Posts Tagged ‘meg baird’
if rats are made out of nothingness
New Labour won the Glenrothes by-election. Gordon will be gloating. He sits at night in his new primrose yellow room full of broken cogs and scattered springs and cannot believe his luck. He sniggers. He chortles. He laughs like a Kirkcaldy drain. How many dark nights did he sit over-winding his beloved timebomb, praying to the mythical deity that the bloody thing wouldn’t blow up in his face? But blow up it does and guess what: he’s off the hook! You’d almost think Gordon had done this deliberately, wouldn’t you? I gather he’s now asked Sarah to get him a wrecking ball for Christmas. He’s told her he’s come up with an ingenious solution to the recession in the construction industry.
I spoke to Talullah Hudspith a few days ago. I hadn’t seen her since Rosie’s leaving do. She asked me what I thought of Jack’s performance.
‘Quite remarkable,’ I said. ‘And brave. The man rocks, doesn’t he?’
Talullah and Jack have an odd relationship. Some say she has a thing about him; others say the exact opposite is true. I personally remain agnostic on the Talullah and Jack issue.
‘Do you think so?’ Talullah said, with more than a hint of a sneer. ‘I thought he was bloody ridiculous, actually. I mean, what on earth would possess a man of his age to prance around like that in front of all those poor women? He’s got no shame.’
In the light of this response you too will now no doubt be hypothesising about Talullah and Jack. I certainly was. But a tactical evasion seemed the order of the day.
‘So is he back at work?’ I asked.
Talullah chuckled, or perhaps snortled. ‘Oh ho, he’s back all right!’ she said. ‘The dirty hound’s always skulking around in the shadows somewhere. He’s never yet spoken to me about his antics, of course. He’s quite ridiculous, really. Do you know he’s now wearing dark glasses for work? He never takes them off. Who the hell does he think he is, Elvis Presley?!’
‘Yeah, I would be too if I’d done what he did!’ I said. ‘The guy’s probably just a bit embarrassed.’
‘Embarrassed?! Him?! That’s a laugh. You couldn’t knock him back with a shitty stick, man. No, he’s a star reborn, that’s what our Jack is. I wish he’d do us all a favour and just retire.’
‘So,’ I said. ‘How’s the delightful Mrs Gormley? Did she enjoy the night?’
‘Oh, Betty loved it! She’d do it again tomorrow if she could.’
‘Maybe Jack’ll play for her if she asks him nicely,’ I said. ‘If he really is a star reborn, he’ll have no problem with that. Nor will she, I suspect. Just as long as he keeps his pants on next time.’
Talullah’s from a theatrical blackground. She’s naturally dramatic. She’s the kind of woman who likes to start a riot. Maybe it just gets up her nose that Jack upstaged her.
Mandy has been into the office a couple of times this week. There have been almost daily sightings of the Arab in the white Mercedes and she’s getting very stressed. On Friday she and Mr Zee were waiting to see Debs when I arrived at the office. Mr Zee looked very smart, as always. His rich brown cape was almost shimmering in the morning sun.
‘How you doing?’ I said to him.
‘I’m okay,’ he replied. ‘You know.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I know. So are you still reading Bukowski?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I decided he wasn’t my cup of tea. I’m reading Neruda at the minute. They’ve got lots of his stuff at ZorrStore.com. I’m trying to get into Rumi too.’
Mandy then told me that the phone had rung seven times during the night for each of the last three nights, and each and every time it was the same old tune.
‘Is Flinty still with Molly?’ I asked.
Mandy shrugged and looked at Mr Zee.
‘We don’t know,’ he said.
‘Have you told the police?’
‘Yeah. Nothing they can do. The caller’s using a stolen mobile.’
When I got home that night there were three more big boxes of slippers in the hall. De Kooning was sitting on top of them playing king of the castle. Geraldine was talking to Margaret about the latest curse of the Citadel: rats. They were first spotted by Big Trevor while I was in Glasgow it seems, scuttling around beneath his railings.
‘They weren’t there until the builders came,’ Geraldine said.
I wondered if she thought the builders had imported them as a sort of alien species, or simply because no building site is complete without a good infestation of rodents.
‘So how did they get there?’ I asked, already allowing my mind to toy with the notion of their ex nihilo creation.
‘Well, it can only be the building site, can’t it?’ Margaret said. ‘They weren’t there until they started building that monstrosity.’
Okay, I thought, but how did they get here? Did Griff dress himself as the Pied Piper and lead them here from their old haunts along the quayside? Did they hear along the grapevine about the Citadel site and make their way here, like the Israelites to the Promised Land, like Americans to California? My guess was that they’ve always been here or that perhaps the sightings are apocryphal, a plague of the Citizens’ collective imagination.
‘We need to visit the site en masse and register our protest,’ Geraldine said. ‘Rats are dangerous. Did you know that they sometimes curl up on your pillow beside your face as you sleep! Imagine that. It’s horrific!’
‘Will we be safe?’ Margaret asked.
‘As long as we wear sensible footwear we will be!’ Geraldine said, obviously recalling the mass trespass during the summer when she fell off her high heeled boots. It’s not often Geraldine makes a joke about herself.
‘I’ll wear my Timberlands,’ Margaret said. ‘They’ll never get me in them.’
I went through to the conservatory to drink a cappuccino. There were a dozen or so pairs of slippers lined up across the floor. They were obviously part of the Christmas stock. Slippers with owls and guitars and ducks on them. Camper van slippers, cows and gingerbread men slippers. There were also a couple of pairs of fake fur leopard skin bootie slippers. I stepped over them and stood at the window. The sky was almost dark. There were vague lights flickering somewhere deep in the carcase of the Citadel. It looms over us like Kafka’s Castle. I began again to wonder where Hugo had put his little giraffe.
‘Edna will never come home now,’ Margaret said, after Geraldine had left. ‘She’ll never cope with the idea that she might wake up and find a rat sleeping next to her face. It’s an absolute crying shame.’
I stared out at the Castle. I wondered about the rats that are made out of nothingness.
‘I’m going to Brenda’s tonight,’ Margaret said. ‘Her friend who’s an astrologer is coming to her house. She’s going to do my horoscope.’
I nodded. I said nothing for a minute or so.
‘Are you taking some of these slippers with you?’ I eventually asked.
‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘But I am taking the boxes in the hall.’
When she left I had another cappuccino and sat for a while reading my book on Scottish art. Some of W G Gillies’ paintings are stunning. I love his border landscapes and they sort of feel like home to me too. It takes a lot of confidence to paint as freely as he does in those paintings. But I was particularly taken on Friday night by his 1973 painting The Garden in Winter. We sometimes fail to see the beauty that lies in the ordinary things, the things we can see from our windows. We sometimes fail to see how much those things really matter. I gave De Kooning his prawns and painted a new square canvas over with a Prussian blue ground.
I watched it dry and listened to Meg Baird’s album. I decided I would have to go up to Temple soon to see the house where Gillies lived and where he did all those late paintings.
I watched Newsnight. I went to bed.
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between gauntanamo and the grey corries
Most of the day I’ve been trying to get things in order at the office before I go off on holiday. The truth is that this is a virtually impossible task. The most that can be done is to lift down or push back those things that are teetering on the brinks of the highest shelves so that they won’t fall while you’re away. This task was done with a mixture of hopeful determination and resentment. But I was constantly prone to a lack of concentration. Already my heart was in the Grey Corries where space itself shrieks and sobs, whispers, breathes and yammers. Where shadows plunge into impossible, unimaginable abysses, where ridges and outcrops leap and glower among dark and ragged skies. The thought of those places made it hard for me to tidy my desk.
Gilmour rang me in a panic earlier in the week. The press had picked up on the discussions on Metro radio. The Journal and the Daily Mail had both been in touch asking what we knew about the Flinties and what we were doing about them.
‘These aren’t Moslem kids, are they?’ Gilmour asked, almost pleading.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not clear that they have any religious affiliations at all, in fact. They’re just a bunch of kids running around in pillow cases.’
‘So what’s this throwing aeroplanes at people’s houses about?’
I told him the tale of Flinty’s return and how he’d become a sort of folk hero and spawned this daft craze. I told him about Batman and Bob Marley too.
‘Okay, so what are we doing about it?’ he said.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘What should we be doing, confiscating the pillowcases?’
‘Well, no. But we’ve got some scared people out there. We do need to do something. Or at least we need to seem to do something.’
‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘Incarcerate them in a pillowcase camp, set up a mini Gauntanamo behind the Woodhorn Museum? Get a bit of extraordinary rendition going and ship them off to Middlesbrough?’
‘What about getting some youth workers down there or setting up some activities and play schemes? Perhaps we need to put in some support for parents – educational input and parenting courses. And we need to think about the victims. I’ll speak to adult services. We need to see if we can get some counselling for anyone who’s been traumatized by these young people’s activities. I’ll speak to the police and see if we can get extra patrols in hot spots. We need more police presence in the community, some good old-fashioned Bobbies on the beat. We need to be talking about getting more CCTV on these estates. People need to feel secure. We need to take the lead here. We need to coordinate a full multi-agency response. We’ll see if we can get housing on board. Maybe they can do something about some of these families under the anti-social legislation. I wonder if we should be talking to church leaders too? What do you think?’
What I thought was that he might be over-reacting just a bit. What I thought was that kid will be kids. What I thought was that Flinty was the only real risk to anyone here and it would be helpful if he was arrested. But I somehow doubted that this was what Gilmour wanted to tell the press. He had gone into full shock and awe mode. I wondered how long it would be before we considered the Guantanamo option.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What about the funding?’
‘Oh, I’m sure the money will be there for this one. Listen, this sounds good to me. I’ll get on to the press office. We’ll say we’re aware of this problem and we’re on to it, but that we’re sure these young people do not pose any threat to the general public. We’ll say we’re working with the community to find solutions and putting in specialist workers to help these children and their families. We’ll say there’s no evidence that these young people are in any way involved with Moslem groups.’ He paused for a moment. ‘No,’ he went on, ‘I’ll leave that bit out. But we’ll set up a help line. What about using your team to man it?’
‘No chance,’ I said. ‘We’re run off our feet. And anyway, what would we say to anyone who rang? And why do we want them to think we can do anything in any case?’
‘Hmmm,’ Gilmour said. ‘Okay, no help line. Okay. That’s fine. Anyhow, how you doing, my boy? How’s your dad?’
‘Oh, he’s fine. Still working in the boiler room, you know. Yours?’
‘He’s very well, thanks. Absolutely tickety boo. Did I tell you my lad’s driving the quad now?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think you did. Your daughter’s got a dappled horse too, hasn’t she?’
‘She has, yes. Beautiful beast.’
‘And the horse isn’t bad either, eh?’
Gilmour chuckled.
‘Have you had your holidays yet?’ I asked.
‘Not yet, no. We’re off to Provence again in a couple of weeks. You?’
‘I’m off to Scotland next week to do some walking. I’m looking forward to it.’
Gilmour bid me farewell and went off to speak to Public Relations. Just after he hung up Michelle told me there had been another sighting of Captain Hook. He was walking along Pont Street eating a bag of chips. It’s said he has a slight limp, as if he’s hurt his left foot.
I’ll be leaving for Fort William tomorrow morning. After tea tonight I carried De Kooning out into the garden and we gazed together at the Citadel. They’re putting the concrete floors in now and the huge aluminium window frames.
‘Watch what you’re doing while I’m gone,’ I said to him. ‘Don’t you go wandering over there, okay?’
He laid his head against my arm for a moment. I’ll miss him while I’m away, I always do.
We went inside and I began to get together the things I’m taking with me. I like to take a small selection of CD’s and a book or two. I decided to take the latest albums by Eliza Carthy and Meg Baird, both of which are excellent, as well as The Essential Leonard Cohen. I’ll take my book on Scottish art to read, along with a couple of books of poems by Kathleen Jamie. Tomorrow I’ll travel north. On Sunday I hope I’ll walk the Grey Corries again.
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yammering 