Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

  “Have you ever thought about forgiveness?” the voice was saying now, as if in need of forgiveness itself, while the face was still grinning unaccountably.

  Now in the months and years following her husband Colin or Eric’s murder in the killing van in the woods, Mrs Dewar had found herself both plagued and consoled by the kindnesses of strangers — sexual and religious strangers, sometimes both. But such attention, as aforesaid, had waned and died as the shock of her loss had faded from collective memory, and she in turn had lost for others that talismanic frisson that attaches to the tragic in general and the very young and newly widowed tragic in particular. Besides, none of those preachers and vagabonds had spoken like this oracular hobo, this gruff soothsayer. Her sense of something alien it was that prompted her precipitate rejection of his unsettling and unasked for, but not in and of itself unreasonable, solicitude.

  “Just fuck off, will ye,” she said … and a strange light lit in the stranger’s eye, and she was suddenly very scared.

  “Your husband was murdered by unrighteous men.” He said this with the level certainty of knowledge.

  “Mum!”

  The voice of her wee son was on the stairs now, and, thoroughly nervous for the both of them suddenly, Elspeth attempted physical persuasion, actually pushed at the man’s body. And he did not resist her, only repeating as he retreated, “Have you ever thought about forgiveness?”

  Reassured a little at his docility and, dimly, as through a glass darkly, recognising the word “forgiveness” as having had something to do with church when she was wee, she tried for the moment to believe that this was merely a return visit by some God-bothering bureaucracy or other she’d forgotten which just happened to have her name on a database or something, so she demurred again with more confidence: “Just leave us alane, I’m tellin ye. I’m no’ interested.”

  Still he smiled. The stranger still smiled. Understanding nothing in the doorway. So she got a wee bit more aggressive, and defined her rejection of whatever he was offering more expansively.

  “How dae you bloody people find me anyway? I’ve said I’m not interested. Just leave us alone, why don’t ye?” she shouted at him hopefully.

  And for the first time, Tommy now blinked, his smile failing and his expectations now confused. He’d lost the place and so improvised momentarily, went off his script, and then all was lost. He said this …

  “Elspeth … I’m sorry …”

  … and shut himself up almost as soon as he’d spoken, actually putting one hand over his mouth and pulling the carpet bag over his crotch, as though he’d exposed himself.

  There was a pause, and, hearing the pain and regret in him, she inclined her head to one side, as if to see him from a different angle.

  Then she couldn’t see at all suddenly, some awful dawn blinding her, till she got used to the light. And then she saw who he was, she saw what was happening. She looked into those eyes into which she’d last looked at the furthest extreme of her experience, and in that sudden reseeing, her veil of compromise and forgetfulness fell from all of her senses at once. She could smell again the stale sweat and old clothes in the courtroom, hear again the murmurs and whispers as the life sentence on Tommy Hunter was announced and he’d turned and looked at her sorrowfully from his pale, devil eyes.

  That was all it took to bring her from her world for a moment into his. So now it was Tommy who had to watch as Elspeth’s face melted in front of him, draining, aging visibly, turning grey as breathed-out smoke. And he knew that she knew him. And that she was helpless with that knowledge. She was struck dumb by her horror, by her hatred and her grief and her fear, and by only she knew what other griefs since.

  2.1.2.1

  He was never going to know. She was never going to tell him any more than she just had. Nothing was going to be shared between them. There was no forgiveness here. She was telling him nothing. There was nothing he could tell her to make it better. There was nothing he could say. Nothing she would hear. Nothing to be done. And thus, for the first, and by no means the last time, Tommy’s narrative collided with real life and fell to pieces in front of him.

  2.1.2.1.1

  She fell to the floor and wept, and he lifted her left hand and sorrowfully pushed a sealed white envelope into her open fingers. It was, as we’ll discover, his fail-safe or default gesture of recompense, and luckily Elspeth was too deranged with shock to reject it.

  2.1.2.1.2

  She said, or she told Frank later, that when she’d shut the door, or when he’d allowed her to close it on him … that she thought she’d heard him say “I’m sorry” once again. Anyway, right now, Donald, fully descended in his boxers and a knock-off Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, saw his mother on the carpet in helpless, lonely tears.

  “Who the fuck was that fucking guy?” Donald asked her, and getting no reply, pushed past her, his seventeen-year-old manhood surging through his PJs, and opened the door again even as she found her voice and screamed at him urgently please not to.

  2.1.2.2

  But Tommy Hunter was already walking away, not quickly and not slowly, mind already set on his next appointment, and he scarcely heard the yelling boy behind him, busy in reflecting rather, that barring Elspeth’s emotional collapse, the first necessary preliminary to the fulfilment of his epic destiny had gone more or less as well as it might have done. He’d made his first delivery, after all.

  “You! Hi! You! I’m talkin tae you, ya cunt!” a boy’s voice was yelling behind him for some reason, but soon faded out of earshot as Tommy turned the corner into King Edward Street.

  2.1.2.2.1

  Donald, son of Colin or Eric, whose resemblance to his dead father might well have tweaked a pang of memory from his father’s murderer, had said murderer been sufficiently distracted to turn round, Donald, with his bare feet sore, obviously, and realising also from the wind that froze the tip of it, that his willy was hanging out, tucked it back in and turned himself back towards his widowed mother, who now stood in the open doorway of her house holding in one hand a torn white envelope, and in the other what seemed to the young man to be the largest sum of cash he had ever seen in anybody’s hand.

  (Three grand it was. Thirty-four left in the carpet bag, if you’re counting, as you surely should.)

  “Who the fuck was that?” asked Donald. And watched as his mother’s eyes turned to him, tears stopped up, blank as stone, implacable as war.

  2.2

  Meanwhile, Tommy Hunter strolled on into Oor Wee Toon, his mind quietly blazing in the quiet of the breaking dawn and looked across to the rainy hills, vaguely unsatisfied. Perhaps he had hoped to exchange words or regrets, tokens of shared humanity with Elspeth, as well as to deliver his token of repentance. But perhaps not. What he’d just paid her, after all, had been no more than Colin or Eric’s agreed share in the original enterprise (or one-fourth thereof). But at least he’d done that much, perhaps he now consoled himself as he descended the hill into the brown haze of home.

  His gesture had been his sole and sufficient purpose, I’m speculating. How his gesture had been received, as indeed would be the case for all of his future gestures, was not strictly speaking his business. He was not in the business of meaning, but only, in the words of Lowell George, of being willing to be moving. He was on the essentially private road to wherever he was going, and probably attempted to cheer himself with that thought or some approximation thereof. But he maybe felt a wee bit deflated as well, to have gleaned so soon some inkling of the inconsistency of the world and its purposes with his own, mad construction of it. It might have been the weather, too, which wasn’t very good.

  2.2.1

  And ours, let’s face it, is a townscape, even in its occasional sunshine, that few if any can return to without some feeling of defeat. The heavy grey and mocking orange of the buildings in the High Street, such as it is, are ugly even in comparison to each other. Our architecture sits on the soul like a weight. Even the best of us comes home, even at the best
of times, even those few of us with money and accolades from the wider, better world to cheer us, even we arrive back here somehow with our tails between our legs. Even if we actually have done quite well for ourselves and we’re only back to see our grannies, we feel like failures to be back here. Even if we return as kings, we still feel shame that we were drawn back here at all. Even if we aren’t defeated, the very fact of our being here, being back here, makes us feel that we must have been. Our London or Hong Kong or New York eyes fall down quickly on the pavement where they belong, as if even the best of us are ashamed at presuming to have escaped.

  2.2.1.1

  We belong here for good and ill, for good and all. You’d think we’d be used to it by now.

  2.2.1.2

  Tommy Hunter’s promises had only ever been to himself, and he was unclouded by illusions of worldly success as he pursued the familiar directions he’d so long contemplated and envisioned. His head was still held high, he was still defined and delimited by his antic purpose, still talking only to himself, still true to the lines on his internal map. The very rain seemed to part for him. He at least seemed to know where he was going which is more than you can say for most of us. And he stayed on his intended itinerary. What else was he going to do?

  2.2.1.3

  He paused, mind you, outside Saxone, the shoe shop in the High Street (just opposite the bell tower which not even the original architect could have thought was anything other than hideous), and squelched a moment, uncertain. His feet were freezing. But Tommy knew now that he could not afford to improvise, no matter the state of his feet, and he pressed on. First things had to be first. There was no other way to hang on to himself.

  Besides, the shoe shop wasn’t even open yet. Now he looked, he saw that there was nothing open yet. And he remembered, with a shock, that shops had hours, that people had jobs and bought things and sold things in prearranged orderings of socially contracted time, and he was momentarily panic-stricken at his own forgetfulness. He was out of practice in a world where people had such structures, however uncomfortable and annoying, in their lives. There was so much to remember, and there was nothing he just knew about, instinctively, not without thinking about it, not any more.

  2.2.1.3.1

  If he ever had just known about such things the way we’re all supposed to. And it’s not just his growing up in care, then being in the army and then in prison almost all his life. In the depths of an experience that had either been wholly policed or wholly chaotic, there had always been something deliberate about Tommy. Something self-directed and inscrutable. Unfeeling, some thought. Autistic, some psychotherapist had even diagnosed, and it is true that he had always had to consider carefully every step he’d ever taken. And that he was a poor judge of character. But that was because, deep down, he trusted the universe, and also himself. So he tended to trust other people. And who is to say he was wrong about that, ethically speaking anyway, in the long run?

  2.2.1.4

  He stood in front of the hotel now, which, being a hotel, was, to his relief, open and serving breakfast from the buffet bar in the William Wallace dining room. He breathed deeply a few times, and went into reception, still talking to himself, steeled for the next exchange. Whatever would be would be.

  2.2.2

  The receptionist on duty, as it happens, was a Polish lad called Miroslaw, which didn’t faze Tommy in itself, as he already had to dredge up his dialogue in English from a distant memory, but Miroslaw having an accent like that might not have been thought to be helpful.

  As it was, Tommy was pouring sweat well before he reached the desk, his long preparation of every step already hopelessly out of kilter with the perpetually surprising world. That he found himself faced with a nice young chap with an unimagined Krakovian accent was the least of his perturbations. He himself was a child again, and far more foreign to this locality, and younger in its mores, than Miroslaw, for all his Polishness, could be.

  Besides, a commercial transaction can always admit of eccentricity more easily than can communication with the widow of a man you’d murdered getting on fourteen years ago, and so with cash paid for a night in advance and a false name and address murmured (both inspired, incidentally, by his sole attendance, with his own hitherto and everafter absent father, at a professional fixture of Association football in 1988), Tommy Hunter, perspiring like a horse, found himself in possession of a small plastic card (which he nervously accepted, after some persuasion, was in fact a key) that opened up the minimal beige requirements of the weary business traveller. Having mastered the momentary vertigo of being given a key that wasn’t a key, and, once at the door, being shown by a Somali maid how to work the thing, he stammered his further thanks and entered Room 417 and collapsed, fraught and shaking, into the nostalgia of finding himself settled until further notice into a small, institutional cuboid.

  He got up again for a moment to shut the curtains and complete the homecoming, then he lay back on the bed in a twilit state of weeping, near collapse, his chest heaving as he shrank the world back into proportions he could handle and predict. It would be an hour or more before he could move. And that was to go for a piss.

  2.2.3

  The hotel records as later sequestered by DS “Danny” Boyle showed that Mr Greenock Morton made just two outside phone calls and had had no meals in his room. He didn’t go out and had only one visitor until he left. Which was on the Wednesday.

  2.3

  Which hiatus allows me to cheat a little, and to narrate briefly the first of the cascade of unlooked-for consequences of Tommy’s unlooked-for return. That is to say a phone call made by Elspeth Dewar to Frank Wheen within minutes of her son Donald’s departure to the wee job at the supermarket (which had been secured for him by his Uncle Frank — uncle in the sponsoring rather than familial sense).

  2.3.1

  Frank Wheen, as aforesaid the brains of the old outfit, was by now a highly regarded figure in Oor Wee Toon, because, having invested his ill-gotten gains right wisely, he had also maintained the necessary incuriousness of a number of folk, constabulary and otherwise, as to the origins of his seed money by spending some of it on them — and distributing other forms of influential largesse in their interests. The list of these personages naturally included Elspeth Dewar and her wee Donald. Elspeth had been, before and throughout the debacle of the van raid, entirely conscious of Eric (or Colin’s) role in the whole mess. And she had kept her trap shut all these years in exchange for an initial bung, followed by regular emollients.

  2.3.1.1

  In this initial communication, Elspeth omitted any mention to Frank of the further compensation for her loss that Tommy Hunter of his own free will had given her. Her self-discipline in this regard led her at this stage to restrict herself to merely deflecting a portion of her own trepidation on to Frank, informing him of Tommy’s appearance at her door, you may be sure withholding no detail of the oddness of his behaviour, excepting only as aforesaid the financial gesture, which she didn’t see any earthly reason to suppose was any of Frank’s business anyhow.

  2.3.2

  The intelligence thus transmitted, Elspeth felt she was safe now, and had no further part to play in this narrative, an impression of which she would be shortly and, let me recoilingly confirm at once, forcibly disabused once the paranoia latent in Frank’s social position and in any case embedded in his personality came into play. Let alone what might happen if Crazy Joe ever got to hear about it.

  2.3.2.1

  Indeed, the foremost consideration for Frank at this first news of Hunter’s return was as to precisely what he was going to tell his fucking nutjob of a brother, presently not all that gainfully employed as a handyman for the string of care homes for the elderly which were still Frank’s primary business interest. But whatever his fraternal trepidation as to Brother Joe, you may be sure that Frank no longer considered that the man-management of a non-familial nutjob like Tommy Hunter was any part of his portfolio, and was equally all to
o aware that man-management of a specialised variety was right up Joe’s apples and pears, and that the same Joseph Wheen, once activated, was a hard man to control, even, or even especially, if you were his smarter, younger brother.

  2.3.2.1.1

  Frank was to remain — fatally — undecided for some days, about how much was the working minimum he had to tell Joe about this and other matters, and on how best to employ his (Joe’s) talents in this tooterie situation. The fatality aforesaid being that Joe, once apprised of that situation, would apply those talents at his own terrible and indiscriminate discretion.

  2.3.2.1.2

  To be fair though, and smart though he was, there’s no gainsaying that Frank had some tricky and time-limited considering to do that morning before accepting even his own role in the saga; a role which, he already felt certain, no matter what he did, and no matter what he did or did not tell his wild-souled sibling, would precipitate unpleasant consequences leading towards what he rightly feared might be no happy conclusion, even if he now turned Buddhist and did nothing, and even if he could somehow refrain from bringing his volatile predecessor of the maternal womb into the equation at all.

  2.3.2.1.3

  Which he couldn’t. He knew that. Some cunt was bound to tell Joe something. Some cunt always did. So better if it came from him in a considered fashion so there might be some minimal possibility of damage limitation. He’d have to tell Joe right now that Tommy Hunter was back in town. Right now. He knew that fine. Nonetheless, Frank poured himself a cheeky wee malt, and indulged in the illusion of free will for another three minutes and forty-four seconds.

  2.3.3.

  Let us leave Frank for that period, then, in his discreet brown study, and transfer our attention to the party of the second part, Joseph Wheen, who, in that same short span of time, was enjoying some desultory sexual activity, the precise details of which I’ll not be going into, thanks, with Joan MacHutcheon, a nursing assistant at one of the care homes aforementioned, taking advantage of the temporary absence of Alec MacSwiney, normally resident therein, but happily away in Motherwell today having his cataracts seen to.