Strip the Willow (7 page)

Next morning his face was chilly. He snuggled under till he heard the front door click and then got up.

He moved down to the kitchen and poked around. From time to time, the grandfather dinged.

He made a pint of coffee. She had white pint mugs.

He unfolded a slatted blond chair and set it down at the side of the Raeburn. He took the top manilla folder from the plastic bag on the worktop and laid it broadways across the slats. He fetched the coffee and put it on the stove, on the asbestos mat.

He laid his bum to the stove’s heat, as close as he could, and then swayed away. She must have banked it up specially.

He clasped his biceps in opposite palms, and kneaded them with his thumbs.

He repeated the previous bum manoeuvre.

Running out of things to do, he made an excursion to the loo.

Out in the hall, the grandfather dinged.

He lifted the folder, to balance on his lap, so’s he could sit. He reached for a swig of warm coffee. Last moment of freedom; freedom of that sweet ignorance, forgetting. He twisted to check the door was closed. He thought of a different Tam, well-mounted on his night mare Meg – mired to the stirrups indeed – jolting her rider into storm.

There was such a thing as dread of the almost known.

He flopped the first folder open. Withdrew one sheet.

Which was blank, possibly a cover.

It gave him pause for all that.

A second sheet, he drew out. Blank.

A third. Ditto.

A fourth, a fifth—

All the snows of amnesia come again.

Alison knew the relationship with Finlay wouldn’t work. What she didn’t know was why she was drawn always to repeat such doomed experiments. It taxed her optimistic view of human nature, to find her own so prone to stupidity. Younger men, why was she drawn to younger men? Sure, they had their famous vigours. But what could you talk about when you took a break from fucking? It was wrong to generalise but, by and large—

They had arranged their second meeting in Ma’s, Ma Cameron’s, and there he was. Sitting in the alcove on the left, in a rugby jersey and red long hair like a Celtic bard.

– Hi, Finlay, luve, she said.

– Hi, hun, he said. Usual?

Lucy got back from Edinburgh in mid-evening and found him sprawled on the kitchen floor. He was in a slack form of the recovery position. She could have taken a felt pen and traced his proneness, with the volume of white paper splayed beneath his body.

– This is terrible, she said. You need to build yourself back up. Or you’ll be no use to man or beast.

No comeback. No gay repartee.

– So were they ramblings? she said. Shall we just burn them?

– Very funny.

– Oh, she said, picking one up. They’re not upside down, then.

– Do you think – Tam? she said.

– Leave Tam out of it, Lucy. It’s hardly going to be Tam.

It was not a discussion. It was a very short circuit.

He woke in the middle of the night and went through to her room. It was locked.

– Lucy, he said. Speak to me. Tell me what you’ve done with them.

No reply.

– Lucy, he said. You’re perfectly safe, I don’t have a hard-on. No answer.

– Lucy, he said. Whatever you do, don’t try to control me.

He went back to his room and lay with the light on, looking at the ceiling.

She was surprised next morning to find him down at breakfast. He had made eight pieces of toast and propped them in the stand.

– Sorry about last night, he said.

– What?

– Sorry that you felt you had to lock your door.

– I think you should get out of the house today, said Lucy.

– Get out—?

– Of the house.

– You don’t want me snooping, is it?

– I think we need to give each other space.

– That’s another of my beliefs, he said. People always give me space. People give each other space. But what are you meant to do with it? Had my space, more than enough, thank you.

– Don’t take offence, it isn’t meant that way. I have things I need to adjust to, come to terms with. Some are at work.

After tightening his belt and asking for additional braces and the address written down and a map and a little money, he set off. He went the easiest way, downhill. Crossed the road. He saw a bus coming and took it. Hazlehead. There were huge trees and massive banks of rhododendron. He found a maze.

– It’s the only municipal maze in Scotland, the attendant said.

– What’s
municipal
got to do with it?

– What the brochure says,
The only municipal maze in Scotland.

– New on the job?

– Student.

After an hour and a half the student attendant mounted the wooden safety tower. He shouted down to the figure grazing and pausing amongst the privet.

– You lost, mister?

– I think I know where I am. Still in the maze, amn’t I?

– Aye. Get your money’s worth, I would.

Lucy got into the department with her briefcase tucked under her arm, and was a bit short with Alison.

– I’ve really got piles, said Lucy.

– Funny place tae hae them.

– So can we leave that meeting till after break?

– New problem wi Guy we’ve got— said Alison. Okay, okay, nae problem.

Lucy got into her office, opened a spreadsheet on-screen,
reconfigured
some calculations, dealt with seventeen emails, signed three letters, and made out her expenses for the week before.

She unlocked a bundle of papers from her briefcase.

She had glanced through odd pages in bed, two nights ago, and had glimpsed some stuff. Unsettling, very. She hadn’t risked Tam’s text at all night two. Now she took the first sheaf and shuffled the pages, then banged the whole wad tight. It was all shouty and bold, the Sixties for you. Here goes, she thought. It was straight in, there wasn’t a title page.

He was a strange character, the man I met, the man whose life I tried to record, if
character
is the word. But what else can you say? He was a strange
lack of character
? He was a strange
useless character
? That’s hardly fair. Even useless characters have their uses. He was a
windy character,
that’s for sure, that’s what I feel most. A strange
windy
character
,
in at least two senses.

He blew with the wind at times, with as much control as a piece of
paper. He was bold at others, but easily frightened off, so windy in that sense too. But then you can never sum somebody up, you never quite get them. Because, listening to him, listening to A13, which is how I first knew him, listening to Jim as he became, I knew there was more. For a wind blew through him too, as though he was a harp strung from a tree, an Aeolian harp that a gust might snatch a chord from.

Yet the various gusts that blew, after his accident, for I only met him afterwards, sometimes made him seem not so much a harp as an empty hall, with hollow echoes of glory and servitude. No, let me get that figure closer. There were portraits on his wall, and French windows flung open, at both ends. Wind made the portraits rock where they hung, to gouge thin grooves in ancient plaster.

The first portrait that sprang from his throat threw me. Not that I was supposed to be thrown, my job was just to keep the tape-machine running, put in new spools, thread them through the recording head, and start again. Sometimes I missed some of the stuff that came from him, because he wouldn’t stop. He was in a trance after the operation, and he wouldn’t stop, nor could he be shaken from it. Lady Macbeth, sleep-talking. So I tried to remember that stuff, some of it no doubt lost for ever. You have a life, maybe momentous, maybe not. Yet if the moments go, you might as well not have gone to the trouble of living them. Without a proper connected story you start to decline to a kind of newspaper, each day new, that never gets a second reading. The ecstasy of your soul and all its troubles start to fade, like so much drawer-liner or scrunched absorbent for wet shoes. I exaggerate, but you get my drift.

Well, the first portrait threw me, because it wasn’t his father. No doubt his father made a huge impression on him, a huge depression too, but it was of his father’s friend Ludwig that he spoke most at first. Ludwig had lost a hand, that was probably what made his portrait stick, Ludwig had lost a hand in an industrial accident. He nearly bled to death, after his wrist was shorn by the whirling blades at the top of a fertiliser hopper. The bleeding stump they stuck in superphosphate. His ex-hand they plonked in a Time-and-Motion inspector’s briefcase, before they rushed both to Casualty. It was easy to see how this would stick in a young Jim’s mind. Not that he was a witness, but he heard
about it at table, after meat, and he marvelled at Ludwig’s hook.

The next portrait threw me too, because it wasn’t his mother. His mother was dead. Jim’s mother died when he was not much more than a lad. He remembered releasing her ashes out of a glider window, as they overflew a mountain. Was that a flight of fancy, as some might say? I don’t think so. It seemed, as I taped it, remarkably real. But it wasn’t his mother he spoke about at first, but of two other women, Amande and Lucy. Amande could be fairly intense, which seemed to embarrass Jim. She was an older woman who had come across from Brittany in the war, married a whitefish skipper, then been bereaved, a shocker of an accident at the mouth of Aberdeen harbour. For which she was not consoled. Yet isolation and consolation became her themes, and it emerged she and Jim had been mighty close, mighty close in some lifesaving sense.

Then there was Lucy, the portrait of Lucy. To say she was the love of his life is to understate. But love is the home of all extremes, I think, and this love was so full of truth, for so short a time, so full of
imposture
and needless harming, that even extremes became beggared.

Jesus, thought Lucy. Is that where we’re going.

With Lucy he seemed to want her so much, he was able to imagine her inner life, though how accurately we can never know. He would be running along with his own story, and then there would be something like
At her window, gazing
or
Meanwhile, in bed
and it would be about Lucy. But then men are notorious projectors, as my wife Iris is never slow to point out. (Whereas she is so rooted in circumstance, locality and practicality, it makes your eyes water at times. And a complete anarchist.)

Then again, with his long-time nemesis, Spermy McClung, a similar thing applied. Not that there was
inner life
to imagine where Spermy was concerned, Jim didn’t spend a whole barrel of time looking for that. But
where
Spermy was, what he was
doing,
who he was
bawling out,
how many million of which marine species he was currently
murdering,
that he did have a knack for. Envy of man-of-action by full-time wimp, I suppose, simple as that. Spermy had pained him before, and would be instrumental in savaging him again. No doubt you do well to develop
a sixth sense for the swerves and shifts of a man like that. (Did it verge on hero-worship? Because that’s dangerous ground, as the moth finds out every time it shuns moon and worships incandescence. Though
are
moths drawn by moonlight? I have to admit I’m guessing here.)

The third of those to get seriously under Jim’s skin, so to speak, was Julie. Julie Swink. Only the Lord Provost’s daughter, so help me. Scientist, toughhead. About as sentimental as a barnacle. (Mind you, apparently Charles Darwin, I nearly said
Dickens,
Charles Darwin spent about eight years studying them.
Nora Barnacle,
who was that again? Sometimes I wish I had more time for research, instead of wandering around sticking microphones under chins. Transcribing? It takes so
long
! No way you can skate it: it’s all in real time.) As I say, Julie got under Jim’s skin. But whether it was empathy or
something
less exotic, it sure turned out a stormy time. Hang on to your hats, gentle readers. Julie Swink was either a scientist fallen amongst rogues, or she was a diver and she took him down. For the moment let us leave it at that.

Marilyn knocked and came straight up to her desk.

– Bundle of stuff for signing-off. UbSpec want a meeting tomorrow, they’re open as regards time. Are you okay?

– Oh, fine, she said. I think so, yes fine. She had been careful not to bundle up the papers guiltily when the Admin Sec came in. When did you say?

– The time’s not decided yet. Marilyn looked over the
typescript
briskly and back at Lucy.

– Research, said Lucy. The Civil War. I understand we might do it after all.

– Never heard that, said Marilyn. I think they want something far, far bigger. Do you want coffee bringing? You’ve been in here a while.

– No, no, I’m awake. It’s fine.

– Suit yourself. We can check timetables for tomorrow later. Come past my desk.

Well it was a draughty hall the wind blew through, rocking the portraits. Ludwig, Amande, Lucy, Spermy, Julie. The way I’ve set it out
in the final text, they’re hung in that order. There were, of course, quite a few more.

His father, Andy. Andy was upstanding, integrity carried to an annoying degree, that nobody (not Jim for sure) could hope to live up to. Sober, practical, pretty selfless (not that Jim thought so), Andy was one of those Communists who resigned on principle after the Russians invaded Hungary. Jim’s sister Annie, a bright spark, was briefly present, but if there were other siblings, brothers perhaps, they didn’t appear in the audio record. (Mind you, it was Hogmanay, they might just have been out, carousing the night away, in other houses.) Then a professor from Crete, Zander Petrakis, and a caterer from Shanghai, Bing Qing, that he bumped into. Though the longer I go in this game, the less I believe in random coincidence. Then Iris, I’ve mentioned already, my second wife Iris. Jim and her went back a long way, in the school chum sense. Iris knew Jim’s real name, of course, though by the time I met her, I’d just about finished typing this. Thanks, Iris, I said. It was just after she came out of prison, I wanted to do an audio-feature on her, but she refused. Then, in the course of our increasingly warm discussions,
Jim
came up in some context or other. They both wrote plays at school. Such a detail by this stage was not even ironic.

Anyway, let’s gather this. All the time, as Jim spewed out his trance on tape, and as I transcribed it, then shaped it up in the way you’ll soon read, I had been trying to piece together who this piece of wind, this part-time harp, this draughty portrait hall could be. By
could be
I didn’t mean just his name. Names are a bagatelle:
Jim, Shem, Hamish, Hamlet,
what can it possibly matter? No, it wasn’t his
name
but
who he really was
that I was after. That was the core of my project, long after the cheques from the NHS were gone. There was even that other quest he’d fondly flirt with:
Who he could have been, given luck and a fair wind.
We can all indulge ourselves in that sort of thing. But it can also throw some interesting beams. Well, I had to be frank with Iris. My typescript was as good as finished. No, I said, your
information
has come too late, get your tank off my lawn.
Not
the way you want to speak to a recently-freed anarchist, let me tell you. I said to her, I’ve done the best I can, it would weary me past conscience to reorder all my stuff.

You might ask what it is, this
best
that I’ve done. Well, I’ve done the basics. I’ve turned all first person into third, in order to turn Jim into someone more distanced. No-one wants to hear
I, I, I,
hammering on. I’ve moved some recordings around to where I think they belong in the original chronological sequence. Nobody’s that keen on reading jumble. And I’ve edited out most of the repetition, I hope. Because sometimes Jim moved via trance to a strange kind of incantation. A dream to listen to, but if you ever try setting incantation down, a
thorough
bore to read.

That’s about it really. I’ve added interior decoration, a few
descriptions
of the city from my own knowledge, and some sketchy
topography
so you can keep a hold of the journeys. But it’s the
feeling
that’s most important, and that’s what was there on the tape. What it
felt
like to be this man. If you don’t sense that, then it is my fault: he blew me plenty, I shaped too much. Does it in any way
touch
on the novel? Perhaps all biography must. This I attest above all: I fleshed out scenes only where that seemed vital, and in ways I thought consistent and reasonable.

Icarus ’68
opens at the outset of a year. That may seem daunting. Courage, reader: it is over by the end of the first day. This is one of the swiftest accounts of a fall you will ever meet.

Let me begin.