The Fanatic (2 page)
Authors: James Robertson
In the first week of his being there his fellow-prisoners had tried to mend his leg and restore his physical strength, but the best they could offer was their prayers. They were ragged, slate-faced men, scrunted and thin, and bent, like the handful of wizened cherry trees that grew at the top of the Bass, by the constant buffeting of the wind. Then these men withdrew from him by degrees, because they could not reconcile themselves to the vehemence of his will. Mitchel knew that they thought him embittered, even deranged. But he saw through their weakness: he had only carried the principles that they all upheld – the right of God’s people to resist unholy rule, the
duty
of God’s Scotland to defend the Covenant against prelatic blasphemy – to their logical conclusion. What they shied away from was their own fear: they were
afraid
to strike the righteous blow, to be the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.
Because of his leg, he had spent nearly all of the two months lying helpless in his cell. There was no possibility of escape from the Bass, which was sheer and devoid of landing-places on three sides and heavily fortified at the one spot on the fourth where a boat, in calm weather and with a
favouring tide, could come in; and so the prisoners were allowed, one or two at a time, to walk everywhere upon it. But this was no advantage to him, crippled as he was. In any case, he was subject to special, more restrictive orders.
Some of the others, in fine weather, or even in wet, cold-blasting storms, spent more time out stravaiging among the solans than in the company of each other. Alexander Peden, the prophet of Galloway, had been there nearly four years, and Alexander Forrester and William Bell, arrested for field-preaching in Fife and in the Pentland Hills, almost as long; James Fraser had arrived on the same boat with Mitchel, and shortly after had come another minister from the north, Thomas Hog of Kiltearn, and a man called George Scot, committed for harbouring fugitive ministers; and there was one Robert Dick, a merchant, who had organised and attended the Pentland conventicle at which William Bell had preached. Together or alone, standing among the pecking solans that moved like a crop of bleached barley in the stiff wind, these men could look across the narrow, impossible sea and dream of re-crossing it. The soldiers of the garrison used to joke that the ministers took lessons from the birds in whining and preaching, so that if they ever got back to Scotland they could deave the whole country with their piousness.
The solans’ screaming never ceased. It sometimes sounded to Mitchel, who could only get to his door and back again, as though the cell must be the only place in the world not filled with birds. A madman would think the constant racket was inside his head. Several times a day Mitchel made a conscious effort to separate the white bird noise from his thoughts; to reclaim his mind from it.
For in his dreams, behind the skull-capped bishop and the hooded torturer, there lurked a third figure, an old man, also a prisoner. Mitchel laboured at his prayers and his Bible because when his mind grew slack this old man approached. He had long white hair damp with seaspray and the skin of his face looked like it had been eaten away by years of salt. More years than Mitchel could bear to think of. He feared the old man; the doubt and self-loathing in his milky eyes. He knew who it was, and it was not himself; but he feared becoming him.
Sometimes in rough weather supplies of food could not be got across from North Berwick for a week or more. In February the prisoners – and the soldiers who guarded them – had been reduced to mixing snow with oatmeal, and chewing on dried fish. The soldiers would sometimes catch fish from the sea, nail them to wooden boards and then float the boards on ropes under the cliffs. A diving solan, spotting the herring, would impale the wood with its beak and be hauled in to be roasted, but these adult birds, some of them twenty years old or more, were tough and oily meat. It was better to eat the fish.
In late summer, men would come to catch the solan chicks, when they were fat and tender but not yet able to fly. Hundreds were taken every year, and sent to London as a delicacy, and yet the colony showed no signs of decreasing in numbers. When the catchers were at work with their nets on the upper part of the Rock, or descending on ropes to knock the flightless chicks on the heads and fling them into the sea, where other men waited to pick them up from a boat, it was like watching Satan’s helpers harvesting souls.
The captain of the garrison administered this business on behalf of the governor, in return for an annual salary and a percentage of the profits. The governor was the Secretary of State for Scotland, John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale. The solan crop was worth around eighty pounds annually. But, this aside, neither he nor anybody else cared much how the captain exercised his power. If he chose, the captain could shut the prisoners in their cells and deny them access to the meagre criss-cross of paths that usually they could share with the birds and the two dozen scabby sheep that grazed the upper slopes of the Rock. He could put a stop to mutual prayers, or prevent visits from friends or family, some of whom travelled for days to reach North Berwick. There was no set of rules, no higher arbitrator to whom the prisoners could apply: the Bass fortress lay off Scotland as impregnable and cold to human comfort as a castle in the moon.
Hugh Hardie needed a ghost: one that would appear down a half-lit close at ten o’clock at night, and have people jumping out of their skins. He also needed a drink. He was seated at a table in Dawson’s, while Jackie Halkit was up at the bar getting it for him. The drink, he thought, might be business or it might be pleasure. He hoped both.
Dawson’s was a large overbright bar in Edinburgh’s Southside, that lurched between douceness and debauchery depending on the time of day. At four o’clock on a Monday afternoon in early spring it was quiet. Office workers were still at their desks; students from the university, with few exceptions, were attending lectures or dozing in the library. The juke-box was silent: the most noise in the place came from three old men settled in one corner, supping halfs-and-halfs and murmuring smug discontents at one another. One student, barely rebellious, was reading the
Sun
, and nursing his pint like a hospice patient, till all life had gone out of it. A woman, possibly a tourist, since she had a small rucksack beside her, was writing postcards at another table. She was drinking mineral water and to Hugh Hardie looked like she had been disapprovingly sober since the day she was born. The old men, he decided, were at that moment the liveliest patrons Dawson’s had. Himself and Jackie excepted, of course.
They were in Dawson’s because it was handy for them both. Hugh’s flat was a few streets away in Newington, and Jackie’s workplace, a small publishing house, was not far in the other direction, off the Canongate. Hugh had an idea for a book that he thought Jackie might be interested in publishing. Jackie was pretty certain already that she wouldn’t be but she hadn’t seen him for a while and she seemed to recall that she’d found his eager boyishness irritatingly attractive. Plus it gave her a good excuse to leave work early: the office was too cluttered and cramped to
receive potential authors in any privacy. When she had suggested meeting in a pub on the phone, Hugh had named Dawson’s. Now she was returning from the bar with a pint for him and a gin and tonic for herself. She had insisted, in her role as interested publisher, on buying the first round.
‘Bit early for this,’ she said. ‘What the hell.
Slàinte.
’
He raised his glass, souked an inch or more out of it. ‘
Slàinte.
’ It was only recently that he’d learnt that this was Gaelic for ‘health’. For years he’d said ‘slange’ thinking it was an obsure Scots term signifying ‘slam your drink down your throat and let’s get another in’. It was watching
Machair
the Gaelic soap opera that had enlightened him.
‘Well, good to see you,’ he said.
‘Yeah, you too. I can’t remember when I last saw you,’ she lied.
‘That Chamber of Commerce day conference on tourism and small businesses,’ he said with precision. ‘Last autumn, remember?’
‘Oh aye,’ she said. ‘That was a long time ago. And now it’s spring, and the tourists are almost upon us again.’
Simultaneously they said, ‘And how
is
your small business?’, and laughed. It sounded like a line from a
Carry On
film.
Carry on Kidding Yourself
, Jackie thought. Not for the first time, she found herself entering a conversation that somehow, for her, wasn’t … well, it wasn’t
authentic.
It had been the same at the conference. So-called experts and consultants delivered talks on resource management strategy, maximising customer/product interface potential, tactical merchandise-redeployment awareness – it all meant nothing and had her nodding off almost immediately.
Later she and Hugh shared a joke or two at the consultants’ expense, but it was apparent that he had taken in about ten times more of what they had said. And yet he derided them, agreed with her when she dismissed them as bullshitters. She wasn’t naive: he was two-faced in a perfectly harmless way; but then, so was she; and all night maybe he was trying to get up her skirt, but she didn’t mind that. It showed initiative.
He was transparently shallow but she wasn’t sure she wanted profundity in a man. She wasn’t sure she wanted a
man. She was, however, interested in the idea that Hugh might be interested.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you tell us about your book and then I’ll tell you about my small business. Cause that’s the order they’re going to have to come in.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Is that how it is?’
‘Aye. That’s exactly how.’
‘Okay.’ He didn’t protest, didn’t even hesitate. ‘Well, you know about my ghost tours, don’t you?’
‘Of course. How are they going?’
‘Put it this way, we’re through the winter. That’s always kind of tough. The problem is, quite a lot of locals want to come on the tours but – and I can’t say I blame them – they’re not keen to wander round the Cowgate in the dark in a freezing January wind. We do a limited programme, depending on the weather and the demand. But it gets better from now on in. In July and August we could run tours every other hour if the Council would wear it. So, to answer your question, things are going all right. A healthy little number, but seasonally dependent.
‘That’s where this idea of mine comes in. I need to spread the potential income across the year. So I’ve been thinking, you know, spin-offs. The mugs and T-shirts option isn’t really an option, don’t you agree? But a book is a different proposition.’
‘The book of the tour?’ said Jackie doubtfully.
‘Exactly. Well, not exactly, no. I mean, you could just make a kind of pamphlet out of the tour script, but it wouldn’t be very long and it would need a lot of rewriting for it to work on the page. You know, you can’t have a rat running across someone’s feet every time they turn over page thirteen.’
‘You’ve got a rat that runs over people’s feet? Did you train it or something?’
‘Not a real one. A rubber rat on a string. You’ll have to come and get the full rat experience one night. It’s very atmospheric’ He paused, and Jackie wondered if he was going to offer her a free pass, but he only drew breath before breenging on with the sales-pitch.
‘Anyway, I had in mind something a bit more substantial than just a twenty-page pamphlet. A proper paperback stuffed
full of Edinburgh’s haunted and macabre past. There’s tons of stuff, Jackie, as I’m sure you know, and a big market of people who want to learn about it. Or get scared silly, in an unthreatening kind of way. It’s not as if I’m the only person operating ghost tours after all.’
‘You certainly are not. You can’t move around St Giles in the summer for folk like you trying to flog their wares to the tourists: what with all the ghoulies and ghosties and body-snatchers and stranglers, you’d think Edinburgh history was one long overflowing bloodbath.’
Hugh shrugged. ‘I can’t help history. Give the people what they want, that’s my motto. I don’t see many of them signing up for the Edinburgh Social and Economic History Perambulating Lecture, do you?’
‘All right, point taken. What about the book?’
‘The blurb would relate it to the tour, so that hopefully people who picked up the book somewhere would come along to do the real thing, and vice versa. But it would stand on its own too, and sell as a good read to visitors and locals alike. Now, I don’t have time myself to mug up all the stories that would be in it, but we could commission someone to do the research and write it all up. Then all we need is a spooky, eye-catching cover design and a snappy title. I had in mind
Major Weir’s Weird Tales of Old Edinburgh
for that, by the way.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Jackie. ‘Commission someone to write it? Who’s going to do that, you? And who’s Major Weir when he’s at home?’
‘A very good question. He’s one of the characters on the tour. I thought he could maybe do an intro to the book – from beyond the grave kind of thing. We don’t want it too po-faced after all. Which reminds me, you wouldn’t happen to know of anybody who might want a bit of casual evening work, would you?’
‘Don’t dodge out of it, Mr Hardie. If you’re not going to write this book, I hope you’re not expecting us to pay someone else to.’
‘You’re a publisher, Jackie. Surely that’s your job. No gain without pain. And let’s face it, you’d get the bulk of the profits. I mean, I’d only be looking for a fifteen or twenty per cent royalty depending on the print-run and the cover-price.’
‘Hugh, in a moment you’re going to get up and buy us another drink, but before you do, listen to me a second. One, I – the company – wouldn’t pay a fee up front for a book that hasn’t been written. All we can afford to take on are finished manuscripts that we think are going to sell, and publish on the basis of the author getting paid a royalty. Two, in the unlikely event that we did pay a writing fee, we certainly wouldn’t be paying a royalty on top of that. Three, the absolute maximum royalty you can expect is ten per cent – if
you
write the book. You know all the publishing jargon, Hugh, but you’re short on the realities.’
‘But don’t you think it’s a great idea for a book? We’re talking about three or four different overlapping markets: local history, ghosts, tourists –’
‘Sure. If you had a finished or even a half-finished manuscript, I’d read it. I’d consider it. But I couldn’t commit to anything on the basis of what you’ve told me. To be honest, Hugh, you should think about publishing it yourself.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to begin.’
‘Well, go back to the pocket guide to publishing you’ve obviously been reading and look in there. It’s really not that difficult these days. All you need is a computer and a DTP package. The technology’s sitting waiting for you, and once you’ve paid the printers, so is all the profit.’
Hugh gave an incredulous laugh. ‘Listen to you, you’re talking yourself out of business.’
She laughed back. ‘Publishing isn’t like any other business. Scottish publishing isn’t like any other publishing.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘It’s true. It may not be how it should be but it is. Scottish publishing is about avoiding anything that might drag you into a swamp of debt and drown you in it.’
‘No wonder it’s the country cousin of London then.’
‘Quite. Now get us another drink.’
Hardie went up to the bar and ordered in his loud, boolie voice. It wasn’t offensive to Jackie, it went with his friendly, disarming smile, but she saw the old men glower at him suspiciously. Dawson’s was used to students but not to entrepreneurs. Jackie could still make out the Edinburgh merchant’s school accent underlying the mid-Atlantic drawl,
but only because she knew it was there. The auld yins probably thought he was English.
Waiting at the bar, Hardie thought about his chances with Jackie. She might have knocked him back on the book proposal, but she’d asked for another drink. She was nice enough looking – but not so she could afford to be choosy. She had thick dark hair and brown eyes, and cheeks that must have been podgy ten years before and would be again in another ten. The same went for her figure – short and tending to dumpiness. But warm and inviting for all that. He imagined her in a white fluffy bathrobe, pink from the bath. It was a heart-stirring thought.
He also thought about his ghost. The old ghost had quit on him that morning, complaining of poor wages and conditions. He’d handed over the cape, staff, wig and rat, demanded the twenty pounds lie wage held back against the return of these ghostly accoutrements, and walked off, never to be seen again. You’d have thought he might have treated the twenty pounds as a kind of bonus, but no. His last words had been to the effect that Hardie was a miserable tight-arsed capitalist bastard and he hoped his trade would drop off. Hardie wasn’t unduly upset. The guy hadn’t done a convincing haunt for months.
‘This is probably a stupid question,’ said Jackie, when he told her his problem, ‘but why do you have to have a ghost anyway? Surely you can do the tour without one.’
‘Sure I can, Jackie, but a ghost tour without a ghost …? Come
on.
Look, in the main season we do three tours a day. The one in the afternoon doesn’t need a ghost, it’s broad daylight and it tends to be more, how can I put it, historical. Mary Queen of Scots, John Knox, Bonnie Prince Charlie, that kind of stuff. The six o’clock tour doesn’t need a ghost either: it’s still daylight, and it caters for the fat Yanks who are about to hurry back to their hotels for the usual haggis and bagpipes tartan extravaganza that’s laid on for them there. The tour is just an hors d’oeuvre. BPC features heavily again. But the nine o’ clock tour – that’s different. That’s the cream of ghost tours. It starts’ – his voice dropped and assumed an exaggerated tremor – ‘as the night draws in, and ends in darkness. The people who come on this tour expect a ghost.
Some of them have been drinking all evening. They’re in high spirits. They’re Swedish inter-railers and rowdy English students and gobsmacked Australian backpackers. I charge extra for this tour. There are little tricks and hidden delights in store for the people who come on it. One of them is a ghost. I must have a ghost.’
‘You must have a ghost,’ Jackie repeated. She was looking past his shoulder towards the door. ‘How about him over there, then?’
Hugh half-turned to look. A tall, slightly stooping man had just come in. He reached the bar in three long strides that seemed almost liquid in their execution, or as if he were treading through shallow water and the splashes of each step were left for a moment in the space where his foot had just been. He was over six feet, skinny and gaunt, his face so white you’d think he’d just walked through a storm of flour. He was almost bald apart from a few wild bursts of hair above the ears. He ordered a pint and while it was being poured stared grimly into space, seeming to aim his gaze along the length of his nose. Hugh Hardie was transfixed.
‘He’s perfect. My God, he’s perfect. You’re absolutely right, Jackie.’
‘He’s not the ghost to solve your problems. He’s out of
my
past.’
‘You mean to say you actually know this person?’
‘Sure. Haven’t seen him for years, right enough. We were at the uni together.’
‘This is uncanny. Quick, call him over.’
‘Now just hold on a minute. Like I said, I’ve not seen him for ages. I’m not sure that I want to renew the acquaintance.’