by Will Self
The wands of memories interleaved themselves with the sprigs of scenery, and then the whole hedge of impressions was further shaped and moulded by the music which poured from all four corners, before being flattened by the mantra of impulsion. Last night at the pub – the local doctor, Bohm, drunk – mouthing off about miracle cures for dipsomania – psychedelic drug rituals in West Africa, mystical twaddle – the walk home in the stiff wind, rain so hard it gave his cheeks and forehead little knouts. Now, on the road ahead, a passing opportunity, slow-moving old Ford Sierra, ahead of it two lorries and another two cars slightly further on, doing about sixty – a good seven hundred metres to the next bend. A bend beyond that allowed a view of more open road, but what of the hidden stretch? Calculate how much there was. Count: one, two, three seconds. Chance it. Rearview, Bam! Accelerator floored, wheel wrenched, back pressed back into seat. Leather smell. Vague awareness of oceanic chords playing – perhaps Richard Strauss. Indicator popping and tocking. Past the Ford. Past the first lorry. Up to eighty now. Bam! Shift rammed into third. Eighty now, nearing the bouncing butt of the second lorry. Fuuuck! There was a car. Now about a hundred metres off. Moving fast. Deathly fast. Check wing mirror. Dance the one-step of shock. Slide between the two lorries. Receive a fusillade of flashing and honking. Then – Bam! Back out again. Two hundred metres left of the straight – no view of the next stretch, just green tussocks, grey-green wall, strident black-and-white cow – keep it in third, will it back up … eighty … ninety … the ton. Fifty metres left – and the second lorry was cleared, evacuated, left behind as surely as a shit in a toilet in a motorway service centre. Left behind like the past, like failure, like regret.
Bill felt this marvellous sense of freedom and release as he cheated death and unslipped the surly gravity of the lumpen lorries. He felt it ten times between Borgue and Helmsdale, fifteen between Helmsdale and Brora, then more and more as the road opened up and the hills retreated from the road, leaving it to flow and wiggle, rather than twist and turn.
A glimpse of Langwell House, gothic on its promontory, as he zigzagged through Berriedale; a proscenium framed shot of Dunrobin Castle as he wheeled past its gates and cantered down into the long spare main street of Golspie, And still the sun fell down, and still the road glimmered, and still Bill thought – or perhaps only thought he thought – of nothing. Past the Highland Knitwear Centre. How many sweaters had Bill bought in a lifetime of blandishment? Too many perhaps. One purple cable knit at this very shop – for a girl called Allegra. A diminutive blonde – too young for Bill. Then twenty-two to his thirty-five. She was all chubby bits, a dinky little love handle, who when stoned on dope became psychotic, fanatically washing her hands in the air like some method-trained obsessive. Bill had to talk her down every time it happened – and he didn’t like taking his work to bed with him.
She gave head like a courtesan – like a goddess of fellation. She pushed down the prepuce with her lips, while her tongue darted round the root of his glans. One of her childlike hands delved in the lips of cloth that sagged open over his crotch, seeking out the root of him, juggling the balls of him. And this as the car motored along the banks of the Cromarty Firth, past the outcropping of cranes and davits at Invergordon. Even at the time Bill had recognised the automotive blow job as a disturbing concomitant to Allegra’s manic laving. It was her way of placing him back under her control; he might have the steering wheel – but she was steering him, gnawing the joy stick.
It was Allegra’s first and last trip to Orkney with Bill. Their relationship didn’t so much split up as shatter some weeks later, when, at a dinner party given by middle-aged friends of Bill’s, Allegra, drunk, had screamed, ‘Why doesn’t he tell you all that he loves going down on women, but can’t stand to have them go down on him!’ then thrown her vodka tonic in Bill’s face, then attempted to ram the solid after the liquid. A lunge that Bill deflected, so that the crystal shattered on impact against the invitation-encrusted mantelpiece. The friends had plenty to talk about after Allegra and Bill had left.
As the car tick-tocked along the bleak street, Bill imagined the grey houses to either side populated with his past courtesans, his myriad lovers. It would be like some Felliniesque dream sequence. No, come to think of it, better to house the past lovers – there had to be at least a hundred of them – in Dunrobin Castle itself. It was so big there would be a room each for the more mature, and convenient dormitories for the young girls. Bill smiled at the thought of this perverse seraglio. But hadn’t Fellini been right? Wasn’t this the only possible psychic solution to the sense of hideous abandonment that the practice of serial monogamy imparted? To get them all in one place. It wasn’t that Bill wanted them all sexually available – quite the reverse. But he wanted them in a context that made what existed between him and them, if not exactly important, at any rate viable. He wanted to feel that it had all mattered, that it wasn’t simply animal couplings, mechanistic jerkings, now forgotten, now dust.
Taken with the fantasy, Bill allowed it to occupy him as he pressured the big car through the long avenue of trees that led from Golspie to Loch Fleet. Dunrobin Castle populated by all of his lovers, all of the women he’d ever had sexual relations with. The younger ones would handle the bulk of the domestic work. There was Jane, who was a professional cook, she could run the kitchens, with the assistance of Gwen, Polly and Susie. There would be enough women in their twenties to handle all the skivvying, leaving the more mature women free to spend their time in idle conversation and hobby-style activities. Why, come to think of it, there was even a landscape gardener in Bill’s poking portfolio; perhaps there was a case for not simply maintaining the grounds of the castle, but redesigning them?
Even as Bill entertained this notion of a comforting castle, cracks began to appear in its façade. All of his former lovers … That meant not just Allegra, coming at him time after time with vitrified daggers, during the fatal attraction of cocktail hour, but other, still more unstable lovers, howling and wafting around halls and stairways. Worse than that, it meant his ex-wife; where would she come to roost? No doubt in an outhouse, from where, on dark nights, the sounds of screamed imprecations could be heard, blown in with the wind, and echoing around the drawing room where the others sat sewing, and Bill himself grimaced over another whisky.
And if there was to be room for the ex-wife, there would have to be room for other unsavoury characters as well. Despite himself, Bill urged the conceit to its baleful conclusion. The tarts – there would be room at Dunrobin for the tarts, the brasses, the whores. Bill imagined trying to keep them out – this delegation of tarts. Meeting them at the gates of the Castle and attempting to turn them back. ‘But you fucked us!’ their spokesmadam would abjure him. ‘We demand room in the Castle!’ He would have no choice but to admit them – and then the fragile concord of the seraglio would be shattered. The other lovers might have been prepared to accept sorority as a substitute for monogamy, but the tarts? Never. The tarts would swear and drink. They would smoke crack in the billiard room, and shoot smack in the butler’s pantry. They would seduce the younger lovers and outrage the older. On cold nights Bill would find himself desperately stuffing his head beneath covers, beneath pillows, trying to shut out the sounds of their wassailing, as they plaited with the moan and screech of the wind.
On the long straight that bounced up the other side of the loch, Bill clocked the signs requesting assistance from the coastguard in the fight against drug smugglers: If You See Anything Suspicious … The image of gracious polygamy faded and was replaced by one of Bill beachcombing, prodding at shells with a piece of driftwood, his jacket collar turned up, its points sharp against his chilled ears. The oiled tip of his makeshift shovel turns up a corner of blue plastic bag. He delves further. Six rectangular blocks, each sealed in blue plastic and heavily bound with gaffer tape are revealed to be neatly buried. Bill smiles and gets out his penknife …
Another sign whipped by at the top of the rise: Unmarked Police Car
s Operating … Spoilsports. No seraglio and now no mother lode of Mama Coca; no white rails for the wheels of the big car to lock on to; no propulsive, cardiac compression to take Bill’s heart into closer harmony with the rev counter … He hunkered down once more, gripped the steering wheel tighter, concentrated on the metallic rasp of John Lee Hooker’s guitar, which ripped up the interior of the car. Then came the roadworks. Then came the hitchhiker.
Bill braked, and looked for somewhere to pull over. About fifty metres further on there was a break in the earth-soft verge where blue-grey gravel puddled on to the roadway. Bill aimed for it, indicated, and then crunched the car to a halt. In the rearview mirror he could see the hitchhiker running towards the car, his pack bouncing, his poncho flapping, an expression of gap-toothed desperation on his face, as if he were absolutely certain that this offer of a lift was a taunt or a hoax, and that as soon as he was level with the car Bill would drive off guffawing.
The hitchhiker yanked the car door open and the fresh air and moisture and sunlight streamed in. ‘Thanks, mate –’ He was clearly going to converse.
‘Get in!’ Bill snapped. ‘I can’t stop here for long.’ He gestured at the roadway, where the cars were having to pull over the centre line in order to pass. The hitchhiker threw himself into the front passenger seat of the car, his pack still on. Bill glanced in the rearview, indicated, lazily circled the wheel to the right, and rejoined the traffic.
For some seconds neither said anything. Bill pretended to concentrate on the driving and observed his captive out of the corner of his eye. The hitchhiker sat, his face almost against the windscreen, the backpack – which Bill now saw had a tent bag and roll of sleeping bag tied to it – was like a whole, upper-body splint, designed so as to force its wearer into closer contemplation of the road. A Futurist’s corset.
‘I’ll stop as soon as I can,’ Bill said, ‘and we can put that in the back.’
The hitchhiker said, ‘Thanks very much.’
He was – Bill guessed – in his late twenties or early thirties. His accent was Caithness, the sharp elements of a Scottish brogue, softened and eroded by a glacial covering of Scandinavian syllables. His black, collar-length hair was roughly cut. He wore the yellow nylon poncho, and under it a never-fashionable, fake sheepskin-lined denim jacket. From behind the distempered non-wool, poked the collar of a tartan shirt. The hitchhiker’s breath smelt foully of stale whisky. His eyes were bivouacked in purple bags, secured by purple veins. He was unshaven. His teeth were furred. He had an impressive infection in the dimple of his strong chin – he wasn’t bad-looking.
‘Are you going far?’ he asked.
‘All the way,’ Bill smiled, ‘to London, that is.’
The hitchhiker grinned, and attempted – insofar as the pack allowed him – to settle more securely in his seat. It was the last question he asked Bill for the whole journey.
They were across the Cromarty Firth causeway and on the Black Isle before Bill found a proper layby to stop in. They both got out of the car and Bill rearranged the things on the back seat so that the hitchhiker could stash his pack. They were rolling again in a couple of minutes. Bill pushed the car up to seventy and then idled there, the index finger and thumb of his right hand holding the lower edge of the steering wheel as if it were some delicate surgical instrument. The rain ceased and the roadway shone once more. The muted CD played the current single by a hip guitar band. The hitchhiker drummed chipped, dirty nails on frayed, dirty denim.
‘So,’ said Bill after a while, ‘where are you headed?’
‘I’m going all the way too.’ He hunched round to face Bill, as if they were casual drinkers striking up a conversation at the bar of the car’s dashboard, ‘I stop in Poole, Dorset, but I’ve a mate in Glasgow I want to see for tonight.’
‘Well, I can drop you outside Glasgow, I’m heading straight on through and south.’
‘That’ll be grand.’ The hitchhiker smiled at Bill, gifting him a sight of peaks of plaque. It was a smile that should be given at the conclusion of such a trip – not the beginning. ‘Nice car,’ the hitchhiker said, still smiling.
‘Yeah,’ Bill drawled, ‘it motors. So, where’re you from?’
‘Thurso.’
‘And what’s the purpose of the trip?’
‘I’m studying down in Poole, got myself on a computer course like. I had a reading week so I thought I’d get up to see my kiddies –’
‘They’re in Thurso?’
‘Aye, right enough.’
The old ’fluence was still there, Bill thought. A couple of miles, a few questions insinuated in the right vulnerable places, and like some cunning piece of Chinese marquetry – a box with hidden compartments subtly palped – the hitchhiker’s psyche would begin to open out, to exfoliate. They swung over the ridge of Isle and the car caromed on down, on to the dual carriageway. They emerged from a forest of scattered conifers and there, hunkered around its cathedral spire, Inverness gleamed.
‘Inverness,’ said the hitchhiker.
He even states the obvious! Bill snidely exulted.
‘Did you come from Thurso this morning?’
‘I did. After a bit of a session – if you catch my meaning.’
‘Some mates saw you off then?’
‘They couldna’ exactly see me off – they were all pished malarkey. Five of the fuckers, all inna heap. So I tiptoed out. Got a lift right away across to Latheron, then down to Dornoch. Then I was walking in the bloody rain for four miles before you stopped for me –’
‘It was difficult to stop. The roadworks –’
‘Aye, right enough.’
‘You’ve got a tent and stuff there?’
‘In case I get caught short like – and have to spend the night on the road. I had to do that on the way up. I slept by the side of the road near Aviemore.’
‘Wasn’t that a drag?’
The hitchhiker snorted. ‘I’ll say. Come five in the morning the rain starts coming down holus-bolus, and then a fucking cow starts giving a horn to ma’ flysheet. I was back on the road before dawn, with my thumb stuck up like a fucking icicle …’ He trailed off and gave Bill another grimy grin. His stubble was blue.
Bill was emboldened to ask, ‘So, you’re fond of a drink then?’
The hitchhiker pressed the ball of his thumb into one eye socket, the middle joint of his index finger into the other. He kneaded and scrunched his features, answering from within this pained massage, ‘Oh well, I suppose … perhaps more than I should be. I dunno.’
Bill grimaced. He looked for a turning on the left – the carriageway was still dual – when he saw a forestry track. He dabbed the brakes, indicated, lazily circled the wheel and pulled in. ‘Slash,’ he said.
They both got out. Bill left the car running. They both pissed into the edge of the woodland. Through steam and sun Bill examined his companion’s urine. Very dark. Perhaps even blood dark. There was a touch of jaundice in the hitchhiker’s complexion as well. Maybe kidney infection, Bill thought, maybe worse. Not that this would be necessarily pathological in any way. They drank like that in Thurso – as they did in Orkney.
Bill knew ten men under thirty-five on Papa alone who had stomach ulcers. In Dr Bohm’s surgery there were forty-odd leaflets urging parents to check their children for symptoms of drug abuse. Absurd, when about the only drugs available on the island were compounds for ensuring the evacuation of bovine afterbirth. Bohm also had one small tattered sticker near the surgery door, which proclaimed: Drinkwise Scotland, and gave a help-line number. This lad was, Bill reflected, quite possibly addicted to alcohol, without necessarily being an alcoholic.
When they were back in the car Bill reached back behind the young man’s seat and pulled up the car bottle. It was half-full. ‘Will you have a dram?’ He sloshed the contents about; they were light and pellucid – as the stream of urine ought to have been. Bill appreciated the exact battle between metabolic need and social restraint that danced with the young man’s f
eatures. He broke the spell by uncorking the bottle and taking a generous swig himself. Then he passed the bottle to the young man who was saying, ‘Sure … Yeah … Right.’
The whisky went off like an anti-personality mine somewhere in the rubble-strewn terrain of Bill’s forebrain. He flicked the shift into reverse and crunched backwards. He took the bottle from the young man and re-stashed it. He hugged the headrest and sighted down the road. Nothing. He banged the accelerator and the car twisted backwards, pivoting at the hips, rested on its rubber haunches for a second while Bill flicked the shift into drive, then shook itself and plunged back up the long hill. Twenty, thirty, forty … the turbo-charger ‘gnunng’ed!’ in … fifty-five, seventy, eighty … to either side the rows of orderly conifers strobed back; the gleaming road ahead twanged like a rubber band; the sky shouted ‘Wind!’; the reggae music welled like beating blood: ‘No-no-no-oo! You don’ love me an’ I know now –’ Bill was feeling no pain. The young man was shouting something, Bill hit OFF.
‘– arked cars –’
‘What was that you said?’ Bill’s voice was precise and dead level in the instantaneously null environment of the car. It sounded like an aggressive threat.
‘Y’know the police, man … the pigs … They have unmarked cars on this road.’
‘I know.’ Bill poked at the speedometer. ‘Anyway I’m only doing eighty-five, they won’t pull you till you get within a whisker of ninety – d’you smoke?’ Without so much as twisting the thread of conversation, Bill had filched another joint from his inside pocket.
The whisky and the skunk opened the young man up. He skewed himself further in his seat, imposing more intimacy, and Bill began to feed him questions. His name was Mark. His father had been a marine engineer. Much older than the mother. The father was Viennese – Jewish. A wartime refugee, he designed some of the early SONAR systems. The mother died of cancer when Mark was eight, the father four years later. The father had had money but the estate was mismanaged by uncaring trustees. Mark and his brother ended up in children’s homes. They were separated. Mark left school, got a job with a carrier’s. Married, had two children and …
