Whirligig (8 page)

‘Right. Yeah. I couldn't… Right. But…' He took a sip of his water. ‘Aren't you posh, though, Peregrine?'

‘Yes, quite so,' said the older man. ‘But we're not a unified tribe. Posh Scots absolutely hate each other.'

Claypole could not help but smile.

‘It's true,' said Peregrine with gravity. ‘When any two members of the Scottish upper class meet, they are mutually suspicious, and with good reason. There is the distinct likelihood that an ancestor on one side probably diddled, raped or killed an ancestor on the other side. Given all these ancient internecine loathings, it's a wonder we still marry each other. And we go through life being as loud and as weird as we like.'

Peregrine leaned back.

‘Take my old chum Crispian Mount…'

Lord Mount, according to Peregrine, never left his monstrous, freezing castle in a flat and rain-drenched part of the far north, and his main entertainment was to threaten the guests at his strange dinner parties. ‘Now then, Bubble,' he would bellow to the woman on his left and gesture to a man halfway down the table but very much within earshot, ‘do you mind awfully if I bump off your fat friend? Never killed a fat man, see?' When informed that the man was in fact her husband, Mount would merely laugh and pronounce, ‘Ah well, there's profit in the enterprise then.' The man in question, quartered alone in a chilly dungeon, would not sleep well. Mount himself was known to sleep in nothing but a cummerbund.

‘Anyway, look,' said Peregrine, looking at his watch. ‘I assume your great business brain is forming a plan
as to how to banjax these blasted local councillors at this evening's meeting.'

Claypole's face registered confusion.

‘At the community hall.' Peregrine frowned.

‘Oh. Yeah.' But before Claypole could quiz his business partner further about this public meeting, a man wearing a luminous tabard was upon them.

‘You the 4.30? Over to the west, aye?' The man had addressed Peregrine.

‘That's me,' said Claypole.

Claypole had imagined his PR offensive – the new sheriff gambit, as Peregrine had put it – starting with disembarkation at Loch Garvach from some sort of jet, with Claypole kissing the ground and shaking hands with emissaries bearing chains of office. But emerging from the craft which he and Peregrine now beheld on the damp tarmac would not be so impressive. The four-seater plane was painted in two shades of brown, comically squat and of early 1970s vintage. But Peregrine was making up for Claypole's disappointment with boyish excitement as they squeezed into the tiny charter, courtesy of Claypole's credit card.

‘I say,' said Peregrine cheerily. ‘This certainly beats taking the bus.'

After an uncomfortable take-off, they banked and turned west, West Lothian opening up below them in bumpy fits. The engine was hard at work, and conversation was impossible, so Claypole pressed his head against the cold window and watched the world underneath them. They passed over Silicon Glen in the central belt of Scotland. Where once the economy of middle Scotland had mined coal and then made semiconductors, it now had call centres and
Amazon.com
. Claypole caught sight of a wind farm, looking small in
the grand sweep of the landscape and snuggled next to a motorway. Just a few minutes later they winged over the vast sprawl of Glasgow – home of sectarian football, boiled sweets and fine art. Then further west, over the mountains of the Highlands, the purple and the green rising up as if to kiss the small plane. Coyly it reeled upwards and away from the embrace of the land, and then dipped down, teasing the ground to rise up again. Lochs, both the still, brown inland version and the inlets of the choppy, grey sea began to appear more frequently below them, interspersed with steamy pine forest.

Claypole almost never thought about Scotland. He classed anywhere that was ten Tube stops from Marble Arch as ‘the countryside', and tried to keep time spent there to a minimum. This despite the fact that his parents – and after the age of ten, just his mother – had whenever possible bussed him from the southern English market town where they lived into what she called ‘greenery'. Claypole had protested that all countryside was ‘full of people who had failed'. (It was a line he had got from a newspaper columnist in pursuit of cheap Saturday morning laughs, but he had been happy to recycle it as his own coinage.) But relentlessly these excursions had continued. Creeping down the A303 at half-term to childless friends of his mother's in Cornwall, eating fish-paste sandwiches in the Hillman Hunter in front of raging seas, and the interminable summers in Scotland for as long as his grandmother lived. In those damp rented cottages, he had stayed moodily indoors, fitting together thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles of HMS
Victory
and mildly racist depictions of African scenes, openly wishing for a return to concrete and real life.

So, while he did not particularly look forward to being a part of the scenery he saw below him, at least being spokesman for a wind farm in the undeniably attractive Scottish countryside would be easy. The backwaters of Loch Garvach, after all, could not be remotely as shark-infested as the editing suites of Soho. The work, in any case, was a secondary goal compared to that of persuading Coky to…

Claypole felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Peregrine with headphones on, offering him a similar pair. Peregrine adjusted the microphone in front of his mouth, flicked a switch and urged Claypole to do the same.

‘Hello!' said Claypole.

Peregrine winced. ‘These things are pretty good at picking up a normal voice, old boy. No need to shout.'

Claypole looked down again at the forests, incongruously neat green blankets of regimented planting lines in the rocky chaos surrounding them.

‘So, what are you going to say at this meeting, old boy?' Peregrine asked.

‘What?'

‘Your speech. To the community meeting.' Peregrine smiled.

Claypole's eyes widened in alarm. In response, so did Peregrine's.

‘What? You mean I've got to –'

‘Christ! Don't tell me Coky didn't… She must have thought that I –'

‘Maybe Coky did tell me. I'm afraid I…'

‘Right.'

In wide-eyed silence, they both computed the crossed wires that must have occurred. Then they rallied.

‘So. Well. I'll just, brr –'

‘Yes. Just…'

‘Talk the thing up a bit.'

‘That's the spirit. Give 'em a bit of la-di-da,' said Peregrine.

‘Right.'

‘King Hal at Agincourt. Fighting spirit and all that. Good man. Terrific.'

The men looked out of different windows for a full minute.

‘Ooh, hullo. Doors to manual!' announced Peregrine, and the plane began a steep descent into Loch Garvach.

The reception committee at Loch Garvach airfield consisted of a man in turned-down black wellies and a bulky white sweater, a crew-cut youth with a clipboard and Coky Viveksananda, grimacing stoically against the wet wind. Claypole had so wanted to emerge from the plane – his plane – like a billionaire in the making, and doubly so now that Coky was watching. But owing to the minuteness of the plane and the tremendous size of his rucksack, he ended up having to get out of the plane in an ungainly bum-first fashion. Peregrine sprang deftly onto the tarmac like a rock star, lit a cigarette and bounced towards Coky.

‘Darling!' he trumpeted and stooped to kiss his niece, a gesture she more allowed than participated in. Claypole dawdled behind Peregrine, hoping that following on the heels of Peregrine's kiss, he would be allowed to do the same. So when Peregrine moved aside, he began to lean in towards her. But Coky stuck out a hand for him to shake.

‘Hey, Gordon,' she said warmly.

‘Hey, Coky.' He reeled backwards. ‘What an unexpected –'

‘Claypole!' said Peregrine, offering the man in wellies, whose thick white hair remained impervious to the wind as Claypole's few purple-black wisps danced manically. ‘This is Tommy Thompson. Old friend, stand-up chap, and importantly for us, a local councillor and chairman of the planning committee.'

Of indeterminate age between fifty and eighty, Tommy Thompson's face was a medieval field of lines and pits, the colour of smoked mackerel. He looked more like a fisherman than a politician, and his demeanour suggested that he owed deference to no man.

‘Tommy, this is Claypole. He's going to be helping out with the wind farm.'

‘Aye,' said Tommy Thompson, and fixed Claypole with an intense look from under wiry salt-and-pepper eyebrows. Claypole nodded and moved swiftly to shake the hand of the boy with the clipboard, who blushed instantly.

‘That's an airport chap,' said Peregrine quickly.

‘Oh,' said Claypole.

‘Hullo,' said the boy sheepishly, and darted away to minister to the plane.

‘I have arranged a room at the hotel and a car for you, Mr Claypole,' said Tommy Thompson.

‘It's just Claypole,' said Claypole, and added his thanks. As they set off towards the car park, Claypole strode ahead of the party. He had read in a magazine that the person with the highest status always gets into a waiting limousine first. So he walked quickly and hopped through the gate in the perimeter fence well in front of everyone else, scanning the car park. There
was a Royal Mail van, a mud-spattered four-wheel drive with a child asleep in the back seat and a lorry which to judge by its livery contained a large quantity of crisps. None of these looked like a suitable vehicle for a visiting dignitary. Peregrine, Tommy Thompson and Coky arrived next to him.

‘Behind the truck,' said Tommy Thompson as he pressed a keyfob and a shaft of orange light briefly lit up the gloom behind the crisps lorry.

‘I thought you'd probably like something with a small carbon footprint,' said Tommy Thompson. ‘What with you being a green.'

It was an electric car in a shade of aquamarine found only in lycra on the legs of Miami trophy wives. It was laterally squished as if it had been in a cartoon crash and clearly designed to carry nothing larger than a couple of anorexic seventeen-year-olds. Claypole was handed the keys, and the four of them walked around the car in silence, examining it as a school of sardines might regard a tin.

On the twenty-minute journey along the coast road to the town of Garvachhead, Peregrine and Tommy Thompson squatted in the back, their grey heads bent together and giggling like schoolboys. Coky was hunched in the front, dwarfed by Claypole's rucksack on her lap, and with Peregrine's briefcase cramping her legs. The car shook and twitched violently at even the tiniest gasp of wind, and Claypole sweated and strained like a fighter pilot as he drove.

A road sign said ‘Garvachhead' in black, and ‘
Céann Loch Garbhach
' again in green. Claypole spoke to the rucksack next to him.

‘What's with the Gaelic?' he said.

‘For the tourists,' said the rucksack. ‘Here we are. Opposite the hotel.'

A dim blue light shone outside a small granite building, and Claypole slowed. ‘Police', it said reassuringly in 1950s script. Next to it, the community hall announced its presence with a red-and-white canvas banner lashed to the front of its breeze-block facade. Across the road, ‘Loch Garvach Hotel' in austere letters across the front of a whitewashed building with black windows announced Claypole's residence for the duration. Outside it were half a dozen male smokers, stoically and silently puffing away. One of them, a dark-haired shambles in a donkey jacket, caught sight of them and tapped a lanky and bearded compadre on the shoulder. The two of them glared at the car with purpose.

‘Who's that?' Claypole looked at the dark-haired man, who stared back. ‘They look like Swampy's dad and Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo
.'

‘Listen, Gordon,' Coky turned to him. ‘Just keep it short, OK?'

‘Ha,' he said. He thought better of telling her that he had no speech, and that therefore keeping it short would not be a problem. ‘Brr. Piece of cake.'

‘Don't underestimate them just because they're country people. Some of them are extremely good at getting what they want.'

‘I suppose the wicked witch is coming?' This was Peregrine, from somewhere behind and above Claypole's left ear. Coky did not answer as she opened the passenger door and wriggled out from beneath the rucksack.

Inside the hall, Claypole was ushered into a seat on the first row of chairs in front of a wooden stage. Peregrine and Coky sat either side of him. The rest of
the gathering numbered no more than fifty. Tommy Thompson positioned himself on the stage behind a long formica table, an efficient smile on his lips. On his left, sitting with her arms folded, was a woman in her sixties with a shelf-like bosom and half-moon spectacles. She was looking at Claypole with the curiosity a child gives a struggling beetle. On Tommy Thompson's right was a man in bottle-bottom spectacles, grey jacket and brown v-neck jumper. Tommy Thompson banged a gavel and the room settled quickly.