The Adorata

A fascinating world and very funny too – irvine welsh

Test

The cries for help weren’t funny anymore. He could not go on finding them funny for months on end.

On his desk and screen were the letters and emails his newspaper had received this morning. He started through them again, searching for some clue to a sincere answer.

Dear Miss Solutions

I am sixteen years old now and I dont know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the scheme makeing fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose — although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.

I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me.

What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didnt do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Dad and he says he doesnt know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born. Should I commit suicide?

Sincerely yours,

Desperate

Miss Solutions threw the letter into an open drawer of his desk. He bit off half a piece of Nicorette gum and chewed.

Dear Miss Solutions–

I am writing to you for my little sister Gracie because something awfull hapened to her, and I am afraid to tell my mother about it. I am 17 years old and Gracie is 13 and we live in Motherwell. Gracie is deaf and dumb and biger than me but not very smart because of being deaf and dumb. She plays on the roof of our flats and doesnt go to school except to deaf and dumb school twice a week on tuesdays and thursdays. Mum makes her play on the roof because we dont want her to get run over as she isnt very smart. Last week a man came on the roof and did something dirty to her. She told me about it and I dont know what to do as I am afraid to tell mother on account of her being liable to beat Gracie up. I am afraid that Gracie is going to have a baby and I listened to her stomack last night for a long time to see if I could hear the baby but I couldn’t. If I tell mum she will beat Gracie up awfull because I am the only one who loves her and last time when she tore her dress they loked her in the closet for 2 days and if the local boys hear about it they will say dirty things like they did to Titch Conors sister the time she got caught down behind the bins. So please what would you do if the same hapened in your family.

Yours truly,

Michael S.

The gum seemed to contain no nicotine. Miss Solutions took it out of his mouth and stared at it furiously.

Solutions

Truth: the supreme art of the devil was never greater than the filching away of man’s conviction that he must emulate the sacrifice of Christ.

‘Ye call Me Master and Lord,’ says the Christ, ‘and ye say well, for so I am. If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.’

But sure enough >>>>>>>>>>>>> we mortals leave one another’s feet alone!

YOUR COMRADE-IN-ARMS

Miss Solutions threw both halves of the gum in his mouth and chewed. The Program was the answer, he still knew, a sly transmission of the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, which he still revered. The Program and maybe on a good day Jesus Christ.

He bent over the keyboard and typed more of his column: ‘Life is worthwhile. It is full of peace and prosperity, kindness and happiness.’ But it was impossible to continue.

His features editor John Shripe mushed old face leaned over his shoulder. ‘The same old stuff, eh?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you give them something new and hopeful? Tell them about the glories of art, son. Here, I’ll dictate:

‘Art Is a Way Out.

‘Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the debris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering.

‘For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation. For those like yours truly with a little talent and an agent…

‘Go on from there.’

…

When Miss Solutions finished work he found that the weather had turned warm and that the air smelt as though it had been artificially heated. He decided to walk to Delehanty’s for a drink.

He entered a little park and swallowed mouthfuls of the heavy shade that curtained its arch. He walked into the shadow of a lamp post that lay on the path. It pierced him like a spear.

There were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind that generates life. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. Only in July had a few green spikes shot up through the exhausted dirt.

What the park needed was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow in his column he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, YOUR COMRADE-IN-ARMS, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-junkie-husband, and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet…

He sat down on a bench. If he could only throw a stone. He searched the sky for a target. But the grey sky looked rubbed with a soiled eraser — it held no angels, flaming crosses, olive-bearing doves, wheels within wheels. Only a newspaper struggled in the air like a kite with a broken spine. He got up and started again for the pub.

Delehanty’s was in the cellar of a tenement. It was only half full. Miss Solutions looked around for John Shripe and was relieved at not finding him. By the third drink he was settling into the warm mud of alcoholic gloom, A belly full of drink and a head full of A.A., as he used to hear at their meetings… Then John caught his arm. ‘Ah, my young friend!’ he shouted. ‘How do I find you? Brooding again, I take it.’

‘Fucksake.’

‘You’re morbid, my friend, morbid. Forget your weaknesses and remember something else. Remember the renaissance. There were no brooders then, just those who acted.’ John raised his glass, the whole Borgia family in his gesture. ‘I give you the renaissance. What a period. What pageantry. Drunken popes… Beautiful courtesans… Illegitimate children…’

No matter how fantastic or excited his speech John never changed his expression. ‘To the renaissance,’ he kept saying. ‘To the renaissance. To the brown Greek manuscripts and mistresses with the great smooth marbly limbs. But that reminds me, I’m expecting one of my admirers – Miss Markis, a cow-eyed divorcee of great intelligence.’ His hands carved two breasts in the air. ‘Don’t care for women, eh? J.C. is your only sweetheart, eh? Jesus Christ the King of Kings, the Miss Solutions of Miss Solutions…’

A middle-aged woman approached the bar. Long legs, thick ankles, big hands, a powerful body, a slender neck and a strangely childish face.

‘Miss Markis,’ John said, making her bow like a ventriloquist does his doll, ‘I want you to meet Miss Solutions. Show him the same respect you show me. He too is a comforter of the poor in spirit.’

She gave Miss Solutions a masculine handshake.

‘Miss Markis works in a flowershop.’ John patted her rump.

‘What were you two talking about?’ she asked.

‘Spiritual matters.’

She laughed and John raised his fist as though to punch her. The bartender came up and asked them to go into the back room. Miss Solutions did not want to go along but John insisted and he was too tired to argue.

In a booth John again raised his fist but when Miss Markis drew back he changed the gesture to a caress. Again he began to shout and Miss Solutions recognised his seduction speech.

‘I am a great saint,’ John cried. ‘I can walk on my own water. I have at times compared the wounds in Christ’s body to the mouths of a miraculous purse in which we deposit the small change of our sins. It is indeed an excellent conceit. But now let us consider the holes in our own bodies and what these congenital wounds open into. Under the skin of man is a wondrous jungle where veins like lush tropical growths hang along overripe organs and weed-like entrails writhe in squirming tangles of red and yellow. In this jungle, flitting from rock-grey lungs to golden intestines, from liver to lights and back to liver again, lives a birdie called the soul, it’s claimed. The Catholic hunts this bird with bread and wine, the Jew with a golden ruler, the Protestant on leaden feet with leaden words, the Buddhist with gestures, the gypo with clothespegs. I spit on them all. Phooh! And I call upon you to spit, my dear. Phooh!’

He buried his hatchet face in the woman’s neck.

…

Next day Miss Solutions sat at his desk thinking of a desert, not of sand but of rust and body dirt, surrounded by a fence covered in flyposters describing news events of the previous day, 3-5-00: Father Slays Wife With Garden Strimmer… Berk’s Sub Snub… McLoos stamped the old woman’s false teeth down her throat… Inside the fence Desperate, Broken-hearted, YOUR COMRADE-IN-ARMS, Disillusioned-with-junkie-husband and the rest were gravely forming the letters MISS SOLUTIONS out of white-washed clam shells.

He didn’t notice Colin Smith until a heavy arm dropped on his neck. He freed himself with a grunt. Colin smiled and bunched his fat cheeks like rolls of pink toilet paper. ‘How’s the drunkard?’ he asked imitating John.

Colin had finished off his column for him yesterday, so Miss Solutions hid his annoyance and thanked him.

‘No trouble at all,’ Colin said. ‘It was a pleasure to read your post.’ He threw an envelope on the desk and one moist, rolling eye winked. ‘Sent by an admirer.’

FROM MISS LONELYHEARTS was written on the back of the envelope. Miss Solutions looked up at Colin, who smiled back down.

Miss Solutions read the start of the letter:

My own name for it was the Balloon, but that hardly matters. Airship, Zeppelin, Tausendjährigerheißluftballon — no grouping of letters can suggest the reality of that sacred something. The horizon glowed with its pale blue light as it sailed above the good North Sea, the wind opening it like a gigantic rose, it seemed, to disclose a giant Adolf Hitler smile. Ah Jesus, that unearthly Nazi splendour, that outrage of a Balloon…

The colour falling from it flooded Aberdeen and when it swayed the streets seemed to spin in blueness. My sister Wendy blew soap bubbles through a straw, and when they burst they left their own colours in the air.

Still the Tausendjährigerheißluftballon letters kept on coming. He binned this one.

Colin laughed. ‘That’s no way to act. Let’s print the thing. It’s written by a pro.’ He walked off and Miss Solutions started pounding out his column.

Life, for most of us, seems a struggle of pain and frustration, without hope or joy. But it only seems this way. Every man or woman, no matter how unlucky or disadvantaged, can teach himself or herself to use our five senses to the full. See the beautiful cloud-shapes in the sky. Smell the freshly cut grass or the coconut-flavour shampoo. Stroke the baby’s skin, the lover’s muscle tone. Life is

His mind returned to the imaginary desert where Desperate, Broken-hearted and the others were still building his name. They had run out of sea shells and were using faded photographs, timetables, playing cards, broken toys, empty tubes of suncream and dental bleach, imitation jewellery — junk that memory had made precious to them, far more precious than anything the sea might yield.

Miss Solutions killed his great understanding heart by laughing at this junk and then reached into the bin for the Balloon letter. Against the dark mahogany desk top the cheap paper took on rich flesh tones. He thought of the letter’s sender as a great mad tent, hair-covered and veined, stretched over the desert, and of himself as a handsome skeleton. When he made the skeleton enter the flesh tent it flowered at every joint. The letter said:

My mother’s nerves failed after Wendy disappeared. Days on end she stayed in bed, surrounded by her maps of Aberdeen and complaining of errors she found in them, once running across them barefoot to explain some vital point. Other days she was near back to her old self, it seemed, still mostly in bed but lost in her Illustrated Bible or the wireless.

Sometimes her eyes widened as if her bedroom was growing huge and strange around her, and to distract herself she’d grab her maps and pens and start folding, measuring, marking, fighting urges to grab dad’s tufts of hair, to gouge out his careless eyes. Her mind was sneaking into obscure private mazes and soon we heard her argue in bed with the Manny Hitler, pleading and also refusing some swap he was demanding. One night his mental shriek echoed from that room, ordering mum to submit a Missing Person’s form written in her blood. Locked outside, we could hear his spirit enter mum as she bounced upon her bed, all choked with words that then spattered out like bullets.

I have never seen an Old Testament prophet, no, but at the sound of mum’s lamentations killed by that rasping shriek, hardly of this world, I understood at last the wracked hearts of such holy types. Adolf Hitler faces, I believed, loomed in that room’s every corner. I saw him float on lamplight as if upon his Balloon. I saw him sail a tiny Balloon right through the wireless. I saw a gigantic Hitler perch on our birchtree and press a giant moustache against her window, his flaring nose all mushed. The door opened and a streak of tears and hair ran for the bathroom.

In her flapping nightie mum tossed the contents of her chamberpot, which keened soft as a seashell.

Miss Solutions quickly finished off his column and continued reading.

One day I woke with misty oval shapes beneath my eyelids. I ached for the Balloon.

I went through to my parents’ bedroom and confessed this, but mum became hysterical and ran around screaming out for Wendy, and then for the Balloon, and then cried out love and hate for both together. She thrust her Bible in my hands and on the opened page I saw great processions of animals along roads and hills in distant countries. Above them in the sky were birds in V formations and an upside-down pyramid on whose tip there wobbled Noah’s Ark.

I raised my eyes to her. ‘But what have you all done with the Balloon?’

Mum looked away and let dad hold her.

I pulled out his old poultry papers and ledgers from the cabinets, threw them on the floor and with coloured crayons and pencils drew markings, scribbles and zigzags and knotty scrawls blurring into whooshes and other motion trails.

I sat there hunched taut as a bow, my drawings burning brightly on the floor around me. More visions surged forth and piled up and spread, the room now a country flowing with migrations of scrawled Balloons – plus other apparitions I’d no memory of drawing.

My mum couldn’t bear to watch. Dad led her from the room.

Further down:

Our pub’s barmaid Sally was wiping down our bar with a rag of silk, and as it wiped beneath my nose visions came of foreign folk staring at their walls. A thought struck me – this rag was once part of the Balloon. I snatched it from Sally and quietly asked: ‘Where did you get this?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘You daft girl, Jan. Your father brought the stuff home from Aberdeen. A roll of it’s behind the bar. We tear scraps off every day for use as rags and hankies and other things.’

I got that roll and rushed up to my room. With trembling hands I rubbed that silk, brought it to my nose and smelled… And saw folk slowly recovering from wounds in places conquered by the Nazis such as Poland and the Ukraine, all telling moving stories of their convalescence, some waving their now unneeded crutches, ripping plasters from their wounds and sores. They lived in small sad places, not unlike our village of the Shaugh, even in wartime their lives full of daily drudgery beneath low murky skies. These were forgotten villages locked deep, deep inside time, where the folk were tied fast to their little fates. They worked hard and drank a lot and smoked cheap tobacco and kept their heads down as they hummed by kiosks selling lottery tickets and magazines. Sometimes they wrote long complaining letters to God and then put them in the post, thumping the letterboxes to make sure they were awake. In their dreams gulls flew off with the letters in their beaks…

I blazed with soft joy. This fabric was indeed from the Balloon, the holy original, however torn and tattered. When that night I placed it in my bedside drawer, covering it with clothes, it felt like putting the moon itself to bed.

And later:

I pushed mum away and pointed at the oval of fiery blue floating through the parlour air, bright flecks swirling around inside it. Our curtains were on fire, it looked like, lit up by the oval on its way inside. It turned blood-red and grew veins and swelled to bursting point, something inside trying to free itself with a whine and then a piercing scream. With outstretched arms and fingers I pointed: ‘Shoot it from the air and free our Wendy. Shoot it down.’

Mum looked where my fingers pointed. ‘Shoot what down?’

‘The Balloon.’

She approached me shaking her head and said, ‘There are many, many hot air balloons in this world, love. The German Balloon was just a myth of war. We believed in it during wartime, believed strongly, and this was as it should be. But in peacetime such things should no longer be taken seriously. Let’s get you to bed.’

…

Miss Solutions went home to his flat in a taxi. The walls there were bare except for an ivory statue of himself hanging opposite the foot of his bed, a present from a sculptor he’d once dated. He’d removed the figure from the cross she’d fastened it to and nailed it to the wall with large spikes. But the effect he wanted had eluded him. Instead of writhing the figure remained calmly decorative.

In bed he read a few pages of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, ending with these thoughts of the eighteen-year-old Hal Incandenza:

We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté.

It was an impressive message. If he stole it and sneaked it into his agony aunt column, his worklife would surely go from strength to strength. The column would be taken up by the Record’s big sister paper the Daily Mirror and the whole of Britain and then the Western world would drop the face-eating mask of hip cynicism. The Kingdom of Heaven would arrive and Miss Solutions would have fame and wealth and women and sit soberly on the right hand of the Lamb…

His father had been a minister, and aged twelve Miss Solutions discovered that something stirred in him when he shouted the name of Christ. He had played with this thing but never allowed it to come fully alive. ‘Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ. Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ,’ he’d chant, but the moment the thing started to uncoil in his brain he’d become scared and stop. Then a few years later he’d tried on the mask of jaded irony, etc… He now knew what that thing had been — hysteria, a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors where the dead world takes on a semblance of life. And how dead the world was…

He read the Balloon letter yet again from start to finish. John had told him that evening of a Jan Teasdale, their paper’s agony aunt Miss Lonelyhearts in the 1960s, who’d quit after receiving letters about goings-on – burials, lice, horses, Standing Stones, other events Jan would not divulge — in the Shaugh up in Morayshire when she was young. John had then toasted her memory and allowed Miss Solutions to talk for once.

The Tausendjährigerheißluftballon meant little to Miss Solutions now – old films and newsreels, the occasional reference in his paper – though he’d spent months building an Airfix model of it when he was eight or nine. He read the letter’s final paragraphs again, put it aside and slept.

A dream followed in which he found himself onstage as a magician who did tricks with doorknobs. At his command they bled, flowered, spoke. Then he tried to lead his audience in prayer, his voice that of a conductor calling stations:

‘Oh Lord, we are not of those who wash in wine, water, urine, lice, vinegar, fire, oil, bay rum, milk, brandy, or boric acid. Oh Lord, we are of those who wash solely in the Balloon of the Lamb.’

Blood of the Lamb, Miss Solutions corrected his dreaming self.

The scene of the dream switched to his old journalism college. With Steve Garvey and Jude Hume he’d been drunkenly arguing about solipsism all night – pub, club, house party, hardly noticing the girls — and they were now on the way to a co-operative Spar for some early morning cider.

The sun and the smell of vegetable birth renewed their drunkenness. They bought four litres of white cider and wandered to the farmers’ market where they stopped to play with some lambs. Jude suggested buying one to roast over a fire in the woods. Miss Solutions agreed on condition that they first sacrifice it. After a long haggle the youngest lamb was bought, a little stiff-legged thing, all head.

They paraded it through the market, Miss Solutions in front carrying his penknife, Steve following with the lamb and then Jude with the cider bottles. As they marched they sang a pornographic version of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’

Halfway up a hill they found a rock and covered it with daisies and buttercups. They laid the lamb among the flowers. Miss Solutions was elected priest. While Steve and Jude held the lamb Miss Solutions crouched over it and they all began to chant, ‘Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ. Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ.’

When they’d worked themselves into a frenzy he brought the knife down hard but only made a flesh wound. He raised the knife again but this time the lamb’s struggles made him miss altogether. The penknife broke on the altar. Steve and Jude pulled the animal’s head back for him to saw at its throat, but only a small piece of blade remained in the handle and he was unable to cut through the matted wool. Their hands were covered with slimy blood and the lamb slipped free and crawled off into the underbrush.

Something passed before the sun and the altar rock turned palest blue, the scene gathering itself for some new violence. They bolted down the hill till they reached a meadow and fell exhausted in the grass.

Miss Solutions begged them to go back and put the lamb out of its misery. They refused to go. He went back alone and found it under a bush. He crushed its head with a stone and left the carcass to the flies that swarmed around the bloody altar flowers.

…

Did the Balloon really resurrect itself? Did it really shed blood on Aberdeen? These are not simple questions, no. Certain events occur without what might be called precision. They are too large to be contained by the world of facts, their occurrence partly an attempt to find out if this world can bear them, wary as they are that mere realisation may strip them of integrity. Think of all those strange gaps in the history of the human race, those Tunguskas and Marie Celestes, weird historical stigmata that come to pass and then quickly fade away.

Normal events are strung along time like pearls upon a necklace — they have their causes and their effects, knocking into one another and forming all our stories. But what about those events that occur when time’s necklace can take no more, and are left hanging in the air, causeless and effectless?

Well, believe it or not, my friend, time has many parallel tracks, and the fact is that down certain secret tracks these miraculous events await us. We should cherish these mysterious stations through which each life must pass. We should collect them like shards of broken mirror or splinters of the Cross. Miss Solutions: let us pool our imaginations and piece by piece help rebuild the transcendental history of these groggy lands.

Spooked by its challenge to our comforts and our sloth, we have been too keen to doubt or deride the transcendental. Nevertheless, you of all people know that the transcendental is. We feel its cool fire on our tongues and the fiery ice of its breath upon our cheeks.

Are we ready yet to rebuild our history? For God’s sake then – let’s shut up and embark.

…

PART I

1: Transplanting

………

Wild weather it was that January of 1933 and the night smoring with sleet when Ken and Wilma Uath crossed their family and gear from Echt and down into the Shaugh. Twice the great carts laired in drifts before the ascent of the hills faced the reluctant horses. Darkness came down with weariness below it and Ken looked over at Wilma in her nook in the leading cart where she sat with deaf Jan at the breast, Wilma’s skin bare and cold and white and a strand of her rust-gold hair draped down from the darkness about her face into the light of the swinging lantern. ’We’d better loosen up at Aberlour,’ said Ken, ‘and not try the hills this night.’

But Wilma swore at that, ‘Think we’re made of silver to put up the night at Aberlour?’ and she sighed and held off Jan, and the milk dripped creamily from the soft sweet lips of her.

‘No,’ Ken answered, ‘but maybe we’ll lair again and all die of the night.’

Maybe she feared that herself, Wilma, and her rage was her worriment with the night, but she’d no time to reply for a great bellowing arose by the winding scurry of peat moss that lined the road beneath the dying moon. Old horse Bod had halted there, tail to the wind, refusing to pull his cart any longer into the hills and the sting of the sleet, little Wendy Uath by his side wailing at the beast that had loved his life in the haughs of Echt, while north there across the uncouthy hills was a world cold and unchancy.

Wilma dropped the tarpaulin edge that shielded furnishings and gear good and plentiful enough, and leaving Jan gurgling on her back she ran past the head of Bod. There she slapped Wendy and cried, ’Have you no sense, brat?’ and uncoiled from her hand the length of hide that served her as a whip. Its crackle snarled down through the sting of sleet and the hair rose in long serrations across Bod’s back, and in a minute he neighed and fell to a trot. The other horse Hide followed after, slipping and sprawling with their cloven hooves, the reek of their dung sharp and bitter in the sleet smore of the night.

So, creaking and creaking, and the shelvins skirling under the weight of their loads, the family passed that danger point and the carts plodded into motion again, the first with its hooded light and house gear and hens and pickled chicklets born on their old farm. In the next cart were provisions and equipment for the grocer’s they’d soon open in the Shaugh, potatoes and flour and sugar and bags of tools and implements and graips and forks fast tied with esparto twine, and dairy things and a turnip machine with teeth that cut as a guillotine cuts. Head down to the wind and her coat mottled with sleet went Hide leading the second cart, the load a nothing to her, fine and clean and sonsy she marched, following Wilma’s cart, in this half-mile and that Ken crying, ‘Fine, Hide, fine. Come on then, lass.’

Wendy had now joined James in this second cart, four and ten years old, only, and the road wound up and up, straight and unwavering, and sometimes they hiddled in the lithe and the sleet sang past to left and right, white and glowing in the darkness. And sometimes they clambered down from the shelvins above the drag of Hide and ran beside her, one on either side, and stamped for warmth and saw the whin bushes climb black the white hills the blink of lights across the moors where folk lay happed and warm. But then the upwards road would swerve right or left this steep ledges and the wind would be at them again and they’d gasp and climb back to the shelvins, James with freezing feet and hands and the sleet like needles in his face, wee Wendy in worse case, colder and colder at every turn, numb and unhappy, knees and thighs and stomach and chest aching so that nearly she wept. She willed the horse onward and whispered the name Jehovah.

She had heard the word in the Roman kirk of Echt where the pious sit with shaven chins and the offering bags between their knees, waiting the sermon to end and to march with slow sleeked steps up through the pews, hearing the penny of penury clink shy-like against the pound of affluence. And Wendy one Sunday heard fall from the priest’s lips the word Jehovah and treasured it for the bonniness of it, waiting till she might find a thing to fit this word, well-shaped and hantled and grand.

Now had been in summer, the time of fleas and glegs and golochs in the fields, when cattle would start up from a drowsy cud-chewing to a wild and feckless racing, the glegs biting through their hair and hide to the skin below the tail-rump. Echt was alive that summer with the thunder of herds, the crackle of breaking gates, and last with the groans of Ken’s horse Benny caught in a swither of Highland steers and his belly ripped open with the stroke of a great curved horn.

Ken saw the happening from high in a park where the hay was cut and he swore out and started to run, fleetly as was his way, down to the groaning shambles that was Benny. And as he ran he picked up a scythe blade and as he neared the horse he unhooked the blade and Benny groaned and turned away his neck and Ken thrust the scythe at it, sawing till the horse was dead.

That had been the end of Benny, and so Ken tramped into Elgin and bought a new horse, Hide, riding her home to the raptured starings of young Wendy. And under James’s supervision Wendy watered the horse in Benny’s old stall and gave her hay and corn and reached up and set to grooming her fine strong legs. Hide stood eating her corn as working with smooth strokes Wendy groomed till she finished the front legs, and then there flashed in her mind the fine word she had treasured. ’Nice to meet you, Jehovah!’ she cried smiting the horse roundly. But then her mother heard the word out across the yard and came rushing from the kitchen, wiping oatcake from her chin –

She should not have stricken Wendy as she did, for the girl fell around the horse’s feet. Hide turned her head, dripping corn, and looked down at Wendy’s bloody face and then swished her tail and James patted her calm and she stood stock still. Wilma dragged her daughter aside and picked up brush and curry-comb saying, ’Whoa, Hide,’ and went on with the grooming.

‘And mind, Wendy, if I ever hear you again take your Maker’s name in vain, I’ll libb you. Mind that. Libb you like a lamb.’

So Wendy had hated her mother a little and whispered that hate as she lay in the loft room high in their old house as the moon came sailing over and the peewits wheeped above the lands of Echt…

And now she fell to a drowse through the freezing sleet and rain, and a strange dream came to her as the horses plodded on through the ancient hills. For out of the night ahead came running a man and nobody else paid heed to him, though the horses in Wendy’s dream shied and snorted. And as the manny came up he wrung his hands, a foreign-looking creature in a long black coat he was, and he sang in a foreign accent about a yellow submarine… and went by into the smore of the sleet-storm, and queer dreaming that was of Wendy’s.

By then they’d cleared the hills and below was Millbuies and beyond that through the sleet, down across the laich of Moray, the twinkling points of light that shone from the houses of the Shaugh.

…

The egg

………….

Ach, our awful chickens. They hatched, lived for weeks as small fluffy things, became hideously naked, ate quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of mum and dad’s brow, developed diseases called pip and cholera, stood looking with stupid eyes at the weak sun, sickened and died. A few, meant to serve God’s mysterious ends, fought their way through to life as hens and then laid more eggs, and so the whole sorry cycle was repeated.

My parents had rented ten acres of stony land in Echt and embarked on the nightmare of raising these wee creatures. Dad grew quieter and more absent than ever. Mum grew angry and depressed, a small bald patch appearing in her hair that I sometimes imagined was a clearing in the local woodlands where life was good and eggless. After years of wasting money on Professor Bidlow’s White Wonder Cholera Cure and suchlike, of worry with incubators that did not hatch, of balls of fluff that passed on into semi-naked pullethood and then into dead hen-hood, we packed our belongings on carts and drove down Griggs’s Road and across the hills in rain and sleet, and then down into the Shaugh — a sad-looking lot, we must have been, a bit like refugees: my mum and dad, my older brother James, me Wendy and my baby sister Jan, who was deaf for her first few years. Our carts had been borrowed from Albert Griggs and on the one mum drove, above the pile of beds, tables and boxes was a crate of live chickens. Beside mum was her greatest treasure. I will tell you of that.

On our farm grotesques were sometimes born: four legs, two pairs of wings, or perhaps two heads. The things did not live — ‘Back they go to the hand of their Maker that briefly trembled,’ mum said, though she often spoke of taking a five-legged hen or a two-headed rooster to county fairs and charging folk to see them. This explained the monstrous things pickled in glass bottles and then stored in the box beside her on the cart. When we arrived they were placed on a prominent shelf in our new family business, a grocer’s where folk could also grab a bite to eat. People liked to look at strange and wonderful things as they ate, mum believed.

The shop should remain open at night, she’d decided, to catch passengers off the last train at ten o’clock. Dad slept at night, mum in daytime, and one long night she decided that their failures to date were due to a lack of cheerfulness, that a liking for their entertaining company should spring up in the breasts of Shaugh folk and bring happy groups singing in the shop door. This idea then invaded our house, forced smiles and laughs suddenly replacing any glumness. Mum’s cheerfulness became near feverish.

Late one night I was woken by a roar of anger. I woke Jan and we went through to our parents’ bedroom, followed soon by James. The front door of our shop banged shut and soon mum appeared before us holding an egg with a half-mad light in her eyes. I expected her to throw the egg at dad but she laid it on the bedside table and dropped onto her knees. She cried like a young girl and for some reason Jan and I soon cried as well, our joint wails filling that little bedroom. Mum’s bald spot glowed soft in the lamplight. Here’s what had occurred downstairs.

Joe Kann had come into our empty shop to wait for his father off the final train. He ordered a cup of tea and read his paper sitting at the counter, and for a while mum gazed at him, suffering from stage fright. ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘you have heard of Christopher Columbus, eeh? That Christopher Columbus was a cheat. He boasted of making an egg stand on its end and then went and sliced that end right off.’

She seemed beside herself at the sneakiness of Christopher Columbus, saying it was wrong to praise him when he was just a slimy cheat. She walked up and down rolling an egg between her palms and mumbling about the effect on it of her body’s electricity. Without breaking its shell, she said, and by rolling it in her palms, she could stand the egg on its end, for her hands’ warmth and the gentle rolling motion gave the egg a new centre of gravity. Joe Kann seemed mildly interested. ‘I have handled thousands of eggs,’ mum said. ‘No one knows more about eggs than I do.’

She stood the egg on the counter and it fell on its side. She tried the trick over and over, each time rolling the egg between her palms and speaking of the wonders of electricity and the laws of gravity. When she finally succeeded in making the egg stand up she found that Joe was no longer watching, and by the time he was watching the egg was on its side again.

Mum took the bottles of grotesques down from the shelf. ‘Fancy having seven legs and two heads like this wee fellow?’ she asked, smiling down at the most amazing of her treasures.

Joe was made a little ill by the sight of the terribly deformed bird and got up to go. Mum grabbed his arm and forced him to sit again, offering him a cigar on the house and then filling a pan with vinegar and announcing a new trick. ‘I will heat this egg in this pan of vinegar,’ she said. ‘Then I will put it through the neck of a bottle without breaking the shell. When the egg is inside the bottle it will resume its normal shape and the shell will become hard again. Then I will give you the bottle. You can take it about with you wherever you go. Folk will want to know how you got the egg in the bottle. Don’t tell them. Keep them guessing. That is the way to have fun with this trick.’

After a bath in hot vinegar the shell of the egg indeed softened and mum carried it on a spoon to the counter and got an empty bottle. Then with the trick about to be completed they heard the train arrive. Joe made for the door. Mum picked up the egg. It broke and its contents spurted. Joe Kann laughed and a roar rose from mum’s throat. She grabbed another egg and threw it, just missing Joe’s head as he dodged through the door.

She then tramped through to her bedroom with an egg, as I have explained, maybe with some idea of destroying it, of destroying all eggs. Instead she laid the egg on the table and dropped to her knees.

Later that night I crept back to my parents’ room and looked at that egg, wondering why eggs had to be and why from the egg came the hen who again laid the egg. The question got into my blood, I suppose, because I am the daughter of my mother. Something cracked inside her that night, I think, though she and dad now own a busy pub where her display of grotesques is a great success.

The problem of hens and eggs remains unsolved for me, and that is proof of the complete and final triumph of the egg — at least as far as my family is concerned.

…

2: The war was on, and not a haver only

………………………….

George Somor came into the Clavie pub on his crutch, patted Jan and Wendy’s heads and said, ‘Aye, my bonny nieces.’ And he told the pub’s owner Ken Uath that he might have to fight for these daughters of his ere this war was over and wasn’t that a dreadful state of affairs? The Germans had broken through, he said, and were raping women and braining bairns all over Poland and it was all awful, awful bad. And Wilma said, ‘Who’ll win, then?’ and George sighed and shook his head and said if the Germans did there’d be an end of both peace and progress forever, for there wouldn’t be safety in the world again till the Nazis — awful German brutes, the very worst — were beaten back to the hell they came from. And to top it all, the professional football was cancelled till the war was over, the papers said, leaving George bereft of his mighty Glasgow Rangers. But Ken just yawned and said, ‘Oh, to hell with the Germans and the Huns both. Lighten up for once, Georgie. Are you going to the Shaugh’s match the morn?’

But the match was just as bad for Ken, for nobody spoke of anything but the warring. His Irish pal Paul Molven was there, and Alec Mutch, a fair drink in their bellies, both, and swore they’d enlist the morn were they younger, by God. George cried he might indeed enlist, half crippled though he be, and to hell with staying at home among cowards and reading gas meters. And Ken cried to him, ‘George, you can hardly walk,’ and George said, ‘Feek it, man, I can lift a rifle.’ That was just the drink speaking, no doubt, but the very next week Ken’s son James joined up with the Gordon Highlanders, one of the first to go from the Shaugh. Wilma and the girls were fair distraught but Ken just thought James daft, he said, showing off and looking for a holiday, just, for there was no use coming to such stir as that when the war hardly mattered to men of Moray. Though the Northern Scot said it should, of course, and right fierce were that paper’s words. ‘Man,’ said Ken, ‘some of those editors are right rough creatures, eeh? I pity the Germans if those leader writers had their hands on them.’ And folk just shook their heads, not understanding Ken’s larking, and agreed that the newspaper billies were ill to run counter.

So the war brought such speak and stir as the Shaugh hadn’t known since the last one. Then funny rumours went round about a sermon of Father Stune’s, and though he couldn’t bear with kirks or kirkiness Ken broke his habit and put on his best suit and went down to Mass next Sabbath with his wife and girls.

There was a fell crowd there, more than last week’s, and the place was all on edge to hear what Father Stune would say. Nothing unusual as he gave out the hymn and the prayer but then he took a text about Babylon’s corruptions, Jan couldn’t remember which, saying they’d been very coarse there. And then he said that God was sending the Germans for a curse and a plague on the world because of its sins, for it had grown wicked and lustful and God’s anger was now loosed as in the days of Attila. How long the war would rage, to what deeps of pain their punishments would go, only God and His anger might know, but from the chastisement by blood and fire the nations might rise anew, Scotland not the least in its ancient health and humility to tread again the path to grace.

And up rose old Minclair of the Netherhill, all the congregation watching, and he went step-stepping slow down the aisle and out. No, he wouldn’t listen to this brute defending the German tinks and some friend that he called Attila. Hardly had he risen when Gus McKechnie rose too and went off home, and Paul Devine half made to rise but his wife pulled him down, making him look daft as a half-throttled turkey. The priest turned red and then white and rattled off the blessing as though it was a cursing. Outside in the kirkyard some gathered to shout abuse as he left the kirk, but others shooed them away, and he threaded the throngs like a futret with kittle and made for his house and padlocked the gate.

Ken didn’t care one way or the other, as he told to Wilma on the way home. The daft priest might be right or be wrong with his Babylons and whores and might slobber Attila every night of the week, but folk had their crops all in and cash for Clavie drinks and that was all that mattered. And though she was devout and also fair concerned for James, Wilma murmured to her husband, ‘Yes, what a blither about a war, isn’t it, love? ‘

So they were douce and safe and blithe in the Shaugh as yet, though the Uath home above the Clavie was unco quiet without James the chief chuckler of the house. His lass Kirsty McStrach came up on a visit and said James would never come back, for those Germans were so bloodthirsty they’d kill and eat every British soldier in their path. And to comfort her Ken said, ‘Maybe they are not so bloodthirsty as the papers say,’ and at that Kirsty jumped up and said, ‘So, you’re another damned pro-German as well, are you? There’s over-many of your kind in the Shaugh.’ Jan and Wendy stared on at this scene clean amazed, but out Kirsty went running, and that was the last they saw of her for weeks.

Whether or not Ken was pro-German, there could be never a doubt now about goodly Father Stune. For the next Sabbath day the congregation got all the patriotic fury they could wish, the priest saying that Adolf Hitler was the Antichrist and that until this foul evil had been swept from the earth there could be neither peace nor progress again. But Ken, when he heard the story — no kirk for him a second week — thought it more likely that he weighed losing his kirk and collections a feeking sight worse than any German that was ever clecked.

For, and it grew a fair scandal all through the Shaugh, Ken Uath didn’t hold with the war. He said it was a lot of damned nonsense and that those that wanted to fight, the M.P.s and bankers and editors and muckers, should all be locked up in a pleiter of a park and made to gut each other with graips. There’d be no great loss to the world and a fine bit sight it would make for decent sorts to look at. For folk with sense to take part in the soss and yammer about King and country was just plain hysteria. Not that the Germans weren’t as bad, no, for they were all tarred with the same black brush.

And folk said that Ken couldn’t speak like that, the big brute, without being in his heart pro-German, as the papers called it. But the whole stour might well have blown over, for Ken was a well-respected billy now and you needn’t heed his blithers, if Father Stune hadn’t taken to the business and preached a sermon about tinks and traitors and a lot he preached about a jade called Jael — fell uncanny she’d been, right holy though, and she’d killed a childe Sisera that she couldn’t thole because of his coarseness to the Jews. And Father Stune boomed out she was fine, a patriot and a light unto Israel she’d been, and we in like manner must act the same, for right here in our midst are traitors that have sided with the Antichrist and shame on the Shaugh that it should be so.

Folk listened to the sermon and got fair excited, and after dinner that Sabbath a horde of billies went round to the Clavie, and there was Ken sitting outside in the sun smoking a fag and reading in a book, coarse stite about there being no God and God knows what else. And Ian Stobho cried out, ‘Here’s the Führer’s crony, let’s duck the mucker!’ and the lot made a run at Ken and got him gripped. Ken thought it some joke at first but then they started to haul him over to the mill-course where the water was sparkling and raging from a good bit spate in the hills.

Ian Stobho larked about Ken once being feeked by tinks and also about his Wilma’s eggs, and that fair raged Ken and he gave a great roar and kicked Ian right in the tender parts, and Ian he screamed like a fell stuck pig, and folk laughed right well when they heard that. The next thing that happened was that Ken got a hand free and gave Russell Tettle, a meikle man from Burnside, a clout in the ear that stretched him flat. And then Ken leapt inside the Clavie and barred the door.

His tormentors might have gone home then if it hadn’t been that Russell Tettle picked up a great stone and crack! through a Clavie window it went with a bang and splinter inside.

Next minute the door flung open and there was Ken with a shotgun in his hand and his face fair grey with rage. He cried out, ‘Poke fun at Wilma’s eggs and smash my window, would you, scum?’ and the gun’s pellets sang past the nearest billy’s head and they all turned and scattered. Ken gave chase on foot, cursing Wilma for forcing him to sell his horses, and his gun went bang and bang again and you could hear it all over the Shaugh.

Folk ran to their doors, for they thought the Germans had landed. Returning from Bible study with the Wifie Clail, Jan and Wendy shaded their eyes and saw the running figures fanning out from the Clavie. And behind ran another figure that stopped now and then, and a puff of smoke went up at each stopping, and there came another bang. The fleeers ran in an awful rout and the sisters saw them vanish into the coming of the evening mist, their own father scudding and shooting on and on in chase.

So that was the result of Father Stune’s sermon, then, the Shaugh fair seething with the news for days, all about the attack on the Clavie and how Ken had chased the childes that came up against him, and how some could hardly sit, so full were their bums with pellets. And some said that if Ken was willing to fight like that for his windows he should go off like his son and fight those Nazis. But the Lairdie Sir Lawrence Gortmacall liked Ken fine and sided with him, saying it was a damn poor show for Scotland if her patriots were such as had run from Ken’s pellets.

The odd Clavie drinker switched his business to the Stobhie Inn, but folk as a rule were hardly so daft as to shun the best pints around just because Ken believed not all Germans were bloodthirsty tinks. And maybe, you know, there was something in what the man said, coarse devils though most of the Germans were.

…

The teachers said Jan was a clever one and so Wilma said she might have the education she needed if she stuck to her lessons. In time she might come out as a teacher and do her parents credit, and that was fine of her mother, something whispered in Jan, though something else laughed at it with a blithe sweet face. But more and more she turned from that laughter, resolute, liking to hear of the things in the histories and geographies, seldom thinking them funny, strange names and words like Too-long and Too-loose that convulsed the classes. Four prizes in four years she had.

But one book she’d thought fair daft, Alice in Wonderland it was, and there was no sense in it at all. But What Katy Did at School she loved and wished like Katy she lived at a school, not tramping back in the spleiter of a winter night to help clean and set the pub, with the smell of the stale beer rising feuch! in her face. As for Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes, some bits were good and some fair wearying. He had a right bonny wife, Rienzi, and was sleeping with her, her white arms round his neck, when the Romans came to kill him. And given her by her Uncle George at Christmas was The Humours of Scottish Life and if that stite was fun, she thought by Boxing Day, then she must have been born fierce dull. These were all the books in her room but for the Bible her granny McKinzie had left her, inscribed To my dawtie Jan: Trust in God and do the right.

So that was Jan and her reading and schooling, so two Jans there were that fought for her and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning and books were brave and fine one day, and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, crying in the heart of you with the smell of the earth coming through your open window, and almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies. You saw them in firelight, your father’s and mother’s faces, before the lamps lit up, faces dear and close to you, and you wanted the words they’d known and used, forgotten in the far-off youngness of their lives, Scots words to tell to your heart, how they wrung it and held it, the toil of their days and unendingly their fight. But then that passed from you and you were back to the English words so sharp and clean and true — for a while, till they slid so smooth from your throat you knew they could never say much that was worth the saying at all.

…

On the war went, rumbling its rumours like the thunder of summer beyond the hills. But nobody knew now when it would finish, not even James Uath come home all the way from Burma. In the orra-looking uniform he came, with two stripes sewn on his arm, for he was now a corporal. He entered the Clavie with that prowl-like walk of his, crying through the doorway, ‘Aye, folks, are you in?’

Jan and Wendy gave loud cries to see him, James himself, so altered you’d hardly believe it, his fine eyes queered and strained somehow and those cheeks that liked to laugh so clapped in awful thin. Soon the barmaid Sally Jaka was pouring him a dram and he paced before the fire and spoke up about things in the war in his slow-slow-fast way, making whistling and hissing and booming noises like he’d heard on far-off battlefields, concluding that the whole show wasn’t so very bad if it hadn’t been for the flaming lice. God, he said, it was good to be home and not having to reach up his shoulders to get at some such devil sucking. And he gave a great laugh, his old laugh queerly crippled as it was, and Wendy asked what he thought of the Japs, were they truly coarse? Good question, good question, but he was damned if he knew, said James, for he’d hardly seen one alive, though a body or so you saw now and then, so awful green, but mainly in those foreign parts you just lay about and had a burrow and a keek at the soil they were made of. And man, it was dreadful land and the Burmese were no good as farmers at all, they just pleitered and pottered in fields that you’d hardly use to grow a pea on. Damned poor folk you’d to fight for, them, meaner than dirt and not half so sweet.

The first change James noticed was the next morning. He rose and lit a fag and gave a great roar so that his family came running asking, ‘What is it, James, a wound?’ They found him pacing before his window, cursing himself black in the face he was, and asking how long had this been going on? So they looked out and saw it was only the felled trees by Peesie’s Knapp that vexed him. It made a gey difference to the look-out, true, but fine for the village the woodmen had been, and they’d lodged at the Clavie and paid high for their board. But James cried out, ‘To hell with their board, the bastards, they’re ruining my feeking village!’ And he pulled on his trousers and boots and would fair have run over the park and been at the woodmen, but Ken caught at his sark and cried, ‘Have you gone mad with killing Japs?’

And James asked him why he hadn’t said in letters that the trees were cut. It would lay this part of the village open to the north-east winds now, said he, and Ken answered up that they’d be no worse than the other folk, would they, for many of the Shaugh’s trees were due to fall. And James ignored that and said he’d often minded them out there in Burma, the Shaugh’s trees, so bonny they were and thick and grave, fine shelter and lithe for farm hands and bairns and lovers. Nor more than that would he say and it seemed then to Jan that he became quiet and queer and not so ready with the funnies for the remainder of his leave, and wasn’t it daft to let a bit wood go vex him like that.

The last night he walked with his sisters to Urquart and nothing but the woods and their fate could draw his eyes. They came upon the woodmen, teams and teams of them hard at work on the trees that ran up the high brae, sparing nothing but the yews. And up above Upperhill they had cut down the larch that lay back of Pooky’s. The trustees had got awful high prices, said the woodmen, for the wood was wanted for aeroplanes and such-like things. James found the factor and the creature peeked at him through his horn-rimmed glasses and said the Government would replant all the trees when the war was won. And James said that would console him a feeking lot, sure, if he’d the chance of living two hundred years and seeing the woods grow up as some decent shelter for beast and man, but he doubted he’d not last so long. Then the factor said they must all do their bit at a sacrifice, and James asked, ‘And what sacrifices have you made, you scrawny little mucker? Eeh?’

That wasn’t fair to the factor, Jan thought, for he was a decent childe and not fit to fight, but James sometimes got so mad and righteous he hardly knew what he said and didn’t much care either. So when they fell in with the Lairdie things went no better, for James knew the Lairdie had grown even bigger in the mind and pouch in wartime. He headed the Home Guard, for one thing, and folk said felled trees were earning him silver like a dung-heap sourocks, buying him another piano and limousine. Meeting them on the road he said, ‘Ow, it’s the three young Uaths. Are you home for long, James?’ and, ‘I’ll bet you want back to the front line, eh?’ And James said he’d be wrong in the betting, for did you ever hear tell of a woman’s that wanted a baby put back in her womb? And the Lairdie gowked and said nothing, and James said, ‘And neither have I.’

And to that the Lairdie cried, ‘Front-line drunk, coward, demoraliser, and from what I hear, cannibal of his fallen comrades. Verily the lovely Wilma never wished that back in her womb. Might find itself eaten up!

‘And which of my lovelies have nabbed your heart of late?’ he cried to Wendy, referring to his racehorses, which she watched at his training track many mornings before school. ‘Sunstreak, sir,’ said Wendy quietly, and then the Lairdie turned to Jan and cried that she looked gey serious, and asked what was on her mind.

‘Heaven,’ she said, to which the Lairdie asked her, ‘Are you tired of this world?’ to which Jan shook her head. ‘In heaven you will still be bullied,’ the Lairdie cried. ‘You will not be rewarded for earthly virtue. There is no justice. Tell me, would you not like to kill your bullies?’ And to this young Jan declared, ‘Killing is forbidden.’ And at this point James came in with, ‘Mind your words, sir.’

‘Embrace all this world has to offer,’ the Lairdie cried. ‘Develop guile, with which David smote Goliath. With cunning you can conquer. Shed others’ blood, like your dear brother has learned to do. Without blood and corpses and scattered limbs there is no triumph. To triumph you must dive neatly into burns of blood. Become hale and sleek. Do gymnastics every morning.’

And with that the Lairdie went galumphing down the road, and more strange talk awaited the Uaths, for as soon as they held through the parks they came bang on their Auntie Nell, the daftie standing right mid-way of the turnip-field, wearing her usual dark blue shabby dress and a straw hat too big for her head. Her eyes were fixed on the workmen felling trees, and God but she might have been staring there for days by the look of her. ‘Aye then, Nell,’ they cried out hardly expecting a reply, but Nell turned and said, ‘Ah, my bonny nieces and nephew. So the mills of God still grind, dears?’

But before they could answer she cried, ‘Herr Adolf Hitler’s God is a weird shaggy thing he called down to ride atop his Panzers. Herr Adolf Hitler dropped gas to make us believe we’re Stans and our kin are Ollies, though it didn’t really work, not on local sorts, though the pigeons aren’t half fidgeting and eyeing one another funny.’

‘He’s no pal of the British Empire,’ said James, nodding, nodding.

‘After a sore incident with a mousetrap,’ their auntie continued, ‘Herr Adolf Hitler banned the colour purple. But the ban wasn’t enforced completely, for purple’s there in rainbows, eeh?

‘One day they gather in their Olympic Stadium, those slimy Huns,’ she told them. ‘The Manny Hitler runs onto the track in raspberry-coloured tights hung with bells and his many medals, and then bolts around the track, one hand saluting and one parked upon his hip. He takes each corner smoothly with his jingling choir of bells, face sweating buckets behind its wee moustache, fearsome as a fly, unbelievably purple, shooing barking dogs that will not leave the soul alone.’

So those were the thoughts of their Auntie Nell about the German Führer. They tried for further conversation but she was not for it, and so on they walked, Jan thinking of that speak of Nell’s, real daft-like she’d thought it at first. She stopped and looked back and there was her auntie still glued to the ground and staring at the fallen trees. And Jan shivered and went on with her brother and her sister.

So they wandered their round of the Shaugh, a strange place to James now and desolate with its crash of trees and missing faces of others off to fight. And not that alone, for the folk seemed different now, he said, for into their bones the war had eaten. They were money-mad or mad with grief for somebody killed or somebody else wounded.

Bridge End they found with James’s pal Stephen Molven away off selling sheep in Elgin. But the Wifie Molven was there and she sat and smoked and told them Stephen was a fell patriot, for he’d enrolled in the Lairdie’s Home Guard and every other night went out for a drill, a sight for sore eyes, mind you, them prancing about like dogs with diarrhœa. She asked James when the war would end and he said God only knows. ‘And you still believe in Him?’ she asked, and James was real shocked, for a man might have his doubts but you expected women to be different, them that needed most support in this hard world.

At Pooky’s they knocked but got feint the answer and Wendy told James that wasn’t surprising for old Pooky had grown awful queer and claimed he heard men tramping the roads in the dark chill hours, Norse dead out of the earth that had come to work ill on Scotland. And if you but looked quick between the bending of a bough or the bar of a gate, you’d see a white Norse face distorted still in his last red pain. And that was queer fancying from Pooky, you might say.

As they approached the Clavie Ken came out to meet them, and then Wilma made them all their supper and the men drammed and argued far into the night, Jan and Wendy allowed to coory up late and listen. And James went streaking about as the Manny Hitler in his jingling tights, Wilma laughing hard and then asking Ken why he couldn’t make her laugh like that. And Ken cried, ‘What, run about my pub as Adolf Hitler in jingling tights?’ and Wilma said indeed, and Ken asked her even louder and Wilma said indeed.

And then she had a dram as well and got pogled awful quick and told them all again of how like James she’d bade her mother and father goodbye when she set out in 1911 to for first fee, no shoes on her feet even then, for she wouldn’t wear shoes till she was twelve years old. It wasn’t a real fee, that first one, and she’d done little more than scare the crows from the fields of an old bit farmer and sleep in a garret, but fine she’d liked it, and she’d never forget the singing of the winds in those fields or the daft crying of the lambs she herded or the feel of the earth below her toes. ’There are better things than your studies or books,’ she turned and said to Jan and Wendy. ‘There’s the countryside your own, and you its, in the days when you’re neither bairn nor woman.’

And she’d worked and ran the parks those days and had been blithe and sweet, her bairns well knew, and they saw her again against the sun as though you peered far down a tunnel of the years. She’d stayed long on her second fee, seven or eight years she was there till the day she met a certain Ken Uath at a ploughing-match at Borough Briggs. And often her bairns had heard of that, that it was nothing grand of a match, the horses poor and the ploughing worse and a coarse cold wind was soughing across the rigs and half she’d made up her mind to go on home.

Then it came the turn of a brave young childe with a red head and the swackest legs you ever saw, his horses laced in ribbons, bonny and trig, and as soon as he began the drill you saw he’d carry off the prize. And carry it off he did, young Ken Uath, and not that alone, for as he rode from the park on one horse he patted the back of the other and cried to Wilma with a glint from his dour sharp eye, ’Jump up if you like.’ And she cried back that she liked fine and caught the horse by its mane and swung herself there till Ken’s hand caught her and set her steady on the back of the beast. So out from the ploughing match the two of them rode together, Wilma sitting upon the hair of her and laughing up into the dour keen face that was Ken’s.

And that had been beginning of their lives together and in two-three years they’d chaved and saved enough for gear and furnishings and were married at last, and soon James was born, and a few years later Wendy, and rented that farm in Echt, Cairndhu it was called, mind? And they’d sat themselves down there raising chickens, and winters or springs, summers or harvests, life ploughed its rigs and drove its teams but still the glint of her husband’s eyes could please her, she said and sipped her dram, and James and Wendy minded how they’d heard their parents cry out at night as they went at each other. Wilma’s face grew queer and questioning then, her eyes seeming lost back in those early years she’d never see again, and she turned to Ken and cried, ‘And you told me Two of a family’s fine, love. There’ll be no more.’ And Ken turned to her and cried, ‘And you thundered back in that way you have, Fine? We’ll have what God in His mercy may send to us, my manny. See you to that.’ And sure enough He soon sent them Jan.

The talk went on late and James swore he still believed the war would bring a good thing to the world, for it would end armies forever and the day of socialism at last would dawn. Aye, the common folk had seen what their guns could do and right soon they’d use them when they came back.

And Ken said, ‘Havers, havers. The common folk when they aren’t sheep are swine, James son. Uaths are exceptions, us being hens and roosters.’

And what he meant by that James didn’t know, nor had he it figured later when he snuck out and held over the moor for a look at the Standing Stones beneath the rising moon. And it was by those faintly humming Stones that a gey strange thing occurred.

The thing was this: James saw before him a halted cart, and a man leave the cart and splash something on a Standing Stone and then stand and listen to that something’s trickles. And James thought it some carter billy from the Netherhill relieving himself unseen, or so he thought. ‘Fine pints, then?’ James asked, but there wasn’t an answer and so he looked again, and no cart or man was there, and the Stones around him shone a faded blue and the peewits cried off in the distance. And James’s hackles fair stood on end, for it came on him that it was no cart he had seen but a thing of light wood or wicker-work and with no pole or axle or ponies yoked to it, and the childe that knelt had been in strange fancy gear, a long black leather cape or coat.

And James near jumped from his skin when a pheasant started under his feet with a screech and whirr and shot away into the darkness. And perhaps, he thought, it was one of the men of old time that he’d seen there, a Norseman such as seen by Pooky, or a Calgacus’ man from the Graupius battle when they fought the Romans, or perhaps it had only been the power of his father’s whisky.

…

3. Second best

……

When the racing season comes on and the Moray thoroughbreds go to the races and there is all the talk in the streets about the new colts, and folk go down to the spring meeting at Perth or to Ayr, and the men that have been down to Aintree or maybe at a meeting at Leopardstown in Ireland come home to spend a week before they start out again, and horse racing is in every breath of air — at such a times I wish that I was a horse. It’s a daft thing to say, but that’s the way I am about horses, just crazy. I can’t help it. I get it off my dad, I think, who worked as a groom when he was young, though he seldom talks of horses now. Anyway, I must tell you about what we did and let you in on what I’m talking about.

Three boys from the Shaugh and me, the only girl, we made up our minds we’d sneak in to the race meeting at our Lairdie’s tracks. I have turned fourteen and I am the oldest of us four and it was my scheme. I admit that and I talked the others into trying the scheme. There was Andrew Devine and Keith Reeback and Tom Rutton and myself, Wendy.

It was Gary McCarthy who let us in for free. Tinker sorts like Gary are all right about things like that. They won’t squeal on you. Often a settled manny you might meet, when you asked him to sneak you in like that, might appear to be all right and then go and give you away. Settled men will do that, but not a tinker. You can trust them. They are squarer with bairns. I don’t know why.

Though everyone was saying how quiet the wartime meetings were there were a lot of men around, for example my lame Uncle George and Dave Smint and Colin Kigh and many others. There were also a lot from Elgin that Keith Reeback knew but I didn’t. They were black marketeers and Keith Reeback’s father is one too. My own father runs a pub, as I have said already, but I don’t see what he’s got to do with this story. I’m puzzled. I’ll soon be a wifie and want to think straight and there’s something I saw at the race meeting I can’t figure out.

If you’ve never been crazy about thoroughbreds it’s because you’ve never been around where they are much and don’t know any better. They’re beautiful. There isn’t anything so lovely and clean and full of spunk and honest as some racehorses. On the Lairdie’s estate the horses train in the early morning. Hundreds of times I’ve got out of bed before daylight and walked to the track. Mum wouldn’t of let me go but dad always says, ‘Let her alone.’ So I got some bread out of the bread box and some butter and jam, gobbled it and went out.

There you sit on the fence with local men like Uncle George and they watch and smoke and talk. It’s early and the grass is covered with shiny dew and in another field a manny is ploughing and you know how George can complain so hard about the world that you just have to laugh. Nearly every morning a few of the Lairdie’s colts are brought out and some of the old racehorses and geldings and mares.

It brings a lump up into my throat when a horse runs. I don’t mean all horses but some. I can pick them nearly every time. It’s in my blood like in the blood of trainers. Even when they just go slop-jogging along I can tell a winner. If my throat hurts and it’s hard for me to swallow, that’s him. He’ll run like there’s no tomorrow when you let him out. If he doesn’t win every time it’ll be a wonder and because they’ve got him in a pocket behind another or he was pulled or got off bad at the post or something. If I wanted to be a gambler I could get rich. I know I could and my pals say so too. All I would have to do is to wait till that hurt comes when I see a horse and then bet every penny. That’s what I would do if I wanted to be a gambler, but I don’t.

You don’t see the kind of horse I’ve been talking about very often, but it’s nice anyway. Any thoroughbred that is sired right and out of a good mare and trained by a manny that knows how, that horse can run. If he couldn’t what would he be there for and not pulling a plough?

Well, out of the stables they come and the boys are on their backs and it’s lovely to be there. You hunch down on top of the fence and itch inside you. Everything smells lovely. Nothing smells better than manure and horses and pipes being smoked out of doors on a morning like that. It just gets you.

But about the race meeting. Not a soul said anything about us being there and everything came off just as we wanted it to, fine weather and horses and races. Then the thing happened that got me upset. Here it is.

At the meeting they saddle the horses right out in an open place under trees on a lawn as smooth and nice as all the Lairdie’s lawns. It’s very nice. The horses are sweaty and nervous and shine and the men come out and smoke cigars and look at them and the trainers are there and the owners and your heart thumps so you can hardly breathe. At the risk of being recognised and caught I went to the paddocks before every race. The three boys didn’t but I did.

On the Wednesday the Mulliford Handicap of 1942 was to be run. Middlestride was in it and Sunstreak. The weather was fine and the track fast. I could hardly sleep the night before. Both these horses are the kind it makes my throat hurt to see. Middlestride is long and looks awkward and is a gelding. He belongs to Joe Thompson, an Urquart owner who only has a half dozen horses. The Mulliford Handicap is for a mile and Middlestride can’t untrack fast. He goes away slow and is always way back at the half, then he begins to run and if the race is a mile and a quarter he’ll just eat up everything and get there.

Sunstreak is different. He is a stallion and nervous and belongs to our Lairdie. Sunstreak is like a boy you think about sometimes but never see. He is hard all over and lovely too. When you look at his head you want to kiss him. He is trained by Jerry Till who was good to me lots of times at the meeting, let me walk into the horse’s stall to look at him close and other things. There isn’t anything as sweet as that horse. He stands at the post quiet and not letting on, but he is just burning up inside. Then when the barrier goes up he is off like his name, Sunstreak. It makes you ache to see him. It hurts you. He just lays down and runs. There can’t be anything I ever saw run like him except Middlestride when he gets untracked and stretches himself.

God, I ached to see that race and those two horses run, ached and dreaded it too. I didn’t want to see either of those horses beaten. There never was a pair like that before. All the men said so. It was a fact.

Before the race I went over to the paddocks to see. I looked a last look at Middlestride, who isn’t much standing in a paddock that way, then I went to see Sunstreak.

It was his day. I knew when I saw him. I forgot all about being recognised and asked if I’d paid for my entrance and thrown out and I walked right up. No one noticed me except Uncle George.

I was standing looking at that horse and aching. In some way, I can’t tell how, I knew just how Sunstreak felt inside. He was quiet and letting them rub his legs and the Lairdie himself put the saddle on, but the horse was just a raging torrent inside. He was like the water in the Spey just before its goes plunk down a waterfall. That horse wasn’t thinking about running. He doesn’t have to think about that. He was just thinking about holding himself back till the time for the running came. I knew that. I could just in a way see right inside him. He was going to do some amazing running and I knew it. He wasn’t bragging or letting on much or prancing or making a fuss, but just waiting. I knew it and Uncle George knew. I looked up and then that manny and I looked into each other’s eyes. Something happened to me. I guess I loved the manny as much as I did the horse because he knew what I knew. Seemed to me there wasn’t anything in the world but that manny and the horse and me. Uncle George had a shine in his eyes. His bitterness was all gone now and he said he’d been watching Sunstreak since he was a colt and now he’d bet all he had on Sunstreak winning. Then I came away to the fence to wait for the race.

Sunstreak ran first of course and he busted the Morayshire record for a mile. At least I’ve seen that if I never see anything more. Everything came out just as I expected. Middlestride got left at the post and was way back and closed up to be second, just as I knew he would. He’ll get a Moray record too someday.

I watched the race calm because I knew what would happen. I was sure. Andrew Devine and Keith Reeback and Tom Rutton were all more excited than me. After the race I was thinking about Uncle George and how happy he was all through it, waving Sunstreak on with his crutch. I liked him that afternoon even more than I liked my own father. I almost forgot the horses thinking that way about him. It was because of what I had seen in his eyes as he stood in the paddocks beside Sunstreak before the race started, so happy and unburdened for a change. It was the first time I ever felt for a manny like that.

After the race that night I left Tom and Andrew and Keith. I wanted to be by myself and I wanted to be near Uncle George if I could work it. Here is what happened.

If you go past the Lairdie’s estate you get to a hard road and if you go along this for a few miles, I found out, there is a road turns off to a little farmhouse set in a yard.

That night after the race I went along that road because I had seen Uncle George and some other men go that way in the Lairdie’s limousine. I walked for a bit and then sat down by a fence to think. I wanted to be as near George as I could. I felt close to him. Pretty soon I went up the side road and came to the farmhouse. I was just aching to see my uncle, like wanting to see your father at night when you are just a bairn. Just then the limousine came along and turned in towards the farmhouse. George was in it and Keith Reeback’s father and the Lairdie and two other men I didn’t know. They got out of the limousine and went into the house. It was only about nine o’clock, but they were all drunk and it turned out the farmhouse was a place for bad wifies to stay in. That’s what it was. The wifies were local. I won’t name them. I crept up along a fence and looked through a window and saw.

It’s what gave me the heebie jeebies. I can’t make it out. The wifies in the house were all ugly and angry-looking, not nice to look at or be near. They were homely too, except one who was tall and looked a little like the gelding Middlestride, but not clean like him, and with a hard ugly mouth. She had red hair. I know her name. I saw everything plain. I got up by an old rose bush by an open window and looked. The wifies had on loose dresses and sat around in chairs. The men came in and some sat on the wifies’ laps. The place smelled rotten and there was rotten talk, the kind you don’t ever expect to hear talked when there are wifies around. It was rotten. A tink wouldn’t go into such a place.

I looked at Uncle George as he bragged and grumbled in that bad house as I know Sunstreak wouldn’t ever have. He said that he made that horse with his love and trust and his large bet, so in a way it was him that won the race and made the record. The jockey Tommy Curd had almost lost the race by sparing the whip. Sunstreak should have busted the record by much more, in fact. Aye, George certainly lied and bragged and nitpicked like a daftie. I never heard such daft talk.

And then he looked at the wifie in there, the one that was lean and hard-mouthed and looked a little like the gelding Middlestride, but not clean like him, and his eyes began to shine just as they did when he looked at me and at Sunstreak in the paddocks. The tall rotten-looking wifie was between me and my uncle just as Sunstreak was in the paddocks in the afternoon.

Then all of a sudden I began to hate that manny. I wanted to scream and rush in the room and kill him. I never had such a feeling before. I was so raging clean through that my fists were doubled up so my finger nails cut my hands. And Uncle George’s eyes kept shining and then he went and kissed that wifie and betrayed my Auntie Nell and I crept away and went back to the tracks and to bed and didn’t sleep hardly.

I’ve been thinking about it since and I can’t make it out. I go to the Lairdie’s training track mornings same as always, and I see Sunstreak and a new colt named Strident I’ll bet will lay them all out.

But things are different. The air doesn’t taste as good or smell as good. It’s because a manny like my uncle could see a horse like Sunstreak run like that and then lie and boast and moan and betray his wife and kiss a filthy thing like that all on the same day. Damn him, how come he did it? I keep thinking about it and it spoils looking at horses and smelling things and everything. Sometimes I’m so raged about it I want to fight someone. It gives me the heebie jeebies.

…

‘I dreamt I was dirty,’ Jan told me. ‘That my hands and feet had taken root. Briars grew from my neck downwards. Frogs inhabited my hair. Things tugged my eyelids. Dratted things. They tugged my eyelids.’

‘Och but I’m bored,’ I said.

‘Two fat badgers gazed at my bottom cheeks and then grabbed onto them for dear life.’ Jan sat beside me on the grass. ‘After a month of constant badger pressure my buttocks lost their curve. Then the badgers wandered off shaped like bottom cheeks. No one gained in this exchange.’

Her profile as she spoke, looped above with brown-red hair, warm with the dusky-and-scarlet complexion of a pear, was calm as a mask. Her hand rubbed the dimple by her knee. We were near the hedge-bottom of the wild garden behind our pub. She said, ‘Why didn’t you ask me to the race meeting?’

‘So bored,’ I said.

Two dark, hectic eyes flared challenge at me. Jan was peculiar for these looks that shocked people by their suddenness. The look softened and she smiled. ‘Why?’ she asked again.

‘Och, I’m only a bit tired.’ Jan was only ten — men like George Somor were just like big dogs to her, but I was still troubled.

The country was morning-still and in the fields everything shone beside its shadow, the hillsides gave off heat in silence, the brown turf seemed in a low state of burning, and through the foliage around us shone the red and white buildings of the Shaugh. The willows by the burn shook with a dazzling effect like diamonds.

Jan put in her lap some hazel nuts, whitey-green things with one cheek tanned between brown and pink. ‘You know Stephen Molven?’ she said pulling a kernel from its shell. ‘He gave me the foot off a rabbit he’d caught.’

‘Well, great.’

‘Well, it is. He said he’d take me to the Beltain Feast and then took Maureen Sinky.’ Click and snap went a nut between her teeth.

The garden with its blonde-headed thistles, its heaps of silent bramble, its brown-husked gorse in the glare of sunshine – well, that garden seemed near holy at that moment. Across the burn began the square brown fields of wheat, khaki patches of pasture, red stripes of fallow, with the woodland leading away to the hills where the check-pattern shrank till in the blackish haze of heat only tiny white squares of barley stubble showed distinct.

Certain objects nearby had a weird unfriendly look: the weight of greenish elderberries on their purpling stalks, the twinkling of the crab-apples that clustered high up in the hedge, the limp tired leaves of the primroses lying flat in the hedge-bottom. A mole was moving over the warm red soil, nosing and shuffling and dark as a shadow and as suddenly fast and silent, a wee ghost of glee paddling, snuffing, running in blindness all delighted by the sunlight and the strange hot things that brushed its belly and its nose. The earth began to shake beneath me.

I could hardly speak. ‘A mole, Jan.’

Jan stood and put her boot on it, not too heavy. You could see the struggling, swimming movement of the brute’s pink hands and the twisting and twitching of its pointed nose as it wrestled beneath that boot.

‘It wriggles,’ she said, frowning at the eerie feeling, and bent down to study the heaving of the mole’s velvet shoulders and the twisting of the face.

‘Kill the thing,’ I said, the ground still rumbling beneath me.

‘Nah,’ went Jan, smiling. ‘You can, if you like.’

‘I don’t like.’

After several attempts Jan got the mole up by the scruff of its neck. It threw back its head and flung its long blind snout from side to side, the mouth open in a strange oval, with tiny pinkish teeth at the edge, the heavy and clumsy body scarcely moving.

‘A snappy wee thing,’ Jan said, twisting to avoid the teeth. ‘I’ll take it home and let dad kill it. ‘

She swaddled the mole clumsily in her hanky and sat down beside me. There was a spell of silence as she fought the efforts of the mole.

‘You’ve not had much to say about Sunstreak,’ she asked. ‘Did you see him break the record?’

Eventually the earth went quiet. I slowly calmed. ‘Aye,’ I said.

‘Aren’t you sweet on him any more?’

‘Aye.’

‘So who won their bettings?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Go in with you,’ went Jan poking the mole back into the hanky. The mouth turned like a spark on her finger.

‘Oochah,’ she went and dropped him to the ground. The dazed thing fumbled round and I felt like shrieking at him to be gone. Jan picked up a fallen branch and crushed him dead. The mole lay there like a little bag, scarce a quiver.

Jan took her finger from her mouth and looked at the tiny pinpricks. ‘Vicious nuisances, moles are, but what bonny skin,’ she went, stroking the fur with her finger and then her cheek. One ruby drop of blood hung on the snout till Jan shook it off onto some harebells. I couldn’t look.

I ran down to the burn and then on to a field where stooks of barley stood in rows, the blonde corn streaming onto the ground, the stubble bleached by the sunlight so that the stretch glared white. The next field was sweet and soft with a second crop of seeds, thin straggling clover with pink knobs resting bonnily in the green. The scent was faint and sickly. I stood and slowly got my breath back.

Near the gate Sandy Hiur was mowing fodder for his family’s cattle. He left off working and I walked towards him with a bored look. He was in the year above me at school and had muscles. Sunstreak I loved. This boy only affected me a bit.

He hitched his trousers. ‘You are back then from the races,’ he said uncertainly.

‘No, I’m still at them.’

He tipped his hat with a vague gesture. ‘This isn’t you then?’

I looked in Sandy’s eyes and for a second was there with him. I liked his larks, his daftness, and his slow boyness. ‘What do you think?’

‘Look here, Sandy,’ broke in Jan, running up.

‘A mole. Did you find it dead?’

‘No, it bit me.’

‘And that got you feeking peeved, did it?’

I said, ‘Language, Sandy.’

He glanced at me.

‘I like you to talk nicely,’ I said.

‘Do you?’ he replied, tilting his hat again.

‘And generally you do.’

‘I’ll give it a go then.’

‘What?’

‘Talking nice to you.’

‘Hey now,’ said Jan patting his arm. ‘You mind what you’re saying.’

‘Take many knocks to kill the mole then?’ he asked.

‘One blow,’ I said sounding more bored than I meant.

‘You’re not so good at knocking them?’

‘Only if it was necessary.’

‘You don’t think it’s necessary?’

‘Would you like me to kill moles then?’

‘They do us a lot of damage.’

After a secret hunt the following night I found another mole playing in the heat. There were several failed attempts. I was very upset. Finally I managed to kill it.

I took it to Sandy.

‘Here you are then.’

‘Did you catch it?’ He took the velvet corpse and studied it close to hide his nerves.

‘Did you think I couldn’t?’ My face was near to his.

Luftwaffe bombs fell far off to the east, rippling galaxies reflected in the liquid in his eyes.

‘I didn’t know.’

I laughed in his face and the blood came up in me. Seeing the muscles newly formed there in his neck I felt an urge to bite.

There were more rumbles and flashes in the eastern sky. New shadow Wendys shuddered on the ground, grateful I was here to shield them.

‘Will you go out with me?’ he asked in a shaky voice.

‘Yes,’ I answered in a dead voice. There was pleasure in this death.

…

4. Splendours and miseries of British airspace

…………………………

Wernher von Braun:

Close study reveals that time is held within its limits but precariously, thanks only to non-stop human vigilance and swift correction of time’s excesses. Loosening the airship from consensual time required an audience too intoxicated for such vigilance — hence the trip to Scotland.

Adolf Hitler:

As loving Christians we read in tears the passage in which the Lord finally arose in His might and drove from the temple the brood of Jewish snakes. How great was His battle for the entire world against the Jewish poison. Today, after these two thousand years, with deep emotion we see that this was why He had to shed His blood upon the Cross.

…

Uncle George and Auntie Nell’s cottage was surrounded by rusty railings. Fastened to each was a red or white or blue plastic globe in which glowing shapes slid and swam, like inside soap bubbles. Weird patriotic handiwork of Nell’s, I now assume.

In the dingy hallway, hung with moulding photos of my family, I smelled a musty Somor smell. ‘Come in, girls,’ Nell called out to me and Wendy, waving us into the parlour from her seat beside the fire. We released each other’s hands and sat and took Nell’s offered cup of water with rose syrup, a tang in which I’d found, I realised years later, the essence of the Shaugh.

George said from the couch, ‘The Northern Scot claims Adolf Hitler is speeding for Aberdeen in his Tausendjährigerheißluftballon.’ He squinted at his newspaper. ‘Which means thousand year hot air balloon. Seems it was a birthday surprise from Wernher von Braun and the finest German boffins.’

He continued in his reading-out voice: ‘Citizens await Wednesday’s confrontation and eye a sky ever more populous and complex, strewn from abyss to abyss with an unbelievable star-dusting. “Godspeed Mr Hitler’s airy Leviathan,” their Prime Minister has declared, and resolve lights their faces and leaves their chests as sighs.’

He turned the page: ‘Leaning backwards they let their imaginations explore distant galaxies and claim them for His Majesty the King. Souls spray through the void reddened by supernovae and faintly blued by starlight, Britishly showering the Milky Way in diagonal formations. From Easter 1943 there dates a brand new constellation: THE UNION JACK.’ ‘

‘Well, well then,’ Wendy said and clapped her hands. ‘We must all hit Aberdeen and scope out the raging little fellow.’

‘Britishly, indeed,’ George said reaching for a pen and pad, no doubt to write another complaining letter to the Northern Scot. The man’s constant grumbling, whether to Nell or Clavie punters or to the good Scots air itself, was really just an overflow from his demand for more bairns from Nell, his bitter pleadings for more rides. Or so my mum had said.

Those globes glowed through the window and lit up Nell’s grey eyes. As a girl she’d got a brain sickness that left her no longer counted among the Shaugh’s sensible types. When the war came others’ lives were battered and swept away but Nell’s life continued in a boring line that jiggled neither up nor down. Odd the way her looks reflected all those great trials and larks her life had missed out on, as if her dreams had drawn them across her face, giving it a hardy but empty beauty. ‘NO MORE BAIRNS,’ I’d seen her tell George outright, though an awful dose of whining soon had her beaten down. There was always something mighty about Aunt Nell as a mother, birthing and rearing Arthur maybe her triumph over her own empty life. In he came in his sixteen-month-old body. He held out to me a hand like a doll’s, a hand still forming, and at our touch he blushed and smiled a hazy smile. He’d big blue cloudy eyes.

His first months had been marked by fury and confusion at the empty hours between his sucks, but then worship of suckling gave way to worship of life’s good larks. The world laid good fun traps for him, such as fascinating new stuff to eat, such as afternoon sunshine on the rug, so fine to crawl about on, such as the twists and turns of his own limbs. And like all bairns Arthur understood that he’d already seen it all as he lay inside his mother’s womb. He faced new situations and folk and things, yes, but none really surprised him. Facing each he’d search his memory of his time inside his mum, the deep memory of his soul, till he found the response he’d had so long to prepare there.

Unless, that is, as now, he stumbled across a beetle. Arthur did not shrug beetles off. Rooted to the spot he stood as a black monster scooted by on many legs. With open mouth he tilted his head this way and that to match the beetle’s zigzags. But now for the first time something rose up inside him, and he produced a roar such as we’d never heard before, far beyond his normal screams.

But he roared in vain. There’s no place in the beetle tongue for such a roar, no, and so it carried on its way, till it was squashed beneath Nell’s foot. ‘Only Nell the ghostly church mouse scurries across this room,’ she said. ‘My nose quivers as I sniff at all this blood.

‘I sit up with my paws held high and dainty,’ she went on, ‘my eyes bulging like I’m already dead and stuffed. I’m a sick sight reflected in the mirror. Side-on I watch myself glancing sideways. When I dance I dance also, half turned away as if I do not know my reflected self.’

The nasty thought came: chanting the magic word Tausendjährigerheißluftballon would scare Nell silly at this moment. Tausendjährigerheißluftballon, Tausendjährigerheißluftballon…

Arthur turned and left for his parents’ room. Wendy and me put down our cups and followed.

‘But the other me is listening for something echoed from the reflected depths,’ I heard Nell say. ‘Whispered instructions from a different world.’

Arthur held George’s wallet open.

Nell screamed that we were all going to hell, everybody ever born, that compared to the afterlife this existence was as nice and comfy as a mother’s womb, that the only ones prepared for the hell ahead were those already tormented in this life, in body like Wendy or in their head like me.

Arthur laid something on my palm, a photo of a pile of naked wifies. His stare at us was serious, his hazy smile all blown away.

…

That night I dreamt of Salvation Army hordes in Aberdeen, looking a wee bit lost. They gave one another gentle nods, a trumpet blew, and then Aberdeen Pleasure Beach was treated to their snaking march.

A great parade it was of mannies and wifies who’d never had a ride! Aye, the prim and hardly kissed were showing with a thousand raised flags and banners and fists and weedy voices that they were not all amazed by Adolf Hitler and his Tausendjährigerheißluftballon but instead by Someone greater.

A gust of sea wind sharpened the sun’s pink glare off their trumpets and then their flags and banners hung still as if for a roll-call, the whole beach filling with pinked threat. The Tausendjährigerheißluftballon neared as a British cannonade sounded far off in the distance — eight soft booms in the gloaming air. Lords and ladies stood and saluted. Marchers threw palms across their hearts, me and mum among them, I now saw.

A horse-drawn carriage drove by. Wendy reclined inside it, near sinking among the satin of her dress, her face half hid by her ruffle. Beside her sat a manny in a black frock coat and bowler hat.

As the carriage drove past, Wendy said something to the manny, who turned to me and mum and stared. He had the features of a wise old lion without a mane.

…

We arrived in Aberdeen off the Balloon Special train around eight o’clock on Wednesday, Wendy and me, our parents and Nell and George. Too much excitement for young Arthur, it had been decided, so he’d been left in our pub with Sally.

Wendy blew soap bubbles through a straw and watched them float and burst. Her steps along the city pavements had a strange sort of nervy grace. Her face held some dread though not a patch on Nell’s. Ach yes, our Wendy always had her grace, it seemed.

Her eyes lifted from the pavement and looked right at me through a floating bubble. Och Wendy, a right legend you were to your sister! Years I studied your perfect blondeness with love and fury. How elegant were your steps as you carried your bulging bag that day, each one with a wee wiggle that seemed planned a hundred years ago, as if you’d long known every last curve of your fate. As you walked along I wanted to ask you something with my eyes, to reach something I could hardly find a name for. And before I’d asked – Is this day it? – already you’d given a single gloomy nod.

And then you gazed downwards. Was the fate that awaited us so very bad? It’s just the way things must be, your quiet hunchedness seemed to say. What strips away our joy will also strip our expectations and set us strangely free.

Soon we reached the Pleasure Beach and what a lark it was. Drunkards jigged on waltzers, some lobbed crabs at the Dunk-a-Dwarf stall, or at posher types on water dodgems, or kicked sand in faces, some did. A few girls were in clowns’ make-up and grinned and swanned about like clowns might, though they weren’t dressed a bit like clowns, and och they smelled so fine whistling sailors led them to the harbour for a nice fish tea. One boy had brought his own balloon-shaped kite which was flying well enough, but a drunk snipped the string and away it flew, all a bit sad and confusing and fair exciting. There was the odd scattering of gulls and tinkers.

A Madame Torch paraded herself outside a little tent, her bubs near spilling from her gown. ‘I laugh at manly strength,’ she said. ‘I bring the strongest men to heel. Tonight it’s the turn once more of little Adolf Hitler.

‘There are proven methods for humbling that little worm of which I’ll say no more, save to direct you to my manual Purple Nights in which I recount my experiences in male’ – her big eyes flashed – ‘dressage. Those interested in a private demonstration…’

She wiggled into a tent smiling at the men left drooling, her nasty words all topsy turvy in my head.

‘ ‘Lost in the infinity above,’ ‘ George read out from his paper, ‘ ‘locals gulp air excitedly and seem to forsake solid ground, becoming dizzy, forgetful, ripe for pick-pocketing, though none occurs.’

He looked about him a bit quizzical and glum and then went on: ‘Such scenes suggest we have removed the bottom from the barrel of the national imagination, from the ultra-barrel of national myth, and have released a prehuman flood that cannot now be stemmed.’

He pocketed his paper and said, ‘The balloon cannot be shot down, claims the Manny Hitler. Ten bob I’ve on that says he’s wrong.’ This last said with a hand on Wendy’s shoulder, but she shook it off and walked ahead.

Went Nell, ‘Why are we on the beach?’

‘Ach, Nell,’ went George shaking his head.

Again she said it: ‘Why are we on the beach?’

‘Tell Nell why we’re here, Jan.’ Mum’s words were an order.

Nell’s eyes stared into mine.

‘Tonight,’ I told her, ‘we’re going to show the Manny Hitler his birthday present isn’t fit for Scottish skies.’

Folk had turned to listen. A breeze melted the beach’s sounds into the city din.

I said louder, ‘No problem have we with the balloon itself, Nell. Swanky thing and sturdy too, no doubt, and well done to the Manny von Braun and his boffins for their efforts. Nah, it’s him riding the balloon that’s the ruddy problem!’

Beer was shaken and sprayed by a nodding drunkard and I went on, ‘We’re no nice day out for no dictator, Mr Hitler! No beasts of zoo to be pointed out and photo’d! You and your flaunting of your fancy big balloon — you’re still short a bollock, chief!’

Not a single sound. Poor girl’s off her nut, folk thought.

I was reddening and staring at my ankles, vexed at mum’s order and also Nell’s soft head, I must confess, but when sniggers didn’t come or any sound at all I looked up at the faces staring eastwards through thick fagsmoke.

What’s a nearing Tausendjährigerheißluftballon sound like, you’ve maybe wondered, eeh? Well, I heard sighs like the wind makes in your curtains and then hums like the flight of the shining moon. Yes, the moon adrift on starry seas was the sound of this balloon and it wasn’t your ears that heard it – it was those tiny birring hairs upon your ears. Upon your neck and arms as well, birring like rubbed legs of grasshoppers, a bit. And then I saw the thing.

Though I wasn’t aware I saw it. I thought I was seeing a squadron of Banff bailies, those biggest whitest clouds that mean get indoors and sharpish. Big bailies looked fine enough, true, but none ever made my throat gag with its fearsome beauty…

A pale blue oval shape it was, a gigantic airship of sorts that looked towed by a thousand gulls. Messerschmitts and Heinkels were looping it like our good earth round the blazing sun, their drones the only engine noises, for from the balloon casting a North Sea shadow like a cathedral then a fiend then an eagle the length of Banff there came just a faintest hum. It really was so awful huge and fine, a floating township with curved surfaces painted with giant blond sober sorts draped on one another’s muscles, gazing soft and winsome at waterfalls and rainbows and eagles and Swastikas and torches, and all looked right grand glinting in the evening sun. And what made your throat clam wasn’t any single bittie but the unbelievable glory of the craft itself. The cheek of it. The plain showing off. Ach the Tausendjährigerheißluftballon!

A man’s voice said, ‘Only a Christian could imagine such a craft.’

Folk turned around and stared but there was raging in no eyes, and anyway the speaker was a man of cloth, a Proddie minister at that. There was silence for some good hard thinking till mum said them Nazis weren’t Christians and dad said aye they were, and then we were off and running with all and sundry chipping in their thoughts.

The Big Wheel and other attractions squeaked among themselves, deserted. Snoring drunkards were being woken up to see the sight, some trembling at the balloon’s bonniness and some at the mighty terror. Posh folk in a covered stand squinted into opera glasses and gasped, and oh there was Harry Lauder and Cheeky Benny Souter. Such a craft might tempt Christ Himself to float down here for a better lookie…

Mum sighed and mouthed James’s name. Wendy’s shaved calves brushed against me as she hugged me and blew more bubbles through the air. Nell was in such a tizzy she sat rocking back and forth in tears, and dearie me but her petticoat was awful tore and grubby. There was no sign of George.

I looked again. It seemed the balloon was now a shining eagle gliding with much grace. My heart became a rose. Another was fast blooming in my brain. A flash emptied the sky of all but the balloon’s eagle beak, which said, ‘Do you see Me?’

I said, ‘I see, I see.’

…

A note on the composition: if some of this material looks familiar: yes, you’re dead right.