The Last King of Scotland (1998) (45 page)
Read The Last King of Scotland (1998) Online
Authors: Giles Foden
The kettle starts to whistle, but I don’t get up.
Other nationalist elements, meanwhile, maintain that the Major is indeed an MI5 counter-insurgent posing as a clandestine extremist in order to flush out potential terrorists, and that his arrest is a bluff.
A statement put out by the Scottish National Liberation Army cites the notebooks of the poet and activist Hugh Mac-Diarmid, who died in 1978: “MacDiarmid was President of the 1320 Club. Their members, of which Weir was originally one, believed that the British imperial state would not yield power to Scotland without violence. The club was named after the year of the Declaration of Arbroath. MacDiarmid soon identified Weir as a police spy and denounced him. Then Weir disappeared. Now we know that he went to Uganda to engage in other British-sponsored activities against notionally independent states.”
The Scottish Nationalist Party, which proscribes membership of both the APG and the 1320 Club, said that it did not condone violence of any sort. “Scotland urgently needs self-determination but violence is not the route to be taken. Bombs are not the answer.”
To the right of the story, there is a picture of Weir being escorted to a police van from a rather squalid-looking cottage. He’s wearing a tartan-trimmed beret and Arran stockings. The whistling has become insistent. I take the kettle off the stove and make the coffee in a daze, staring at the picture on the table as I do so.
The phone rings. I jump. For some reason, I wonder vaguely whether it might be Sara. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately.
“Hello,” I say.
“Hello, my good friend. Is it you, Doctor Nicholas?”
I say nothing, imagining Sara coming out of the sea like a mermaid.
“Hello, hello?”
Outside, I hear the deep moan of the ocean. I think of the island, my island, settling on the waves
like a butterfly
as that brochure had it, and of Mr Malumba’s hill, blown by a magic power through the skies of Africa, smothering all beneath it.
“I know you are hearing me. I know it. Yes, I am here in Saudi Arabia, studying democracy. I’m badly in need of your advice. The Saudi contact in London, he fetched your telephone for me. It is true. You were always a kind man to me, and I need your advice. The American government has asked me to intervene again with Ayatollah Khomeini, my old friend, about the hostages held there in Iran. Shall I do this thing? I think so, even though I will tell them that if I had commanded the foolish mission to rescue them, it would have been successful…like your SAS storming of the Iranian Embassy in London recently. They are good fighters, so good they must in truth be the Scottish Air Service. Anyway, the world is causing much trouble for Iranians, isn’t it?”
I see the brown wings of a skua flap by the window, the great skua with the white patch, the robber-gull, which feeds by forcing other birds to disgorge.
“On the subject of raids, I have been watching very closely the feature film of when the Israelis were visiting Entebbe. I say it is stupid and ridiculous to feed public opinion on bogus events and deceive people with falsehoods for the sake of money. You know that one of the actors died while the camera was running. It was a punishment by Allah and should be a lesson to those who want to imitate Field Marshal Amin…”
As he continues talking, my eye follows the steep fall of the island down to the sea. The whole is more fairy-like and romantic than – I must confess my thoughts take this shape – anything I ever saw outside of a theatre. It is exactly the sort of place, in fact, where, bridged across from one rocky side-slip to another, brigands or the supporters of some fanatical cause might assemble round their leader.
“…what do you think? Doctor Nicholas? Since you ask, I am very happy here in Jeddah. I have a Chevy Caprice, a nice house on the beach and one wife is easier, I have found. I am wearing white robes and reading the Koran most studiously. And I go swimming every day. In the Red Sea…”
In the end, I just put the phone down on him, his voice getting fainter as my hand goes down. I stare at the receiver in the cradle. And then I say to myself, I must pin up that honeysuckle in the porch. I will dig out a hammer and nails from among Eamonn’s tools and do it.
EOF