Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

  2.3.3.1

  When the reluctant call from Frank came through to his mobile three minutes and forty-four seconds into this activity, Joe had only just got hard, and it was the opening chords of “Purple Haze” that were his coitus interruptus (or preventus) and the fanfare of all that now followed. Not that Frank at this stage divulged any detail as to what his “fucking problem” might be in answer to that enquiry. At this stage Frank as the senior brother in income if not in years, and his elder brother’s employer, merely requested the immediate pleasure of Joseph’s company, of his “getting his arse round the house” at his earliest convenience. Something, he said, had come up — a consummation that, for Joan MacHutcheon, was devoutly to be wished.

  2.3.3.2

  After Frank’s interruption, Joe did his best for some time to carry on in that regard, thrusting manfully in support of his diminishing and embittered equipment, but his old resentment of his brother distracted him, as did the realization that he and his lady-love had all this time been observed by a grinning, toothless harridan, one Frances O’Hagan, chuckling with inane nostalgia in the bedroom doorway, holding her purple toothbrush to attention. Joe said for her to fuck off, but the proximity of death or the memory of life made her stay to watch his pounding, joyless buttocks. Frances had herself, in times past, been notorious hereabouts for her waylaying of car workers on payday (when there were such people and such days around here) on their way home to their spouses. Perhaps she was smiling at the evocation of those simpler, happier times, rather than actually mocking the courting couple, but however that may be, Joseph Wheen found himself unable to continue with his lovemaking, and, as he pulled his trousers over his dwindling, damp erection, he loudly and colourfully evinced his confirmed and recurrent Weltschmerz.

  2.3.3.3

  Fucking Frank. Who the fuck did fucking Frank think he was fucking talking to?

  2.3.3.3.1

  Etcetera.

  2.3.4

  Frank, meanwhile, assuaged his own disquiet by means of telephoning and berating the most senior of his numerous sources within the local police service as to why the hell was he being taken by surprise by the unwelcome intelligence of Tommy’s arrival? What did those cunts think he was paying them for?

  “I’ll meet you at the golf club tonight,” came the enragingly complacent reply from Superintendent Bellamy — the bane of the aforementioned DS Boyle’s existence and vice versa … of which, again, much more to follow.

  2.3.4.1

  To reassure himself still further that he remained, as yet, the master of his fate, Frank slammed the phone down on his bland interlocutor. Then sat himself down and had himself another sloppy dram of Bowmore from a heavy-bottomed Caithness crystal tumbler, sitting in his big front room with his big bay windows, looking out on his big back garden, facing south in the pissing, filthy rain, the sounds of his happy family home all around him already stained with tenuousness, their voices now echoes in a cave, the expensive whisky poison on his tongue, as he anticipated loss with every fibre of his bloodstained being.

  2.4.

  In summary, then, this was the condition of our principals, including the money, most of whom have now been, or are shortly about to be, introduced into the narrative. Frank had his garden, his golf, his children, his VAT returns, his investments, his Meissen, his carburettor problems, his Rotarian meetings, his charitable contributions and his wife Eleanor to contend with, and with each of these he had an ongoing, complex but largely predictable relationship. Joe had his mates and his speed and his women and his wee bets and his anger issues and his probation officer to contend with on a similar footing. Eleanor had the precarious management of the house and the school and the universe likewise under her control. Even wee Ronnie and Janette, Hunter’s children, after their fashions, had stuff like work and school and walking and talking and bus fares and the weather to deal with along with all the other stuff that life had already had the time to throw at them, and succeeded in so doing, by and large. So too did old Agnes, though her world was now tightly circumscribed by her angry routine of aches and serial diagnoses of some or other fucking thing in her body that was trying to kill her … as well as a certain amount of cooking and her crossword puzzles and going down to the Paki shop for bread and milk. Ronnie’s social worker Padraic had the various mispronunciations of his name and the pretended optimism of his weekly reports upon his juvenile charges to occupy his waking life. Even old Jack Webster had his fear and his negotiations and his seeking out of this and that to keep him from the frightful vacuum of space-time impinging itself too much upon his consciousness.

  2.4.1

  Only Tommy Hunter had nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. Apart from thirty-four thousand pounds arranged in envelopes in a carpet bag, he had just himself and his own howling, crouched like a stone wolf in a hotel room with the blinds down, eyes closed, feeling it swirl about him, this vortex of uncertainty in which he was a singularity. Only Tommy Hunter lived within the event horizon of himself, inside the black hole, his gravity sucking down light. Only Tommy knew the truth, the elemental, world-ending truth. And its gravitational pull was off the scale, its other-dimensional topology all-circumscribing.

  2.4.1.1

  The rest of them, Frank, Joe, Jack, Agnes, Ronnie, Janette and the rest hadn’t yet been drawn into that crushing, stretching orbit. That’s why they were still part of the sky. Even the remaining thirty-four thousand pounds now neatly bundled into packages of various amounts tucked neatly in the folds of Tommy’s carpet bag, however large and decisive a role it might play among the inhabitants of the strange sphere he was visiting, was inessential, as far as Tommy was concerned.

  2.4.2

  Only Tommy Hunter was free. You could look at it that way as well if you wanted to.

  2.5

  But now there was a knocking at the door, a rapping through the empty chaos of Tommy’s liberty, making him blink uncomprehendingly. He had a visitor. His first in fourteen years. And he was free no longer. His negotiated re-entry to our common bondage was upon him. There was, and is, only one way that ever ends for anybody.

  2.5.1

  Tommy sat up, cleared his throat, said, “Hawd on,” adjusted his crotch, approached the door, and opened it, exhausted, each successive action costing him decisions, as if he’d been remembering the rules of chess.

  3.0

  I never actually met Ronnie Hunter, but let me tell you something that happened to me on a bus once.

  I was sitting thinking about something else with my eyes facing front when I hear this mad wee tune going on somewhere behind me. Kind of a humming in a wee sing-songy voice, and a hollow clonking noise, quite gentle, keeping time with “Wonderwall” or some such shite … this was a few years ago now … and I couldnae help myself, I had to turn round to look, and I saw this horrible wee ned, pattern of a cup and ring shaved into his baldy, singing this horrible wee song, horribly tapping a half-empty bottle of cider against an old man’s skull. Keeping the beat. Nice and slow. He wasnae hurting him or anything, but by Christ, he could have if he’d wanted to … kind of thing. And I don’t know if this thin old guy had been a POW in Burma, or had liberated Europe once upon a time, or was just a retired tube fitter with a dodgy lung or whatever, but he was pale as imminent death at being traduced like this, at discovering that all he’d ever been in his life to whoever had loved him was now reduced to the shame and humiliation of being at the mercy of this poisonous, anonymous gnome whose voice hadnae even broken yet, tapping a rhythm on his napper, gently like, just like that, just because he could. Singing out of tune as well.

  There was no way, there is no way, that an old guy like that, with a story, a history of marriage, military service and employment or whatever, could cope with the degree of shapeless, consequence-careless threat that was bonking a bottle in time to its own psychosis on his tired, tired skull. The old man’s lips were moving, silently voicing something … disbelief, terror, I don’t know. He was talking to me
silently. I don’t think he was asking me for help, but. He was past help. We all are.

  Then, of course, psycho boy caught me looking at him in his theatre of shit. He stopped his singing … and now he looked straight at me. Now I was his audience. He started talking to the old guy’s cadaverous, tufted earlobes, but he kept on looking at me.

  “Jew no like me?” the wee fuck was saying, “Jew no wanni be friends wi me?”

  And what did ah dae? Ah did fuck all, didnta? I turned back round and looked away, hair erect at the back of my neck. Sure I did. And I wasnae the only one.

  This was a bus full of adults, men and women, you understand. And maist of us could have had the wee cunt, even the women. He was only skinny … five foot nothing and half-cut as well. But not one of us did anything. Whether by calculation or animal indifference, we had all handed our moral compass to a nasty wee shite who wouldn’t know what to do with a moral compass if you stabbed him in the face with it.

  We were all so degraded as to actually be relieved when a fat boy from a posh school got on the bus and Frankenstein Junior decided to go and talk to him for a bit. He started telling this Bunter character in graphic detail all about him diddy riding his bird … or some such pish. But we didn’t care. The posh kid had a violin and everything, and deserved whatever was coming to him.

  Aye, him, we all said silently. Have a go at him.

  Then I got off. Me and a guy in overalls wi a tool bag, we both did. We didn’t even look at each other. We had seen the future. And there was nothing about it we wanted to discuss.

  3.0.1

  Like I say, I never met wee Ronnie myself … but I think that was the likes of him. None of that inchoate tribe of lonely wee monsters varies in the slightest degree from any of the rest of them in my experience. I remember thinking about the boy on the bus later on when I heard about the summit conference held by the Wheen brothers with Ronnie Hunter at the Dryry Street hostel where Ronnie was housed at the time.

  3.0.1.1

  Not quite sixteen years old by my reckoning, Ronnie must have been panting for his freedom by then, which was gonnae be short-lived, of course it was. If there ever was a boy with “Property of Her Majesty’s Prison Service” tattooed into his genome, it was Ronnie Hunter, third-generation parentless, his only male role models an absent father reputed to have done for his mother, and of course, those slightly older exemplars of immediate energy, his peers at school and various hostels, who had been torturing the worthlessness of everything into Ronnie’s flesh every waking and sleeping moment since he left Janice’s lost womb, giving him general and specific evidence of the universal rule of casual violence, till he had a PhD in the random science of tomorrowless existentialism. Which creed is surely definitive for the likes of Ronnie, abandoned and forsaken multitude that they are, a future-robbed creature made of thousands of limbs and a thousand heads all with a single thought: Trust No One. Never. Not yourself, not your friends, not your social workers. And you’ll not be too disappointed when they betray you and lock you up for the good and safety of those incomprehensible others with their families and lives and ambitions and legal ownerships of this and that. Ronnie was of that lost, dangerous tribe.

  3.0.2

  It could be worse. There’s places in the world where wee cunts like that are the Polis.

  3.1

  They didn’t have a lot of visitors except the Polis in Dryry Street. Once in a while mebbe, a drama worker came in to exorcise his or her bourgeois guilt preparatory to running back to Mammy and a proper job. That was about it. So when Frank and Joseph Wheen swept up in a BMW 3 Series that Monday morning and got out wearing suits, you’d have to call that an event. There’d be nothing else worth talking about till Tommy Hunter manifested himself a couple of days later (also in a suit) and turned the world properly upside down.

  3.2

  Frank thought about his own kids while he and Joe surveyed the rancid hallway, you can bet he did, and he warmed himself with his accomplishment of their rescue from places like this. But it wasn’t Frank that anybody was looking at. They knew who Frank was of course. But they were all looking at Joe. They’d heard his legend, and they were poking their heads round doorways for a noisy, shushing glimpse of his grey face and his white scars and his polished nails. They bathed in the once and future violence he so thrillingly embodied. He was, after all, and despite the best efforts of our tolerant and inclusive and endlessly self-deceiving culture, their ideal. Even Padraic Macreesh, their genial and troubled superintendent (who would unhappily also be on duty two nights later), couldn’t help looking at Joe while he spoke to Frank. He was only human. He knew who they both were, of course (it’s only Wee, Oor Toon), and that Frank was a power and a presence in the parts of the world that Joe’s lumpenproletarian charisma couldn’t reach (as well as vice versa), and that between the two of them, they represented practically the full possibilities of the social elite of North Lanarkshire, but Mr Macreesh too had a title and a set of regional and national parameters to bolster his self-worth, and he dodged behind his statutory obligations in an effort to seem relaxed about this unwonted interest from these local celebrities in one of the most anonymous and hapless of his unlucky charges.

  “Perhaps you’d like to come in the lounge, Mister Wheen,” said Padraic, with the confidence of his stewardship.

  They all sat in the encouragingly postered games room, the social worker protected by a pocket file. “I have informed Ronnie that his father has in fact been released, but I have to tell you, we’ve had no contact from him, either through head office or directly. Not in all the time Ronnie’s been here, in fact. It’s a most unusual history …”

  “Is Ronnie here now?” asked Mr Wheen, interrupting respectfully. Padraic hesitated. Frank went on. “As you know, we’ve looked in on Ronnie and his sister from time to time. Just to see how they are.”

  “Yes … Mister Wheen … might I ask … what is your relationship with Ronnie? You’re not down here in the file as being family …”

  “We grew up together … Ronnie’s father and us … We served together in the army, Mister Macreesh.”

  You did, didn’t you? Thought Macreesh … you pounded up and down the streets of Newry stomping your Scottishness into my already Jock-afflicted Isle … and now look at you … and look at me … you bastards … but all he said out loud was:

  “Then, perhaps, you’re in a better position than …”

  Frank sat forward. “We don’t know where Tommy is. But we do know that he’s dangerous.”

  The social worker blinked his dark Irish eyes at them. Dangerous Scotchmen were something he and his ancestors knew a lot about.

  “Do you think he might be dangerous to Ronnie?”

  Joseph interjected. “He killed his fucken mother. He fucken killed her. What dae you fucken think?” Mr Macreesh decided against offering a measured judiciary caveat to this assertion.

  “What are you suggesting, Mr Wheen?” he asked instead.

  Frank sat further forward, and, in a tone of quiet concern, said: “We’d like to know where Ronnie’s sister is. And we think that Ronnie … should be moved … until …”

  “Mr Wheen,” attempted Mr Macreesh, “Mr Hunter, I understand, has been released in Glasgow on condition of weekly parole attendance, and according to my information …”

  “He’ll miss it,” said Frank. “He’s been seen … here …”

  “But you’ll understand …”

  “We’d like to talk to Ronnie now. Alone.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t sanction that, Mr Wheen. Ronnie is in the care of the local authority, and I can’t …”

  “We understand,” lied Frank with a glance at his brother. “Stay if you want …”

  Macreesh stood. “Excuse me,” he said and left the room.

  In answer to his brother’s unspoken question Frank answered to no one in particular.

  “I want this under control. I want this done right.”

  3.2.1
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br />   Macreesh returned, leading a barefoot, tangle-haired, chewing youth in a donated orange sweatshirt and blue pyjama bottoms, smelling of armpit and calamity. Not looking at anyone, Ronnie Hunter gave his bony arse to gravity, sat down, feral eyes shaded under an unfashionable auburn mop.

  “D’ye remember me, Ronnie?” said Frank, as gently as he could. Ronnie chewed to himself behind his hair.

  Frank glanced at Macreesh, who declined to prompt the boy into responding, looking straight ahead of him, just like I did on the bus I told you about, declining to compromise the meaningless autonomy that served Ronnie as his parodic set of human rights — here, as so often in the arena of our social relations, generalised indifference to the many manifesting as respect for the individual.

  Frank persevered in his own pretence, trusting to Ronnie’s experience of the jungle to identify the threats and promises behind his careful choice of words.

  “I want you to know you can call me … anytime … if there’s anything bothering you … Okay, son? If you need my help.” He put a card on the table with a twenty-pound note. “That’s my number. And a wee something for yourself. Okay?” He thought maybe Ronnie graced him with a glance. “I wanted to … eh … get in touch with your sister too. See if maybe I can … help her out as well …” Macreesh leaned forward. “Now, Ronnie, you know you don’t have to answer any questions if you don’t want to.”

  Macreesh smiled legalistically. Ronnie knew very well he didn’t have to answer to anybody. And his communication of that understanding was no more verbal than the grubby paw that scooped up the card and the twenty, only looking at the purple note derisively so that Frank could see that, yes, an understanding had been reached, before flopping from the room as silently and untidily as he had entered. Macreesh too smiled and stood.

  “Will that be all, gentlemen?”