These Demented Lands (21 page)

I turned and shuffled through the dancers back towards the hotel. Brotherhood had issued me with a key to the front door. I let myself in, the beats of the Big One faint. I did my work in the kitchen, knelt and says a wee prayer.

Aircrash Investigator wasn't in his room. I shouted ‘Hoi, Houlihan, Warmer, Failed Screenwriter. I don't care what you're called, only what you
are
. Come on.'

I was having difficulty reading my watch. As I locked the front door of the hotel I looked up towards 96-Metre Hill, saw the solitary fire ablaze. Holding my arms out before me I walked towards the graveyard.

A bonfire was burning amongst the graves and Brotherhood stood beside it smoking a cigar as a harassed-looking Macbeth excavated a grave using the council digger. ‘What in Christ's name are they up to?' hissed the forester's voice out to my side. I was about to answer when I think my waters burst – anyway, all hell went loose in my guts.

The forester was helping me back to the hotel which was on fire. ‘Too bad, too bad, it'll have to be here,' I snapped, as he let me droop to the ground in the turning place.

‘No way, no fucking way,' and he dragged me to the garage and kicked in the door with real spectacularness.

Next thing, Dad, I'm being lifted somewhere: it's the rear of a Volvo hatchback that's been filled with hay. Worst of all it's a M reg!

The garage doors were wide open. I noticed, in my confusion, cause the drugs I'd taken were really getting busy with me now, a New Age family seemed to be living in our old staff caravans, they were ushering kids out the door. I was sure Quiet Life by Japan was playing on a radio somewhere but I couldn't remember the lyrics.

Smoke was swirling around and buggered if this one wasn't pulling off my Levi's.

‘Hey, it's like a shag on the beach. You only need to take one leg of your jeans off.' I laughed, then I felt this weirdy muscle stuff and I pushed to high heaven.

An oily slab of smoke purled and whipped past the garage doors. A massive sheet of flame whipped up into the sky and some beams collapsed in the long extension corridor, the lights flicked on insanely, responding to the inhuman movements.

A window exploded then the curtains in the dining room tore outwards and erupted. The fire burned along the roof towards the pine plantation and through my tears I saw a string of trees lift up in a rush of fire, windows burst out and the roof tiles curled above the kitchens where I'd turned on the deep-fat friers earlier: full power, wet tea-towels over.

Soon, all the way down, the blockade of pine plantation was alight and, as my child was born in a burst of blood and the forester whirled her free, the smeared face of an ancient prophet or seer came close to mine, smearing a mucousy
blood across one of my tits, nipple erect in smoke-driven breeze while the inferno of trees fell, some of them across the airfield, some of them collapsing into the graveyard, swiping down the grievous angels, the prudent crosses covering the grave of Brotherhood's father, his dream of torching the hotel complete, and of Carlton's now-robbed grave and the bright red hair of the mummified horror Macbeth had dug up – the random grave I had told Brotherhood was Mum's – the grave that yielded nothing, and the fire covered Mum's untouched headstone.

The forester took the knife he'd lent me and popped the umbilical, handed the knife back to me.

Sure enough, Devil's Advocate on the hill above had jerked open his eyes and screamed as he rose from his lair, white eyes wide; departing, as he arrived, in a plume of flame. He ran, sucked by the beat down that hill Carlton had once ascended: down into the burning enclosures and outhouses he came to the garage.

I was lying in the back of the car, my daughter under my chin. The Argonaut stood, hands held high, shaking. I had the big revolver pointed vaguely at him as the Advocate stepped in, scowled at the Argonaut and says, ‘Who fired the hotel? Brotherhood?'

‘Me.'

‘Where's Brotherhood?' goes the Advocate.

‘He was digging up in the graves.'

‘So that's where he . . .'

‘He's gone,' went the Aircrash Investigator who stepped
in. ‘He had it hidden in Carlton's grave, must've put it there ten years ago. Inside the rotted ribcage no doubt.'

The Argonaut spoke, ‘Just like the old resurrection men: dig up the graves of the unknown sailors and visitors washed onto shores, get them sealed in a barrel of brine then sell them to the Glasgow medical schools.'

‘You shut your mouth,' growled the Advocate.

‘She's crazy, man, already let loose one bullet.'

‘You best give me that back. I've let you keep it long enough. You're safe with this man here.' The Advocate took the gun out of my hand.

I says, ‘The three wise kings.'

They laughed. The Argonaut says, ‘It's true, I followed the light in the eastern sky, Nam the Dam hovering overhead.'

‘I dunno what you're so chirpy about, Brotherhood's bolted in your rowboat towing your bong-bong drums behind.'

‘What! Bastard. Well, I've paid respects to the Messiah. I'm off.' Argonaut bolted.

‘He says I was already dead,' I goes, Drowned. I'm in netherworld; purgatory.'

‘You shot at him,' smiled the Investigator.

The Devil's Advocate says, ‘I really suggest, before the forces of the state arrive, we all leave. My patience hasn't paid off; meanwhile . . .' He stepped out into the flame-lit night.

The Aircrash Investigator kneeled by me in the old car; he says, ‘Haven't you and I heard the chimes at midnight.'

‘Happy New Year,' I says, then, ‘That means you've really lived, eh?'

‘Yes, to the full,' he went.

I goes, ‘It's from My Own Private Idaho.'

‘Nah, it's Shakespeare.'

‘Aye?' I went.

‘Have you lived?' he says.

‘Aye,' I goes.

‘Will we . . . go . . . together, you, me?'

‘Together,' I says. ‘Us?'

He went, ‘Yes. For always, with her.'

I thought of Brotherhood. What had happened to him. He was darting and zig-zagging through the groups of young people. Some were still arriving, gawping silently at the huge burning of the hotel, spilling from the disco bus; a tractor had drawn in a horse box that opened and young girls thundered out.

Brotherhood was casting a black shadow in the flame of his burned hotel. Wrapped tight and held to his chest: the filthy towel holding the shard of metal or plastic. As he wondered if even the ghost had come to dance, the wrapping fell free and the thing he was carrying bumped ahead of him. It hit the ground and seemed to bounce once, then suddenly it went rigid like metal, but at first it had changed shape with the impact. Forgetting the towel, Brotherhood stooped, picked up the fragment, and stumbled down the embankment, the Devil's Advocate chasing him, but Brotherhood was into the first boat he found and power-rowing out. The Advocate had screamed, sat on the shore and only then noticed the uncoiling rope on the drum-raft, the Knifegrinder slumped unconscious on its stool.

But the Advocate had to choose. On or until another day. As the drum set moved out into the waters of the Sound, the Advocate limped through the dancers, back towards the frazzling beams of the collapsed Observation Lounge.

After carefully placing the wreckage part in the bottom and rowing into the black sheet of the Sound waters, probed by the Oyster Skerries beacon, Brotherhood was halfway across before he realised he was towing something. He cast it loose. Next afternoon, Knifegrinder was awoken by a passing trawler far out in the ocean.

Brotherhood never saw
Psalm 23
till he heard the clean sheath of its prow – the still-going beats of the new century covered the ship's approach.

He reached for the fragment then the boards flew under him and he was in water. John Brotherhood trod water. Like a lightning storm far below him, the seabed flickered, showing the stomachy depth of the Sound. He stared and shivered with loathing after the stern of the car ferry, at his burning hotel half a mile away; then he began to swim, not back to the island, but kicking out onwards to the uninhabited banks below the mountain range.

‘For always?' I says.

The Aircrash Investigator went, ‘Here's the deal: I'll always hold the hair out your face while you puke.'

‘Aye. All right then,' I goes.

There you have it, Dad; all you need not to know surrounding the birth of the beautiful grand-daughter I'll
make sure you never see. Forgive my elliptical style: I want you to die in the maximum possible confusion. Don't dare even think of me on your death-bed.

When the fire engines had arrived they knew it was a dead loss, so the firemen danced in the big top where Lucky People Center were fashing it up. The firemen's reflective jackets looked fantastic in the lights.

We were headed other way, the flight into Egypt. The Advocate and the forester put me and my daughter in the coffin pulled by Charlie the shire horse – a bit covered in Vongole sauce but I was spattered with blood anyways – and off we slid, up the driveway, rumping over potholes and much nicer up the flanks of 96-Metre Hill. Old Charlie tugged us, the Aircrash Investigator following, smiling at me and the wee thing under our mound of blankets. For the first since coming to that island I wanted sleep but Aircrasher was pointing and forester was shouting, the Advocate staring up. Up at the tracking station where the Observatory once scanned the heavens, the telly repairers had got flashing semaphores diving and dotting, up and down and up and down the enormous aerials – each mast lighting up in different rhythm: chaos of blinkings, dyings and flourishings like God's Christmas tree: the entire sky seemed to be doing press-ups. I could see the stars lurking beneath the pulsars of masts and when I looked back at the Aircrash Investigator, a fantastic column of flame and smoke was over his shoulder. I lit a Silk Cut, Extra Mild.

Goodbye.

Morvern Callar

Thanks to the Scottish Arts Council for a bursary and the K. Blundell Trust for an Authors' Foundation Award

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Epub ISBN: 9781407063843

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Published by Vintage 1998

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Copyright © Alan Warner 1997

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First published in Great Britain in 1997 by

Jonathan Cape

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ISBN 9780099577911