Whirligig (14 page)

‘Yes, well, there you go,' said Dorcas.

They sat for a while, the snooker greenly flickering.

‘Right,' said Dorcas, and clapped her hands together as she sat up. ‘Martin Chang's playing like a dick. High time we watched something improving.'

Claypole had seen
Braveheart
once before. He couldn't remember a great deal about it except that some of the later scenes were quite gory. Dorcas claimed to have
seen it over a hundred times.

‘Mind if we skip the first hour?' she said. ‘The battles are the best bits.'

Claypole shrugged.

‘So. William Wallace has rallied the Scots against the English oppressors. He's taken it personally because an English soldier killed his rather simpering wife. The Scottish nobles are divided, and while they dither he has a vision of justice for Scotland, which appeals to the common folk enough for them to fight for him. Or rather, as Wallace says, to fight for themselves. Battle scene coming up.'

She pressed play on an old VHS recorder, and they watched.

After a few shots of hillsides and men with weapons gathering together and making flippant remarks, Mel Gibson, mulletted and woden, rode a skittish nag up and down a line of mutinous Scots. Claypole glanced at Dorcas. She was transfixed, her eyes wild and moist. He smiled and placed his head back on the armrest of the sofa. He was almost horizontal.

‘Everyone in Scotland has seen this film,' she said quietly as she watched. ‘It made a big impact when it came out. It's one of the main reasons people vote for the Nationalists.'

Gibson was now bellowing in his Australian-Scots accent, swivelling his horse to and fro in front of the blue-faced hordes.

‘They may take our lives,' yelled Mel, his voice taking on a stagey quality, like a man who knows that if he were actually to shout as loud as he wishes to give the impression he is shouting, his voicebox would splinter into a thousand pieces. ‘But they will never take…' Here a pause, hardly discernable – the length of time it
takes a man to swallow an emotion. ‘… our freedom!' The mob roared and rattled their weaponry.

A lone tear burned its way hotly out of Dorcas's eye. She wiped it away quickly, and did not turn her head from the television.

‘I'm a silly billy,' she sniffed. ‘But it gets me every time.' She dabbed her eyes again. ‘Anyway, that'll do. Time for bed.'

Dorcas looked over at her guest and got slowly up from her seat. She hovered over him, staring, for a moment. Then, covering him with a duvet, and before she turned the lights off and went to her own bed, she whispered in the direction of Claypole's sleeping form.

‘Celibate,' said Dorcas quietly. Claypole stirred, but did not wake. ‘That's the word I was trying to remember. Coky's decided to be celibate.'

Tha dragh anns an t-saoghal.

There is trouble in the world.
Teach Yourself Gaelic
, Robert Mackinnon

C
laypole woke among the silent books and the dusty sunlight in Dorcas MacGilp's sitting room and stared at the ceiling. He wondered whether he had ever spent so comfortable a night. The sofa's old springs and cushions had cradled him perfectly. The duvet that Dorcas had given him was vast and thick, excluding all draughts. But above all he had been
physically
tired. The echo of this novelty – the faint buzz in the limbs and the heaviness in his back – was still there as he got up and tried in vain to restart the fire in the grate. Frustrated that he would make such a poor arsonist, he went into the kitchen feeling instinctively that he was alone in the house even before he found the note.

While Claypole slept on sofa bed,

His broken truck was fetched and fed.

Niece Coky now suggests he come

And find the beach known as Glen Drum.

Behold! The aunt has drawn a map,

That he may find it
sans
mishap.

But first we must insist he break

His fast. Therefore, consume this cake.

Claypole read the note twice, and then put the map and a slice of fruitcake in his pocket. Although it was a little breezy for a day at the beach, there was a frisson of mystery in the note that he could not resist. Why had Coky summoned him to the beach? Might he get to see her in a swimming costume? He appropriated one of the many preposterous hats that hung in the hall of Dorcas's cottage and headed out to find the old Land Rover, keys inside and fuel a-plenty.

Cajoling the Land Rover along at a more sedate pace this time, he felt more than anything like optimistic flotsam. He thought a third disastrous journey in a row statistically unlikely and was almost cheery. He found Glen Drum using Dorcas's excellently drawn map and guided the Land Rover down the pitted and difficult track that would have tortured and killed any normal car. Walkers heading in the same direction had to stand out of his way, all carrying bags and cases of various kinds. They regarded him with what he initially thought might be suspicion, but soon realised was envy. So he offered a lift to a pregnant woman walking alone, and struck up a chat in the hope of finding out what was going on down on the beach.

It was a festival of sorts, but for just 150 invited souls. It had even been given a jokey name, Lochstock, in emulation of or homage to the first great music festival in New York State in 1968. Drinking, dancing and music would be taking place in the evening, according
to the pregnant woman. But until then there would be food and chatting, with games for children, and swimming and fishing in the loch.

‘It's just for locals,' said the woman, glancing sideways at Claypole. ‘Lachlan doesn't want it to become a big thing.'

‘Who's Lachlan?' asked Claypole.

The woman – nose-ring, rainbow-patterned sweater, name of Jade – described an interesting-sounding figure. About forty, Lachlan Black had no family other than the half-dozen or so friends and floaters he gathered around him at his encampment here on Glen Drum beach in a fluid sort of commune. Some would just come for a month, but others had been there for ages. When someone left, whether for work or to go surfing in Spain, they would always be replaced, although there were never more than half a dozen camper vans there at any one time. But Lachlan was the constant. He was there all year round, and had been for two years.

‘I thought the guy at MacGilp House… I thought he owned this land,' said Claypole, not wanting to appear too friendly towards Peregrine in case Jade were hostile to him, or to ownership in general. She looked like she might be.

‘He does,' said Jade, and proceeded to dish some first-class gossip, with some relish.

Peregrine had regarded the encampment initially with amusement. He openly regarded the campers as indolent, damaged and weird, but essentially benign. But when he learned that they collected somewhat cultishly under the wing of this Lachlan Black, he asked them to move on. Lachlan's response was to take two bottles of wine up to MacGilp House one rainy
afternoon and request an audience. He emerged late that night with an understanding from Peregrine that they could stay on the beach as long as they didn't have wild parties or cause any litter or destruction. Lachlan's campers were immaculate, and the beach was in fact cleaner than it had been for decades. But they were keen on celebration. Thus, one wild party later, Lachlan had had to perform the same trick following a threatening letter from a law firm in Edinburgh stuck to the windshield of his camper van. This time, Lachlan knocked on the door of the big house with a bottle of cask-strength whisky of great vintage that had cost him a hundred pounds, and a bag of intensely transportative marijuana, and reprieve was again granted. To his camp-mates' surprise, Lachlan himself also began working for Peregrine, performing menial jobs on a part-time basis. The work became more skilled in nature as Peregrine discovered that Lachlan was both a competent mason and an excellent carpenter. But the bargain wages remained immutable, and Lachlan knew that becoming indispensable was the key to continuing the ad hoc tenancy of the beach.

Claypole wondered aloud how the woman knew all this.

‘Oh,' she said, ‘I live here.'

‘Ah,' said Claypole.

‘And also,' she said with pride, ‘Lachlan is my lover.'

‘Ah.' Claypole had never known anyone refer to their ‘lover', and felt as bourgeois as life insurance.

‘So… if you don't know Lachy, how come you're here?'

‘Coky,' he said. ‘Coky Viveksananda?'

‘Oh,' said the woman, and stared straight ahead.

They came to a hand-painted sign that read ‘SLOW –
Children and Daft Hippies', and Claypole drove at a crawl over the last hill before the grand sandy sweep of Glen Drum beach came into view.

Claypole had been to the Glastonbury Festival only once. He seemed alone in his generation in having put off going there for the first time until he was thirty. Many of his contemporaries had been going every year since they were at school. He had gone with some ex-colleagues from the BBC, and the enjoyment was rather muted. Not that any of them disapproved of taking drugs and getting drunk. They worked in television, after all. But the senior BBC people insisted on referring to it as a ‘bonding experience', rather than a good time – which made it neither. Claypole had spent many hours talking to a bosomy Senegalese poet called Dolly, but she had moved off with a lot of men called Julian who barged into people when they danced, barked about how ‘arbsolutely wickud' their yurts were, and worried publicly whether yobs were going to break into their 4x4, clearly under the impression that this was their own private party. He felt choked, not by Dolly's rejection, but by the volume of people, the overpowering smell and the very public brand of fun that everyone else seemed to be so effortlessly enjoying. Claypole concluded that he didn't like festivals. Mass humanity and shared experience might be a thing of joy in theory, but in practice it was a pain in the neck because it shared space.

Lochstock was not Glastonbury. There was music and food and bustle, but the people were utterly dwarfed by the landscape. The beach held the choppy loch as if in the vast head of a spoon, and was itself made to look small by the surrounding wilderness. On one side was low but dense forest, on another side peaty bog, and
behind was rocky heathery outcrop. It was low tide, and there were many expanses of pure yellow sand. Claypole glanced around the horizon. There were no houses visible, no roads and no signs of technology save for the half-dozen camper vans, a few clusters of tents and now his Land Rover. The sea too was an empty green, sparkling in the sun. No human could possibly stumble across this scene unless they had been invited to come. This was an intimate party, but one conducted in infinite space. Claypole looked at the faces as they drew nearer. None of them was doing anything other than smiling. The musicians were smiling; the children dancing in front of them were smiling; the people cooking food over open fires were smiling; and even people aimlessly milling about were smiling. There was no fashion, and certainly no uniform. Some of the women were wearing luminous lycra, some long floating dresses, and some were wearing wellies and raincoats – there was even one in a wetsuit. The men were no more homogeneously dressed – there were some in jeans and jumpers, others in safari shorts and sweatshirts, and one man in a boiler suit. Claypole felt that here, even in ill-fitting cast-off jeans held up by a tie, a pink fleece and a flat cap of vivid green checks with a large fishing fly attached to the side, he would not stand out.

He pulled the creaking handbrake up on the Land Rover and was pleased to see Coky approaching.

‘Hey, Gordon,' she called. She was wearing, to his disappointment, a large poncho and a black skirt down to her ankles.

‘Heigh-ho,' he said, jumping out of the car. It was not something he was used to saying. In fact it might have been something he had never said before in his life.

‘Heigh-ho yourself,' Coky chirped mockingly. Then she caught sight of the woman in the passenger seat. ‘Hi, Jade.'

‘Coky,' said the woman, who promptly got out of the vehicle and wandered off. Claypole noted that Jade had not thanked him for the lift. He was about to comment to Coky when he received a shock. Arriving at Coky's side was the dark-haired man who had made the threatening gesture at Claypole at the community hall in Garvach. Claypole took a step back. But the man was smiling in greeting.

Coky said, ‘Claypole, this is Lachlan, chieftain of the beach. Laird of Lochstock.'

Lachlan thrust out a hand and Claypole took it with caution. The grip was firm to the point of violence.

‘Hullo,' said Lachlan with a glower.

‘Oh, I… Yes, I gave your… wife a lift down here…' Lachlan's face was blank. ‘Across the fields…'

Lachlan's smile turned slightly sour. ‘She's not my wife.'

Coky smirked, but left Claypole to dig himself out.

‘Oh, no,' said Claypole. ‘She said… That wasn't the word she… Congratulations on the baby…' Coky was almost grinning now.

‘Aye.' Lachlan looked into space. ‘Not mine.'

‘Right. Brr. Anyway, I've… Nice turn out for the…' Claypole gestured at the partygoers.

‘Mm-hm,' said Lachlan. ‘We have a party here every full moon. But this is the biggest yet.'

‘Oh right. Is that a religious thing?' Claypole tried to sound sincere and credulous. Lachlan looked at him with amusement.

‘We just find we can see better. After dark.' The pause drifted on as all three looked at their feet. Then
Lachlan said quickly, ‘Excuse me. I've got a lot of tofu to defrost,' and Coky and Claypole watched him leave.

‘He was at the meeting the other day,' Claypole began in an excited whisper. ‘He…'

But Coky wore a puzzled expression, and Claypole thought better of explaining the finger-across-the-throat gesture.