And the Land Lay Still (16 page)

‘It’s a curiosity, certainly,’ Mike says. ‘Maybe that’s all it is. I’ve never been able to get excited about that whole Stone of Destiny thing. All that stuff about replica stones and who’s got the real one. It seemed like a daft student prank when I first learned about it and now it seems even more so.’

‘Well, that’s what it was,’ Jean says. ‘But what a prank! You have to remember how totally moribund the national movement was in those days. Sure, it was just a wee stane wi a ring, as the song goes, but the prank made people think a bit. Made them laugh too, which was equally important. Not the government of course, the po-faced bastards. The police came and took the stone into custody, locked it up in Forfar for the night, and the next day it was whisked off south and reinstated at Westminster.’

‘No sense of humour,’ Mike says, ‘is a failing in most governments. But you know, Jean, you’ve changed your story. When you told it all those years ago, you said the young couple left first, still whistling. And you didn’t say anything about pictures being taken.’

‘Did I not? Well, it was a different story then. A different story with a different meaning.’

‘How convenient.’

‘Stories aren’t static, Mike. That’s what we were talking about earlier. They grow, they shrink, they change with the retelling.’

‘What about the rest of
your
story? The one you shared with my dad. How has that changed over the years?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it wasn’t just 1951 that you and he were together, was it? It went on a lot longer than that.’

She lights another cigarette.

‘Didn’t it?’

‘Aye,’ she says. ‘Aye, it did.’

§

The decade when the world changed. This is how Mike thinks of the 1970s. Maybe this is because it was in those years that he himself changed, came to know who he was. And maybe that’s nonsense, because who ever really knows who they are? And does the world, or anybody, ever stop changing?

Still, this is what he thinks. It was in the 1970s, for example, that people first understood that oil, on which everything else had so recently and completely come to depend, would not last for ever. It had been plentiful and cheap, but no longer. Wherever it was – in the Middle East, the Americas or the North Sea – it became more than just fuel. It became the currency of hope, security, greed, power, threat and counter-threat. In the wake of this realisation, politics shifted and lurched. People took up causes. Other people took up defensive positions. Nothing was safe, nothing was certain. Nowhere was unaffected.

There was oil in Scottish waters. On land there was nationalism. The discovery of the oil did not lead to the nationalism but it certainly focused minds on the constitutional arguments. In response to nationalism’s growing appeal various politicians cobbled together a plan intended to ease the political frustrations of the Scots while keeping them, and the oil, within the United Kingdom. The new deal was called devolution. There followed a continuous, mind-numbing stream of debates, conferences, speeches, commissions and reports on constitutional change. How to devolve power? What powers could or should be devolved? How would an assembly in Edinburgh be funded, how elected, how many members would it
have, should it even be in Edinburgh? (Similar questions were being asked in and about Wales, but less urgently, because there was no oil off the Welsh coast.) The letters page of the
Scotsman
was crammed daily with opinions for and against. There were people who seemed to do nothing
but
write letters to the
Scotsman
. Mike would see the address at the top or the name at the bottom and know what the letter was going to say before he read it. Occasionally there were letters about the correct pronunciation of ‘devolution’. Was it devolution or dee-volution? Some people cared, even about that.

Harold Wilson stood down as Prime Minister, and Jim Callaghan succeeded him. Mike almost felt sorry for him, genial Jim, struggling to keep his own backbenchers on board the devolution slow train while many of them did everything they could to delay it further, and if possible derail it. The Labour Party had a single-figure majority in the House of Commons and hours and hours of parliamentary time was being taken up with the issue because they had to keep the Nationalists at bay. Meanwhile, across the dispatch box from Callaghan, Ted Heath was long gone. The Conservative leader now was Margaret Thatcher, a steel-haired, abrasive Britannia. Consensus, if it had ever really existed, scuttled off stage, exhausted. Within eighteen months of replacing Heath, Mrs Thatcher had undone his commitment to devolution and positioned the Tories in staunch opposition to it. Less government, not more, was the new Conservative cry. It had a certain appeal. People in the Borders, in the North-East, in the islands, were far from happy at the prospect of ranks of grey-faced Labour councillors from Glasgow and Lanarkshire, Dunbartonshire and Ayrshire, dominating the proposed assembly, even though many of
them
detested the very idea of devolution.

Mike wanted devolution – he wanted that at least, since it had never made sense to him, if Scotland really was a nation, that it didn’t run its own affairs – but he had a bad feeling about what was likely to be on offer. And when he spoke to others and heard their confusion, their outrage or their lukewarm support, but most of all when he saw their indifference, the bad feeling increased.

Angus’s monthly cheques became quarterly, then occasional. Then, about the time Mike would have been graduating, came one – more substantial than usual – accompanied by a note saying that it would be the last. What would he do with this money? Save it for a
rainy day? He’d had enough of rainy days in dismal, indecisive Scotland. He applied for a passport, gave some money to Eric to cover his share of the rent, borrowed a rucksack and, with a couple of changes of clothes and his camera, caught the overnight bus to London. The next day he was in Paris.

He spent a week there, wandering the streets, riding the metro, sitting in cafés, visiting museums and galleries. When he was stuck for words he summoned M. Lucas to his assistance. M. Lucas roared broken sentences in Mike’s head, and somehow he got by. Every angle revealed a photograph, every moment was an opportunity. He fell in with other travellers, some innocent, some experienced, and mixed with Parisians, some generous, some exploitative. He vowed to himself that nothing he experienced was to be regretted or resented. Nor was it. He slept the first three nights in a dirt-cheap hostel by the Gare du Nord, camera case clutched to his chest and the straps wrapped round his wrist. On the fourth day he found a bar near the Place des Vosges that didn’t close till three in the morning and was the haunt of men looking for easy company. He went home with a different one each night for four nights. Then, sated with sex and with Paris, he left, and spent the next few weeks on buses and trains, or thumbing lifts, meandering through France in a generally southern direction. In late August he wound up in a village near Lyon, where he picked grapes till the end of the season and met a lot of brown, lean, happy people doing the same thing. He was brown and lean and happy too, but eventually there was no more fruit to pick. He turned again to the north, and was back in Edinburgh, and the Tollcross flat, in time for the onset of autumn.

Scotland had seemed both smaller and potentially greater from abroad. It seemed simultaneously both to defy and encourage imagination, and returning felt not entirely like the defeat he had feared. Although he’d spent most of Angus’s final cheque in France, there was a little left, and together with his meagre grape-picking earnings it tided him over until he began to get photography work again. This was sporadic and the rate of pay unpredictable. Some months he was flush, others he was tapping Eric for a loan. He never starved, but it was no way to prosper.

The jobs that interested him most were the ones that paid least or not at all. Campaigners heard about him through other campaigners.
He took pictures of charity events, community groups fighting corporations or councils, he sneaked on to industrial sites and photographed evidence of pollution, safety lapses, illegal practices. Some of this work was dangerous and very little of it earned him any money. To continue doing it he would have to subsidise it. He sharpened up his culinary skills and got a job in a restaurant kitchen, Thursday and Friday nights, cash in hand and a quick exit out the back door if anybody official came inspecting. And he signed on the dole, which meant he could also claim housing benefit. He remembered Bob Syme saying ‘the system, as you call it’. Well, he was playing the system now, biting the hand that fed him crumbs.

‘Don’t you have a guilty conscience?’ Eric asked one Friday when Mike came in from the restaurant. ‘I mean, that’s the tax from my soon-to-be-hard-earned salary that’s paying for the likes of you to be a scrounger.’

Mike took it from the formulation that Eric wasn’t entirely serious. He was in his final year of medicine and seemed to spend every waking minute studying. He had a girlfriend called Moira, but they hardly ever saw each other. On this occasion he was slumped in front of the television, watching a vampire movie and drinking a can of lager as a nightcap. A pile of textbooks was on the floor beside him. He looked exhausted.

‘I’m performing an essential public service,’ Mike said. ‘It’s not as if I’m being idle, is it?’

‘You bloody lefties,’ Eric said. ‘You think the world owes you a bloody living. When are you going to get a proper job?’

He enjoyed trotting out such clichés, the kind of reactionary tosh he said his father, a GP, spouted. But he was very convincing. Mike reckoned that in twenty years Eric would have become his father, and would be delivering the same lines for real. Mike, of course, was never going to become Angus.

‘Do I owe
you
any money?’ he said.

‘Not at the moment.’

‘Well, then. My conscience is clear. The state is simply paying me for work that wouldn’t otherwise get done. What are you going to do, shop me?’

‘Fuck off. Get yourself a can from the fridge. And get me another while you’re there.’

‘How’s Moira?’ Mike asked when he came back. ‘Haven’t seen her for ages.’

‘Nor me,’ Eric said. He popped the can without taking his eyes off the screen. There wasn’t a lot of dialogue in the vampire movie and it seemed you could keep up with the plot so long as you kept watching the picture. ‘She’s fine. It’s her birthday tomorrow. I’m having the day off. We’ll do romantic stuff and then I’ll take her out for a meal.’

‘Where to?’

‘Not your place. The New York Steam Packet.’

‘Hamburgers, steak, chips, cheesecake. She’ll love it almost as much as you will.’

‘Fuck off. What about you?’

‘Thanks for asking, but I’d be in the road.’

‘No, idiot, what about you and romance? Have you not met the man of your dreams yet?’

‘Not yet. Is Moira the woman of your dreams?’

‘I think she could be, aye.’

‘That’s good.’

They sat and watched the vampires for a while. A lady vampire in a red dress that struggled to contain her bosom was clamping on to a younger woman in a white dress with a lesser but also heaving bosom. The first one was after the second one’s blood but there was a lesbian subtext.

Mike said, ‘It doesn’t bother you at all, does it, me being gay?’

‘Why would it bother me?’

‘It would bother a lot of people.’

‘A lot of people are stupid. I’m going to be a doctor. What am I supposed to do, pass moral judgement on my patients before I start treating them?’

‘There’s plenty of doctors that do, I’m sure.’

‘Then they’re not good doctors. Watch the film.’

They watched the film until everybody with a personality had been staked through the heart. Then they went to their beds.

§

It was a while since Mike had been at Jean’s. The next night he walked up there with a bottle of wine borrowed from the restaurant. It was
after midnight when he rang the bell. The door was opened by Catriona MacKay.

‘Mike!’ She gave him a hug and a kiss.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. She’d graduated the year before and moved to Glasgow, where she was at teacher-training college.

‘I’m through for the weekend,’ she said. ‘Where else would I end up in Edinburgh on a Saturday night but here?’

Walter was there too, and a few other familiar faces. It was May, and the night was warm. In the front room the big windows were open wide but only occasionally did the noises of the city reach through them. Jean was holding sway, as usual.

‘Come in and find a space. Over here. There’s somebody I want you to meet.’ She indicated a man in the chair across the fireplace from her own. ‘Mike, Adam Shaw. Adam, Mike Pendreich.’

The man half-rose, put out his hand and said hello. He was wearing a pale blue denim shirt and dark jeans and had a sandy moustache and long hair swept back from his high forehead. He looked a few years older than most of the others. His handsome, serious, almost severe face gave the impression of a man who couldn’t stop thinking of all the important things he had to do, but when he smiled his eyes brightened – as if he’d realised nothing was that important after all.

Jean had met Adam through Walter and the folk scene. Walter had been singing at a club in Dunfermline and she had gone along to support him and Adam had also been there. They’d shared a table and had got along well, and she’d told him he was welcome in her house any time – if he could find it. And he had, she concluded, and so here he was.

He was a hospital clerical officer, and also a district councillor for the mining town of Borlanslogie, which was just over the Fife boundary in neighbouring Central Region. He’d grown up in Borlanslogie and still stayed near by, just a mile out in the country.

Jean couldn’t hear the words ‘Central Region’ without bristling. ‘Can you believe some bureaucratic imbeciles took it upon themselves to give the historic heart of our country that name?’ she demanded.

‘It’s nae worse a name than “the Highlands” or “Queen Street” when ye think aboot it,’ Adam said.