Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (12 page)

When at last they were spent, and lay wrapped demurely in the Persian rug which had been yanked from the floor by their thrashings, Brion lit a Meta-Marlboro with the lanky lighter and turning to Jane, cupped her big face in his big hand. ‘Just remember,’ he winked at her, ‘don't say a word to the grown-ups.’

TOUGH, TOUGH
TOYS FOR TOUGH,
TOUGH BOYS

B
ill saw him about five miles after he had powered past the Dornoch turning. The hitchhiker was walking with one foot in the newly minted road, and one on the just-born verge. He was wearing some kind of cheap plastic poncho, which didn't really cover the confused pack on his back. There were no road markings, as yet, on this fresh stretch. Two hundred metres before he saw the hitchhiker, Bill had passed one of the road workers holding a lollipop sign with GO written on it in white-out-of-green capitals. The traffic was thick solid files moving at twenty miles an hour in both directions. The cars were kicking up spray, and from out of the sharp blue sky, big, widely spaced drops of rain descended.

The hitchhiker was trying simultaneously to turn and give the car drivers a come-hither grin, keep his footing on the uneven surface, and shelter himself under his plastic poncho. It was, Bill thought, a pathetic sight. There was that, and also an indefinable something about the hitchhiker's bearing – Bill thought later, and then thought that he had thought so at the time, in the precise moment foot slipped from accelerator to brake – which he recognised as being not that of a tourist, but someone going somewhere with a purpose, not unlike Bill himself.

Bill had spent the night at Mrs McRae's bed and breakfast, at Bighouse on the northern coast of Caithness. In the blustery evening, after a poorly microwaved pie – there was a chilly nugget in its doughy heart – he had stumped to the public phone, the half-bottle of Grouse in his jacket pocket banging against his hip, and called Betty. Once his fingertips had been digitised and resolved into connection the line sounded dead in Bill's ear. He could recognise the tone of Betty's phone – he knew it that well; but the phone was at the bottom of a galvanised metal dustbin. Then Betty was in the dustbin as well, and he was calling down to her: ‘Betty? It's me, Bill.’

‘Bill, where are you?’ She sounded interested.

‘Bighouse, I'm at Mrs McRae's –’

‘Bill – why are you there, why did you backtrack?’

‘I could only get the four o'clock ferry from Stromness, and I wanted to stay between Wick and Tongue . . .’ This was an old joke, and Betty didn't laugh. Anyway he was lying – and she knew it.

‘What's it like then between Tongue and Wick?’ She owed it to the history of the old joke to sustain the repartee – a little.

‘Oh, you know, furry, an odd bit of lint here and there, some sweat, a smear of soap, perhaps later some semen –’ He broke off – preposterously there was banging on the door of the phone box.

A white face bloomed out of wind and darkness: ‘Will you be all night? The wind's bitter.’

‘I've only just got through.’ He held the receiver out towards the old woman's scarf-wrapped face. She looked at it. Bill thought of Betty on the other end of the line, listening to the gale, participating in this non-conference call.

‘The wind's bitter,’ the old woman reiterated – she would say nothing more.

Bill jammed himself back inside the phone box, but didn't allow the heavy door to close completely. Pinioned thus, he called down into the dustbin, ‘Betty, there's an elderly lady here who needs the phone – I'll call back later.’ He heard her faint valediction and hung up. He hadn't called back later.

In the morning the storm that had hung over Caithness and Orkney for the past week had cleared. The sun was chucking its rays down so hard that they exploded off all glass and metal. Looking out from the window of the kitchen, where he sat at Formica dabbling rind in yoke, Bill saw that the aluminium trim around the windows of his car was incandescent. He paid Mrs McRae with wadded Bank of Scotland pound notes – eleven of them. ‘Will you be back soon, Dr Bywater?’ she asked.

‘Y’ know, Mrs McRae,’ he replied, ‘when I'm next up to Orkney.’

‘And any idea of when that'll be?’

He shrugged his shoulders and held his hands out, palms uppermost, so as to indicate the maximum possible mixture of doubts and commitments.

Bill threw his bag in the boot of the car and picked up the CD interchanger. He inserted the restocked cartridge of CDs into the rectangular aluminium mouth, and listened with satisfaction as the servomotors swallowed it up. He set the interchanger back in its housing and slammed the boot. He walked round to the front of the car and undid the bonnet. He checked the oil, the water and the windscreen reservoir. He checked the turbo cooling unit pipe that had burst while he was in Orkney, and which he'd welded himself. He did this all quickly and deftly, his blunt fingers feeling the car with unabashed sensuality. Bill was proud of his hands – and his skill with them.

Inside the car he wiped the hands on a rag. He started the engine of the car and listened carefully to the note of the engine. He stashed the rag and inserted the CD-control panel into its dash mounting. He dickered with the servos that automatically adjusted the driver's seat. He gave the windscreen a few sweeps of soapy water. He programmed the CD to play randomly. Finally, he lit one of the joints that he'd rolled while he was shitting after breakfast. Exhaling the first blast of smoke made the interior of the car seem like a fantastical van de Graaff generator, the lights on the fascia sparking through the haze.

Bill reached behind him, pulled up the bottle of Campbelltown twelve-year-old from under the stack of professional journals he kept on the back floor. He glanced about at the roadway, but there was nothing, only the slate roof of Mrs McRae's, with a bank of grass swaying in front of it. Bill took a generous pull on the whisky, capped the ‘car bottle’ as he jocularly styled it – to himself – and re-stashed it. He checked his rearview, then planted his foot on the accelerator. The big car shook itself once before plunging along the road. The inertia pressed Bill into the worn leather of the seat, releasing tiny molecules of good smell. He heard the turbo-charger kick in with its pleasing whine. John Coltrane's sax burst from the four seventy-watt speakers, the long flat sheets of sound spooling out like algorithms of emotion.

Bill managed the twenty miles into Thurso in about half an hour, ridiculously good going for this twisting stretch of road, the camber of which constantly surprised with its adversity. But the rain was gone and the visibility good. Bill kept his foot down, feeling the weight of the big saloon slice through the fresh air. The car was so long that if he drove with one arm cradling the headrest of the passenger seat – which he often did – in his peripheral view he could see the back of the car turning, gifting him a peculiar sense of being a human fulcrum.

As he drove Bill looked at the sky and the land. He didn't love Caithness the way he did Orkney. Orkney was like Avalon, a mystical place where beyond the rampart cliffs of Hoy a shoal of green, whale-like islands basked in the azure sea. But this northern coast of Britain was composed of ill-fitting elements: a bit of cliff here, a green field there, a stretch of sand and dunes over there; and over there the golf-ball reactor hall of Dounreay, the nuclear power station, waiting for some malevolent god to tee it off into the Pentland Firth. Caithness was infiltrated with a palpable sense of being underimagined. This was somewhere that nobody much had troubled to conceive of, and the terrain bore the consequences in its unfinished aspect.

It was one of the things Bill loved most about the far north. Professional, middle-class friends down south would have no sense of the geography of these regions. When he told them that he had a cottage in Orkney, they would insistently confuse the islands with the Hebrides. It allowed Bill to feel that, in a very important way, once the
St Ola
ferry pulled out of Scrabster harbour, he was sailing off the face of the earth.

Thurso. A grey, dour place. The council housing hunched, constrained, barrack-like; and pushing its closed face into the light of day, as if only too aware that this sunshine was the end of things, and that soon the long, long, windy nights would be back. Bill stopped at the garage, on the rise from where he had the best possible view of Orkney, sixteen miles away to the north. The day was so clear he could make out the crooked finger of the Old Man of Hoy, where it stood proud of the great sea cliffs. There was a light coping of snow on top of the island, which flared in the sunlight. With a wrench in his heart Bill pulled off the forecourt, and wheeled right.

Once he had left Thurso, and was accelerating up the long gradient out of the town, Bill settled down to think about the drive. Into this mental act came the awareness that he hadn't, as yet, really relaxed into it. The Bighouse to Thurso stretch had required the wrong kind of concentration; Bill needed to sink into the driving more. He liked to trance out when he was driving, until eventually his proprioception melded with the instrumentation of the car, until he
was
the car. Bill conceived of the car at these times as being properly animate: its engine a heart, its sump a liver, its automated braking system a primitive but engaging – sentience.

The car supported Bill's body in its skin-coated settee, while he watched the movie of the road.

Bill thought about the drive and began to make wildly optimistic estimates of the time each stage would take him: two hours to Inverness, an hour and a half on through the Highlands to Perth, then another hour to Glasgow. Maybe even make it in time for lunch. Then on in the late afternoon, down the M72 to Carlisle. Then the M6 – which felt as if it were a river, coursing downhill all the way to Birmingham. He might be in time to stop off in Mosely for a balti. Penultimately the M40 in the dead of the night, ghostly tentacles of mist shrouding the road as the big car thrummed through the Midlands towards London. And then finally the raddled city itself; the burble of the exhaust reverberating from the glass façades of the car showrooms and office-equipment suppliers along the Western Avenue.

Placing himself in London at 1 a.m. after seven hundred miles of high-pitched driving, Bill could anticipate with precision the jangled condition of his body, the fraying of his over-concentrated mind. He might – he thought – let himself into Betty's flat, then her bed, then her. Or not. Go to the spieler instead. Get properly canned. Ditch the car. Reel home.

The car was lodged behind a glowering seven-ton dump truck. Mud bulged above its grooved sides, the occasional clod toppled off. They were on the long straight that heads down to Roadside, where the A882 pares off towards Wick. There had been rain more recently here and long puddles streaked the road; in the sunlight they were like mirror shards, smashed from the brilliant sky. Without thinking, Bill checked the rearview mirror, the side mirror, flicked on the indicator and rammed his foot to the floor. The car yanked forward, the turbo-charger cutting in with an audible ‘G'nunngg!’. Bill felt the wheels slide and skitter as they fought for purchase on the water, mud and scree strewn about the surface. He was two hundred metres past the truck and travelling at close to ninety, before he throttled back and pulled over to the left once more.

The first pass, was, Bill reflected, the hardest. It represented an existential leap into the unknown. If car and man survived they had made their compact for the journey. There were only two ways to do this mammoth run: slowly and philosophically, or
driving.
Bill had opted for the latter. He celebrated by lighting the second of the joints he had rolled at stool. The Upsetter came on the CD, awesome bass noise transforming the doors into pulsing wobble boards, the whole car into a mobile speaker cabinet. Bill grinned to himself and hunkered down still further in his seat.

The car bucketed through the uneven terrain. The landscape was still failing to distinguish itself. From the road a coping of peat bog oozed away into the heart of Caithness, a caky mush of grasses and black earth. In the distance a single peak raised its white-capped head. It was, Bill considered, a terrain in which a few triceratops and pterodactyl wouldn't have looked altogether out of place. He'd once had an analysand who had a phobia about dinosaurs – not so much their size, or possible rapacity, he could handle that – but the notion of those vast wartinesses of lizard hide. Bill had cured the phobia, sort of. He grinned at himself in the rearview mirror at the memory; he hoped ruefully. But the herpetophobe became correspondingly more erratic in almost every other area of his life. Eventually, psychotic, he ended up being sectioned after ripping the heads off hundreds of model dinosaurs in a spree through South London toy shops.

Bill didn't psychoanalyse anybody any more. He could no longer see the virtue in it – or so he told himself. In truth, he found it easier to sign on with agencies and do various psychiatric locums. He could pick and choose his shifts, and he got a variable case load. Bill had a peculiar affinity for talking down the real crazies; people who might become fork-wielding dervishes. The cops called him a lot nowadays, when they had a berserker in the station and didn't want to get body fluids on their uniforms. Bill wouldn't have said he fully entered into the crazies’ mad mad world – that kind of Laingian stuff had gone the way of non-congenital schizophrenia – but he could fully empathise with these extruded psyches, whose points of view were so vertiginous: one minute on the ceiling, the next on the floor.

Bill also liked to live a little dangerously. To swing. He used to seduce women – but tired of it, or so he thought. In truth he had simply tired. He still drove fast and hard. Up and down to Orkney five or six times a year. At the croft on Papa Westray he mended walls and fences, even built new outbuildings. He had five longhorns – really as pets. And of course there was drinking. He had Betty, sort of. A relationship based on sex on his part, and sex and anticipation on hers. Bill didn't think about his ex-wife. Not that he couldn't bear to acknowledge the truths surrounding her – insight was, after all, his profession – but because he really didn't feel that he needed to harp on it any longer. It was the past.

Bill had a thick leather car coat. Bill had a turbo-charged three-litre saloon. He liked single malts and skunk. He liked boats; he had an Orkney long liner skiff on Papa. He was a blunt-featured man with rough-cropped blond hair. Women used to stroke his freckled skin admiringly. He liked to climb mountains – very fast. He'd often done three Munros in a day. He wasn't garrulous, unless very drunk. He liked to elicit information. He was forty this year.