The Stillman Read online

  Tom McCulloch was born and raised in the Highlands of Scotland. He has published prose and poetry in numerous magazines and journals. He was long-listed for the Herald/Imagining Scotland short-story competition in 2011. The Stillman is his first novel. He currently lives in Oxford.

  THE STILLMAN

  TOM McCULLOCH

  First published in Great Britain by

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  PO Box 5725

  One High Street

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9WJ

  Scotland.

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored or transmitted in any form without the express

  written permission of the publisher.

  © Tom McCulloch 2013

  Editor: Moira Forsyth

  The moral right of Tom McCulloch to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN: 978-1-908737-67-0

  ISBNe: 978-1-908737-68-7

  Cover design by Mark Blackadder, Edinburgh

  Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.

  For my family.

  And Bev, for lighting the way.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  One

  It all begins with death, it all ends with death. The crow lies on the low concrete wall outside warehouse 21. The beak is slightly open and bright blood spatters the snow, guts grey and spilling. Siberia’s gale has momentarily dropped to a stabbing breeze. The oily feathers barely move. In an hour or two they’ll be frozen. I bend closer, studying the scene, like a TV detective. There’s no surrounding tracks or marks. Did the crow just fall out of the sky? It must’ve been some height to splatter viscera like that.

  I look up. Sky the colour of wet pebbles. The first bird I’ve seen for days and it’s dead. What would it be like to never see any other kind of life-form again? Nothing but people.

  The crow’s feathers give an indignant ruffle. No wonder, imagine being gawped at after your suicide leap. Savage, dying insults, that’s what I’d scream at the gathering crowd and their repulsed but fascinated stares. I give the crow its decency and look away. Des is leaning against the big red warehouse door, wearing that greasy fur hat he says he got in the navy.

  ‘When’s the delivery due?’

  ‘96 barrels coming in.’

  ‘I know that, but when?’

  Des stares at the snow, as if he’s wondering how long it’s been falling. I can’t remember either, it buries memory as it smothers the landscape. I’ve never known a man to stare like Des. Sometimes he still seems to be up on deck, lost in the ocean, pondering whatever he ponders.

  I follow him inside. The high racks of barrels stretch three hundred feet into the darkness. The smell of whisky is strong. Des opens the tea-hut door. We call it the tea-hut but it’s just a small room for taking a break. And I’ve never seen anyone drinking tea. Mostly we sit and mostly in a loaded silence. The barred window is frosted up, accentuating the nearness to each other. I sit on the bench, chin down into my jacket. I move my feet on the gritty floor. The raspy noise cuts into the silence and Malky sniffs. I stop moving my feet.

  ‘If you farted in here it would freeze in the air. If you were first in the next day you’d walk into a wee smelly cloud. You’d know it was a fart but you’d know it couldn’t have been you, so how did it get there?’

  Nobody bothers to reply to Camp Gary. He probably doesn’t want a response anyway. But I know we’re all now thinking about it. Five grown men wondering if it’s possible for a fart to freeze. Times like these I’m glad when I hear the lorry rumbling closer. Then the driver’s face is at the door and he’s calling us a bunch of lazy bastards and he wants the barrels off pronto. I’ve seen this driver before, the one with the wraparound shades, who sits in his cab dreaming he’s an Apache helicopter pilot, swooping low over the Tora Bora.

  The light. I can’t get enough of it. The way it pours through the open warehouse doors as I wait a hundred feet away in whisky dark for the next barrel to come rolling out of the gloom. There’s no place for colour here, never has been, a monochrome edgeland, ever cold. How could it be otherwise? Given time most things eventually come to chill us, become grey.

  Our three evenly spaced heads bob in silhouette, passing the barrels along. The heavy trundles echo and undulate, separate and combined, like intertwining sine waves; now louder, now quieter, the barrels slowing down, speeding up. I glimpse ghost-stencilled letters, numbers, feel the breath I can’t see. My hands are warm for the first time today. It’s too noisy to be certain but I know Camp Gary is whistling that same tune I’ve never placed and never asked him about. I’m glad I can’t hear him. I don’t want to admit that at this particular moment I’m oddly content as well, bent like a blind cripple in winter’s bleakest prison.

  Not that I belong here. The distillery, sure, but not these forlorn warehouses. I’m a Stillman. I take care of the nine copper-pot stills where the whisky’s born. It’s me who selects the middle-cut, the heart of the spirit, swinging the collecting pipe in the spirit safe at that moment of utmost gravity. But we aren’t producing anything at the moment. Winter closedown; mid-December to mid-January. I’ve been exiled to the warehouses. I don’t like this time of year. I find it unnerving when I open the door and there’s no smell of pot ale, no Christmas-lit Stillhouse floating on the night. The distillery exists to pulse, to breathe.

  I turned 50 yesterday. So many years in the one place. The celebrations were the very definition of muted. My wife bought me Homer Simpson socks, a frying pan, and a posh bottle of red, Burgundy I think. If there’s a message in this I don’t feel much like looking for it. Recently she’s been getting into wine. Always been aspirational, not that it’s stopped her battering the cheap voddie. She was pissed off when I started drinking the birthday bottle before it had properly breeeathed. But nothing was said. It was my birthday. It was my day.

  ‘I told you take it out to defrost,’ she says, soon as I’m in the door.

  ‘I thought I had.’

  ‘You know what thought did?’

  Thought could have done a lot of things so nothing really leaps out.

  ‘No. I guess you don’t.’

  She clatters in the cupboards. My cup of tea’s getting cold and it’s a provocation to sit here supping away when she’s rushing around getting dinner ready. I should help but don’t. There’s a fizzing sound coming from the living room, see, I’m trying to work out what it is. Could be a sitcom’s canned laughter, crowd noise on the Boy’s football manager Xbox game.

  ‘You going to drink that?’

  I shrug. She’s forgotten to put the sugar in. I know I shouldn’t say it. ‘You forgot the sugar.’

  She freezes at the cooker, slowly places the tin of beans on the counter. ‘You know how busy I was today?’

  I rub at a black mark on my boiler suit. Nothing I say can be right, not now. I listen to her go on and on and don’t touch a drop of the tea. I say something in apology. It isn’t meant and she knows it. Our fragmented ghosts in the dark window, what a true reflection they are.

  At some point my son appears in the doorway, watching us with that smirk I can’t fathom. It’s starting to spook me but then he is fifteen; essentially unknowable. It’s why I’ve started calling him ‘the Boy’.
The pathetic explanation that mum and dad are just talking will never work on that smirk. He’ll leave on his own terms and I won’t realise when he finally does. At least I understand where he gets it from. I’ve always known when to make the timely exit. I stand, taking care not to scrape the chair. So that’ll be that then, eh? my wife says, end of discussion. Jim Drever has decided enough is enough, he’s made his point.

  ‘There’s logs that need chopping, need a good fire the night.’ The cold catches my throat as soon as I open the back door. The security lamp clicks on; white dazzle in already white dark.

  ‘As you wish, Jim.’

  It could be a sigh of resignation. More likely relief that I am finally going, exiting the frame.

  ‘I’ll give you a shout for dinner, shouldn’t be too long. Lucky we didn’t finish the rest of that stew. You want chips or tatties?’

  ‘Whatever you like.’ Not because I have no preference, I do, I want chips. More because I want to give the impression that I hold to higher ground, unconcerned with such trivialities. Victory! She’ll be glaring out the window as I cross to the shed. But when I look back she’s at the cooker laughing, mobile phone clamped to her ear. I think about the dead crow, viscera.

  That reassuring mustiness, smell of fathers, grandfathers. I leave the shed light off and feel my way to the old easy chair leaning against the back wall. I know the outline of every jar of assorted nails, each plant-pot and tool. Nothing moves unless I move it. That’s why I come here. I pick up the axe, running a finger along the iron head and settling it across my lap. The night’s made for a George Romero movie, doesn’t even need a full moon. I’ll do some major axe damage when the zombies come staggering round the side of the house.

  I’m sweating after six swings. The logs split easily. They’re well-seasoned and I wonder where Malky got them. He’d come round last week, big smiles, asking if I wanted to buy 200 kilos of larch. The man’s an entrepreneur, wasted in this place. I soon build up a pile that’ll last a few days. And we’ll need it, been eight or nine below for over a week, like a fuckin walk-in freezer. I stop for a rest, wiping the shavings from the head as I stare at the distillery.

  All these years since childhood but it could be anytime. As if I haven’t moved. The cold tang of ten thousand nights and the same sad bleating sheep somewhere on the juniper moors. The access road winds in front of our terrace, over the weighbridge and up to the main site. The back-shift’s up there, the Filling Store glow seeping out from behind the Dark Grains Plant. 120 casks we collected from the bonded warehouses this afternoon, they’ll be emptying them into the collecting vat for hours yet. Fogged breath. Cold-finger cigarettes. The cooper’s adze echoes, slicing the bung flush, the white of fresh oak like a new layer of skin.

  And the Stillhouse, forever drawing my eye. A dark silhouette that shouldn’t be silent. Two more weeks of closedown. Two more weeks in the warehouses. These days they call it a secondment. I’m counting the minutes. Nineteen years I’ve worked in the Stillhouse. That ever-present thruuum. I pad across the scuffed yellow floor, checking hydrometers, temperatures. Distillation is in itself a distillation, of process, chemical and electrical determinism, the regulation of time. Narrow parameters always reassure me. I‘m comfortable within set limits, I guess, where the hazards are long neutralised, problems foreseeable.

  There’s four places set, three taken. Me, my wife and the Boy. My wife’s evangelical when it comes to eating together. She’ll quote you some expert, the setting aside of family time is essential to harmonious functioning. I’m unconvinced. Mostly we just sit in silence and surely conversation is essential to harmonious functioning. Not that the silence is total. If I close my eyes I can tell who’s responsible for each sloppy sound we make when eating. It’s all to do with the extent the lips are left open, the slight differences in the air inhaled with each mouthful.

  The Boy has his iPod in. Anonymous thrash metal leaches out of the headphones. When his mother tells him to remove them he ignores her. I nudge his arm and he ignores me too. Then my wife is shouting and the Boy eventually deigns to comply. I’m impressed again at the effortless way he can draw his mother’s fury to a savage peak and then calmly capitulate. Artfully done, giving the sense that it’s his mother who’s actually the defeated one.

  ‘Is she coming?’

  My wife finishes texting before answering. ‘She’s late.’

  I glance at the kitchen clock. 6.42. We always have dinner at 6.30. It must be the optimum time for family interaction. My wife makes a strange snorting noise as she eats a forkful of potatoes. I picture a claggy bit of tatties stuck in her pink throat. At least my daughter Amber is actually expected this evening. She moved out six months ago but my wife insists on leaving her place mat set. This annoys me. If you move out then you move out. And you don’t just turn up when you want and expect a plate of food to be put in front of you.

  ‘Peter’s a dick,’ says the Boy.

  I can almost hear my wife’s hackles rise. ‘What did you say?’ she asks. Why do people say that when they’ve obviously heard?

  ‘Peter. The fiancé. He’s a dick.’

  ‘That’s your future brother-in-law you’re talking about so you better get used to him.’

  ‘Might be my brother-in-law but he’s still a dick.’

  ‘Stop saying that – ’

  ‘Down the hall doing wheel spins in the car-park. He’s near thirty!’

  ‘Leave the table.’

  The Boy carefully, ever so slowly, places his cutlery on the plate and leaves the kitchen.

  My wife is staring at me. I count the beans on my plate, seven.

  ‘You need to talk to him.’

  ‘He’s just being protective of his big sis.’

  ‘He’s a poisonous wee shite is what he is.’

  I don’t disagree. But the slam of the front door distracts her attention and means I don’t have to respond.

  My daughter Amber breezes in with a breathless hello and drops some packages and post on the table. ‘They were in the porch. Do you ever check your mail? What’s for tea, I’m down to bare cupboards and Peter’s out.’

  ‘It’s in the oven love, stew. We were going to have chicken but your father forgot to take it out.’

  ‘Dad!’

  I’m struck again at the similarity between my wife and daughter. It’s not really physical, my wife is short and dumpy, Amber taller but with a developing belly. More in the personal choices, the clothes and the groom. Both have highlighted blonde hair and favour a militaristic use of make-up. Similar scents too, loose fitting tops and Ugg boots. My wife looks like a tubby, overly-made up Eskimo. If Amber isn’t careful she’ll end up living in the same igloo.

  They talk about the wedding. Why February? I still don’t understand it and they better hope this snow lets up soon. Amber wasn’t happy when I asked what the hurry was. I said she’d only been with that fanny Peter for seven months and should just tell us if she’s pregnant. Ok, the ‘fanny’ was left unsaid but my wife still hauled me up. They’re in love, they don’t want to hang around waiting, can’t you just be happy for them? I can’t, not that I’ve tried too hard. And I’m still not convinced she isn’t pregnant. Only a few weeks to go, my wife says.

  In a short second I stop listening. Like some quantum fluctuation I come across myself at the bedroom window three and a half hours later. It happens more and more these days, maybe I’m gradually slipping out of existence. Up at the distillery the Filling Store lights go off, the back-shift straggling across the bridge. Someone glances up and I raise a hand as if I just happen to be skulking in the dark and haven’t been standing here for a lifetime.

  The packages were for me, all from Amazon. Blue Collar, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and the best movie ever made, digitally remastered just for me, The Deer Hunter. That perfect ambiguity. I could remake it, change Vietnam to Iraq, the steel plant to the distillery, blast furnaces in cold air to the mash tun, the stills. I need a score, something
to catch the melancholy. Sad strings and slanting rain, walking home from the Stillhouse, hands in the pockets of my boiler suit. I’ve got this Oscar-winning script in my head. I just can’t get it out.

  I crank up the laptop and check the web history. My wife’s been at the bingo and probably won again, she always seems to win. Yahoo reveals I’ve got three unopened emails. Two of them have the same oddly appealing information about how to increase the size of my cock.

  The third email has remained unread since 1st January. It has . I’ve never had an email from [email protected] and I don’t know if the address or the attachment worries me more. The paperclip icon has been burned onto my retinas. When I glance away it lingers, on the white walls, the carpet, a stain on my vision. It’s like Alice in Wonderland, we’ve all got rabbit holes to scurry down if we’re that way inclined, if we have the right strength and curiosity. I position the cursor over the email and ask myself again whether I do.

  * * *

  Favourite kinds of seafood. A classic morning tea-break conversation. I can’t handle it. Ah like squid, O’Neill says in the Glasgow accent everyone knows he exaggerates. Something fishy about those eyes right enough. Mackerel for me, says Ronnie. His lips are too red, too moist. Must be all those fish oils my wife’s always on about, whatever they’re called. Flash of childhood, a teaspoon of cod liver oil coming towards me. My wife had it mixed with milk. To disguise the taste. A memory to make you gag. O’Neill’s beady eyes mock me as I walk away.

  The stacks of worn-out barrels have become flat-topped white hills, the drifts three-feet deep alongside the top warehouses. The snow’s left the world empty, like childhood’s open book. As a boy I read so much it worried my father. I would have immediately discovered Eskimos, fur trappers and Grizzly Adams in the snowy mile stretching from the other side of the burn up to the spruce plantation. That imagination, it’s so far away now, inaccessible.