Whirligig (7 page)

‘So, I'll ask a question. Would you like to do the crossword or would you like to have a conversation where you write down the answers to questions that I ask?' Coky smiled nervously at Claypole's utterly blank expression.

‘Silly me. Still not clear. Would you like to do the crossword?'

Claypole hesitated, gripped the pencil and prepared to write. Coky jumped up to help him. Claypole watched Coky incredulously as she eased his hand over the blank space next to the crossword for workings-out and doodles.

‘There we go,' said Coky, sitting down again, pained by the fact that she sounded like a bumptious lollipop lady but seemingly quite unable to stop herself.

Claypole pressed down on the paper and wrote. Then he put down the pencil as if spent by the effort and looked out of the window. Coky looked at the paper. ‘NO' took up all the space available in a shaky script.

‘OK,' said Coky, her cheery demeanour beginning to fade. ‘Would you like me to ask you questions and you can write down the answers?'

Claypole looked back at her with a look of profound sadness. He took up the pencil. Coky got up to help him again, but Claypole swiftly raised his hand as if to stop oncoming traffic.

‘Oh,' said Coky, ‘you've got it, have you? Cool.'

She looked at what Claypole had written. He had put the smallest of ticks next to the massive ‘NO' that he had written before.

‘Oh.' Coky frowned. ‘What about if you put your hand up when you want to say “no”, like you just did,
and you can put your other hand up when you want to say “yes”. OK?'

Claypole raised the same hand he had raised previously.

‘Ah, no. You mean “yes”, so you raise your other hand, your left hand. Right?'

Claypole continued to keep his right hand raised. Coky sighed.

‘Sorry, I'm not being very clear, am I? I said “right” just after I said “left”, which didn't help. Come to think of it, I also said “no” and “yes” in the same sentence as well.' She paused and her shoulders sank. ‘Sorry.'

To Coky's relief, a nurse appeared at her shoulder. ‘How are we today, Mr Claypole?' asked the nurse.

‘Fine, fanks,' said Claypole, and had just enough time to regret having spoken before Coky exploded. While she would have been justified in exploding with anger, in fact the explosion was one of laughter.

After they had spent some time apologising to each other, Claypole found the next ten minutes wonderfully relaxing. No one had talked to him for two days for any purpose other than the briefest of introductions before stabbing him with a hypodermic or to enquire with hasty condescension whether “we need a wee-wee”. But this was a delight. Coky's enthusiasm for wind farming allowed him to concentrate on her face. He could just bathe in her gaze, unabashedly.

‘It wasn't so long ago that it was still a novelty,' she was saying. ‘But it's a mature technology now, of course.'

Claypole noticed again how fanglike Coky's incisors were. They flashed periodically when she smiled that nervous smile of hers.

‘Of course, almost everything that could have been done to ensure a bad result from the council's planning committee has been done. My uncle is nothing if not a shoddy cheapskate, and Aeolectricity wasn't much better. The environmental survey is amateurish; the plans for where the turbines are going has never been properly settled; little thought seems to have been given to the requirements of the national grid, or the transport problems that will arise; and no plans at all have been put in place to actually buy turbines. We should delay it, really. But that costs money. And if the council says no, in theory we could take it to inquiry, but that would cost a million quid, and… well, same problem.'

Claypole's face held firm, attempting not to betray his incomprehension. Were ‘turbines' the windmill thingies? Yes, probably. He knew vaguely what the national grid was, but the rest of it sounded too much like science and legal quagmire.

‘But in a way, none of that matters,' said Coky. ‘The biggest problem is that the local community is either suspicious or actively hostile. We have a PR disaster on our hands. That's the thing we'd like you to turn around.'

This was less difficult for Claypole to grasp. It sounded like very bad news, and very much as if his inclination to run in the opposite direction from this project as soon and as fast as possible was the correct one.

‘Having said all that, it is windy.' Coky shrugged.

‘I've heard.'

‘
Really
windy. If we get planning consent, it'll make a fortune. You're getting two per cent, right? Did Perry tell you what that might amount to?'

Claypole shook his head.

‘About £200,000.'

Claypole coughed, and a fleck of spittle arced towards his foot. To his relief this seemed to go unnoticed by Coky, who was staring into space.

‘… And about £25,000 a year for twenty-five years,' she continued. ‘Of course we're all interested in the environmental benefits. But it's going to make money too. I mean, that's the ideal thing, isn't it…?'

Her eyebrows also wrinkled and unwrinkled constantly, flicking between worry and brightness.

‘… From your point of view. As an entrepreneur and a committed environmentalist. Good for the world, and good for your wallet…'

Claypole wondered what had happened in her life to make her so tense. She had presumably, like her uncle, so many advantages, and on top of the self-possession of her upbringing, she appeared so free. So why did she seem just a little bit… broken? Claypole wanted very much to puzzle her out.

‘… Anyway,' Coky carried on, ‘this project has been so amateurishly conducted that you couldn't possibly make it worse.'

Finally Claypole surrendered to the thought he knew he shouldn't allow himself, viz. how beautiful he found those eyebrows, those teeth, that peculiar clothing, so dark for a summer's day. And those limpid blue eyes. He had a sudden vision of the two of them in a Venice hotel bedroom. Having never been to Venice, he had to fill in the gaps in his knowledge with a lot of white muslin and soft focus, and the effect on his mind's eye was a bit too much like a 1980s pop video, but he enjoyed it nonetheless. After slow walks and long meals, they would… What would they do? Would
they perform the act of love that they had probably not yet enjoyed? But might it be possible if he hung around her for long enough? Claypole had never in his life chased a girl, but assumed that all you had to do was put the hours in.

‘… And it wouldn't be for very long… Anyway, now is the time to tell me if you can't do it. I mean, maybe it's not medically… well, for whatever reason.'

She stopped, and blinked at Claypole. With a jolt, Claypole realised that he should now respond, but he had missed a piece of her monologue and thus had no idea what he was responding to, so he just nodded sagely.

‘Oh good. Great news. I'm flying to Scotland tonight. But you'll come and join me next week?'

They sat in silence while he licked his split lip and his tongue explored the gap where his front teeth had been. Then he prepared to speak, but she interjected.

‘Oh yeah,' Coky said. ‘What does the “S” stand for? Your middle initial.'

Claypole reshaped his mangled mouth with extra effort.

‘I don' know why vey put dat. I 'aven't gorra miggle name.' He looked away.

‘Oh. OK.' She played with her fingers. ‘So, you'll come and help us out?'

Claypole thought. Coky was watching him so closely with those blue, blue eyes. Claypole stared across the ward. A small boy clutching a plastic beaker containing his appendix held Claypole with a malevolent glare. So Claypole looked away and out of the window. A pigeon reproached him from the sill outside as it unblinkingly shat.

The silence went on for so long that Coky thought
momentarily that her friend might have had another stroke, and she looked at him with concern. But gradually a smile broke across her face as Claypole spoke.

‘I owe you my life.'

What lemmings are supposed to do when they get too many has become almost apocryphal, and the simile has been used often enough to prophesy the course of human behaviour by people who have no understanding of lemmings or their environment.

Wilderness and Plenty
, Frank Fraser Darling

C
laypole never ran. In fact he never even hurried. Nonetheless his gait certainly had an extra jaunty element as he trotted through Edinburgh Airport with a stein of strong frothy coffee in one hand, and in the other a gravid sack of muffins, croissants and other chocolatey treats from the same multinational purveyor. His tiny legs tiptoed and scuffled his bulky frame along, extra-heavy with a backpack and suited again for the first time since his meeting with Peregrine MacGilp. He told himself he was hurrying so friskily because the plane he had to catch was
his
plane, chartered for the purpose of flying to Loch Garvach, there to become the spokesman for a wind farm project. He would not admit to himself the possibility that he was
jogging through the airport because he was, for the first time in his life, in pursuit of a woman.

Arriving at the private departure lounge, he saw Peregrine MacGilp, on the other side of a glass partition, who waved at him extravagantly. When Claypole had put down his backpack, and Peregrine had ordered champagne for himself and mineral water for Claypole, they immediately got down to business.

‘Here it is,' said Peregrine, sliding a binder across a coffee table and pointing to the last page of a legal document. ‘Fresh from the lawyer. Just plop a pawprint at the bottom, dear boy, and we shall be partners.'

‘Brr', said Claypole. He took a minute to read the three pages that gave him ownership of two per cent of the Loch Garvach Wind Farm. It seemed like a straightforward document, and he saw that Peregrine had already signed it. ‘MacGilp', said the signature, and underneath it in block capitals ‘MacGilp of MacGilp'. Claypole made a rapid series of indecipherable scrapes and slashes, and underneath wrote ‘Claypole' in capitals. Then his pen hesitated. He wrote again, and pushed the file over to his new business partner.

Peregrine looked at it. ‘Claypole of Claypole,' it said.

‘Congratulations,' said Peregrine, absent of glee, and put the binder to one side. They were silent for a moment, perhaps in lieu of celebration.

‘Brr,' said Claypole.

‘Do you know Edinburgh?' asked Peregrine.

‘Been once. S'awright,' said Claypole, and while Peregrine made his own views of the city known, Claypole reflected privately on his only other experience of Scotland's capital.

In the summer after leaving university, Claypole had acted in a student production at the Edinburgh Festival
Fringe. It was a musical-comedy adaptation of
The Diaries of John Major
, entitled ‘Not Inconsiderably!', and the performance had been reviewed by the
Scotsman
. The cast had crowded excitedly around the newspaper as they read together:

Beany Luckett, who plays Norma Major, manages to bring some gusto to her solo song, ‘Does He Even Love Me?', but she punctuates every joke with a nervous, almost angry, glance at the front row of the audience. Tristram Jones, the writer, director, producer and star, plays John Major as a camp bodybuilder with minor financial worries – which may or may not be intentional. But really the only member of the cast with a possible career in show-business is Claire Pearson, whose Edwina Currie is played for laughs of the ‘Carry On' type. I enjoyed her solo, ‘Secrets' – but I enjoyed the striptease that accompanied it more. The part of Norman Lamont was played by Gordon Claypole. At no point were his lines audible, and he sweated so profusely that his grey wig kept slipping over his false eyebrows. It was only during the jazz dance number ‘Black Wednesday' that it became clear why he he was also strangely reluctant to face the audience. Mr Claypole was maintaining, despite the black lycra, an all-too-visible erection.

Claypole's attention clicked back to Peregrine's monologue.

‘The terrible thing about Edinburgh – Scotland in general, come to that – is that it could be such fun,'
Peregrine pronounced. ‘It's cheap, drink is everywhere and it's awfully pretty. The problem isn't the place, or even the blasted weather. It's the people.'

‘Oh yes?' Claypole asked, staring at Peregrine's glass of champagne.

‘Posh Scots are horrible. Old rivalries and jealousies still lurk. Grudges going back to the Monmouth Rebellion of 1687. Further, really. At the drop of a hat they'll sing Jacobite songs and they'll damn you if you don't know the words. You have to be on your guard.'

Claypole glanced around the departure lounge. A man in baggy linen trousers and a tall woman with a ruddy complexion were earnestly looking at a laptop. Two men in suits of different shades of corporate blue talked intensely over expensive beer. This didn't appear to be a nation at war with itself. It just looked… busy. Peregrine leaned in conspiratorially.

‘Religion still causes a ruckus too, absurdly. But worse is land. Did you know that sixty per cent of the land in Scotland is owned by just a thousand people? Scottish nobles' complicity to Union with England was bought with gifts of land in the early eighteenth century, and the place has never fully recovered. No wonder the poor hate the landowners. Not that I'm a nationalist. But Union has never really worked. Even under torture no Scot would admit to being British. He is a Highlander, or a Scot, even – God help us – a European. Never British. Only the English call themselves British.'

Claypole watched the bubbles in his mineral water as Peregrine glugged at his champagne.

‘So is me being English going to be a problem?' Claypole asked.

‘I thought you were half Scottish? No matter. The
important thing is to show them there's a new sheriff in town. And there are worse crimes than being English. Just don't be posh.'