James Robertson
* * *
TO BE CONTINUED
or, Conversations with a Toad
Contents
Author’s Note
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Follow Penguin
By the same author
The Fanatic
Joseph Knight
The Testament of Gideon Mack
And the Land Lay Still
Republics of the Mind
The Professor of Truth
365: Stories
In loving memory of Owen Fraser Stewart (1973–2015).
And for Isla Catherine Isabel Macdonald (born 2015).
do not tell me
said warty bliggens
that there is not a purpose
in the universe
the thought is blasphemy
– Don Marquis, ‘warty bliggens the toad’
Author’s Note
The geography in this book is not to be trusted.
1
* * *
THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME
I am sitting on the upper deck of a number 11 bus, stuck in traffic on Lothian Road, Edinburgh, when I turn fifty.
I check my watch: it is 12.15 p.m. This is it. Exactly half a century ago, I entered the world.
A small cheer rises in me, which I elect to quash.
I am able to mark the occasion with such confidence and precision because, last night, I looked out my birth certificate and examined it closely. Scottish birth certificates specify not only the place and date of birth but also the time. In this, I believe, we differ from the modus operandi of Our Friends in the South. I am uninformed as to what practices prevail in other jurisdictions.
(My chest swelled with patriotic pride when I saw that attention to detail. We may not be perfect, I said to myself, we may fall short of expectations in other departments, but by God we know how to fill out a birth certificate.)
It occurs to me now, in my deflated mode, that we are a nation of record-keepers, not of record-breakers.
Immediately I am ashamed of the paucity of this observation and the feebleness of my wordplay.
Returning to the matter of my birthday, I consider standing up and making an announcement to the other passengers. I could ask them to stop – just for one moment – texting, surfing, reading the free comic disguised as a newspaper, or gazing through the window, as I have something to tell them: ‘Fifty years ago, to this very minute, I arrived. I was born. Is that not amazing? I don’t remember it myself, but it’s recorded fact and I want to share it with you.’
I decide against this course of action. For one thing, I am of a shy and retiring disposition. It would not be a misrepresentation of my character to say that, as a rule, if I am in the vicinity of a parapet I do not put my head above it. Furthermore, proof of my assertion might be demanded and I do not have the birth certificate about my person. It is in a drawer of my father’s desk where documents relating to identity, insurance and the ownership of Premium Bonds reside, and have done for as long as I can remember. On the few occasions in my adult life when I needed to produce my birth certificate for official inspection I always asked my father for it, he released it to me, and to that same location it always returned, like a pigeon to its doocot-hole.
This – habit, custom, idiosyncrasy, call it what you will – has been the cause of some ill feeling between myself and Sonya, my – partner, lover, bidie-in, ex- of all the preceding, call her what you will. That I did not, during the ten years of our cohabitation, choose to transfer such documents as refer specifically or solely to me from the parental home to hers – the domicile which, until recently, we shared – has been held up by Sonya as exemplifying both my immaturity and a failure to ‘commit’ to said relationship. There is, no doubt, some truth in the charge. Arguably, however, the fact that I am once again resident in the parental home – which is, legally, also my home, or half of it is, or it half is – and thus in a position to access these papers at my will and leisure (my father being no longer able to perform his role as Custodian of the Family Paperwork), demonstrates foresight, not to mention loyalty to tradition.
There are three other people on the upper deck of the number 11 bus: a woman sitting across the aisle from me, two rows further forward, and two men right up at the front, in the exciting seats, the ones where the future rushes to meet you with worrying questions such as ‘Will the bus make it under this bridge?’, ‘Will it crunch into the back of the bus in front?’ or ‘Has that smacking branch cracked the glass and will I be held responsible because of my proximity to the scene of the incident?’
It is likely, therefore, that these men already have plenty to occupy their minds, and will not be remotely interested in news of the anniversary of my birth. Nor, in all probability, will the woman. Why should they, or indeed she? Who am I, Douglas Findhorn Elder, that total strangers should care anything about me?
Nevertheless, I do have a small but persistent yearning to tell my news to someone. My mother, for example. ‘Hello? Mum? Guess what you were doing right now, fifty years ago?’ But I have left my mobile phone in the house and my mother has been dead for two years. A pity, that. Not that she is dead – of course that is a pity, even though she reached a good age – but that I can’t tell her, can’t pass on my congratulations, and my thanks.
‘Thank you for having me.’
I would mean it, too, despite everything. In the grand scale of existence, the ‘everything’ that pertains to Douglas Findhorn Elder is not so very much.
ASKANCE
I would like to talk to someone and receive some positive feedback. Yesterday I spoke to a toad, but all I got in reply was a dirty look. I cannot blame the toad. I was in the garden, digging out some lilies, and I narrowly avoided spearing it with a graip. At least, I hope I avoided it. As I pulled the tines back out of the soil, what I thought was a clod of earth suddenly became animated, wriggling in a wounded kind of way and then crawling under some dead leaves. Fearing that I had stabbed the creature, I cleared the leaves in search of it and touched its back to see if it moved. It did. ‘Sorry,’ I said, which was when it looked askance at me with a malevolent red eye, before retreating deeper into the vegetation. So I spoke to it from afar. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ I said. The toad remained still and invisible, frightened or aggrieved, and possibly injured. I felt guilty but also that I should not interfere further. I pulled a few weeds in a perfunctory manner in another part of the garden and then went inside, where I was overcome by a need to sleep.
THE LATE DOUGLAS ELDER
Fifty is just a number. What is it? It is a 5 and an 0. It is a wee jingle such as one might hear on a radio station the chief characteristic of which is a mood of forced jollity.
Five-Oh. Not long to go.
No sooner have I thought this thought than several other slogans present themselves like messages running along the bottom edge of the screen of my vision. This happens without any voluntary activation by myself of the mental processes, yet to the best of my knowledge they are not slogans that exist outwith my own imagination, and it is therefore a puzzle to me as to how they have got in there:
You will shortly be losing your grip and flying off the not-so-merry go-round of life.
You are going to die. Soon. Soonish. Sooner rather than later.
Sooner rather than later, YOU will be over.
Your immortality warranty is about to expire.
Weighty of authority and dire of consequence though this last proposition appears to be, it does not fill me with dread as I have no idea what an ‘immortality warranty’ is.
Across my outlook on the world, jogging backwards from right to left, comes another newsflash:
>
Elder: less time left than already used up.
I consult my watch again. It is true: I am going to be late. I already am late. Not late as in dead: the late Douglas Elder. (I feel at my wrist for a pulse, find I still have one.) Late as in late. I am alive, fifty, stuck on a bus, and late for another man’s funeral.
The service is due to kick off, if that is not too recreational a term, at 12.30 p.m. I start to get my apologies for being late in early. First I apologise to Ronald Grigson, a former colleague, whose funeral it is, although presumably he is not going to care a button whether I turn up or not. Then I apologise to a pewful of black-coated, horse-faced mourners as I edge along in front of them, causing them to rise and fall like a kind of Presbyterian Mexican wave: more forced jollity. I do not recognise these people and this again is disquieting, for if they are figments of my own imagination then why do I not know them? The pew stretches into the far distance and it seems that I am destined to keep disturbing the occupants until I reach a vacant space rumoured to exist at the opposite end several miles away. Why these people cannot all simply shuffle one arse-width along eludes me, but puzzles like this are the stuff of dreams, and if I am not dreaming then I do not know what I am doing.
I do not know what I am doing. This is an accurate statement.
A voice mutters inside my head: ‘Sorry. Sorry I’m late. Excuse me. Sorry.’
It is my own voice. At least I recognise that.
THE EGG-TIMER OF LIFE
Some minutes pass. The bus nudges forward a few feet. I am getting used to being fifty. It is slightly disappointing. I thought I didn’t want any fuss – in fact, I emphasised to Sonya in a phone call that I didn’t, and I don’t, and certainly I expect none from that quarter – but I feel something is missing.
What can it be? I have all that a man newly turned fifty can reasonably desire, other than a job, a settled relationship and confidence in the future. And a general feeling of contentment. Apart from these trivial absences, I am what you might call living the dream.
Yes, this too is not inaccurate. See, for supporting evidence, the above episode with the eternal pew. I feel that I do not have a good grip on reality. Or that reality does not have a good grip on me.
The phone conversation with Sonya in which I established my preference for a complete lack of birthday fuss took place about a week ago. I called to ask how she and her offspring, Paula and Magnus, were doing, having not seen any of them for some weeks. She was quite chatty, and the news of all three, such as it was, was good. Paula, nineteen, a second-year art student, had started a part-time job in a bar. (This is almost revolutionary, Paula never before having shown the slightest interest in connecting the sweat of one’s brow with the possession of a disposable income.) Magnus, twenty-four, who works in IT and seems to have purloined his sister’s share of the work ethic while she was asleep and added it to his own, was up for promotion and still enjoying club rugby; and Sonya – well, Sonya was her usual unrelaxed, brittle yet somehow also, to me, I don’t know why, endearing self. She made no mention of any lifestyle changes, such as having met or begun searching for a new significant other to replace the one, i.e. me, she recently ejected from the household, and for this I was, if not grateful, at least gratified.
How can one be attracted to someone to whom one is not attracted?
I don’t know, but it happens.
It is 12.20. I am five minutes into my second half-century. Nothing has changed. Everything is different. No it isn’t. Yes it is. Thoughts tumble past me like pieces of litter. Through the streaked window of the bus I see them. A gusty wind is blowing. The thoughts whisk, roll, flap, sail by.
I watch them go. It is quite interesting, but also terrifying. I wonder if this is how it is for my father. I see him in his room in the Home, leaning from the beige armchair to grab at passing thoughts, trying to attach words to them.
I see, too, his strong, slashing signature on my birth certificate: Thomas Y. Elder. Done with a real pen, in real ink. My father was thirty-three when I was born. That signature represented something in 1964: boldness and energy. He can hardly write his name at all now, let alone dash it off like Zorro with his rapier, and even if he did he would not necessarily recognise it as his own.
Men crash like trees or rot like trees, but they fall at last, one way or the other.
I am not at all sure of my own ability to remain rooted and upright for much longer, or to continue to put my thoughts in order: one thought after another, coherent and connected. The old confidence, never that great, has taken a few knocks of late, and witnessing my father’s deteriorating condition does not help. It is as if, hiking across moorland on what I believe to be my own chosen course, I suddenly spot Dad, a hundred yards ahead, sitting on a rock looking lost, and it transpires that I have been following his trail all along without knowing it.
It gives you a jolt, a thing like that. It pings the bell on the egg-timer of life. It brings you face to face with yourself, whoever you are.
This is often not a pleasing experience.
A WALKING ENCYCLOPAEDIA
The bus is at a standstill again. More debris rushes by in the wind – litter or thoughts, one or the other. The world is a jumble of red-and-white-striped barriers, shouting men in hard hats and loud, yellow machinery. As if the road were a patient in the hands of a team of raucous surgeons, it has been opened up and all its internal organs exposed. There is no dignity to it. I feel sorry for Lothian Road – which are six words I never thought I would arrange in that order.
To distract myself from the anxiety caused by being late I engage the woman passenger, or more accurately the back of her head, in conversation. She is occupied with turning the pages of the free comic, so doesn’t object.
‘I used to make a living from that, you know.’
From what? Roadworks?
‘No, wordworks. Arranging words in a certain order. I was pretty good at it, in fact.’
Is that so? What were you, a Scrabble champion?
‘No, I was a newspaperman. I was employed by the Spear.’
That rag?
‘Madam, a rag is what you are perusing now.’
It’s all relative.
‘Fair point. I concede that the Spear is not what it used to be. More than twenty years I worked there. Six days a week, often enough.’
That must have been an awful lot of words, then?
‘It was.’
You’ll be a walking encyclopaedia.
‘A striking metaphor, if I may say so. There’s no denying that the words have an effect. After a few years you find that you’re seeing your thoughts in the shape of printed phrases, sentences, paragraphs – actual blocks of typography – and then to clarify what it is you’re thinking you knock and stretch them into different shapes, so that they fit neatly into the blank space available.’
Is that right? I don’t see my thoughts at all. I just think them.
‘It’s an occupational hazard. You get used to it, but it doesn’t make your thoughts any more meaningful. Mind you, in a newspaper context – in the context of actually working on a newspaper – the word-shapes do mean something. They serve a purpose. They tell stories, form opinions, transmit information to readers.’
Och, who reads newspapers these days? It’s just rubbish that’s in them. This one on the buses, I read it. It’s full of rubbish too but at least it’s free. When you get to the end you don’t feel you’ve wasted your money as well as your time.
‘That’s a point in its favour, I suppose. Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, something happened after all those years at the Spear. I started to lose the knack. I became incompetent.’
Oh, what a shame! Did you go to the doctor?
‘It wasn’t really a medical problem. Maybe it was less about my incompetence, and more about my competence no longer fitting the job, because the job had changed. Officially I was a sub-editor, but the demarcation between jobs had been getting very blurred, and for quite a while I�
�d not only had to sub stories, I’d had to write them as well.’
Sob stories, did you say?
‘No, sub. Edit them so they make sense and fit the page. It’s a dying craft. The thing is, I was subbing the very book reviews and diary pieces I’d written myself. Even the odd feature – that’s a longer article, a kind of short essay. In the old days the trade unions would never have stood for that kind of thing – one person seeing an item through from start to finish – but the old days are over. That’s true, isn’t it? The old days never last. Hello? Hello?’
But it’s no good. I’ve lost her. If she had eyes in the back of her head they’d have glazed over. Meanwhile, the ones at the front finish with the comic, which she folds and places on the seat beside her. Then she stares steadfastly ahead as if quite unaware of my presence. Which she probably is.
Another possibility, of course, is that she is unaware of my absence. That is to say, what proof do I have that I am here at all?
SO I JUMPED
Times change. Technology changes. My competence didn’t fit a job I no longer enjoyed doing. There was no satisfaction in putting the newspaper to bed. There should be a parental kind of pride and pleasure in that, but I didn’t feel it. I wasn’t even putting myself to bed properly. In the old days I came home well after midnight and I was tired but it was a good tired. I felt good about myself and my tiredness. I slid into bed and slept. Maybe Sonya would wake up and we would have a cuddle, or maybe she wouldn’t and we wouldn’t, but either way was fine, and we would both get a good night’s sleep.
When I say ‘home’ I mean her place. It was my place too – our place – but really it was her place and I just shared her bed and the bills. Most of the contents of the house, including Magnus and Paula, were hers as well, and still are. That’s not the point. The point is, the old days were over and I wasn’t getting a good night’s sleep any more. Not ever. I fell into bed exhausted, I turned and tossed for hours and woke up even more exhausted. Night after night. It wore me down. It wore Sonya down. It wore us both down until we had to deal with it. We dealt with it by me not going to hers after my shifts. I went back to my old home instead, to my old bedroom in my parents’ house. When I came in late at night there, at least I never disturbed them because my father slept like a log and my mother was dead. That was another thing. My mother had died a few months before this and my father was lonely. He needed some company and I needed to keep an eye on him, because he wasn’t quite himself. He wasn’t a lot himself, as it transpired.
To Be Continued Page 1
