FESTIVAL FEATURES | Alan Warner
what’s coming and so do they when the lips come off. I move quick, like a herring gutter, off with the top one then the bottom, just like cutting clear the skin of a chicken, then I use my thumb to stick them right down their throats like a slimy oyster. And what a smile they have.’ I stopped talking into the mike. I reached up my hand to the oracle, I suppose the burn of the bulb would have burned most hands but not mine. Not a blacksmith’s. I found I could force the spotlight round slowly though it creaked and protested and small fragments of dust l uttered l oorward. I didn’t feel it was going to twist all the way round but it didn’t need to. The small room was completely emptied of people. Apart from Tidy in her short silver dress, still in her seat, wearing the giant Stetson tilted back on her wee head – snogging Ewan McEwan like they were at the old high school dance. I punched my i st through the ceiling.
*
Evidently the three of us left the pub at closing and Tidy drove us north in the VW, to Lochearn, taking our new acquaintance, Ewan McEwan, back to the old village and the lochshores of his boyhood, among other things.
Tidy and I had heard a lot about Ewan in the pub, his evangelical fervour for the healing qualities of comedy, but I was not so dismissive. Ewan’s drinking, the divorce, the children they never had, the start of the depression, the medication, the series of bedsits, the Comedy Therapy course and now the l at shared with men half his age who wanted to be rid of him because he was awful dour l atmate for a stand up comedian – as those insensitive swines had put it.
As we moved through Strathyre I asked our new acquaintance, ‘Ewan, Ewan, I’d respect your opinion on, that guy. The pub landlord comedian guy.’ ‘Al Murray, he’s great.’ ‘He is isn’t he. Aye. I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ I pointed out. ‘But comedians man. Pretty much all wimps are they not? Knock em down with harsh language. But him, the pub landlord guy. He looks well hard. I respect him, he’s okay in my books.’
McEwan nodded, ‘I liked your gruesome monologue by
the way.’
‘Did you?’ ‘Yeah. Killing the comedians. That was funny.’ ‘Was it?’ ‘I wonder what did happen to those two guys.’ ‘Well I’m killing them.’ ‘The disappearances I mean.’ I frowned. Gosh, life was like a dream. Perhaps he was not wrong. Perhaps we had never killed them and these events were just idle spectres of our minds? I never took myself for an over-violent type. Just moderately so. No, I had killed them, I was sure of it. It was the one thing in life you could count on, that you’d killed other people. Folk rely on the certainty all the time, politicians, the army, the terrorists, the police. It is the one thing you can be sure of, the rest of your life is just a book of estimates but killing is the ultimate afi rmation. It really gets a reaction. It must have been terrible in those nightmarish ages when it was lawless and nobody cared. ‘That’s where they’re going to. I’m killing them. They’re not disappearing. I’m a serial killer. I want to get caught too. I long to be institutionalised for the end of my days. I’ve nay pension scheme, so what am I meant to do? Tidy here, there’s nothing between us. Romantically I mean. Obviously I wish there was. Don’t I, my fair companion, but it’s more like a brother sister thing, it’s just. She’s depraved. Isn’t that right love?’ She turned round from the steering wheel a little bit, she
still had the Stetson on. ‘That’s right darling aye.’ ‘She’s depraved, she’s deeply, deeply sick, she moved beyond all the boundaries of eroticism until only witnessing torture and murder eh, gets her off. For weeks it lasts. Forty Shades of Blood, that’s her thing.’
‘Ha.’ Ewan really laughed at this. ‘That’s really brilliant. What you want to think about is getting an agent, a London agency behind you. I mean what a line. How could we put it? The I-am-a-serial-killer routine. Not black humour but blacksmith humour. That’s what the circuit needs Crelan, more jokes about shoeing up horses.’ I frowned. ‘Really. Do you think so? That an agent
might take an interest?’
‘Aye man. That one about the vest too. Brand new mate.’
*
We drove into the night village and went up there and turned around so Ewan could take a look at the changes in the old place. After all it was for the last time; then we cut up the loch side towards my lands. Ewan, me and my fair companion got settled into the boathouse and I mixed the drinks. Tidy was wearing the black frock coat by this time but it came down near the l oorboards on her. I’d got all my good old vinyl records going on the turntable which I’d rigged there, one speaker each, lashed high up on the two roof supports, shrouded in poly carrier-bags because the slates leaked a bit. Purple, Motorhead, Cock Sparrer, The Scorpions, April Wine, Vardis. All a bit scratched now, mind.
Ewan was talking shit, ‘You’ve got great hair Tidy,
really long like Crystal Gayle,’ he claimed.
‘Aye,’ Tidy tolerated him, ‘It’s so long, when I go to the hairdressers they cannie put me in the chair, I have to stand so they can snip the ends.’ Ewan nodded his head to the Metal, said, ‘Oh it’s great to hear the sounds of home again. You can have bit too much Emmylou Harris. What are the cocktails big man?’ He was sat in a deckchair next to the boat which was slapping about a bit in the slip water. Annoyingly there was a wee breeze up.
I told him, ‘Well its Kahlua and gin for me and Tidy but
with a good dose of Rohypnol in yours.’
He laughed. ‘Would you like some scrambled eggs before we kill you Ewan?’ Tidy bent down with the frying pan and she just dipped it into the slip water by the boat and took the scouring cloth to the dried egg skin and fried up batter. It wasn’t too good a scoosh the lassie gave the pan. I must admit. ‘Sure you won’t have some, the condemned man’s i nal meal?’ asked Tidy as she used a fag to get the blue ring going.
‘Ah no thanks. No, yous go ahead if you’re peckish.’ He seemed a bit squeamish about Tidy’s cooking,
despite being smitten, the hypocrite.
‘Hey,’ he went, ‘Look there now,’ he was pointing up
into the shop.
I turned round to see. ‘Oh aye, that’s the wee anvil,
that’s my own wee anvil we’d use for the smaller jobs.’
‘I mind that, I really really remember that well, Crelan. Really, it’s great to be back.’ He frowned down to the boat. ‘Do yous both really sleep in the boat?’ he asked, nodding at the two scrumpled up sleeping bags, the empty, crunched cans of super lager, ripped fag packs and the foils of sleeping pills littering the bottom of the Zodiac. ‘In the summer we do aye, not in the winter. Tidy used to get sea sick over the sides but she has her legs now. Great legs. We’re not crazy man. Look, were you serious, about the agent?’
‘Oh aye man, you have good material there. Great
material.’
‘Would you write down your agent’s address for me?’ I asked handing him his spiked drink. ‘Sure. You’ve got good material.’ It was annoying me the way he kept repeating that
ridiculous word. Material.
‘Great material. It’s all about your material in the long run, but it’s like I says back there in the big smoke. It’s no
28 THE LIST FESTIVAL 14–25 Aug 2014