And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  ‘It doesn’t help,’ Jack said.

  ‘I dinna ken tae this day how I came oot o that,’ Don said. ‘I was the only one, ye ken. Everybody else was deid, and I didna hae a scratch on me. How was that? How did I survive?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jack said, with such gravity and force that nothing else could be said by either of them. I don’t know. It went through Don like a knife. And then, for the only time in their friendship – you could call it that – Jack reached out and touched Don; rested a hand on his shoulder for a moment, then slipped it under his arm.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you home.’

  Just once you came back, you didn’t plan it but one day you were close, and drawn closer by the familiarity of landmarks, road signs. You came to the town. You walked past an entrance to a place you recognised. Nobody was around to recognise you. You’d hardly have recognised yourself. You thought of your wife and daughter, and something tugged, you half-remembered what that life had been like. It was gone, over, but for a moment you wondered if some ruins of it might still exist that could be repaired or built on. But while you were still a few miles away from the village something else happened, a coldness came over you that you read as a warning, an urgent message to escape while you could. The impossibility of normality. Because you’d pulled yourself back once before and it had been a mistake. So you cut out of the town, head down, avoiding glances, the curiosity or pity or fear or distaste in some eyes. You were a tramp to them, that was what they saw and what you let them see, and you tramped east, through the mill towns, onwards to coal country. You escaped as you had before. And things fell into place again.

  You’d escaped because.

  Poor towns and villages gave you more than other, wealthier, places. The people in them saw how near their lives scraped to yours, how a piece of bread and cheese or a few pennies or a kind word might keep your life away from them. That was the difference: you wanted it, they didn’t. You were walking along a street of miners’ cottages and a lassie who might have been the same age as your own stood watching you go by, and you stared hard to see who was inside her, to see who she might become, and you didn’t see it, but then you were blind to the pattern, if there was one, so you stopped and made an offering to her from the pocket of stones, and she was afraid, so you placed it on the road for her and went on, and when you looked back from the end of the street she was gone, and so were you.

  You’d escaped because.

  You hadn’t planned to leave. Or you didn’t remember planning it, but at some deep level you must have, because when it happened, when you found yourself away, you found yourself equipped for not coming back. The haversack, the spare socks, underwear, shirt, the knife, the boots in which you’d worked the garden till they felt like your feet, boots you could walk a continent in, or a country of many twists and turns. The heel of a loaf was all the food you took, you kept it in your pocket as an insurance, you wouldn’t eat it till you had some other food for later. Never be without something, however small, for later. And it need be only enough to keep hunger at bay, enough to give you strength to go till the next meal. And then there was the money. You must have been laying money aside, squirrelling it away in hidden places, the garden shed, behind the fuse box, in the loft. You must have done this because you knew the places, you saw your hands moving dusty jars and tins, pulling a note from here, from there, and yet you couldn’t remember putting the money away, only retrieving it. The money was for eking out, for learning how to do without money, because it wouldn’t last for ever. No money would ever last for ever.

  You’d escaped because everybody else was hell-bent on wanting everything and you saw it wasn’t going to work. Didn’t matter what your politics were after all. Irrelevant. Didn’t matter whether you were free or independent or democratic or oppressed, everybody wanted everything and they couldn’t have it. It wasn’t the age of small nations as you’d thought, it was the age of money and waste and garbage and pollution and destruction and it was all going to get worse, you could see it coming and you couldn’t do it, you couldn’t keep your place in such a world, couldn’t support a wife in such a world, couldn’t bring up a child in such a world. It was time to go. It was time to abandon.

  When you left there was some kind of journey in your head, though you didn’t know the shape of it. You didn’t go on the bus, you weren’t risking being seen and brought back, you weren’t trusting anybody else. You were going on a journey and if nobody knew you were going or where, if you didn’t know yourself, then nobody could betray you, and after that it would be between you and the land. And so you went up the hill, through the woods, on to the moors. North. That much you did know. You were going north. In time you would go in every other direction too as you followed coastlines and paths and tracks and sometimes as you followed no discernible route at all, east and west and south you’d go, but always, sooner or later, north again. North, always north.

  PART THREE

  The Original Mr Bond

  All these fucking conversations in your head. Single-sided, a lot of them. One-versations. Nobody talking back, or you to yourself. Years, decades of dialogue, monologue. Thousands, tens of thousands of words. Millions. And who gives a fuck? You don’t yourself but that doesn’t stop the words battering round the inner wall of your skull.

  Aye you do.

  It would be good to have someone to talk to.

  Croick, maybe. Even Canterbury. Somebody who actually understands where you’re coming from. But Croick’s dead and Canterbury’s God knows where. In some care home for the politically deranged maybe. Or a cottage in rural Britannia pruning his roses. Never knew exactly how old either of them were, but Canterbury must be close to ninety if he’s not beyond it. If he isn’t dead too.

  Ach he’ll be dead, surely?

  Lots of other people are definitely still alive but you can’t speak to lots of other people. You’re a ghost. You made yourself a ghost some time ago. You’re on the other side of an invisible something. People see you but they don’t speak to you, and you can’t speak to them.

  Maybe they don’t even see you.

  Aye they do. The guy in the café saw you. You read the signs. The glance. The frown. The second glance. The guy didn’t place you, not then, but he will have by now. The memory will have come back. Or not. It doesn’t for everybody.

  It does for you, Peter Bond. The memory always comes back. You’ve that kind of brain. Full of filing cabinets. That’s what the inside of your head’s like. A dome like the old British Library’s and round the walls shelves and shelves of reference books, and corridors leading off lined with stacks, the stacks laden with cardboard folders, box files, arch files, and rooms off the corridors crammed with grey steel cabinets. Every document catalogued and retrievable. You can retrieve anything. Could. Not so good now. You’re like a computer but you don’t imagine your head as a computer because you’re from a pre-computer age; you can visualise card indexes not gigabytes – how the fuck do you visualise a gigabyte? – you were born in an age of small libraries in small towns and bigger libraries in bigger towns and huge libraries in cities and that’s what you are, a walking library, that’s how you grew up, how you were trained, how you were and are and will be till the doors close and the lights go out for the last time.

  Which, the way you’re feeling, might not be that far off.

  All the more reason why it would be good to have someone to talk to.

  And maybe that’s what Croick thought, away back then. That time he summoned you. Maybe that was all he wanted. He’d run out of time, and he wanted to talk, and you were the only one even vaguely approaching the idea of a friend he had left.

  That was in the days when you still had a telephone. Well, you still have a telephone but it’s been dead for years. Another reason for the one-versations. No bastard ever calls you because your phone’s been cut off by the bastard phone company.

  But Croick called you. Because you were the only o
ne he had left. He called you because he wanted to get it all off his chest, out of his system, before the lights went out.

  Wait a minute. Who’s putting the lights out? Who’s closing the doors? And who’s this coming at you? Wait a fucking minute. Some kind of uniform. A security guard. What the fuck is a security guard doing in your head? In your head? And why doesn’t he have a face? STAY BACK, YA CUNT!

  All right, all right, calm down. Deep breaths. Nobody there after all. Just yourself. Empty room, empty corridors. Everything as it should be. Apart from one thing. One particular door at the end of one particular corridor. Security-locked. Sign on it saying NO ENTRY, AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. Stuff in there you should have access to but never did, too late now. In your own fucking head. Somebody put the bodies in and sealed the door and now you’re like Bluebeard’s wife, you want the key but you don’t, you want to know but you don’t, you can’t face it, you can’t face it, you can’t face it.

  Get a grip, Peter. Behave yourself. Aye, right. Just sit in the corner like a good auld boy and read the papers. That’s it, that’s it. Deep breaths. Now. Let’s try again.

  He placed the guy in the café at once. Pendreich, Michael. Photographer. Did some of the covers for Root & Branch. Devo-porn. Twenty-five issues, 1984 to 1989 or thereabouts. Provided a lot of the photographs. Did some of the cartoons too. All donated freely to the cause. Peter recognised him instantly.

  What else does he know about him? Father: Angus, also a photographer, a better one, more successful anyway. Much more. Died two or three years ago, a few more-or-less respectful obits. Aye, Peter still reads the papers and he still reads between the lines. So. Michael Pendreich: soft-left, soft-nationalist, presumably still is but who knows, we’re not what we were. Self-determination: that was the catch-all term folk like Pendreich used, trying to be as inclusive as they could. Let the people decide how far they want to travel: a worthy and reasonable enough sentiment, if you think the people give a damn. Peter first clocked him years before as a student, in Sandy Bell’s, then hanging out at Jean Barbour’s place. Then later, in his journalist phase, he saw Pendreich from time to time, this meeting, that march. You take care, Peter wanted to say to him. Maybe he did say it to him and doesn’t remember because although he never forgets a face he often forgets an incident. You take care, you’re being watched. He didn’t know if it was true because by then it wasn’t himself doing the watching, but he knew it was more than likely.

  In the self-determination wars Pendreich was only ever a foot soldier not a strategist, indian not chief. That was the thing about Scotland back then, nobody wanted to be a chief. Still true today. You can see it as healthy or limiting. The downside of ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’: if I try to be a chief some other bastard will take the feet from under me. The sliding tackle of the Democratic Intellect.

  There’s intellect and intelligence and then there’s Intelligence. Peter’s stock-in-trade, or used to be. God, how Intelligence hates having to deal with indians. It prefers chiefs, ringleaders. It struggles with decent, ordinary human beings who become political radicals not because they’re either very political or very radical but simply because they’ve had enough: it means they can’t so easily be victimised, demonised, isolated, framed, entrapped, beaten up, imprisoned or otherwise neutralised. Decent? Does he really mean decent? Aye, he does, certainly in comparison with some of the shites on the other side, his side as was. Decent and thrawn. They just dig in their heels, these people. Doesn’t matter what the cause is. Take that Jim Swire whose daughter was killed in the Lockerbie bombing. Jesus, Intelligence loathed him. Like a terrier he was, just got gripped on with his teeth and wouldn’t let go, and it was clear as day to everyone that he was a decent man with nothing to gain but the truth and what he was getting was evasion and obstruction and downright fucking lies and he was never going to be satisfied with that. No, no. Pick a self-promoting radical any day if you want a victim or a demon. Pick a George Galloway or a Peter Tatchell. Oh aye, something else about Pendreich: he’s gay.

  Otherwise neutralised. Very good. Like extraordinary rendition, collateral damage. One of those phrases.

  When Peter saw him in the café he thought, now there’s somebody I could have a dialogue with. Some shared ground, some mutual acquaintances. We could talk about the old days. But he didn’t go over. He went on reading his Scotsman, initiating imaginary conversations as his coffee got cold, and ten minutes later Pendreich stood up and left.

  He might have followed him but he doesn’t maintain much of a pace these days and Pendreich looked fit. Anyway, what would have been the point? It’s not as if the guy has anything to hide, or Peter has anything to find out. Those days are over, if they ever existed.

  It’s not as if he has a job any more. A role. Freelance, floating or otherwise. There’ll be somebody out there, trying to fuck things up Croick-style, trying to drag the process out, but it isn’t Peter.

  How far apart people’s lives are, and yet how closely they miss each other. How small an adjustment would have left you leading another man’s life, and him leading yours.

  He paid the waitress at the till. She was glad to see the back of him. He knows he’s deteriorating fast, on the edge of being completely unacceptable in public places. He’s not yet quite so far gone that he doesn’t wash his clothes, there’s a launderette where he takes everything, wouldn’t mind getting in the big machine himself sometimes, nevertheless he’s not the favourite client of Edinburgh teashops, no sir. It’s not happened yet, not that he can remember anyway, but the day is coming when he’ll be ejected before he’s even managed to spot a vacant seat.

  On the way back to the flat he had a pint in Maggie Dickson’s, and in a shop on Bread Street he bought a bottle of cheap whisky to replace the one he finished the night before.

  The flat is a midden. The kitchen trails dirty plates and coffee mugs and biscuit crumbs into the living room which spills newspapers and books and pens and folders into the tiny passage and along it in one direction to the front door where the junk mail lies and in the other to the bathroom and the bedroom. The bathroom is sticky and foul and foreign, he goes in there as seldom as possible, to do the basics, to shit and pee and occasionally puke. Sometimes to clean himself up a bit. Standing room only in the bath, Christ you wouldn’t want to sit down in it, there’s a shower over it and a shower curtain with a slimy hem and if you’re not too fussy about the soles of your feet it’s tolerable. Silverfish everywhere. Resilient wee fuckers. Then there’s the bedroom: a dark, bio-hazardous hole he ends up in sometimes when he doesn’t fall asleep in a chair. If he wakes up in his bed he wonders how the fuck he got there. Welcome to the Hotel Caledonia.

  This is the wreckage he lives among: the wreckage of an edifice he tried to construct for more than forty years, but which was crumbling almost from the outset, was mothballed in the late 1970s, suffered a serious structural failure in the mid-1980s and collapsed more or less completely in the spring of 1997. It’s a fitting monument to his own wrecked life. In modern-art terms, a kind of un-installation made up of unfound objects. If his name was Tracey Emin he’d be a genius. A rich fucking genius too. He scrabbles around on the debris, vaguely trying to piece it together again even though there’s now no point. He could clear it out but he doesn’t. That would mean clearing out his entire adult life.

  What makes him shudder, what makes him so disappointed in himself, what makes him sit there on the stale settee with the whisky on the table in front of him, him staring at it, it staring at him just sitting there like Alice in fucking Wonderland saying drink me drink me, what makes him pick the bottle up, its lovely cool familiar glassiness, what makes him turn the metal cap, feeling the retaining seal give a little, letting go, turning it again, letting go, testing himself, resisting, testing, ah fuck it turning the cap completely, the click of release, the beautiful fumes, lifting the lovely weight of the full bottle, pouring the first glassful, glug glug glug, what makes him do this night after n
ight isn’t the fact that he’s been taken for a total ride, that he’s been fooled and used and discarded. It’s the fact that he conspired to allow it to happen, that he pretty much knew all along, even as it was happening, that he didn’t have the guts to call time, walk away, blow the whistle, whatever phrase you want to apply he simply didn’t do it. He can hear a voice, from years back, sounds like his father: Ye’ve let yersel doon, son. That’s it, he let himself down and this is him not letting himself get back up again because that’s how he deals with it. Or doesn’t deal with it. He is sixty-eight years old, for fuck’s sake. One minute you’re listening to ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados, the next you’re a pensioned-off drunk in a stinking flat in a run-down street that you, ya shaky auld cunt, to quote a youth he accidentally nudged when crossing it recently, should be afraid to go out in at night. But that’s one thing at least: he isn’t afraid of the dark or what might lie in wait outside. The stuff that unnerves him is right there with him in the flat.

  Actually, in retrospect maybe he bought two bottles.

  So, if he’s a ghost. How would that have happened? Ex-spook becomes ghost. One thing he knows from his life in the shadows is how people fade in and out. They matter, they don’t matter, they’re tailed, they’re not tailed, somebody cares, nobody cares. Other people remember them, forget them. Over time this has an effect: their existence starts to break up, like a bad TV picture or a dodgy phone connection. We’re not talking here about climbers going missing in a blizzard, fishermen lost at sea. We’re not talking about the ones search-and-rescue operations are launched for. We mean the many others who go, eventually, unnoticed and unlooked for. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re away themselves. They just fade and flicker until they disappear altogether. Ghosts, right enough. Thousands of them every year. They’re here, then they’re not. Stories without endings. Like a book you can’t be bothered finishing. So why wouldn’t it have happened to him? He’s been half-absent for decades anyway. All it would take is a few stumbles further into the darkness. And let’s face it, Peter stumbles from time to time. So aye, why not him? Why wouldn’t he already have joined the spectral crowd? And who else is out there? Lucy Eddelstane? Aye, she’ll be wandering the lost zone somewhere, no map or compass. Must be. He recognised a kindred spirit when he slept with one. But she’s gone, long gone. They passed like ghost ships in the night.