by Alan Warner
His eyes followed their frail yet beautiful movements. He smiled wryly as he felt them nipping him. He’d have to get into the house. He would have to find out when the bus left in the morning. That would be the first stage of the journey: after that he could find out about boats and trains and planes.
Murdo & the Mod
At the time of the Mod, Murdo tended to get into long arguments about Mod medallists. He would say, ‘In my opinion Moira Mcinally was the best medallist there ever was. Her timbre was excellent.’ Most people wouldn’t know what timbre was, and Murdo would repeat the word. On the other hand, he would say that though her timbre was excellent her deportment wasn’t as good as that of Norma McEwan who became a bus conductress on the Govan route.
Such arguments would go on into the early hours of the morning, and as many as eighty Mod medallists might be mentioned with special reference to their expression when they sang their songs, as well as their marks in Gaelic and music. Murdo would sometimes say, ‘97 out of 100 is not enough for a medallist since I myself used to get more than that in Geometry.’
‘However,’ he would add, ‘Mairi MacGillivary got 99 out of 100 for her timbre, though she only got 7 out of 100 for her Gaelic since in actual fact she was a learner and was born in Japan.
‘Her expression,’ he would add, ‘was enigmatic.’
At one Mod he offered protection for adjudicators. This was a service which consisted of whisking them off to an armoured taxi immediately they had given their adjudication. For he said, ‘Haven’t you realised the number of threats those adjudicators get? Not so often from the contestants themselves but from their close relatives, especially their mothers who have carefully trained these contestants for many years in expression, timbre, and the best method of wearing the kilt. No one has any idea of what is involved in producing a gold medallist. His Gaelic must be perfection itself as far as expression is concerned and must be taken from the best islands. Furthermore, he must stand in a particular way with his hand on his sporran, and his expression must be fundamentally alert, though not impudent, though for the dreamier songs he may close his eyes. Now a mother who has brought up such a contestant cannot but be angry when an adjudicator, who doesn’t even come from her island, presumes to make her son fifth equal in a contest which moreover only contains fifth equals. There have been death threats in the past. Some adjudicators have disguised themselves as members of the Free Church and carry Bibles and wear black hats and black ties, but this isn’t enough as everyone knows that the Free Church doesn’t like Mods, since they are not mentioned in the Bible. The Comunn Gaidhealach have even produced very thin adjudicators who, as it were, melt into the landscape when their adjudication is over, but even this has not prevented them from being assaulted. These mothers will stand in freezing rain outside adjudicators’ houses and shout insults at them and sometimes the more ambitious of them have fired mortar shells into the living-room.’
Thus Murdo’s ‘Adjudicators Rescue Service’, knows as ARS for short, was in great demand, and for an extra pound the adjudicator could make faces at frenzied mothers through the bullet-proof glass.
Another service that Murdo would provide was skin-coloured hearing aids which in practical terms were in fact invisible. These were for turning off after the seventh hearing of the same song, such as ‘Bheir Mi Ho’. If the hearing aids were visible it would look discourteous to turn them off. So Murdo would advertise for people who would make skin-coloured invisible hearing aids, and sometimes he would even apply for a grant for such people who had to be highly skilled and whose pay was high as they only worked during Mod times.
Another service he provided was special tartans for people from Russia and Japan and other distant countries. His tartan for the Oblomov clan was well thought of. It was a direct and daring perestroika white with a single dove carrying a Mod brochure in its mouth. Sometimes too it might carry a placard ‘Welcome to Mod 1992 in Dazzling and Riveting Kilmarnock, home of Gaelic and Engineering Sponsorship’. Indeed his sponsorship from Albania was the high point of his life, and he kept for a long time a transcript of the short interview he had with its president, who at that time was being besieged by 300,000 rebellious people demanding more soap and toilet paper.
Murdo indeed became very animated at the time of the Mod, as if he were emerging out of a long hibernation like the church at Easter. He ran a service well in advance of the Mod for booking Choirs into Bed and Breakfast locations, and he further advertised a service for making rooms soundproof so that pipers could practise their pibrochs, one of which was in fact dedicated to him. It was called Murdo’s Farewell to Harry Lauder. He invented a device by which a piper could smoke while playing the pipes at the same time. He advertised this by the slogan ‘Put that in your pipes and smoke it’.
But I could go on for ever describing Murdo’s energy and innovative brilliance at the time of the Mod. It was as if he grew alive again, as if he vibrated with elan.
He was here, there and everywhere, organising dances, selling tickets, raffling salt herring, giving endless votes of thanks, singing songs, defending the Mod in midnight debates, pinpointing the virtues of Mod gold medallists of earlier years and interviewing them in a special geriatric studio which was fitted with bedpans, dressing up as a starving Campbell who needed sponsorship, writing short stories and sending them in under assumed names such as Iain MacRae Hemingway or Hector Maupassant. It was a week of glorious abandon for him, so much so that the rest of the year was an anticlimax, and he could hardly wait until the Mod was to be staged in Gatwick or Henley.
Murdo’s closely reasoned paper on why the Mod should be held in Paris was probably his masterpiece. He said first of all that many of the older slightly deafer people might think it was Harris, and before they knew where they were they would be strolling down the Champs Elysees rather than Tarbert. Also there were a number of Gaels in Paris who had been detained there after the last football international as well as some ancient followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Furthermore, it was probably from here that the original Celts had come before they had changed from ‘P’ to ‘Q’. Also the word ‘église’ was very like the Gaelic word ‘eaglais’ and there was a small French religious sect called L’Eglise Libre to which Pascal had belonged.
So it was that Murdo was busy as a bee when Mod time came, especially with his compilation of Mod medallists into leagues, headed by Morag MacCrimmon (aged 102), and by his selection of raffle prizes headed by his special editions of the Bible with a foreword by Nicholas Fairbairn, and a page three of aged schoolteachers from the Stornoway Gazette.
‘I envisage,’ he told the press recently, ‘that our next Mod will be in East Germany. As a goodwill gesture I have decided that there will be no communists on the committee. I hope to see you all there.’
I should like, but for pressure of time, to detail Murdo’s other astonishing achievements, e.g. the year he won the Mod Medal himself by an amazing margin of 90 points, and also his epic poem which won him the Bardic Crown and which was called ‘The Church and the Sound of the Sea’. However, I have said enough to demonstrate that Murdo was by far the most interesting President, Secretary, and Treasurer seen at the same time which the Mod is ever likely to have, and his creation of twenty fourth-equals out of a total entry of twenty-one was the most dazzling arithmetical feat ever seen and also the fairest.
His interview in Gaelic with President Mitterand was a sparkling performance when he countered the President’s ‘Tha e fluich’ with ‘C’est la guerre’.
Sweets to the Sweet
When I went into the shop next door that day, I heard them quarrelling, I mean Diane and her father, Mason, or the Lady, as we called him. Perhaps they hadn’t heard the tinkle of the bell or he had forgotten that I often came in at that time.
‘And I’m telling you that university is crap. I’m not going and that’s the end of it.’
That was beautiful baby-faced Diane with the peroxide, white hair and the heart-sha
ped ruthless face.
I heard him murmuring and she began again:
‘I’m telling you, you can shove these books. And all that stuff about sacrificing yourself for me is a lot of . . . ’
At that point I went back to the door, opened it and let it slam as if I had just come in. The voices ceased and the Lady came into the shop.
He looked tired and pale, but his sweet angelic smile was in evidence as usual. I heard a far door slam and judged that it must be his daughter leaving.
‘Marzipan?’ he said. I agreed. I like sweets and I eat a lot of them.
Mason is the kind of man who was born to serve, and not simply because it is his trade but because his whole nature is servile. I mean, one has seen shopkeepers who are brisk and obliging, but this is something else again, this is obsequiousness, an eagerness to please that is almost unpleasantly oriental. It makes one feel uncomfortable, but it must please a certain type since his shop does a good trade and, in fact, the rumour is that he is thinking of expanding.
I return to his servility. It isn’t that he is insincere or anything like that. It is as if deep in his soul he has decided that he really is the servant, that you are a different order of being, an aristocrat, and he lower than a peasant. He gives the impression of finding himself in you. If it weren’t for you he wouldn’t exist. Frankly, if you haven’t met that kind of person, it is difficult to explain it. I hope I won’t be accused of anti-Semitism if I say that he reminds me of a Jew, and yet he isn’t a Jew, he belongs to this small town and was born and bred here. I suppose there is something about that kind of person which brings out the fascist in one, a desire to kick him as if he were a dog, he looks so eager to please, hanging on your every word, on your every order, as if a few ounces of sweets is more important to him than anything else you can conceive of. (Some day, if I have the time, I shall write a paper about the psychology of service. I think it’s important, I imagine a shopkeeper who screams at you because you don’t buy anything from his shop as if ‘you had something against him’.) The Lady will even cross his hands and stare at you like a lover till you decide what you want, and then he will sigh as if an accomplishment had taken place.
I come here fairly often, and I know his daughter reasonably well. He has only the one daughter and no sons, his wife is dead. They say that he treated her badly. I don’t know about that, but I’m sure that he loved his jars of sweets more than her. Imagine living among sweets all day: one would have to be sour when one had left them surely. Is that not right? He wants Diane to go to university since somewhere buried beneath that servility is ambition. I know her, and she is a bitch. Anyone with half an eye could see that, but she’s sweet in public, dewy-eyed and cool above the mini-skirt. One of these peroxide blondes and the kind of nutty mind that may get her yet into a students’ riot in our modern educational system.
He has brought her up himself, of course. I have played chess with him in the local chess club; I always win, naturally. After all, would he want to lose a customer? But sometimes, I have seen him looking at me . . . He thinks the world of his daughter. You know the kind of thing; if she’s first in Domestic Science, he’ll give her a bicycle. As a matter of fact, I know that she goes with this fellow Marsh, who’s at least ten years older than her, and he takes her out to the beach at night on his motor-cycle. His father owns a hotel in the town, and he’s got quite a reputation with the ladies. You’re not going to tell me that they are innocently watching the sea and the stars.
She doesn’t like me. I know that for a fact. I can tell when people don’t like me. I have antennae. She thinks I’m some kind of queer because I’m fifty and not married, and because I’m always going to the library for books. And because I wear gloves. But why shouldn’t one wear gloves? Just because young girls wear mini-skirts up to their waists doesn’t mean that all the decencies should be abandoned, that the old elegancies should go. I like wearing gloves and I like carrying an umbrella. Why shouldn’t I?
That day – as so often before – I got into conversation with the Lady while he hovered round me, and we came round to education.
‘They’re doing nothing in those schools these days,’ I said, and I know it’s the truth. ‘Expressionism, that’s what they call it. I call it idleness.’
He looked at me with his crucified expression and said,
‘Do you really believe that?’ He had a great capacity for listening, he would never volunteer anything. Some people are like that, they hoard everything, not only books, not only money, but conversation itself. Still, I don’t mind as I like talking.
‘In our days we had to work hard,’ I continued. ‘We had to get our noses to the grindstone. Arithmetic, grammar and Latin. Now they write wee poems and plays. And what use are they? Nothing. How many of them will ever write anything of any value? It’s all a con game. Trying to make people believe that Jack is as good as his master. I’m afraid education is going down the drain like everything else. They can’t even spell, let alone write.’
Suddenly he burst out – rather unusual for him –
‘She doesn’t want to go to university.’ Then he stopped as if he hadn’t meant to say so much, and actually wrung his hands in front of me.
‘You mean Diane?’ I said eagerly.
‘Yes. I’m so . . . confused. I wouldn’t have said it only I have to talk to someone. You know that I don’t have many friends. I can count on you as my friend, can’t I?’
As far as you can count on anyone, I thought. As far as anyone can count on anyone.
‘She says to me, “I can’t stand the books”. That’s what she says. What do you think of that? “I can’t stand the books,” she says. She says a haze comes over her mind when she is asked to study. She says that she has read all the books she wants to read. “What is the good of education anyway?” she asks. “All that’s over. We don’t need education any more and anyway,” she says, “we’re not poor”. What do you make of that?’
‘Oh, that’s what it’s come to,’ I answered. ‘There was Mr Logan died the other day. Now he spent all his years teaching in that school. He read and read. You won’t find many like him any more. Nobody needs him. Nobody wants him.’
He wasn’t listening. All he said was, ‘After what I did for her too. I used to go with her to get dresses fitted and her shoes and everything, and I’m not a woman you know.’
There might be two opinions about that, I thought to myself. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, wringing his hands. ‘What’s wrong with them? She wanted a guitar. I gave her a guitar. She used to go to the folk club Thursday nights and play it. Then she grew tired of that. She wanted to go to France for her holidays and I let her do that. Do you think it’s a phase?’ he asked eagerly, his face shining with innocence and agony, the crucified man.
I thought of the little white-headed bitch and said, ‘No, it’s not a phase.’
‘I was afraid it might not be. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ He was almost crying, such a helpless little man that you couldn’t help but despise him.
‘I think you should beat some sense into her,’ I said suddenly. He looked horrified. ‘I didn’t know you believed in corporal punishment,’ he said.
‘In extreme cases I do,’ I answered, ‘and this seems to be an extreme case. If it was my daughter, that’s what I’d do.’
I took my umbrella in my hands, sighting along it like a gun, and said, ‘She’s betrayed you, kicked you in the teeth. But that’s the younger generation for you. They’re like bonbons, mealy on the outside but hard on the inside.’
He smiled, for I had used a simile which he would understand. Deliberately.
‘Do you really think so?’ he said at last, almost in tears, his lips trembling. ‘But it’s true, you give them everything and they throw it back in your teeth. I slaved to make this shop what it is and it was all for her and she doesn’t care. She’s never served a customer and I, I have to do it all. I’ve even got books to study so that I can help
her with her lessons. I’ve got the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica. What will I do? She says she’s going abroad. I gave her everything and her mother too, for five years when she was dying, I’m tired, so tired.’
Aren’t we all, I thought, aren’t we all.
Anyway, that was the last glimpse I had of him, his wet tremulous lips, his doglike expression, his low emotional voice.
The next part of this story is rather undignified, but I must tell it just the same, and the more so because it is undignified. I am not the sort of person who hides things just because they are unpleasant. On the contrary, I feel that the unpleasant things must be told. And I must justify myself too, especially in this situation, in this unprecedented situation.
I have lived in this town for many years now and people are always hiding their little pseudo-tragedies in holes and corners when, if they only knew it, their tragedies are comedies to the rest of us, and as clear as glass doors, too. But I know all about them. I could blackmail the lot of them if I wished, even the most important people in our town, though they sit at their dinners and lunches, among their glasses and champagne. Walking about the town – stopping here, stopping there, speaking to one person at one corner and to another at another corner – I hear many things. I am one of the sights of the town with my kid gloves and my hat. They all know me, but they don’t know how dangerous I am. After all Socrates told the truth and he was put to death.
However, let me continue, though it should rend me. One night, not long after my talk with the Lady, I was taking my walk out to the bay in the moonlight. I like the evening. Everything is so apparently innocent, the stars are beginning to shine, you can see the boats in the water lying on their own reflections, and you can hear the gentle movement of the sea. All is cool and gentle and without intrigue. Now and again as you pass some trees you may hear a rustle in the undergrowth, a desperate movement and perhaps a squeal, but that’s only rarely. The thing about animals is that they don’t wear gloves or hats, and they don’t gossip about each other.
