Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  Also by Keggie Carew

  Dadland

  First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019

  by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Keggie Carew, 2019

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 407 6

  eISBN 978 1 78689 409 0

  For Jonathan

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  The Late Visitor

  The Amateur Waitress

  The Tidy House

  The Exciting Invitation

  The Camel Raid

  The Arrogant Poem

  The Invisible Story

  The Constant Murderer

  The Bad Matchmaker

  The Anticipated Celebration

  The Black Purse

  The Good Uncle

  The Last Thing

  Acknowledgements

  PREFACE

  I have had my fair share of awkward predicaments and the toe-curling mortification of the aftermath. Something irresistible attracts mishap and misadventure to me, or me to it. I effortlessly put my foot in it. Say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing. Yet for someone with few qualms about not conforming, why, oh why, is my internal discomfort so deep? If fate is not conspiring against me, then it must be something to do with me.

  I feel an affinity with people who have excruciating things happen to them. Obviously they make me feel better, but there is something beautifully levelling about it too. Picasso said a picture hung crookedly on a wall tells you a lot more about the owner than a straight one ever could; he preferred crooked pictures. He knew, of course, we are all crooked pictures, busy in the lifelong pursuit of straightening ourselves, yet it is the straight picture we strive to portray.

  The crack that yawns open to swallow us is the place that interests me. Making a hash of it. Being human. The tripwires of our hasty conclusions, our fixed ideas, our contradictions in thinking, our tribal prejudices, our base selves. As witness to my own prosecution I am forced to inspect the soft underbelly of my unruly, conflicted self. Not for absolution, but to embrace the human drama. To let the air out.

  In the years of working away in the quiet anonymity of my shed I have often been encouraged by writers’ aphorisms, by their tips and guidance, by their bons mots. Muriel Spark’s advice: ‘You are writing a letter to a friend . . . Write privately, not publicly; without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it was never going to be published’. Or as the poet Liz Lochhead said, ‘You are stuck with something until the point where you go, “To hell with it, I’ll tell the truth.”’

  The stories in this book are true. Some contain privacy-protection mechanisms, but they are all strictly faithful to my experience of what occurred. I am obsessively superstitious about it. Tamper with the evidence and the human reaction and outcome will be altered, the truth lost or perverted. And truth has to take priority over finer feelings. It is rarely comfortable. But that is life. I laughed when Colm Tóibín on Desert Island Discs refuted the idea of waiting until someone had died to tell a story. His solution was to ring them up and say, ‘You know that awful story you told me last week with all those personal details in it, well, I’ve written it up and it’s being published next week!’

  Any good story, for me, has disaster in there somewhere. So I began to collect mine. In some I am the witless protagonist, in others a reluctant witness or victim of circumstance, but I am always there – in the silent groan. Alarmingly, the pile on my desk is still growing. The earliest story in this collection happened on the eve of my twentieth birthday, yet every detail remains as chilling as if it happened yesterday; the most recent is too recent for comfort. These are not banana-skin tales, but more my mother’s medicine – gallows humour. Human fuck-ups. Mostly mine, but not always . . . Perfect storms, incompetence, paranoia, insecurity, clumsiness, privileged lives and over-fed white middle-class anxieties, dark deeds or pure bad luck at being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some are just terrible. Some are not terrible at all, just excruciating. Anything that makes me shudder gets an airing. When the mirror throws back that bright, bitter shame; when good intentions fall short in our unequal world. I am recycling awfulness.

  Flawed creatures that we are, I hope these voyages into quicksand might lessen our shared fragility.

  Keggie Carew, 2019

  ‘Fail again. Fail better.’

  SB

  ‘Fail again. Fail worse.’

  KC

  THE LATE VISITOR

  It is 1976. The year of the Entebbe hijack, of the IRA bombings in London, of the first commercial Concorde flight, of Taxi Driver and M*A*S*H. Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe is accused of hiring a hitman to murder his homosexual lover. Jimmy Carter moves into the White House. It has been a scorching summer. I’m nineteen, and life at home has been terrible; Dad has left, Mum is ill, my sister, Nicky, and I have gone feral living off jam sandwiches. I’ve bunked off school, done badly in my A levels, my boyfriend has gone to university but I know I have no chance with my lousy grades. I have been working as a barmaid and making clay necklaces, and have saved enough money to buy a one-way ticket to Toronto. The only reason I have chosen Toronto is because I met some Canadians in the pub I was working in, so I have an address where I can stay for a few days, which makes the leap a little less daunting.

  So off I go on my beginning-to-regret-I-ever-mentioned-it adventure, wearing my Doc Marten boots, with everything I think I need in my dad’s WW2 army backpack with its ridiculously uncomfortable metal waistband and heavy leather straps.

  When I arrive in Toronto at the end of October it is already bitterly cold. I have never felt cold like it, a whistling-through-you cold that my thin brown coat and gappy knitted jumper do nothing to allay. After a week of trudging around on my own – for my Canadian friends are busy at work – I catch a bus south to Hamilton to meet an English friend, Ian. I cannot remember what he was doing in Hamilton, but we decide to head south into the United States, and because we have very little money we hitch-hike. We take a route through the backwater states of Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, and it is quite eventful, but miraculously we survive, and get rides all the way to Texas. In Texas I notice a large billboard on the side of the freeway advertising horse-riding trips with pictures of cowboys lassoing cattle, and on a whim we decide to check it out because I have always wanted to ride western style like a cowboy, so we ask our ride to drop us off the interstate at the next junction, which is a place called Sweetwater. Sweetwater is right in the heart of Texas, almost dead centre in fact; it is a flattish town with wide streets and low houses, and while we can’t find any cowboys lassoing cattle, it is big on cotton, oil and rattlesnakes. Which is exotic enough to make us stay and try to find jobs. We are conspicuous with our packs and because we are the only two people who go around town on foot. There are no pavements on these wide streets which seem to be made only for big cars with big noses that sort of bound and glide everywhere, even in and out of the take-away. For me it is like being in an American movie. We ask around if there is any work and are directed to the local cotton gin (where raw cotton is processed); and there we are hired by a bemu
sed Texan foreman wearing a cream Stetson hat to work with the Mexican ‘wetbacks’ – illegal workers (of whom we were two) – so called after the migrants who had to swim the Rio Grande to get across the US border. Our job is to shift and stack massive 600lb bales of cotton with a large cotton bale hook called a gaucho – there’s a knack. Not the best at this, I graduate to driving the forklift in the warehouse, where I shine and show off as the fastest driver and most accurate cotton-bale stacker in the whole gin – an accolade bemusedly conceded by cowboys and Mexicans alike. We are earning $2 an hour with time-and-a-half overtime, and working 90 hours a week, give or take an hour, so our take-home pay is around $230 a week (the equivalent of more than a thousand dollars today), which for a nineteen-year-old in 1976 is a whopping amount. I’m certainly earning more than my dad is back in Britain, where an average wage for a man is less than £70 a week (£45 for a woman). What’s more, at night I double it with a preposterous streak of beginner’s luck at pool in a pool hall downtown called The Green Room, where there is an endless supply of cowboys ready to put their money down on the table and take me on.

  We work, play pool and save money. We buy a black VW Beetle and call it Horace – you give names to cars when you’re nineteen. The plan is to drive to South America, so we convert it into a camping Beetle that we can sleep in. We take the back seats out – this is in the days when the seats were on runners which you could just undo and pull the seats right out. For sleeping, we rig up a system where you slide out the front seats and flip them so the backrest is horizontal on the floor and the seat is wedged vertically against the front dash. Then we jigsaw out a 3-ply board which fits into the back with a hinged section that folds over into the front when the seats are turned round, which basically turns the whole car into a double bed. I make some foam cushions for a mattress, put up some curtains in a Navajo fabric with a zig-zaggy geometric design, with enough left over to cover the ceiling. It is homey. On the outside we paint a wide white stripe right over the top, across the roof, bonnet and boot, to reflect the heat we are expecting in the tropics. It is a very distinctive car. It looks like a skunk.

  By early spring we have worked so many hours and played so many games of pool that we have saved a fortune, so we give in our notice. We want to see some more of the States before we head south, so we drive to Tombstone and the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert, into California and Yosemite, Big Sur, San Francisco, Death Valley. We free-camp to save money, and anyway the season hasn’t started so no parks are open until May.

  On 21 April 1977, late in the afternoon, we arrive at Lake Tahoe in California looking for a place to camp. Lake Tahoe is a big blue lake and a well-known beauty spot surrounded by pine forests in which you are allowed to picnic, but not until May. We drive off the road, ignoring the ‘No Camping’ sign, and into the forest. The ground is hard and dry and we slowly putt along through the trees. We need to drive quite a way in order not to be seen and thrown off by park rangers, so we continue until we are well out of sight and sound of the road. We choose a nice flat picnic spot with a table and BBQ provided (these civilised Americans). We set Horace up for sleeping, slide out and flip up the front seats, make up the bed, collect firewood. We are delighted with our fine secluded spot. However, we have hardly been there an hour when a grizzled old-timer with some pots and pans turns up. He tells us he’s a gold-panner. We talk a little, have a cup of tea, but interesting as a gold-panner is, this particular night neither of us are in the mood for an uninvited supper guest, because we’ve splashed out and have got two steaks lined up. I’m not unfriendly but slowly become more monosyllabic until he eventually slopes off, pans rattling as he goes. We get the BBQ going. Wrap a couple of potatoes in foil and nudge them into the embers, boil up some carrots, sizzle the steaks, which give off a mouth-watering aroma. Stars come out. The treetop silhouettes are spiky black against the velvet sky. We eat our delicious supper. Sit by the crackling fire. Everything is perfect.

  Out of nowhere another figure comes out of the forest. He is standing in front of us. A very big guy. With a sack. He puts the sack on the picnic table as if he’s staking a claim. He must be six foot four or five, he has a short crew cut and he wears an open-neck camouflage shirt with khaki pants. He wants food. We scrabble around and he eats everything we can find. He eats the biscuits and the bread and the one leftover burnt potato in the foil, and the cheese and the bar of chocolate. Then he picks up Ian’s knife. A large, sharp, steel, wooden-handled knife we used mostly for chopping carrots. And he plays with it. Rubbing the blade against his thumb. I am now wishing I hadn’t given the gold-panner the cold shoulder. I try to engage our visitor in conversation. I ask him his name. He says ‘Animal’. It’s not a good start. Ian asks him what he does. He’s a mercenary. Just back from Angola, he adds. In the news a few months previously, three mercenaries had been executed by firing squad in Angola. Two Britons and an American. I stupidly mention this. I hear the words blurting childishly out before I can retrieve them. Trying to be friends, trying to make everything normal. He says the American was his brother. Still playing with the knife, he tells us that as a young boy, brought up by the Navajo, he’d been taught survival and how to live in the wild. He can track anything, he says, kill a bear with his bare hands, run fast as a deer, sleep with one eye open and one eye shut. He shows us the bullet holes in his biceps and the scars on his chest – describing how he got each one (people or animals ‘messing with him’). Then he goes over to Horace, bends down, puts both hands under the front door and lifts one side right off the ground, so the car is suspended on two wheels. We laugh nervously.

  Animal says he was in Vietnam and begins to explain in great detail how they tortured the Viet Cong for information. One method he describes was to heat up a metal pipe until it was red hot, then plunge it into their stomachs and haul out their guts. He smiles grimly. Then with a swift lunge he grabs my hand and thrusts it in the fire and pulls it out again. Ha! he laughs. After Vietnam he worked as a contract killer. Well, we did ask. He tells us how each hitman leaves their special mark, and that if he killed us, for instance, only his colleagues in the trade would know – from the information in their special reports – by his signature marks on our bodies. Where most hitmen take the ear of their victim to send back, Animal prefers to take the scalp. A nod to his Navajo foster parents, apparently.

  In demonstration, he stands behind me, grabs a fistful of my hair and, while holding it up, marks little notches three inches apart around my head with the tip of the knife. The nicks are tiny but enough for me to feel each prick and the faintest trickle of blood. Just a joke, just a little fun, ha, ha. He is holding my hair tight, twisting the spray slightly, tauntingly, daring me to protest. Ian looks on uncomfortably. Neither of us know what on earth to do, because as Animal is demonstrating his scalping technique, he is also telling us that if anyone crosses him he will hunt them down and find them wherever they are, whatever country they are in. He eyeballs Ian sharply.

  By now it is midnight. The embers of the fire are glowing, fading, glowing, fading. More stars have come out. On the outside I am managing to stay calm and cool, but on the inside my temperature has dropped ten degrees. My voice is not shaky, but measured and congenial, as if I am his friend, as if I trust that he is our friend, but inside I am terrified. My mind is flying around trying to think how we can escape. With the bed set up and seats flipped round, the car is undrivable. Animal could out-run us both. And I can’t think of anything. And I can’t believe that I can’t, because I always thought that if I was ever in a compromising situation I would come up with something, and now that I am being tested, I am empty. I am completely blank. The one thing that seems vital is to act like there is nothing to worry about, that all this is normal. That we are just having a friendly chat. That no harm is meant. Animal is just throwing his weight about a bit.

  He is now gouging out great chunks of the National Park picnic table with our knife: A. N. I. Maybe I am imagining it. M. A . . . May
be this is just an American tough-guy kind of thing, maybe Ian is not worried and understands the situation better than I do, or maybe I am just spooked. L. He blows away the splinters. I tell Animal it is my mother’s birthday the next day – which it is, April 22 – and I need to call her, and because of the time difference, I have to call early, so I need to go to bed. Then I add, possibly a little too pointedly, that she is expecting my call. Animal says I will be getting up a lot earlier than I’d planned, and that ‘Ma’ might not be getting her call. The first direct threat, indirectly . . .

  If we didn’t know before, we know now that we are in a very perilous position. This guy is a time bomb. Anything might set him off. Either he is all that he says he is: a killer psychopath and a very dangerous man; or he is a nutter – a very big, strong and imaginative one – and a very dangerous man. Either way, we are in the shit.

  I can see Animal’s demeanour has changed. He orders us to get into the car. He is going to sleep, he tells us, with his back leaning up against the driver’s door. We get into Horace. Animal is four inches away. And it is now, at the moment when I shut the car door and Animal is out of sight, that I lose my outwardly cool appearance. My fear takes on a visceral reaction that overwhelms my whole body. I start to shake uncontrollably. My hair follicles actually stand on end. I can feel them. My shaking is making the car shake. This terrifies me more because I think he might think we are up to something, or canoodling, or worse, which might infuriate him and send him into a rage. And I glance at Ian, vainly hoping I am imagining this and that he – far more worldly than me – is not scared at all, but a white look flashes between us and I know. We are lying down – for that is all we can do – and I am shaking, looking up at the Navajo zig-zaggy fabric on the ceiling, thinking I’m not going to make my twentieth birthday, just two days away. Thinking: what does one think if one only has a few hours left? And then trying to think it. Trying to think of my family, my dad and my mum, my sister and brothers. But not sure what to think about them. I am mouthing in my head: I love you, Dad; I love you, Mum; I love you Patrick and Nicky and Tim. And I am trying to think about my family, and have good thoughts. But Ian is trying to talk to me, which makes me even more scared, as I am sure Animal can hear everything with his supersonic hearing, so I put my hand over Ian’s mouth to try and stop him. But he pulls my hand away, and eventually he manages to whisper a plan in my ear.