Whirligig (18 page)

As he put the club away, thunder rolled moodily not far away, clearly signalling the end of the game. He had heard of people being struck by lightning on golf courses and didn't fancy the idea. Walking next to the trees, he tried to remember whether you were supposed to walk under the trees during lightning strikes, or whether this was specifically not what you were supposed to do. He couldn't remember, and just plodded on.

Reaching the green like Sir Edmund and Tensing – with profound relief and similarly out of breath – Claypole looked around for the ball. He looked up the fairway and back towards the tee. He looked down the slope, as if he might have been mistaken about the quality of his shot and had sliced it. Nothing. He also looked up the hill in case he had hooked it. Nothing.
Standing in the middle of the green now, and some twelve feet from the hole, he was puzzled by the absence of the ball. Could it have sunk into the ground somewhere along the fairway? The ground was wet enough. Perhaps it had been appropriated by some larcenous rabbit? Ah well, he thought. Life's too short to look for golf balls when a hotel room is waiting. Walking past the pin, he just happened to glance into the hole. It was a gesture not of optimism – the shot could not have been that good – but of curiosity.

There was a ball. He didn't for a moment think it was
his
ball, so picking it up out of the hole was an act of surreptitious theft. He turned it round in his hand. ‘Slazenger B51', it said.

In the black driving rain and soaked through, Claypole walked back to the Land Rover. No one would ever believe that he had hit a hole in one, but he didn't care. He wondered whether his luck might be changing.

Do I step on the brake to get out of her clutches?

Can I speak Double Dutch to a real Double Duchess?

‘New Amsterdam', Elvis Costello

M
eeting Peregrine's younger sister, the gorgon Bonnie Straughan, for dinner at her house was far from being a prospect he relished, but Claypole's joyous mood was not easily dimmed following his private triumph on the golf course. He even hummed as he skipped damply into the Loch Garvach Hotel and acquainted himself with his cramped room that now smelled of fried fish. He dried himself and put on some of his own clothes. Though there was no time to rest, he consoled himself that he would sleep in the hotel bed that night.

It had stopped raining when he emerged, and the evening sunshine blazed again on the damp street outside the hotel. With a skip, he hopped into the cab of the Land Rover and turned the key in the ignition. It made a noise like a rheumatic donkey, and then died. This evening, Claypole was not to be got down by the Fates. One quick ‘fuckety fuck' was all he allowed
himself by way of demonstrable irritation, and got out of the Land Rover whistling. A pair of hiking-booted tourists – German, if he'd been forced to guess – were watching him with curiosity. He gave them a ‘good evening', and walked back into the hotel to order a taxi.

Bobby Henderson – he of the electric car hire – also ran Garvachhead's only taxi service. Claypole feared Henderson might know about the totalled electric car by now, and be on the hunt for Gordon Claypole. So under the name Barry Macbeth, Claypole called for the taxi to take him to Bonnie Straughan's house. Henderson, a garrulous pot-bellied Yorkshireman, refused to drive his Mercedes down Bonnie Straughan's pitted drive, and Claypole was forced to walk the last half-mile. Claypole swore as he walked along the gorse-lined track, and stumbled over rocks and fell into muddy potholes when his eye was taken from the track to the fabulous view across the loch. The green and light-brown hills rose up at a gentle gradient from the shore on the other side of the loch, which seemed a stone-skip away. The heather-covered mountains behind glowed a brownish purple in the golden evening light, and even Claypole, who never thought he had cared much for views, could not help but be impressed by the magnificence of the scene. But this uppish mood was destined not to last, for the sun was on its way down. The sun going down on a still, cloudless day at any point between April and October can mean wonderful sunsets in Scotland, and gladdens the heart of every visitor. But it also means midges, particularly in August.

It is very fortunate for the Scots, and any guests in the country, that the walking pace of an adult human,
if they are reasonably fit and not doing anything to delay their pace (such as having a conversation, or admiring the scenery), is just greater than the flying pace of a midge. Even this is not enough to save you from being bitten occasionally, because the midges don't just follow you – the ones in front of you are also attracted to your scent, your heat, or the carbon dioxide in your breath (researchers are divided on their opinion as to which). In tests, the adult male going at a fair walking pace at dusk smacks the back of his neck, or flicks his ears with irritation, on average every fifty seconds. This is just tolerable. But Claypole felt none of the benefits of this lucky equation, because he was fat, urban and moving over rough ground. His was no greater than the walking speed of a heavily laden five-year-old. Within three minutes of closing the door of Henderson's Merc, he was being completely savaged.

When he finally saw a sprawling early-nineteenth century farmhouse with many messy and half-ruined outbuildings, he was therefore profoundly relieved, and yet also filled with dread. He never managed entirely to rid himself of the childhood fear of going to houses he did not know. This trepidation was doubled in the countryside. The inevitable lack of a doorbell forces one to go uninvited into the house, calling ‘hullo' with a faltering voice. But his trepidation as he negotiated the gate to the courtyard, and listened hard for dogs and ghosts, was tempered by the fact that he was absolutely desperate to get indoors and stop being bitten by the infernal midges. If Bonnie Straughan did not answer the door, he told himself, he would have to get relief from the midges by running into the loch like a cartoon character running from a swarm of bees.

But there was Bonnie Straughan, answering the door
before Claypole got there. She was smiling uncertainly in a way that Claypole had seen Coky do.

‘So,' she said, with the smile turning delinquent, ‘are we to have the mutual respect of opposing generals?'

Claypole took a moment to decipher this elegant sentence.

‘Yeah,' he said, ‘no reason for it to be nasty. Brr.'

He followed her as she strode in silence to the large sitting room. On a grand sideboard stood a bottle of white wine in a cooler, and stuffed olives lay glistening in a bowl.

‘Will you have a glass of Zinfandel?' she asked, and looked him up and down with a brazen sweep of her head. ‘I'm afraid I have no beer.'

‘Brr. Great,' said Claypole, and went to run his hand through his hair, only to discover afresh that he had none. He scratched his stubbly head.

‘Were you
terribly
midged?' she asked with sympathy. ‘I heard about your car, and I should have warned you that Henderson won't come up the drive. Big wimp. Will you be a poppet and open the wine?'

For somewhere with such bad communications, Loch Garvach certainly had an efficient bush telegraph. Everybody knew everybody else's business.

As he fussed to uncork the bottle, he examined the room furtively. There was a grand piano, and two sofas either side of a low table, on which were laid out Middle Eastern dishes of every hue and texture. Velvet throws adorned the furniture and kilims were piled overlapping on the floors as in a bazaar. The lushness of these fabrics in the dimly lit room made for an almost orgiastic feel. Framed photographs chaotically adorned one wall. Bonnie smiled toothily and flicked her magnificent hair. Claypole popped the cork on the
bottle uneasily and sensed a stirring somewhere in the room. He turned and saw, rising from the floor behind the piano, the biggest dog he had ever seen. The animal lurched to its feet, as nimbly as a shire horse and not much different in size. Grey and white, it looked at Claypole and gave one thunderclap of a bark.

‘What the…?' said Claypole, gulping.

‘Zeus!' Bonnie admonished, and the animal swivelled its massive, stupid head towards her, its huge jaws spraying spittle twelve feet in every direction. ‘Sit!'

The dog paused. It stared again at Claypole before flopping back down on the floor with a foundation-shaking thud.

‘He's an English mastiff,' said Bonnie. ‘Very sweet, but a bit nervy.'

‘Wow,' was all Claypole could manage. He imagined the number of mouthfuls that Zeus would require in order to eat him, and decided that it was less than five. Bonnie continued.

‘You're supposed to convince me about the wind farm. My brother is clearly too chicken to do so himself.'

‘OK,' said Claypole neutrally.

She sat with poise on one of the sofas and gestured for Claypole to do the same.

‘Brr,' said Claypole, having sipped the wine. He was no wine buff, but this tasted like dusty batteries. He vowed not to touch it again.

‘I think the Loch Garvach Wind Farm is a dangerous mistake,' said Bonnie in the same shrill tone she had used in the community hall. ‘Let's eat while we talk.'

Claypole sat dumbly looking at Bonnie, and she took this as her cue. As she spoke, he ate, and her thoughts seemed not to have evolved from those that she had chaotically outlined in the community hall. But to Claypole's alarm she also posed him questions.

‘Wind farms don't make very much electricity, do they?' she asserted.

‘I don't think that's right,' Claypole began through a stuffed vine leaf, but found he could not follow up, and was subjected to another five-minute lecture. She then began a new topic.

‘They only operate when the wind is blowing, of course. Don't you think that makes the whole thing redundant?'

‘Well, brr… that doesn't make them useless,' he began, but was mown down once again.

‘Why do they have to be so ugly?' she posed.

Claypole saw that further objection would be pointless, especially as he had no facts at his fingertips with which to deny her assertions. So she continued to list her every objection. Occasionally he managed to say ‘I should ask someone whether that really is true'; ‘I'd be interested to see evidence on that point'; or ‘I bet that isn't entirely the case'. He even weakly muttered 'I'd heard that they aren't really that bad', but he was on quicksand and knew better than to struggle.

‘They have to build roads to make wind farms, and they have to dig thousands of tons of earth out of the pristine hillside. Hundreds of tons of concrete get shoved into the ground; pylons get erected, buildings are built, and God knows what else. Lorries pinging up and down, emitting tons of CO
₂
. Does this sound like a boon to the environment to you? No, of course it doesn't.'

After half an hour, Bonnie had finished. Her final soliloquy, devoted to the qualities of nuclear power compared with the pointless hideousness of wind farming, ended with the question, ‘So, why on earth
would I sign Peregrine's silly old legal banana and let them drive HGVs over my land? You tell me that. Huh?'

Claypole looked at her and marshalled his thoughts. He had prepared nothing to say, so he made the only gambit he could think of.

‘Money?' he said, and let the word hang in the air.

Slowly, a crooked smile ran across Bonnie's lips. ‘Ha!' she said, and they sat in silence for some moments. Claypole looked at his watch.

‘Tell me about yourself,' she said at length. ‘Coky says I met your parents.'

‘My father was Geoffrey Claypole. Mum Janice. Art teacher.'

‘Your father's dead?'

‘When I was ten.'

‘Sorry to hear that,' Bonnie said, pulling her hair away from her neck. ‘What did
he
do?'

‘He was a spy,' said Claypole.

‘Ooh, really?'

‘No.' Claypole paused. ‘Not really. But I used to tell people that. I wished he'd been a spy not just because it would have been exciting, but because if you're a spy and you die on the job the government really looks after your kids. No such luck for me, though. We got screwed when my dad died, and anyway, he was something much worse. Something much more cynical. One of the most morally bankrupt professions you can be in. It's viewed alongside arms dealing these days. With this wind farming, maybe I'm trying to… I dunno… Brr.'

Bonnie was looking at the houmous, suddenly quiet. Perhaps she was giving Claypole airtime for his unexpected confession.

‘At the time, we were proud. Kids my age watched
Dallas
and thought that what he did was glamorous. They thought he was rich, or would be soon, and they envied me. But I can't even mention it now. You get hated before you've even opened your mouth if people know that your dad…' There was another pause. Bonnie's eyes were popping. Claypole smirked grimly. ‘My father was in the oil business.'

Bonnie's eyes narrowed, and she studied Claypole intensely for a moment.

‘I
do
remember your father,' she began. ‘Yes. Geoffrey. Yes.' Then she looked up and laughed. There was something in her giggle that Claypole objected to. Bonnie played with the rim of her glass. ‘Will you allow me to read your fortune?'

‘Say what?'

‘Tarot,' she said simply. ‘I'd like to read for you.'

Claypole scowled, but found himself nodding.

Bonnie fetched a deck of cards, larger and more numerous than normal playing cards, and began, with no fuss or ceremony, to shuffle. She asked him to touch them, and then began dealing.

‘What's first?' she said, and laid on the coffee table a picture card of a fat woman. ‘Ah, the Empress. Known also as the Female Pope, and associated sometimes with the Virgin Mary. That's good, obviously.'

Claypole was already bored, but Bonnie was oblivious. She dealt again.