After the Dance

by Alan Warner

  The driver, manoeuvring equably between a foreign car and a truck, said, ‘I can’t do that sir. The passengers are watching it.’

  ‘And I am not a passenger, then?’

  The driver considered this, chewing gum all the while – he was in fact quite young, and he wore a uniform and a pair of boots from Macdonald and Sons – and then said, ‘I suppose you are, in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘What do you mean, in a manner of speaking?’ said Sam loudly. He wanted to kill this young man, he wanted to wrench his bones apart, he wanted to spatter his blood all over the bus.

  While he was standing there, a large man with a red face touched him lightly on the shoulder, ‘Had you not better sit down, Papa? The rest of us can’t see the screen.’

  Sam turned round abruptly. He should really kick this man in the groin, but on the other hand reasoning might be better.

  ‘This is pornographic filth,’ he said. ‘This man should be ashamed of showing it.’

  ‘We like pornographic filth,’ said the large man simply. ‘Don’t we?’ and he turned to the other passengers. There was a chorus of ‘yes’.

  ‘You tell that bowler-hatted nyaff to sit down,’ said a woman with red hair, who was sitting in one of the middle seats.

  ‘You tell him to sit down or you will kick his balls in,’ said a fat woman with a fat chin, who was sitting in the front seat.

  ‘You sit there, Papa,’ he said, ‘We don’t want to put you out.’

  I will report that driver, thought Sam, in incoherent rage. I will report him and hope that he will be dismissed from his job and turned out on to the street of whatever town he lives in. I wish to see him starving and indigent, begging for food, subservient, humble, asking for mercy as the whip lashes his back.

  He maintained a resentful silence till the bus pulled into the bus station at Inverness, imagining only the large man’s flesh dripping from his bones in hell. He then got off the bus in the same silence, making a note, however, of its number. He should have slugged that bus driver, and that large man. He felt a familiar contempt: his toothache throbbed, his arthritis hurt, his blood pressure was rising, and now he felt a pain just above his heart.

  When he was biting into the pie which he had bought at the café at the bus station, he belched. Thank God it wasn’t his heart, it was indigestion. He looked around him savagely. The usual crowd of nonentities, fodder of the Clearances, remnants of the ’45. He felt such unutterable contempt that he almost vomited on the spot. The good ones had gone to America and now he was left with illogical dross, who winked their eyes and seemed to have a secretive tradition which they would only tell after eons of time had elapsed. ‘You should do something about your salt,’ he said to the proprietor as he left, and felt the deep satisfaction which his parting shot had given.

  The question however still remained. Had Donnie stayed in Inverness, or had he gone further afield? He felt a sudden pain in his kidneys and went into the lavatory at the side of the café. After he had finished he looked around him for a towel but there was none available.

  ‘You use that machine over there,’ said a young man with a grin.

  Sam pushed the button on the machine but finding that no towel came out of it he left in the worst of humours.

  What else could he do but parade the streets of Inverness.

  If it hadn’t been for that film he could have questioned the bus driver about Donnie Macleod. But he could not ask a pervert for information and in any case he would have lied to him. I have to assume that he is still in Inverness, he thought, there is nothing else that I can do. I have to rely on the intuition of the great detective. I feel in my bones that he is still here.

  In comparison with Portree, Inverness was a metropolis. He counted ten churches before giving up: the Woolworths too was larger. Feeling tired, he sat down on a bench for a while. He took a blue tablet from his pocket and swallowed it; it should keep his thrombosis at bay.

  A man who appeared to be a beggar came and asked him for money for a cup of tea.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Sam. The beggar looked at him for a moment and then scuttled away.

  Sam gazed straight ahead of him at what appeared to be a cinema, and whose lights flashed intermittently. A moment’s thought however told him that it was not a cinema. It was in fact some kind of a club as he deduced from the large green letters which said ‘THE MESS OF POTTAGE’. It suddenly seemed to him certain that he would find Donnie Macleod in there. He had no logical means of knowing this, only the mystical intuition of the great detective that he was.

  He walked over to the building. Behind a glass screen sat a large woman who was wearing black lipstick.

  ‘One ticket,’ he said crisply. ‘That will be enough.’

  ‘Adult?’ said the woman in a husky voice.

  He disdained answering her; he had taken an instant dislike to her from the moment he saw her. But, more than that, he was suddenly struck by an intuition as he looked at her naked neck and almost naked breasts. He couldn’t quite focus on what it was but it told him he had come to the right place.

  He left the lobby and going through a door ahead he found himself in a large smoky room, in fact Sodom and Gomorrah. The noise was frightening. Dancers clung closely to each other. Some people were drinking at tables. On a stage a large, almost naked, woman was prancing. So this was what the Highlands had come to after the Clearances. So this was what the ’45 had done to the people. So this was the result of the sheep runs and the deer forests.

  If it hadn’t been for his instinctive desire to pursue his investigations, he would have left at once. He touched his bowler hat as if for comfort.

  As he stood there hesitating, a large woman wearing red lipstick and tottering on the sharp heels of her shoes (Armstrong and Brothers, Inverness) came up to him and said in a deep attractive voice, ‘Are you not dancing, darling?’ And before he could say anything he was dragged into the maelstrom of light and noise.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ asked his partner, against whose naked breast Sam’s bowler hat bobbed like a cork in a stormy sea. He couldn’t account for his hatred of her, but said sharply, ‘Portree.’

  ‘Portree, darling. Over the sea to Skye and so on.’ (Her cliché immediately offended him. Why, wherever one went nowadays, could one never get a really satisfactory religious discussion?) Her mouth yawned, surrounded by a red infernal line.

  ‘Do you always wear a bowler hat when you are dancing?’ she asked.

  ‘Always,’ said Sam.

  ‘How flip, what an ironic comment you are making on our contemporary society,’ said the large woman. ‘You must be a satirist, rather like Juvenal.’

  Not another pagan writer, thought Sam savagely. Why not one of the prophets such as Micah? But no one ever mentioned Micah or Jeremiah.

  The large woman made as if to kiss Sam. He turned his head away from a breath that stank like garlic.

  ‘Has “THE MESS OF POTTAGE” been here long? he forced himself to say, trying to wriggle away from her hand which rested on his rump. A thrill of horror pervaded him.

  ‘Who knows, darling?’ So many questions, so few answers.

  Her shadowy chin bent over him and suddenly the solution to the case was as clear to him as a psalm book on a pew on a summer day. He withdrew rapidly from the woman’s embrace and made his way to the exit, the sign for which hung green above his head.

  ‘I knew it,’ he said to the receptionist, ‘I knew I had seen you before. The hair on your chest registered subconsciously.’

  ‘It is true,’ said Donnie. ‘You have run me to ground. I suppose it was Annie who hired you . . . ’

  ‘It was indeed,’ said Sam. (You ungrateful pervert, he muttered under his breath.) He wanted to crush Donnie into a pulp. So he had been right after all. That red spot beside the word ‘enuff’ had been lipstick, not blood.

  ‘I couldn’t stand it any longer,’ the vicious serpent was saying. ‘I was tired of hearing Leviticus and especiall
y Numbers. You have no idea what it was like. If I had stayed I would have gone mad.’ (You horrible atheist!) ‘I couldn’t distinguish between the Amalekites and the Philistines.’ (You pathetic heretic!) ‘When sitting at the table I would have an impulse to stab Annie with a knife. I knew there was no future for us. I saw this job in the paper and applied for it.’ (You belly-crawling snake!)

  So this was why Donnie had said to that ineffable boring ferryman, ‘A change is good for a man.’ So this was why he had looked devilish.

  ‘I won’t go back,’ said Donnie simply, ‘I’m happy here. I love my new dresses. Pink was always my favourite colour.’

  ‘You used to dress up in your bedroom,’ said Sam.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  Sam ignored the question. After a while, Donnie said, ‘You are a marvellous detective, the best in Portree. But you can tell Annie I will not go back. I have made a new life for myself here, and Jim and I have fallen in love. Tell her that if it hadn’t been Leviticus it would have been someone else.’

  Sam Spaid looked into Donnie’s blue eyes, thinking many thoughts. His gaze rested on the rose in his corsage. Then he sighed deeply. ‘I think you are taking the wrong course,’ he said. ‘But I cannot take you back by force, much as I would like to. You will have to give me something in your handwriting that will show Annie that I met you.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Donnie, taking a pen from his purse of tinselly yellow. He wrote rapidly, and Sam read what he had written.

  ‘Annie, you’re a good woman. Too good for me. I shall think of you as a sister.

  Signed Deborah.’

  ‘Deborah,’ said Sam between his teeth.

  ‘Yes, I have changed my name. Jim didn’t like the name “Donnie”.’

  Sam put his hand out to Deborah (Donnie) while at the same time he was thinking that he should kick her (him) in the teeth.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘And may you learn more about those fleshpots than you know now.’

  As he left ‘THE MESS OF POTTAGE’ he was thinking that he would not make much from this case – his fee, and his expenses, which were the rates for the ferry and the bus.

  He would have to try and find some more complicated cases. Little did he know that there was one waiting for him which would be known as ‘The Case of The Disappearing Pulpit’ and which would push his logical powers to the limit, and bring him expenses to the devil-possessed village of Acharacle.

  The Old Woman and the Rat

  When the old woman went into the barn she saw the rat and she also saw the feathers of the little yellow chicken among which the rat was sitting. It was a large grey rat and its whiskers quivered. She knew that there was no way out for it but past her, for there was a hole between the door and the wall and she knew that this was the place where the rat had entered. She regretted that she had not filled this up before. It seemed that the rat was mocking her but certainly it knew that she was present. And it also knew that the chickens had belonged to her, those beautiful little chickens of bright yellow which she had nursed so carefully and which had seemed so much the sign of a new spring. The day was Easter Friday.

  As she gazed at the rat she felt a ladder of distaste shudder up her spine climbed by many rats, but she stood where she was and then bent down slowly to pick up a plank of wood with nails at one end of it. Her back ached as she bent. The barn itself was large, spacious and clean with a stone floor. At the far end were the remains of the chickens and the hens. Above were the rafters on which hung an old mouldy saddle which her father had once had for the horses. It hung its wings on both sides of the rafter. She thought, and then quite deliberately she stuffed it, mouldy and breaking as it was, into the hole which the rat had entered by. All this while the rat watched her with bright intelligent eyes as if it knew perfectly well what she was up to. The arena was prepared, the large clean spacious arena. She made her way rather fearfully towards the rat. She felt rather unsteady but angry. After all, she was quite old and she had arthritis in her hands and she had varicose veins in her legs. The rat certainly was fitter than her, more agile, more swift. She advanced on the rat steadily with her plank, the nailed end foremost. It waited, almost contemptuously. She went up to it and thrust the plank at it. It moved rapidly away and crouched, looking at her, its long rat tail behind it, its whiskers quivering, its bright eyes moving hither and thither. Where have you been? she thought. Before the chickens, where have you been? She thought of her husband, dead in the cemetery, and closed her eyes. She deliberately made visions of flowers appear.

  She thought. Then slowly she went over to a big disused table which she had put in the barn many years before and propped it up on end, to cut off part of the space. But that was useless for the rat immediately climbed up to its top and stood there slightly swaying and half smiling. For the first time as she looked up at it she thought that it might leap down at her from above and this frightened her. She was also frightened that her fear might be communicated to the rat which might then attack her. She backed away from the rat slowly, thinking. What a terrible thing to have this battle when she could be in church, but then some things were more important even than church. She backed towards the door still holding the short nailed plank ahead of her. She pulled the door slowly behind her and backed out, shutting the door quickly. She was determined that the rat would not escape. She almost felt the rat’s claws in her back as she turned away but she knew that it was still there in the barn with the remains of its feast, its obscene supper. She went into the house and got a box of matches. Then she went round the side of the house in the great calm of the morning and got a lot of straw and grass, all of which was dry because of the blue cloudless weather. She felt happy now that she had something to do. But clutching her masses of grass and straw and with the box of matches in the pocket of her apron she was slightly frightened entering the bare arena again. Still it was better to be bare than not, for one knew where one was then. She felt in her mouth the tiny fragile bones of the chickens, and the taste of the blood. She slowly opened the door and edged in with all that grass and straw. The rat stayed where it was, licking its body. She threw the straw and the grass as far towards it as she could and then rapidly picked up the plank with the nails again, her back vibrating with terror. The rat watched her, more uneasily now, as if wondering what she was up to. She lit the match nervously and threw the lighted flame among the dry straw and the grass. The fire ran along it boiling like illuminated rats. The rat backed away into its corner, snarling. Smoke began to rise and billow round it, for there must have been some dampness at the centre of the straw somewhere. She backed towards the door. The rat rushed out through the smoke towards her, its teeth drawn back. Behind the rat she saw the flames rising and the smoke. It seemed to have emerged out of, been generated by, the fire. The rat made for the place where she had stuffed the remains of the broken winged saddle. As it did so she swiped at it with the nailed plank. It squirmed away, half hit. It turned and faced her snarling as if it knew that she was the only obstacle to its escape. Its face looked incredibly fierce and evil as if all the desire for life had been concentrated there. It wished to live at all costs. For a moment she was terrified at what she had done, at the smoking arena she was in. But she knew that the stone floor would prevent the fire from spreading. The rat launched itself at her, knowing that she was the enemy, that there was no going back through the smoke. She swung the nailed plank as its face, snarling and distorted, looked towards her, and she felt it hit the rat, felt the rat’s claws scrabbling against it as if it wanted to get purchase on it, to grip it and climb towards her. She swung the plank against the floor and banged and banged. The rat’s head and body squelched against the stone floor of the barn which had once been filled with sacks of corn. She banged and banged till the shudders left her back and breast and legs. She banged it so that it was a flat grey mess on the floor. Then after a while flushed and panting she opened the door on the wide day. She threw the plank as far away as she
could into the undergrowth. There were bits of rat attached to it. No doubt the birds of the air would finish it off. She forced herself to get a spade to detach the smashed body from the floor. She threw the mashed carcass from the spade into the bushes as well and then fetched pail after pail of water which she splashed over the place where the body had been. She cleaned and cleaned till there was not even the shadow of the rat left. When the straw had finally burned itself out she took that away as well, and the remains of the chicken and the hens which had themselves got burnt. She spent a long time cleaning the barn, making it bright as new. When she had finished she went into the house and made herself strong tea. It was too late for church now. Still she could go there in the evening. Meanwhile she could sleep for a while by the window, for she felt empty and victorious. As she passed her mirror she saw that her face looked gaunt and fulfilled, and she hadn’t felt so light for a long time.

  The Crater

  In the intervals of inaction it had been decided by the invisible powers that minor raids were feasible and therefore to be recommended. In the words of the directive: ‘For reasons known to you we are for the moment acting on the defensive so far as serious operations are concerned but this should not preclude the planning of local attacks on a comparatively small scale . . . ’

  Like the rest of his men on that particular night, Lieutenant Robert Mackinnon blackened his face so that in the dugout eyes showed white, as in a Black Minstrel show. He kept thinking how similar it all was to a play in which he had once taken part, and how the jokes before the performance had the same nervous high-pitched quality, as they prepared to go out into the darkness. There was Sergeant Smith who had been directed to write home to the next of kin to relate the heroism of a piece of earth which had been accidentally shattered by shrapnel. His teeth grinned whitely beneath his moustache as he adjusted the equipment of one of the privates and joked, ‘Tomorrow you might get home, lad.’ They all knew what that meant and they all longed for a minor wound – nothing serious – which would allow them to be sent home honourably. And yet Smith himself had been invalided home and come back. ‘I missed your stink, lads,’ he had said when he appeared among them again, large and buoyant and happy. And everyone knew that this was his place where he would stay till he was killed or till the war ended.