These Demented Lands (13 page)

Brotherhood crossed to my table. He laughed, placed my favourite whisky with crushed ice on the table, ‘She's had a
fine idea already: a party to liven this old hotel up – a DJ, but a party with a difference. We'll open up the dining room, eh?
All
guests will attend, so don't go hanging yourself before.'

By the time the Observation Lounge smelled of coffee, the young woman had finished eating and returned to the bar where she told stories to two couples, drank a chain of lemonades with fresh orange and was the life of the party; cardigan wrapped round her, leaning back on her stool she shook some hair away from a bare shoulder, the curve of which then reflected the log-fire flames. Brotherhood leaned on the bar encouraging the conversation, prodding it in various directions. Then the couples sheepishly and unwillingly made themselves leave the fun in the name of this new concept called: their marriage. The men had been trying to look at their wives as much as the girl but they hadn't succeeded. I left before the girl and Brotherhood crossed to the flames of the log fire. I sighed, infinitely weary. When I stood up the girl gave me a challenging look. I couldn't bear to hear his patter begin; his tired old routines: revolution, irony, Africa, duality and the uses of black magic rituals at the moment of death; atrocities in the Middle Ages: how they would build little wooden boxes round victims' heads then throw them down the cliffs of the castle; the social position of skull stackers in the Khmer Rouge.

‘Goodnight!'

‘Nighty night,' they called wickedly, I saw her flat canvas shoes that made her look so young, that summer.

In full view of them I picked up one of the ashtrays. In the reception I didn't push open the fire doors and move up the
flickering corridor but I swung out the front door then walked over the gravel of the turning place, round the corner and moved into the pine plantation where, in the dry night, over to the left, I saw honeymoon couples embrace. I stepped into the suddenly-lush beds of chicken weed, over to the patio of 15 and cast the heavy ashtray through the door. Shattering near the bottom, the upper section hesitated then, in a collapse, the glass fell downwards. I laughed out loud, turning to make sure the couple (from 7) saw me. They scuttled off to tell Brotherhood who would nod solemnly but laugh out loud as soon as they'd turned their backs on him.

Morning:

1. Glaziers from the island's other side.
   
2. A mildness in the sudden air that brought a daddy-long-legs as frail as the filaments in a bulb.
   
3. Her perfume bottle banging down on the dresser through the wall from my headboard.
   
4. The poster in the foyer.
   

Editor's note: poster inserted in manuscript:

‘
SOME OF THEM
are condoms!' a honeymooner-couple-man called and right enough, some of the balloons on the ceiling of the never-used dining room – stuck up round the fakey chandeliers with pale surgical tape from Brotherhood's father's skinny wrists where his glucose drips fitted into him – some of those fixed-up balloons
were
Durexes.

It was DJ Cormorant who DJ'd the drag party and then grew in him desires to organise millennial rave after that Christmas: to celebrate advents of new centuries.

He was out the portico bawling, ‘May all your landings be gentle,' as the tippy-up back of Joe the Coal's lorry dumped the metal-cornered bass bins.

Still dressed as man, Brotherhood appeared at dusk with a box of records, but it was all Bob Dylan. I went for a walk down past the airfield gate, grass soaking the canvas shoes, across open spaces that would fill with marquees, DJs and tribesters at Hogmanay. Then I saw the familiar figure haunting per usual hinterlands of Drome Hotel: The One Who Walked the Skylines of Dusk with Debris Held Aloft Above His Head. His long black raincoat, like an office
worker's in a city, foreshadowed the lyrics of Dylan's Man in the Long Black Coat – a song I would circle to in his arms that night (my fingers on the bare flesh of the man's neck, above his dress's low-cut back) – one of the many scratched, mysterious waltzes Brotherhood had indicated as the only permissible music.

The raincoat was slapping about his legs as he lurched, madly measuring out distances halfway up the runway; looking into sky then with a lone, still-headed stare out to the Sound waters where his unattainable aircraft lay all-sunken, he made a note in a wee book.

It was getting dark when I saw the Aircrash Investigator turn against the last slick of light upon the wide waters; he seemed to take a long look in my direction. It was then I spotted the figure between us, head slumped down and moving at a walking pace, though I couldn't see the feet, just he/she making
its
way forth where banking of the ground beyond the runway dips down to stony shore. As you watched you guessed the new figure was three hundred yards-ish distant, legs hidden by sheaves of moor grass. It came closer, in the half-light, harder to distinguish it from darkshadow where the jetty began. The Aircraft Investigator in his blackcoat began to point, I could see him show his erect arm to the first stars: it wasn't at me he was pointing but the walking figure. The Aircrash Investigator shook both hands in the air so you recognised he had started running. Then I turned my head, but as my eyes adjusted, as close as I would ever see, the ghost's head still bowed, movements stiff
and face so pale it seemed blue-coloured: no feet, spookily floating along the stones.

I heard a sound; at first I thought it was a seagull then I recognised the humanness of a shout: The Coated One Who Walked the Skylines was waving me, calling me. I frowned, sudden, in coldness offof what I'd seen. I walked towards him across the runway but he veered down the shore banking out of sight. By the time I'd crossed, Aircrash Investigator was along under the seaweed covered jetty-supports (the tide was right out); the other figure was nowhere to be seen. I squinted shore darkness and open runway space but the ghost was gone.

‘I hear a kangaroo has escaped from the zoo now,' gasped out the coated guy, arms chucked out to balance, one leg so bended at the knee; the slope so steep his face almost touched the grass. He chuckled, hard.

‘Aye. So I heard. They took the grizzly away slung under the helicopter,' I says.

He nodded, looked both ways then leaned his palms on his knees. The belt of the overcoat had come loose of its loops, the grass had saturated it so wet it was glisteny as it dragged and suddenly gave me such powerful (what I call privately) Human-Frailty feelings for the leaned-over man. I almost blurted out everything. Tears came bubbling out and I wanted to dish a big hug on him. Human Frailty, never to be confused with the thing called pity; I was only saved by his excited blethers.

‘You were so close and you saw it, eh?'

I nodded, my eyes bright below the tripping skies that were starting to shuffle in plains of stars.

‘Like you've seen a ghost. Hey, help me out. I've got to get dressed, there's no woman among all these wives I can ask . . .'

As we walked up to the hotel, away from the ghost-sighting, in darkness now, One Who Walks the Skylines of Dusk says of how days had passed ‘as they do'. He mentioned Chef Macbeth's buzzing remote-control aircraft ‘circling through these unbearable afternoons' and, the phrase I like best, ‘the couples who linger like graveyard statues in the pine plantation.'

In his room he says to me, ‘I may as well be Robinson Crusoe.'

‘Tonight I'll be your
Man
Friday,' I smiled. He roared in the hystericals, returned the long-forgotten-about raincoat to the empty wardrobe. From the suitcase (behind it an almost empty bottle of Spar whisky) he took the suit. I held the jacket with my fingers then swung it on, pulling it tight onto my sides by pushing arms straight into the bottoms of pockets. He had covered the mirrors of his room with towels long ago so I moved to the bathroom shouting, ‘Do you have a shirt?' realising that never before would he have heard a voice calling from there.

So in a once-elegant suit gathered around my feet he saw my socks still on, my fingernails with titchy remains of coloured Miss Selfridge's nail varnish. It was then he began to realise.

He said, ‘You won't show me your feet, cause of new nail varnish. I smashed your window; you must've been afraid, if
only I'd realised before,' he laughed, ‘you're amazing, just amazing. You didn't come to me to lay those two dresses on the bed and try to win the Belle of the Ball, you didn't come to show me the few bits of make-up and lipstick you filched from the youngest-looking two of all the wives, or to show me how to measure my foundation shade against the blue veins of my wrist,' he says, ‘you want to show me you and I are the same, you've come to reveal the truth. At first I thought it was . . .'

When he'd got me to take off the woolly, itchy socks from the Chandlers we stared at each other. I put down the Ladyshave, says, ‘I'll call for you at quarter-to; get
your
legs shaved!' and headed out wearing his suit.

An hour later I'm walking with him, arm-in-arm up the corridor; a honeymoon couple were in front: the man's muscled thighs beneath a short skirt, the woman's hair brylcreemed back, a lit cigarette in her hand that she wasn't smoking.

More of the bizarre drag couples were gathered in the dining room, laughing and admiring each other's clothes. DJ Cormorant, looking glum behind his mixing desk, droning out Dylan, a whelk-picker's halogen lamp bouncing up and down as he perused Brotherhood's circled tracks on The Permitted Albums.

Chef Macbeth, dressed as a nurse, was serving draught beer from behind the white-clothed buffet table far across the dining room. Everywhere the men-figures were lifting half pints or soft drinks to their mouths; the women-figures were
guzzling pints and staining whisky glasses with bright red lipstick. A man-figure in a sailor suit holding a life-belt came in with a woman figure shoving out a massive bosom that parted the doors; the woman was Shan the Ferryman, the man was his wife.

A woman-figure in seventeenth-century high white wig with tumbles of sparkling earrings stepped in, looked around. Through the viciously applied foundation I recognised Brotherhood; the velvet of his dress shifted as he crossed and spoke sharply to Macbeth, lifted a clutched pint to his pale face.

Mrs Heapie entered with her husband. She'd really gone to town with an orange boilersuit buffed up with oil stains, a construction worker's hard-hat and a menacing big monkey-wrench that she placed, carefully, down on the tablecloth, her steel-toed boots sparkled gaily in the disco lights.

And I, One Who Walked the Skylines on my arm, I'd gone and drawn a man-moustache,
bigote
, above my lips with curly ends; the baggy suit and my titchy canvas shoes. The One Who Walked had one of the wives' (from 12 I think) short dresses showing his long, now smooth, legs but we hadn't been able to get him fitting shoes, so's at the end of those great legs were just the clodhopper boots but we waltzeyd straight off to that Father of Night Dylan track (1:29) (How mysterious, containing all things that are hidden.)