The Fanatic Read online

  Carlin felt the polis’s handmark burning through his shirt. He took the guy’s books and distributed them back to their correct places.

  Alison passed him with her coat on, heading for the exit. ‘Hope ye’re proud o yersel,’ she said. He didn’t answer.

  He headed round to the pub. A pint and a dram. A pint and a dram. A pint and a dram. As they went down the words were swirling in the tilt of the glasses. Proud o yersel. Proud o yersel. Proud o yersel.

  When he stumbled back to the flat, hours later, and looked at himself, haggard, bubbly, wretched, the mirror was silent.

  In the morning, he walked to the nearest phone-box and called the infirmary. He wanted to check on somebody admitted last night, he said. He gave the details: picked up by ambulance, about ten, the address. No, he wasn’t a relative, he didn’t know the man’s name. He worked in the bookshop. He was just concerned.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ the receptionist said.

  He held the receiver under his chin and closed his eyes. He heard the breathing he made below the hiss in his lug. He felt himself slump against the news he knew was coming.

  ‘Hello,’ said the woman.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Did you say you were a relative?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was workin in the shop where he was … where he was picked up. I was jist wonderin.’

  ‘We don’t know who he is yet,’ she said. ‘That’s why I asked.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Then …’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t make it. Sorry.’

  Carlin sat in the pub. Nine years gone and only the posters for Fringe shows were different. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. How could it not have after that night? He’d brought an anonymous man to a small hot concrete cell and sat with him while he overdosed and died. He’d handed over the water to help the pills go down.

  He still saw the guy. Sometimes he was lying in a shop entrance. Sometimes he was fucked out of his head in Princes Street Gardens, the Meadows, Calton Hill. Sometimes he was old, sometimes younger. He’d seen him just a week ago. This time he was a big fellow, tall and strong-looking, slumped against the railings of St John’s Church at the West End. Two polis, a man and a woman, were standing beside him. A polis van was pulling up alongside. The two officers were snapping on plastic gloves.

  Carlin had handed in his notice at the shop. He’d had holidays due. He went sick for a week. Never went back. He became a regular fixture in the pub. One day, on his way to or from it, he couldn’t be sure which, he realised he hadn’t called his mother. He did this once a week, an obligation, to check that she was all right. He stopped at the first phone box he came to.

  The voice that answered sounded like his mother’s, but it wasn’t. It was her sister. ‘Andra,’ she said, as soon as he spoke. ‘Ye’ll need tae come hame. Yer ma’s no lang for this world, son.’

  He sobered up on the train, but he’d have been better taking a carry-out. By the time he reached Stirling he felt dreadful: sore head, bones, belly, everything. His aunt’s husband met him on the platform. They had to take a taxi straight to the infirmary, he told him. She’d been dwining away all afternoon.

  They got there ten minutes too late. His mother looked tiny and unreal in the bed. He put the back of his hand to her parchment cheek and was surprised at the feathery feel of it.

  ‘Did she say anything?’ he asked his aunt.

  ‘Aye. She sat up and asked for yer faither. That was aboot three oors ago. Since then, naethin.’

  ‘Whit did she say?’

  ‘She said, is that Eddie? Quite loud, like that. Like she was in a panic, feart or something. Mebbe she seen him, I dinna ken. I calmed her doon, I says, dinna fret Mary, there’s naebody here but us. She was quite placid eftir that. Lay back doon and niver said anither word.’

  Of the two deaths, the one that left him most bereaved was the guy’s, the junkie’s. He started to think of him as John because he couldn’t bear the anonymity. His mother was old and had been dying for years. He didn’t know what age John had been. He guessed about twenty-five. Younger than himself, for sure. That was the thing. When you saw someone go out of the world before their time, it was like death tapping you a reminder – This is ma fuckin life!

  For months the mirror gave him nothing. When finally it did, it mocked him. ‘Don’t fuckin kid me ye’re grievin for Johnny lad. Who was he onywey? Jist a junkie. So yer mither’d been dyin for years, that cunt was dyin frae the day he was born. And awright, you gied him the water but ye didna gie him the pills or aw the ither shite he had jaupin aboot in his system.

  ‘Forget him.’

  Bass Rock, April 1677/Edinburgh,

  December 1666

  James Mitchel was trying to persuade himself that he did not miss freedom. He had to keep telling himself that freedom was nothing, that even in a filthy prison on a barren rock you could be as free in the love of Christ as you could be anywhere. He remembered Samuel Rutherford again, writing from Aberdeen exile: I have learnt not to mourn after or seek to suck the world’s dry breasts. Nay, my Lord hath filled me with such dainties that I am like a full banqueter, who is not for common cheer. He wished he had Rutherford’s conviction. He wished he had Rutherford’s poetry in his own heart. He wished he had the book of letters by him: it had been a great source of strength in the years of his own exile and wandering through the world. He could still mind other phrases: The world is not my home, nor my Father’s house; it is but his foot-stool – let bastards take it … The greatest temptation out of hell is to live without temptations … Faith is the better for the free air and the sharp winter-storm in its face … Grace withereth without adversity … Now I say to laughter, ‘Thou art madness’. When he turned these words over in his head they were like names on a map of his own life.

  Rutherford had been a leading light of the General Assembly of 1638, the mighty Glasgow Assembly which threw out the bishops and re-established Presbyterianism. For two years before that he had been banished from the Lowlands to Aberdeen, forbidden to preach publicly because of his attacks on the Englishman Laud, him that had tried to force the prayer book down Scotland’s thrapple. Rutherford had sent a stream of inspirational letters to his friends and supporters from the grey north. It was these that had been gathered into a book after his death.

  Mitchel had met the man who had published it. His name was Robert MacWard and he had for a while been Rutherford’s secretary. After the Restoration settlement in 1661 which brought the bishops in again, MacWard had been imprisoned and then driven abroad. He had settled in Rotterdam, a refuge and a glowing forge for holiness. That was where Mitchel had met him, ten years ago. MacWard was as fierce a saint as any. He had been patronising, almost dismissive of Mitchel, and would doubtless have forgotten him entirely by now if God had not chosen him to be the instrument of his wrath. James Mitchel, the slow, the weak-minded, the stickit minister – raised from obscurity by the design of God. Mysterious and wonderful his ways! None of them would forget him now – not one of them.

  His leg felt better today, but he was not allowed out to walk on the Rock like the others. He was still the subject of a stricter regime. Some days the soldiers let him sit outside, but on others – it seemed to depend on how vindictive the garrison captain was feeling – he would be left in his cell, deprived even of a few minutes’ proper daylight, and this was very hard to thole.

  Some of the private soldiers had become friendlier to him. He was not a minister, he was a man of action, and they admired that. They admired the fact of his torture too: it raised him in their eyes. They would offer him tobacco, and sometimes if the officers were not around they would sit in his cell and smoke with him. This was ironic. Before his imprisonment he and Elizabeth had run a stall selling spirits and tobacco in Edinburgh, and she still did. It was their only source of income, and if she had been allowed onto the Rock she could have kept him and the soldiers well supplied. But he had not seen Elizabeth for fifteen mont
hs: even when held in Edinburgh he had, by the orders of Sharp, been denied all visitors.

  The soldiers wanted to hear about the assassination attempt, but Mitchel was careful to say little on that subject, and certainly did not admit his own part in it. For all their friendliness, it was possible they were being paid to extract information, so that later they could be used as witnesses against him. But he had no objection to talking about it in general terms. After all, he had never denied that he’d been in Edinburgh on the day, 9 July 1668. On the contrary, he told them, he had been one among the crowd who searched for the attacker.

  The soldiers hated the Bass at least as much as did those they guarded. They did not care about the rights and wrongs of religion, and so had no reason to practise the patience of martyrs. The place was a hell-hole and anybody who said otherwise deserved to be rotting in it. They did not understand the ministers’ relative calmness. Of course, even as prisoners the ministers had a better life than the soldiers. Some of them had servants with them; they were sent food and messages of comfort from Scotland; their families received support from loyal congregations. The soldiers, on the other hand, had nothing. Their boots leaked, they had rotten teeth and little money. They feared their captain, and were indifferent to their prisoners. All that was certain in their life was the constant cry and stench of the solan geese.

  One of the soldiers, an old veteran called Tammas, had been a member of the Edinburgh Town Guard in the sixties. Mitchel had a vague feeling that he knew his face. At first this made him extremely wary, but as time went on he realised that if Tammas had ever seen him before he either did not remember or did not care.

  Tammas was ugly beyond redemption: he had two lower teeth sticking up like fence palings at the front of his mouth, and one or two others still serviceable at the back. His nose had been broken so often that it seemed to have no bone left in it at all: a battered auld neep gone soft in the middle of his face. His cheeks had been badly marked by a pox of some kind. Between the pits and sores reddish hair grew in feeble patches.

  ‘I kept watch ower the Archbishop’s hoose when the rebels cam oot the west in the year ‘66,’ Tammas told him. ‘The rebels – or whitiver ye’d cry them – that mairched frae Dumfries tae the Pentlands, and wis bate by mad Tarn Dalyell the Muscovite.’ He pointed his pipe at Mitchel. ‘Ye wouldna hae been mixed up in thon, would ye?’

  Mitchel shook his head. The gesture was not quite a lie. It had been late November, grey, wet and miserable. He had ridden out from Edinburgh to join the tiny Covenanter force – you could not have called it an army – and had actually spent the night before the battle in the field with them. But in the morning, against all his protestations, he had been sent back to the town with sealed messages for certain parties. He never knew what was in those messages: by the time he had ridden round the government troops, and before he could deliver the letters, the news that Dalyell had routed the insurgents after a fierce engagement was racing through the streets at his heels. He burnt the letters and wondered what to do next.

  ‘That auld bastart Andra Ramsay was feart that somebody would hae a crack at pistollin Sharp or cuttin his thrapple, and he would get the wyte for no lookin eftir him,’ said Tammas. ‘So ye michtna hae been the first tae try it, and ye’ll no be the last,’ he added, trying to catch Mitchel’s eye. ‘Onywey, we was ordered tae staun watch on the street ootside his hoose aw nicht, in case o an attack. In November, man! The only yins that was gaun tae be deid in the mornin was us, wi the cauld. Sae we kept oorsels warm by raisin an alarm ivery hauf an oor. It was “Staun tae!” and “Haud, or I fire!” aw nicht. The bishop was fair dementit atween want o sleep and fear o bein murdered in his bed. Eftir the first couple o nichts he gaed up tae the castle and lodged there insteid.’

  Dalyell had brought the captured Covenanter remnant in from Rullion Green, and his troops had roamed through the town, hunting out sympathisers. Mitchel’s name had somehow got on the wanted list. In growing horror he watched from the shadows as men known to him from Galloway and elsewhere were brought before the courts, found guilty of sedition and armed rebellion, and condemned to death. Through the first two weeks of December the town pulsed with a terrible excitement. On the seventh the first ten condemned men were hanged on a single, groaning cross-tree at the Mercat Cross in the High Street. The crowd was muted, sullen. They knew that many of the defeated Covenanters had been armed only with heuks and graips and whittles. The bodies were dismembered and the heads sent back to be stuck on the gates of their home towns in the west. Their ten right hands, which had been raised in solemn oath when the Covenant was renewed at Lanark, were sent to adorn the roof of the tolbooth there. On the fourteenth a second batch of prisoners was executed.

  ‘Man, thon was fierce times,’ Tammas continued. ‘There was mair bluid in the syvers than ye’d see on a mercat day. They werena aw hingit, of coorse. There was some puir bastarts that set oot tae walk jist frae Dumfries tae Edinburgh that niver stopped till they reached Barbados. Ye’d hope they were the lucky yins but I mind thinkin ye couldna get closer tae hell than a passage in the kyte o a plantation ship. I hadna seen this place in thae days, richt enough. But it was worse for ithers. There was a young minister, a fell guid-lookin man, that aw the women were grievin ower, that wis pit tae the boots afore he was killt –’ Tammas broke off in midflow and stared guiltily at Mitchel’s leg. ‘Christ save us, I’m sorry, sir.’

  Mitchel excused Tammas with a wave of his hand: the profanity offended him more than the talk of torture. ‘Hew McKail,’ he said. ‘The minister was cried Hew McKail. If iver there was a saint, it was him.’

  Tammas nodded. ‘The womenfolk doted on him, if that’s a sign o haliness,’ he said thoughtfully.

  Not just the womenfolk. Mitchel had mingled in the crowd at the Mercat Cross to see him die. McKail was twenty-six, just a few years younger than himself, and a brilliant, enigmatic preacher. Ill health had kept him from being in the field at Pentland, but his reputation as a relentless critic of the government made him far more dangerous than any cottar with a heuk. He was arrested trying to return home to Lanarkshire, brought to the capital and tortured for information on other insurgents. Refusing to co-operate, he was sentenced to die on 22 December. A plea was lodged for clemency, but there would be no mercy for a man who, in a sermon preached at St Giles, had referred to the King as an Ahab on the throne, and to James Sharp as a Judas in the kirk.

  Six men were to die that day. At their last meal in prison, McKail had encouraged their appetites: ‘Eat to the full, and cherish your bodies, that we may be a fat Christmas pie to the prelates.’ News got around Edinburgh fast at such times. When McKail appeared on the scaffold, white-faced and dragging his ruined leg behind him, half the people gathered there already knew the joke he had made the night before, when asked if he was in pain: ‘Oh,’ he had replied, ‘the fear of my neck makes me forget my leg!’ Now it seemed as though the entire world fell silent as it watched him struggle to keep upright. Here was a man going to his death and already like an angel. Women began to greet and there was a rumble of anger through the crowd, but McKail held up his hands and the people fell silent.

  The crush in the street was oppressive; every window overlooking the scaffold was packed with faces. The Privy Council had placed McKail on the greatest stage he could have wished for. Mitchel felt he would faint like a woman at the passion and simplicity with which the condemned man addressed the crowd. He would speak no more with flesh and blood, he said, but begin his intercourse with God, which would never be broken off. He would bid farewell to his father and mother and to his friends, farewell to the light of the sun and the moon, and enter into eternal light, eternal life and everlasting love and glory. He pulled himself up the ladder with difficulty and then spoke again:

  ‘This is sair work, friends, but every step on this ladder is a step closer tae Heaven.’ His voice faded a little and some of his next words were lost in a new sound; a swelling, prolonged groan, that Mitch
el realised was coming from himself and from the people round him. ‘Welcome sweet Jesus Christ,’ McKail was saying, almost singing, ‘welcome blessed Spirit of grace, and God of all consolation! Welcome glory! Welcome eternal life! Welcome death!’ The crowd was now ecstatic in its anguish. Men and women alike were sobbing and holding up their hands to the figure on the scaffold. There were soldiers in solid ranks around the platform, and their officers looked terrified at the effect McKail was having. But McKail had finished. He gave a sort of wave and turned to the rope. A minute later he was swinging like a sack of straw from the gibbet. A man positioned below him jumped up and clung onto his legs. There was a dreadful choking sound, then silence, but the man held on for as long as he could, like one insect trying to mate with another. Mitchel recognised him as a cousin of McKail’s. He would have paid the hangman to allow him in close, to speed young Hew on his way to Heaven.

  Mitchel left the Grassmarket with tears streaming down his cheeks. He made no effort to hide his face, although he was probably safe enough – if the troops had tried to make any arrests there would have been a riot. He was transfixed by what he had seen. McKail had been noble, visionary. It was as if he had left his broken body even as he steered it up the ladder, and was flying like a dove into Paradise. Mitchel was in awe. Mitchel was in admiration. Mitchel was jealous.

  He wanted what McKail had. He wanted that purity of vision, that transcendence. He wanted the adoration of the crowd. But you would get these things not by deception or manipulation. As with McKail, they would come through faith, devotion to the cause, and through clarity of purpose.

  Mitchel was no preacher. In his heart he knew it. He had struggled for that gift but he could not unleash the rivers of prayer that had gushed from the lips of men like Rutherford or McKail. God must not mean to speak through him in that way. Then how? Through deeds, perhaps, not words.