Whirligig (23 page)

‘Oh.' Claypole didn't know how to react. They climbed into the car in silence. When they were half a mile or so away, Claypole spoke again.

‘Is there… Do you get a lot of that sort of thing here…?'

‘Yup,' said Coky curtly. ‘Actually,' she said after a pause, ‘it's not the prejudice I mind. At least prejudice is based on something. It has a certain ignorant logic. “I am suspicious of brown people. You are a brown person. Therefore I am suspicious of you.” All the time I am assumed to be from somewhere else because of the colour of my skin. I'm not Indian, and I never will be. I'm Scottish. But never mind that. The thing that makes me cross is when people are prejudiced
after
they know me. Even people I've known for years still treat me differently. They ask me to order the curry for the carry-out; they ask me about yoga; they assume that my life is somehow like my genes: half Indian. I even had Lachlan asking me if I needed more clothing the other day, like I needed looking after in this cold climate or something.'

‘Ah yes, Lachlan,' said Claypole with a sneer.

‘Have you been listening?' He turned to look at her in surprise, but the irritation in her voice had gone as quickly as it had arrived. ‘Ach, sod it.' They sat quietly for a moment before Coky spoke again. ‘He likes you, you know. Lachlan.'

‘Really?'

‘Yeah. He said. You should give him another go.'

Claypole could not resist a jibe. ‘You certainly did.'

Now Coky really was angry. ‘Excuse me?'

Claypole swallowed, now regretting having raised the topic of Coky's night in Lachlan's van. ‘The other night when you…'

Coky looked at him with horror. ‘I did
not
sleep with Lachlan Black,' she said with a shudder. ‘I helped him to bed because that's what friends do.' She huffed, and spoke almost to herself. ‘God. Why does everything have to be so…?'

She trailed off into fuming silence, and Claypole was forced to reassess his assumptions about what had taken place on the night of the party at Glen Drum beach.

Arriving at MacGilp House, Claypole and Coky went immediately to the empty Victorian walled garden to practise firing a shotgun. Coky assumed that Claypole had fired a gun before. He didn't want to disappoint her, so he nodded sagely as she rattled through the basics.

‘Well, here you go.' Coky handed him a twelve-bore shotgun with two cartridges loaded. ‘Try and hit the can I've placed on that box hedge over there, and we'll see how your aim is.'

Claypole took the gun from her as if it were a day-old baby and then nearly dropped it from the weight. Then he raised it to the wrong shoulder and gazed uncertainly down the twin barrels. She corrected his grip and he aimed again. At the end of the barrels, and in between them, there was a helpful-looking bead of metal. But he found that if he focused on it, two cans would appear beyond, out of focus. Likewise, if he
focused on the can, two beads would appear either side of it. But he said nothing, made his eyes go out of focus for everything as if looking at an Impressionist painting and lined twin cans somewhere near twin beads. He pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled dramatically, and the end of it shot up in the air.

‘Ow,' he said. But then he saw that the can had been blasted from its position on the box hedge and it lay riven and mangled on the ground. He turned to Coky with undisguised glee.

‘You'll be fine,' she said. ‘I'll stick by you all the same.'

Claypole rejoiced. He had managed both to impress her and to cause her to be his companion for the afternoon. As they walked back to the house, he decided to capitalise on his success and ask her a question that had been nagging him.

‘You're an eco-warrior, right?'

‘Eco-accountant,' she corrected him with a smile.

‘Yeah. Well, how do you square that with… You know…' He nodded at the gun she was carrying. He didn't want directly to accuse her of hypocrisy.

‘Eh?'

‘Um,' he continued. ‘You like to kill birds, right?'

‘Only grouse.'

‘They're birds, aren't they?'

She looked at him with interest and amusement. ‘Ah-ha! You're doing it!'

Now it was his turn to be confused. ‘Doing what?'

‘Weighing up an action in terms of its environmental consequence.'

Claypole sank into thought. ‘Fuck me,' he said suddenly and stopped walking.

‘Yeah, it's a real thing, isn't it? Very addictive.'

But Claypole's expletive had not been apropos of their conversation. He was staring at an old red tractor parked in a barn with double doors to it.

‘What?' asked Coky.

‘I'm having… Brr… It's a memory… or a déjà vu, or…' He stood and stared at the tractor, his mind turning over images from long ago that were by turns vivid and opaque.

‘Never mind,' he said quickly, but frowned as he continued walking.

As they returned to the courtyard behind the house, they came across the shooting party, which was mustering itself in joyful chaos. There was Peregrine himself, several men of a similar vintage and class to him, a few women of ruddy and weathered demeanour, and a pair of American men. These men, in identical plus fours, woollen hose with loudly coloured garters, brand-new tweed jackets with shiny leather patches and worsted shirts, with their grey hair poking out from under extravagant tartan hats. It would be very difficult to describe to a Martian what it was that was different about their appearance from that of their host. Peregrine wore roughly the same gear, and even sported a ruby cravat, but something indefinable set him apart – and it wasn't just the kilt.

Coky sidled up to Claypole and whispered, ‘The yanks look gayer than Freddie Mercury, don't they?'

Claypole nodded.

But Peregrine, although he was being loud, did not seem to be the master of ceremonies, and only appeared to be interested in making sure all the food and the booze were accounted for. It was Coky who quietly sorted out the guns and ammo and had quiet conversations with the beaters and loaders who, Claypole
noticed, numbered Lachlan and Milky among them. People milled about, and dogs were everywhere, excitedly peeing on everyone's boots. Land Rovers began to start up. Claypole hopped into the one containing Coky and the two Americans. He was greeted in an overfamiliar fashion by one of them.

‘I know old Perry's takin' me for a ride, but I don't care. Now my Ginny's gone I got no one to spend money on. I wouldn't be invited if I didn't pay, would I?' He winked.

‘Oh. Brr…' Claypole flustered. ‘Are you… a good shot?'

The man looked puzzled. ‘I don't come for the shootin'. I come for the ceilidh!' And he clicked his fingers in a way that indicated that he had absolutely no rhythm whatsoever. Claypole smiled weakly, and the Land Rover lurched off.

It was after some twenty minutes of bumpy ride through woodland that the convoy stopped, and the party began to tramp across rough heather. In films of shooting parties there always seemed to be clouds of grouse, pinging in all directions and dying in Passchendaele numbers. This was certainly not the case here. The odd shot was fired at grey-brown streaks, but you could hardly call it action-packed. During the lulls between what Claypole thought could be described as other lulls, Coky chatted to him quietly about various aspects of gun safety without making him feel as if he were being babysat, although he clearly was. Once again he had cause to marvel at her ability to be kind and tactful.

‘It's a good idea to keep the safety catch on while you're walking‘, she would gently suggest; ‘If you're climbing a gate, you shouldn't really have your gun loaded‘; and “perhaps you might
like to keep it pointed at the ground,” she would add intermittently, with a gentle hand on the barrel of his gun.

The shoot, it seemed from Peregrine's rapidly building temper, was not going well. His harsh voice, floating across the moor, could hardly be mistaken for that of a man having a good time.

‘Where are all the bloody birds?' he shouted at Lachlan more than once, whose fault it could hardly be but who never left the old man's side and seemed to be his personal bagman.

‘Slim pickin's, Perry!' said one of the ancient Americans with uncompromising honesty. ‘Maybe it's divine retribution!'

Peregrine smiled thinly and fumed, muttering something that only Lachlan would have been able to hear. Lachlan did not smile.

‘If Peregrine weren't so tight,' Coky whispered, ‘he'd have managed the moor better.'

The party continued to trek further into nowhere in search of grouse. The midges became more intense, and the ground more intent on twisting the ankles of the unwary. But there were more birds, and Peregrine's hollering became more cheerful. As they walked further into the bleak hills, it seemed to Claypole that every time a dog bounded forward into the springy heather ahead of the line of guns, something feathery would fly up with a kerfuffle. With a short pause, the bird or birds would then be blasted at, and more often than not they would then cease flying and plummet to the ground with an ugly twist, landing on the ground with a deathly bounce.

Claypole spent his time tramping awkwardly through dusty heather, coughing quietly and swatting
midges away from his ears, trying not to fall over. The first time he was allowed to fire, he raised his gun in a panicky arc and tried to locate anything in the sky near the end of the barrel. When he fired he had been holding the gun gingerly, and the butt had recoiled into his shoulder painfully. Of course, he had hit nothing. The second time, having been given further tips by Coky, he held the gun so tightly into his shoulder that he forgot to aim at all and the shot wanged harmlessly towards a lone cloud. The third time he squeezed the trigger and thought he might have been somewhere near hitting a bird, nothing happened because the safety catch was still on. He had just about got the hang of firing the gun when the last manoeuvre was announced.

‘You're up,' Coky said excitedly. ‘Whatever comes over you, you try and get the bead just ahead of it and fire. OK?'

Claypole knew that she had sacrificed her own shoot for his sake. She had allowed herself only six cartridges, and had bagged a grouse every time. He owed her some sort of victory therefore, and swore to himself that if anything coming out of the undergrowth had wings, be it owl, seagull or parrot, it would die. With gritted teeth and a bloodlusty squint, he leaned forward and raised the butt of his gun to chest height as she had instructed, adopting a stance like a keen pointer.

‘Oh. Snipe!' said Coky. The snipe, a darting creature that had nothing of the fluttering grace of the grouse or its straight trajectory, came out of the heather just fifteen paces from them, and shot out at an angle, wheeling back towards them and up into the sky. Claypole raised his gun rapier-quick.

‘Get it,' said Coky with excited insistence. Claypole
hesitated. He knew he was nowhere near being able to hit the thing, and he wheeled the gun about in the sky wildly, trying to line the bird up with the bead on the end of his gun.

‘Go on, fire!' she said. But the bird broke its line and dived down again towards the horizon. Claypole pulled the end of the gun down to follow it. Just as he was preparing to fire, he took his focus off the bird. He saw other movement in his eyeline. Fifty yards away, staring in horror at Claypole, were Lachlan Black and Peregrine MacGilp. They both ducked instinctively as they saw Claypole's gun wheel in their direction, with the snipe between the end of his gun and them. Just beyond the bead of his gun, Claypole saw Lachlan barge Peregrine to the floor and cover the old man with his own body. It was not a feudal gesture, though – more of an instinctive reaction. In any case, it made Claypole hesitate, despite his avowed intention to murder the snipe.

‘Go on,' commanded Coky, looking only at Claypole. He closed his eyes, tensed himself for the recoil, and squeezed the trigger.

There was silence for a moment, a wisp of smoke, and then pandemonium.

When he heard the shot pass a not-unworrisome six feet or so over his and Peregrine's sprawled bodies, Lachlan quickly got to his feet and shouted at Coky. It was a sentence too fearful to contain swear words, and too angry to be cogent. Coky immediately raised her hands in abject apology. Claypole just stood there dumbly shocked. Peregrine struggled to his feet. Lachlan turned to him with a worried look. Claypole could not hear what was said, but Peregrine threw down his gun and pushed the younger man twice,
clearly giving him an earful. It was an argument conducted at contained volume, but vicious. Lachlan had to keep backing away and putting his hands up in placation. He did not raise his voice, but eventually turned and walked away, shedding various hampers and bags in his wake. Peregrine continued to mutter away to himself, even after he had picked up his gun and begun to head back down the hill for the long walk to the Land Rovers.

Claypole turned the incident over in his mind as the party sat on rugs and on tailgates, munching pâtés and cheeses and drinking warm whisky in the cool breeze. Claypole felt sheepish, and drank only water. But that wasn't what occupied his thoughts. Why had Peregrine reacted so badly? Yes, he had been pushed to the ground. But Lachlan's intentions had surely only been to protect his employer. Could Peregrine not see this? Coky was continually apologetic to her uncle, but the old man was inconsolable. He kept going on, not about Claypole's stupidity in letting off a shot that had endangered him, nor Coky's excitement getting the better of her caution, but about Lachlan's impertinence. If it had not been for the infectious delight of the Americans, kept unaware of how close death had been to visiting the party, there would have been ill-tempered silence instead of excited chatter about the evening's impending festivities.

Some distance away in a camper van, Lachlan and Milky were having a much darker conversation. They were debating the pros and cons of a crime for which it was possible to receive a life sentence.