John McPake and the Sea Beggars Read online

  Despite the turbulent times in which he lived, Bruegel managed to survive the paranoid religious purges of the Inquisition. Moving from Brussels to Antwerp in 1556 he stayed one step ahead of the medieval McCarthyism sweeping the Low Countries. He somehow managed to please his patron Antione Perrenot, Cardinal de Granvelle, while keeping his integrity intact and his true religious affiliation a secret. His paintings are not what they seem. They are crowded with symbols that tell of adherence to different truths. The hunters in the snow are indeed in pursuit of something but their quarry is neither fox nor bear. On what journey have they embarked? What are they seeking?

  One late February evening before the library closed, John glanced out of the window and saw that the yellow lights marking out Middle Meadow Walk were virtually obscured by swirling snow. As if summoned by a force he didn’t understand, John stood up from his study carousel, ignored his overcoat and walked through the doors into the blizzard. He positioned himself equidistant between George Square and Melville Drive and stood stock-still. If he stared hard enough he would see what they saw, and know where they were going. Shaking with incipient hypothermia he had a sense that a young child was out there somewhere, a young boy.

  Sarah collected him from the Royal Infirmary, conveniently close to where he had been found by several drunken students. On leaving the Outpatients Department she could contain her exasperation no longer and pummelled her gloved hands into his face, each blow emphasising a syllable in her invective, ‘You useless man, you useless waste of space of a man, you pathetic, sad, weak, mad, incompetent failure!’ He offered no resistance. She left him shortly after.

  After his career and marriage fell apart John agonised, analysed, apportioned blame, and invoked revenge on all who had harmed him. He waged imaginary conversations with various protagonists, punished at will, felt sorry for himself but always in his own internal voice. This internal voice was indistinguishable from his speaking voice in which he conducted day-to-day business, relationships and transactions. His own voice was soft, educated Edinburgh, middle class. He had been told it was a calming voice; certainly he had used it to great effect in the classroom, pouring vocal oil on potentially troubled waters. His first girlfriend had told him he sounded sexy and begged him to read poetry to her. Keats always worked, if he remembered.

  Gradually though, his internal monologues became dialogues in which he was aware of engaging with distinctively different personae. At first he was frightened and felt – rightly as it turned out – that he was going mad. Initially drink helped to restore prominence to his own, albeit slurred and increasingly inarticulate, voice. He blamed the stress of his domestic and professional situations and took disproportionate comfort from the times in the early days when the Voices left him but they always returned and always stayed longer.

  Various other Voices arrived unannounced over the years and left just as abruptly. He sometimes hankered after the Girl who was there one morning in his head, teasing him with sexual banter, promising him a good time, urging him to touch himself.

  The Old Woman was a strange one. She would regale him with stories of her own dysfunctional childhood in the Bronx. No one else could get a word in, and she would talk over them in an ever louder nasal drawl until they gave up. He had no idea where she came from. Alarmingly he would always smell her before she turned up and took over.

  Unwashed, with a patina of garlic, alcohol and subway, she had views on everything and fundamentally trusted nobody. Her bags had always been gone through while she slept in a doorway; other vagrants were always molesting her, ‘wanting to get their hands on her purse,’ as she put it. She had a soft spot for one of the police who patrolled her territory, ‘Pat always looks out for me,’ she said. ‘Sometimes he slips me a burger.’

  What did he think of the current crop? If he was honest he was growing increasingly fond of the Academic, completely lacking in social skills perhaps, and an appalling sense of timing, but driven by an intellectual rigour and an insatiable quest for knowledge. John certainly recognised something here of his own early self. He was haunted though, by the fact that the Academic who lived in his own head had access to knowledge that was significantly beyond what he, himself, knew, or had ever known. Where did it come from? There was of course the possibility that the Academic made up half the things he claimed to know while perfecting the cadences and verbal nuances appropriate to great certainty and insight. He had also read about psychic interpretations of schizophrenia, but that was somewhere he didn’t want to go. The idea of Dennis Wheatley and entourage camping in his brain was not an appealing thought.

  He felt much more ambivalent about the Tempter. On the one hand he held out hope and blew skilfully on the flames of possibility and redemption, on the other he would dash out the brains of hope against the nearest wall when it suited him.

  Although the Bastard could make him physically sick with his plausible accusations, and his ability to rake up ugly little kernels of long-forgotten sins, he felt, at one level, that they deserved one another.

  And of course he admired the apparent objectivity of the Narrator and his capacity to endow the mundane with a sort of poetic truth. (I had to say that John.)

  FOUR

  At breakfast Beverley was her usual breezy self. ‘Morning, John, you look smart today. I like you in that cord jacket.’

  Sometimes I think she overdoes it. He looks all right for a large man in his late forties with unfashionably long hair but he’s not going to be asked to take part in a photo shoot for Vogue – I must be careful what I think; I don’t want the Tempter to put ideas in his head. John nodded at Beverley and patted his pockets indicating that he was out of cigarettes.

  The corner shop was in the next block. Leith Walk was busy with people who in the main didn’t hear Voices apart from those of self doubt, worry about work and family; whose fantasy worlds were bound by action replays of Hibs’ late equaliser and impossible yearnings for unavailable potential lovers; whose anxiety levels rarely exceeded the fear of being late for work or niggling concerns about the facial mole that in some lights seemed to be getting larger.

  John looked carefully at every male face, even those who could not under any circumstances belong to his brother. His scrutiny was habitual. Sometimes he held the gaze of strangers for a millisecond longer than was socially acceptable. Last week someone had asked him ‘What are you staring at, you scary bastard?’ He avoided confrontation by lowering his eyes and muttering apologies.

  He didn’t even own a picture of Andy. He would though stare for ages in the mirror at his own face and slightly alter its contours as if he were a Crimewatch reconstructed photo fit. Add a moustache, make the cheekbones thinner, recede the hairline, add a hat. What other tricks could time play on flesh over thirty years?

  The Evening News was invariably a source of promise then disappointment. It seemed that every reader who celebrated a birthday, wedding anniversary, or mitzvah would pay for the publication of a head and shoulders portrait invariably cropped from family holiday snaps.

  A month back John had taken the bus to Cramond. He had read that a man called Andy was going to marry a woman called Sylvia after a long engagement. I told him it was pointless but the Tempter urged him on. For an hour he paced nervously up and down the narrow street outside the parish church into which chattering wedding guests wandered. He was grinding a fist into the palm of his hand. I tried to calm him down but nothing worked.

  Then his eyes lit up with recognition and he rushed forward as the portly groom stepped out of a black limousine parked on the gravel. The best man reacted as if he was protecting an American president from a potential assassin.

  John shrunk as if an air valve in his flesh had been

  released.

  After Jack’s failed attempt at self burial the hostel managed to secure a small grant to renovate the garden and Beverley did her utmost to involve the residents in a decision over the best use for the small space. The suggestion box reveale
d several receipts and a betting slip covered in something unpleasant. A meeting was convened in the garden.

  Kevin sneered and suggested that maybe Jack had a point, a residents’ graveyard was a practical solution. Someone suggested a bowling green. The idea caught on. Derek said they could enter a local league. Kevin said he wasn’t aware of a league the rules of which specified an officially agreed quota of schizophrenics and others with alcohol problems. Beverley, mindful of the last Care Commission report, suggested it might be a good idea to grow vegetables.

  ‘I hate fucking cabbage,’ said Mick.

  ‘Language,’ said Beverley.

  Once the others had returned to the house John picked up the new spade that Beverley had produced as an inducement and walked to the upper part of the garden. More than ever he needed to distract himself from an environment he hated, but to which he was resigned and probably deserved. During his student days he had worked as a labourer earning significantly more than in his short-lived teaching career. He instinctively checked his palms for calluses but there were none.

  ‘Hairy palms?’ asked the Jester.

  ‘Certainly a wanker,’ sneered the Bastard.

  The new blade sliced into the wettish clay, a knife into a cake. Had his brother married? Was he an uncle? ‘Some uncle!’ the Bastard chipped in predictably. ‘A fat retard with no pals.’ John turned the first sod over. It glistened and a resilient worm pulled itself to safety. Perhaps Andy was searching for him too.

  John looked up. He felt that someone was watching him, trying to communicate with him. The Bastard suggested it was the Governor from the children’s home wondering which innocent he would take into his study. ‘It’s your turn, John, you know it is, you deserve it after looking at that magazine.’

  The Tempter butted in. ‘It’s the young woman you saw in the park yesterday. She really liked you, she knows about your diagnosis and thinks it makes you interesting. She is sometimes unwell herself. Soul mates waiting to meet … And she knows where Andy is.’

  John looked round the garden. ‘There’s a man in uniform behind that tree, he’s playing with himself,’ said the Bastard.

  ‘She just wants you to hold her, she’s desperate for a kiss and she’s brought a bottle of wine with her,’ said the Tempter. John, his unease mounting, stared at the tree and then scoured the sky above the brick wall. Why wouldn’t the Voices give him a break, why not just fuck off and leave him alone? If he concentrated on the strange bird circling the garden and excluded all else the Voices might go away. It was probably a crow, perhaps a hundred feet in the air, circling slowly, sometimes gliding, riding the current. As if catching sight of what it had been looking for it climbed above the tenements and flew towards the snow-covered peaks, the tallest of which pushed its dagger-sharp ridge into the hanging belly of the turquoise sky.

  FIVE

  ‘It’s just a bird,’ said Cornelius. ‘Probably the same one that has followed us for days now. Satan’s own spy.’ The men huddled together on the cold ground.

  ‘Keep the faith,’ said Balthasar, ‘keep the faith.’

  ‘Isn’t faith to blame for all this?’ asked Cornelius.

  Johannes looked into the dark. Adopting the new religion had been easy in the early days. The villagers had received the visiting Anabaptist pastor with the courtesy that tradition demanded. They had broken bread and offered him a floor to sleep on. He had seemed old beyond his years but spoke with a simple, almost hypnotic, conviction about the essential goodness of Christ and the irrelevance of pomp and ritual.

  He took care not to trample on the old ways that had provided solace to past generations in harder times. He even spoke fondly of how his own villagers would dress up in their finest clothes to process along the riverbank behind a shaking statue of the Madonna. He described how one year the village simpleton, having been entrusted with holding a cord, started speaking a language no one could recognise, his words sounding like birdsong on a spring evening while his breath had the fragrance of flowers.

  ‘Did I ever tell you why I stopped going to mass?’ asked Balthasar.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cornelius and Johannes with one voice.

  ‘I was fishing down by the river. The day was hot. I had finished a flagon of best mead and my wife’s cake. The line dragged slowly downstream and my eyes closed. After a while a grunting, slavering monster wandered into my dreams. Then the rogue made sighs and little laughs … ’ Having heard the story many times Cornelius shook his head and soundlessly mimed along to the much-rehearsed tale. ‘I opened my eyes and saw Father Hoekstra with his cassock round his ankles and his priestly member firmly planted in my neighbour’s wife. ‘‘On your knees, Balthasar, and pray,’ he said, “I’m exorcising a wicked spirit.” He was a man after all, I had no problem with that and the woman was bonny. But on Sunday he preached about the seventh commandment. He called us all adulterous sinners for whom the fires of hell would never be sufficiently hot to purge our lustful ways. Legions of devils their faces contorted with sin would be queuing to tear out our innards. I walked out and never returned.’

  ‘ … and never returned,’ said Cornelius shaking his head.

  ‘Do you think they’re missing us?’ asked Johannes, keen to interrupt before Balthasar embarked on another tale.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The villagers.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Cornelius.

  ‘Perhaps the apprentices have taken over,’ suggested Balthasar.

  Fathers, anxious about finding work for their sons, frequently petitioned the group to remember them when they next needed a helper. Unsolicited baskets of wine and pancakes were left at their doors. The villagers often assumed the weavers were brothers, and frequently remarked on the facial similarities between them. Perhaps their faces had become similarly lined by staring at the heddles for hours on end and frowning when the warp tangled. Last month they had discussed the possibility that their separate machines, having developed personalities of their own, were now capable of playing tricks and being mischievous.

  ‘Make us a fire,’ said Johannes.

  Cornelius swept the needles into a pyre with his feet and reached into his smock for the tinder stones. His firemaking was legendary in the village. He would often wander past the homes of the elderly and, at the houses where no smoke rose from the stacks, would knock at the door and offer to raise the fire in the hearth.

  True to his reputation, he soon conjured the imps of flame and wisps of smoke. ‘Come closer, Johannes. Get some warmth in your bones.’

  Johannes reached into his bag and sunk his fingers into a clod of sodden bread; it was all that remained. Expressionless, he showed the wheaten mess to his companions.

  Balthasar took the dough and reshaped it and then placed it next to the fire. ‘I should have been a baker, not a weaver,’ he said.

  On the cusp of sleep the men grew silent and preoccupied. Cornelius yearning for Geertje, tried to dismiss the dumb show of possible horrors that his fear acted out for him. How safe was any young woman from the Spanish mercenaries? Would she stay in the loft as agreed? Would curiosity and boredom get the better of her?

  Balthasar thought of Wilhelmien. They had not parted well.

  Johannes thought of Michel. Why had they snatched him? Why hadn’t the stupid boy stayed hidden? But there was still a glimmer of hope. They hadn’t found his body broken and tossed aside in the snow. They had seen a set of distinctly smaller footprints alongside the others. And there was the lace. Michel was young and strong, but there had been rumours that the Spanish took boys as slaves to carry food and weapons from plundered village to plundered village. What if they had taken him for other purposes? Dear Christ!

  SIX

  John woke consumed with anxiety, thinking his heart was going to burst from his chest. The bedclothes were wet with sweat. He didn’t fancy breakfast but couldn’t stay in the room for a moment longer. Pulling on yesterday’s clothes he stepped into the corridor where he was met by the smell
of piss from Dennis’ room. When he had first stayed in the hostel, John too had been too riddled with fear to step across the threshold. In some ways it had been easier living on the streets.

  ‘Dennis is an even bigger loser than you,’ said the Bastard. ‘He’s on his last warning. Beverley told him they wouldn’t replace his carpet again. It smells like a shite hole in there. Poor mad sod. No wonder his wife used to beat him up. Why wouldn’t you want to beat up such a useless wee runt? You know what the problem is, don’t you? He blocks the sink with fag ends and then pisses in it. He’s almost as bad as you, John. At least he doesn’t whine on about his lost brother all the time. By the way he’s dead, you know, don’t you? They fished him out of the Clyde a month or so back. Didn’t you see the article in the Mail? Headless body in river. You’re wasting your time.’

  Leave him alone Bastard, he can’t take it. Come back later if you must.

  ‘I don’t know why you think you should be narrator-in-chief, you’re just a voice like me. Delusions of grandeur. You’re meant to be objective; all you do is pussyfoot around with your misplaced compassion. What you don’t understand is that John and I have a Faustian pact. We deserve each other. The trouble is you haven’t got a Helen in your life, have you, John? In fact you’ve got fuck all in your life. I’ll leave you alone just now but I’ll be back!’

  He’s gone John. Are you all right?

  Mick was already at the table. He grunted as John sat down but didn’t look up. ‘They were asking for me yesterday but I gave them the slip. You can’t keep a good Communist down. I’ve cancelled the Morning Star, it was just asking for trouble. I’m going to get the Telegraph just to confuse them. Porridge. Ye canny whack it. Any luck with your brother yet? He may be in a camp. I’ll ask round. Have to be careful though. They don’t like too many questions.’