Love Over Scotland (9 page)

23. The Charms of Neo-Melanesian Pidgin

“I had rather a lot of Chopin that morning, I must confess,” wrote Domenica. “The Mazurka in C sharp minor, the Nocturne in E major, and so on, all interpreted sympathetically by Mary Hong, daughter of Edward Hong, M.A. (Cantab.). By lunchtime I was obliged to look discreetly at my watch and claim that, owing to jet lag, I needed to get back to the hotel for an afternoon nap.

“We parted the greatest of friends. If I came back for a midmorning tea a couple of days later, Edward Hong said, he would make sure that there would be a pirate contact for me to meet. ‘He might be a little on the rough side,’ he said. ‘But we can have some Chopin afterwards to make up for it.’

“I returned to the hotel and spent an afternoon writing up my diary. I haven’t done such a thing for years, but I have the feeling that my experiences here in Malacca are going to be somewhat unusual and should be recorded. I did a little pen and ink sketch of Edward Hong in the margins and one of his daughter playing Chopin. I was quite pleased with these, although you would regard them as mere amateur scratchings, Angus. Yes, you would, although you would be far too polite to say as much.

“I spent the next two days wandering around Malacca. It’s a delightful place, a bit like Leith, in fact, but with totally different people and buildings, and climate, too, I suppose. I spent very pleasant hours reading in a chair in the garden of the hotel, under a very shady tree that looked remarkably like those Sea Grape trees you see in places such as Jamaica, but no doubt something quite different. I read about the history of this place–very colourful–and about all the different groups of people who have made their home here. This had implications for my study of the pirates. Because of the dearth of information on the subject, I had no idea whether they would be Malay, Chinese or Indian in their origin, and this had implications not only for how I would approach the study, but also for how we could communicate.

“I had envisaged that I might need an interpreter, but then it occurred to me that because of the…how shall I put it?…delicate nature of the research it could be difficult to find a local person who would be prepared to live amongst the pirates themselves. For this reason, I might need to speak to them directly.

“I telephoned Edward Hong about this. He said that the pirate bands were of mixed ethnicity and that I should expect to encounter all the main groups to be found in Malacca.

“‘It’s rather like the French Foreign Legion,’ he explained. ‘People join up if they want to get away. But what makes them different from the Legion is that they bring their wives and children with them. And as for languages, well, I would suggest that since you don’t have any of the local Chinese dialects–and no Tamil, or Malay? No? Well, I’d use a pidgin of some sort.’

“As it happens, I know all about pidgin–I learned Tok Pisin in New Guinea and I became quite interested in the subject. It’s amazing how far one can get with pidgin, Angus. And pidgin languages are so colourful! Wonderful creations! I suspect they’ll be speaking pidgin down in Essex before too long–they’re certainly heading in that direction.

“As you know, pidgins are a real mixture of this, that and the next thing. You get a bit of English, a bit of German, a bit of Dutch–everything. And the grammar is simple in the extreme. Do you know that when Prince Charles went to address the Papua New Guinea legislative assembly–where the official language is a pidgin–they introduced him formally as ‘Nambawan pikinini bilong Mrs Kwin’? Isn’t that marvellous? And it was quite accurate, of course. The word “bilong” does an awful lot of work in pidgin. And here’s another little gem. In Neo-Melanesian pidgin, if I wanted to say: Why did you wreck that machine? I would say: Olsem onem yu buggerupim onefelo masin? You’ll notice that the verb has an obvious etymology.

“My mind was set at rest by the thought that I would be able to speak directly to the people in the pirate band–not that I imagined I would be speaking too much to the pirates themselves. I imagined that I would be talking to their wives–or, I suppose pirates have partners these days rather than wives–and discussing social arrangements and the like. It’s always very interesting to find out how decisions are made in these alternative communities. Often, you know, the power structure is fairly clearly delineated. Remember
Lord of the Flies
, Angus? Remember how the right to speak was determined by possession of the conch? Well, I rather suspected that I should find similar symbols of authority amongst my pirates.

“I was really rather excited by the whole prospect. And so, when I went in due course to Edward Hong’s to meet my contact, I was filled with anticipation. Edward’s manservant greeted me at the door and ushered me upstairs and into the room in which we had listened to the Chopin on my previous visit. My face fell, I’m afraid. Edward was by himself.

“‘I’ve made inquiries,’ he said. ‘I’ve found somebody who’s prepared to take you to them. But he wouldn’t answer some of my questions, and frankly I’m not sure if I trust him. But don’t worry; he’s obtained the pirate chief’s agreement to let you live with them for a few months in exchange for money. He asked for one thousand US dollars, and I beat him down to sixty. He’ll take you there tomorrow.’

“I was very grateful, and thanked him profusely.

“‘No need to thank me,’ he said. ‘The pleasure is all mine. But now, how about a bit of Chopin? Yes? Mary will be only too happy to oblige.’ He leant forward and winked at me. ‘Onefelo Chopin make nambawan good musik bilong piano!’ he said, and laughed, most collusively. Such a charming man. (Note: Edward Hong should not have said ‘piano’ but ‘bigfela bokis tut bilong em sam i blak, sam i waet–taem yu kilim emi singaot’, which means: big box with some black, some white teeth–when you hit it, it cries out.)”

24. Pat Gets to Know Tessie a Bit Better

When Pat found Tessie standing outside her door, she was unsure whether she had heard her agonised muttering about how Wolf meant nothing to her. The other girl, however, gave nothing away: Tessie was impassive.

“Oh, hello,” said Pat. “It’s you.”

Tessie nodded. “Yes. I thought I might drop in and offer to make you a cup of coffee. We haven’t had the chance to chat very much since you moved in. In fact, we haven’t really seen one another at all.”

Pat looked over Tessie’s shoulder, into the hall. “But your boyfriend,” she began. “I thought that your boyfriend was here.”

“He was,” said Tessie. “But he had to go. He just popped in to ask me something.”

Pat relaxed. It appeared that Tessie had not heard her muttering and had no idea of how she felt about Wolf.
If
she felt that way about Wolf; she was by no means sure about that yet, although all the signs had been there–the quickening of the pulse, that warm, butterfly-like feeling in the stomach, the slight dizziness. And then there had been that strange desire to touch his teeth; that was very peculiar and surely meant that something was happening between them.

She thought for a moment. She could not let this happen; she would have to stop it. There was no point in falling in love with somebody else’s boyfriend, particularly a flatmate’s boyfriend. And yet, and yet…people fell in love with those who belonged to others. It happened all the time in fiction, and presumably in real life, too. And even if it often led to tears and disaster, sometimes, at least, it worked.

She looked at Tessie. The other girl was shorter than Pat–appreciably shorter–and had rather fat calves, thought Pat. She looked at her hair. It was rather mousy-coloured, and was not, in Pat’s view, in very good condition. Split ends probably. As for her face, well, that was pretty enough–in an odd, irregular sort of way. There was something strange about her nose, which had the slightly angled look of a nose that had been broken. Men were generally improved by broken noses, which added character to the masculine face, but a broken nose could be more difficult for a woman.

They looked at one another for several seconds, each lost in an assessment of the other. At length, Pat broke the silence.

“That’s kind of you,” she said. “I must meet the others, too. You shared with one of them last year, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Tessie, as they made their way through to the kitchen. “I was at school with Donna–I’ve known her for yonks and yonks. But I didn’t know Jackie at all. She’s new–like you. She only arrived yesterday. She’s in her third year of medicine, I think. At least, I saw her with a stethoscope sticking out of her pocket.”

They went into the kitchen, which was the largest room in the flat–and had the finest view, too, over the green and the rooftops towards Arthur’s Seat in the distance. The original floor of large flagstones had been preserved here, and this added to the charm of the room. There was also an old Belfast sink, with high arched taps, and a wooden draining board.

“This kitchen’s a bit of a museum,” said Tessie. “But there’s always enough hot water to do the washing-up. You will wash up, won’t you, after you’ve done any cooking?” she added, looking over her shoulder at Pat.

Pat slightly resented this question, and there was a tetchiness in her voice when she replied. “Of course I will,” she said. “I always do.”

If Tessie picked up the irritation in Pat’s voice, she did not reveal this. She looked at Pat over her shoulder as she filled the kettle. “That’s just one of the rules about sharing a flat with other people,” she said. “Naturally, there are others.”

Pat stared at her. “But naturally.”

“Noise, for example,” went on Tessie. “Some people think that if they close their door, then other people can’t hear them playing their music. They’re wrong. Noise travels through wood quite easily. It also travels through stone walls.”

“I know,” said Pat. “In Scotland Street there was a saxophone that…”

“And then there’s the telephone,” said Tessie, cutting short the rest of Pat’s sentence. “Some people are dishonest when it comes to the telephone. They use it and they don’t write their calls down in the book. And then when the bill comes they say that it should just be split equally four ways or whatever it is. I hate that sort of thing.”

Pat felt her irritation grow. This was unambiguously a lecture on how to behave, and she resented Tessie’s assumption that she needed to be told these things. “I have shared before,” she said. “I had quite a difficult flatmate, in fact, a boy…”

“And that’s another thing,” said Tessie. “Boys. If anybody has a boyfriend, then the rule is that the boy is off limits to others. That’s the rule.”

For a few moments there was complete silence. Pat looked at the floor. She tried to look at Tessie, but the sight of the other girl’s eyes glaring at her from either side of the broken nose was too disconcerting. What on earth did Wolf see in her? she wondered. Did he not mind those fat calves? Was he indifferent to the broken nose–and the split ends? She decided to speak.

“Of course that could be a problem, couldn’t it?”

Tessie gave a start. “A problem? Why?”

Pat took a deep breath. She thought that she might as well continue. She hadn’t started this, after all. “Well,” she said, “what if the boy in question fell for somebody else–and that somebody happened to live in the flat? What if the boy in question suddenly went off his girlfriend because…well, because he decided that she had fat calves or something silly like that–what then? Why should the other girl turn him down if she felt the same way as he did?”

Tessie reached for the kettle and began to pour the hot water into the coffee pot. “There’s a very good reason why the other girl shouldn’t allow that to happen,” she said quietly. “And that is because the first girl would kill her if she did. She could kill her, you know. Really kill her.”

25. Matthew’s Friends

Matthew had not planned to go to the Cumberland Bar that evening, but when six o’clock came round, he realised that he had nothing else to do. He could go back to the flat in India Street and make a meal for himself, but what could he do after that? The crowd, as Matthew called his group of friends, had not met for at least two weeks. One member of the crowd was on holiday, another was on a course in Manchester, and one had recently become engaged to a woman who not only was not a member of the crowd but who had little time for it. It had never entered Matthew’s head that the crowd would disintegrate, but that was precisely what it appeared to be doing.

Matthew had other friends, of course, but he had rather neglected them over the last year or so. There was Ben, with whom he had been at the Academy. Matthew saw him from time to time, but now found his company somewhat tiresome, as Ben had become an enthusiastic jogger and spent most of his spare time running. He had finished in fifty-second place in the previous year’s Edinburgh Marathon and was now talking about competing in the next New York Marathon.

He had met Ben for a meal at Henderson’s Salad Table, and the conversation had largely been about calories, energy levels and the benefits of Arnica cream for soft-tissue injuries.

“I’ve got a really interesting story to tell you,” Ben said over their meal of mixed pastas and roasted red peppers. “I was running about two weeks ago–or was it three? Hang on, it was three because it was the week before I was due to do the Peebles Half-Marathon with Ted and the others. Anyway, I was doing a circular route up Colinton Road, past Redford Barracks, and then down into Colinton Village. You know how, if you turn right after the bridge, there’s a path that goes down and follows the Water of Leith? There’s an old Victorian railway tunnel there that you run through–they’ve lit it now; it used to be pitch dark and you just used to hope that you didn’t run into a group of neds or anything like that!

“Anyway, I ran through there and then over the bridge that goes over the Lanark Road and then turned and ran along the canal. You know the aqueduct? Well, that’s where it happened. The path along the side of the bridge has setts or whatever, and I should have walked, but I didn’t and I twisted my ankle. I swear that I felt nothing right then–nothing at all. You know how you can tear things without feeling them? Except your Achilles’ tendon. If you tear that, you feel it all right. Cuts you down. Just like that.

“I didn’t feel it, and I carried on running, but I knew by the time that I reached the Polwarth section of the canal that there was something wrong. You know that place where the Canal Society has its boathouse and there’s that guy who wears the kilt who looks after all the boats? You know the place? That’s where I found that I had to slow right down and then walk.

“I said to myself: ‘First thing you do when you get home is rub Arnica cream into it.’ And I did. I put a lot on–really rubbed it in. You can also get it in homeopathic solution but, I’m sorry, I’ve never been convinced by homeopathic remedies. If you look at the dilution, how can such minute quantities have an effect? Right, so I rubbed it in, and you know what, Matthew? The very next day, I was running again. No trouble. And I didn’t feel a single thing.

“And the next day I ran out to Auchendinny and back, and did it in a really good time. That’s quite a run, as you know. No trouble with that ankle. That’s Arnica for you.”

There had been a silence after that. Matthew had looked at his pasta and at the ceiling, and tried to remember what it was that he saw in Ben all those years ago. He had liked him. They had been friends, and now this thing–this running–had come between them.

There was another close friend from the Academy, Paul, whom he used to see and whom he now avoided. He had married young–they were both twenty-two at the time–and now had two young children. This friend now spoke only of issues relating to babies: of nappies, unguent creams, and feeding matters.

“Here’s a tip for you, Matthew,” Paul had said to him the last time he had seen him. “When you put a baby over your shoulder to wind it, make sure you put a cloth underneath it, just where its mouth is. No, I really mean it. It’s important. I found that out the hard way when I was about to go to work when little Hamish was about four months old. He’d just had his feed and I put him over my shoulder and started to pat his little back. The wind came up very satisfactorily, but what I didn’t realise was that half the feed came up too and went all the way down the back of my suit jacket! I didn’t notice it and went off to the office. I went to a meeting–it was quite an important one–and I was standing next to one of our clients and I could see him sniffing and puckering his nose. And then one of the secretaries came and whispered in my ear and the penny dropped. So just you remember that, Matthew!

“And here’s another thing. When you travel with a baby, make sure that you’ve got a good, strong bag to put the dirty disposables in. We went off to see some relatives of Ann’s who live at St Andrews. Stuffy bunch. We had to change the kids on the way there and we put the disposables in the same bag that we had put the flowers for Ann’s aunt. Now, you can imagine what happened when we took the flowers out of the bag and thrust them into her hand! Yes. So that’s another bit of advice for you. You don’t mind my giving you this advice, do you, Matthew? I know that you’re not at that stage yet, but it’ll come before too long and you’ll thank me. I’m sure you will.”