69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess (10 page)

We drove through Dyce and past the airport. Alan wanted to practise his ventriloquism, so it was Dudley who pointed out Tyrebagger Hill from the back seat. I’d almost forgotten about the oral sex we’d had at the recumbent stone circle up there a few days before but it came back with the clarity of a recurring dream. Dudley was talking about the writer Duncan McLean, describing him as almost a local lad, what with being born in Fraserburgh and growing up in some wee village outside Banchory. Dudley informed me that McLean’s first book
Bucket of Tongues
featured a story entitled ‘The Druids Shite It, Fail To Show’, in which a bunch of middle-class soccer casuals get pissed at a fictional location loosely based on the Tyrebagger stanes. I asked Dudley how he knew the hooligans were middle-class. He told me that was easy. Everyone knew that the Aberdeen supporters who’d minced their way to tabloid notoriety back in the 80s were a bunch of bourgeois tossers. Their badly-dressed mascot Jay Allan even boasted about this in his illiterate attempt at autobiography
Bloody Casuals: Diary of a Football Hooligan.
⁷

Dudley described McLean as a proletarian post-modernist who wanted to give Dyce the psychogeographical treatment, exaggerating the distance from the heliport and the nearest bus stop. Making out that a bunch of wankers from the village were going out of their way and up more than one hill to get to what was actually an easily accessible local landmark. It went without saying that it was the intellectual shortcomings of the characters – a pig-ignorant bunch of bourgeois fantasists – that led them to believe that the Tyrebagger stanes were erected by Druids. The publishers of the book wouldn’t know truth from fiction in terms of either setting or milieu, but locals reading the story would have a good laugh at the media clowns down in Edinburgh and London being taken in by this baloney!

Alan interrupted Dudley by going into an old-time barker’s rant he often used when interacting with the dummy. I don’t remember exactly what he used to say but the gist of it is this: ‘On top of Tyrebagger Hill there is a heathen temple. It consists of ten long stones placed in a circular form; the diameter of it is about twenty four feet. The highest of the stones, which stand on the south side, are about nine feet above ground; the lowest, which are on the north side, four and a half. There is one stone placed on its edge, betwixt the two southmost stones which is about six feet high. They are all rough stones and of great bulk. Likewise, scattered throughout north-east Scotland there are to be seen many very great stones, brought together, and set on end; some one way; and some another; and, for the most part, on tops or risings of hills. It is the common tradition that they have been the places of pagan sacrifices; for it is like that it hath been a ceremony of the heathen worship to be on high places. I never minded to observe if there could be any footsteps of fire perceived on these stones. We find Jacob set up a stone and if this have been a ceremony of religion in these days, as is like, the pagan idolatry, no doubt, has had something in imitation thereof.’

Once Alan had done his party piece, Dudley said he’d read a lot of Duncan McLean’s work,
Blackden
for example, which was set out Banchory way. There McLean cocked a snook at self-styled metropolitan sophisticates by unfavourably comparing the Bogie and the Gadie – at the back o’ Bennachie – to an American river he claimed was called the Cranberry. That gave Dudley a few belly laughs at the expense of McLean’s literary puffers who’d promoted his prose as merciless realism! Alongside McLean, the other local author the dummy really rated was a retired primary school teacher called Doris Davidson. This Aberdeen-based writer had penned a number of romantic classics including
The Brow of the Gallowgate
,
The Road to Towanbrae
,
Time Shall Reap
and
Waters of the Heart.
While McLean ironically confronted the concerns of what the media configured as young males, Davidson addressed the fantasies of those who allowed themselves to be constructed as middle-aged women. Constant references to ‘rearing beasts’ drummed home Davidson’s much repeated message that men simply couldn’t control their sexual urges.

Dudley’s discourse on Davidson’s historical romances was interrupted by our arrival at Safeway on the outskirts of Inverurie. Alan carried Dudley into the supermarket café and propped him up on a chair while I ordered two breakfasts. Being relatively early in the morning, there weren’t many customers in the supermarket and I was quite surprised by the pleasant ambience of the Safeway café. Large plate-glass windows meant there was plenty of natural light and even though the view onto the customer car park wasn’t exactly scenic, it was pleasant. As we ate Alan quipped that I had some rare treats in store as I worked my way through his bin bag of literary junk. He ran through some names. The majority I didn’t recognise but I knew Robert McCrum because at the time he was literary editor at
The Observer.

McCrum’s weekly column had often irritated me and I stopped reading it towards the end of 1998. The final straw was a piece in which McCrum suggested that over the past few years there’d been resistance to business forces entering the book market. McCrum’s time scale was several centuries out and I could only conclude that he didn’t know about the crucial role the book played in the development of capitalism. In many ways the book can be considered the first commodity and whole books had been written about the perfection of this commodity form. I figured that if McCrum didn’t know his arse from his elbow then, alongside virtually every other newspaper columnist employed on ‘Fleet Street’, he really wasn’t worth reading. I wish to stress that I am not trying to suggest McCrum suffers from an inability to do his job.
The Observer
, like a great many other papers, chooses to fill its pages with columns and a crucial qualification for landing one of these regular spots appears to be a propensity towards emotional self-indulgence and a refusal to do research. Columnists are expected to fill columns with words and judged on such criteria McCrum remains a consummate professional.

Alan was delighted that I recognised McCrum’s name and between shovelling forkfuls of fry-up into his gob, he whooped out a hundred and one put-downs of the would-be author. According to Alan, McCrum was a time-server and this was patently evident from his first book
In the Secret State.
Nominally a thriller, the work is really about office politics and how one gets ahead in a bureaucracy. Typically, Alan observed, McCrum mistook position for power and singularly failed to understand that bureaucrats are simply acting out a script. For someone to exercise power they must necessarily be in a position to effect change. A literary editor or spook who merely acts out the decision-making process in ritual form, reproducing already established patterns of behaviour, has very little real power. McCrum was Alan’s best example. When McCrum had been a literary editor at Faber and Faber he’d patently failed to break the mould of what had been published before he got there. Of course, given McCrum’s connections, he was able to get his books published and favourably reviewed, but he could not be described as influential. He was every inch the bureaucrat and would never be an opinion shaper.

Alan was still talking about McCrum’s first book as he bundled Dudley into the car and we made our way to the Brandsbutt symbol stone. This was located in a housing estate very close to Safeway. At one time there had been a stone circle abutting the Brandsbutt stone but that had been destroyed long ago. Dudley was wheeled out of the car and we took a few photos. I thought Alan might move on to the subject of Kevin Callan’s
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess
, but he had yet to exhaust the subject of Robert McCrum. As we got into the car Alan made a series of jokes about the Byron complex that McCrum was alleged to suffer from. Of course, like Byron, the hero of
In the Secret State
has a limp but Alan cackled, the thing that really hobbled in this novel was the prose.

At this point we were neither following Callan’s route nor that of the Stone Circle Trail. Alan was chuckling about the many clangers in McCrum’s first book. Specifically he was in hysterics about the fact that McCrum quite earnestly used a character’s rereading of Carlyle as evidence that this stereotype loved history, blissfully unaware that no one who knew the first thing about the subject would treat the author of
The French Revolution
and
History of Frederick the Great
as a serious historian, particularly when it was the flaws in the latter work that made it one of Hitler’s favourite books. Once we’d reached the village of Daviot, Alan pulled up in a car park by a scout hut. A short walk through some trees brought us to Loanhead of Daviot stone circle. Immediately in front of us was a recumbent stone with two flankers and eight others making up the circle with a kerbed ring cairn inside. Just to the east was an enclosed Bronze-Age cremation cemetery. All of this was set on a gentle slope with the countryside to the north spread out before us.

Alan threw Dudley down on the recumbent stone and the dummy announced languidly that he was tired and wished Alan and me to dance and play before him. We waltzed around the stone circle and simultaneously removed our clothes. Alan pushed his legs between my thighs and in this way our genitals and bottoms were paraded before Dudley in the lewdest possible fashion. As we went on we grew more excited, smacking each other’s rumps until Alan grew bold enough to pull some hairs out of my cunt. Then he kissed my sex better, licked it copiously and before long we were fucking.

The ground was rough. Alan got up and dislodging Dudley from his resting place, reclined on the recumbent stone. I bent over Alan, petting his prick and smiling as it stood up stiffly. It was about this time that I spotted two girls of my age watching us from the edge of the wood. I winked at them as I drew down the soft foreskin and uncovered Alan’s large swelling head, red and shining like a ripe plum. Alan, who had also spotted our two admirers, directed me to sit on his face and called the girls over saying he’d like them to play with his prick and arse. I clambered onto the recumbent stone and knelt with my knees on each side of Alan’s shoulders so that I could place my cunt full on his mouth. One of the girls lay between Alan’s legs and lifting them up, pressed back his hams and thus gained access to his upturned
derrière
, into which she thrust her wet tongue as far as she could. The other held Alan’s prick in her mouth but without frigging it, which, I observed, she carefully avoided as she sucked the head and gently stirred the balls.

We carried on in this way for quite some time, the sun beating down upon us, until Alan and I had simultaneous orgasms. The two girls had yet to come, so Alan and I jumped down from the recumbent and they leant back against it as we hitched up their skirts, pulled down their knickers and got to work with our tongues. Once our new friends had enjoyed orgasms, we all adjusted our clothing and got into the car. We dropped the girls in Inverurie, then made our way back past Safeway to the Easter Aquhorthies stone circle. Fortunately the route was signposted since we had to make our way up a single-track road for the best part of a mile. There was an old 2CV occupying one of the spaces in the minuscule Easter Aquhorthies car park when we arrived. We hauled Dudley out of the back seat and made our way up a track, forked right and quickly found ourselves at the stanes. I’ve forgotten what Alan told me about McCrum’s second novel
A Loss of Heart
as we walked back to the circle.

A 40-something hippie mama was doing a lap of the circle, placing her hands on each stone, closing her eyes and hoping to feel the energies. A considerably straighter-looking man was attempting to keep two children entertained. As soon as the bairns clocked Dudley they wanted to play with the dummy. Alan did a bit of ventriloquism, getting Dudley to explain that he liked to slit the throats of youngsters and fry up their kidneys. The kids were enthralled, their father was grateful to get a break and their mother was so consumed by her quest for mystic energies that she ignored patter that in different circumstances she may have considered offensive.

Taking his leave from the dysfunctional family, Alan returned to the subject of Robert McCrum. He began talking about the literary time-server’s third novel
The Fabulous Englishman.
Alan tittered that in this work McCrum’s literary powers extended no further than describing an Austrian train station as typically Austrian and the air on a station platform as carrying the smells of a train station. When Alan told me this I thought he was exaggerating McCrum’s hack style. However, when I eventually tracked down a paperback copy of the novel I found these extremely literal descriptions on pages 66 and 67 exactly as Alan had assured me I would. Mercifully, McCrum avoided the accusation that he did not know his material by making his main character a failed novelist. As we bypassed Inverurie town centre, Alan observed that being a dedicated bureaucrat McCrum not only succeeded in getting this novel published, he even received puffs in the press for his brilliant descriptions. I wondered why McCrum bothered, since most of those who read the book must have done so for the cheap laughs to be had at his expense. It was the McGonagall syndrome all over again.

By the time we reached the Aberdeen side of Inverurie, Alan had exhausted Robert McCrum’s prose as an object of ridicule. He was kept busy justifying his deviation from the route described by K. L. Callan in
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess.
Alan claimed that we’d needed a decent breakfast and having headed out to the Safeway café it had made sense to re-order the first day of the journey described in Callan’s book. Alan’s reasoning was that we were merely attempting to test the credibility of Callan’s claims by carting a dummy weighted with bricks around the Gordon District Stone Circle Trail, we weren’t trying to recreate the journey Callan described.