Tricksters (2 page)

‘Rachel, love,' Murdo said with a heavy sigh, ‘I can't possibly feel much worse than I do just now.'

‘ “We'll see”, as the blind man said,' Rachel replied.

 

Me, I'm from . . . ah . . . from Back in Lewis. Well, I was born in the Poligan, the only son of Effie MacMillan, but I was brought up in Inverness, Aberdeen and Perth. Sam Kerr's my Sunday name, but I much prefer the nickname they gave me when I was still quite young. That's ‘Sam the Scam'. I never knew my father – some bastard from the Lowlands who abandoned his wife shortly after I was born – and my poor mother had to work in the Northern Bank in different branches where she was bored out of her skull. When I was growing up, she always used to advise me to take a secure job in a bank. She wanted, I'm sure, to ensure that her son suffered the same agony she endured. When I entered the world of television, she was not best pleased. As it turned out, her own job wasn't as secure as mine. Much of the staff at the Northern Bank was ‘slimmed down', and replaced by stacks of electronic machines and computers which made a box-up of people's savings, chewed up credit cards, and charged usurious rates of interest that would have shamed the moneylenders Jesus scourged from the Temple. These machines were free to steal without any human supervision.

Never mind, here I am lying on a blanket on the pavement of a street called the Cowgate in Edinburgh. It's a cold, wet night in February, and me and a crowd of people, mostly pale-faced males with a couple of females thrown in,
are waiting for the big lorry carrying the priest and a young team of boys and girls who give out sandwiches and soup to the unfortunate souls who are homeless. I can hardly believe that I, Sam the Scam, formerly Head of Drama and Documentaries at Etive Television, am now considered a member of the underprivileged.

‘Homeless?' The priest is approaching with a steaming mug and a roll.

‘Not for long.' I'm hoping to get back with Dolina, though she put me out of the house as soon as she discovered I'd lost my job and the days of the megabucks were long gone.

‘Because we're MWH. Sorry, Meals on Wheels for the Homeless.'

‘Well, yes, I suppose I am. Temporarily homeless.'

‘I understand. My name's Kenneth.' The priest hands over the food. ‘What's yours?'

‘Donald.' The lie issues from my mouth with practised ease. All my life I've been telling lies. In IRA, or Inverness Royal Academy, and in Dundee University, where I opted for Journalism, I didn't spend much time studying. I used to cheat on teachers and lecturers, cribbing assignments from the few pals I had. This habit of deceit was extremely useful when I finally reached the world of television. It's true, if you put down on your CV that you're a self-centred bastard, it'll do you no harm at all.

I know all about this. The first thing I did when I moved from the
Perthshire Gazette,
where I was a tipster for our readership who liked to gamble on the horses, to Etive Television was to wield the axe. I got rid of every producer, presenter and director in the place and hired two or three people who would do exactly as I'd tell them. This action saved the company a great deal of money, and my standing with the Board increased dramatically.

How things have changed! I used to cut back on staff expenses and what I skimmed went into my own pocket. I was so well off that some days I couldn't remember which of my cars I'd taken to work in the morning. I'd have to go down to the car park at lunchtime and look around. ‘Ah, yes,' I'd say, ‘it was raining when I left home this morning. I took the red one.'

But the wheel has turned full circle and the warmth has become bitter cold.

However, I'd better start at the beginning, the summer of last year . . .

We were on our way to the Uists – my PA, Yvonne, a cameraman, soundman, a sparky and myself, Leader of the Pack – to shoot footage for a documentary called
In the Footsteps of Erskine Beveridge.
We lodged in a hotel called the Tartan Pagoda on the Monday night with the intention of catching the ferry to Lochmaddy on Tuesday, the twenty-fourth of August. Although things had started off rather promisingly, it was to become my day of disaster and shame . . .

Sam Kerr lay, naked, on his back, in the middle of a bed in Room 3 in the Tartan Pagoda. His arms and legs were stretched out in the form of an X. His head lolled on his shoulder as though he had been garrotted. He was a large, well-built man, twenty-eight years of age; a descendant of a race of seamen well accustomed to extreme cold and spray from hostile waves. His hair was long and thick, dyed yellow, and flowed over his ears to a loosely plaited pigtail at the back. He sported an all-over tan, for he was seriously addicted to sun beds. The bleep of his mobile phone awoke him. He got up, scratched his chest, pulled on a silk bathrobe and padded into the bathroom. After micturating, he washed his hands and put out his tongue at the mirror above the handbasin. This tongue resembled a slice of steak that had been baking in the sun for at least a fortnight. Too many cigarettes and drinks last night. And every night. He had a dim memory of standing at the bar casting pearls of wisdom to Yvonne and a pudding of a man from Benbecula, and though he couldn't put a face to the guy, he was pretty confident that, with his natural way with words, he had impressed
him. The retard who had been so drunk he'd tried to chat up Yvonne – what a deluded fool! He quickly erased the memory of the previous night from his mind.

This was the worst time for somebody connected to television who was about to embark on filming a programme that would certainly gain another BAFTA award and reap fame and fortune for its creator. This was the time he had to haul himself out of sleep, all alone, examine his dried-up tongue, rub his red-rimmed eyes, and finger the stubble on his jowls. He wondered, for a moment, if the game was worth the candle. To banish these depressing thoughts he decided to take a shower. When he had finished his ablutions he felt invigorated and spoke aloud: ‘Rangers 3 Celtic 1. Have we visions to mix and awards to be won? Yes, Sam, baby, you certainly have!' His electric razor started to hum, and Sam's brain started to hum too. First, he'd check every part of his room for anything that he could possibly steal, and then he'd have a quick look in the holdall that contained his treasure and his heart.

Sam returned to the bedroom and dressed in clothes he considered appropriate for a director of a television crew – chinos, Timberland brogues, a white polo shirt with the logo of Etive Television on the front, and a blue baseball cap, skip to the rear, bearing the Latin legend
Alere Flammam.
He glanced at his watch. 09.40. He picked up a red canvas bag – there were at least four of them scattered around the room – and with trembling fingers opened it. He gazed with reverence at the dozens of little packets of shortbread, coffee, sugar and miniature jars of jam – the kind of snack food that can be found next to the kettle in most hotels. He whispered excitedly, ‘Wonderful!'

 

Me, I'm from North Uist. To tell you the honest truth, I don't know. I don't know if there is a shred of hope for us right now. I came to a decision that he was the man I wanted, and it may have been the wrong decision, but I made the decision anyway, and here I am right here. Honestly, I don't know what can change that. I love Murdo, and I'm trying to do the honourable thing. There's either some hope in that, or there isn't.

Well . . . uh, Murdo . . . my father and mother . . . and lack of money.

Murdo's the main problem.

He's a hollow man.

He has no trade, he's almost forty years of age, he's been on the ‘Out-of-Work' since he got the elbow from the university and . . . he drinks too much. Well, not so much recently. He's really made an effort. But, despite all that, he makes me laugh sometimes. What I mean is, I'm comfortable with him. I can't imagine me making it without him being in my life in some way or other.

But I don't want to hurt my parents. God, they're always giving me static because I'm going with him. Well, my father's not as heavy as her, but I know he's hurting. He's disappointed in my behaviour . . . But it's his own fault. ‘Daughter of mine,' my poor dad must have said to me at an impressionable age, ‘never learn from your mistakes, never
pay any heed to experience. Is that clear? Also, always be hopeful, that if you get involved with an old drunk, everything will turn out all right, even in the teeth of outright contradictory proof. Now, all right, let's have it, what did I just tell you?'

‘What did you tell me?' I must have hotly replied. ‘You told me nothing! I don't need anyone to tell me anything! What the hell are you questioning me for? My life's going to be like a Gaelic song.' At which my daddy presumably chuckled and said, ‘That's my girl!'

And then my poor old white-haired mother, her and her old black mourning gear, comes to my room looking like somebody that just got hit in the head. And I've got to sit through all that Gaelic psalm wailing. You know, ‘Cia fhad' a bhitheas corruich ort, a Dhè, am bi gu bràth?' ‘How long will wroth be upon you, Lord, will it be forever?' ‘I pray for you, Rachel,' she says. ‘I sent a donation to the Resuscitation Fund on your behalf. I hope you give that man up, Rachel. I know in my heart you're a good girl.'

‘Rachel,' she says, ‘you've got to get onto the straight and narrow.' She writes to a religious bookshop in Partick every week and orders cassettes of famous Free Church ministers' sermons. She's offering to send me to Lourdes . . . and we're not even Catholic!

‘Look, Mother, I'm not crippled,' I tell her.

‘In your soul you are,' she says.

Jesus, isn't it great to be young! They disapprove of him. They think he's too old for me, that his family are low-rent, that I should finish my course at uni . . . and that's what I'm going to do.

As the old guy from Barra said, ‘I'm in a quadrangle.'

But I'd better start at the beginning, the summer of last year
. . .

‘I had to sleep in the van. Well, I lay down in the van. Didn't get a wink,' Murdo said, shaking like a fishing rod.

‘Your conscience killing you, was it?'

‘It was the cold,' Murdo said. ‘I looked round, first thing this morning, to see if old Admiral Scott or Roald Amundsen were hanging about. They'd have felt right at home in this van.'

‘You didn't get a bed at the party, then?'

‘It wasn't up to much.'

‘You didn't pull a bird, then?'

‘There weren't any women there,' Murdo said.

‘The cruiserweight was there!'

‘Well, there was one woman called Yvonne,' Murdo said, ‘who worked for that television guy . . . the guy who was buying me all the drams last night. I thought he was going to offer me some work . . . since you and I are . . . more or less, er, finished.'

‘Oh, we're not quite finished yet, Murdo.'

‘Anyway,' Murdo said, ‘I put up a kind of black along with Yvonne and Sam.'

‘Yvonne . . . She was the one in the dungarees, wasn't she?'

‘Yes.'

‘Timberland boots on? Peroxide hair, cropped into her head?'

‘Something like that.'

‘Murdo,' Rachel said with a chuckle, ‘she wouldn't go with you if you were the last man on earth. She's buckled, you half-wit!'

‘If I were the last man on earth,' Murdo said defiantly, ‘I'd be far too busy to bother with the likes of her!'

‘What a stud you are!'

‘Rachel, I just thought you'd let me . . .'

‘What? Stay where you are, you gimp!'

‘Will you not let me get the head down in your room?' Murdo said.

‘I'm going upstairs for a shower,' Rachel said. ‘I reckon you'd have . . . maybe five minutes in it.'

‘That's not what I meant at all.'

‘I know fine what you meant,' Rachel said.

‘Shall I tell you about the black I put up?' Murdo said.

‘No,' Rachel said. ‘I'm sick fed up of all the blacks you've put up.' She turned to face Murdo full on. ‘Murdo, we've got to talk.'

‘What is it you want?' Murdo said.

‘I've never asked you for anything, have I?' Rachel said.

‘No, you haven't,' Murdo said, ‘but if you had done, I'd have done miracles for you.'

‘That's good to hear, Murdo,' Rachel said. ‘And I was always straight with you, wasn't I?'

‘You were,' Murdo said.

‘Whatever we made at the shows we put on, didn't I give you half?'

‘You did.'

‘I never once opened my mouth about you drinking too much.'

‘No, you never did.'

‘I've been a good partner to you.'

‘Yes.'

‘Because I could've been pretty rotten to you if I'd wanted.'

‘Aye, right, just a minute, Rae . . . let me . . .'

‘I could've left you in the gutter, if I'd wanted,' Rachel said. ‘I know what you did in Golspie. Do you remember that night?'

‘Yes!' Murdo replied vehemently. ‘I remember that night.'

‘That's good,' Rachel said. ‘After every gig we played, I wrote down every single penny of income we made at the door. I
knew
how much should've been there.'

‘Just tell me what you want.'

‘Am I keeping you back from anything, Murdo?'

‘I need to see somebody in the hotel.'