by Ann Leary
PART FOUR
Auld Reekie
TWENTY
THE EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL Arts Festival is one of the largest annual arts festivals in the world. It began in 1947, as a postwar effort to reunite the cultural communities of Europe and the United Kingdom. The first festival was so inspired and highly anticipated that there were more performers than venues, so in addition to the promoted, featured performances that year, there were eight uninvited acts that crashed the event in order to take advantage of the crowds and publicity, which is how the Fringe Festival was born. Over the years many famous performers have gotten their start at the Fringe Festival, including John Cleese and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Dudley Moore, and many others. In August 1990 Denis was going to bring his one-man show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
John Thoday, Denis’s manager, had him booked into clubs two or three nights a week, but he didn’t want Denis on the road too much, as it was only a few weeks until the festival, and he wanted Denis to have time to write. Soon posters began arriving in our flat featuring a huge photo of Denis smoking a cigarette and the title of the show, No Cure for Cancer, emblazoned across the front, along with the name of the venue in Edinburgh where Denis was to perform. Denis would wake up in the morning and stare at the posters while he ate his cereal. “I really have to finish writing that show,” he’d say calmly, and then he’d wander into the living room and turn on the television.
In 1990 there were only four channels available to most British viewers: BBC1, BBC2, ITV, and Channel 4. This might seem like a meager selection to those who grew up with hundreds of cable channels at their fingertips, but the truth was that almost everything on British television, including the ads, was unbelievably good. Each night there were riveting documentaries, extremely funny comedies, teleplays, quiz shows, and, with amazing frequency, nature programs.
It was almost impossible to turn on the TV that summer and not see a program about small woodland creatures on one of those four channels. Unlike American nature programs, which typically featured sleek tigers and voracious lions, these British documentaries usually centered on voles, weasels, and the ever-popular badger. Badger shows ran constantly. In the morning I would nurse Jack while watching badgers mate. Later Denis would tune in to another channel to find a feature about the nesting habits of badgers. Badgers eating, sleeping, yawning—apparently there was no end to the British appetite for information about these creatures. Although I never saw it, Denis claimed that in the early-morning hours, when most programming was over, one channel showed oddly engrossing footage of badgers with pop music playing softly in the background.
By far our favorite program was One Man and His Dog. This was a televised sporting event shown once a week. It was a sheep-herding competition, and each week it took place at a different locale. It was shot on video, and although the camera work was somewhat primitive, the views of the British countryside were beautiful. A small flock of sheep would stand grazing in a meadow. A tweedy old farmer would approach the field with an intensely enthusiastic Border collie. The man would stare at the sheep. The dog, poised for action, would stare at the sheep, then at the man, then the sheep, then the man, the sheep, the man, until finally the man nodded and grunted, and the dog would be off like a low-flying missile aimed right for the sheep. The man would let out a whistle, and the dog would drop to the ground. Another whistle and the dog would crawl along to the left of the sheep or to the right. The dog did all the work, the man stood in one place and whistled orders, and the announcer, in hushed tones, would say things like, “Let’s see if Jip can steer them round that last gate … oh, no! She’s lost one! Horrigan must be terribly disappointed with that. She’s been a rather unreliable bitch throughout her career, really.”
Denis began spending more time writing his show, and I passed our last few weeks in London walking with Jack through the streets of the city by day and watching television at night. Jack and I would sometimes visit Jo and her daughter, Florence, and occasionally a nurse from UCH would pay us a visit and fill me in on the gossip from the unit.
Denis had asked his friend Chris Phillips to come to the Edinburgh Festival to play the guitar for his show, and Chris arrived in London a few days early, to do a little sight-seeing. Chris’s presence distracted us from the surprising melancholy we felt about leaving the city that had held us captive all these months, and it was wonderful to finally be able to show off Jack to an old friend.
During the second week of August, Denis and I packed our few articles of clothing and gave back the books and baby gear we had borrowed from Jo and some of her friends. I phoned Jo and Joan and paid a last teary visit to the neonatal unit at UCH. We had an American passport made for Jack, and in the photo he was held aloft between Denis’s hands, his legs dangling like a pup’s, his cheeks pink and plump. Finally, on our last morning, we said good-bye to Robert and Brian, Caroline and Sandra, Betty and the loathsome Timmy, and we set off for Edinburgh, Jack snuggled against Denis’s chest in his pouch.
The train trip to Edinburgh was very scenic and was really my first glimpse of the British countryside. We had seats that faced each other and a little table between them, where we placed Jack’s basket. He obligingly slept most of the way. When he awoke and I nursed him, Chris looked concerned and finally, unable to restrain himself, asked me when I was going to start giving the baby a bottle. I said not for many months, and Chris tried to smile casually, but I could sense his alarm. Later on the trip, Chris warmed up to me to the point where he felt comfortable enough to dispense child-care advice as well as hints regarding how I might make myself more attractive to men. Breast-feeding, I was informed, was going to ruin my breasts and turn Jack into a fag. My decisions regarding feeding and sleeping schedules, burping, and diapering were all scrutinized and basically discredited by this man who had no children and had never dated a woman longer than a few months. Two beautiful, pale children were seated in our car and wandered over from time to time to look at Jack. They asked his name and his age, and because they looked like forlorn English street urchins, Chris would sing a song from Oliver!—like “Whe-e-e-re Is Love?”—every time they approached.
The moment we arrived in Edinburgh, a sense of profound relief came over me. The air was cool and crisp and the city more picturesque than I had even imagined. I soon learned that we would be sharing our Edinburgh flat with not only Chris but also Nathan Green, Denis’s New York manager. Nathan arrived in Edinburgh with enough luggage to clothe a Scottish regiment, and he and his vast shoe collection took one of the two bedrooms. Denis, Jack, and I took the other, and Chris was required to sleep on the couch in the living room. Chris, it turned out, was not a couch-in-the-living-room kind of guy and fretted constantly about people touching his things. I learned later that he worried incessantly that in the evenings, when he and Denis performed, I might be breast-feeding the baby on the very couch where he slept. As the couch faced the only TV in the place, that’s precisely what I was doing. Still, it was a tidy flat, and the building was conveniently located in the old town in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle.
That first evening Denis and I took Jack out for a walk. Despite a light drizzle, the city of Edinburgh was alive. People young and old thronged the streets, and music could be heard all around us. In the parks, in churches and doorways, everywhere, there were jugglers and magicians, portrait artists, gymnasts, and dancers. The crowd that moved along the sidewalks with us was made up of parents and children, junkies and punk rockers, old grannies and hustlers, and tourists of every imaginable ethnicity. And most exciting of all, thanks to the efforts of Denis’s brilliant manager, John Thoday, there were posters for No Cure for Cancer everywhere we looked. They beamed down at us from the sides of buildings and fences. They adorned streetlights and telephone poles. They were surrounded by hundreds of posters from other shows, but all we could see was Denis, wreathed in smoke, encircled by quotes calling his show “brilliant” and “hilarious.”*
Denis
reached for my hand, and we strolled along, our little family. Only five months earlier, he and I had walked like this through London, so thrilled at finding ourselves in a strange and exciting city, so completely unaware of the disaster that lay just moments ahead. I had thought of those moments before my PROM thousands of times over the past few months, and when I did, it was like watching a movie in which the subjects don’t know they’re just about to drive off a cliff or be eaten by a shark. How innocent we were! We had no idea that babies could be born three months early and survive. We had never attended a childbirth class and knew nothing about obstetrics or neonatology. We had only vague, anecdotal ideas of what parenting entailed and not an inkling of the human capacity for hope, despair, fear, desire—the churning, tumultuous, heart-swelling realities of parental love. Somehow we had found our way from that bleak, wet corner on Oxford Street… to here! Denis was starring in his own show, which had been successfully previewed in London. There were American and European agents and producers everywhere. It was as if we’d been swept off a beach by a tidal wave that, after dragging us under and smashing our heads against a few rocks, finally tossed us up onto a nicer, more bountiful beach than the one we’d left behind.
Jack’s tiny feet dangled from his pouch and bobbed against my belly. From the enclosed fortress of Edinburgh Castle rose the sound of bagpipes, and the smell of wet wool and tobacco smoke and burning peat filled the air around me and I couldn’t stop smiling. I cradled Jack’s tender feet in my hands, and we followed the crowds through those cobbled Edinburgh roads, the three of us.
AFTER JACK AND I awoke at dawn the next morning, I hastily fed and dressed us both, put Jack in his pouch, and headed out the door to see what I considered to be Edinburgh’s most awe-inspiring tourist attraction, Greyfriars Kirkyard, which held a statue of a “wee terrier” named Bobby. Everything I knew about Edinburgh, before that August, I had learned from a Disney movie called Greyfriars Bobby.
According to the movie, which I committed to memory as a child, Bobby was a Skye terrier who, sometime during the nineteenth century, belonged to a poor shepherd called “Auld Jock.” When Auld Jock died, he was taken to be buried in Edinburgh at Greyfriars Kirkyard. The wee Bobby, who had never left his master’s side, followed Auld Jock’s body to the kirkyard. Bobby was chased from the kirkyard, but he returned that evening—and every evening for the rest of his life—to lie beside his master’s grave. The little dog’s fidelity was admired far and wide, and not long after he himself died, a statue of Bobby was erected in the park.
As a young girl, I loved that story and fantasized about having a little dog of my own who would lie shivering on my grave out of absolute devotion to me. In reality I did own a dog—we’d always had dogs when I was a child, but our dogs seemed to be as devoted to the idea of escape as Bobby was to his master, and if we didn’t keep them leashed, they would have run off, presumably forever. Bobby, who slept on the ground on a craggy Scottish hillside and was tossed an occasional crust of bread, wouldn’t leave his master’s side even after his death. Our dogs, who slept in our beds and were fed Alpo Prime Cuts twice a day, viewed themselves as captives and would seek any opportunity to flee. One dog, Coco, in apparent desperation, hurled herself out of our car window as we sped along a country road. So, it was with great admiration that I sought out the grave and monument of the loyal terrier. When we arrived, I managed to prop Jack up against the statue and take his picture.
After paying homage to Bobby, I walked along the High Street and found a coffeehouse. It was not busy inside, just a few hippies and tourists, and the place smelled of clove cigarettes and strong coffee. A cheerful waitress told me to sit where I pleased, and I found a corner table and ordered a coffee and a scone. The coffee was served in a carafe and was so dark and rich I almost wept. The scone was light and flaky, and I smeared it with the freshest, creamiest butter I’ve ever tasted. Around me I heard German spoken, and French. At the next table, a heavily tattooed man wrote a letter in a surprisingly effeminate hand, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of belonging. In London I had felt like the guest who wouldn’t leave, but here in Edinburgh I felt like a free spirit. The people around me were in Edinburgh to attend the Fringe Festival, a festival in which my husband was performing. No longer the needy losers whose membranes ruptured in other people’s countries, we were now an exciting young American family who thought nothing of packing their infant in a little basket and attending arts festivals.
That week Jack and I toured the city each day, only to return to our flat in the evenings, just as Denis and his convoy-in-residence were preparing to leave. From the moment Denis had first mentioned to me the idea of his doing a one-man show at the Fringe Festival, I had viewed the entire idea with skepticism. “A one-man show?” I’d asked. “Who’d want to go see that?” This was to be the first of many, many instances in Denis’s career when I was convinced that I was the only person who could see things rationally, who had her finger on the pulse of what an audience will and will not want to see, only to be proved completely clueless and pulseless. Denis’s show, which was booked into one of the largest venues at the festival, was sold out the entire week and received outstanding reviews. (“Dazzling. Fearsome. Supremely funny,” said the London Times.) I couldn’t attend any of the shows because I had Jack, but each evening before they left, Denis and Chris would fill me in on some of the highlights from the previous night’s show. Then, after being quizzed by Chris about which of his belongings I usually touched while he was out, I would be left alone with Jack to lactate with wanton abandon.
After a few nights of this, I was lonely. I was in a city alive with festivities, and each night, as I watched television documentaries about badgers or voles, I heard the military tattoo performed next door at the castle with its drums and bugles and thunderous cannons. Far into the early-morning hours, laughter could be heard on the streets, and at dawn, when Jack and I were usually ready for our first outing of the day, a stray couple would sometimes still be making their way home, each wearily supporting the weight of the other.
At the time, there were a number of walking tours advertised on posters throughout the city. Tours of churches, gardens, and castles held no real appeal for me, but I found myself stopping several times a day to study a poster boasting the line FEEL THE SPIRIT OF AULD REEKIE in red Gothic lettering. It was an advertisement for a tour of “Haunted Edinburgh.” The tour promised to visit the “witching points” where witches had been burned alive and to travel along the cruelly cobbled streets where they had been dragged, again alive, behind carriages. But it was the prospect of an encounter with this mysterious Reekie that captured my imagination. Denis had caught a cold soon after our arrival, and some concerned individual, whom I never got a chance to thank personally, suggested that he drink tea made from raw garlic, which he did, by the pint. Then he would sweat onstage for two hours, drink and smoke with his friends, and by the time he returned to the flat each night, he seemed possessed by something evil indeed. Something that might easily have been mistaken for the spirit of Auld Reekie, so I felt a spiritual connection and was soon consumed by the idea of taking the tour.
I decided to save the tour for our last night in Edinburgh. It was to begin at the “witching hour,” which, according to the poster, was 8:30 P.M. AS the hour grew near, I fed Jack, bundled him into his pouch, and was just heading out the door when I realized I’d forgotten to ask Denis to leave me the six pounds for the tour. It was now seven-thirty, and Denis was about to go onstage—someplace. I knew that his show was in a theater called the Assembly Rooms, but I had no idea where these Assembly Rooms were. I quickly made my way to the High Street, looking for ads for Denis’s show on every wall and lamppost. As is usual in situations like this, Denis’s poster, which in the preceding days had beamed down at me on every corner, was now nowhere to be found. I walked for blocks and wandered into various performance halls, but I was usually met at the door by an employee who glared at Jack.
&n
bsp; “You’re not coming in here with … that?” asked one house manager, and the way he scowled at Jack, you’d have thought I had a bomb strapped to my chest.
“Can you please tell me where the Assembly Rooms are?” I asked, but the man had turned away and was taking tickets from the other people in line. It was now eight-twenty, and I was sick with self-pity. The one thing I had looked forward to, I was going to miss. Denis got to do incredibly exciting things every night, but I had only this meager hope for a little fun in Edinburgh, and it had been dashed because my husband was too self-centered to ask me if I needed six pounds before he left. Fighting tears, I began to walk back to our flat, when suddenly I spotted Nathan Green coming toward me.
