by Will Self
‘Y’know, Mrs McRae,’ he replied, ‘when I’m next up to Orkney.’
‘And any idea of when that’ll be?’
He shrugged his shoulders and held his hands out, palms uppermost, so as to indicate the maximum possible mixture of doubts and commitments.
Bill threw his bag in the boot of the car and picked up the CD interchanger. He inserted the restocked cartridge of CDs into the rectangular aluminium mouth, and listened with satisfaction as the servomotors swallowed it up. He set the interchanger back in its housing and slammed the boot. He walked round to the front of the car and undid the bonnet. He checked the oil, the water and the windscreen reservoir. He checked the turbo cooling unit pipe that had burst while he was in Orkney, and which he’d welded himself. He did this all quickly and deftly, his blunt fingers feeling the car with unabashed sensuality. Bill was proud of his hands – and his skill with them.
Inside the car he wiped the hands on a rag. He started the engine of the car and listened carefully to the note of the engine. He stashed the rag and inserted the CD-control panel into its dash mounting. He dickered with the servos that automatically adjusted the driver’s seat. He gave the windscreen a few sweeps of soapy water. He programmed the CD to play randomly. Finally, he lit one of the joints that he’d rolled while he was shitting after breakfast. Exhaling the first blast of smoke made the interior of the car seem like a fantastical van de Graaff generator, the lights on the fascia sparking through the haze.
Bill reached behind him, pulled up the bottle of Campbelltown twelve-year-old from under the stack of professional journals he kept on the back floor. He glanced about at the roadway, but there was nothing, only the slate roof of Mrs McRae’s, with a bank of grass swaying in front of it. Bill took a generous pull on the whisky, capped the ‘car bottle’ as he jocularly styled it – to himself – and re-stashed it. He checked his rearview, then planted his foot on the accelerator. The big car shook itself once before plunging along the road. The inertia pressed Bill into the worn leather of the seat, releasing tiny molecules of good smell. He heard the turbo-charger kick in with its pleasing whine. John Coltrane’s sax burst from the four seventy-watt speakers, the long flat sheets of sound spooling out like algorithms of emotion.
Bill managed the twenty miles into Thurso in about half an hour, ridiculously good going for this twisting stretch of road, the camber of which constantly surprised with its adversity. But the rain was gone and the visibility good. Bill kept his foot down, feeling the weight of the big saloon slice through the fresh air. The car was so long that if he drove with one arm cradling the headrest of the passenger seat – which he often did – in his peripheral view he could see the back of the car turning, gifting him a peculiar sense of being a human fulcrum.
As he drove Bill looked at the sky and the land. He didn’t love Caithness the way he did Orkney. Orkney was like Avalon, a mystical place where beyond the rampart cliffs of Hoy a shoal of green, whale-like islands basked in the azure sea. But this northern coast of Britain was composed of ill-fitting elements: a bit of cliff here, a green field there, a stretch of sand and dunes over there; and over there the golf-ball reactor hall of Dounreay, the nuclear power station, waiting for some malevolent god to tee it off into the Pentland Firth. Caithness was infiltrated with a palpable sense of being underimagined. This was somewhere that nobody much had troubled to conceive of, and the terrain bore the consequences in its unfinished aspect.
It was one of the things Bill loved most about the far north. Professional, middle-class friends down south would have no sense of the geography of these regions. When he told them that he had a cottage in Orkney, they would insistently confuse the islands with the Hebrides. It allowed Bill to feel that, in a very important way, once the St Ola ferry pulled out of Scrabster harbour, he was sailing off the face of the earth.
Thurso. A grey, dour place. The council housing hunched, constrained, barrack-like; and pushing its closed face into the light of day, as if only too aware that this sunshine was the end of things, and that soon the long, long, windy nights would be back. Bill stopped at the garage, on the rise from where he had the best possible view of Orkney, sixteen miles away to the north. The day was so clear he could make out the crooked finger of the Old Man of Hoy, where it stood proud of the great sea cliffs. There was a light coping of snow on top of the island, which flared in the sunlight. With a wrench in his heart Bill pulled off the forecourt, and wheeled right.
Once he had left Thurso, and was accelerating up the long gradient out of the town, Bill settled down to think about the drive. Into this mental act came the awareness that he hadn’t, as yet, really relaxed into it. The Bighouse to Thurso stretch had required the wrong kind of concentration; Bill needed to sink into the driving more. He liked to trance out when he was driving, until eventually his proprioception melded with the instrumentation of the car, until he was the car. Bill conceived of the car at these times as being properly animate: its engine a heart, its sump a liver, its automated braking system a primitive – but engaging – sentience.
The car supported Bill’s body in its skin-coated settee, while he watched the movie of the road.
Bill thought about the drive and began to make wildly optimistic estimates of the time each stage would take him: two hours to Inverness, an hour and a half on through the Highlands to Perth, then another hour to Glasgow. Maybe even make it in time for lunch. Then on in the late afternoon, down the M72 to Carlisle. Then the M6 – which felt as if it were a river, coursing downhill all the way to Birmingham. He might be in time to stop off in Mosely for a balti. Penultimately the M40 in the dead of the night, ghostly tentacles of mist shrouding the road as the big car thrummed through the Midlands towards London. And then finally the raddled city itself; the burble of the exhaust reverberating from the glass façades of the car showrooms and office-equipment suppliers along the Western Avenue.
Placing himself in London at 1 a.m. after seven hundred miles of high-pitched driving, Bill could anticipate with precision the jangled condition of his body, the fraying of his over-concentrated mind. He might – he thought – let himself into Betty’s flat, then her bed, then her. Or not. Go to the spieler instead. Get properly canned. Ditch the car. Reel home.
The car was lodged behind a glowering seven-ton dump truck. Mud bulged above its grooved sides, the occasional clod toppled off. They were on the long straight that heads down to Roadside, where the A882 pares off towards Wick. There had been rain more recently here and long puddles streaked the road; in the sunlight they were like mirror shards, smashed from the brilliant sky. Without thinking, Bill checked the rearview mirror, the side mirror, flicked on the indicator and rammed his foot to the floor. The car yanked forward, the turbo-charger cutting in with an audible ‘G’nunngg!’. Bill felt the wheels slide and skitter as they fought for purchase on the water, mud and scree strewn about the surface. He was two hundred metres past the truck and travelling at close to ninety, before he throttled back and pulled over to the left once more.
The first pass, was, Bill reflected, the hardest. It represented an existential leap into the unknown. If car and man survived they had made their compact for the journey. There were only two ways to do this mammoth run: slowly and philosophically, or driving. Bill had opted for the latter. He celebrated by lighting the second of the joints he had rolled at stool. The Upsetter came on the CD, awesome bass noise transforming the doors into pulsing wobble boards, the whole car into a mobile speaker cabinet. Bill grinned to himself and hunkered down still further in his seat.
The car bucketed through the uneven terrain. The landscape was still failing to distinguish itself. From the road a coping of peat bog oozed away into the heart of Caithness, a caky mush of grasses and black earth. In the distance a single peak raised its white-capped head. It was, Bill considered, a terrain in which a few triceratops and pterodactyl wouldn’t have looked altogether out of place. He’d once had an analysand who had a phobia about dinosaurs – not so much
their size, or possible rapacity, he could handle that – but the notion of those vast wartinesses of lizard hide. Bill had cured the phobia, sort of. He grinned at himself in the rearview mirror at the memory; he hoped ruefully. But the herpetophobe became correspondingly more erratic in almost every other area of his life. Eventually, psychotic, he ended up being sectioned after ripping the heads off hundreds of model dinosaurs in a spree through South London toy shops.
Bill didn’t psychoanalyse anybody any more. He could no longer see the virtue in it – or so he told himself. In truth, he found it easier to sign on with agencies and do various psychiatric locums. He could pick and choose his shifts, and he got a variable case load. Bill had a peculiar affinity for talking down the real crazies; people who might become fork-wielding dervishes. The cops called him a lot nowadays, when they had a berserker in the station and didn’t want to get body fluids on their uniforms. Bill wouldn’t have said he fully entered into the crazies’ mad mad world – that kind of Laingian stuff had gone the way of non-congenital schizophrenia – but he could fully empathise with these extruded psyches, whose points of view were so vertiginous: one minute on the ceiling, the next on the floor.
Bill also liked to live a little dangerously. To swing. He used to seduce women – but tired of it, or so he thought. In truth he had simply tired. He still drove fast and hard. Up and down to Orkney five or six times a year. At the croft on Papa Westray he mended walls and fences, even built new outbuildings. He had five longhorns – really as pets. And of course there was drinking. He had Betty, sort of. A relationship based on sex on his part, and sex and anticipation on hers. Bill didn’t think about his ex-wife. Not that he couldn’t bear to acknowledge the truths surrounding her – insight was, after all, his profession – but because he really didn’t feel that he needed to harp on it any longer. It was the past.
Bill had a thick leather car coat. Bill had a turbo-charged three-litre saloon. He liked single malts and skunk. He liked boats; he had an Orkney long liner skiff on Papa. He was a blunt-featured man with rough-cropped blond hair. Women used to stroke his freckled skin admiringly. He liked to climb mountains – very fast. He’d often done three Munros in a day. He wasn’t garrulous, unless very drunk. He liked to elicit information. He was forty this year.
At Latheron, where the North Sea reared up out of the land, and the low cliffs collapsed into its silver-blue beauty, Bill checked his wrist-watch – a classic chronometer. It was just shy of eleven. The dash clock said five past, the LCD on the CD control panel winked 11 dead on, and as he looked back from the road, winked 11.01. The Portland Arms at Lybster would be opening; after such a tough morning’s driving there was a good case for a pint – and a short. Bill lazily circled the steering wheel to the left and headed north up the A9.
In the wood-panelled bar lounge Bill was the only customer. The barking of his leather jacket against the vinyl of a banquette summoned an elaborately courteous man in the Highland toff’s – or wannabe toff’s – uniform of tweed jacket, waistcoat with horn buttons, flannel trousers, brogues. His Viyella shirt absorbed his tartan tie into its own slight patterning. He sported in addition a ridiculously flamboyant ginger handlebar moustache, which cancelled out his weak-featured face as surely as a red bar annuls smoking. Bill didn’t recognise the man, and thought that he must be the winter manager; new to Caithness and perhaps not yet aware of how bleak his allotted four months of erratic pint-pulling would prove.
‘Good morning sir,’ said the absurdity, ‘and it is a fine morning, isn’t it?’
‘It is.’ Bill replied curtly – and then, feeling he had been too curt, ‘I’ve had a clear run all the way from Bighouse; not so much as a shower.’
‘Well, they say the gales will be up again tonight …’ He picked up a half-pint glass from the draining board beneath the bar and began, idly, yet with skill, to wipe it. Bill walked to the bar, and the absurdity took his cue: ‘What’ll you be having then?’ Up close Bill saw brown crap on the man’s teeth, and lines of burst blood vessels, like purple crow’s feet around his eyes.
Bill sighed – no need to account for his choices with this one: ‘Is that a Campbelltown there?’ He stabbed a finger towards the bottles of malt brooding on the shelves.
The absurdity got the bottle down without further ado. ‘This is the fifteen-year-old?’ His tone indicated that this was a request.
‘A double,’ said Bill.
Bill had brought yesterday’s paper with him from the car, but he didn’t bother to open it. He knocked back the whisky, and then chased it with a bottle of Orkney Dark Island. The whisky gouged more warmth into his belly, and the ale filled his head with peat and heather. Really, Bill thought, the two together summed up the far north. He was sitting back on the banquette, his feet propped on a low stool. His back and shoulders were grasped by the thick leather of his jacket. It was an old leather jacket, of forties cut. Bill had had it for years. It reminded him of a jacket he’d once seen Jack Kerouac wearing in a photograph. He liked the red quilted lining; and he especially liked the label on the inside of the collar that proclaimed: ‘Genuine Leather, Made from a Quarter of a Horse’. Bill used to show this to young women, who found it amusing … seductive. Bill used to rub saddle soap into the thing, but recently had found he couldn’t really be bothered, even though the leather was cracking around the elbows.
While Bill had been drinking, the absurdity was pottering around the vicinity of the bar, but now the pint glass was empty, and plonked back on the bar mat, he was nowhere to be seen. Bill pictured him, padding along the chilly corridors of the old granite hotel, like a cut-rate, pocket-sized laird. Impatiently, he rang a small bell – and the ginger moustache appeared instantly, directly in front of him, hoisted by its owner through the cellar hatch, like some hairy standard of rebellion.
‘Sir?’ came from behind the whiskers.
‘The damage?’ Bill countered.
‘That’ll be …’ He turned to the cash register and played a chord. ‘… Four pounds and seventy-eight pence.’ While Bill fought with his jeans for the cash, the absurdity had produced – from somewhere – a printed card. This he handed to Bill in exchange for the money, saying, ‘You wouldn’t mind, would you, filling out this card. It’s a sort of survey we’re doing, y’know, marketing and such, trying to find out who our clientele are …’ He trailed off.
Bill looked at the card: ‘Where did you first hear about us? 1. In the media 2. Personal recommendation 3. As part of a package holiday …’
‘Of course,’ he told the deluded hotelier, ‘but if you don’t mind I’ll fill it out later and post it, I’m in a bit of a hurry.’
‘Not at all, not at all – here’s an addressed envelope for you. Make it easier.’
As he marched across the car-park to the car, Bill crumpled the card and the envelope into a ball and tossed it into a convenient bin. He also abandoned himself to unnecessarily carping laughter – the idea that this isolated spot would ever attract anything much besides passing trade, and the occasional shooting, fishing and drinking crew was as ridiculous as the ginger moustache.
Feeling the wind rising at his back impressed further how far Lybster was from anywhere – save the North Sea. Bill took off his jacket and chucked it on the back seat of the car. Then he swung himself into the front. He rammed the key into the ignition, turned it, and the car thrummed and pulsed into life. The CD chirruped – then some John Cage came on. With another negligent circling of his hand, Bill scraped the big saloon around a hundred and eighty degrees, and shot back up on to the A9, this time heading south.
For the next hour, until he saw the hitchhiker, Bill drove hard. There was something about the man in the pub at Lybster, the whole episode in fact, that unsettled him. There was that, and there was the sense that as the car plunged south – switch-backing over spurs, and charging down hillsides – it was taking Bill out of the underimagined world and into the world that was all too clearly conceived of, fixed in its nature, h
ammered into banality by mass comprehension.
Not that you’d know it thus far: the road still leaping and twisting every few yards, the gradients often one in ten or better. In mist, or rain – which was almost always – the A9 was simply and superficially dangerous, but shorn of its grey fleece it became almost frolicsome. So Bill thought, chucking the car in and out of the bends.
In rain you had little opportunity to pass even a car, let alone any of the grumbling lorries that laboured up this route to the far north; and there were many of these. It could slow the whole trip if you got caught behind one. Slow it up by as much as a half again. Even in fair conditions the only way to pass their caravans – they tended to travel in naturally occurring clutches, equally spaced – was to get up to about ninety on the straight, then strip-the-steel-willow of the oncoming traffic and the lorries themselves.
It was exhilarating – this headlong plunge down the exposed cranium of Britain. After twenty miles or so Bill had a spectacular view clear across the Moray Firth to the Grampians. The mountains pushed apart land, sea and sky with nonchalant grandeur; their peaks stark white, their flanks hazed white and blue and azure. Not that he looked at them, he looked at the driving, snatching shards of scenery in the jagged saccades his eyes made from speedometer to road, to rearview mirror, to wing mirrors, and back, over and over, each glance accompanied with a head jerk, as if he were some automated Hasidic Jew, praying as he went.
In a way Bill was praying. In the concentration on braking and accelerating, and at these speeds essentially toying with life and death – others’ as well as his own – he finally achieved the dharmic state he had been seeking all morning: an absorption of his own being into the very act of driving that exactly matched his body’s absorption into the fabric of the car; a biomechanical union that made eyes windscreens, wheels legs, turbo-charger flight mechanism. Or was it the other way round?
