Whirligig (22 page)

‘I don't have a plan, old fella,' he said. ‘You tell me. What should I do?'

The hound beheld him with mournful disdain, so he chucked it half a piece of bacon. As he chased his bread around a greasy plate for the vestiges of egg yolk, he heard purposeful bootsteps in the hall, and Peregrine burst into the room carrying a shotgun.

‘Ah. Ready to kill?' he barked.

Claypole swallowed, and suddenly the breakfast, so welcome moments before, began to sit heavy.

‘We have to go to kirk before the shoot, I'm afraid.' Peregrine was unscrewing a large bottle of whisky. ‘Just one of those things.'

‘Shoot?'

‘Yes.' Peregrine turned to look at Claypole. ‘Bit behind the curve aren't you, old boy? It's the Garvach shoot today.' And seeing Claypole's further incomprehension. ‘Grouse, man!'

‘Right!' spluttered Claypole. ‘Grouse. With guns?' He had of course heard of people shooting grouse.

‘You can use a bow and arrow if you like, but I don't fancy your chances.'

‘Do we…? Is it…?'

He was going to ask whether it was compulsory to actually fire a gun, but he had been stunned into silence by the sight of Peregrine MacGilp emptying the entire bottle of whisky into a huge silver hip flask. Peregrine eyed Claypole closely.

‘You're not a
vegetarian,
are you?' said Peregrine.

‘No,' said Claypole with indignation.

‘Yes. Well. Stick with the ladies. Perhaps that's best.'

‘Sure.' Claypole was cheered about the prospect, especially if one of the ladies were Coky.

‘And you'll have to come to kirk, of course.'

‘Kirk is… church?'

‘Mm-hm.' Peregrine was now counting boxes of shotgun cartridges into a hamper.

‘Why don't you just take the bottle?' Claypole nodded at the empty bottle of whisky and the hip flask.

‘Ha!' Peregrine thought for a moment. ‘Well, then the hip flask wouldn't save my life if I got shot, would it?' He inserted the huge silver beast into his breast pocket and patted it. It did indeed cover his heart as well as most of the rest of his torso.

‘I've been reading the files,' said Claypole, ‘and I think we should talk.'

Peregrine showed no signs of responding to him when the kitchen door opened. Both men turned towards it, and Coky stepped into the room, sending the dogs into a frenzy of excitement. They all charged at her with thrilled lurches and demanded to be fussed over.

‘Hi!' she said to humans and dogs alike. Coky was wearing jodhpurs and tight leather riding boots. Claypole tried to get out of his chair, but his legs didn't seem to be working.

‘Hello, darling!' Peregrine used the same soupy tone he used for the dogs. ‘Now, you'll leave some of the birds for the guests this time, I hope?'

Coky blushed.

‘Coky here's the best shot of all of us.'

She smiled modestly, and turned to Claypole.

‘Ready to kill?' she said.

Having gone to a Church of England school that required a certain amount of time to be put in worship-wise, the teenaged Claypole had given some lazy thought to whether God did or did not exist. He had decided that, on the balance of the evidence available to him, it was more likely that the whole thing was a myth. He had made this calculation logically and rationally. Therefore, if God
did
exist, and was as forgiving as reputed, Claypole could not be blamed for drawing such a conclusion, and would therefore be excused at the Reckoning, should there in fact turn out to be such a thing. In the meantime, he was happy to abide by all the commandments except those that were clearly out of date or inconvenient. But he had no atheistical zeal, and had absorbed, even in the semi-waking slouch that he adopted during his religious education, some notion of the span of the Christian faiths. Scotland, he remembered, had various brands of Protestantism that ranged from the broad Church of Scotland to stricter and tinier sects, which were indistinguishable from large, gloomy families. He therefore went to kirk without any expectation except that of being bored. In any case, his mind was very much on other things. Coky had agreed to give him a lesson on how to fire a shotgun so that he might stand by her side at the afternoon's slaughter. He was by her side now, and that was all he wanted.

The Garvach kirk was no more than a whitewashed cottage, but it had a cute grace given it by dark leaded windows and a large arched door painted with that terracotta red you find on the underside of old fishing boats. The beach, just fifty yards below it, served as
the car park, and there was storm-flung seaweed on the drystone walls of the cemetery. The rotting notice board, worn by time and sea air, had two fliers pinned inside it with rusty thumb tacks. One advertised a talent show and curry night three months ago, and one instructed the reader most sternly to ‘Visit Norway‘. Claypole was about to point this out to Coky, but the seriousness of her face stopped him. Her expression was, to his amusement and surprise, devout.

‘Do you disapprove of shooting on a Sunday?' he asked, but she did not answer.

When they had filed into the kirk along with no more than a couple of dozen others, including Peregrine and Bonnie (studiously ignoring each other at opposite ends of one pew), a man in a dark suit stepped with serious intent onto a raised dais.

The Minister, Jim Fry, was a tall man in his fifties with eyebrows like poisonous caterpillars. Claypole watched him as he greeted each individual congregant very slowly with a furious stare. This look was intense enough to be very useful when rounding up sheep or trying to frighten children, but Claypole thought this was surely no way to greet consenting adults. He turned to Coky, but her face warned him against further flippancy.

‘I shall now invite you,' said the Minister in a gravelly Glasgow accent, ‘to sing hymn number 704…'

He coughed lightly to alert the organist and muttered the name of the hymn in her direction. The owlish organist was smiling pleasantly, but in a world of her own.

‘Jeanie!?' barked the Minister crossly, and the organist grimaced as she bolted upright and squinted through her large tinted spectacles at the Minister.

‘Sorry, pet,' Jeanie
shouted cheerily as if they were alone in the building, and bumbled her way into the depths of the hymnbook in front of her, taking a long time to find the correct page. As she did so, itches were scratched and yawns were stifled in all of the congregation apart from two: Coky, who was desperately staring ahead, looking as if she were in terrible pain; and Claypole, who was open-mouthed and staring at the organist.

With a satisfied ‘hurrumph‘, Jeanie folded down a page of the hymnal and immediately crashed her plump hands onto the plastic keyboard. The old organ howled in protest, almost quietly at first and then, as the loud pedal kicked and thrummed into life, suddenly at ear-splitting volume. Those near the speakers lurched backwards as a wall of sound came at them.

Claypole made his urge to laugh worse by suppressing it, and put his hand over his mouth. Coky was herself in the middle of trying to control her own rapidly building giggles, and they deliberately did not meet eyes.

‘Sorry,' mouthed Jeanie as she squinted at the page in front of her. The organ continued with the melody, but was suddenly reduced to almost no volume at all. Jeanie's expression betrayed that she knew this wasn't right, but equally that she could do little about it.

Jeanie and the organ fought valiantly with each other as they wallowed through the first four lines of the hymn by way of introduction. Claypole had never heard the tune before. It was both mournful and chaotic. The other faces in the congregation seemed unconcerned, so Claypole cleared his throat with the confidence of a man who is going to mouth his way through a song he does not know while others do the work,
in the knowledge that he will get away with the fraud.

But when the music started up again, Jeanie going back to the first line with an improvised flourish, several very different noises came from the congregation. One or two men growled an upward glissando, apparently fixing their pitch wherever the mood took them. One woman began with a soprano wail somewhere near Top C, and found that she had to stop and recalibrate more towards the middle of the range for
Homo sapiens
. Others seemed to pick a volume and a key that they knew suited them, and warbled uncertainly in the direction they imagined the tune was supposed to take. Had this been a rehearsal, a choirmaster would have stopped by tapping his baton on a music stand and bellowing ‘No, no, no!', or possibly simply breaking his baton in two and walking off to become a postman. But this was kirk, and the momentum of the several different hymns they had begun was unstoppable. The Minister peered over his hymnbook with alarm, but carried on singing in his fulsome baritone.

Unaccountably considering what a bad idea they both knew it to be, Coky and Claypole met eyes. Instantly, they regretted it. Coky's nostrils began to quiver as she sang without volume, and her chin to shake. Claypole gave a ‘ha!‘, but quickly pretended it had been a sneeze. Coky's eyes began silently to water.

Jeanie continued to thunder or whisper through the tune, cajoling the unruly organ beneath her flapping, tweeded arms.

As Claypole began to sing in a voice so small that the pitch and tone might be undetectable, Coky planted a finger firmly in the corner of one eye, her hand trying to hide the rest of her face, and she was partly doubled
over. A generous assumption would have been that she had something very painful in her eye, and possibly osteoporosis as well, but Claypole could feel the bench shaking.

Eventually, the hymn ended and everyone sat. Coky gave Claypole a surreptitious flick on the arm, clearly blaming him for her hysterics. He retaliated with a playful punch on her thigh. They both stared straight ahead. Minister Fry beheld everyone individually again, pausing particularly to inspect the red-eyed Coky and the ashen Claypole. The Minister closed his eyes in reverence before starting his sermon.

‘What…' he asked, with wistful cadence, ‘do we find in the middle of the road… at night?'

He was staring at the congregation. After several seconds' pause beyond the merely rhetorical, to Claypole's horror one of the congregation piped up.

‘Weeds?'

‘No,' said the Minister definitively. He raised his magnificent eyebrows and cast around the congregation for other responses.

‘A fox?' said another.

The Minister continued to look.

‘Midges,' said a young girl.

‘That wasn't what I was thinking of. No,
on
the road.'

‘Horse poo,' said a boy of four, and some of the other children giggled. The Minister ignored them, and the congregation all continued to rack their brains. Claypole knew what the Minister was thinking of, and he knew why no one in the congregation would ever guess. They all lived in remote Scotland, and they all lived down single-track roads, rarely travelling on anything else.

‘Cat's eyes,' he said, quietly.

‘What? Who was that?' The Minister shot a look in his direction, and for one horrible moment Claypole thought he might be wrong, or worse, that he might have caused offence. But the Minister was looking straight at him, and he could not avoid repeating himself, this time more clearly.

‘I just… Brr… Cat's eyes?'

‘Aye!' shouted the Minister in delighted triumph. ‘Cat's eyes.'

The rest of the sermon explored a clunky metaphor about ‘lighting the way‘, and rounded off with a joke in poor taste about a dead cat. Claypole sat feeling the eyes of the rest of the congregation on the back of his neck while Coky dug him in the ribs, whispering ‘swot' and ‘teacher's pet' so that only he could hear. After some more excruciating hymns and a reading from a particularly gruesome section of Revelations, Jeanie struck up the organ with a Lloyd-Webber medley and they all filed out.

The Minister shook the hands of everyone as they left kirk, and Coky's smile as she greeted Jim Fry was of such joyousness that the Minister visibly brightened.

‘I'm so glad you enjoyed it,' said the Minister to Coky, whose grin became even brighter. ‘Have you come far?' Suddenly the Minister found himself shaking hands with the small fat man with broken teeth and a shaved head, and the striking Indian girl with the fixed grin had moved on.

‘That was
spectacular
,' said Claypole gravely, and shook the Minister's hand like a long-lost brother. He and the Minister discussed the weather for twenty seconds, and Claypole caught up with Coky when she was halfway towards the Land Rover. He was
expecting continued hilarity, but her mood had suddenly changed.

‘That was… hilarious,' he ventured.

‘Yeah,' she said, but her face said otherwise.

‘What's the matter?'

‘Did you hear what he said? “Have you come far?” Like he didn't know me. I've known him for twenty years and all he sees…
still
… is a brown face.'