Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (14 page)

And if there was to be room for the ex-wife, there would have to be room for other unsavoury characters as well. Despite himself, Bill urged the conceit to its baleful conclusion. The tarts – there would be room at Dunrobin for the tarts, the brasses, the whores. Bill imagined trying to keep them out – this delegation of tarts. Meeting them at the gates of the Castle and attempting to turn them back. ‘But you fucked us!’ their spokesmadam would abjure him. ‘We demand room in the Castle!’ He would have no choice but to admit them – and then the fragile concord of the seraglio would be shattered. The other lovers might have been prepared to accept sorority as a substitute for monogamy, but the tarts? Never. The tarts would swear and drink. They would smoke crack in the billiard room, and shoot smack in the butler's pantry. They would seduce the younger lovers and outrage the older. On cold nights Bill would find himself desperately stuffing his head beneath covers, beneath pillows, trying to shut out the sounds of their wassailing, as they plaited with the moan and screech of the wind.

On the long straight that bounced up the other side of the loch, Bill clocked the signs requesting assistance from the coastguard in the fight against drug smugglers: If You See Anything Suspicious . . . The image of gracious polygamy faded and was replaced by one of Bill beachcombing, prodding at shells with a piece of driftwood, his jacket collar turned up, its points sharp against his chilled ears. The oiled tip of his makeshift shovel turns up a corner of blue plastic bag. He delves further. Six rectangular blocks, each sealed in blue plastic and heavily bound with gaffer tape are revealed to be neatly buried. Bill smiles and gets out his penknife . . .

Another sign whipped by at the top of the rise: Unmarked Police Cars Operating . . . Spoilsports. No seraglio and now no mother lode of Mama Coca; no white rails for the wheels of the big car to lock on to; no propulsive, cardiac compression to take Bill's heart into closer harmony with the rev counter . . . He hunkered down once more, gripped the steering wheel tighter, concentrated on the metallic rasp of John Lee Hooker's guitar, which ripped up the interior of the car. Then came the roadworks. Then came the hitchhiker.

Bill braked, and looked for somewhere to pull over. About fifty metres further on there was a break in the earth-soft verge where blue-grey gravel puddled on to the roadway. Bill aimed for it, indicated, and then crunched the car to a halt. In the rearview mirror he could see the hitchhiker running towards the car, his pack bouncing, his poncho flapping, an expression of gap-toothed desperation on his face, as if he were absolutely certain that this offer of a lift was a taunt or a hoax, and that as soon as he was level with the car Bill would drive off guffawing.

The hitchhiker yanked the car door open and the fresh air and moisture and sunlight streamed in. ‘Thanks, mate –’ He was clearly going to converse.

‘Get in!’ Bill snapped. ‘I can't stop here for long.’ He gestured at the roadway, where the cars were having to pull over the centre line in order to pass. The hitchhiker threw himself into the front passenger seat of the car, his pack still on. Bill glanced in the rearview, indicated, lazily circled the wheel to the right, and rejoined the traffic.

For some seconds neither said anything. Bill pretended to concentrate on the driving and observed his captive out of the corner of his eye. The hitchhiker sat, his face almost against the windscreen, the backpack – which Bill now saw had a tent bag and roll of sleeping bag tied to it – was like a whole, upper-body splint, designed so as to force its wearer into closer contemplation of the road. A Futurist's corset.

‘I'll stop as soon as I can,’ Bill said, ‘and we can put that in the back.’

The hitchhiker said, ‘Thanks very much.’

He was – Bill guessed – in his late twenties or early thirties. His accent was Caithness, the sharp elements of a Scottish brogue, softened and eroded by a glacial covering of Scandinavian syllables. His black, collar-length hair was roughly cut. He wore the yellow nylon poncho, and under it a never-fashionable, fake sheepskin-lined denim jacket. From behind the distempered non-wool, poked the collar of a tartan shirt. The hitchhiker's breath smelt foully of stale whisky. His eyes were bivouacked in purple bags, secured by purple veins. He was unshaven. His teeth were furred. He had an impressive infection in the dimple of his strong chin – he wasn't bad-looking.

‘Are you going far?’ he asked.

‘All the way,’ Bill smiled, ‘to London, that is.’

The hitchhiker grinned, and attempted – insofar as the pack allowed him – to settle more securely in his seat. It was the last question he asked Bill for the whole journey.

They were across the Cromarty Firth causeway and on the Black Isle before Bill found a proper layby to stop in. They both got out of the car and Bill rearranged the things on the back seat so that the hitchhiker could stash his pack. They were rolling again in a couple of minutes. Bill pushed the car up to seventy and then idled there, the index finger and thumb of his right hand holding the lower edge of the steering wheel as if it were some delicate surgical instrument. The rain ceased and the roadway shone once more. The muted CD played the current single by a hip guitar band. The hitchhiker drummed chipped, dirty nails on frayed, dirty denim.

‘So,’ said Bill after a while, ‘where are you headed?’

‘I'm going all the way too.’ He hunched round to face Bill, as if they were casual drinkers striking up a conversation at the bar of the car's dashboard, ‘I stop in Poole, Dorset, but I've a mate in Glasgow I want to see for tonight.’

‘Well, I can drop you outside Glasgow, I'm heading straight on through and south.’

‘That'll be grand.’ The hitchhiker smiled at Bill, gifting him a sight of peaks of plaque. It was a smile that should be given at the conclusion of such a trip – not the beginning. ‘Nice car,’ the hitchhiker said, still smiling.

‘Yeah,’ Bill drawled, ‘it motors. So, where're you from?’

‘Thurso.’

‘And what's the purpose of the trip?’

‘I'm studying down in Poole, got myself on a computer course like. I had a reading week so I thought I'd get up to see my kiddies –’

‘They're in Thurso?’

‘Aye, right enough.’

The old ‘fluence was still there, Bill thought. A couple of miles, a few questions insinuated in the right vulnerable places, and like some cunning piece of Chinese marquetry – a box with hidden compartments subtly palped – the hitchhiker's psyche would begin to open out, to exfoliate. They swung over the ridge of Isle and the car caromed on down, on to the dual carriageway. They emerged from a forest of scattered conifers and there, hunkered around its cathedral spire, Inverness gleamed.

‘Inverness,’ said the hitchhiker.

He even states the obvious! Bill snidely exulted.

‘Did you come from Thurso this morning?’

‘I did. After a bit of a session – if you catch my meaning.’

‘Some mates saw you off then?’

‘They couldna’ exactly see me off – they were all pished malarkey. Five of the fuckers, all inna heap. So I tiptoed out. Got a lift right away across to Latheron, then down to Dornoch. Then I was walking in the bloody rain for four miles before you stopped for me –’

‘It was difficult to stop. The roadworks –’

‘Aye, right enough.’

‘You've got a tent and stuff there?’

‘In case I get caught short like – and have to spend the night on the road. I had to do that on the way up. I slept by the side of the road near Aviemore.’

‘Wasn't that a drag?’

The hitchhiker snorted. ‘I'll say. Come five in the morning the rain starts coming down holus-bolus, and then a fucking cow starts giving a horn to ma’ flysheet. I was back on the road before dawn, with my thumb stuck up like a fucking icicle . . .’ He trailed off and gave Bill another grimy grin. His stubble was blue.

Bill was emboldened to ask, ‘So, you're fond of a drink then?’

The hitchhiker pressed the ball of his thumb into one eye socket, the middle joint of his index finger into the other. He kneaded and scrunched his features, answering from within this pained massage, ‘Oh well, I suppose . . . perhaps more than I should be. I dunno.’

Bill grimaced. He looked for a turning on the left – the carriageway was still dual – when he saw a forestry track. He dabbed the brakes, indicated, lazily circled the wheel and pulled in. ‘Slash,’ he said.

They both got out. Bill left the car running. They both pissed into the edge of the woodland. Through steam and sun Bill examined his companion's urine. Very dark. Perhaps even blood dark. There was a touch of jaundice in the hitchhiker's complexion as well. Maybe kidney infection, Bill thought, maybe worse. Not that this would be necessarily pathological in any way. They drank like that in Thurso – as they did in Orkney.

Bill knew ten men under thirty-five on Papa alone who had stomach ulcers. In Dr Bohm's surgery there were forty-odd leaflets urging parents to check their children for symptoms of drug abuse. Absurd, when about the only drugs available on the island were compounds for ensuring the evacuation of bovine after-birth. Bohm also had one small tattered sticker near the surgery door, which proclaimed: Drinkwise Scotland, and gave a help-line number. This lad was, Bill re-

fleeted, quite possibly addicted to alcohol, without necessarily being an alcoholic.

When they were back in the car Bill reached back behind the young man's seat and pulled up the car bottle. It was half-full. ‘Will you have a dram?’ He sloshed the contents about; they were light and pellucid – as the stream of urine ought to have been. Bill appreciated the exact battle between metabolic need and social restraint that danced with the young man's features. He broke the spell by uncorking the bottle and taking a generous swig himself. Then he passed the bottle to the young man who was saying, ‘Sure . . . Yeah . . . Right.’

The whisky went off like an anti-personality mine somewhere in the rubble-strewn terrain of Bill's forebrain. He flicked the shift into reverse and crunched backwards. He took the bottle from the young man and re-stashed it. He hugged the headrest and sighted down the road. Nothing. He banged the accelerator and the car twisted backwards, pivoting at the hips, rested on its rubber haunches for a second while Bill flicked the shift into drive, then shook itself and plunged back up the long hill. Twenty, thirty, forty . . . the turbo-charger ‘gnunng'ed!’ in . . . fifty-five, seventy, eighty . . . to either side the rows of orderly conifers strobed back; the gleaming road ahead twanged like a rubber band; the sky shouted ‘Wind!'; the reggae music welled like beating blood: ‘No-no-no-oo! You don’ love me an’ I know now –’ Bill was feeling no pain. The young man was shouting something, Bill hit OFF.

‘– arked cars –’

‘What was that you said?’ Bill's voice was precise and dead level in the instantaneously null environment of the car. It sounded like an aggressive threat.

‘Y’know the police, man . . . the pigs . . . They have unmarked cars on this road.’

‘I know.’ Bill poked at the speedometer. ‘Anyway I'm only doing eighty-five, they won't pull you till you get within a whisker of ninety – d'you smoke?’ Without so much as twisting the thread of conversation, Bill had filched another joint from his inside pocket.

The whisky and the skunk opened the young man up. He skewed himself further in his seat, imposing more intimacy, and Bill began to feed him questions. His name was Mark. His father had been a marine engineer. Much older than the mother. The father was Viennese – Jewish. A wartime refugee, he designed some of the early SONAR systems. The mother died of cancer when Mark was eight, the father four years later. The father had had money but the estate was mismanaged by uncaring trustees. Mark and his brother ended up in children's homes. They were separated. Mark left school, got a job with a carrier's. Married, had two children and . . .

‘Fucked up, I s'pose, right enough.’

‘What's that?’

‘With the kiddies like. Fucked up. Y’know, I was young – didn't know what I wanted. Still don't, I s'pose.’ He gifted Bill another smile that had once – no doubt – been charming.

Bill had been waiting for this; this descent into the cellar of Mark's mind. The kids – his relationship with his kids – would have to be the trapdoor, the way down. Bill had pegged Mark as a bolter almost immediately. There was an aspect of bruised dejection about the young man which suggested someone who was willing to wound but afraid to strike. Someone who would say the unsayable and then attempt retraction. Someone whose capacity for self-love would only ever be manifested through attitudinising and narcissism.

Bill thought that he quite hated Mark already. He hated the young man's willingness to be drawn out. His self-absorption. His tiresome lack of cool – he had told Bill four times while they smoked the joint how good the dope was in Poole, and how adept he and his pals were at obtaining it. Bill resolved to pump Mark for all he was worth. To gut the man's past, quarter his present, and draw a bead on his future. It was a game Bill had often played before – trying to find out as much as he could about someone he encountered by chance. Find out as much as he could, and – this was crucial – not give away anything about himself. Once the mark began asking questions themselves the game was over.

‘It's difficult bringing up kids –’

‘Specially with no dosh. Specially with no space, y'know. Space to think. I always thought there was more to me than just a driver. My father was a brilliant man. I couldn't find myself. Couldn't in Thurso – nothing there. And my wife . . . she didn't, sort of, get it . . .’

‘Understand?’

‘Right.’

‘And it's better down in Poole? Did you go there directly?’

‘Well, no. I bummed around the country, sort of, for a while. I mean, I set off aiming for Glastonbury that year – and then just sort of kept on. Got, well, ended
up
in Poole because of the Social –’

‘Easier to claim?’

‘Aye.’

They were well into the mountains and the clouds had come down. To the right the Monadhliaths, to the left the Grampians. The valley was a mile or so wide. Beyond the rough summer pasture the mountains did what they did best: mounting. Either the furred flanks of forestry, or the abrasive architecture of scree. Up and Up, until the indefinite, thrusting peaks made contact with the cloudy massifs lowered from above. Bill noted that the car was almost out of petrol. They would have to run into Aviemore.