Republics of the Mind

by James Robertson

  There was a hand on his shoulder, and he jumped. It was Kate’s. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I kept trying to come over but the phone kept ringing. Are you all right?’

  ‘Aye. I’m pretty fou but. What time is it?’

  ‘It’s nearly ten. Have you been here all this time?’

  ‘I skipped the walk. Listen, Kate, there’s this guy I met. A really nice guy.’ But the man was gone. He must have slipped away when Kate appeared.

  Robert said, ‘I was going to introduce you but I didn’t know his name anyway.’

  Kate sat on the empty stool and got herself a drink. ‘Just one, I think,’ she said, ‘and then we’d better get you home. Are you all right?’

  ‘Aye. I’m just pissed.’

  ‘You’re in a state.’

  ‘No, I’m okay, honest. Kate.’ He put his hand to her face for a moment. ‘Kate, I really love you, you know that?’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I love you too. So tell me about this guy.’

  They got back into the flat and while the kettle was boiling for coffee he knocked over the milk carton.

  ‘You are pissed,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. I was late. Anyway, if you can’t drink at a time like this …’

  They went through to the front room and sat down. They sipped their coffee for a minute. She was going to put a record on but decided it wasn’t appropriate. She said, ‘I mind one time last summer, you were out with Joe and Mark. I stayed in, went to bed early. When you got back, you were really bevvied, really stinking of it. Do you mind this?’

  He nodded. She wasn’t sure if he was listening, nor was she sure what she was going to tell him.

  ‘You got into bed beside me and that was all right. But after a minute you touched me. I remember I turned my back on you and got as far away as I could.’ She stopped again. When she said it aloud it didn’t sound very dramatic, not the big deal she had in her head. There must be something more, at the end of what she was saying, but she didn’t know quite what. She thought she might be upsetting him. ‘Should I be telling you this now?’

  ‘Aye, tell me.’ He smiled at her.

  ‘It’s just you’ll not remember.’ In the morning, was what she meant.

  ‘I think I was just trying my luck,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you weren’t getting anything that night, that’s for sure.’ They both laughed.

  After a pause he said, ‘I don’t blame you for turning away. If that’s what you’re wondering.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s not it. I mean, it was just at the time. I was feeling pretty scunnered at you.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s okay. I shouldn’t have got so tensed up about it. I lay awake for ages while you started to snore. I was raging. Like you’d deliberately insulted me or something. Completely stupid.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying that. I’m more angry with myself than you, when I think about it now. I should have got up and read a book or something. Letting a wee thing like that get to me. It was as if I was some snooty old bag in my fifties.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s just,’ she said, ‘whenever I think about that, it’s very clear in my mind. Just a wee incident. But I always think, wouldn’t it be terrible if I’d lost you then? If that had been the moment when I lost you?’

  He looked at her, a worried look. ‘Have you lost me?’

  She touched his hand across the table with hers. ‘Never. I know that now.’ Then she said, ‘I’m really sorry about your dad. He was a lovely man.’

  He nodded. ‘He was. He was one of the good guys.’

  Robert went to bed. Kate sat for a few minutes, letting the day go out of her head. She liked to do this, to think through the day and let it go bit by bit. She went to the bookcase and picked out the book of Scottish history. She kept going back to it, to the famous passages, as if it were a Bible. Nearly always she went to the brief fame of Kate Douglas, who tried to save her king, James Stewart, first of that name, before his assassins had him cornered in the sewer and finished him with sixteen deadly wounds to the breast:

  And in the menetyme, quhen thay wer slayand him, ane young maidyn, namit Kathren Douglas, quhilk wes eftir maryit upoun Alexander Lovell of Ballumby, steikit the dure; and because the greit bar was hid away be ane traitor of thair opinioun, scho schott hir arm into the place quhair the bar sould haif passit; and becaus scho was bot young, hir arm was sone brokkin all in sondre, and the dure dongin up by force, throw quhilk thay enterrit, and slew the King with mony terribill woundis.

  ‘Scho schott hir arm into the place …’ Such simple, desperate courage. One moment in a woman’s life, and down the centuries all that was left of her life was that moment. But what a moment! What it spoke of, and left unspoken!

  She got into bed beside him. They lay side by side. Then they turned and kissed for a while.

  ‘Do I stink of beer?’ he asked. ‘Or the whisky?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said.

  He felt her mouth moving down his chest, across his belly. Then her hot breath was on his balls and penis. She ran her tongue up and down it. He felt himself slipping in and out of her mouth.

  It wasn’t right, though. It was great but it wasn’t right. Maybe because he was drunk and she was sober but he didn’t want them to be apart like that. He pulled her gently up towards him. ‘Come here.’

  They kissed again. It was better, her mouth and his. But in a minute she was off again, and this time he let her go.

  He stretched out on his back. He felt he was on fire below the waist. But he couldn’t connect with it. Images of his father were there. It was as if he should be guilty about what was happening, as if there should be no pleasure with his father dead. He wondered if she was enjoying herself, if she thought he was. Well, he was but it was remote, like watching a sexy scene at the pictures. He had never felt such a strangeness from her before. And yet he loved her more intensely than ever. What was going on? He lay there with her mouth on his prick, trying to connect.

  There was a good turn-out at the funeral. His parents had stayed in the same town for more than thirty years – in fact Robert had been born not long after they settled there – so his father was well known and well liked. He was a joiner to trade, but in later years, when the money was more plentiful, he’d concentrated on his real love and art as a cabinetmaker. The house was full of fine pieces of furniture, all dove-tailed joints and inlays and carved feet, and he’d made a lot of stuff to order as well. The Minister paid special tribute to his skills. A craftsman, he said, one who loved detail and sought perfection in all he did. A good father and loving husband. An honest man. A kind man. A true friend to Scotland. In such phrases the man in the pulpit touched on the aspects of his father’s life. Robert felt as though he were hearing these things for the first time. It was like reading his own obituary – or the obituary of the man he would like to be.

  And then there was the burial itself, the lowering of his father into the ground. He was at the head of the grave, his mother and his sisters on either side of him. It was a beautiful day – he could tell people kept biting their tongues to stop themselves from saying how lucky they were with the weather. And yet they were lucky. A miserable, gloomy occasion it would have been in winter.

  The sunshine put him in mind of his childhood here in this town. Holding the cord reminded him of holding the string of a kite. One year, when he was about ten or eleven, there was a craze for kites. All summer long the hill behind the town wore kites in the sky like a garland of bright flowers. There might be ten or fifteen of them up there at any time, traditional diamond-shaped kites, box kites, kites in the shape of birds and planes, and even one like a skulland-crossbones. It looked so exciting from the bottom of the hill, it looked like the best thing in the world to be doing. So of course he had to have one.

  But funnily enough once he got up there, with his re
d kite with its long tail, once he’d unwound the string to its full extent and was gripping the little tube at the end, everything lost its interest. You could make the kite dip and leap only so often. Then you withdrew from the other kite-fliers each bidding to outdo the tricks of the rest. And a new feeling came. You wanted to let the kite go. You didn’t really but then you did. Let the kite fly off like a real thing, like a live thing, that’s what you wanted.

  He became aware again that he was standing over the grave. The coffin was being lowered and the others had released their cords onto the lid. The gravediggers had paused in letting down the straps and it was a moment before he understood that they were waiting for him. He heard a voice and felt the touch of a hand on his arm. ‘You have to let go now,’ said the voice. He didn’t do it though, not deliberately, but still he felt the cord slip away through his fingers. Something fell from his face and landed on the wood. He found that he was crying.

  He turned from the grave for a moment and wiped his eyes. It was daft, but he didn’t want his father to see his tears. I don’t want to be here anymore, was what he was thinking. Then he waited, head bowed, while the Minister completed the words about the resurrection and the life.

  * * *

  There were sandwiches and tea and the harder stuff back at the house, for the family and close friends. Robert had heard his mother going among the folk at the service, picking them out: ‘You’ll come back afterwards, won’t you?’ She was being very brave, very restrained. He wished he could be closer to her, but it was his dad he wanted.

  The Minister was there, of course. It was some years since Robert had last seen him, let alone spoken to him.

  ‘Would you say my father was religious?’ he asked him.

  The Minister had the grace to ponder this before nodding.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But he baulked a little at the organisation. Like many of us these days.’ There was a smile playing about his lips, as if he were testing a heretical view. ‘He liked the product but not the firm that marketed it.’

  ‘That’s because he believed in humanity,’ said Robert. ‘The Kirk sees humanity as an expression of God, of religion. He saw religion as an expression of humanity.’

  ‘I think you’re being a wee bit unfair on the Kirk,’ said the Minister.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Robert. ‘But that’s the essence of it, isn’t it? That struggle, I mean. Are we God’s or is God ours? I don’t go to church but I’m still religious. You can’t change that. It’s in you, it’s a state of mind.’

  The Minister said that that was good, in his opinion. He excused himself and moved on. Robert looked around for Kate. She was with one of his sisters across the room. She was wearing a neat little dark suit. She looked wonderful.

  * * *

  Robert’s sister was admiring the little dark suit. Kate made the necessary smalltalk without much sense of being there, in that house after the funeral. She was thinking about what she and Robert would do next. She’d like them to go away, the two of them, just for a few days. It would do him good – to be somewhere else.

  And she thought of that curious limbo they were in, that place between what they had and what they sought. They were whole people but they were less than whole because of how their country was. Yet she felt a confidence in herself, that she had reached an understanding of the situation. This was only a temporary lull. It might last a long time but it was only temporary. What she recognised in the hopelessness of the politics was her own hope, her complete inability to give up. That’s the thing we have, she thought, the unbeatable hand that we may never play but that we always hold, the thing that they just don’t understand. All we are doing is waiting.

  He saw her across the room from him, and she seemed both very close and far away. Then he found himself thinking about the big things again: the earth spinning, and the pull of the moon on the tides, like the endless shuttle of a loom, the tide endlessly covering and laying bare all the world’s beaches, and somewhere in the west a long white empty beach, where the labours of the sea went unwitnessed by humans for generations. He thought about that empty beach, and where it might be, and he wanted to be there, to be away from all this, on a beach on the far side of an empty island, with nothing to look to but the moon-dragged sea. An island, and himself alone on it. And Kate would be there, but later. In such a place he would become small, insignificant, completely aware of the scale of things. He would step barefoot onto that pure white beach and leave his fleeting trail behind him as he walked down to the pure-blue, ice-blue water, and he would watch the horizon rising to meet the sun and feel himself being tipped with the motion, there on the edge of the world. But then, at the moment of believing himself to be utterly alone, out beyond the line where the waves begin their roll, a seal’s head would appear, bobbing, watching, as if to say, I am here, I am with you, I am beyond you, and the only answer that could form in his head would be the only one that matters: I love you, I love you, I love you.

  Pretending to Sleep

  I could stay here all day like this, pretending to sleep, and no one would know. No one would know how awake I really am.

  Sometimes I even fool myself into thinking I’m asleep, and sometimes perhaps I do nod off for a minute or two, and sometimes – perhaps – I’m fooled by the dreams I have into thinking they’re reality. I could tell a few dreams that I’ve had. But I don’t think I’m going to. I’m just going to lie here, pretending to sleep.

  Nobody tries to disturb you if they think you’re sleeping. They can hardly believe that someone would stretch out in the middle of all their wakefulness and fall asleep, and it overawes them. They don’t want to be the one to wake you, because they don’t know what you’re like. You might be cuddly or you might be crazy. You might roll over or you might bite. You’re a sleeping dog – better to let you lie.

  It’s not just that they’re afraid. They’re envious too. If only they could stretch out in the sun or the rain, and not have to keep going, stay alert, be part of it. You’re not part of it if you’re sleeping, that’s for sure. You can be right in the middle of things – in a street or a park – and you’re separate, outside. You’re something else.

  Even the police leave you alone. There was a time when they would shake you awake and move you on, and if you slumped over ten yards further on they would lift you. Then you’d to sleep in the cells. There was no point in pretending there – you either slept or you didn’t, and more often you didn’t. You didn’t care one way or the other but then again there wasn’t anybody there to fool. Nobody could see you, except the guy who came every once in a while to check you weren’t dead, and the only reason he came was because it would look bad if you died in his charge. Whether you lived or died was of no concern to him, so long as you didn’t die on his shift. But it’s a long time since I’ve been lifted. These days the police are more enlightened. They don’t see the harm in a wee sleep. Besides, they’ve plenty to keep them occupied. A sleeper is way down their list of priorities.

  Funny how in the cells they come to check you’re not dead. Out here, out in the open, nobody checks. Maybe as they pass they see your chest rise and fall – I don’t know. But they never stop and touch you, stand over you, ask if you’re all right. This is the fear again, the fear and the envy. They don’t disturb you, because you disturb them. Just by lying there, pretending to sleep, you get under their skin, like an itch, you get deep into them.

  Sunny days are best but rain can be all right too. With enough layers on, it can take all day to soak through. And the effect on the people passing by is greater, it totally upsets them. A man lying asleep in the pouring rain is like a corpse at a table in a café. He shouldn’t be there. He should have been tidied away. But he is there, and he can’t be ignored.

  Some people think they do ignore you, but they don’t. You go into them just the same, but more subtly. You lodge yourself like a parasite in their brain, and they don’t know why they’re getting these terrible headaches. Long af
ter they’ve forgotten you you’re uncurling yourself in there, eating away at their consciousness, bugging them, you’re something gnawing at the back of their mind. They don’t remember the figure prone in the park, the drizzle, the slight rise and fall of the chest, but the memory’s there just the same.

  If I dream, the dream is that I’ll never wake up. That’s why I know the dreams are not real, because I’m not asleep at all. I’m wide awake, pretending. I do it for myself. And I’ll say this, I do it for everyone else too. I do it for all the ones who can’t sleep, who can’t stop, who can’t lie down in the street. I pretend on their behalf.

  This is the thing. I pretend for them. They look at me and think I’m asleep, but I’m completely aware of myself, of what’s going on. I know who’s awake and who’s not. I may fool them, but they don’t fool me.

  There’s more of us this year than ever before. You’ll have noticed. Every month there’s more of us, sleeping out in the open, in broad daylight. I’m not talking about homelessness, that’s another story, I’m talking about people who’ve had enough, who are prepared just to lie down and be counted, or not be counted, to fall asleep and make the crowds step round us.

  Only we’re not asleep. I’ve told you that. We’re just pretending. You’re getting so used to us that you keep forgetting that important point.

  One day you’re in for the fright of your fucking life.

  Opportunities

  I came across a poem today by Robert Louis Stevenson, about a lighthouse keeper high above the sea, surrounded by ‘the chill blind circle of the night’: he is reading, oblivious to a gull beating against the pane of light. The poem finishes with something about the keeper being a martyr to his salary, but it was the gull more than the man that affected me. I thought of the bird drawn like a moth to a flame, and of the dull, irresistible impulse that brought it wearily to the signal that was not meant for it. And I disliked the coldness of the man within, aloof as a god, unaffected by the gull’s hope and its despair.