The Red Men (15 page)

I was unaware of it at the time, but this meeting marked my initiation into the outer circle of Hermes Spence. Like an Italian prince of the Renaissance, Spence had a court to guide his power
and influence. He would take a meeting about new ways of living the gospel in today’s world, then afterwards sit in a private Soho club to listen to the new young rich eulogize the latest
microtrend. Spence’s executive remit was novelty, what he called ‘the new new thing’. He had no patience for being the steady hand on the tiller, grinding out shareholder value.
He was a corporate prince of the Brand Age, a hiatus in Western history when nothing could touch us. It was already winding down when American Airlines Flight 11 tore through the North Tower of the
World Trade Center. History had been gaining on us all year and that clear sunny morning in New York it finally pounced. Spence decamped to the Caribbean island of Nevis. Left to fend for itself,
his court fell into in-fighting and disrepair.
Drug Porn
collapsed and I ended up naked in a field beside a tent full of my own urine, some way short of enlightenment. The Brand Age was
over. The Age of the Unreal was upon us, and it began for me with a trip to the tiny Hebridean island of Iona.

‘It begins today. It starts right now. I can feel it. We are going to be ahead of the wave. An upturn is upon us – I have foreseen it. Do you want to know how I
know? It’s the moment when everyone is selling, when the very idea of buying makes you physically sick, that you buy.’

On a flight to Glasgow, the man in the next seat lectured me on his theories on the nature of cyclical capitalism. It had a whiff of the old bullshit, and I said so. He ignored me.

‘It’s coming, I know it’s coming. I’ve been grinding out this recession for three years now, waiting for the cycle to turn. You should spend less time quisling and more
time thanking me for getting you on this plane.’

Reclined in his seat, Bruno Bougas was a squat satyr with a head of filthy curls. His hands rested on a hillock of gut, whorls of black hair squirming beneath the cotton of his white shirt. He
paused to dig the last flecks out of a bag of crisps, and I got a word in edgeways.

‘Your punditry is always optimistic. You are always selling opportunity, That’s why I never believe it. It’s Bruno Bougas’ Amazing One-of-a-Kind Corporate
Cure-All.’

Bruno asked, ‘You still doing
Drug Porn
?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll give you this: you won. Everyone does drugs, everyone does porn.’

‘We had the opposite intention.’

‘Do you have any drugs on you?’

‘No, not anymore.’

‘No porn either, I bet. You’ll fit right in where we’re going.’

At Glasgow airport, we were met by our driver. He was holding a card with an occult symbol on it.

After a drive through the Highlands, Bougas and I boarded a ferry at Oban as foot passengers and shared a fried breakfast, the tubby consultant relishing the peppered blood of the black
pudding.

I had signed up for this trip with no inkling of what it was for: I was so desperate for money that when Bougas offered me an invitation I had to restrain myself from biting off his hand. Gone
were the fake fur and silver rings of my pomp, replaced by a tattered windcheater and an unkempt beard I was cultivating in anticipation of the birth of my first child.

I had thickened about the waist and the skull. A greater mass fixed me to the earth. The burden of bones and meat was taking its toll. Sedentary and settled, the fast-flowing channels of ideas,
notions and schemes were silted up by habit. A stagnant puddle here and there of old dreams and aspirations.

I reminisced with Bougas about our bohemian salad days until he put aside his pork pie in disgust.

‘When I hear people fondly recalling their past, I hear Death sharpening his knives.’

The rest of the journey up the Sound of Mull was spent on deck, sitting upon a bench slick with spray. The early morning sun was a cold white hole, toiling to clear thick banks of cloud. To the
east, up in the highlands of the mainland, Ben Nevis and its range appeared entirely icy and deathly. To the west, Mull presented first a striking castle, then a desolate mountain with snow in its
striations, the land draped, on that morning, with a fine blue gauze. There were rocks out there, the hard Lewisian gneiss, that were over three thousand million years old, from a time when the
only life on the planet was bacteria and algae.

‘Does that inspire you?’ I asked Bougas.

‘I see rocks and water, Nelson. And tourist attractions. Hikers queuing to disembark. We’re not Romantic poets.’

He shifted on the bench and nodded back toward the interior of the boat. ‘I’ll tell you what inspires me. On the next deck down, they have a shop and in that shop there is a sign
which reads: “We are committed to quality”. I had to say to them: why are you merely committed to quality? Why not “fanatical about quality”? I took out my pen and made a
new sign for them: “We’re so obsessed about quality that we sit in an armchair every night sharpening a knife in case quality cheats on us.” Not bad, but it needed something
snappier. Why not simply, “Degrading ourselves for you”? A little white sign above every shop in every provincial shit hole which reads “Wasting our lives embodying a value
rendered meaningless by its ubiquity FOR YOU.” I’d buy. First in the queue.

‘So, no, I am indifferent to nature. Consumerism inspires me. It’s my playground.’

We disembarked at Craignure and made our way to the village pub where Bougas whiffled down a couple of single malts. I wanted to breathe in the space and time of the Hebrides. Where I saw a
rural idyll, Bougas saw only inconvenience. He didn’t like to be anywhere where you couldn’t stick out a hand and get a cab to take you away. Eventually a car pootered down from
Tobermory to drive us around the southern coast of Mull, the journey broken only by the odd stray sheep and Bougas’ intermittent baiting of the driver about the number of no-smoking signs in
his car: there were four. After an hour we were dropped off at Fionnphort, a staging post for the small ferry over to the isle of Iona, our final destination. After exhausting the vending machine
in the ticket office, Bougas declared that this village made Craignure look like Babylon. I mooched around on the beach, careful not to step in the legions of beached jellyfish.

Down in the narrow sound, fishing boats meditated at anchor. The silence was prehistoric.

Hermes Spence was gathering his court together again. I didn’t know why; I knew nothing more than the symbol the driver had held up at the airport, the same sigil embossed on my
invitation. There had been no briefing, no suggestions for preliminary research. My off-hand inquiries to Bougas about the purpose of this mystery tour were met only with the assurance that it was
big: ‘it has to be’. Nor did he clarify why Hermes was stuck out on this remote rock. For all his years hiding from the recession, Iona was still an unusual choice for a player like
Spence. Beneath immense banks of dark cloud, the isle was slight and unassuming, a kerb of rock surrounded by the wind and water.

On Iona, Bougas and I shivered on the jetty with our bags. There was no sign of a reception party. The village was a line of whitewashed and grey cottages with rain-spattered conservatories. Our
fellow passengers were mainly Catholic pilgrims, moving reverentially past us. Bougas and I fell in step with them, making our way up the small street to the Argyll hotel. It was fashioned out of
the isle’s distinctive pink rock, its bricks marbled with mortar.

After checking in, we slipped out and went for a walk along the Street of the Dead, its flagstones treacherous with rain. Low-lying and exposed, this was a landscape would not long escape a
rising sea – one freak oscillation of the tide and a giant wave would smother it.

Iona Abbey bored Bougas. Only its well-tended gardens pricked his interest. Beside astonishing blue and purple-haired thistles, he spied opium poppies swaying alluringly in the sea wind, their
heads green and ripe. He caressed one and showed it to me – the provocative bulbous tip of a Martian phallus. Then he slit it with his penknife, gathered the viscous sap on the lip of his
index finger and sucked it down greedily.

Rising beyond the abbey was Iona’s sole peak. We staggered up a couple of hundred feet, Bougas’ complaints assessed by the sheep dutifully grazing at evenly spaced intervals on the
trail. He questioned the stiff wind and unrelenting rock, and critiqued the appeal of nature. He showed me where the water was spilling into his loafers. Swiftly, a cloud swaddled the hilltop and
pressed its rain upon us. When the cloud sped on, revealing the extent of Iona’s modesty – three miles long, one mile wide, a few sandy coves, the ruins of a nunnery, a youth hostel
– he abandoned the climb.

‘We should be in Soho.’ Hands on his thighs, bent forward and panting, he was showing the wear and tear of a day on the sauce. ‘Sometimes I wonder if Hermes is going too far
with the Christianity. I understand it makes sound business sense, in this climate, to hold breakfast prayer meetings and network at AA. But I resent coming out to this whoreless, neutered
rock.’

‘It doesn’t inspire you,’ I said, referring back to our earlier conversation.

He gestured back to the abbey and its Christian community. A chapel full of banners against poverty, magazines about Africa with cover lines selling famine and drought.

‘It’s a sexless god-bothering vegetarian enclave,’ continued Bougas. ‘There is bromide in the communion wine and valium in the host. Not that the women inspire much
stirring of the libido. I see wide-hipped pastors saying grace before serving vegetable stew for twelve. Only one thing I don’t understand about these women. They don’t drink, they
don’t eat meat – so how do they get so bovine? They say they want to heal the world – I say they just want to eat it. Save the whale? Reader, I married it. And then there are the
men, those beanpole ascetics with enormous dormant members. I imagine it’s full of accountants who saw the light after their first nervous breakdown and now fill in the rest of their lives
with watercolours in the day and weeping in the evening.’

Bougas did a little jig of frustration, balling his fists in his curls and stamping his feet.

‘For god’s sake, don’t you even have a joint on you? Look at me! I’m foaming at the mouth!’

He refused to walk any further and insisted on returning to the hotel so that he could make a call to rustle up supplies. I let him go. I wanted to explore further. There was a road out to the
north beach.

Intrigued by the prospect of solitude, I headed away from the town. Lambs raced to watch me through the fence. The farmer drove by on his tractor with the grim expression of the only realist on
the isle. The road ended at his farm gate. This was a more solitary path. Hood up against the raw sea wind, I skirted the highland cattle grazing on the machair, the grasses that grew upon the
shoreland dunes. Unlike the bleak peat lands of Mull, the machair was fertile, a meadow beside the sea. Resting on sand, this rare grassland is very prone to erosion; the coastline shifts and
mutates accordingly. The machair lay upon the sand like a tablecloth upon a table. The earth was uncertain beneath my feet.

The north beach was deserted. Fierce waves broke upon the sands. A liverish boulder, fresh with sheen and striped with meaty horizons, made me gasp: have giants had their guts drawn and
discarded on this beach? The sandstone, moulded into organic knobbles and curves, was livid, heaving, pulsing. I needed to urinate, and sheltered by an enormous heart-and-lung rock formation, I
pissed messily into a crosswind. I washed my hands in a pool of saltwater then returned to the beach prepared to explore further, only to see, in the distance, a figure watching me. Wearing a cowl
and habit, this man or woman struck me as outsized. I couldn’t be sure across such a distance but the figure was almost seven foot tall. It clambered up a hillock looking down upon the beach.
The wind caught its hood and yanked it back, briefly revealing a head with no jaw, none of the angles of a human skull, just a smooth brown oval. I felt an echo within me, an intimation of a state
of mind I had not experienced for some time. Hallucination. Time stops, the moment elongates, fear stretches and yawns. The figure pulled its hood back over its head and stumbled out of view. Did I
really just see that? There was a pilgrim’s path on the island, and a monastic retreat; perhaps an eccentric individual, starved of society, was intrigued by me but lacked the confidence or
the manners to introduce themselves. But what about their head, their smooth oval head? I walked quickly back across the beach, skirting away from the shore, where the waves broke with such
intensity it was as if they were trying to communicate something to me, an urgent warning in a language I did not understand.

When I returned to the hotel, I headed directly to the conservatory and spent the afternoon browsing shelves of worn paperbacks while working my way from left to right through
their selection of single malts. I did not tell anyone about the figure I had glimpsed on the north shore and concentrated on cladding my mind with alcohol.

Every half hour, the ferry deposited more members of Spence’s court on Iona, each of whom tentatively poked their head around the lounge of the Argyll – only to have Bougas leap upon
them, press a drink in their hand and enquire as to whether they had brought any drugs. So many familiar faces: Morton Eakins, wearing a cable-knit white sweater and clutching a glass of milk;
Jonathan Stoker Snr and Jonathan Stoker Jnr, a captain of industry from St Albans and his adoptive son, the capitalist realists of the court. Whether it was selling St Moritz fags in Lagos or
horse-trading out in the Argentinean pampas, the Stokers could always turn a profit. Lavishly varnished and newly fitted out with the latest in cosmetic surgery, Stoker Snr worked the room with
much greater confidence than his son; by contrast, Stoker Jnr was bleached by long days worrying over the white glare of a screen. It didn’t take long for his father to gladhand his way
around to where I was sitting.