These Demented Lands (19 page)

Brotherhood's father was laid out then on the bed of sand. Opportunistic viruses, papa: lovely. Then the one in his spine started heralding the arrival of the Frame. The upper section of his spine was turning to a jelly; to continue eating the milky porridge I brought up to him – my big belly that he wanted to touch, jutting out – and so's could sit upright to eat, the Frame would be bolted onto him: a structure of metal rods clamped to his collar-bones and secured round his forehead, his lips slowly moving like a tortoise, through the space where I passed the spoon, between the bars – the structure preventing his head crushing his neck in a final shrug. His skeleton was sinking down through the ocean of his organs as the oxtail soup of bad piss gathered in the catheter bag; then his tears, not the sadness of this end but the humiliation of the big spot on his nose – his wasted body still having the strength to produce
that
. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Dad; that's what Brotherhood's father died of. Had off the French lassies who dived from the wings of the seaplane and swam, bobbing towards him, the summer water glistening on their foreheads.

But what was most on my mind was the Odyssey, the crossing made by the man with the propeller. When he had appeared on that lantern skyline and stumbled back into our domain I turned away from the window and raced down the
spiral stairs (with one hand on the banisters); I ran up the drive, the canvas shoes sinking into the brown, clayey, puddly bits. I saw Brotherhood appear from the boathouse direction carrying the shotgun he'd been pigeon shooting with. Sudden I got the notion Brotherhood was going to shoot the man with his arms held out all helpless and racked up. As I walked towards him, Aircrash Investigator smiled and fell on his knees. I reached out and touched the cold metal of the propeller.

‘It's the one. I came back. You're expecting.'

‘Isn't that the truth,' I says and began untying the rope.

Brotherhood was laughing, standing on the other side of the barbed wire shaking his head. With both hands I let down one end of the propeller to the earth.

‘Do what you want with him.' Brotherhood laughed.

I took him to the room full of the supports; then as winter deepened he moved from one freezing room to another at will, trying to find the warmest.

In my imagination I thought loads about his lone crossing – the propeller lashed across shoulders, under the changing skies from which dark winds came – those clear stars near the derelict tracking station – the hollow clangs of the abandoned observatory. Closely he passed, chin pushed into his chest – a flame, bright and warm as sirius-glint in the frozen air: a burning at the base of his long spine; always knowing if he stumbled forwards on his front he might never rise again. It became too dark to walk on, and he leaned backwards, rested the weight of the prop from Alpha Whisky upon the slanted generator roof of the telly-aerial bothy: stock-still all night,
till the grey air was vibrating enough for him to move into the gold of dawn, his vision still troubled by animals patrolling near him in the darkness that had gone before.

Unable to drink for fear of man's ability to drown using inches of water, but singing out loud as he thought of the child unfolding week by week in my once-flat belly. Singing! So sheep jerked their heads towards him and unseen deer herds, that once belonged to the giants, flicked away uphill over the ridge as his tuneless voice cracked on. He crashed through the birch saplings bawling, Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Lemon Tree segueing into Yellow Bird, Yellow Submarine, Flower of Scotland, the Corries' Glencoe, Nature Boy, Away in a Manger. Bark peeled from the winter trees, moles burrowed deeper for more convinced hibernation – the dead bracken-beds, crimson and burnished copper, broken stocks stomped lower, were lucky: spores deep buried for next year. On he came, careering through the singing woods, across the hollow of the dark grazings and down back braes, high on the plateau known as ‘The Planet'; in dusk once more above the sole bulb of Boat Chandlers at Ferry Slipway, within earshot of the frightening shrieks of the military zoo, the childish chattering exhaust of the miniature train below, circling loudly over the switch points, the elder Grainger boy gripping the engine between his thighs, spitting into the metallic carbon-dioxide rush, ‘The family will rise again, the aviary will burn; I'll be the hero, releasing the peacocks which that degenerate, Cormorant, wants to hire for this New Year ballyhoo at Drome – National Service for
the lot
; the days when the railways were great, each engine
agleam; I will save the peacocks, releasing them to rut and breed throughout the grounds – their feathers erect like regimental colours, they'll mount, mount . . .' as he clicks the track using the remote facility fixed above the regulator, the train moves off up the papier-mâché tunnel to bring him, in his boiler-suit, to the dinner table, prompt . . .

Upward the skyline figure goes, this time racking the weight of the propeller on the lower branches of a larch and hanging there, till the pickings of some bird in his tousled head at dawn's first moan bring him onward: unhinging the prop and letting him become pushed down the sheep paths, feet pattering quick below the ridges – the telly aerial and the haze of disused masts from the tracking station, their different heights and rusted dishes sort of vertiginous monuments to the variety of private investors involved in the doomed station – whispers and frames of obscure aerials vivid in the morning sky.

On, to the end of the glen, the black cattle-drove roads flooded so he, for the first time, in the water around his feet, saw the image, the shocking ancient image he showed the world, reflected amongst the clouds in the clear, shallow floodwaters. Beyond he came to the dripping cliff, water rattering down the moss clumps so's he held his open mouth to the drips and his naked torso contracted and tightened as the icy water spattered it, yet it was here he leaned against the base of the wall, shivering till he slept. And dreamt his river-dreams:

Dark water took him as he stepped forwards – the weight
on his shoulders forcing him face-down and downwards, legs kicking, sinking, till his wide-open eyes reached the silt of the bottom, where he drowned – his body bloating up over the days, till its bags of swole air gently lifted the prop and all floated downriver, through the interior and out, into the sandy whorls of the delta, the ballooned Investigator turned with the propeller out into the bay where they swirled down among the burning phosphorus beds and twisting barnacled metal of Alpha Whisky. The distended corpse hanging, turning round slow in the sanded water, held up the propeller till the pincers of lobsters, caught in a force ten's up-swirl and briefly tangled in the body's mesh, snapped at the huge sac of rot-gas. Freeing a massive silver bubble and its satellites, which rolled surfacewards, the emptied corpse dove to the seabed till it became bones. A bubble of methane hoisted the skull surfacewards where a bobbing gull pecked out the remaining eye jelly, the heavy dunt driving the skull spinning down again, where it fell among the bubbling phosphorus bombs. Filling with their gas, the skull leapt to the surface once more, only to be cracked in two by the slicing prow of the
Psalm 23
.

All this he dreamed, before he picked his way through the night to the river's bank, illuminated by the burning islands of branches and twigs, circling down the glen. By keeping a steady pace, these passing islands of fire led the crucified figure along the lands, then the blazing pyres on the rock outcrops, shoreward of the loggers' camp and its portakabins . . .

He was sighted by Joe the Coal, driving fast along the glen
floors, the coal shed from the nunnery stuck on the back of the hydraulic lift; the nuns in pursuit, waving from the windows of their Morris Minor, missed the latest new miracle.

The Aircrash Investigator moved down through the Devil's Advocate's encampment; the Advocate himself, soup spoon frozen under his new goatee, watched the Aircraft Investigator stumble through his stream, swerve down to the first barbed-wire fence and step over it.

‘She's pregnant,' he shouted.

‘I know,' the Advocate nodded quietly, too softly for the Aircrash Investigator to hear. The wire squeaked as the Aircrash Investigator descended on to the wood-smoke of Drome Hotel, the Observation Lounge centred on the cross his body formed. Still with me, Dad? You should pay attention; you might learn something, extend your horizons, a wee bit edification: here's another letter.

No reply from that one, Pa. That's the aristocracy for you. Old Mr Brotherhood similarly lamented before he died, quoting O'Sullivan at Culloden, ‘Oh, Sire, all is going to pot,' and what Walker Percy in
The Moviegoer
called ‘the going under of the evening lands'.

Old Brotherhood had says, ‘Listen, Lassie, come close so I don't have to shout. Tidy up your act for Christ' sake. You're pregnant, what's the short skirt for? Hard-ons have got both of us into enough trouble.'

We laughed, his lips slipping over his gums like a foreskin. He grabbed my hand. ‘You've been good to me. Don't pretend it's easy for me. The doc is in every day now; bastard's usually asking about your belly. Just waiting for the hour he can really crank on my Diamorphine,' And, Papa . . . this is truly what he says, ‘Come close, love. Now listen. After I'm gone you must promise me to do something . . .' and I lean close and he whispers what it is he wants me to do. When he died he gasped ‘It's just like Christmas!' The Devil's Advocate stood out on the open slopes of 96-Metre Hill, watching Brotherhood Senior's burial with binocs.

There was just me, the Aircrash Investigator, Chef Macbeth, Brotherhood, the man from the council who worked the mechanical grave digger and the doctor who kept glancing at my belly.

Four took the cords and lowered the coffin into the hole. There was an awkward silence requiring a few words. Brotherhood shrugged, says, ‘I told him way back they were tarts.'

I grimaced at the cold wind.

The men drank the Linkwood whisky. In the wind gusts that shook the closed hotel you could hear the sounds of the mechanical digger, jerking around in the cemetery. I was coming up the spiral staircase from the toilet. Brotherhood was on the way down. Here's what I told him, Dad. I put my hand on his shoulder. He smiled. The doctor laughed at something said by the Aircrash Investigator upstairs.

‘My fostermother is buried in the graveyard. When she died a few greedy relatives turned up at the funeral; my fosterdad, in those days he still had a few guts left, he was still a good communist . . .'

‘Hah,' Brotherhood knee-jerked.

‘There was a lot of cash. Lots of jewels. Some that meant things to me. I would do anything to get those jewels back. And I need the cash. I would admire the man who could get those things . . .'

‘Where are they?'

‘To spite those relatives, to show he loved her, to show the root of all evil was below him, my fosterdaddy took those jewels, those handfuls of money, and he shoved them in the
coffin with the corpse of the woman he loved before the undertaker bolted the top on . . .'

‘Wow,' Brotherhood's eyes widened.

‘. . . The stuff is still out there.'

‘You're amazing.' He stared at me. ‘What's the name on the gravestone?'

I told him. He looked at me a way I'd never seen him look.

He walked up the stairs, glancing back at me. Now Dad, don't go rushing over there till you've heard the whole story. I suppose these pages are shaking by now. Listen to me tell you about Christmas Day instead.

It was raining. There were still some leaves moving diagonally down from the stripped deciduous trees to plaster themselves on the wet grave slabs and against the roofless chapel, elevated up on its stairs so cattle couldn't graze inside.

Brotherhood had begun the day shouting ‘Football in No Man's Land.'

He couldn't find a football, so a frozen turnip dug from the whitened earth of Gibbon's field had to do.

Up the hill went the men, towards the Devil's Advocate's encampment with its shorn tendril of tinsel hung on the nearby stunted larch – Chef Macbeth trailing, DJ Cormorant pointing upwards, gesticulating in the lead with his mobile phone held aloft like the staff of Moses, voices babbling from it, ignored. Brotherhood followed, tossing the turnip in his palms, trying to thaw it out; even the Aircrash Investigator had been persuaded from the boathouse where he spent all his time with my present to him, listening to the Andante
Con Moto once a day (allowing the failing batteries to revive).

‘Out your trenches, you Bosche,' Brotherhood yelled.

The Devil's Advocate was wearing a long, enormous, sheepskin coat: sleet and hail adhered to the collar as he opened his arms in salutation through the flames of the big bonfire he built from the larches, felled in the dark, all save the solitary stunted, decorated one.

The game began: Brotherhood and the Devil's Advocate versus DJ Cormorant, Chef Macbeth and the Investigator. From the Observation Lounge, through the sleet, I could see their kicks raise plates of water from the ground. The game was called off when the Devil's Advocate tried to save with a header and was konked out. They tossed the neep into the flames and headed down, gathering wood on the way for the log fire.