Wrinkles had firmly established themselves in the corners of his eyes, far too firmly to be passed off as laughter lines. Hair at temples and forelock were graying slightly, but the thing which always annoyed him more than any other was how gray his beard had become.
The beard had been his pride and joy since university days and had gone through many mutations of shape. As some people have worry beads, Brian had a beard, pulled and twisted into strange tufts of varying lengths.
None of the changes had been so drastic as that of the last year though. His beard, from a sleek black vibrant extension of his face, had become a limp, pale gray collection of separate hairs. This morning as on many others previously, he toyed with the idea of shaving it off, but he was afraid that the chin underneath would be in no fit state to see the world.
He had left university seven years ago with a degree in Botany...a failed zoologist as his girlfriend as the time had so wittily observed...and no idea as to what to do next. He drifted into teacher training college more to avoid unemployment than through any vocational urge. Once finished there, he found, as if by magic, that a place teaching biology had become available in his hometown. He took the job, promising himself that it was only for a couple of years then onwards and upwards to somewhere.
The where he never quite figured out and, five years later he was still in the same place.
Surprisingly, to himself anyway, he enjoyed his work. He hadn’t fallen prey to the world-weary cynicism of the older teachers and hoped he never would. Just before she left him his girlfriend had observed that, as his mental age was the same as most of his pupils why shouldn’t he have a rapport with them?
There, he’d done it again, started thinking about her. Hangovers seemed to bring it on the most, probably because that was when he felt sorriest for himself.
“Ho hum,” he said to the girlie-calendar on the wall behind him. As usual this month’s model didn’t reply but just talking to her always perked him up. The wonder of self-hypnosis, he told himself as he left the small bathroom.
The letterbox in the front door behind him clattered just as he turned away from the bathroom, frightening him into a small yelp of surprise. The voice of the postman carried through the door.
“Morning Mr. Baillie, bills again this morning.”
And there were bills.
Gas and telephone on the same day? Shit! Time to increase the overdraft again.
There was also advertising, exhorting the benefits of life insurance, ladies handbags, the Socialist Workers Party and the forthcoming jumble sale at St Patricks’ primary school.
Mentally noting the date of the sale, always good for second hand paperbacks, he consigned everything except his newspaper and the bills into the large black plastic bag, ready and waiting to be taken out of the bin. Sometime.
~-o0O0o-~
The bus was late so Brian had plenty of time to ponder on why he queued at the stop every morning rather than drive himself. He supposed that he wanted to mix with people and not sit locked in his car, removed from the hubbub of life.
Once he got on the bus the drone of conversation from behind him made him think, not for the first time, that maybe he should get his car out of the garage more often.
The woman was, as usual, using her time on the bus as a sounding board for her conversations of the day.
“Is this weather not just terrible, all this rain and wind. I don’t think we’ve had three good days together all summer. I hope the autumn’s a wee bit better. It’ll have to be, or else none of the vegetables will come up. When I was younger it was never as wet as this. Personally I think its them atomic bomb tests that’s done it.”
She stopped to catch breath.
“Are you listening to me?”
Her husband, engrossed in his morning newspaper grunted a reply but she took it for assent and, almost without a break, started again.
“Auld Missus Dunlop died last night, Margaret down at the shop was telling me, just dropped off during Coronation Street. Well she had a good innings anyway, eighty-five she was, and never missed a night at the bingo. Never missed Coronation Street either for that matter. I suppose she must have died happy.”
Next to her, her husband grunted again but this time Brian guessed he’d had enough for one morning. He stood up, grunted one last time and made his way down the bus.
She wasn’t finished yet though. Brian had discovered over the last six months that she always wanted the last word.
“And don’t you be going into that pub on the way home. If you’re not in by six o’clock you won’t get any tea.”
This elicited just one more grunt from the small man before he left the bus, leaving Brian undisturbed to catch up on Saturday’s football results. He often used his fifteen minutes on the bus to read his newspaper, but today he found it difficult to concentrate.
The headlines didn’t make it any easier. Yesterday it had been cattle mutilations...today it was an escaped psychopath…KERR ON THE RUN, the headline shouted in bold type…more titillation for the bored masses. His attention wavered, mostly due to his hangover but also partly due to his dreams of the night before.
His dreams of late had been troubled, not just populated with current acquaintances, but with friends and relatives both alive and dead.
He spent his dream-time wandering through strange scenes, like one-act plays but with no posh BBC type linkman to tell him what was happening, no titles to let him know who the cast were.
He felt vaguely aware that he was not sleeping too well. He had dim memories of half waking most nights, punching his pillow into submission. Once or twice he’d woken to voices, shouting almost, before he realized that it was him that was making the noises. Along with that, his sheets and duvet seemed to do a lot of travelling during the nights.
Last night had been particularly harrowing, as the dreams had concerned his late father.
Tom Baillie had been a large man. His face, round, white and smooth creased into a patchwork of large irregular shapes when he smiled, his eyes all but obscured by rising cheekbones meeting falling epicanthic folds.
This transformation paled when compared to that when he opened his mouth, tossed back his head and laughed, a great hearty bellow from the region of his stomach.
He could be imagined at a medieval banquet, calling for more ale, bashing a pewter mug on the table while cradling a wench or two in the crook of one massive arm.
At least, that was how Brian remembered him. In his dream however, the laughter had been harsher, eyes blinking pig-like from a red face with an expression more suited to a Roman Emperor attending a slaughter. All sense of humor had left this man, leaving behind a sly predatory cunning, laughing at others trouble.
Brian could still remember the dreams’ mocking laughter and wondered, not for the first time, if he wasn’t perhaps working himself too hard.
~-o0O0o-~
The school, although only fifteen years old, looked like it was in a state of terminal decay.
Large swathes of the walls were liberally daubed with graffiti, windows were broken and holes had been punched into the concrete with a wide variety of blunt instruments. It had been built to replace three separate local schools, becoming a catchments area for children from almost a ten-mile radius.
Brian remembered the day it had opened up. It had been his first day as a third year pupil, the year where you have to make decisions that could affect the rest of your life. He could remember that time clearly.
The previous year he had done well in both sciences and languages and had to decide between them soon. He wavered between the two, some days wanting to be a scientist, to discover the secret of old age perhaps or a cure for the common cold. Alternatively he could stick with the languages and become a politician capable of uniting the world. To say that he’d been an idealist would be a bit like saying that Jesus Christ was religious.
Back then the place had the antiseptic feel of a hospital but it hadn’t taken fifteen
hundred kids long to turn it into something which more resembled a bombsite.
The brush of a football against his leg brought him back to the present. A small group of boys ran past him, screaming, chasing a ball that was little bigger than an orange.
Elsewhere in the playground small knots of pupils had formed...the same groups of like minds that formed in schools everywhere.
Brian knew that there would be other small knots in places he couldn’t see...the smokers, the shy, and, worst of all, the solvent abusers. He said a silent prayer that the really heavy drugs hadn’t found their way to this part of Scotland yet...the glue sniffers were bad enough.
Brian remembered his own ‘experiments’ during his late schooldays and early on at university. The time spent watching his face melting in a large bathroom mirror…petrol pumps which had to be pounded into submission with fence-posts before they had a chance to terrorize the countryside and, even less coherent than that, the white stag on the hill with the cold blue eyes, disdainfully watching him trip and tumble on his way home from ‘magic mushroom’ hunting.
Was glue sniffing like that?
He had always considered his drug taking as experiences, broadening his understanding of the world around him. The kids at the school with their faces pushed into old polythene bags seemed content only with contraction, shutting out everything but the buzz from the glue.
On one occasion he had caught three glue sniffers in the act. After relieving them of bottles and plastic bags, and after several threats of bodily violence, he had asked them why they did it. The only coherent reply had been brief.
“Well, it makes ye forget, ye know, makes all this shit go away for a while.”
While not condoning their action, Brian could see their point. Fifteen- and sixteen-year-old kids, kept at school against their wishes and with little prospect of a job when they eventually left, could see little hope ahead in their future. Apathy had become the order of the day.
He had to push past a recalcitrant knot of sullen girls to get to the main corridor. They shouldn’t have been there, but he just didn’t have the energy to move them on.
The teachers’ coffee room was noisier than most of the classrooms, the bulk of the chatter being generated by a knot of modern language teachers congregated around the only kettle. The rest of the room was gainfully employed infusing their bodies with the days’ first dose of nicotine.
Brian managed to wrest the most comfortable chair from the fat tabby cat sleeping there and took out his Guardian newspaper. He knew that the ‘blue rinse set’ had him marked down as a left wing reactionary so reading the Guardian merely reinforced their view.
One of these days he would treat them to a “Hang ‘em and bash ‘em” speech, just to see how many mouths fell open in amazement.
“Morning Brian, and how are we today, then?”
Every morning his reading was interrupted in the same way.
Tom Duncan was the nearest thing Brian had to a friend in the school. A small fat scruffy man, Tom was the butt of most of the cruel jokes circulated amongst the pupils. Looking at him, it wasn’t difficult to see why.
Tom’s wife had died in a road crash four years previously and since then he had turned increasingly to drink. His personal habits had also gone downhill and most days he wore the same clothes...a scruffy red cardigan, a pair of badly worn corduroy trousers, and a very old shirt, gray at cuffs and collar. Alongside the slow decay of his clothes, he hadn’t trimmed his moustache properly for a long time, giving him the look of a down at heel walrus.
Today Brian noticed that Tom hadn’t shaved over the weekend, making him look even more of a down and out. He would have to give him one of his lectures again, otherwise Tom’s job wouldn’t last much longer, but there was genuine warmth in his voice as he greeted his friend.
“Oh I’m fine Tom, but you don’t look too hot. Had a rough weekend?”
The older man started to laugh but stopped quickly when it turned into a wheezing cough.
“Rough? You would never believe it. But I don’t want to talk about it in here with all these sweetie wives listening.”
Brian looked around and noticed that the knot of teachers round the kettle were trying too hard to look as if they weren’t listening in to the men’s conversation. He turned back in time to hear Tom’s next question.
“Can I see ye in the pub at dinnertime?”
“Dinnertime?” Brian replied. “Would you not be better off having something to eat?”
Tom almost laughed again, then seemed to think better of it.
“I’ll get a roll in the pub. Listen, I really need to talk to you. It’s important. I’ve got to go. I’ve got 3D for Religious Studies and if I don’t get there on time the wee bastards will have broken the desks up to make clubs. I’ll see you in the pub?”
Brian watched the older man thread his way through the knot of teachers and allowed himself a grim smile as he saw them stand back as if Tom carried some strange infectious disease.
Going to the pub at lunchtime was something Brian had been trying to cut down on since leaving University. On more than a few occasions a quick pint had turned into two or three then six or seven and before you knew it, it was eleven o’clock and they were throwing you out. Today however, although he’d tried to dissuade Tom, he thought that a pint or two might be a good idea.
But first he had to negotiate 4C. Trying to teach biology to fifteen-year-olds must be one of the toughest subjects. Almost every topic in the syllabus had an item that had something to do with fertilization or impregnation or conception, bringing with them giggles, jokes and general mayhem, not to mention the questions designed to embarrass the teacher. Brian always felt drained after these classes.
The more he thought of it, the better the idea of a pint at lunchtime became.
The morning passed quietly for Brian. The kids seemed to be subdued, their thoughts on something else. He got the feeling that every time he turned his back notes were being passed.
He even managed to get through the subject of asexual reproduction in amoebae without a single giggle. On his way to the pub he hoped that the afternoon would be equally as quiet.
~-o0O0o-~
Once his eyes became accustomed to the darkness of the bar, Brian could make out Tom in his usual position at the far end. It looked like being another of Tom’s ‘sessions’. He could only have been there for ten minutes at most but he already had an empty pint glass in front of him.
“Hello, Brian. How about a pint then?” the older man said, and Brian was dismayed at the weariness in his friend’s voice. He wanted to reach out and hug Tom, but showing affection to other men was a dangerous thing to do in a pub in this town.
“Aye, all right, but only one mind, I’ve got a lot on this afternoon.”
Both men were quiet as the barman poured two pints from the tap just in front of them.
“Come on and sit over in the snug,” Tom said. “I need some heat in my bones. I’ve been feeling the cold a lot recently.”
The pub had not changed since Brian had first visited it many years ago. He had been sixteen at the time and didn’t know what to order. Dave, the present barmen had been there even then. He had taken pity, albeit illegally, on the boy and let him buy a round with his mates.
The linoleum Brian and Tom were walking on was exactly the same, just in a much more faded condition. The pool table had a new baize cloth, the jukebox and video games were new models but to Brian’s eyes nothing else had changed. The smoke still hung in the air, there was a slight but unmistakable smell of urine and the beer still got him drunk.
Much of Brian’s late youth had been spent in this bar, honing his pool playing skills, trying unsuccessfully to chat up the scarce female customers and trying to avoid confrontations with the locals who had a chip on their shoulders about students. There were more than a few of them Brian remembered. On several occasions it had come to blows and he had heard that there was still some bad feeling, but
as a schoolteacher Brian was what was known as a respected member of the community and he had even had some of his previous antagonists buy him drinks. It was a strange old world.
Apart from the two of them there were only three other people in the bar and they were all in the alcove at the far end, clustered round the pool table. It was quiet and cool and the beer tasted so good that Brian thought he could happily spend the rest of the afternoon letting oblivion take him away.
Tom just sat and stared into his pint for a while, fiddling with a box of matches before finally deciding to light a cigarette. Brian realized that whatever was bothering him was hard to talk about and helped him on with a little prompting.
“So what was so bad about your weekend then? You didn’t go to the Bowry again did you? I’ve told you before to stay clear of that place on a weekend.”
Tom didn’t even look up from his beer as he replied.
“No. No, it’s got nothing to do with the drink. I don’t know where to start. You know that my wife died four years ago? Aye, I suppose I’ve bent your ear often enough about it.”
Tom paused to take a long slip from his drink. He wiped the excess foam from his bushy moustache. Suddenly Brian realized that he really didn’t want to hear this story; he had the feeling of standing over a precipice as a cold wind got up at his back. He was about to try to break the mood when Tom started to speak.
Brian sipped his pint as the monologue started.
“It was on Saturday night. Late on...must’ve been nearly midnight. I was well on...you ken how it is. Anyway, I found myself up on the moor road. It was a fine night...a clear sky, and not too cold. Just as well really...I would have frozen my bollocks off otherwise.
“I was coming to my senses slowly...too much whisky and not enough to eat. There was some trouble with my eyes...everything looked misty. I shook my head to clear it, but the mist stayed right where it was. And then it got worse. It was fine, drizzly kind of stuff, and it started at my feet, creeping up my legs. And that’s when I heard the voice.”
Eldren: The Book of the Dark Page 4
