The Accidental Recluse Read online

  Tom McCulloch is from the Highlands of Scotland. He currently lives in Oxford with his family. With his first novel The Stillman he became an Amazon Rising Star.

  @tomamcculloch

  Also by Tom McCulloch

  The Stillman

  A Private Haunting

  First published in Great Britain by

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  Dochcarty Road

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9UG

  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.

  Copyright © Tom McCulloch 2018

  Editor: K.A. Farrell

  The moral right of Tom McCulloch to be recognised as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland

  towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN: 978-1-912240-18-0

  ISBNe: 978-1-912240-19-7

  Cover design by Mark Swan

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typography Ltd, Newtonmore

  Contents

  Fade-In

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Fade-Out

  For Ada and Orin – there are not enough words

  Fade-in

  A five-star hotel, a three-room suite. Laughing surgeons have dismantled me and put me back together very carefully, but in the wrong order. I want to be in my own bed. This will not be possible for a long time.

  The maid has pulled the sheets so tight it almost seems malicious. She must have had someone in mind. A husband, most likely, her hands on his scrawny neck, tighter and tighter, and what blissful relief as he tenses, struggles and finally goes limp, a degenerate smirk on her plump face . . .

  I tell my feet to move. All they can muster is a few desperate toe wiggles. I’m trapped, an outworn Pharaoh they got bored with, mummified alive in thousand thread-count Egyptian cotton.

  At least one part of me is going to sleep. Despite the vague panic that comes with constriction this is not displeasing. It may be the only way I sleep at all tonight, the spreading numbness eventually reaching my buzzing brain. I should be grateful to the maid. I should insist on a new bedclothes protocol back home. Because jet lag is far from the only thing that stops me sleeping.

  I shuffle up the bed, dragging my dead feet with me, and sit up against the headboard. A soft and giving material cradles my head. Velour or velvet, something expensive-feeling anyway.

  The quick stab in the centre of my chest is a reminder that luxury is always balanced by austerity in the end, usually of a physical kind. All aboard the Degradation Express! Heart failure, you say, what comparative banality, sir, step this way, back of the train, please, front carriages for the grim and imminently doomed only, the terminal must reach the terminal first, hoho!

  Another sharp stabbing. I think of it as a warning jab. A finger in the chest, my father’s looming face and something else I have done or not done. Johnny! What the hell are you playing at?

  ‘Nothing, Dad.’

  No response from the glowering dark. But he’s out there, beyond the window that I know is beyond the dark rectangle of curtain across the room. I am no idiot, you understand. I did not rise to these bowel-loosening heights, able to insist on the finest of murderous bedding and the most luxurious of three-roomed hotel suites, without knowing that behind a curtain is a window.

  More often than not, that is. For I am also a shrewd man, oh yes, a point emphasised across the years by media profiles, both fawning and abusive. A shrewd man is not dogmatic about curtains. He knows that occasionally there is something else behind them; a plaque, a naked dancer, night . . .

  It was already dark when I got here, the curtains already closed. I am not yet ready to open them.

  I sip water from the crystal tumbler on the bedside table. The thud as I put it down is startling in the silence. Like every five-star hotel room this one is soundproofed to ensure my privacy should the bunga bunga take my unlikely fancy. Yet the silence, as ever, is different. No two are the same, each permeated with the memory of what has just been extinguished. I have come from a silence full of buzzing neon and a million voices to one echoing to the scrawk of a lone seagull.

  ‘I’ve never known silence like this,’ Akira had said earlier. We were standing in an extraordinary cold, a half moon rising huge and incandescent behind the bulk of an unknown mountain, as if the universe was a black curtain and the moon an aperture into a dazzling beyond.

  The silence unsettles me more than opening the curtains. I wonder again why on earth I am here.

  I pick up the device on the bedside table and press buttons until the room fills with Duke Ellington. Money Jungle. A sudden nostalgia makes me select Solitude but the desolate piano has me scrolling for Switch Blade. I follow the boomerang swells of Charles Mingus’s double bass, step with Ellington’s flowing keys into this return that I am too old for as I was once too young.

  I slip lower into my sarcophagus.

  I’m apprehensive about what’s coming, Duke’s making me uneasy. Not Ellington but my brother, named after the genius who is finally taking me closer to sleep. A sentimental choice by our parents, I always felt, as if to keep manifest in him what will inevitably be lost between them.

  They’re all out there in the dark, Anna too, lazy circling as Ellington now fades into that zany, plinky-plonky theme tune from the Japanese chat show, the director counting five-four-three-two . . .

  One

  The famous old Irish playwright, Sam Beckett.

  I do look like him. It is true.

  I watch my face on the TV monitor as they attach my lapel mike. A later Sam Beckett. And Sam Beckett, note, not Samuel Beckett. As I have grown into that pinched, lined face and seen my hair become its white, flyaway fuzz, so too have I gained a friendliness with the man himself.

  Tomorrow, I am seventy-five.

  Sam too reached seventy-five, but not much further. The thought won’t detain me too long for I have no intention of dying. Yes, brother Duke, I know. I hear you sniggering. Yet I will not. I will sit forever in a Parisian café, legs crossed and a glass of Burgundy, one of those small glasses in which the French specialise that somehow make drinking a profession rather than a pastime.

  The sound engineer finishes attaching the mike. He gives an enthusiastic thumbs up, beams me a toothy grin.

  Japan, that emphatic friendliness. I have lived here for over thirty years, yet it can still unnerve me. I fear its sudden collapse under the repressed rage of centur-ies, the engineer’s smile become a sneer as he jabs his thumbs into my astonished eye-sockets and starts to twist, gouge . . .

  I notice Erin staring at me. My niece is sitting on a canvas director’s chair behind the camera. I used to have one of those! My initials stencilled on the back, of course. JJ. Sure, everyone knew JJ, no need for the full Johnny Jackson. I am too old now to have such a young name.

  It’s embarrassing.

  Erin smiles, more lupine than reassuring. ‘It’ll be fine,’ she says and goes back to staring at her phone. Her PA set up the TV show and in she flew this very mor
ning, London to Tokyo, a bandy-legged Icarus in a Gucci suit. Poor child of the rickety genetics. If her legs were straight she’d be six feet six.

  Takeshi Nakazawa has still not appeared. I admire the man. In the oppressive zaniness of Japanese showbiz TV he is a redoubt of solemn dignity. I have seen him interview presidents, PMs and popes.

  Now me.

  There is no audience in this tiny studio. When the interview begins it will just be me and Nakazawa, a cameraman and a sound engineer. My status is being emphasised. I am a man of such rarefied access that the plebs cannot look directly upon me. I have achieved the broom-cupboard . . .

  Yet I will be watched. A monitor beside the one showing my face relays pictures from an auditorium elsewhere. I see people filing in to take their seats and watch the big-screen feed of my interview.

  I like the sophistication of the staging, the emphasis on both the confessional and the voyeuristic. I can pretend that no-one is listening by focusing on Nakazawa, or I can play to the crowd by looking at the monitor. But I gave up the stage decades ago for a good reason. Spend any time with an audience and you start dialling it in. Start dialling it in and you start watching the watchers.

  ‘Where is Mr Nakazawa?’ I ask a floppy-haired production assistant who has appeared with a tray of drinks.

  ‘No English, Mr Jackson,’ he says, absurdly, because I asked him the question in flawless Japanese.

  ‘Find out.’

  Off he goes. I shuffle in my chair and catch my face in the monitor. Heavy lines on the forehead. Arched eyebrows and a pursed mouth. Sour. I look sour. Sour as my breath. I regret the sashimi I ate an hour ago and the mint I forgot to eat afterwards. No much wonder the PA fled, my putrid breath fogging out at him. He may never come back. He may never eat fish again, the poor sod.

  Erin gives me another smile, more strained now. She is urgently whispering into the physical appendage which is her mobile phone. If she removed her hand it would remain attached to her ear. I never hear the phone ring and presume it communicates directly with her brain.

  Can you imagine any of this, Duke, what it has come to? I take a drink from my hip flask and feel a familiar anxiety at having to tip it higher to get a swig. Once more we are on the slide towards emptiness.

  The crew is ready. They’re staring but trying not to stare. Up on the monitor, the grinning audience is in place. The only absentee is the venerable Nakazawa-san. I await his grand entrance with sweaty palms.

  I am nervous.

  I regret asking Akira to wait in the car. This is my first public appearance in fifteen years. A rehearsal, a settler, before the more important ones back home. Home, do you hear that, Duke?

  They think of me as some kind of eccentric, of course. I should have played up to it, sat here in a pair of Howard Hughes-esque white gloves, even a mouth-mask, but a mouth-mask is not unusual in Japan. Hughes wouldn’t have agreed to this. He would still be in his bunker, sat in the geometric centre of the room, surrounded by toadies and empty tins of tuna. Yes, indeed, HH would also have had fish breath, and fish breath is what this crew will call JJ. Fish-breath has asked where Mr Nakazawa is, that’s what the PA is saying, somewhere beyond the curtain.

  ‘Mr Jackson.’

  I look away from Sam Beckett’s face in the monitor into the anxious eyes of a goatee-bearded man. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You asked about Takeshi Nakazawa.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I fear there has been a miscommunication. Mr Nakazawa does not present this particular programme.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘Shinohara Sugita.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Our host. Shinohara Sugita.’

  I look across at Erin, who is hurrying towards me, wide-armed in an exaggerated shrug with a sly grin. My mouth opens and closes a few times. Like a fish, a big cod, as would be expected of fish breath.

  ‘Did you know about this?’

  ‘I knew.’

  ‘So when were you going to tell me?’

  ‘Nothing to worry about. It’ll be fine. Just stay general. Tell them the teaser trailer is coming but no details. Say they’re going to be astounded, that in all your career this is a genuine landmark.’

  There is flint in her gaze. Our inverted relationship is so strange, as if she is the elder and me the fifty-four-year-old. She controls via a studied arbitrariness in which I am forever wrong-footed.

  I mime the drawing of a zip along my lips and make some muffled noises.

  ‘What?’

  I undo the zip. ‘Mum’s the word.’

  Erin smiles but her eyes don’t. I’m on a three-line whip. There were other plans for the fiftieth anniversary of Breda Pictures but the best-selling success of my autobiography changed them. Her Cosa Nostra-like ability to never forget dug out a memory of The Bruce, my never-made biopic of King Robert the Bruce. The ideal anniversary vehicle, she said, why not dust down the famous director at the same time, my first film in three decades in the year I turn seventy-five.

  The perfect PR storm. I never liked the schmooze . . .

  You know the game, Duke, the peddling of anecdotes to over-coiffed egomaniacs. My stomach lurches as I look at the monitor and the expectant audience. I stand up. In three minutes I could be back in the car with Akira. In an hour we would be back in the silence of Shuzenji.

  I ask the PA for the bathroom, where I splash cold water on my face and take another hit from the flask.

  ‘What am I doing?’

  In the mirror, Sam Beckett shrugs. Never been much use that guy. And there’s you, Duke, laughing at your brother who simply must make another movie, darling, if only to prove to himself that all that is long gone is not also lost. Did I really think Erin would let me direct? She tried not to laugh when I suggested it. Executive producer is as close as I’ll get, which isn’t close at all.

  But to film in Inveran?

  That was unexpected. You, Duke, have never let me be. It’s all the others I’m not used to, like our mother; there she is, beside me in the mirror, a grumble of pots in the sink as the old man winks . . .

  Back in the studio Erin looks at me suspiciously. I ignore her, closing my eyes as they dab make-up on my face.

  When I open them, an improbably beautiful young woman has appeared. Long black hair and big moon eyes. She wears a tartan miniskirt, of course, and a tight white blouse. I stand up and shake her tiny hand. She very much enjoys my work, says she, which is very much over, says I.

  Not at all and surely not, she says, so very coquettish that I even blush, all of which goes to prove that if flattery is the first instinct of the manipulative then delusion is the refuge of old men. I will indulge anyway, live on Japanese TV with this beauty whose legs angle away from the camera as she sits, yet are perfectly positioned to offer me and only me a glimpse of white panties.

  She smiles! She knows! The floor director is counting down ten to one. I am ready for any and every question.

  ‘Do you miss the monkey?’

  Except that one.

  I swallow. I make the mistake of glancing at the audience monitor behind the cameraman. They are howling with laughter. In front of me Shinohara Sugita stifles a little giggle.

  ‘Because we have one.’

  Oh dear God they surely do. The floppy-haired PA leads one into the studio. A monkey on a leash. Behind the camera Erin takes a picture on her phone and gives a gleeful thumbs up. This is the support for my re-emergence into the light which she flew six thousand miles to offer.

  Along with the monkey, a massive cake is wheeled on, a six-tiered pink and white monstrosity, big enough to hold a person. I panic at the thought of another woman, bikini-clad, undoubtedly, bursting forth to give me a birthday kiss. The reality is infinitely worse. I struggle to control the shake in my hands as a wall of the tiny studio rolls open to reveal the audience I can still see on the monitor, a floor director leading everyone in a rendition of happy birthday.

  Even the monkey is clapping . . . />
  What follows is not an interview, no Takeshi Nakazawa channelling William F. Buckley and deconstructing my career and comeback with the skill of a psychological surgeon, no references to the telling passages of the autobiography which has led to my being here in the first place.

  What follows is instead a raucous celebration of the monkey films that made the Breda Boys famous.

  A young man with acne and milk-bottle glasses is led on and presented as my greatest fan. He makes one deep bow after another, head almost at his feet. It is an extraordinary physical performance.

  There follows a bizarrely complicated game involving old film clips, girls in monkey costumes waving little paddles with pictures of gorillas stuck on them and the young man being asked questions, each correct answer accompanied by a hooting monkey noise, an incorrect one by brown slurry pouring down on his head. This being Japan, I can’t be sure the monkey shit is fake.

  * * *

  Erin is babbling. She’s delighted. She sits in the limousine in the seat diagonally opposite, gesticulating wildly, saying things I’m not listening to. I look out the smoked-glass window and let Tokyo take me.

  Cities by night, I’ve always loved them. I remain the wide-eyed bumpkin, greedy for neon. Give me favela Rio from a de Havilland Comet, ramble-tamble oranges in the shuddering night-black, a cigarette in one hand and a Martini in the other. Or Los Angeles from Mulholland, grids of light like the city’s glowing bones. Or give me tonight, this lurid Roppongi nightscape. I’ve not been in Tokyo for a long time. It does not change. It simply grows, metastasises.

  Akira is a skilled driver. Fast enough to make trails in the neon but smooth enough to ensure my comfort. I look at the adverts in the sky, the mysterious flickering symbols of the multicoloured bar signs on every level of the fleeting tower blocks. Akira pulls suddenly left to avoid a taxi. I shift in my seat, the ice cubes clinking in the glass. I am never nervous when Akira drives.