John McPake and the Sea Beggars

by Stuart Campbell

  ‘Your purpose?’ asked the figure hunched at an ornate desk on which rested several ink wells and a selection of quills.

  ‘We bring tangible evidence of the contrition and true repentance of our brother Johannes Pakesoon,’ said Balthasar. Cornelius produced the wedding coin and placed it on the desk. The official glanced round nervously and when he was certain that there were no witnesses to the transaction he covered the coin with his hand, drew it towards him and feeling its weight muttered, ‘God loves a sinner.’

  Johannes knew that he was next. Once the cold light seeped through the cracks and under the door of the holding shed his companions assumed identities. The first to be hauled out was a man of a similar age with a wound disfiguring the left side of his face. He offered no resistance when the soldiers came to bind his hands and take him away. The silence hung heavily in the room until it was broken by a single strangled cry which could have been defiance, resignation, acceptance, or simple terror.

  The next was an elderly woman who walked slowly towards the guards when they returned. She offered her hands for tying and let herself be led towards the door through which the fires Johannes had glanced the previous day were still burning. The door slammed shut but there was no cry.

  In the moments that followed Johannes tried to savour the sensation of living: the blood pounding in his chest, his breathing, which he tried to make more regular, the small pangs of hunger and fear in his stomach. He concentrated on the small noises that penetrated from the outside, the incongruous chatter of the executioners, even a small burst of laughter. A bird cry somewhere. As the door opened for a final time his stoicism collapsed before an overwhelming sense of having failed Michel, and awareness of his own imminent oblivion.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The other Voices had stopped. Apart from me, John was untroubled by the rat pack of personae who lodged in his consciousness. Respite was temporary but welcome all the same. His tongue felt too big for his mouth, swollen and sore after the guard had slipped during the ECT. He couldn’t remember anything of the train journey and fretted lest he had lashed out at any innocent passengers who had the misfortune to be his travelling companions that day. He looked at his knuckles and saw no scratches or other evidence that he had fought against his perceived transgressors. His wrists were still red from the handcuffs.

  ‘Do you fancy a walk?’ asked Derek who had told Beverley he would get John out of the ward for an hour or two. This despite the fact his shift had just finished and his girlfriend was waiting for him in the Asda car park.

  John put his face up to the fine drizzle that smothered the hospital gardens and reread the array of white signs that pointed to the different wards, supplies, family rooms, chapel and morgue. He thought he heard the Bastard muttering in his ear, ‘Only a matter of time,’ but no, he was merely anticipating what the Bastard would have said had he been active and not recovering from 200 volts of electricity. It occurred to him that the Bastard might as well be there if his absence was only filled by him imagining what the vindictive Voice might have said. The circle had been squared.

  Derek gossiped harmlessly about the other residents. ‘Cracking new cook,’ he said. ‘Mick was convinced she was a poisoner and insisted I taste his macaroni cheese. Dennis came out of his room and chatted with the others, he was OK. Beverley brought in the remains of her son’s birthday cake. Grand.’

  They left the grounds and walked up Morningside Road towards Bruntsfield. Derek bought a paper from the Big Issue seller outside of the bank. They recognised each other. ‘How’s it goin’, pal?’ asked the vendor. ‘Still working at the hostel? Am getting ma life together. How’s it hangin’, John, still lookin’ for yer brither?’ He abandoned his enquiry having caught the eye of a possible punter. ‘Big Issue, sir? Great articles … suit yersel, sir, have a guid day … wanker.’

  John’s instinctive reaction to Big Issue sellers was one of respect and envy. When he was homeless, his head had been too chaotic to embrace the status afforded by vest, badge and supply of magazines. Big Issue sellers were on the way back; they had turned corners and re-engaged with a world of supply and demand, of financial transactions, negotiations and moral certainties. ‘We can’t accept charity, you have to buy a magazine.’

  John’s aspirations had extended no further than securing the thin strip of pavement that abutted the hot air grill from the old Waverley Hotel. His bulk had helped. He looked large and scary. Rivals for the pitch invariably slunk away muttering until, one night, he was wakened by a hand on the shoulder. The touch was too gentle, too tentative to be the police. ‘Is it you, Mr McPake?’

  The young street worker had been one of his former pupils. She hid her astonishment and passed no judgement with no hint of how are the mighty fallen. She had played Nancy in the school production of Oliver that he directed. With her hand still on his shoulder she sang softly, ‘Consider yourself, at home, consider yourself one of the family,’ and laughed at the unintentional irony of the words. It was she who had arranged for a mental health assessment and smoothed the way for him to move into the hostel. He owed her a lot, and hoped her life had turned out well.

  They were soon marooned in a sea of kids liberated from Boroughmuir High School and caught up in a miasma of chewing gum, aftershave and perfume exuded by the hormone-fuelled tide which swept through them as if they didn’t exist. The wave solidified outside a cafe that had tried in vain to protect its profits by limiting the number of school children who could be admitted at any one time. The surreal jabber of half-insults and inane banter evoked an acute sense of loss in John. He had been a good teacher. He had boundless energy, the kids loved his lessons, and he knew they did. For some reason he heard himself talking to a concerned couple at a parents’ evening about a child he couldn’t remember from Adam. ‘A good lad, distracted sometimes, needs to stick in now with the prelims coming up.’ The parents hung on his every sainted word. ‘He mustn’t be afraid to ask if he doesn’t understand.’

  And now? The sheer impact of his wasted life left him literally unbalanced. He clutched at Derek who looked at him anxiously. The overwhelming sapping sense of loss made him panic. Pointless, illness-ridden nothingness. A mockery. Everything thrown away.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said the Bastard.

  That evening John found himself mindlessly reading one of the notices near the nurses’ station: Waste Management Segregation. Several subtle distinctions were strictly drawn SANPRO WASTE – specific sites only – Non-infected waste eg continence products, catheter drainage bags (empty); SHARPS CLINICAL WASTE – Needles, syringes, blades, IV cannulae (Placenta packs must be disposed of in a dedicated rigid container); YELLOW STREAM CLINICAL WASTE – Human tissue and recognisable body parts, highly infectious waste – ORANGE STREAM CLINICAL WASTE – items with blood or body tissue waste eg dressings soiled with blood or body fluids.

  ‘Gives you hope doesn’t it?’ said the Bastard. ‘You come in because you’re mad, next thing you know they’ve lopped off vital parts and stuffed them in a bag. Recycling probably. Lots of folk would like new bits, not yours though. Be honest what could you give, a ruined liver? An ear perhaps. There is after all a precedent; who’s the boy cut off his ear to spite his face? You could give them your cock, good as new, one careful owner.’

  John grimaced and looked through the glass panels on the door down the corridor which evidently led to both the dental surgery, the chapel and the Pimms Ward.

  ‘That’ll be number 7,’ said the Jester. ‘Just next to the McEwan’s ward and the Bulmers ward. Sponsorship you know.’

  ‘A quick game of darts, a few beers, no harm done,’ said the Tempter. ‘Help you relax, make a few friends … ’

  Johannes looked down on himself with curiosity and detachment. There was something biblical over the way the soldiers cast lots over his clothing once it had been torn from his body. Comparatively useless he would have thought, but perhaps they were worth a few coppers in the paupers’ market.

 
; He watched dispassionately from on high as the small figure below was roughly strapped to a wheel which had previously been attached to a lumbering hay wagon. Bizarrely he anticipated the strange rush of vertigo at the moment when his body, its legs broken and bent, would be hoisted into the sky on top of the poles, one more mast in a macabre fleet lurching towards an unseen horizon. The ropes hung loosely from the pole as the soldiers strained to anchor it in the small stone-lined hole before it could be hoisted upwards. He wondered if conversation would be possible between the dying as they lay together a tree’s length above the ground. They would have to shout above the wind, he thought.

  One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us! He thought it was Luke the evangelist but he couldn’t be sure.

  He witnessed the functionary scurrying up to one of the soldiers and placing a restraining arm on his shoulder. After some explanation the soldier nodded and efficiently cut though the ropes binding him to the wheel. Johannes watched with curiosity as he saw himself being hurried back into the building where he had been tried.

  In a side room he was reunited with Balthasar and Cornelius. The older man could not hold back his tears. ‘Look at you, look at you!’ was all he could say. Trapped somewhere between anger and joy Cornelius punched Johannes in the shoulder and ground his fist into his stained shirt. They clasped each other, three figures entwined in solidarity and love. They quickly left the building in case someone had a change of plan.

  Johannes put a hand in each of the dog’s mouths. They growled with pleasure as he tugged playfully against their teeth. Balthasar raised a flagon of water to his lips. Not vinegar, thought Johannes. Cornelius handed back the clothes that had, as an afterthought, been tossed into the room before they left. Johannes steadied himself against the fence as he climbed into someone else’s breeches.

  ‘While waiting for you,’ said Balthasar, ‘we spoke to one of the guards, a small runt of a man who said he had only been obeying orders … ’ Cornelius snorted. We asked what was going on. He said he couldn’t possibly tell us. After biting on the guilder we gave him he found the courage to gab. He said the Spanish are massing their forces near Antwerp. They believe the sea beggars will soon attack. It was our coward’s considered opinion that any available labour was being shepherded to the coast to build fortifications and lay mines. If Michel is still alive he’s probably travelling north.’

  ‘Come on, lads,’ said Johannes, ‘there’s a boy to be found.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  John eased himself back into the routine of hostel life. The cook was an improvement although Paul was not coping with the change and would stare at her suspiciously from behind his copy of Nostromo. Kevin snorted dismissively when their paths crossed on the stair.

  John’s CPN, a brusque but compassionate woman in her late forties, appeared more frequently than usual to check that he was taking his medication. Mick studiously avoided her. He seemed in danger of losing weight such was the strength of his conviction that he was still being progressively poisoned by conspirators of various hues, all united by their hatred of Communism.

  ‘Can you lend me the price of a fish supper?’ he asked John in the dining room, but didn’t take the consequent apologetic shake of the head too personally. ‘Got to you as well, have they?’

  It was Derek in one of their chats who suggested that John might want to make a start on the garden. Any initial enthusiasm shown by his fellow residents had quickly dissipated once it was apparent that some hard effort was needed. ‘Exploitation of the masses,’ said Mick, ‘Ivan Denisovich all over again.’

  In the interval during John’s stay in the Royal Edinburgh, giant hogweed had been discovered in the garden, to the dismay of a Council official who toyed with the idea of cordoning off most of Leith until the pestilence could be rooted out and burned. By way of a compromise a small area had been roped off as if it were a police crime scene, which Mick thought it was. ‘There’s one of us missing,’ he said, ‘buried in the garden. Mark my words the Hague war crimes tribunal will be here soon.’

  ‘No,’ said Kevin, ‘Fred West’s moved in.’

  ‘Il faut cultiver le jardin,’ intoned the Academic. ‘Work as the panacea for life’s ills.’

  ‘Even if your left buttock has been lopped off by a Bulgar soldier,’ quipped the Jester, showing a surprising erudition and familiarity with Candide thought John, who could only assume that the Academic had been secretly holding tutorials for the other Voices.

  The ground was initially resistant to the spade which had to be levered backwards and forwards before John could make any impression. Eventually the sucking clay let itself be prised out of the ground and turned over.

  John had not gardened since he was encouraged to do so by the second or third foster carer who came into his life, a well-intentioned taciturn man with an allotment on the outskirts of Lanark. When alone with John he would share homilies that testified to God’s infinite goodness, and the importance of repressing all thoughts that were not conducive to treating one’s body like a temple. John had failed to understand the metaphor, and had tried to identify similarities between his gangly adolescent frame and the sort of pillared buildings he had seen in The Children’s Encyclopaedia.

  The tenement flat where he had briefly lived with his wife in Tollcross had a shared back green and neither of them had felt sufficiently pioneering to tame the communal weeds or justify their intervention to the neighbours.

  After the first dozen or so spadefuls had been prised from the earth, he stretched and looked back at the three-story building that was his home, as the Bastard delighted in reminding him. He thought he caught sight of a curtain flickering in Dennis’ room but no face appeared. A slow lizard of water leaking from the rhone pipe had turned the stonework green. A window was thrown open in the adjacent property and he heard someone coughing as smoke was exhaled from the narrow opening.

  Perhaps if he really concentrated on the effort of digging he could keep the Voices at bay.

  ‘You can’t keep me out,’ said the Bastard.

  ‘It’s dark in here, I can’t read,’ said the Academic.

  ‘Black as a whore’s armpit,’ said the Jester.

  John’s thoughts were at least partially his own. He should go back to Register House. Janet had accompanied him before and had explained to the slightly disapproving librarian that they needed to trace an Andy McPake.

  The initial search had proven fruitless but had to be abandoned in any case once the Bastard started laughing like a hyena every time John thought they might be getting somewhere. Eventually he had been reduced to holding the sides of his head and pushing his thumbs into his temples. Christina had helped him onto a passing bus where to the acute annoyance of the driver and the other customers he refused to relinquish his grip on the stair handrail, preventing other passengers from getting off. He should try again, next time he would search records of all marriages in Scotland in the last decade.

  He stooped to pick out two white objects from the hole opened up by the last upturned sod, one was a plastic fork planted in fond memory of either McDonalds or KFC, the other was the bowl of a clay pipe. He turned it over in his hand and tried to envisage who smoked it before dropping in to the ground. It was probably Victorian but was quite possibly much, much older. Overhead, the bird soared.

  ‘We need money, we must find work,’ said Cornelius.

  ‘We must find Michel,’ retorted Johannes.

  ‘I know that, for the love of Christ! But we must eat.’

  The men trudged on in moody silence.

  It was Balthasar who suggested that they join the gang of hired labour. The men were working to stem the flow of cold sluggish water leaking into a field from a partially collapsed dyke.

  ‘We have to,’ he said, ‘you can see the dogs’ ribs.’

  The turquoise sky was streaked with slivers of cloud and a long line of geese climbed ever higher towards warmer
climes: a thin arrowhead of birds following a single speck. Cornelius shivered and Johannes patted the foremost hound.

  The foreman, a dour man in a greatcoat with oddly bulging pockets quickly agreed a rate for three days’ labour and the weavers were directed to the far corner of the field where the black pumping engine was barely turning.

  As they approached, the two incumbents of the treadmill emerged exhausted, clung briefly to each other, groaned in unison and fell to their knees on the sodden ground, too tired to acknowledge their replacements. One was an old man with a distended belly and red face, the other a slim boy shaking with fatigue and ague.

  Having secured the dogs, Balthasar entered first and climbed to the bar some fifteen feet from the ground while the other two stopped the wheel from turning. Then Cornelius held the structure steady until Johannes had taken up his position just behind the older man. On the count of three they trod down on the slats and slowly the contraption turned.

  They soon established a rhythm and fell into a companionable silence, broken only by the creaking wheel and the regular plash of water dropping from the wooden blades.

  An hour or so into their journey to nowhere, when their limbs were beginning to ache and hunger was making its presence known, Balthasar started singing the song of Halewyn:

  ‘BUT FIRST LAY OFF MAER TREKT UIT UW OPPERST KLEED

  WANT MAEGDENBLOED DAT SPREIDT ZOO BREED

  ZOOT U BESPREIDE, HET WARE MY LEED … ’

  Academic, have you any idea what it is about?

  ‘Let me think, those lines are easy, But first lay off your upper robe/for maiden’s blood it spreads so far/if it stained you, it would be my grief.

  ‘An interesting choice. The situation is complex; Lord Halewyn, a possible antecedent for Bluebeard has the uncanny knack of entrancing beautiful young women with a single glance. Not being the nicest of chaps he invariably leads them to their death. However on this occasion his latest conquest is allowed to choose the manner of her death. Despite being in a field of gallows she asks to be beheaded but suggests that her captor first removes his shirt to protect it from her blood. A very clever ruse. The very moment the shirt is over his head, thereby blinding him, she seizes her chance and lops off his head instead. There are of course many different versions.’