by Iain Banks
‘Azshashoshz.’ The word just sort of hung there in the air between all of us, like a particularly vile fart nobody’s prepared to own up to.
I shrugged and looked round everybody who’d been listening.
They all looked mystified.
Jim looked mystified.
He couldn’t remember what it was he’d been trying to say then, at the time, let alone next morning (well, afternoon/evening), and so we never did find out what Azshashoshz actually meant, but it just kind of became a saying amongst us, especially if we hadn’t quite heard what somebody had said, or one of our party was starting to slur their words. Sometimes we use it as a toast, our local equivalent of Cheers.
A year or two later when I wanted to dedicate The Player of Games to Jim, I just put ‘for Jim’ on the dedication page of the hardback. Jim thought that this wasn’t specific enough – unarguably, there are quite a few Jims in the world – and it was his dedication after all, so I changed it for the paperback edition to ‘For James S. Brown, who once said, “Azshashoshz”’.
Next day; more sun, more rolls, more early morning coughing.
But today is no ordinary day. Today, as well as continuing the whisky research – naturally – we are men with a mission. For today we have an appointment with destiny, today we take up the challenge of a profound spiritual quest for a near-mythic location, lost in the mists of time and the depths of ancient Morayshire. We are to revisit the site of one of our most emblematic achievements, a lodestone locus of enormous symbolic power in the personal mythology of all three of us.
Today we go in search of the Bombed Fountain of Elgin.
It was our first trip together round the Highlands, back in the late seventies. We were in the Mk 3 Cortina that had been my dad’s. It was white with a black vinyl roof, boasted a two-litre engine and seemed really quite quick at the time.
I had by this time long been attracted to the concept of foam-bombing a fountain. The idea of seeing an attractive municipal piazza or corporate car park entrance knee-deep in soapy suds just struck me as deeply worthwhile; it seemed like an important artistic statement and a veritable piece of aesthetically relevant semi-vandalism; art terrorism.
I’d got my hands on a big polythene water container from a camping shop which just fitted into an old fake-leather shoulder bag that my mum would otherwise have thrown out. I’d cut a small but carefully positioned flap in the bag so that I could easily reach the little plastic tap at the side of the container and turn it on. The plan was that I’d select a low-rise fountain, one which you could sit on the side of, I’d stock up on lots and lots of Fairy Liquid bottles, empty them into the water container in the shoulder bag, go to the fountain, sit on the side (preferably somewhere near the fountain’s pump inlet) and then – while looking like I was pretty much doing nothing at all – reach down and open the tap, letting the glistening green liquid flow into the waters. With any luck the container would be fully empty and I’d be making my escape before the detergent hit the impeller blades.
Cue vast heaving quantities of foam filling the whole square or corporate HQ entrance, filmy billows of it floating away on the breeze, and assorted comical turns by janitors/policemen/council or corporate officials as I stood somewhere in the middle distance, peeking round a corner and tittering at my merry and not at all in the end destructive prank, readers.
My original intended target had been the fountain in Clyde Square in Greenock, outside the Town Hall, but this struck me as a bit too close to home. I needed somewhere, I decided, where I wasn’t known (and probably wouldn’t be visiting again for a while). The Highland camping trip seemed to present an ideal opportunity for me finally to fulfil my dream. What was more, with Jim and Dave, I’d have accomplices; they could be lookouts and witnesses.
After days of searching we settled on Elgin the way a cloud of locusts settles on a ripe field of corn. We reconnoitred the target; a perfect, low-walled municipal fountain, rectangular in form, with a single medium-height jet and an easily identifiable pump inlet. Having secured the cooperation of Jim and Dave with a minimum of eye-rolling and head-shaking, I prepared to put my long-mulled-over plan into effect.
A busy but peaceful market town of some architectural significance not far from the Moray coast and about 40 miles east of Inverness, Elgin had no idea, as its innocent citizens woke up on that warm summer morning a quarter of a century ago, of the fate which lay in store for it …
… And it had no idea, the following morning, what had just happened to it, either, because we had obviously been the victims of unscrupulous local traders selling low-grade adulterated detergent, or perhaps an unsporting killjoy of a County Council committee had anticipated my deviously brilliant plan and fitted some sort of foam-defeating filter, or possibly the water used in the fountain was so incredibly hard it would have taken a petrol tanker’s worth of highly concentrated industrial-grade detergent to make it foam up satisfactorily, or maybe I didn’t use enough Fairy Liquid.
Whatever, the end result was a sort of off-white scum of bubbles an inch or so deep backed into one corner of the fountain by the breeze, the whole sad mess covering an area not much bigger than the surface of your average household bath and rapidly dissipating in the choppy waters amongst the bobbing ice-lolly wrappers and sweety papers.
I still have a photo of this debacle somewhere, but I forgot to look for it before we left for our week on Speyside, which made our whole return-to-the-scene-of-the-crime quest much more difficult than it needed to be.
It’s a really hot day. Elgin and Moray didn’t have the dry winter most of the west coast had – they had floods here in November 2002. They appear to be making up for it now, however; the town seems covered everywhere in apple and cherry blossom and we three middle-aged men are deeply appreciative of the fact that the young women of the town are taking the opportunity the day’s sun and heat presents to dress in a manner it is hard not to characterise as skimpy; this phenomenon makes our wanderings around the place searching in vain for the fountain actually quite bearable. Frustrated, we lunch in a Wetherspoons place – somewhat against our better judgment, but it’s there and it’s serving food so what the hell – and, after a very much needed ice cream, I spend quite a long time in Gordon & MacPhail’s shop in the centre of town, ogling whiskies, noting down some I’ve never even heard of and buying a few.
G&M have a long and distinguished history as one of the great independent bottlers of single-malt whiskies. At one time grocers like these were the one of the few sources of single malts; along with Cadenheads of Aberdeen (now of Campbeltown), they kept the flame of single-malt appreciation burning while the rest of the world seemed utterly lost in blends. With lots of useful contacts both locally on Speyside and in the rest of the whisky world, and vast quantities of whisky stored, Gordon & MacPhail are still one of those names you can look for in a specialist shop and know that whatever the name of the whisky in the bottle, the contents should be interesting.
I’m tempted to buy lots of deli stuff too, especially cheeses, but we’ve still got that damned fountain to find, and while any whisky I buy won’t be harmed by high temperatures, either in a plastic bag or sitting in the car, cheeses and meats and so on will just melt and/or bloom with unwelcome bacteria in this heat, so I regretfully leave all the scrumptious-looking stuff in the shop’s fridges.
We finally track the fountain down outside the council offices on the far side of the bypass. It’s not a fountain any more; they’ve filled it in and turned it into an admittedly quite impressive flower bed with a strange giant crown thing in the middle which looks like it belongs on a carnival float. We take some photos – filled, once again, 25 years later, with a distinct sense of anticlimax – open up the baking oven that the Jag has become in the sunlit car park, let it cool off and then head for some distilleries on our way to the coast; hopefully both will be cooler than sweltery Elgin, especially if we stay out of the still rooms and keep to the warehouses.
Da
llas Dhu and Benromach are two distilleries which are open again after ownership changes, though only one is actually producing. Dallas Dhu, just to the south of Forres, is an oddity; it’s a museum to distilling but it doesn’t make whisky. Considering that a lot of distilleries feel and look entirely like slightly creaky museums to the distiller’s art which, almost coincidentally, happen to make whisky as well, Dallas Dhu’s new status must represent an attempt to fill a gap in the tourist market I’d have thought you’d need an electron microscope to spot, but somebody must love it. I think they do good business with coach parties, and certainly the place is very well laid out with extremely helpful and enthusiastic staff. I buy a bottle of 1980 vintage 20-year-old which is very light in colour. The lightness continues in the character of the whisky too, but it turns out to be a beautiful, satiny, flowery dram and it seems a pity that when the existing stocks are exhausted, that’ll be it.
Benromach, just outside Forres towards the coast, has been bought by Gordon & MacPhail, the indie bottlers of Elgin; it’ll be a while before the whiskies created under their ownership are up for sale – though as it’s been opened for five years now, maybe they’re already selling big in the Italian market – but in the meantime I buy a bottle of 18-year-old from its previous incarnation. This is a goldeny-brown colour and reminds me of light burr walnut; there’s something nut-like and wood-smoke-ish about the taste too, with lots of sherry. One to compare and contrast with the new stuff when it appears.
We make for the coast and the dunes at Findhorn; the river forms a small estuary here with lots of sand and trees on the far side of the river from the long stretch of village, which is busy with people enjoying the unexpectedly fine weather. Dinghies and power boats everywhere. More ice cream. I hang around looking at boats and boring the guys with Drascombe and Orkney Boats spotting.
‘Hey; think we’ll see Mike Scott?’
‘No.’
Leaving Findhorn, we pass by the perimeter fence of RAF Kinloss. When I was about nine and we were camping nearby my dad got me to stand here at the perimeter fence just yards from the end of the runway when a Shackleton was taking off, thinking I’d be impressed. The Shackleton was a maritime patrol and ASW aircraft based on the old World War Two Lancaster bomber; it had four colossally noisy propeller engines and when it passed over, about twenty feet above, I nearly shat myself.
Dad just smiled when I told him how terrifying the experience had been and I recall being suspicious about this, but he redeemed himself that evening when he arranged for me to be a passenger in a speedboat towing a water-skier. The Shackleton was once memorably described – by someone in one of the crews that had to fly them decades after they should have been superseded – as not so much an aircraft as 30,000 rivets flying in close formation. The old planes are gone now, but as we head towards Forres again we see something even more impressive in a way; enormous straggling, undulating lines and skeins of birds – geese, maybe, though they’re too far away to be sure – filling the skies above the distant dunes and forests.
The A940/939 south from Forres to Grantown largely follows an old military road, and it’s just a peach; a beautiful ribbon of tarmac that climbs wriggling out of the sandy-soil-rooted pines near the coast through sunny forested hills towards the open moors by Lochindorb before starting to descend into the trees again, its course shadowed by the remains of an old and now dismantled railway. It must have been a spectacular railway journey. Even the bare bleached bones of this old line are impressive. The bridges, viaducts and tunnel facings have had Scottish Baronial detailing lavished on them; chunkily dressed confections of quality stone crowned with medieval-lite machicolation. Arguably a bit fussy and certainly functionally redundant, but I don’t care; it all looks great; a gilt framing for this little masterpiece of a road.
‘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.
