by Peter Arnott
9.3.1.2.1.1
Would that all of us sometimes knew our helplessness in so clear a way. Would that all of us experienced our utter reliance on a love that we have no right to expect.
9.3.1.2.1.1.1
(Protestants — or the Elect Few, anyway — used to get that kind of love from God — Justified by Grace. I suppose some people still think they get it from their golden retrievers. Unconditional love appears to be one of those human needs that the world (which, as aforesaid, is only that which is the case) is not at all disposed to afford us. Which means we have to negotiate it from each other. Which causes all kinds of problems. But also affords us opportunities and the possibility of salvation, whether there’s a God involved or not. In my opinion anyway.)
9.3.3
She looked at him then, Janette. And though I’d like to report that in that moment of her regard there was also understanding, or even forgiveness, there really wasn’t to be honest. There wasn’t even hatred or rejection. She was herself, I think, so wholly banjaxed as to be careless of her existential responsibilities, let alone the fact that she could with the slightest touch entirely change the direction of (at the very least!) three lives in this moment; that in this moment, the world was wet clay on her potter’s wheel.
9.3.3.1
It is perhaps of significance that at this moment of her maximum agency, it was not Janette who by conscious choice selected her destiny, or Hunter who changed gear from his “find the kids” mode to the “make a family” mode of being and doing; it was actually what Mrs Lawrence then said (a figure of marginal importance to this narrative and one with, comparatively speaking, only a small stakeholding even in the moment I’m making such a fuss about), that proved to be decisive.
MRS LAWRENCE
Now, I’ve booked a table for the three of you for lunch … Our treat.
Everyone looks at her aghast.
JANETTE
What?
LAWRENCE
What?
RONNIE
What?
HUNTER
What?
MRS LAWRENCE
You can serve Janette today, Bob. I think a nice family luncheon, round the table … is just what the doctor ordered. There’s no better way to celebrate a reunion. Or settle a family quarrel.
9.3.3.1.1
Of such banalities, despite the best efforts of philosophers, does history consist.
9.3.1.2
JANETTE
I don’t WANT to …
LAWRENCE
(to his wife)
Dearest …
MRS LAWRENCE
(definitively, to Lawrence, and to the warring Hunters)
Families are important.
(turning to Janette)
Now, Janette, if you still feel the same way after lunch, I’m sure your father will be reasonable. Won’t you, Mister Hunter?
HUNTER
(understanding he’s just been rescued from destruction)
Janette … just gie us a chance … I promise … I’ll leave … if ye want … if ye just …
MRS LAWRENCE
(to Janette)
Now, I think that’s fair. Don’t you?
She looks between them. Janette, trapped, dully certain of further, future, unspecified unhappiness, lowers her eyes.
9.3.1.2.1
Satisfied, Mrs Lawrence, playing the matriarch she’s never been, speaks to Hunter and Ronnie.
MRS LAWRENCE
(looking at her watch)
Twenty minutes, then, in the dining room.
(to Janette)
You get changed love. Take the day off. Enjoy yourself.
Everything sorted, moved almost to tears at her own wisdom, at helping! … Mrs Lawrence sails … nay, floats … towards the stairs. Lawrence follows her.
LAWRENCE
Margaret?
MRS LAWRENCE
(turning on him, moved, her eyes damp)
What on EARTH’S the matter with you, Bob?
He is startled at her emotion, at her not having the first clue what she thinks she’s doing, at his not having the first clue what she’s crying about. Unencumbered therefore, she sweeps on. Mr Lawrence turns to see Janette running away upstairs to her room, and Hunter put his arm on Ronnie’s shoulder to lead him back to theirs. Then he is alone.
LAWRENCE
(to the silence and emptiness)
Oh, bollocks.
He follows where his wife has gone.
CUT TO:
9.3.2
Hunter, Ronnie and Janette further up the corridor.
HUNTER
(to Janette)
We’ll see ye doon the stair, then?
Janette, a hand covering her face, waves him away.
RONNIE
(to Janette)
Is the scran good? cos I’m fuckin starvin.
HUNTER
C’mon Ronnie.
RONNIE
I don’ want nane ae yer garlic shite.
Hunter looks at Janette as he hustles Ronnie past her.
(to Hunter, as they go)
I’m tellin ye, she was fourteen, in a fuckin kid’s hame, and she goes VEDGIE!
They leave Janette, who, shaken, goes alone up the stairs.
CUT TO:
9.3.2.1
INT. JANETTE’S ROOM – SOME MOMENTS LATER
Janette reaches the little attic room that she repainted in simple eggshell, with its lovely view of the loch. We see a collection of framed photographs of her family, of her father, of her mother, of Ronnie and herself. Like a shrine on her dresser. She looks at her suitcase, already nearly packed. She looks at a picture of herself on Hunter’s shoulders on the beach at Portrush a lifetime — a hundred lifetimes — ago, and she dissolves in helpless tears.
9.4
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Ochils, another multiply complex confrontation was taking place in the police station in Callander, where Padraic Macreesh, even having been coaxed off the roof and back into his clothes, or at least into wrapping himself in a blanket, was still steadfastly continuing to withhold his cooperation from the Black and Tans, and was no more inclined to cooperate at the sight of Superintendent Bellamy accompanied by Messrs Frank and Joseph Wheen coming through the door of the cell to which he had insisted on retreating.
“No, no, no,” he said, “you fuckers keep away from me!”
Bellamy, bland leading the bland, was all emollience.
“Did he say where he was going, Patrick? You don’t mind if I call you Patrick?”
“It’s pronounced Poraig, ye ignorant, Scottish bastard … Keep away from me. I’m sick of the lot of ye.”
Bellamy sat in the wooden chair opposite the little bunk bed where Mr Macreesh had huddled protectively, while Frank and Joe, floating like boxers, flanked him, saying nothing, promising much.
“You’re identifying with your kidnapper, Poor Egg … that’s the Stockholm syndrome, isn’t it,” Bellamy opined. “You’re an educated man. You’d know about that kind of thing”
“Go and fuck yerself,” yelped Padraic, with decreasing conviction and rising vehemence.
Bellamy, veteran of the soft terror of his trade, was in his element. He almost purred.
“You also know … as an officer of the court … that aiding and abetting an armed kidnapper … in this case, the kidnapper of a minor, is an extremely serious offence. Let alone a dereliction of your duty.”
He said this with the forward-leaning, intimate generosity of giving the traumatised social worker a recipe for eggs Benedict.
A moment of frozen silence waxed a mask over Padraic’s expression. He wanted to reply, “Get bent, filth,” as might have been said by Ronnie Hunter or one of his other charges in similar circumstances, but Mr Macreesh was handicapped, in this instance of danger and immediacy, by his having an intelligent interest in the future that made him wary of giving into the total commitment to the present tense involved in the satisfaction of impulse.
&
nbsp; It is this mediation of immediate desire by concern for consequences that is the mark of a civilised individual. It is also how the bastards get you. There are many positive aspects to decent inhibition. But it is, no matter what anyone says, one of the mightiest tools in the oppressor’s box.
(If you have a mortgage and you want to have a pension, you don’t kick a policeman in the face. Even though it’s just THERE!)
“If and when we get him, Mr Macreesh, and we find out that you knew where he was going and that you didn’t tell us, then whatever satisfaction you are deriving from your current irresponsible attitude will be short-lived. We are doing our best to look out for the child, Mr Macreesh, the child towards whom, till his sixteenth birthday next week, you owe a legal duty of care. We need to know what Tommy Hunter wants. We need to know what he’s doing. Where he’s going. You yourself can testify that he is an extremely dangerous man, so you would be doing no less than your duty as a human being, let alone as a social worker, to tell us everything he told you. Where is he going, Poor Egg? You need to tell us.”
Macreesh looked at Bellamy, heard his tone of reasoned threat … and looked at the Wheen brothers, at Frank’s desperate, miserable fear for his own security, and at Joe, with his plain relish for the sound of snapping bones and he felt his resistance dribble in shame between his thighs.
He knew these men. He knew them in his flesh, in his history and in his education. He knew the bullying nature of their nihilism, the terrible certainty of their narrowness. These men were the kind of men who ruled the world, ruled it from within the sociopathic limitations of having no imaginations. He knew their genetic lack of sympathy and ideological scorn of solidarity. He knew that they would kill Tommy Hunter if they could, and that they would kill him too without hesitation if they had to.
And they wore him down, of course. Such is the weariness of postmodern humanity that even the good-hearted, when faced with the apparent invincibility of evil, give way.
9.4.1
We know that death wins in the end. We know that for cosmologically certain now. So it is hardly surprising that death has its cheerleaders, and that those cheerleaders, those devotees of the common sense view of the inherent hopelessness of everything, seem so strong and persuasive to the rest of us a lot of the time. We think they might be right. So that even the best of us, and blameless Padraic Macreesh was surely one of the best, feel ourselves predefeated by the sullen drift of everything towards equilibrium without hope, towards the heat death of the bioverse, even as the worst of us feel emboldened by the same physics to get away with the most unpardonable shit imaginable. We are all signatories, after all, to the same murder-suicide pact with nature. And there are some among us, the worst and most fearful and most powerful of us, who ache to accelerate the worst possible outcomes in the meantime.
In resistance to them, we can only assert that while it is undeniably true that darkness and decay and the red death shall in the end hold illimitable dominion over all, there is no need to abandon all memory to death’s share price in the meantime. The meaning and value of life lies precisely in its resistance to the inevitability of extinction. The uncertainty, unlikeliness and contingency of living richly here and now is life’s beauty and its joy and its only defensible purpose.
But we must forgive each other too … that’s the hard thing. Forgive each other for sometimes betraying our weakness even while accepting that our weakness made us do it. We must forgive Mr Macreesh. It is a lot harder to be joyful and beautiful when you are staring at the wrong end of a senior policeman accompanied by his two confederate gangsters … let alone a policeman that you confidently believe to be a big, bent, Presbyterian bastard who’d set fire to you as soon as look at you, you poor, liberal, bogtrotting Fenian twat.
9.4.1.1
Which is why, at exactly the time Mr Lawrence served the overcooked venison sausages to Ronnie, Janette and Tommy Hunter (see 9.5.2.3.2.1), Mr Macreesh told Mr Bellamy and Messrs Wheen exactly where they were, and felt his heart sinking in shame. They were on their way out of the room, the three of them, when Bellamy’s phone rang.
9.4.1.2
DS Boyle, having stood for a moment in Jack Webster’s vacated room, looked at the blood on the walls, the blood soaked into the bed and the carpet, and having taken in the room being empty of any further trace of habitation, though its walls fairly screamed the dreadfulness of what had happened there, having sent Maggie downstairs to use the car radio to get the Glasgow polis here to close off the crime scene, was on the phone. He called his boss to tell him that Jack Webster, who had done time with Joseph Wheen and who was suspected of taking part in the original robbery with the Wheens and Tommy Hunter fourteen years ago, was likely dead and definitely disappeared.
Bellamy, answering his phone when in the same room as Padraic and the Wheens, allowed no sign to appear in his voice or face that he was being told anything very interesting. But everything was changed by this news. It is my belief that Bellamy, as he looked at Joseph Wheen’s angry, stupid mug and Frank’s anxious, cunning one, already knew who he should be asking about Jack Webster, had he been inclined to ask anyone.
And just like that, he wrote them off, the Wheen brothers. He dismissed them from his future plans. They’d gone too far. He wasn’t going to even try to protect them any more. They joined the ranks of ordinary mortals from whom a man in a position of responsibility keeps secrets.
It took all of his political skill for none of this to register in his face as he looked at the sweat on Frank’s upper lip. And the baboon smirk on Joseph’s puss.
“I’ll get back to you, Danny,” is all he said.
CUT TO:
9.5
Darkness. Exhausted, deep unconsciousness.
RONNIE (V.O.)
Dad!
CUT TO:
9.5.1
INT. BIDE A WEE HOTEL – BEDROOM – DAY
Hunter awakes, his eyes opening from his dream. He is lying on the bed. Ronnie is sitting beside him. They are handcuffed together.
RONNIE
I’m starvin.
Hunter sits up, knowing that his deep sleep the moment before and his anxiety now betoken that his quest has reached its pivot.
CUT TO:
9.5.2
To a thunder of pipes and drums, the Hunter family sat for lunch in the Rob Roy Room. Ronnie and Hunter arrived first, as inconspicuous in these chintzy surroundings, as Raymond Chandler once put it, as tarantulas on a piece of angel cake. More florid than ever, Mrs Lawrence bustled about them with talk of specials and the soup of the day. Hunter looked strangulated by the sitting still. Mrs Lawrence was all sympathy at his red face. She had clearly decided it was her duty as a Christian, and as a fan of daytime television, to bring together the dysfunctional in a controlled setting, unconsciously trusting that the fact they were in public, and together for something as comforting and familiar as a family meal, would moderate any extremities of behaviour. She wasn’t to know that “a family meal” was as familiar to these people as the arachnid and the baked goods aforementioned.
Janette arrived soon after, looking, if anything, and despite her comparative familiarity with the environment, even more ill at ease than her father. The look that passed between them was so full of regret and guilt and fear as well, on his part, of yearning, that it would have taken a heart of stone not to be moved. Mrs Lawrence heaved a sob. Ronnie looked out of the window.
Outside, Ronnie could see a camper van pulling up painted with symbols of the Dakota and Lakota tribes. In it, at the wheel and in the passenger seat, appeared to be two old white men dressed as Red Indians in full buckskins, warpaint and feathers. He turned back to his father and sister to tell them … so that he didn’t see Denise, the hitchhiker, get out of the back of the van. Wearing warpaint too, as it happens.
“There’s fucking INDIANS out there,” he said, but they ignored him. They were deep in silent negotiation with each other. Ronnie looked out of the window again.
> What was it about the country, Ronnie wondered incoherently, that made the cunts in it go balmy?
9.5.2.1
Why people do the things they do has of course been the subject of every philosophical speculation from the analects of Confucius to the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and every treatise of every kind between. Since the beginning of recorded thought, the primary theme of culture has always been “Did you see that? That was batshit crazy! Why on earth did they do that?” The nature of human knowledge can be attested by the fact that although this question has been comprehensively answered again and again and again, still, every day, we are taken entirely by surprise by someone doing something new that’s so batshit crazy that we say to ourselves and to each other: “Did you see that? Why in the world did she do a thing like that?”
9.5.2.1.1
Why, on such short reacquaintance with her rediscovered parent, did Janette agree to go on holiday with him and her frankly unappealing younger brother?
That she left the hotel where she worked immediately after the unlikely family meal arranged by her employers, Mr and Mrs Lawrence, is a matter of record. That she made this decision in the midst of a hail of tears, screaming and gunfire is, I contend, incidental. The immediate circumstances of her departure (see 9.6.4.1.3.1) do not constitute, in my view, sufficient explanation of her decision.
Indeed, the mysterious thought processes of Janette Hunter, who, of the whole family, was surely the one who came closest to what we call “happy”, may well provide the essential test case for the relevance of this entire undertaking. If this narrative can accommodate both the extremity of a Tommy Hunter and the competence of a Janette, then it may have gone some way towards things unattempted yet in song or rhyme, and justify the ways of things to folk.
