Between the Bridge and the River

by Craig Ferguson

  Leon felt guilty because Mom had gotten into trouble. Sophie died in the asylum. She was sitting on a deck chair in the grounds when she was stung by a bumblebee and had a massive allergic reaction. She had been slammed to the back teeth on Thorazine and no one even knew she was dead until it was time for round up and medicate. No one had noticed her. Most of the nurses had been in a meeting in the main building about the need for more nurses, as the hospital was hopelessly understaffed.

  The boys lived in a state orphanage until their teens, then they ran away together.

  The Lanky Crooner and Fat Rasputin in their own little road movie.

  The Road to God.

  PREPARATION

  THE PROBLEM WITH SUICIDE is that it seems so flamboyant. It’s camp. You have to be a bit of a drama queen to ever seriously consider it. Of course, George could make it look like an accident but that was inherently dishonest and he didn’t want his last act on Earth to be a lie. He was very proud of how honest he was. He was glad that he had been a good man in life. He had been decent. A good egg.

  Although maybe he hadn’t been so good after all. Maybe that’s what this was about. Maybe this was punishment. God knows he had a secret or three. Honest at work, honest in business, but not honest at home.

  No, that’s crazy thinking, just being emotional—understandable but not true. You could make yourself nuts that way.

  He wasn’t any worse than anyone else. Come on, he was a good man.

  Although he wasn’t that way to ward off juju. He wasn’t a worker bee for Jesus. It wasn’t that he wanted to store up karma for just such an occasion, like most people. He wasn’t putting a little bit by for his miracle.

  It was just his nature. Being a decent man just came naturally to him, it wasn’t a struggle.

  Consequently he had never really struggled. He hadn’t had any practice, so he was in no condition for a lengthy, dramatic, painful fight that he was predestined to lose. He hadn’t built any resistance.

  He had worked hard and applied himself but he had never fought any inner demons. He didn’t have any.

  He did now.

  A little dark inner demon sitting on his lungs.

  Two times two is four, four times four is sixteen . . .

  God, they grow so fast, don’t they?

  You have no fucking idea.

  He didn’t say that, of course.

  No point in being rude just because you were dying. It’s not as if it was going to change anything.

  So he kissed Sheila and Nancy and patted Bruno and went out the door at half past eight as always, but when he got to the service station he filled the tank and took a left onto the M73 south.

  George was never going to work again.

  Fraser had a problem.

  Fraser’s problem was that he wanted people who didn’t know him to like him, that’s what made him bitter and desperate. When a person he didn’t know didn’t like him, as will happen eventually to anyone, he couldn’t take it.

  It made him furious.

  Margaret, his agent, thought this was an example of just how arrogant and power crazy he really was.

  “It’s the nature of fame,” she reassured him for the seven hundredth time. “Christ, Fraser! Some people didn’t even like Jesus. He got killed for being famous. At least nowadays they just print a photograph of you looking fat in a supermarket.”

  Fraser would never discuss Jesus with Margaret.

  “I won’t discuss Jesus with you, Margaret,” he told her. “It’s inappropriate. You’re an agent, which means you are in the employ of the Earl of Hell.”

  Margaret didn’t really like Fraser but she thought she did. She tricked herself into believing he was complicated and artistic. That he was difficult because he was talented. She thought of herself as long-suffering and kind, which she was, as long as the money was coming in. Like most sharks, Margaret liked to think of herself as a victim of the cruel sea.

  Becoming a television evangelist is not something that Fraser had even thought about before it happened to him. He had never been particularly religious, having been raised a Protestant. As a child he had gone to church with the other children at Christmastime and Easter and he had joined in as the other smelly little Scottish chubsters had mumbled their way through dreary English Victorian hymns that they had been forced to learn by Mrs. Hume, the highly caffeinated music teacher with the one vibrating eye.

  Mrs. Hume’s vibrating eye was a source of wonder to all the ten-year-olds in her charge. It danced from side to side as if she were watching a high-speed game of tennis on a very small court. The eye went faster the angrier she got, and of course, teaching a class of Scottish children how to sing “In the Bleak Midwinter” would make anyone tense.

  George said that Mrs. Hume’s eye vibrated because she was a witch.

  Mrs. Hume spent her appendix years in a Kafkaesque prefab nursing home in Airdrie, watching TV all day and waiting for death to remember her. She became one of Fraser’s biggest fans, watched his show every day. She even sent him a letter, a drooling warble of sycophancy on Hallmark pink.

  She received a form letter and a head shot of Fraser looking pious and concerned in one of his trademark jumpers. One of the nurses Blu-Tacked it to the wall next to her bed and Fraser’s face was the last thing she saw on this Earth. Her heart filled with love as the eye slowly ticked to a stop.

  Neither one of them was aware of their history. She did not remember he was the tubby little fart-machine she had belted with a leather tawse in 1972 and he did not remember her at all.

  Margaret dealt with his fan mail. Such as it was. The host of a five-minute religious segment late at night on Scottish Television was hardly in the Tom Jones league. His fans were gay men and old ladies. The old ladies loved his pithy wee stories that tried to put a positive spin on everything and the gays loved his jumpers, which ofttimes were sent in by the old ladies, who had knitted them themselves. After a while it became quite a craze among certain types of flamboyant Scottish homosexual men to knit jumpers and send them in to see if Fraser would wear them.

  Fraser’s photograph hung in gay bars.

  He didn’t know it but he was yet another unwitting icon.

  Today his jumper had a creamy seagull with a red beak and a small black eye hovering fluffily over a pea-green sea. An inexplicable triangular pink mountain in the background a secret sign from the Knitter to the Queer Illuminati. The wardrobe lady, Daisy, had picked it out. Her long years of experience told her that it would have a high irritability and itchiness factor under the studio lights.

  “Look at me. Who makes these things? I feel like a child’s drawing.”

  Margaret sighed. “You need to do everything to keep your loyal viewers. In fact, keep it on for the meeting after the taping. It’ll remind them of your cult status.”

  “What meeting?”

  “With Gus, head of programming. It’s renegotiation time. We’re asking for a raise.”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot.”

  Fraser had a fantastic capacity for forgetting. It was a skill he had developed as a teenager in order to better lie to the teachers.

  “Who else was there, boy?”

  “I don’t remember, sir.”

  “Right, boy, hands out.”

  But being physically abused by a well-equipped adult is better than being called a rat and despised by your fellow acne sufferers.

  In 1979 the European Court of Human Rights banned corporal punishment in Scottish schools. A year too late for Fraser and George. They grew up being whacked across their outstretched hands by state-endorsed bullies. The hands had to be placed up, in front, in supplication, to receive the Calvinist benediction of pain.

  There is a town in Scotland called Lochgelly, which was badly affected by the court ruling. Lochgelly was the town that made the belts for teachers to use in schools. The “strap,” as it was called by the children and teachers alike, was about eighteen inches long and an inch thick, with two or three s
trands on one end and a hole at the other, so it could be hung in the classroom as a deterrent to the unruly.

  It came in three densities: the Lochgelly Hard, the Lochgelly Medium, and the Lochgelly Soft. There was some talk among the kids that there was such a thing as the Lochgelly Extra-Hard but most dismissed this as scaremongering. Actually, those in the know, and Fraser was certainly one of them, were acutely aware that the Lochgelly Soft was the one to be most feared. In the hands of a skilled thug like Mr. Weir (a.k.a. Le Merde), the French teacher, the softie inflicted a terrific shock of pain followed by a numbness and trembling that lasted for almost an hour.

  It was the drama of the strap that really made it terrifying, though. The Ritual. The fact that a teacher, normally a sedate portly smoker with a disappointed air, would be so full of hate that he would shake off his torpor and use all that energy and a piece of expensive equipment to hurt a child was just awe inspiring to the victims. It really instilled terror, and that’s the thing about terrorism—it works. Especially for the terrorists—they might not get what they want but it feels damn good trying.

  For many terrorists, the means is the end.

  Some of the sexier teachers really got off on the fear. Big Jim Sullivan (Assistant Headmaster—Lochgelly Soft—a.k.a. Big Jimmy, God, T.T.C. [The Total Cunt], and Skippy) used to carry his around with him in the inside pocket of his academic cloak. A cloak—in a comprehensive school in Scotland in the 1970s. Darth MacVader.

  Miss Allen (History—Lochgelly Medium—a.k.a. Fannypad and Wonder Woman) kept hers in her handbag next to her sanitary towels and her dog-eared copy of The Joy of Sex. She was having an affair with Mr. Stirling (English Lit.—no belt—beard, long hair, velvet jacket, a.k.a. Pretty Boy, Hippyshake, and Gilbert O’Sullivan). The pupils punished Mr. Stirling mercilessly for his nonviolent teaching methods until he started sending them to T.T.C. to be dealt with. It was, just as the children had supposed, not true that he was nonviolent. He was just a coward. A sneaky coward who got someone else to do his dirty work. Of course, Mr. Stirling was English.

  Fraser and George and all the other children had to be ever vigilant in the face of such an intelligent, perverse, and cruel enemy. Sun Tzu wouldn’t have lasted a fortnight.

  Nowadays, Scottish kids are contained using the much more humane system of the X-box and heroin.

  Fraser wasn’t particularly badly behaved. He got into no more scrapes than anyone else, just the usual pranks and pushing matches with other boys. His curse was that he was charismatic and physically attractive. Tall, black hair, blue eyes, straight teeth—all present. All white.

  Genetic luck is what made him stand out from the herd. A crime in itself. Not that it’s unusual to be punished for your DNA. Millions were packed into the ovens for just that, so in many respects Fraser got off very lightly indeed.

  It wasn’t a case of why he was punished. It was a case of when.

  So Fraser left school when he was sixteen. He wasn’t stupid, or academically unsuccessful, but he couldn’t take the fear and the constraint any longer. Mr. Tweed, his English teacher (Lochgelly Medium, a.k.a. Tweedy and Hammy Hamster), was terribly disappointed. He confronted Fraser through a nibbled Ritz cracker.

  “Why? Your results are just getting good. You work hard for the next two years, you could go to university.”

  “I’m sixteen. I can leave. I’m going.”

  “You hate school so much, you want to throw the rest of your life away?”

  “That’s not how I see it, sir. I just don’t like to be in an institution where they tell you where they would like you to be by ringing a bell. I feel like a lab rat.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  The conversation would have gone on, perhaps Tweedy would have talked him out of it, but the bell rang and he had to go and force-feed Dickens to 4B.

  It was at this point that Fraser’s and George’s roads took different directions. Fraser was leaving and George was staying on to take higher education. He wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer.

  George had developed a thing about standing up for people he thought needed his help since the time he had whipped Willie Elmslie with a fishing rod on the canal bank; plus he thought it would be like on TV.

  Different case every week with satisfying endings and lessons learned. Also—good money.

  “It’ll be like being an accountant without the fun,” said Fraser.

  “Thanks,” said George.

  “You are the wind beneath my wings,” said Fraser.

  “Fuck off,” said George.

  They had been drifting apart for a while.

  Home was sanctuary, the only nonviolent place in Fraser’s life in the 1970s. His father never hit his kids, really because of all the fuss it caused, not through any real philanthropic notion. Mr. Darby’s fear of intimacy extended to not punishing his children. Mr. Darby liked order. Liked things neat. This is because, as a ten-year-old child in Glasgow, he had seen twenty-three of his classmates killed when a German bomb fell on his school. He never wanted to be around anything that untidy ever again. Any kind of untidiness made him nervous. He even thought of himself as Mr. Darby.

  Fraser’s mother, Janice, was actually quite a happy soul but she had to hide it because, like all pseudo-intellectuals, she thought being cheery made her look stupid, which of course she was for believing that rubbish in the first place.

  She liked to talk about Sartre sometimes, just as insurance.

  The fact that Fraser had left school without any academic qualifications or certificates was a source of worry for his parents. His mother was actually secretly grateful. She lived on worry and Fraser’s behavior was a particularly nourishing source. That’s why he was her favorite. She had another kid, Fraser’s older sister by two years, Elizabeth. An attractive, well-adjusted young woman who excelled in school, so was of no real interest to her mother.

  Actually, during Fraser’s rise to fame, Elizabeth got a Ph.D. in chemistry, married her high-school boyfriend Duncan, had two children, adopted another, and became the head of research and development for a large pharmaceutical company, but she always thought her mother would have been more interested if she’d been an anorexic lesbian circus performer with an addiction to self-mutilation.

  And she was right. It wasn’t that her mother didn’t love her, it’s just that Janice could only express love through concern and interference, and you can’t really apply that to someone who’s doing fine.

  Fraser’s mother managed to love him a lot. Ever since he was a baby he had provided her with fuel. He got croup at an early age. He was late with potty training. He didn’t speak until he was two, he had terrible tantrums. He wet the bed. He was her dream child.

  The bed wetting was a godsend. She dragged Fraser to specialists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists, none of whom seemed to think there was much wrong with him but a small and rather weak bladder. Janice was sure it ran deeper, it was in “his subcontinent.” One therapist, a pale-skinned and freckly ginger quack with a hacking cough whom Janice had been referred to by her exasperated GP, actually prescribed a bed-wetting monitor for Fraser.

  An experimental device being tested by the National Health Service at the time, it was an electric blanket that fitted under the regular sheet that when hit with urine would emit a blood-curdling siren that would wake the whole house. The idea being that the patient would learn to avoid setting off the siren by going to the bathroom.

  It really worked in reverse; Fraser damn near shat himself the first time it went off, as did everybody else in the house. The device only lasted two nights, until Mr. Darby decided it was disrupting family life, but by then it was too late. Fraser had developed a problem with his subcontinent. That is to say, he became subcontinent. Peeing himself in moments of great stress or when standing too close to a passing fire engine.

  His father always thought he was gay, which meant he didn’t really count. His father preferred Elizabeth. Good, reliable, and hardworking
, like a Volvo.

  The real reason Fraser left school is that he knew sooner or later a teacher would give him the strap and he wouldn’t be able to hold the pee till he got to the bathroom. He would pee himself in front of the entire class.

  Like most teenagers, he couldn’t have lived with that.

  He left school to save his life.

  Fraser sat in the leather armchair on the set decorated to look like the sitting room of a Scottish church minister’s manse in the 1950s. A standard lamp next to him, a small table with prop books and a cheap print of The Monarch of the Glen on the cardboard wall behind him. A stuffed canary sat self-consciously on a wooden perch in a gilded cage.

  The buxom new makeup woman, Paula, fussed with Fraser’s eyebrows, her breasts inches from his face.

  He whispered to her, “Come to my room later. I’m going to fuck you, you naughty minx.”

  She giggled. “You are so bad.”

  But she would be there.

  High up in the sound gallery, Stevie Henderson and old Charlie MacDuff smiled at each other.

  “I tell you,” said Stevie, “if he forgets to take the microphone off again I’m recording it.”

  Charlie laughed. “I am way ahead of you, youngster.”

  Women liked Fraser. He was very happy about that because he liked them right back. He had been a tubby kid, so the primary girls hadn’t noticed him at all, preferring the boys who looked like girls.

  When puberty hit, he stretched, the puppy fat disappearing so fast that he didn’t even notice. There was a day in school, though, when Amy Harrison talked to him on the stairs, said he had nice shoes. Said he was funny. Asked if he had a girlfriend. She came on pretty strong. She made it very clear, as women do, what she thought.

  Fraser was glad he had just come from the bathroom, although after she left he went back there anyway.