For Faughie's Sake (20 page)

‘Have you seen my wee rosettes?’ Jenny asked, as soon as she had hustled the last committee member out.

I ignored this and asked a few questions of my own. I’d sensed hot gossip and, like a dog smelling dinner, I wouldn’t be distracted.

‘What’s the story with Betty? Why was she not here tonight? Have I missed an email?’

‘She’s probably gathering her forces before she makes an announcement. We’ll probably get an email in the morning.’

‘What forces?’ I gasped. Jenny used such thrilling language these days.

‘She’s setting up the No vote campaign.’

‘No to what?’

‘FFS Trixie, try to keep up: the no to leaving Britain campaign. She and some of the other committee members feel it won’t be in Faughie’s interests to go it alone so they’re setting up a ‘No to Independence’ campaign.’

‘Oh, right,’ I said, ‘so does that mean that you’re political enemies now?’

‘Och, don’t you start; the press will soon be working that angle. No, we’re opponents. As I’ve been telling everybody all night, this is good for us. This will actually strengthen our case in Luxembourg.
It lets us demonstrate that we aren’t a tinpot dictatorship, as the gutter press are trying to paint us. The referendum will show that, despite a pro-British lobby, we have the majority. We can stand a bit of opposition and, anyway, we need them. If we don’t have opposition we don’t have democracy. It makes us accountable. Now, can we move on please and you can tell me what do you think of my rosettes?’

‘Yes,’ I said automatically, ‘they’re lovely.’

‘Not too gaudy?’

‘Nope.’

‘The folk in the mill are running them up for me.’

‘So, anyone wearing one of these is on your side and not Betty’s, is that the idea?’

‘Well, I prefer to see it as a show of support rather than a divisive measure, and they’re not just for voters, the tourists love them as well – they’re going like snow off a dike in the shop. The mill is struggling to keep up with the orders.’

‘Is this you Keeping It Niche, Keeping It Expensive?’ I said, ingenuously.

Jenny laughed, ‘Hah! Well remembered, indeed I am; why would I not? I’m getting a cracking mark-up on them.’

‘You know,’ I said, once we were settled down at the table and eating with our fingers, ‘Walter was right. He said that Faughie could be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Looks like it could be.’

‘Huh! Typical idealistic socialist. It’s pathetic; that man sickens me.’

Jenny’s unexpected vitriol made me laugh so much I nearly honked my pickled onion through my nose.

‘That’s a bit harsh, even for you. You love Walter.’

As usual she blanked my sneaky Walter-love jibe.

‘Och, they’re all getting carried away with this small victory,’ she said. ‘They’re forgetting we have to satisfy Luxembourg that we have the means to pay for public services and employees – police, teachers, dinner-ladies; old Joe, the lollipop man, for instance, who’s going to pay his wages? Not to mention all the coffin-dodging pensioners we have.’

‘You can talk: typical politician; only looking after your own interests. You yourself are foremost amongst Faughie’s coffin-dodging pensioners.’

‘For Faughie’s sake, I told you not to mention coffin-dodging pensioners!’ she said, and then spoiled it by laughing.

She was on great form. Despite working in committee meetings every night, sometimes until one in the morning, and still opening the shop first thing, it was obvious Jenny was thriving on the buzz of running the country.

‘So, what’s the word on the street?’ she asked. ‘How does Faughie think we’re doing?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know! You know a lot more people than I do, you ask them.’

‘They won’t tell me, they talk behind my back but they’ll never say it to my face. That’s what you’re here for: to tell me what they’re saying about me. I need to be able to respond. You’re my eyes and ears out there.’

I giggled but carried on licking my finger and dragging it across the paper, gathering the delicious remnants of fish, chips, grease and salt, and sooking it off my finger.

‘Seriously, I can take it.’

I stopped licking.

‘Well, nothing terrible. Since you announced your middle name at the election I’ve heard people referring to you as Captain Haddock. You know, as in …’

‘Aye, I get it: Tintin. Well,’ she reflected, ‘an alcoholic beardy sailor, I’ve been called worse things.’

‘And Walter is Captain Birds Eye.’

Jenny snorted.

‘But I haven’t heard anything bad.’

‘And the Claymores, the filum people?’

‘Nope, everyone seems happy enough.’

‘Good. So remember: keep your eyes open and your ear close to the ground.’

‘Yes sir!’ I gave her an exaggerated salute. ‘So, now that you’re El Presidente, d’you not think –’

‘Interim Leader. And I might get voted out at the referendum.’

‘– it’s time you did the decent thing,’ I continued, ‘and made an honest man out of young Captain Birds Eye.’

‘Pfffff.’

‘No, hear me out: apparently unmarried politicians aren’t popular with elderly voters. People might think you’re gay.’

‘Hah! Let them, probably get me a few more votes.’

‘It’s probably worse for Walter; a spinster looks like a career woman but an old unmarried man just looks sad.’

‘Walter isn’t sad.’

‘I know that! I’m just spindoctoring. Think what it would do for your popularity: a fairy-tale happy ending for two of Faughie’s most popular pensioners.’

‘Forget it, Trixie.’

‘Everyone loves a wedding.’

‘Not going to happen.’

‘I don’t know why you and Walter bother keeping up this silly pretence, it’s obvious you love each other, everyone can see …’

Jenny thumped her fist on the table. ‘Enough!’ she yelled.

I think we were both a bit shocked.

‘I’m sorry, Jenny. I didn’t mean to wind you up, it was only a bit of banter.’

‘I know,’ she said.

I started folding up my fish paper.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘tired, stressed, whatever, I’m overreacting. Don’t go home, I’ve hardly seen you in ages.’

‘Ok,’ I said, in awe of what I’d just heard. Was Jenny actually admitting that she missed me?

‘I keep everything so tight, you know?’

She balled her fist and held it low on her stomach.

‘Walter says I’m so secretive I owe myself a shite.’

I didn’t really know what that meant, but I laughed anyway.

‘For years I wanted him to marry me,’ she said, ‘I dreamed of it: my big day, my big white dress.’

It took an effort of will for me not to slap the table and shout: Yes! I knew it! Instead I gave up ironing my chip paper with the
flat of my hand and watched it slowly unfold itself as though it were alive.

‘Well if you’ve dreamed of it why not go for it? What is it they say?
Carpe diem
: seize the day. Neither of you is getting any younger, why don’t you just carpe the firkin diem and get hitched?’

‘And play Darby and Joan? Can you honestly see me in a lavender anorak? Och, I’m too busy for that nonsense, I’m too busy carping the firk out of every diem.’

‘But what about your big white dress?’

‘You’re new here, Trixie,’ she sighed. ‘You don’t know. The gory details.’

She said it in such a doom-laden voice I wasn’t sure I did want to know the details, especially not gory ones. I was still reeling from the revelation that Jackie was my father. That hadn’t exactly had a positive effect on our relationship.

Jenny sighed again, a big heavy sigh.

‘So,’ I said, as gently as I could manage, ‘when you say “gory”?’

‘I was engaged once, you know,’ Jenny began, ‘not to Walter, to Bernard. He was handsome, a decorated soldier, and had only just come home to a hero’s welcome. He asked me to dance at the ceilidh in Bengustie hall. They would always play a slow smoochy one, the last dance of the night, the “moonie” it was called. Bernard asked me to dance the moonie with him.

‘He was twenty-two, a grown man, and he couldn’t dance, not properly, but he had all the moves. He did it slow and in time to the music so that nobody would see. He slid himself across me, right here, and oh my god. I felt it. I felt it right through his clothes and my clothes. It was one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me, I mean
ever
,’ she stressed like a teenager, ‘including being elected Interim Leader. He walked me home that night. We were engaged two weeks later.

‘That’s what you did in those days. In a small village you knew what your options were and Bernard was a catch. His family were respectable and they had a good bit of land out by Gaffney.’

‘Out where Walter lives?’ I asked.

‘Exactly. But more of that later.

‘Now, since he’d come back, Bernard was the man of the house. His dad had died on the fishing boats the year before, leaving his widow to look after the farm and bring up Bernard’s wee brother,
but she wasn’t fit for it. Luisa her name was – fancy name, fancy lady. She had a dodgy hip. It wasn’t that bad, but she played it up every so often, hirpling around to get sympathy. She leaned on Bernard, I mean, depended on him; used him as a replacement for her husband. Och, not in that way, but he was under a lot of pressure from her and from whatever else was going on in his head. Anyway, Luisa didn’t want a common village girl like me for her son’s wife. First she accused me of being pregnant and when I assured her I wasn’t, she said, ‘Well then, what’s the rush? The wedding can wait until we’ve got the harvest in.’ And Bernard agreed. He did everything he could to please her.

‘Anyway, it gave me time to get to know my fiancé, but the more I knew the less I liked. Don’t get me wrong, he was sexy and very charming, that’s what had attracted me to him, but at times he could be cruel. Malaya did that to him. Sometimes he would sob in my lap and say he’d never been forgiven for the things he’d done.’

‘And what had he done?’

‘He’d never tell me but it must have been bad. He was in Malaya.’

‘Sorry, Jenny, as you know, I’m not big on history.’

‘No, I didn’t know much about it either but years later I read up about the Briggs plan: forced relocation, quelling of rebellion and general terrorising of the Malaysian population. It’s gruesome reading. Nowadays Bernard would be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder but then they were just medically discharged.

‘Luisa didn’t want anyone getting close. She didn’t want anyone ruining his war hero reputation. And meanwhile his brother – and this is where it gets interesting for you, Trixie – his baby brother, Walter, he was easy to get on with.’

I perked up immediately, ‘So that’s how you met Walter?’

‘You don’t meet people in Inverfaughie, you grow up with them. Walter’s two years younger than me; we’d been in the same class all through primary, we were friends.

‘I don’t remember his dad, but Walter must have got his nature from his dad’s side. You know what he’s like: gentle, easy-going. Bernard was … There was a sour atmosphere around him. I didn’t know what to do. I told my parents but Mum said it was just
pre-wedding jitters. They wouldn’t hear of me breaking it off, not with a decorated war hero who would inherit that land. Bernard said he’d been having second thoughts too but that we should leave things as they were, give it a few weeks before making any decisions.

‘I thought about it, and worried about it, until eventually I decided I had to tell him it was over. I went to see him but his mother said he was out ploughing the haugh and shut the door on me. Walter, he was only fifteen at the time, a kid, was heading out to go fishing in the wee lochan; there was a big pike up there eating all the other fish. He pleaded with me to go with him; he said it was so big it would take both of us to get it in the boat.

‘Walter and I were just climbing into the rowing boat, laughing and splashing each other, when Bernard came crashing through the bushes at us. It was terrifying, the look on his face; I thought he was going to murder us. He hauled Walter off the boat and punched him so hard in the stomach it knocked the wind right out of him. Walter crumpled and fell to his knees and Bernard started kicking him in the head and all over his body, anywhere he could land a blow; he wasn’t going to stop. Walter curled into a ball; his hands were on his head and I could see the blood spurting out between his fingers. I was screaming for Bernard to stop.

‘I was already in the boat so I lifted an oar and whacked Bernard on the shoulder with it. It was the closest I could get. Bernard turned and pulled it out of my hands. I knew that if he used it on me or Walter we were finished. Bernard was crying and screaming that I was carrying on with his own brother. I swore to him I wasn’t but there was no reasoning with him.

‘Behind him I could see Walter stagger to his feet. Bernard came at me and poked me hard with the oar but it glanced off me and had the effect of pushing me and the boat away from him. Bernard must have heard Walter move and turned back to see him up and running. You only know Walter as he is now, a doddery old man, but back then Walter could run like the wind. He was only fifteen and a skinny big kid and despite the beating he’d taken he managed to outrun Bernard. He had to; he was running for his life.

‘When he realised he couldn’t catch him, Bernard turned back to me. I was frantically paddling with my arms, anything to get away from him, but I was still in the shallows. He strode right into the water and just as he leaned forward to grab the boat he sunk. We were in deep water now. He had completely disappeared. I peered down into the water looking for him. It’s something I remember vividly; it was so strange because, after the screaming and violence, there was suddenly only the sound of birdsong.

‘Something grabbed my arm. Bernard pulled me out of the boat and capsized it over our heads. It was dark under there and all I could think of was getting out, but Bernard kept fighting me. We struggled in the water; Bernard was pulling me under. I kicked and punched, I don’t remember how I got out from under the boat or out of the water or even how I got back to the village, but I did. All the men ran up to the lochan: my father swore he was going to kill him.

‘Bernard wasn’t there. Everyone thought he had run away, but they started to search the lochan. While they were waiting for Jock Pirie to bring his boat, my dad found Bernard under a tree in the shallow water.’