You’d have done the same.’

‘That’s my point! I wouldn’t!’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because it’s a patently insane and crazy thing to do!’

‘Why?’

‘Dave;
you drove under a truck
.’

‘Well, put like that …’

And so on.

* * *

What ought to have finally persuaded Dave he was insane was when he, Jim and Dave’s then girlfriend Jenny bought that damn pub in the Highlands despite the fact nobody concerned had any experience running any sort of licensed premises, or even a shop. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but wasn’t. I remember sitting in Dave’s house in Uxbridge along with Jim, trying to convince them they were both mad – in fact that all three of them were mad – but they weren’t having it.

Ah, Dornie. It’s hard not to like a place set in the midst of glorious mountain scenery with one of the world’s most picturesque castles barely a stone’s throw away, but in the case of Dornie it was worth making the effort. There were some good, friendly people there, in the village and the area, but working behind the bar at the Clachan was enough to convince you the village was home to a disproportionate number of chip-shouldered, hypocritical, right-wing sexist shites.

They’d put down their copy of the
Sun
long enough to tell you in some detail what they’d like to do to these hippies who smoked dope and dropped E, then they’d order their eighth or ninth whisky of the day and plenty of change for the cigarette machine. Later they’d drive off. Or, sometimes, the wife or the daughter would arrive by car and try to drag them out of the bar to take them home for their tea.

These guys could even turn what ought to be an act of generosity into one of aggression. I came to think of it as Aggressive Dramming. Aggressive Dramming usually took place when you’d told a bunch of these people you weren’t drinking, or at least weren’t drinking much – maybe because you were going to be driving later – but then found the bar in front of you filling up with unasked-for whiskies whenever you turned your back. Insisting, even with a smile, that you really had meant what you said and therefore wouldn’t be drinking the whiskies tended to be met with scowls and accusations of being a Poof (in a seriously homophobic, non-ironic manner). A surlier bunch of rednecks you couldn’t wish to avoid.

There were occasional fights. I think I feel the same way about
men
who start pub brawls as I do about countries that start wars.

Anyway, if Dave, Jim and Jenny were mad, so was I, because later on I put money into the pub.

It was in Uxbridge one night that Dave and I got to talking about why, despite me starting to make mildly serious money from my books, I had no intention of buying a Ferrari.

‘Because I’d just get all overenthusiastic with it and wrap the fucker round a bit of Highland scenery and kill myself,’ I told him, sort of semi-presciently.

Dave looked thoughtful. He nodded slowly. ‘That would be a terrible, terrible waste,’ he said solemnly (and like an idiot, I started to make a bashful, self-deprecating gesture of acknowledgement), before he added, ‘of a beautiful car.’

Ditto Brown: telling who your real friends are
.

Summer 1981; one night. Jim and I walking back up Adelaide Road en route to McCartney’s flat after an evening listening to bands at Dingwall’s, Camden Lock. The south side of Adelaide Road consists, for one long stretch, of a brick wall – maybe nine or ten feet or so high – with a steep embankment behind it sloping down to the main railway line leading to Euston. I was still in my Drunken Urban Climbing period, and had shinned up a bus stop sign to get onto the top of the wall so I could walk along the top. Jim was keeping pace on the pavement below. He shouted up;

‘Banksie?’

‘What?’

‘Do you trust me?’

‘Of course I trust you.’

‘You sure?’

‘Positive.’