Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

  10.0.1.4.3.1

  Janette had already come a long way, at least in her own mind, from the unheated room she’d shared with her parents in Agnes’s house. She had already transcended the hunger and violence and, worst of all, indifference she’d endured from her unwell, underqualified, exhausted, bitter great-grandparent, and from her later disposition to the intermittent competencies of the care and fostering system. She’d done better than survive. She had her self-worth intact. And yet here she was (if in fact she was) standing in this ecological theme park watching a pair of overgrown testosterone cases make loud and obnoxious arses of themselves … standing there caring for them and disapproving of them like the caricature of a model of family life, that she, like them, had never really known, but into which she, like them, now found herself falling, the wish for stability seeming to transfer itself without pain to the “family” and temporarily away from the ambitions of grooviness that had held the threads and episodes of her life together this far.

  10.0.2

  It was happening to all of them that day, wherever they really were, this seemingly preordained, species-defining, evolved need of binding and cleaving. Almost as if it were meant, almost as if this were some tendentious story about human nature that someone was making up, just to prove a point. That we are meant to be together. That we need each other. That the atomising criminals who keep us apart to keep us weak and hungry are not simply morally wrong; they are up a gum tree. That there is that in us which makes us one. And that this thing in itself about us is as much in and of the way things really are as are gravity, cancer and quantum uncertainty.

  10.0.2.1

  Whatever the circumstances philosophically or circumstantially, it is, of course, the fact of the change of vehicle that is significant in terms of plot. Their evading detection and capture for twenty-four more hours was what was significant within the genre of flight and pursuit. It might be said that, no longer a throwback to seventies gangster aesthetic, the Hunters were now a family on holiday together in a mobile home in a road movie. And by osmosis or otherwise they were in fact becoming, however eccentrically, a gestalt, a social entity, a family.

  10.1

  Albeit in a mobile one, for the first time in any of their lives, they were at home.

  10.2

  As a matter of purely personal preference, for one reason and another, the scenario in which I choose to invest my belief similarly has Janette standing looking on in contemplation of her life as Hunter and his son behaved badly, but not in any modern eco-aware leisure facility, rather in far more sublime and terrible surroundings, evocative of history, stuffed full of geology, in a glacier-cut channel leading down to the Western Ocean and America beyond, a slow ice sculpture of water, stone and sky, echoing with the shrills of raptors. However unlikely in mundane terms of driving times and distance, I choose to believe the early evening testimony of a party of Harry Potter fans who were photographing the second most spectacular monument from the heroic age of railway engineering anywhere in these islands, the highlight of any visit to the West Highland Railway. The Glenfinnan Viaduct at the head of Loch Shiel is, of course, featured on bank cards and postcards as well as appearing in all the Harry Potter films as the essential landmark en route to the Public School Fairyland of that singularly inexplicable subset of teenage wish fulfilment, so you can see why comparatively normal people like the Hunters might want to visit it.

  10.2.1

  The fans’ testimony was that they’d been terrorised by the sudden appearance of a gunslinger and his vile apprentice loosing off some practice rounds at the nearby Glenfinnan Monument, a Victorian folly built in Gothic imitation of a watchtower at the spot where Bonnie Prince Charlie was said to have raised the Royal Standard in 1745, gathering the clans, inaugurating his last-ditch desperate attempt to reimpose papist absolutism on a land already irredeemably lost to Justification by Protestant Ascendancy. Two magical symbols of lost dreams of childhood and tyranny then, in a single photoshoot on the same sea loch, truly one of the most breathtaking and dramatic meetings of history and culture and sea and landscape anywhere on our magnificent and midge-infested coastline, all framed by swooping crags reflected in the glassy rippling of Loch Shiel and thoroughly spoiled for the schoolgirl party from Hampshire, by the wild swearing and shooting of a madman and his pasty-faced and hellish brood whanging their high-calibre gunfire off that Sentimental Tribute to purposeless Jacobite yearning at the apex of sea and sky and shore. The kind of vehicle they were driving was not described but that absent detail is hardly necessary to the credibility of the sighting which, if solely judged on grounds of mythological resonance, must be judged definitive.

  10.3

  The most cursory of glances at a map makes it unavoidably evident that their itinerary cannot possibly have physically placed the Hunters at all of these places on the same afternoon. To pursue the physical analogy, their confirmed observation at one place precludes the possibility of their being observed by their effect, like protons, at another location. Best, then, I think, not to try pin them down. Best that the Hunters, for that one afternoon of freedom they enjoyed together as a family grouping, however tenuously, however contingently, remain in the realm of probability and uncertainty. On grounds of realism, perhaps, and for the sake of consistency, we should probably assume £40 spent on petrol at some stage, we should estimate the remaining contents of the carpet bag at £24,587.04.

  10.3.1

  If we do not find truth but only make it, as has been variously alleged by all the sages of our disappointed epoch, then can we not allow ourselves not to know? Can we not forgive ourselves a little, and leave to the Wheens and Bellamies and Boyles of this world their false consolations of certainty, their unreflective acceptance of appearance, their spurious purposefulness. Freedom, if it means anything, bears the price of flux, of being unsettled, of not expecting “truth”. There is slavery in what passes for common sense. Given that procedural confidence was largely placed in the description of a vehicle that Hunter, in whatever circumstances, had abandoned, and given that the needs of escape did not, I think, enter into his mind … that rather he was thinking that his children needed a place to sleep where he could watch over them under the very special conditions of their being fugitive together … can we not find a little generosity in our hearts, give a little benefit to doubt?

  10.3.2

  This Scotland where he found himself (wherever exactly he was) was new territory for Tommy in more than the merely topographical sense. However much he might have welcomed some insight into the exterior landscape of his old and weary country, its bleak and surprising beauties, the real landscape of novelty was inside himself and his children. These strangers to him were not strangers to each other, he found to his amazement, and once he had got himself over that barrier, he found himself enjoying their company, the intimacy and ease with which they traded abuse. He was jogged back towards sociability by the habitual nature of the interactions they displayed, by their unconscious ease with each other. Unlike him, they just talked and shoved and mocked each other quite naturally, with a spontaneity entirely alien to him. For him, after so many years of solitude, every movement of conversation had to be thought through, every utterance weighed and its consequences anticipated. He felt his otherness from them then, I think, he witnessed himself as they saw him and he was probably quite sad about that, even as he knew joy at being able to witness his own, lost children. He could only have felt then, probably, when he was near them, how far he had fallen away from them.

  10.3.2.1

  So as he drove he let them talk, their liquid babble washing through him, mainly without his understanding it, but cleansing him nonetheless. It hardly mattered what they said to each other. What astounded him with its novelty, and that he noticed that they didn’t notice, was that they changed each other. Ronnie became animated and actually quite witty in his sister’s company. Janette he knew less about, but she too seemed to relax and enjoy her younger b
rother in a teasing, sarcastic sort of way. He wondered if they were changing him too. He wondered what it meant to change. Whether being changed might be a good thing for one’s identity and not a threat to it, as had been the case in all of his prior experience.

  10.3.2.2

  Hunter was beginning to understand, I think, that he had no way to know the journey he and his children had been on apart and together. He had no insight, for example, into the value each of them, undescribed but constant, had always placed on the mere fact of their relatedness. Everything in their world of social care, like in his world of rather more astringent regulation, had been designed upon the Cartesian principle of the isolated soul, the atomised individual, whose relationship with “society” was regulated solely through their measured conformity to the systemic demands and eccentricities of total institutions. The guiding belief underpinning all such institutions being that it is only submission to the practices of these institutions that offers happiness, normality, morality … humanity even, to those humans damned to dependence on them, and to the irreducible loneliness of mere being. Sod that, as it were, had said the brother and sister, who had in their prior relation to each other an alternate standard by which to judge and find wanting the good intentions of the state in its taking the place of their absent parents. And now, in the restored but aberrant return of the father, in the sudden substitution of the parent for the state, they likewise had a standard to which they could hold him to account. Hunter, like Her Majesty (or at least the District Council) before him, found himself in nominal charge of their destinies, true enough. But that didn’t mean that Ronnie and Janette would put up with any snash from him, thanks very much.

  10.3.2.2.1

  And their defiance, their mockery of him delighted him, I’m happy to say. He found in their cautious mockery a loosening of the sclerotic plaque of his protective rigidity, and, exposing his nerves though it did, he recognised that his only hope lay in their carelessness. His only acceptance was in their forgetting of who he was in their simple celebration of each other, who they were. His achievement, he was staggered to learn, was not that he had reunited them with him, but that he had reunited them for the moment with each other.

  10.4

  Talking away to Janette, Ronnie would never have admitted, not even to himself, how glad he was to see her, how much he had missed her, how grateful he was he had her back, or, how angry he was at the deepest depth of his soul that she had abandoned him to the professional care of others who could not, with the best will in the world, love him. She annoyed him, she amused him, she patronised him and she flattered him all at once, and he felt in himself the dangerous revival of feeling, of that flexibility of the soul we allow ourselves when we feel safe. And with that happiness there came to Ronnie the terrible fear that it could be taken away again. And to the defensive hardening of his heart the vulnerability of that feeling ate at him unconsciously all day, which probably explains both his poisonous mood in the evening and the catastrophe he was to precipitate that night. How Ronnie’s resentment at an imagined slight led him so astray, and in turn incited the climactic incidents of this Scottish Western, we’ll be exploring later on. For now, in any case, by comparison with Janette, his father had arrived in his world like a visitation. Janette, by contrast, he knew now he had found her again, was his whole world.

  10.4.1

  As for Janette herself, she could not help being a little flattered by her father’s clear regard for her. He respected her navigating and accepted her advice as to where to go next utterly without question or without ever allowing his rank as an adult to manifest itself in adult defensiveness. Once they were embarked, once she had accepted their expedition, she was acknowledged as the expert, she took charge, and he let her take charge, enjoying her authoritative advice as to routes, eateries and destinations. It was Janette who had insisted, for example, on their being self-sufficient in terms of accommodation, hence the change from the austere and manly vibe of the vintage Jag to the two-wheel-drive domesticity of their new home. It was Janette who knew about places like Glenfinnan Viaduct and Landmark, the Commando Memorial at Spean Bridge, the Roads of Glen Roy and so on … and her wisdom in matters of tourist attractions also seemed to evidence itself as exceptional emotional intelligence.

  She carefully enquired about what her father remembered of the night they’d lost her mother, for example, and he willingly told her about their dropping Janice off at a service station at a roundabout on the outskirts of Perth. He had done this at her insistence, he told his daughter. He had appreciated that she perhaps needed to assimilate the then new reality for her of being on the lam, as it were, like Bonnie and Clyde, and with a pair of toddlers in the car, she had felt understandably uncomfortable about it. Hunter had, as always, acceded without demur to what Janice had asked of him, satisfying himself with telling her he would get in touch with her via Agnes and then tell her where to come if and when she decided to join them later. He had confidently expected that she would, he told Janette, and showed her the postcard again as evidence of his absent wife’s continued interest in maintaining their relationship.

  He looked at her then with a child’s eagerness, a frightened need for her assurance, desperate that Janette, who he had come to respect as an emotional authority, should confirm him in his hope.

  Janette understood then, from his anxious, naive plea for her blessing on his lunatic expectations, that for her father, the fourteen years that had passed between that journey and this were merely an interruption, a small detour, a momentary distraction from a holiday itinerary that he had kept in his shattered mind for all this time as the only consistency available to him. That this journey they were on right now was not only the fulfilment of his prisoner’s pipe dream; it was the only thing holding him together at all. His surface calm, his clarity of purpose, his reality itself, all these were as fragile as the wings of butterflies. He depended utterly on the little things she was doing to make their day together fun and interesting. He was as utterly and vulnerably reliant on her goodwill as he’d been on radio contact with their base in Crossmaglen when he and the Wheens had been khaki boys together in the wilds of South Armagh.

  10.4.1.1

  Is it possible this responsibility moved her? Is it possible she felt pity for her father? Or is it possible she felt something else as she took, at his urging, another closer look at the postcard of Calgary Beach with the Tobermory postmark from two years ago? What was the meaning of her wordless response, her inexpressive accession to his request to look at it again? Is it possible that Janette knew more than she had told him so far? Was there something in the look she gave him as he handed her again the postcard that she had swatted to the floor in the Rob Roy Room back in Kinloch Rannoch that indicated guilty knowledge? In any case she was lost, for a moment, in interior contemplation, not listening to his story till her father’s barked confession that having dropped Janice off all those years ago, he had, like an idiot, forgotten, in the turmoil of parting, to fill the car up with petrol and that this was why they had stopped at the gates of Drumochter Pass and the polis man from Coupar Angus had come across them there, and Hunter had been arrested and he and his children had been flung into the wilderness …

  “So that’s the last time you saw her?” asked Janette.

  “Sure,” said her dad, “do you not remember?”

  10.4.2

  She was sorry she did not, and had to bite her tongue to stop herself from telling him (yet) what else she knew.

  10.5

  They drove along in silence for a few moments, or rather, drove along to what was to the children the thoroughly incomprehensible country boogie of Lowell George and Little Feat. Ronnie asked then where they were going, which though it seems an entirely reasonable question leads us into a sticky point of narrative procedure which was that where they were going was not at all where they ended up, and how they ended up where they did and not where they were going is the proper subject of the nex
t chapter.

  10.6

  What remains in this chapter is a description of the scene of the last chapter some ninety minutes after the Hunters had left it.

  10.6.1

  Here, in the car park of the Bide a Wee Hotel, surrounded by perhaps thirty policemen of various ranks and functions, including an armed response unit, Joseph Wheen, sitting in the passenger seat of Frank’s Beamer, was snickering mirthlessly, inanely and annoyingly at some private joke he was enjoying while Frank looked through the windscreen towards where Superintendent Bellamy was sitting on a reclaimed park bench with the Lawrences outside the windows of the Rob Roy Room, staring as if he could lip-read what they were saying, irritated beyond measure at both his dependence on Bellamy for useful information and at the clear evidence (in the form of sniggering) that brother Joe was enjoying this ridiculous game of real-life Grand Theft Auto into which that maniac Tommy Hunter had tipped them.

  10.6.2

  Mrs Lawrence, who was now bandaged and saddened at human nature, and Mr Lawrence, with his arm consolingly around her, were doing their joint best to recall details of what the Hunters might have said to each other about where they might be heading off to, before they’d headed off — leaving so much upset in their backwash. They’d just told Bellamy about the postcard, and Mr Lawrence had just recalled the detail of where it had come from … Calgary Beach … and Bellamy had dredged from his own memory that that annoying wee prick “Danny” Boyle had been up that way somewhere a year or two back the last time this ghost had revived, risen, gibbered and begged for reburying. And even worse, that Danny was heading there right now.

  10.6.2.1

  “Bollocks,” he said out loud. Mr Lawrence looked at him anxiously.