The Tartan Ringers

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘Scrap?’ I ragged up my hands, took hold of the cable.

  Big Chas sang piously astride the generator, ‘Mighty are your enemies, Hard the battle ye must fight.’

  Over the other side of the green strange wagons were pulling in. Even the vehicles looked sullen, hateful, as their engines revved and their headlights swathed us.

  ‘Bissolotti?’ I croaked nervously, thinking: Hell fire. The new convoy was forming a crescent. The green was on a slope, and we were below them. Even as I paused to look, another set of headlights rummaged the darkness to our right. ‘Hell, there’s a lot of them.’

  ‘Big mob, Bissolotti’s,’ Chas agreed cheerfully. ‘What weapons do you usually use in a rumble, Lovejoy?’

  My legs, mainly, I thought shakily. Or a Jaguar. I’m not proud.

  ‘I heard he’s a gun man,’ Ern said.

  Those lunatics were actually pleased at the notion of an all-out battle with Bissolotti’s. I felt sick. This wasn’t my scene. A peaceful fairground, yes. But a military column tearing to a private El Alamein, a thousand times no. Soon I’d go for say a pee, and vanish.

  For about an hour we worked on. Every few minutes I sussed out the growing arc of lights about the green. Bissolotti’s wagons began to pitch. We were only a hundred yards apart.

  ‘They’re pitching,’ I said apprehensively to Ern.

  ‘Aye, Lovejoy,’ he called laconically.

  ‘Will we share the pitch?’ I was hopeful.

  Big Chas roared with laughter from somewhere under the Caterpillar’s railed wheels. ‘Lovejoy’s worried there’ll be no rumble,’ the idiot bellowed.

  ‘Don’t worry, Lovejoy,’ Ern said consolingly and carolled, ‘Ye that are men now serve him, Against unnumbered foes . . .’ Big Chas joined in the hymn. I worked on, sane in a world of lunatics.

  They hadn’t finished that particular hymn when negotiations began between the two fairmasters. Bissolotti with ten blokes met Sidoli near where we worked. Our fairmaster also had ten nephews. They stood in two cagey crescents, the bosses talking vehemently for quite a time before our lot returned, chatting animatedly.

  ‘Ready, Lovejoy?’ Sidoli called. Ray-dee, Luff-yoyee? He’d caught a glimpse of me on the Caterpillar bolting the hub’s canopy roof. ‘You get your wish!’

  ‘Great,’ I called back. That one wobbly word took three swallows.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Big Chas said. ‘Fight the good fight.’

  Men were gathering into small groups from our wagons. The pitch was falling silent as the hammering and clattering ceased. Our people were talking. Groups formed. Tactics were being discussed. It was eerily happy, and here was I frightened out of my skin. Madness. Sidoli was among a cluster of paraffin lanterns lecturing strategy. Heads nodded. Some maniac was dishing out steel rods. I thought: For God’s sake.

  ‘Just finish this, Chas.’

  ‘Won’t let a scrap interrupt work, eh?’

  He and Ern left to join the nearest group, laughing and shaking their heads. ‘He’s a cool bugger,’ Ern said admiringly.

  ‘Good night, lads,’ I muttered. I checked the scene once more, then slid off the wood on the dark side, nearest the enemy camp. ‘And good luck with the war.’

  Across the damp grass the Bissolotti mob’s lanterns were wavering as their men assembled. Behind, our own lamps showed where clusters of blokes were being positioned. I crouched indecisively near a pile of wooden façades from the Caterpillar. What were the rules for a rumble? From what little I’d learned, fairs were pretty orderly along time-honoured lines. Maybe they were as set in their ways when it came to all-out warfare. Apprehensively I darted a few yards towards the Bissolotti vehicles, then hesitated. Surely the thing was to avoid both gangs, never mind the wagons?

  Our own pitch was a circular layout on the green’s down slope. Ahead and above stood the Bissolotti crescent, all flickering lamps and din. A wall, terraced houses and some sort of iron railing formed the perimeter where streets began. There were three exits for vehicles, but for an enterprising slum-trained coward spiked railings were hardly an obstacle.

  Suddenly the lights in the Bissolotti camp vanished.

  In ours, there arose a subdued murmur, then somebody called a nervous order and the glims dowsed here and there until Sidoli’s pitch was black. I heard Sidoli yell. A hubble of voices responded, one panicky shout stilled by a threat. We’d been caught napping. Only a sort of air-pallor from the nearby street let you see a damned thing. I went clammy, cursing myself for not having escaped sooner. If it hadn’t been for Joan’s loving farewell I’d be miles away by now. Bloody women. No wonder I’m always in a mess.

  Somebody shouted, ‘Fan out, lads,’ and somebody else shouted, ‘No. Two lots. Over there . . .’ Then a third, ‘Bunch up. Get in line . . .’ So much for Sidoli’s confidence. His men were a shambles. I began to move instinctively to my right. I’d once been in a real army and recognized only too well the authentic hallmarks of disorder. Time Lovejoy was gone.

  I froze in mid-slink. Nearby there was a steady touch of movement. The night air somehow pressed on my face. A hoary old sergeant – a survivor – once told me, ‘Never effing mind what you frigging see,’ he’d said. ‘Survivors feel.’ So I felt, lay down with my head towards the Bissolotti camp, and stayed still.

  A line of men crept past and over me. One boot squelched an inch from my hand. I swear it. The guilty thought came that a true friend would behave like a Roman goose and cackle the alarm. Not me. As soon as the silent line of assaulters had passed I rose and moved tangentially right. No more than forty slunk paces and I came against a giant wagon. I felt my way along its flank. My heart was throbbing. I’d not breathed for a week.

  The wagon’s side seemed to go on forever and I cursed Sidoli for a lying swine. He’d represented Bissolotti’s as a small vulgar outfit. If they could afford massive new transformer-generators like this supersize it was no cardboard cut-out job. And the chug of new Bissolotti arrivals in the next street showed that enemy reinforcements were at hand.

  Smoke. Cigarette smoke. And nearby. Somebody was probably cupping the fag into his palm the way convicts and soldiers do. I’d nearly eeled into them in my fright. I edged beneath the enormous generator wagon and crawled out under the other side. Even then I nearly brained myself by standing up. My shoulder caught on the cab’s open door.

  ‘How much longer?’ a man’s voice muttered.

  ‘Five minutes. Then we shout the rest up.’

  Hell fire, I thought. There must have been thirty or so in that assault line. Plus those vehicles I’d heard nearby. Sidoli’s fair – not to mention me – was caught between two aggressive mobs. A classic pincer movement. I almost moaned in terror. As soon as the rumble started Bissolotti’s would switch on every light they possessed. I’d be spotlighted like a prisoner against a wall. That explained the Bissolotti tactic, of lining his wagons facing down the slope towards our pitch.

  This wasn’t for me. I lay down and wriggled under the vehicle’s vast bulk. The next wagon was smaller, probably a slab carrier, to transport the wooden façades. I heard two more men muttering by the tailboards, found the driver’s cab of the slabber, and lifted myself up. Somebody said, ‘What’s that?’ as I slipped the gear lever into neutral and the hand brake off. I dropped and crept behind my transformer wagon’s quadrupled rear wheels and wormed towards the front. The slab lorry creaked. Its bulk drifted past.

  ‘Christ. It’s moving.’ Somebody ran past, grunting with exertion as he tried to swing into the cab. A man shouted for a torch. Two men cursed. ‘Over here! Over here!’

  I was up and into the transformer’s cabin. A flashlight jumped the gloom. The slab lorry was trundling slowly down the slope, three blokes clinging to its sides and one man already in the cab struggling with the wheel.

  Headlights sprang. The green showed brilliantly. I snicked my wagon’s gear and the hand brake, then saw there were no bloody keys. As my vast wagon began to glide down the slope I fu
mbled desperately with the dashboard, failed to find the wires, crouched and fiddled. The sodding vehicle went faster. I fiddled faster. Somebody yelled. Boots clashed on the door. I dived, clobbered a bloke’s face and he fell off. Something clanged on the truck. Glass shattered. Men were yelling, running, throwing. I finally shorted the wires with my teeth as the giant vehicle juddered and careered down the slope. The engine boomed. I struggled up, cast the headlights and gave an appalled moan.

  It was like a battlefield. The slab carrier had caught some of Bissolotti’s assault men on the green. Two lay strewn. A third was pinned against the Caterpillar’s gearing where the lorry’s front had nuzzled itself to rest. Blokes were tearing about here, there, everywhere. I gunned the engine. Two strange faces appeared, one on the windscreen, I yelled at him in terror, drove crazily to shake him off. They vanished. I jolted round the field, slammed back through the Bissolotti convoy and glimpsed a street lamp in the distance.

  Putting the big wagon at the narrow street took courage, or terror. I remember bawling in panic as the wagon thundered through and out into a brightly peaceful main road. A line of waiting fairground lorries to my right, so swing left to traffic lights, green so on through, to anywhere. Behind was death in that ludicrous war zone.

  It’s hard suddenly pretending everything is normal, but I did my best, stuck up in that tall cab and trying to look like I knew what I was driving, where I was going. It was an interminable cruise in a puzzled Edinburgh, until I found a road that finally promised north by following the arrows. I was forty miles away before I stopped shaking.

  Telling myself I’d done it, I relaxed and let the road decide what happened next, meekly following the headlights to my fate.

  Quiet old life, antiques.

  Chapter 10

  BEFORE I INVENTED sex, when the world was flat and weather constant, I had all sorts of ideas. Cycling round the entire country in a record-breaking week; going for gold in mountaineering; discovering uncharted continents; rescuing damsels. A lad does a lot of this daft imagining, never grows out of his dreams. Girls do, but don’t ever realize that the male is often miles away in his silly head being anointed king of a lost tribe in the Andes or whatnot. Women never learn to see blokes as we actually are, namely incurable dream-spinning romantics, because early in what passes for development women trade perception for appearances. The bird learns that her bloke could only go for Olympic gold in flower arranging. She starts assuming he’s only what he seems – a portly geezer wheezing when tying his shoe. The point I’m making is that people aren’t merely things. Never mind what politicians say. You can gaze at stones and tarmac, rivers and fence posts, with complete dispassion if you want. They’re no big deal. But you have to think when you look at people. You have to. If you don’t, you become a robot.

  One of my old dreams was knowing every town in the Kingdom, so that if some stranger mentioned a tiny village in, say, the Shetlands, I would casually say, ‘Ah, yes. Population eighty-one. Stands on the tributary of . . .’ I failed geography at school. Dubneath was therefore a mystery.

  The big transformer wagon’s petrol ran dangerously low in Clackmannan, though when I got out and inspected its container drums they showed half full. Perhaps you had to switch to reserve? Anyhow I decided to ditch it, before daylight revealed me in all my glory as the non-secret thief of the known world’s largest fairground transformer-generator. I entered Fife, and drove across Kinross in a stealthy manner in the least inconspicuous of vehicles, with BISSOLOTTI THE FAIRGROUND FOR THE WORLD gaudy on its side. I started admiring myself. After all, it takes skill to nick a thing this big.

  Ten miles outside Perth my brain had another mega-rhythm. Mentally shelving a niggling reminder that my previous brainwave had nearly got me killed in a night riot, I knew I’d now got a winner. Find a reasonably sized transport caff, park my giant wagon, and get a lift into Perth where trains and buses lived, and zoom to find the enigmatic Shona McGunn. No road map in my nicked wagon, of course. Typical.

  By dawn I was noshing among the hunched leather shoulders of the night hauliers in a caff near Perth, rather sad at thoughts of leaving my monster.

  A walk of three miles along the road when the lorry convoy had departed, and I became a poor motorist whose car had broken down. A kindly motorist gave me a lift to the Perth turn-off, and I got a bus into that lovely city just as the shops opened.

  Pausing only to sell a Hudson’s Bay Co folding rusty penknife pistol that I’d kept back from Francie – flat horn sides, percussion, two blades – for a giveaway price which still rankles (these 1860–70 collectibles go for twice the average weekly wage nowadays), I phoned the police, anonymously reporting that a Sidoli wagon was ditched in the night caff. Then I got on the train and dozed. I’d got a cold pasty and some rotten crumbly cake I couldn’t control. They fetch tea down the corridor just as you’re on your last legs, so I eventually made it, though weakening fast.

  Painful thoughts of Three-Wheel came to me while I nodded on the journey. And Joan’s grey eyes and long-term philosophy – maybe she was the one bird whose perception had made it? And Jo. And Tinker would be bewildered, with a score of deals waving uncompleted in the breeze. And poor dead Tipper Noone under the coroner’s hammer. And yon driver, poor bloke. Naturally, a twinge of fear came with the haze. I’d started the journey north towards Caithness with a whole fairground full of tough allies, and ended it with two fairs bulging with enemies: Sidoli’s for leaving them in the lurch, and Bissolotti’s for, er, borrowing their vehicle.

  Not much of a social record, you might say. But I felt that all in all I was entitled to pride. So far I’d reached Sutherland. I was in one piece, and being alive is always a plus. I had money in my pocket, and was heading for a mine of antiques, those precious wonderments whose very existence is proof of something more than the brute man. And good old Shona knew where they were.

  The last part of the journey was by bus. Our little local trains have been abolished in the interest of greater efficiency, so now nobody can get anywhere except by public yak. Dubneath’s version of the yak was a bus carrying smiley basket-toting women and distant-eyed men. Before we bowled into minuscule Dubneath I’d revealed all, grilled by the clever interrogation of a pally little rotund lady. I confided that I was a visiting writer. Not going anywhere in particular, just travelling. And I might look up some possible ancestors . . . Oh, my own name, yes. That’s what I wrote my poetry under. What name would that be? ‘Oh, sorry, love,’ I said absently. ‘McGunn’s the name. Ian McGunn.’ Cunning, no?

  It was the last bus that day. I was put down in Dubneath. The sea was there in the late evening. It earned a word of praise from me, which pleased my companion, though the little town was poorly lit and somnolent. Bonny place in full day, I supposed. My plump pal was going on to Lybster further up the coast, but she said there was an inn in Dubneath. ‘Where,’ she added darkly, ‘folk drink.’ We both agreed, tut-tut, sin gets everywhere these days. She’d told me that McGunn was not an uncommon name hereabouts. I said fancy that, and waved the bus off into the night.

  The tavern, replete with drinkers, instantly recognized me as a fellow sinner and agreed to put me up. I’d bought a cheap cardboardy case in Perth, plus a skimp of clean clothes, so I could portray respectability. I was so thrilled at myself I offered to pay in advance. A huge meal, and I tottered exhausted to bed in a long narrow room.

  Came daylight, I saw that it was Sunday. In that part of the world they go big on the Sabbath. Nothing happens. By that I mean nil. Even the bloody seagulls didn’t seem to fly, except a couple of backsliders that revelled unrepentantly in the clear air squawking their silly heads off I walked down the quay, examined the sea. Yep, still there, all the way out to the skyline. Back to the tavern, two streets from the edge of the known world.

  The surrounding countryside was uncomfortably close. As long as it stayed loomingly over there and didn’t ride into town to take over I’d be happy. The shops were closed. The harbou
r boats looked at prayer. A few people emerged blinking into daylight, hurried away bowed as if under curfew.

  I walked down the quay, Dubneath’s vortex. Two old geezers were there, eyeing the sky. A lone kid fished off a wall. I bade the blokes good morning; they said good morning. A riot. I sat on the harbour wall. Got off after a minute, and walked the streets of the metropolis.

  And back.

  About eleven a saloon car of baffled tourists – French registration – whined miserably through. It was all happening today in Dubneath.

  High noon, and a man strode out with a spyglass, notebook, knees showing above elasticated socks. God, I was overjoyed to see him. We spoke. He was disappointed that I wasn’t a birdwatcher. I was disappointed that he was. We parted, him off into the countryside, smiling in happy anticipation. You get these nutters in East Anglia too.

  The tavern creaked awake. By that I mean they served up at dinner time, after which Dubneath plunged back into the twilight zone. Of interest: a few badges glass framed in the taproom, wartime memories now worth enough to redecorate the downstairs rooms; a brass racehorse doorstep of Crowley & Co, Manchester, about 1860 – go for these if you’re wanting cheap Victoriana with class – and by the bar mirrors a trio of little match strikers. Go for these too: many pubs have them left over from times when every smoker used unboxed matches. You can get them for a song because pubs hardly change, and people have forgotten what they’re for. The most desirable are German porcelain figurines by Conte and Boehme. A good one, with a humorous inscription, will keep you in luxury for a week. Three should pay for a modest continental holiday.

  ‘You know about those?’ I couldn’t help explaining their value to the taverner, a husky bloke called George MacNeish.

  ‘Is that a fact,’ he said.

  ‘They’re highly sought after, you see.’

  ‘Aye, but I like the wee things.’

  My heart warmed to him. I’m always pleased to hear this. I offered him a drink, but no. The Sabbath.