Whirligig (16 page)

‘If Gwendolen shall marry again, I shall kill the bridegroom. I shall kill him…' Lachlan smiled manically and fixed his glare now on Claypole, who shuddered. ‘… with a stroke of the antler to his heart.'

Coky had put an arm around Lachlan to help him. Lachlan looked at Claypole and, unseen by Coky, gave a look of surprise. There was a note of something else. Was it triumph? Claypole pretended not to notice. Inside, he was burning.

‘'Night, Claypole,' said Coky. And suddenly, Lachlan and Coky were gone, stepping into Lachlan's van.

Claypole gawped dumbly at Milky, who was in the throes of discourse.

‘Of course, with some kinds of 'shroom you're strapped to the front of the Starship Enterprise for a couple of hours. Take the Venezuelan Redcap, for example…'

Claypole sighed as he looked behind him at the Land Rover, and beyond it to the black fields that led towards civilisation, unlit by the hidden moon. He was incapable of driving, and there was no way he was going to walk, or spend another night in the reeking car. With another, deeper sigh, Claypole knew that his fate was to stay up with Milky, at least until dawn. And Milky droned on.

‘… The Bavarian Blackbonnet is a very different sort of mushroom, though…'

Claypole's eyelids felt heavy. But his fate was as inescapable as the blackness of the night, and as tragic as stolen love.

It is not uncommon for a seer's prediction to come to be applied to the prophet himself… Legend is fluid stuff.

The Lore of Scotland: A Guide To Scottish Legends
, Jennifer Westwood and Sophia Kingshill

O
n waking, Claypole rejoiced briefly that he was not too hungover, before gloom descended as he remembered Lachlan and Coky disappearing into the van. He struggled onto his side in a borrowed all-weather sleeping bag. The morning light had a washed-out quality, but still it stung his eyes. Bottles and cans lay in clusters by the fire, which was still smouldering in a shallow, grey pyramid with some blackened logs lying on its outskirts. Tents billowed in the breeze, and a few people were stirring, either in their tents in low murmurs, or bumbling about quietly outside – cleaning their teeth in the burn, or putting on boots and coats. A tall man in a clean green t-shirt approached the fire carrying a large pot. Claypole saw that it was Milky, still with his beard, but now with a shaven head.

‘Porridge'll be a little while,' said Milky, and placed
it by the side of the fire. With an expert series of kicks and fumbles, he caused the fire to come back to life. Then he looked at Claypole and giggled.

‘Oops,' he said, and nodded at Claypole. ‘Chilly night?'

‘It was awright, but –' Claypole had stopped speaking. He had run his hands through his hair, but it was missing. His head too had been shaved. Milky giggled.

‘Did you forget?' he said.

Claypole was speechless, and took a minute to do anything. He took his phone out of his jacket pocket. No reception, three voicemails and a text message. But he wasn't interested in the communications. He wanted to see his reflection in the dark screen. And there it was. Ginger stubble patchily bloodied where someone had shaved him badly, but otherwise he was bald.

‘What the f… Brr. Brr.' Claypole took a moment. ‘Did you do this?'

‘No, man,' said Milky, looking hurt. ‘You did.'

Lolling backwards with a sudden ache, Claypole longed for London. He longed for the Metropolitan Line's stagnant and ancient pong, its rattling carriages and interminable delays. He longed for a latte with an extra shot of espresso and a vanilla and chocolate shot to catapult him into a humming and airless office with its mindless chatter and hateful lighting. He longed to be normal. To spend the day manoeuvring for a position he didn't want, and grasping more money so that he could spend it on frivolous crap at the weekend in order to dull the terrible sense that his life was rapidly disappearing. Oh to be sipping an expensive cocktail in Soho on a Thursday night, dodging angry addicts in
doorways, and arguing with Somalis over the taxi fare home! He wanted the grey, humid lung that is London in August to breathe him in and never breathe him out.

Instead, his newly nuded head throbbed with dehydration and cold. His socks itched his feet from not having been removed. The sleeping bag was cold and damp on the outside, hot and damp on the inside. He wrestled himself upright and out of the sleeping bag. He breathed in a lungful of what ought to have been healthy sea air and got instead a heavy whiff of sheep shit and seaweed that made him gag. He put his hand in something damp and squishy in the mossy grass, cursed quietly and wiped his palm on what he thought was a patch of clean grass but was in fact something even more squishy and disgusting.

‘Morning.' Coky's voice, far off.

Claypole followed Milky's gaze to the back of a camper van, from which Coky was emerging, her black hair tangled and delicious. He returned his gaze to the fire. He threw a nearby empty orange juice carton onto the ashes, and it swelled ominously before giving a heavy pop and fizzing into flame. Coky arrived at the fire, hugging herself against the cold.

‘Porridge,' she observed, and then caught sight of Claypole and his shaven head. ‘Oh.'

‘Brr' was all that Claypole could manage.

‘It looks… good, actually,' she said. Claypole said he didn't believe her, but he could not help being heartened.

Claypole helped Milky put a couple of heavy logs onto the fire, and they hauled a large wire mesh over the top of it so that the vast saucepan could be positioned on top. They sat, and Claypole examined his
phone to avoid having to talk. He looked at the text message.

‘WICKED WITCH AGREES TO MEAT U THIS EVE. COME 2 THE BIG MOUSE THIS MORN. MUCH TO FIR BURP. Peregrine.'

Familiar with the perils of predictive texting, Claypole stared at the alphanumeric keypad on his phone for a few seconds.

‘Dis… cuss. Much to discuss,' he muttered, put the phone away and looked at his watch.

Coky was looking at him. ‘Everything OK?' she said.

‘Yeah,' said Claypole, not meeting her eye and groaning as he stood up. ‘Gonna miss the porridge. Got work to do with your uncle.'

‘Oh good,' said Coky. ‘You can give me a lift up to the house.'

Claypole drove with a fixed frown and grunted monosyllabically to all her questions until she raised the subject of his meeting with her mother that evening.

‘How did you know about that?' he said.

‘I… had a hand in setting it up.'

He remained quiet, so she riffed on the topic of Lachlan and Milky and the relationship between the two. Claypole let her talk. It was better than letting her know how much he wanted to strangle her and Lachlan both.

Lachlan and Milky had spent time in the city, Coky said. They had gone together when they were nineteen to Aberdeen to be pest controllers. This meant killing seagulls that nested in and on the municipal buildings. Milky, particularly, was fond of saying that he had never met a seagull that wasn't a total bastard.
Poisoning was deemed too cruel by the city authorities, and might cause damage to other birds or be a threat to human health, so they were each given a specially made bat with holes in it. The preferred method was for the operative to dispatch one or two of the gulls with a few swift and frenzied blows, and then to run for cover before the other gulls mobbed him. A couple of minutes later, the operative could return to the scene and do the same again.

‘Milky stayed in Aberdeen for longer than was healthy. He still dreams about those birds, he says. Lachy left the job after three weeks, and a month later he was doing a correspondence course in ornithology.'

Claypole bristled at the term of endearment, and said nothing.

‘Milky by rights should be angry with Lachlan for leaving him there,' Coky added. ‘But they've been best friends since they were three. When they were twelve Lachlan got so sick of Milky's whining that he marooned him on a small island off Garvach Point for eight hours. Milky forgave him by bedtime. When they were fifteen, Lachlan set fire to Milky's sleeping bag on a camping trip and caused second-degree burns. Milky thought it was his own fault. And Lachlan's slept with Milky's sister on and off, and with Milky's mother once. But Milky blames the women, not Lachlan.'

‘Yeah,' said Claypole, grimacing.

Coky shrugged. ‘But when you grow up here… it's so remote, you can't choose your friends. You've just got to get along with whoever's around. Otherwise you've got no friends at all.'

Claypole chewed his lip as they approached MacGilp House.

‘Now of course there's the question of Jade's baby. I don't
know whether even Lachlan and Milky can get over that one.'

Claypole had been gearing up to say something arch about some people seeming to be not so much tolerant of the defects of others as blind to them, but was distracted now that he saw MacGilp House for the first time in daylight. He had a strange sense as he took in its spooky towers and vast grey granite walls, and the lawn in front, that he had seen it before. He shook his head, putting this fleeting thought down to lack of sleep. Or perhaps he was still hallucinating.

Peregrine, wearing a pistachio-green sweater, greeted them from a sedentary position in a kitchen already thick with the smoke of many Dunhills. Coky immediately went upstairs. Peregrine suggested that Claypole make a fresh cafetière of coffee.

‘Have we been with the naughty wood-nymphs?' asked Peregrine.

‘I spent the night on the beach, yeah.'

‘Tsk,' said the old man. ‘Seems everyone takes drugs these days. Have you taken one that makes your hair fall out?'

Claypole ran his hand over his head and looked at the cigarette that Peregrine held delicately between his third and fourth fingers. Perhaps with the amount Peregrine smoked, nicotine was no longer a drug – more of a food group.

‘Ha,' said Claypole. ‘Just need a shower, and I'll be ready for work.'

During his two-hour bath, Claypole read a big chunk of the planning application for the Loch Garvach Wind Farm. He felt a little better informed, and he resolved to read the rest of it later in his hotel. He put on a shirt of Peregrine's that, while not to his taste, did very nearly
fit him, and listened to his voicemails. There was one from his personal banker, and one from a credit card company. He deleted them without listening. The third message was from Kevin Watt of the
Glenmorie Herald
, which also got erased.

When Claypole joined him in the library, Peregrine was standing at his desk behind a large industrial document shredder, feeding it as a French farmer feeds a goose with corn. Owing to the noise of the machine – a high-pitched mechanical complaint, as if at any moment it might be sick – Peregrine did not hear Claypole's approach. Rather than shock the old man, Claypole called out when he was about ten feet away.

Peregrine reeled back in alarm and shouted. Both men clutched their hearts.

‘For God's s-sake!' Peregrine stuttered.

Claypole looked at the pile of documents and back at his business partner. The two men watched as a large sheaf of printed material was chewed and swallowed by the machine. After a last grinding hiccup, the machine slowed itself to a whirr and Peregrine pressed the off switch. Claypole squinted at Peregrine.

‘Love letters?' suggested Claypole, narrowing his eyes. The older man smiled naughtily.

‘Just… yes, well… Things we don't need people to see. Let's have a drink,' said Peregrine, and proceeded to make a noise that sounded like language, but had so many glottal stops and hawkings thrown in that it could equally have been a death-rattle.

‘What?'

‘Knockenglachgach,' said Peregrine again. He held a bottle for Claypole to read. ‘It's the name of the whisky.'

Claypole examined the dark-brown liquid inside the bottle. It had things in it. Some things were swilling densely about on the bottom; some of them floating on the top, dead; and some of the things, Claypole saw to his alarm, were actually swimming somewhere in the middle – as in, alive and doing the breaststroke.

‘It's from Scapa,' said Peregrine, whipping the top of the bottle off and pouring a couple of measures into crystal lowballs. ‘A windblown rock halfway to Iceland that you can only get onto using an arrangement of ropes and pulleys. Only seven people live there, but one of them makes this nectar. And it's very reasonable owing to being… not entirely legal.'

‘Right,' said Claypole, peering into his glass. ‘What were those documents, Peregrine?'

The older man sipped his drink.

‘I think birds are overrated, don't you?' Peregrine examined his glass.

‘Eh?'

‘The RSPB is the richest non-governmental organisation in the country. Or something like that. Ten times richer than the NSPCC. Sickening, really. Sign of the times. Cheers.'

‘I'm really not following you,' said Claypole.

‘There's not only a lot of money to be made from this wind farm, there's also… it's a project that will… you know, save the planet and all that rot. And yet some people… some people who purport to have an environmental interest at heart, want to scupper it because a few birds might,
might,
get… um, damaged… I just think that's wrong. Don't you?'

‘What's that got to do with…?'

‘Mm-hm,' said the old man in frustration. He pointed to a sofa, and Claypole sat down.

‘There are some birds on the bit of land where we want to build our little money-spinner. Not many. Just a few, really. But it could be damaging to our case if it… er… People get so touchy about our feathered friends. Especially birds of prey. I mean, what's so good about birds of prey? They snaffle your lambs and a lot else besides. It's not as if wind turbines kill that many of them. Birds aren't stupid. They get out of the way of twenty tonnes of steel and fibreglass rotating at sixty miles an hour… generally.'