The Stillman Page 2

  I lean against a blackened warehouse wall. What’s the name for the staining caused by alcohol? Fish oil, alcohol stains, am I the only person who can’t remember the names of these things?

  Jack had been on about the strike again, another reason to flee. He’s had a permanent boner since someone at head office passed him a confidential briefing about changes to terms and conditions, short-time working scenarios, full-closure . . . The suits went into full-spectrum denial and spooked the union into balloting for a one-day stoppage to get them round the table. Jack’s convinced the end is nigh and is on a glittery-eyed ‘yes’ crusade. What an opportunity to continue our education! Last week I overheard him talking to Camp Gary about Gramsci. Gary said he wasn’t a fan but he’d liked that song Killer.

  I hear an engine and look back the way I’ve come. The Land Rover’s creeping across the bridge over the burn and I’ve missed my lift to 10. Fourteen puncheons needed, with any luck they’ll be done by the time I mosey on down. I hate the hydraulic loading plate, twenty feet in the air and wobbling like a fucker before you roll on a half-ton puncheon. Certain death if the platform buckles, and almost eccentric, something you’d notice in the papers. I’ll wait a bit, and the sub-zero walk is better than being stuck in the Land Rover with Jack.

  I flick my fag butt into the snow drift, watch the smoke disappear. When I look up I see a figure in the far distance at the top of the field. The farmer out checking the sheep most likely.

  Now I look closer I can see the mucky yellow daubs scattered here and there across the white. The farmer walks slowly along the line of the fence. As the terrain climbs he’s suddenly silhouetted on the horizon line. The sheep notice him and begin bleating. But the farmer just stands there and I get the sure feeling of being watched. From this distance the farmer could in fact be anyone at all, a stranger appeared, Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter.

  Before dinner we decide to have sex. The Boy’s out somewhere. My feet are cold and I want to leave my hiking socks on. My wife pauses in the awkward clamber into her red and black basque and says a simple but definitive no. I take my socks off and lie naked on the black duvet. I can smell the horrible floral scent of one of those plug-in room deodorisers and the string of my wife’s thong has disappeared up her arse crack, perhaps for ever. No way I’m going in there looking for it. My big toe, the left one, still has that infection, fungal most likely.

  Afterwards she can’t wait to get off me. ‘Clean yourself up,’ she says, throwing me a clump of pink toilet roll.

  I spread my arms and legs wide, into a star shape. What it would be like to sleep like that every night, right in the middle of the bed and no-one to jab me in the ribs? And no coitus to interruptus. I heard the phrase on a TV show a while ago and think it’s just as applicable for an almost non-existent sex life as pulling out before I come. Tonight’s event was almost miraculous. I put it down to that book she’s reading. The Power of Now, sounds self-helpy.

  I sit up and put my socks back on, wobble my flabby belly. I can’t really blame my wife for wanting to get away. Not that she’s anything special herself. I’m always slightly alarmed by the way she squeezes into that basque. But I’m a professional, able to rise to any occasion.

  ‘Can you nip down and check that soup?’ she shouts from the bathroom.

  I think about going as I am but decide to get dressed. The Boy’s odd enough without bumping into his naked father in a pair of threadbare hiking socks, face flushed in a post-orgasmic glow. But when I glance out of the little window at the top of the stairs I see him across at the shed.

  A metal pole is sticking out the top of the door. The Boy has unravelled the lead from the shed light and tied it to the pole so the light hangs down. One of the barrels Malky’s always promising to cut into flower planters has been upturned, a mobile phone propped against a log on the top. I watch him check and re-adjust the angle between phone and shed. After three deep breaths, eyes closed, he suddenly leaps under the light, dropping into a ninja pose and doing a few high kicks, bunching his fists and giving short sharp punches.

  My wife appears at my shoulder and we stand there in silence, watching our son film himself doing crappy karate moves in the snow.

  ‘Have you checked the soup?’ She sounds distracted.

  ‘I was on my way.’

  ‘Never mind then. It’s your fault you know.’

  I move aside as she shoves past and down the stairs. ‘I said I was going to do it. What do you mean it’s my fault?’

  She turns at the kitchen door. ‘What do I mean, what do you think I mean? Your son.’ She jabs a thumb over her shoulder.

  ‘How’s it just my fault, why’s it not yours too?’ I pick up the post from the lobby table.

  ‘Just try thinking about it.’

  There’s another letter from the residential home. My wife never opens them although they’re addressed to us both. Never mentions them, and wouldn’t a normal person be curious? I finish reading and stare into the mirror above the table. It’s a fact of nature that no news from a care home is ever good. I lean forward and raise my chin so the skin tightens. Not quite as saggy as my father but getting there. I open and close my mouth, like a dying cod.

  ‘You know I’m going out tonight?’ she shouts from the kitchen.

  I blow out my cheeks, cross my eyes and sieg heil the mirror. She’s right about the Boy, it is my fault.

  ‘You hear me?’

  ‘I heard you.’

  ‘Vari’s having a party.’

  ‘A party, on a school night?’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘It’s an Ann Summers party, seeing as you’re so interested. Amber’s coming too, she thought she might get something for the honeymoon.’

  The leering face of Amber’s fiancé looms out at me. Peter the Chip they call him. Carpenter extraordinaire, he boasts, although he has done me a shelving job that was surprisingly finessed. Malky once told me a filthy tale about Peter, an Englishwoman needing a job done on her holiday cottage and a home-grown courgette. When Amber first took him back for dinner I was haunted by the images for weeks. ‘Too much information Kate.’

  ‘Don’t be a prude, it’s just a bit of fun.’

  She’s wearing a short denim skirt, black leggings and red pumps. In a way I admire this mirroring of my daughter’s style. She can just about pull it off, still on the safer side of desperation. But if I started wearing skinny jeans like the Boy? She’d be guffawing into the middle of next week.

  ‘Jack was on the barrels the day.’

  ‘Aww, you’re embarrassed, quick change of subject there. When’s the ballot, what was he saying?’

  My afternoon had not gone to plan. I took my time getting down to warehouse 10 but some problem with the hydraulics on the geriatric lifting plate meant the puncheons hadn’t been unloaded. Just my luck. It meant half an hour trapped with Jack in the tea-hut. ‘He’s the world’s first perpetual motion machine, never gets tired of repeating the same old shite.’

  ‘You read the memo from the Glasgow office.’

  ‘Yeah. Jack’s mole.’

  ‘But they didn’t deny it.’

  ‘No way they’d shut us down.’

  ‘How do you know? They won’t even sit down and talk about it. They haven’t denied anything.’

  ‘You’re paranoid.’

  ‘Look Jim, we’re going to be paying for this wedding for years. What if you lose your job?’

  ‘I’m not going to lose my job.’

  ‘But you might.’

  ‘What the hell do you want me to do about it?’

  ‘Stand up for yourself for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘There’s a union meeting tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re going, yes?’

  The kitchen door slams open. The Boy stands there holding his mobile phone, gasping and sweaty-faced.

  I call it ‘the Den’ but she says it sounds too American. Why can’t it ju
st be a cupboard? A cupboard is too small in my opinion. Cupboards mean racks of clothes and shoes, old magazines and dust.

  The Den is lined on three sides with floor to ceiling shelves, filled with DVDs and videos I haven’t got round to upgrading. I’m being sold my collection all over again but so what. It means a continuous stream of packages for months and a chance to re-watch old favourites. There’s a 60 inch plasma TV on the wall opposite the door and room for two armchairs. I’ve long since put one of them in the shed because only I ever come in here. I can sit for hours, a few feet from the huge screen, like being in the front row of a cinema. No-one to annoy you, no-one gibbering away. Or coughing, I want to strangle people who cough in cinemas.

  Has there ever been anyone more menacing than preacher Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter? That scene in the bedroom, Mitchum’s open-faced deception with the little girl, trying to wheedle out the secret of where the money’s hid. And the angled shadows as the preacher sings that eerie gospel song, horse and man silhouetted on a pale sky, the horrified boy watching him ride closer to the barn where he and his sister are hiding. Don’t he ever sleep!

  I switch off the DVD. I think I hear the Boy in his bedroom but can’t be sure. He’s a secretive bugger and I don’t really care what he’s up to. Leeeaning, leeeeaning, I quietly sing, like Harry Powell, leaning on the everlasting arms. I walk slowly along the landing to my bedroom, the darkness and snowy skylight glow like being in my own black and white movie.

  In the gloom the laptop is barely visible on the desk. Just the green blink of the standby light. I resisted getting a computer for years but now I can’t imagine a life without one. Strange how quickly we forget that we once got by without something. Like that unread email, still waiting. Until 1st January 2010 I got by without it. I still could, you can get by without most things. All I need to do is delete it. We only make a fetish of the things we want to.

  Preacher Powell would have no hesitation. He’d slump like this as the laptop boots up, studying his love and hate tattooed knuckles. You still scared son, still scared of what you might find out, even now, after all these years? And then a nod of the head, indicating the inbox. He’s a mocking bastard, that cynical curl of the mouth. Well fuck him, I can deal with the hollowness in my stomach, the dryness in my mouth as I open the email from vinales2004.

  Like the subject line, the body of the email is empty. The pdf attachment is titled Helen’s Journal 1.

  Havana Cuba, 23/3/1999

  If you are reading this then I am dead. It is strange, to write those words yet still be alive, to know you have now been sent this journal . . .

  What do you think? Does it work? I have tried dozens of openers and found them wanting, slow-burning build-ups and oblique head-scratchers, contrived twists and artless contrivances. In the end I got bored and went for the default dramatic intro. So, does it work? Come on, I’m on tenterhooks! Are not the most effective openers simple and direct, immediately piquing the interest? Is this not what we have been taught to expect, to demand, from a narrative, a story? But I know so little about you, I have no clue to your expectations. You may be the ultra-pragmatist who stops halfway down the bottle. Or you may be quick to shock, to anger. If you are anything like me, poor thing, then you are both, often simultaneously.

  I can write a thousand words and feel it all pour out, the bile and guilt of a lifetime written brutal and true. Then, as the cockerels start to crow, I will re-read, almost embarrassed, not believing a damn word. The exaggeration I can conjure is almost disturbing. So when everything is arbitrary and ambiguous then the dramatic first line, any line, means nothing. But which one of me is talking now?

  We all need a bit of mystery. You are no different from anyone else although you may think so. How many times, truly, have you stood and looked at yourself in the old speckled mirror and thought ‘is this all there is?’ We can all plod on. I have done it myself, so, so often. But plodding is not living because true living is living the different. Take this journal as my gift of mystery to you, and like all good mysteries it should be open to multiple interpretations. But those interpretations depend on you, by how, and if, you choose to engage. You see, it is mysterious already!

  Where I live the street kids play baseball from dawn till dusk, every day of the week. Perhaps you can picture me, a thin, white-haired woman hurling a curveball into the middle of another of your mundane days. How will you deal with it, take the strike or try and make the hit? I do not know what you look like but I can imagine you considering whether to read any more of this or throw it in the trash. I must seem so calculating. Others have made the same observation. I am simply offering the experience of difference. At the very least you should be glad I have drawn attention to the plod.

  I will stop, for now. I have never really seen the point of introductions anyway. Just get on with it! Anyway, if, as I suspect, we are all characters in the same ever-repeating story then there is no need for a prologue, you cannot introduce something already known. Equally, you could make the case that there is no need for the story itself, there being nothing new under this ancient sun.

  Of course, such a statement establishes a philosophical, if not a dramatic, context. Or, to put it another way, an introduction. Ha! I told you I was unreliable. So, to read or not to read. A balanced decision is impossible because true objectivity is a chimera in most situations, never mind one as fraught as this. It is really about deciding your terms of engagement. Maybe you really are the arch pragmatist, in which case I look forward to keeping your company for a little while. If not, you will have stopped reading already.

  My motives, do they matter to you? If so, as a starter I offer guilt. Yes, yes, so tediously obvious, I know. So I also suggest fear, the fear of forever being a stranger. Is that better? Humanity has been around far too long, all our themes are so terribly hackneyed.

  Two

  ‘I have in my hands a piece of paper.’

  Chamberlain lives . . . Something tells me appeasement won’t be Jack’s strategy. It’s excruciating, the way he milks it, pausing for effect, surveying the audience before continuing.

  ‘A letter!’

  Murmurs in the crowd. Jack’s done a good job of getting most of us here. All the warehouse boys, two mash-men, and the coopers. I’m the only one of the three Stillmen. Rankin’s on holiday and no way you’ll get Stan to a union meeting, Stan who’d once tried to get the union de-recognised. There’s junior management too, a couple of lads who’ve worked their way up from the warehouses and still feel uncomfortable with the grubby white collar.

  ‘Came in this morning from the Chief Exec. I’ll pass out copies and put it on the noticeboards. First acknowledgment of that leaked memo boys. They’re trying to influence the ballot.’

  ‘What do you expect?’ says Malky.

  Jack pauses a moment and scans the crowd. ‘Respect. I expect respect.’

  Fuck me, he’s so earnest.

  Jack again holds up the sheet of paper. ‘So for those of you who’ve haven’t caught up with today’s little admission, here we go: ‘‘Dear Mr Kennedy. In the interests of good workforce relations and given your position as shop steward I write you this letter. I cannot deny the veracity of the memorandum you came to have in your possession. It is my unfortunate responsibility to confirm that, given the financial situation of the distillery and the current economic climate, the options listed are indeed being actively considered by management. The management is willing to discuss these options, but not in the context of industrial action’’.’

  ‘That it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Sounds like a threat.’

  ‘Aye. ‘‘Do what we say or the deal’s off’’.’

  ‘They won’t listen anyway.’

  ‘Like with the pensions.’

  ‘Not this time. This time we make the running, we show them how serious we are. All out boys, all out on the 4th!’

  ‘Fuckin right!’

  I stop li
stening. Snow is falling beyond the big cooperage doors and it’s all so peripheral, this drama. The walls of warehouse 4 stretch into the mist, the red wooden strips below the gutters becoming invisible. Endurance is a dour characteristic but the mist will always lift, eventually. For the distillery to close the world itself would have to be mothballed.

  Jack’s arms flail, a dramatic crumple and throw of the letter. A few claps.

  ‘Handy with the words eh?’

  ‘What’s that?’ I say.

  ‘Your man there,’ Camp Gary points at Jack. ‘Fire one across the fuckin bows, see what they make of it.’

  ‘That so.’

  ‘Yeah Jim, that’s so.’

  The ballot came in the post this morning. Soon as I’m in the door my wife hands it to me. A conscientious man, she gravely states when I tell her Jack’ll be doing the rounds to make sure we all vote. Bit too intense, says I. Least he cares, says she. The Boy moves his head from one of us to the other as we speak, making a whoooosh noise like a car zipping past. I tell him to stop but he doesn’t and after a while we lapse into silence. His work now done the Boy leaves the kitchen. He pauses at the door and does an oriental bow, hands clasped at his chest.

  If Jack says he’ll be around at 7.45 then at 7.45 he’ll appear. I’m in the bedroom on the internet when I hear the door. I can get McCabe and Mrs Miller, M.A.S.H and American Gigolo from Amazon for five quid. Not a bad deal. After my wife shouts for me I click on Wikipedia and spend the next fifteen minutes reminding myself of the plots. There’s a barely audible rhythmic noise coming from the Boy’s bedroom that I don’t want to think about.

  When I go downstairs they’re sitting close together on the couch. My wife’s put on eye-liner and lipstick. It looks as if they’re already on the second dram. I chuck a log on the already blazing fire and settle back on the chair beside the hearth. I can never figure out if Jack is good-looking or not. Maybe it’s his seriousness. Maybe women like the strong, serious type.