A Parcel Of Lies: final version

Yes, this is the house and this is the  field where I dug up that hoard of coins…

No-one had lived here since the terrible thing that happened in the forties. The war had just started  and the woman who lived here with her writer husband came from Hamburg (she pronounced it ‘haybag’ which made people laugh) but the war was a far-off event and unlike her husband she was a friendly, good-humoured soul so it was difficult to see Helga as ‘the enemy‘ although no doubt there was someone unable to see further than her nationality.
And unlike some,  she was free with her money which endeared her to the butcher, the baker and the young lad she employed to come once sometimes twice a week to help with the garden (her husband had more important things to do than push a lawnmower or howk tatties).
Anyhow one day the postie noticed that the parcel he’d left for Helga  propped up against the front door the morning before  was still there.
” How could it have been still there when the accused had gone out of the house before you made your round?” the lawyer asked.
The postie shrugged. ” A dinnae ken, ” he said.
” He doesn’t know, ” the lawyer translated for the judge (a youngish man from somewhere doon Sooth).
So the postie pushed open the door  (nobody locked their doors in those days, still don’t, most of them) and went in and called out her name ( she and he were on first name terms ).
No reply.
Perhaps they had gone over to the mainland, he thought, to visit the writer’s parents in Fraserburgh more than was likely (the father had his own trawler, so folk said) and he was just about to leave was the postie when he heard a strange noise from upstairs, not really a cry, not so much a groan but something in between, the sound you yourself might make with a bag or a pillow-case or a letter-sack pulled over your head.

So he went upstairs to that room high up on the  left (you can just see the window)  and stood outside the door for a wee while, his ear pressed against the wood, just listening.
Sure enough he could hear a sort of muffled sound, a human sound but not words exactly, not like someone trying to cry ‘Help’  or ‘Desist’ with someone’s hand over your mouth and their arm toght round your throat, nothing like that, more like someone away down a pit shaft, deep down, shouting  up to someone, anyone, way up there, out there on the surface, shouting with their two hands cupped like a trumpet round their mouth, trying  without too much hope  to catch anyone’s  attention.
Desperate. Terrified. Lost.
Then the sound was suddenly stopped altogether, cut off (the postie made a cutting up-and-down gesture with his hand) just like that.
Silence.
He could hear  the seagulls squabbling outside and a whirring from downstairs that was probably the freezer from the kitchen starting up or something like that but from the other side of the door… no sound whatsoever.
Nothing.
He coughed, knocked gently on the door, called out the woman’s name
“Helga?” 
his voice rising on the ‘kya’ bit,  then when there was no reply, more loudly, with a note of concern in the way he said it
“Helga!”
at the same time  trying the door handle which turned easily enough in his hand.

The door, almost of its own accord, swung open.

Something went past him, was all he could say later. Something cold like the draught when someone rolls down the car window in winter to chuck out his cigarette without warning you first…
Folk blamed the writer (a teuchit bugger whose only friend was his big daft dog).
The jury blamed the writer( wee eyes too close thegither).
The newspapers  blamed the writer (Novelist Held in Island Mystery).
Not that he had nothing to say in his own defence. Men who earn a living by stringing words together sometimes have surprisingly little ability with the spoken word, but not him, not Ian Stewart  Loudon Leitch. He relished an audience…
” Yes, we had a quarrel,” he said. ” No, nothing serious. Just a tiff. A tiff about nothing at all, if you really want to know: about whose turn it was to collect the eggs; about whether Lawrence was a good man but a bad writer; about why I didn’t take a solid job working for my father  instead of scribbling my life away. Something of that ilk. Anyway I took Argos for a walk along the cliff top path, to cool down, I suppose,  but I’d just gone the length of the field out there when Argos turned and as if someone had called her name raced back to the house. I thought nothing of it, capricious creatures dogs, especially the female of the species so I continued on my merry way, it was a fine morning, the sea was a shimmering sheet of green glass, the azure sky full of bird calls, the air clean as a whistle, it felt so good to be alive that the war being fought on foreign fields and soldiers dying in distant lands was the last thing on my mind…”
And so he went on. As if he was writing a novel. ” It was a woman’s scream, ” he eventually said, ” that brought me running back in time to see Argos standing splay-legged in the doorway, growling a warning to whoever, whatever, was inside trying to get out . ”
The postie wasn’t so wordy: ‘Something went past me’ he repeated over and over again as though whatever it was that passed him that sunny Summer’s morning had clean taken away his wits with it.
” In which direction?” he was asked and he cut the air in front of his face from right to left with his open hand and made a sort of whistling sound to indicate that whatever it was had been travelling left at a fair old rate of knots.
“Into the house or out of the house?” the lawyer asked in a weary voice.
The postie frowned and didn’t answer  and all he said  when the question was repeated was, Something went past me.
That’s how the trial went, stories that didn’t match; questions asked but not answered; lines followed that led nowhere.
What about the parcel that was the thing that supposedly led the postie to go into the house? Did he pick the parcel up? Was the parcel still there when he rushed out? Was there ever a parcel in the first place? (It turned out that the writer  – like lots of  folk  hereabouts – always used the back door, never never the front door)
And Helga? Why did he do nothing to help Helga?
After a long pause and without a shrug this time he said,  not looking anywhere, ” A dinna ken ” which the lawyer again translated for the judge’s benefit.

Folk weren’t comfortable with the postie after all that and it was no surprise when shortly after the end of the trial he left the island,  joined the army, didn’t see any fighting, married a WAAF from Torquay, settled there, nice wife, two kids, good job,  never returned.
The writer wrote ‘A Parcel of Lies’  – (short listed for the Booker prize) – which became a best seller  and probably did a lot to earn him his early release from Ford open prison. When it was made into a film he went to La Gomera where most of it was shot, fell in love with the place, never returned.
Only the house remained to remind folk of what once happened there, tall, grey, gaunt and  haunted, not the sort of place you would want to buy, however cheaply,  for you and your wife to turn  into a home fit for bairns to grow up in.



Unless, like me, you know exactly what happened next.

A Parcel of Lies

THE UNFINISHED STORY

No-one has lived here since the terrible thing that happened in the forties. The war had just started  and the woman who lived here with her writer husband came from Hamburg (she pronounced it ‘haybag’ which made people laugh) .
Anyhow one day the postie noticed that the parcel he’d left for her outside the door was still there and he pushed open the door  (nobody locked their doors in those days, still don’t, most of them) and went in and called out her name ( she and he were on first name terms ).
No reply.
Perhaps they had gone over to the mainland, he thought, to visit the writer’s parents in Fraserburgh  more than was likely (the father had his own trawler, so folk said) and he was just about to leave was the postie when he heard a strange noise from upstairs, not really a cry, not so much a groan but something in between, the sound you yourself might make with a bag or a pillow-case or a letter-sack pulled over your head.
So he went upstairs to that room high up on the  left (you can just see the window)  and stood outside the door for a wee while, his ear pressed against the wood, just listening.
Sure enough he could hear a sort of muffled sound, a human sound but not words exactly, not like someone trying to cry ‘Help’  or ‘Desist’ with someone’s hand over your mouth, nothing like that, more like someone away down a pit shaft, deep down, shouting  up to someone, anyone, way up there on the surface, trying without too much hope  to catch their attention.
Desperate. Terrified.
Then the sound was suddenly stopped altogether and after that there was no sound at all.
Silence.
He could hear  the seagulls squabbling outside and a whirring from downstairs that was probably the freezer from the kitchen starting up or something like that but from the other side of the door, no sound whatsoever.
Nothing.

He coughed, knocked gently on the door, called out the woman’s name,  with his voice rising on the ‘kya’ bit
“Helga?”
then when there was no reply, more loudly, with a note of concern in the way he said it
“Helga!”
at the same time he tried the door handle which turned easily enough in his hand and the door, almost of its own accord, swung open
Something went past him, was all he could say later. Something cold like the draught when someone rolls down the car window to chuck out his cigarette without warning you first…
Folk blamed the writer. The jury blamed the writer. The newspapers  blamed the writer. Not that he had much to say in his own defence. For a man who earned his living by stringing words together, he had surprisingly little ability with the spoken word.
And the postie wasn’t a great deal better. ‘Something went past me’ he repeated over and over again as though whatever it was that passed him that sunny Summer’s morning had clean taken away his wits with it.
What about the parcel that was the thing that supposedly led him to go into the house? Did he pick it up? Was it still there when he rushed out? Was there ever a parcel in the first place?

Folk weren’t comfortable with him after all that and it was no surprise when he left the island,  joined the army,  never to return. Only the house remains to remind folk of what once happened there, gaunt and  grey, not the sort of place you would want to buy, however cheaply, for your wife to turn it into a home and your bairns to grow up in.
Unless, like me, you find it hard to resist a bargain.

Good Buddhies

The Buddha in the garden was here when we moved in.

*******************************************************************

We bought the house from a dentist and his partner who was somebody well known in jurisprudence (I’m not even sure I know what that means). Anyhow neither seemed the sort of guy who would go in for yoga or meditation or any of these Eastern practices which we in the West treat with such reverence as being superior ways to understand the world and the part we play in it. Sitting cross-legged for hours at a time and mumbling OMMMMMMM deep down every couple of seconds or so never seemed to me the most practical way of dealing with life’s pesky problems.

The question was should we get rid of it, move it, keep it where it was. I thought of it as not ours, not us, but a foreign deity imposed by a departed dentist and his jurisprudent partner; Moira (who had recently started Thursday Yoga classes at the University) thought of it as quite nice really and reminded me that the shortest distance between two points was not necessarily a straight line and that since she did most of the garden work anyway the Buddha should stay where it was. If that was all right with me.

And that is how the dentist’s Buddha became Moira’s Buddha and came between us. If I moved it a foot or two to prune a rose bush or whatever, the next time I went into the garden, the Buddha had moved back to its original position. If I turned it  to face nor-nor west, next day it would have swivelled its gaze back to the mystic East.
I started to talk to Moira about it but she  frowned,  lifted an admonishing finger and shook her head. “Let’s not talk about it, ” she said. ” I know you don’t like it but let’s not quarrel about it. If you don’t mind.The shortest distance between – ”
” Okay, O wise one, ” I interrupted. ” Okay, Grasshopper. Okay.”

I became quite grumpy. I know I did. Moira, bless her, didn’t complain about my moodiness but that somehow made me grumpier than ever.

Then I had a brainwave. I bought another Buddha, not quite so serene as the dentist’s  but looking as if he knew a thing or two about giving your common or garden djinn a pretty hard time of it. I didn’t know quite what my game plan was – I think I thought I was starting a Buddha war and that my Buddha would turn up trumps.
Moira just shook her pretty head as she usually does when I embark on a new idea and let me get on with it as, god bless her, she usually does..
I put the Buddhas side by side on a bare patch of earth. They stayed put.

Time passed.
We changed.
The earth changed.
The garden and our two resident Buddhas changed.
In a funny sort of way they cancelled each other out. The garden became for us a haven of peace, a place for coming closer together yet remaining infinitely apart, independent yet together; no man (or woman) is an island sort of stuff. If we found ourselves quarreling we would simply step out into the garden, stand in front of BUDDHA ONE and BUDDHA ALSO ONE, bow, press palms together, make the  deep down sound and wait for the bad waves between us to subside.
Which they invariably did.

  Ommmmmmmm

New Age gods can sometimes be the answer to age-old problems.

IMAGINE

My great-grandfather, a good old-fashioned Presbyterian elder, believed that all who weren’t of his religious persuasion would end up on Judgment Day tumbling head over heels into the darkest and deepest depths of the fiery abyss, shouting out as they fell headlong and helpless Lord-Lord-we-didnae-ken-we didnae-ken!  and in reply they would hear the good Lord’s cheery voice  booming down from on high – “WEEL, YE KEN NOO!

For him Judgment day held no fears. Quite the opposite. As one of The Elect he would be able to watch his enemies receive their just and merited punishments for  his God was indeed a vindictive god, made in his own image.

My grandfather on the other hand reacted against this Calvinistic vision.  When he was 16, he left home, school, church, country for Canada – Dawson City – and returned after 20  silent years, not in a big, flashy car,  not splashing money about,  not loud-mouthed and full of tales of bravado but what you see in a vulgarised form nowadays on television – a secret millionaire. He posted money to people who for whatever reason seemed in dire need of it and to those who could benefit others by being better off – all this coming to light only after his death. God, for him, was other people; like in the John Lennon song – Imagine – no hell, no heaven

And then we come to my father. He went to St. Andrews University, took a degree in geology then seemingly in his father’s footsteps went abroad – Australia – mining – the bowels of the earth – the other side of the world, far and deep enough away to be thought of as a fairly permanent move. But something happened. At some stage in any family history, something ( kept vague, mysterious, side-of-the-nose-touching stuff) h-a-p-p-e-n-s and life can never be the same again. Something happened and he came ‘home’ again. His favourite saying was the title of a book by Thomas Wolfe – ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’. I think he felt he’d taken the correct first step – going to Australia – then chickened out, run home to Mummy, back to his comfort zone, and been ashamed of his lack of  determination and purpose ever since. God, for my father, was that inner sense of purpose and direction with which he had unfortunately lost contact.

And me? I went to Africa. Kenya. Kiambu. A coffee Farm. Loved it all. Three marriages. I wasn’t good at marriage. Two children. I wasn’t the best father in the world. No religion. Never felt the need for it.

The African Queen

” Observe it, the vulgar often laugh, but never smile, whereas well-bred people often smile, and seldom or never laugh. A witty thing never excited laughter, it pleases only the mind and never distorts the countenance.”    

When my girlfriend becomes aroused, she insists that we go outside and find somewhere very public and very dangerous to act out her impulses.  She especially enjoys  kissing and entwining her supple self round me in the main street with all the cars whizzing past, honking their horns,  flashing their lights. Most of all she is stimulated by the lewd remarks shouted at us by shaven-headed thugs leaning from the windows of their flashy cars  with CD players turned up full volume and making obscene gestures with their fingers and forearms as they pass.

When we get back home, fired up after one of these outings, she likes nothing better than kicking off her shoes and lying on the sofa with a giant tub of popcorn on her chest, watching old Humphrey Bogart movies, flicking popcorn into her open mouth and shouting things like, Get ’em off, baby! and Just do it for Crissake!

The African Queen is our favourite.

The Night Visitor

What’s it like to be dead?

ONE NIGHT  last week I sat up in  bed and  and saw when I switched on the bedside  lamp that what had awakened me was  the  bedroom door  being   flung open to admit a woman dressed in a green ballgown who kept blundering and banging into furniture and things and swearing not quite under her breath as she did so. When I coughed a second time and caught her attention, she paused long enough to say she was sorry for being  such a damned nuisance, she had been on her way to the Hunt Ball at Denholm House when she realised she had forgotten her spectacles, couldn’t see a damned thing without them, had turned back to get them, was sure she had left them on the table beside the bed, had run into a group of enemy troops, been taken prisoner and executed as a spy,  but because of the missing spectacles she was doomed to roam the earth looking for them and only when she had found them would she be released and had I seen them anywhere?

I asked her how she had been executed. She said she had been shot at dawn against the wall of  the church, blindfolded which was sort of ironic and that it had been extremely painful and she didn’t want to talk about it.

I asked her what it was like being dead and she said there wasn’t much to it, you got used to it after a while and was I sure I hadn’t seen her spectacles anywhere?

I was feeling sleepy and disappointed in her impatient replies to my genuine questions, so I turned over and in spite of  her thumps and effings and blindings, quickly fell asleep again.

I woke up just as the sun was rising and was relieved to see that there were no overturned chairs or broken vases left to mark the stumbling passage of my myopic night visitor. At least she had had the decency to tidy up before she left for wherever these nocturnal peripatetics  go to during the day.

But my very expensive varifocals which I distinctly remember leaving  beside Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination on the bedside table were missing.  Could she –
I began to panic. Without them I’m blind as the proverbial bat.
I looked for them everywhere, using my hands to feel for them on the bed, under the duvet, beneath  the pillow,  without success, and as I was down on my hands and knees, rapidly running out of hope, peering and groping under the bed, out  they popped onto the carpet from  the breast pocket of my pyjama jacket.

The Yellow Shop On The Corner

Nothing to do, nowhere to go?
Try shopping.
Shopping is such fun. Go on, give it a try, put on your glad rags,  grab your black brolly and off you go.
Something in a shop window catches your eye? Mmmmm.

In  you go, look at it, think about it, talk to the girl about it, look at it again, think about it again. No need to buy it, unless you really want it…. really really want it…

Talk to the girl again, think about it….Mmmmmm..
then go away without it.
But you may come back to it…
Meanwhile

on to the next port of call…
O shopping can be  such fun
and needn’t cost you a penny…

That yellow shop on the corner, I wonder what they sell?

Looking at Pictures

I like looking at people looking at pictures.

I was taking a sneaky photo of this man with his orange cap (held behind him as if he was in a church) looking with some reverence at a Cadell painting because I could see a link between his orange cap and the Cadell picture on his left called ‘The Orange Blind’ when I heard a click behind me and there was this cheeky woman taking a picture of me taking a picture of him…….

>and then when I photographed this woman partly because of her pink jacket and partly because of the way she was standing that suggested cross purposes, I was tapped on the shoulder by a curator who wagged his finger at me and nodded reprovingly at the camera, making me feel like a naughty boy.
That’s just one of the problems in photographing people – another one is do you blatantly ignore someone’s possible resentment when you take his/her  photograph?

LOOSE THREADS

Consuegra.
It means literally ‘ with mother-in-law’ they told me but I think they were just pulling my leg. They have an odd sense of humour once you leave Madrid behind, these rural people – they keep asking me what does a Scotsman wear under his kilt (‘keelt’ is how they pronounce it) and then laughing like drains. Yawn yawn. I’d hitched all the way from Aberdeen thanks to the efficacy of my Black Watch kilt (my grandfather’s actually) and I wasn’t prepared to have it lifted, innuendoed or scoffed at ,  so in reply I just made a hand gesture I’d been taught by my good friend Sergio which he said meant in Spanish, Please go away, you no longer amuse me.
It worked a treat.
Anyhow Consuegra  is where I bought the small but costly packet of  Azafran and was given the name of the man in London who would be waiting for it. It takes 2000 crocuses to make 1 gram of the stuff,  I was told. Consuegra seemingly is the big centre for saffron.  In summer they say the fields around the big white windmills (all 11 of them, 4 still working) are a heaving sea of vivid purple. Worth going there for that sight alone so they say. But more of that later.
When I got back to London I found my way easily enough to the Quixote Bar and Restaurante (opposite the Victoria Bus Station) which, as you might have guessed, was full of  non-Spanish customers ordering very unSpanish tapas at very English prices. The barman, however, was  from Galicia and when I  asked to see  his boss he told me that his very busy boss could not see me at the moment because his very powerful boss also ran a big 4 star hotel in Santiago de Compostela,  Los Abetos, had I heard of it, una mina de oro, very successful,  and his wonderful boss was fortunate enough to be there at this very moment.
Se crio en buenos panales.
At which point the small, bird-like woman next to me at the bar piped up to say to us both in Spanish that she had stayed at that very hotel and she and her husband had been impressed by its high standards.  While the barman ignored us both, obsessively polishing and repolishing a wine glass, holding  it up to the light either to admire his handiwork or to look for vestigial smear marks, I asked her where in Spain she was from. She laughed at this and said that actually she was from Stokesly actually, then lowering her voice, she told me that neither the owner nor the barman were to be trusted and that she
She never got round to finishing  her long sentence. A woman from nowhere materialised at her side, grasped her arm, gave me a flashing smile and took the woman from Stokesly away.
Now by the strangest of coincidences, the Fiesta de la Rosa del  Afrazan was

(to be continued)

TRAVELLING FOLK

What happens to people on public transport?

Folk on the train refraining from any form of communication preferring instead to enter a state of SUSPENDED ANIMATION…….

and folk on the bus immediately and effortlessly drifting into a hypnotic dream state…..