The Accidental Recluse Read online

  He was standing beside the Mercedes when I appeared from the lift in the underground car park. I told him to drive. As I got inside I heard footsteps and looked up into Erin’s face. Sensational, sensational, she was saying. I looked at her toothy smile and saw a grinning monkey.

  I finish my whisky. We stop for a red light and a woman’s impossibly sad face appears at my window.

  Instantly, I think of Anna. It is the film clips they made me watch, that unexpected plunge into the past. Then the woman is gone, leaving a startlingly incongruous memory. I am standing with Anna outside the Sacre Coeur on a piercing winter night. Behind us, St. Matthew Passion is swelling to a crescendo. The lights of Paris, I’m certain, are a code about to be revealed.

  ‘See? It wasn’t all that bad.’

  Erin is holding her phone out, a video playing on the screen. Orange light shifts on her grinning face.

  ‘You came across really well. Relax. Don’t worry, all publicity is good publicity.’

  ‘You weren’t the one sitting there.’

  ‘Uncle Jay,’ she says, ever so gently. ‘That show goes out to millions. Some who’ve never heard of you, some who think you’re a bit . . . odd. Now they’re interested and that’s what it’s all about.’

  She is, undoubtedly, a psychopath. I lie back in soft leather. I finish my drink with my eyes closed.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about anything like that when we get to the UK. Just your bog-standard interviews.’

  ‘Recorded?’

  ‘I promise. I know you hate it. Just think of the movie.’

  The Great CEO tells me again about the interviewers, bright cultural lights who nevertheless remain dim to me. She emphasises the prestige nature of our anniversary project, making clear why she has decided to personally oversee it. Before the London interviews there will be a book tour, starting in my home town, where my life story will culminate in a civic gong which I already have. Perhaps they have forgotten, it was awarded so long ago.

  ‘Inveran,’ she says with a genuinely warm smile. ‘Home.’

  My stomach lurches. Automatically, I reach for the decanter. Going home, Duke, it feels like having you die all over again. Except this time you might have a few more things to say about it.

  ‘Any music?’

  My niece rolls her eyes and mutters something I will not ask her to repeat. Akira’s voice is deep in the speaker.

  ‘The library is synced to your own.’

  ‘Ellington. Far East Suite.’

  A few moments later music fills the limousine. I instantly tell Akira to switch it off. I am not ready for you tonight, Duke, neither you nor Anna. I press the button on the hand-rest and the cabin partition slides open. Akira’s questioning eyes meet mine in the rear-view mirror. I hold this man twenty years my younger in an esteem that would make him blush if he knew.

  ‘Where to?’ he asks.

  ‘Shuzenji.’

  ‘Hey, hey, not yet!’ Erin protests. ‘We have a date. Don’t you remember? You ready for one more surprise?’

  I feel a little bit sick as Erin presses the partition button and Akira’s head disappears from view.

  ‘You want to know?’

  An awful thought detonates as I watch her fiddle with her phone. On the screen that doubles as the partition, six smaller screens appear in a grid. Black-and-white images. Camera feeds.

  One camera shows a forecourt full of the flash cars I have never taken an interest in. On another I read the words Minamo-Hirakawacho Tower. My niece’s residence when she is on a rare visit.

  Erin stares at me as she sips her drink. Her insistence on my delighted surprise is intimidating. The feed from the camera above the fiftieth-floor lift shows the apartment entrance hall. The lighting is low. The fake flames of the fire flicker across empty a leather sofa and a copper-topped coffee table. I have the voyeuristic certainty something bad is about to happen.

  Other cameras relay the inside of the apartment. There are many people on the viewing terrace. They sit or stand and look out on circuit-board Tokyo, multicoloured neon become fuzzed white. Others cluster at the marble-topped bar. All are already boozed-up, ultra-HD making their features sharper than plastic surgeons have made their chins, cheekbones and noses. The faces only become indistinct where they stand too close to the searing glow of the cobalt and white LED lights. In my niece’s feng shui masterpiece of interior design, with all the attendantly elegant evening wear, the banner above the bar is a jarring counterpoint.

  Happy Birthday JJ.

  There is a garish, pink and white cartoon character at each end of the banner. Hello Kitty, of course. But this is a light-hearted occasion; there is irony in the juxtaposition of opulence and tackiness.

  ‘My birthday’s tomorrow.’

  Erin beams. ‘Fashionably early is the new late. It’ll extend the life of the hashtag.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘The social media campaign for your birthday, #notquitedeadyet.’

  ‘You’re joking?’

  ‘Of course I am.’ But she winks.

  I wouldn’t know how to check if she’s having me on or not.

  * * *

  These people and their congratulations. They tell me it is wonderful to see me back in the public eye and tonight’s interview was so funny. They tell me my autobiography is so poignant and they just love the title. The Accidental Recluse. And only volume one! They can’t wait for the second.

  I am supposed to know them, yes? This is surely the meaning of a birthday celebration. Yet if I do not recognise them then how can they know me? Their certainty in our non-existent acquaintance is unnerving, the way they cluster like medical specialists considering a rare and exciting disease.

  Yet I chat, awhile.

  And I admire, somewhat, their being masters all of the discreet retreat. Having circled the centre of tonight’s attention until decency is achieved, they vanish like Botoxed wrinkles to indulge whatever sexual or professional machinations have truly brought them here tonight.

  I find a table in the corner of the viewing terrace. Here, the shadows are deeper; dark oranges and yellows from hidden uplighters. A waiter deposits a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. I sip and I sip, speaking now and then to a well-wisher, the lights of all Tokyo spread below me, so close I could reach out and pluck them one by one, pop them into my mouth like children’s sweets.

  A drunk girl appears.

  Again, I think of Anna, who she doesn’t look like at all. This attachment is a weakness, a failing in the land of Zen, where Dōgen waves an admonishing finger at all that cannot be let go.

  She is American; Abby or Aimee. An actress or a model, the next big thing or perhaps the currently big thing. Not that she is big at all, more a willowy presence who may fly away on the breeze. I have no way of knowing who she is. My references are thirty years out of date although back then I would have screwed her without hesitation. Don’t laugh, Duke, it would have happened, or it could have happened, or who am I kidding, it wouldn’t have happened at all.

  More of the delusion of age. I live vicariously through the ghost of someone who never existed in the first place. Even with five doubles of fantasy from my emptying bottle, it is clear Abby or Aimee has no sexual interest. She is just a fan, ‘a massive fan’. She wants to talk about my films.

  ‘Your art.’

  Yet her only reference is to A Man’s a Man. Not Journey to the End of the Night, say, Captain Bloom soaring over London, or Fisherman’s Blues, the sequence as the Makepeace goes down in the storm, the cuts to Shelley staring at the sea as White Rabbit builds to a crescendo . . .

  ‘It’s a classic,’ she says.

  I offer a modest nod of my head. Don’t give me that derisive snort, Duke. You know better than I that film was Oscar-bait. A saccharine-sweet biopic of Robert Burns. Redford was never sadder.

  ‘Some say it’s better than Braveheart,’ I reply. ‘I suppose people prefer a flyting to a defenestration.’
/>   She doesn’t understand. Her eyes flicker, let it pass. ‘Your autobiography. It’s so interesting, your journey.’

  ‘Well, the time was right,’ I say.

  ‘How so?’

  I watch myself talk, as if from a great and ever-growing distance. It is changing, I tell her, the land of my birth reconsidering what it is. I had such fixed ideas about what it was, my instinct always to look backwards. History meant then and never now. Change happened elsewhere and aspiration belonged to others, the grey skies an ever-lowered lid on dreams and schemes. In this renaissance there could perhaps be a rediscovery of Johnny Jackson, a forgotten son.

  Forgotten son?

  But the pomposity slips past her, as my entire monologue has. ‘Yes. You’re Scottish,’ she manages to say.

  ‘Exactly. You sound like my niece Erin. Have you met her? The one who looks like a giant stick insect? “Why not ride the zeitgeist,” she said to me, something like that. “You’re famous and you’re Scottish, we’ve got a publishing division so why not write your life story.” You know, before I die . . . ’

  ‘Well, I’m glad she insisted,’ she says, with such nobility in the face of my burblings that I could cry.

  ‘The Bruce,’ I say.

  ‘The who?’

  ‘My Robert the Bruce biopic,’ I whisper, leaning in. ‘The Bruce. Keep it to yourself.’

  ‘You’re making another film!’

  ‘One for the road. Talking of which, do you want another?’

  As we drink, I give her a brief outline of the film. She’s thrilled, in on a secret, a gleam in her deep blues and hands on her chin in a manner that hints she may, after all, be carnally interested.

  Has she not seen the liver spots on the backs of my hands? Is she too drunk to notice my sashimi breath? Does she want to kiss me and find a tiny piece of ten thousand Yen black cod dislodged into her hot little mouth? I imagine her breasts and thighs as she bounces up and down on my spindly body and am suddenly thrilled that ancient art has made an old man desirable.

  ‘Can you tell me any more?’

  With half a bottle of Blue down his gullet the birthday boy thinks, why the bloody hell not. With reflection has come the gloop of sentiment and the return of Anna in the guise of this American girl who could not be more different. I take Abby or Aimee’s hand. I have no more connections, I whisper to her, none at all. I feel like King Robert the Bruce in his dank cave, half-mad and talking to spiders, the exile trying to find a way back to the home he left so long ago . . .

  ‘I can see why you have to make the film.’

  ‘As I say, one for the road.’

  ‘And what you’ve had to . . . endure. Your brother and your wife.’

  ‘My brother was a troubled man and she wasn’t my wife.’

  ‘Sorry. I just mean I understand . . . A bit, anyway. My mother also had a heart attack.’

  ‘Life goes on.’

  She is quiet for a few long moments. I await a profound comment on the nature of fate and tragedy.

  Instead, she says, ‘Tell me about the monkey.’

  ‘The monkey?’

  ‘It was just so funny, the way you talked about it in your book. The interview tonight, too.’

  ‘You know Japanese?’

  ‘I live here, don’t I? Silly!’

  I blink. I drink.

  Has it been building up to this all along, the one thing that everyone wants to talk about?

  I could sit here for days, pointing out every crucial detail excised from that most absolving of autobiographies, and back she would circle to the damn monkey. I lift her smooth chin, look into those beautiful cobalt eyes and say what is it you hide? Tell me all about that Nebraskan cornhusker life you left so far behind, what did you choose to bury in those endless fields?

  Except I don’t.

  Two

  Anyway, it wasn’t a monkey.

  It was a chimpanzee.

  In time, it became the centrepiece of the act. But that was later, after the Day of the Menagerie and long after our mother and her disapproval had vanished. Then it was just me, Duke and our father, there in the old croft by the Sound of Skerray, peering over the edge of the world.

  The act, our father’s obsession. I’m a man of Free and Easy heritage, greasepaint in ma lugs, he’d say. Like his father before him, our old man was also a performer, once upon a lost time.

  My brother and I. Slapstick at the shieling and pratfalls on the shore. It seemed so natural. Children of mountaineers will just shrug at the thought of dangling off the Eiger. A taxidermist’s son will stuff the cat quicker than you can say here little kitty. We could sing Arf a Pint of Ale, bat our eyelids like Chaplin and slip into a Will Evans sketch, anything the old man remembered.

  And he remembered so much, had an eidetic memory, it seemed, for every Music Hall and Variety bill from 1900 onwards, the Inveran Empire to the Ayr Gaiety, the Glasgow Alhambra to the Aberdeen Tivoli.

  I say our father, but I mean Duke’s. Of my paternity I was dubious. A blunt lack of affection combined with physical discrepancies that became ever more obvious as the years passed. From a young age I compared my stunted self with Shire Horse and Son, out again in the rowing boat.

  ‘Give ’em to Bucket Boy.’

  Then my brother’s face, smugly looming as he handed me the bucket full of mackerel. ‘Gut them, bucket boy. You heard.’ Yet he would always seek me out later to apologise, Duke having a near-pathological desire to please. It made an inevitability, I suppose, of his future career.

  Then again, with the old man you had to please. He was not a man to anger. A defiant melancholy defined his life and the stories he told. ‘It was something else back then, boys. Listen to this, don’t tell your mum,’ his great belly wobbling with laughter as he reached the punchline.

  I loved those tales.

  The old man was so happy, freed in the telling, a foul-mouthed Peter Ustinov leaning on a spade, rambling on about the time Jimmy Nicol stood on the wrong mark and was knocked out by the sandbag dropped from the flies. Or the not-so-alleged Scandal at the Alhambra, this involving Betty Grable and two chorus girls. The stories tailed off as the present leached back into view. He would seem startled, as if he still hadn’t come to terms with giving it up for the fields and the sea.

  We would come to call these stories Tales of the Fedora. My father loved that hat. Worn at an angle he thought rakish but was actually ridiculous, a product of vanity, aspiration and too many Humphrey Bogart films. Women, as we found out, business or hats: always that tendency to push it too far. Although the fedora only appeared in my teens, when I think back to childhood it is ever-present, a later memory imposed on earlier ones. This is how I have chosen to remember him. In the same way, our small croft at the foot of Ben Chorain is not neat with lazy beds and geraniums, friendly smoke in the chimney, but squats cold and lonely, the flower tubs scrawny with the weeds of so many winters.

  I recall so little about a deeper past that it might only exist as a series of dreams. Perhaps our mother was never alive at all to enforce, with military discipline, a tidy home and busy farm. Oddly, despite the ambiguities of my early memories, I have retained an absolute certainty about her voice: a lilt to mirror an ever-shifting temper, soft as summer surf or hard as a herring gull.

  Already a distant presence, she achieved the ultimate remoteness by dying when I was thirteen.

  Duke was five years older. He was different after our mother died, as if knowing his superior place in our father’s affection conferred a responsibility to look out for me. I adored and hated him, naturally. I admired the easy way he climbed the Esha Cliffs and spoke to girls, who gravitated to him like pretty little planets. His affection for me was fierce. Dead arms and an ongoing series of playful humiliations. I accepted without rancour the apology that would always come.

  ‘Sorry, Johnny.’

  ‘It’s ok.’

  ‘No, it’s not ok. It’s just they kind of expect it from me and before you know
it I’ve said something stupid.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘It won’t happen again.’

  Except it did. Duke needed the attention and I needed the apologies, as the old man needed his stories.

  ‘You mother used to like those shows.’

  We were deep into that frigid February of 1953. Our mother had been in the grave for two weeks. A viscous darkness had settled across the kitchen, only the fire holding it back. My father was midway down the bottle. Duke and I sat silently on the other side of the table. With the firelight behind us we must have seemed mere shadows to him. Perhaps this made it easier.

  ‘She loved them.’

  That stillness, there was none like it in the universe. Only the music was moving. Ellington’s Mood Indigo playing on the Garrard record player they had saved for three years to buy.

  ‘She came to the Inveran show when I was working the coconut shies. Again and again and she was rubbish, boys, I tell you, couldn’t hit a barn door from ten feet. I gave her a prize anyway. A teddy bear. And a wink. That’s what she always said. I was undone by a teddy bear and a wink.’

  Duke and I exchanged a quick glance. We had seen vanishingly little evidence of such fondness.

  ‘My first show at The Empire she was there. Sneaked out and bought a front row ticket. I went down like a sack of summer sharn. A nineteen-year-old Harry Lauder in my head, Wailing Willy to the rest of the world. They booed me, bottom of the bill, but the buggers still booed me. MacDougall was frantic, waving from the wings, wanted me off pronto. Sod the lot of them, I thought. I started into Mairi’s Wedding and it was bad, boys, really bad. But then they started to laugh. The worse I got, the more they laughed. Just roll with it, I thought. I decided to drop in a few heilan jigs as I belted it out, even tripped over my feet, legs in the air and arse revealed. Brought the house down so I did. Your mother was on her feet before anyone else. They clapped forever! It was called satire, apparently. My act was born, “Sorry Lauder”.’