The Fanatic Read online

  ‘Aye, aye. I jist don’t like pigeon-holin folk. Ken, an early version o Jekyll and Hyde, earlier than Deacon Brodie even – it’s too pat.’

  ‘Well, jist brush him under the carpet then. Lea him alane. The last thing we need’s anither split fuckin personality. We’ve got mair than enough o them. Fuckin Scottish history and Scottish fuckin literature, that’s all there fuckin is, split fuckin personalities. We don’t need mair doubles, oor haill fuckin culture’s littered wi them. If it’s no guid versus evil it’s kirk elders versus longhairs, heid versus hert, Hieland and Lowland, Glasgow and Edinburgh, drunk men and auld wifies, Protestants and Catholics, engineers and cavaliers, hard men and panto dames, Holy Willies and holy terrors, you name it Scotland’s fuckin had it. I mean how long is this gaun tae go on, for God’s sake? Are we never gaun tae fuckin sort oorsels oot? I am talkin tae you, by the way.’

  ‘I ken. Hardie would say that’s fine. He would say it’s guid for business. Gies us somethin tae sell tae the tourists.’

  ‘Don’t come the bag wi that fuckin shite. Since when was that pricktugger a fuckin culture expert? And onywey, whit kinna basis is that for an economy? Whit gets sellt tae the tourists is an unreal picture o an unreal country that’s never gaun tae get tae fuckin grips wi itsel until it runs its ain affairs.’

  ‘Independence? The likes o Hardie would run a mile. We’d be like Switzerland. Dead borin, only withoot the money.’

  ‘Noo I ken ye’re playin the Devil’s advocate. Don’t fuckin mock the Swiss. You’ve been there. It’s a clean country, everybody’s got jobs, everybody uses the trains and they don’t fuckin go tae war wi onybody. The Swiss fuckin ken where it’s at, if ye ask me.’

  Carlin turned the backs of his legs to the fire again. ‘Your language,’ he said. ‘Away and wash yer mooth oot wi soap.’

  Carlin twitched the nylon fishing-line to make sure that the rat was free to run. He knew it would be but he couldn’t stop himself. He felt the weight of the rat shift slightly at the far end of the line, just a fraction of an inch, and let his fingers go slack again. Then he waited for the people to come.

  He was huckered against a wall halfway down a steep close between Victoria Street and the Cowgatehead. There was a dog-leg at this point, so that anyone descending could not see him until they turned the corner, and could not see the second half of the close until they turned again at the place where he was standing.

  He was wearing a long black cloak, fastened at the neck, over his ordinary clothes. When he walked the cloak billowed and swirled around him, but now, as he stood still, it hung limp and heavy like a shroud. Leaning next to him against the wall was a black wooden staff, as tall as himself, and surmounted by a misshapen knucklebone head. A straggly wig of wispy auld man’s grey hair fell about his neck, framing the ghastly whiteness of his face. The previous ghost, Hugh Hardie had said on the run-through that morning, had used clown make-up, but he didn’t think Carlin needed it.

  The close was little frequented by locals. It was not on an obvious route to a pub or other destination, and its length and dinginess gave it an unhealthy reputation. It was used by drunks and destitutes as a urinal more than as a throughway. Tourists were seen in it only if they had got lost. Or were on a ghost tour.

  The nylon line ran from his hand along the ground to a hole in the wall a few yards up the close, just before the dog-leg was reached. When the tour party reached this spot, the guide would bring everybody to a halt, and describe the living conditions of this part of Edinburgh in the seventeenth century. Hardie had rehearsed this with Carlin earlier. The guide would talk about the lack of sanitation and ask his listeners to step carefully. ‘This close was once called the Stinking Close,’ he’d say, ‘and it still in some respects is deserving of the name.’ ‘That,’ said Hardie, ‘is your cue, your amber light.’

  Carlin’s first task was to pull the large rubber rat, which was secured to the fishing-line through a hole in its mouth, across the ground and round the corner, causing alarms and excursions among the tourists as it skited over their feet.

  As soon as he’d reeled in the rat, he had to move on. The guide would usher the people on round the dog-leg. They were supposed to get a glimpse of swirling cloak and a shadowy figure carrying a long staff disappearing down the lower part of the close. ‘At the entrance onto the Cowgatehead,’ Hardie stressed, ‘stop and wait for a few seconds. You’ll be silhouetted in the archway. Turn and glare back up at them. It’ll look brilliant.’

  Meanwhile the guide would tell them the tale of Major Weir, pointing out that he had lodged just off this very close with his sister Grizel. He would describe how he had confessed his terrible crimes before a shocked assemblage of fellow Puritans; how he had been tried and convicted of incest, bestiality and witchcraft, and burnt at the stake on the road to Leith; and how poor, mad Grizel had tried to take off all her clothes on the Grassmarket scaffold before she was hanged, just a few yards from where they were now standing. Ever after, the Major and she would be collected at night in a black coach drawn by six flame-eyed black horses, and driven out of the town to Dalkeith, there to meet with their master the Devil. At other times the Major’s stick, with the satyr-heads carved on it which seemed to change shape and expression, would float through the dark wynds and closes, going like a servant before him and rapping on the doors of the terrified inhabitants.

  ‘As you have seen,’ the guide would say, ‘Major Weir lives on. Perhaps, as we journey through these old dark corners of Edinburgh, you may catch another glimpse of him …’

  And so they would. They’d turn into the Cowgate and see a tall, cloaked man moving silently along the wall ahead of them. They would follow him as the guide told more stories of ghosts and murders and other half-hidden horrors. They would be brought, by and by, back towards the High Street, where their tour had started, by a series of narrow stairs and closes. And at the last turn, those at the front of the party would find themselves staring up at the looming, gash-faced Major Weir, glowering disdainfully down his nose at them – just for a second or two, and then he’d be gone, and the adventure would be over. Tell your friends,’ the guide would conclude, ‘but – don’t tell them everything. Leave them to be unpleasantly surprised.’

  Hardie had handed Carlin the props – the wig, the cloak, the staff and the rat. ‘You hang onto them in the meantime,’ he’d said. ‘But don’t lose them. The other guy used to carry a plastic bag with him, to put the stuff in when he’d finished. He said he felt a bit of a prat walking home otherwise. But there’s not much you can do about the stick. Still, should stand you in good stead if anybody gives you any hassle, eh? Now, the tour kicks off at nine o’clock. It usually gets here at about half-past, but you’ll need to be in position ten minutes before that. And sometimes there’s a bit of rubbish lying about, you know, some broken glass or a few old cans. If you can kick anything like that to one side I’d appreciate it. I’m all for realism but we don’t want people stepping in anything too nasty.’

  Now Carlin waited. This was playing at history. He should chuck it. But it had kind of happened upon him, the whole thing. Because that was the way of it, he’d let it go on. In any case, he wanted to find out why he was like Major Weir. If he was like him.

  Linlithgow, September 1645

  The moor was a place of refuge. The boy saw that. In its endless browns and greens you could become nothing, be hidden from the eyes that sought you. You could coorie under a peat bank, in the oxter of a rock, or beneath the grass overhang of a burn. In winter, when the ground was a bog and the mist clung to it like a dripping blanket, men on horses could not follow you among the black pools and moss hags. You could be yards away and they’d never ken you were there. You’d be invisible. The only one you could never hide from, even out here in the worst of weather, was God.

  But this was September. The ground was as dry as it would ever be. The boy, hunkered in the sun on a grassy hummock pockmarked with burrows, picked up yellow-brown pellets from
the dirt and cut open a couple with his thumbnail. ‘Tabacca’s low,’ his uncle had said. ‘Awa up on the hill, James, and fetch us mair rabbit purls. Mind that they’re no full dried oot, but crotlie – like this, see.’ He handed him a twist of brown leaf, breaking it up with his fingers. ‘On yer wey then. Whit the sodgers dinna ken’ll no hurt them.’

  The boy fished the sample out of his pouch and compared it with the compacted shite in his palm. Slivers of grass, like colourless veins, were pressed into the tiny balls. He tore off some tobacco and stuck it in his mouth, began chewing on it. After a minute, when the first bitter shock had diminished and his mouth was filling with juice, he selected a rabbit pellet and pushed it in too, crushing it with his teeth. He couldn’t taste it under the flow of tobacco.

  He began to gather the purls, dozens of them, into the pouch. The town was a mile or two away, out of sight, a thin straggle of houses stretched beside a loch, dominated by the old royal palace which had lain empty and unused for years and was beginning to fall into disrepair. The army was encamped in and around the town, and under the walls of the palace. The boy was only eight, and might have been fearful alone on the moor, but he was not. He was used to being alone. Nothing much made him anxious.

  His uncle had come to Linlithgow because of the army, and when the army moved on so would he. He might take James with him but more likely he would return him to his mother in Falkirk. He sold goods to the soldiers: wee eating-irons, needles, cured and salted meat, eggs (if he could get them), anything not too bulky which a soldier might need or in his boredom might believe he wanted. But his main sales were of tobacco. The war had involved the movement of great numbers of troops throughout the country – not least when the Covenant had sent an army into England against the King the previous year – and demand for the weed had exploded. Some people in distant parts had never even seen tobacco, but they were quick to acquire a taste or a craving for it. Very few had much idea about the quality of what they were buying.

  A whaup flew overhead making its plaintive cry and the boy looked up at the long thin curve of its beak. He stood with his pouch of shite and walked to the top of the hummock, to see where it landed.

  On the other side, not twenty feet away, a man lay sleeping. The boy dropped onto his front and all the juice in his mouth burst out onto the grass with what seemed to him a horribly loud gurgle. For a minute he did not dare raise his head to take another look. When he did the man had not moved.

  The boy saw the chest rise and fall. A dark-faced man, in ragged, filthy clothing; his hair and beard thick, black and matted. The boy breathed in, deep but silent, and caught a stench like that of a fox. The man’s hands lay half-clenched at his sides. The boy could not see a weapon of any kind lying nearby.

  He was looking at an Irish. He had never seen one before but he kent that was what it was. One of the terrible Irishes from Montrose’s army, who had burned and murdered their way from Aberdeen to Dundee to Kilsyth. They ate bairns. If they couldn’t get enough Scots bairns to eat they boiled their own up in big pots and ate them. But the days of their terror were over. The Covenant had destroyed them a week past near a town called Selkirk, fifty miles away. Scotland was safe again and Montrose had fled back to the mountains of the north. Most of his men had been slaughtered in the battle; others had been caught and killed on the high ground between the border country and the Forth, the ground that stretched away south under the boy’s gaze.

  He thought of the rabble of women and boys, the camp followers, wives and sons of the Irishes, who had been captured and brought to Linlithgow. They had spent the night huddled up against the old walls of the great palace, seventy or eighty of them, staring glumly at their guards and the curious townsfolk, or breaking into the strange mutterings of their incomprehensible language. Their clothes were rags, their bodies were smoored in dirt, reddened with cuts and sores. Most of them had no shoes. The boy had watched them for a long while. Some of the lads looked about the same age as himself. In the shadow of the crumbling palace, the light cast by the fires they were permitted seemed to make them more like small demons than real people.

  That morning his uncle had warned him to keep away from the army camp and from the Irish prisoners. He was told he was too young to be among soldiers and see the things that they were sometimes obliged to do. Then he was packed off to the moor. But something special was happening in the camp, he could tell. The Irishes were being moved from the palace to the west port of the town, towards the river, where they were hidden from sight. The boy was desperate to go to the river but his uncle would have had him cutting and mixing wads of tobacco and rabbit shite all afternoon. Not now though. Not now that he had discovered the stray Irish.

  He kent what he had to do. He slid back down the slope on his belly, then got to his feet and crept away. Only when he was well out of earshot did he start to run.

  The Irish was a stranger in a strange land. He was weak, hungry and weaponless. He did not stand a chance.

  They brought him in to the town around noon, his wrists tied by a rope to the saddle of a trooper’s horse, like a stirk that had wandered. His eyes were wide and panicky, dangerous too; he looked as though he would break and run if he got the chance. Somebody asked the soldiers why they had bothered to bring him back. Why had they not struck him down on the moor as they had any others they’d found in the last week? One of the soldiers laughed and said they were taking him to be with his own kind.

  The boy ran beside them as they rode along the thick brown streak that was the town’s thoroughfare. The prisoner stumbled and the boy’s heart leapt. The Irish was his. His uncle would be proud of him.

  Folk from the town were hurrying back from whatever had been going on at the river. Some were laughing and shouting; others looked grim and tight-faced, shocked, even. They seemed hardly to notice the group of riders and their prisoner.

  The little procession went straight through the town, through the west port, towards the high bridge over the river. There were more people on the road, and many soldiers, armed with long pikes and swords. And here was a minister too, black among the buff leather and steel, holding out his hand to stop them. If anything made the boy anxious it was ministers. He knew they could be fierce as well as kindly; they were eloquent and decisive and when they spoke people listened. And he saw that they had something which other men, even if they carried swords and guns, did not necessarily have. They had power.

  ‘Where did ye find this ane?’ the minister asked.

  ‘Twa mile yonder, abune the toun,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘He was asleep when we took him.’

  ‘I fund him,’ said the boy. He could not bear to think that his part in it might not be mentioned.

  The minister bent towards him. He had a grey beard and grey hair which fell to his shoulders from beneath a tight black cap. ‘Did ye?’ he said. ‘And how did ye come tae be there?’

  The boy hesitated. He still clutched the pouch with its dubious contents. Some of the soldiers might be his uncle’s next customers.

  The minister crooked a finger. ‘Come here, lad. Ye needna be feart frae me. Whit is yer name?’

  ‘James. James Mitchel.’

  ‘Are ye feart frae me, James Mitchel?’

  ‘Na, sir. Only … I am feart frae God, and he is wi ye.’

  Somebody among the riders laughed, but the laugh was cut short by the minister’s swift glare. Even the horses stood quietly, heads bowed, in his presence.

  ‘The laddie’s richt,’ he said. ‘He is richt tae be feart frae God. See how God punishes them that resists him. Blessed is everyone that feareth the Lord. Tell me, James, were ye feart frae the Irish when ye fund him?’

  ‘Na, sir. I kent God wasna wi him. I ran, but I ran for help, no for I was feart.’

  ‘This is an uncommon bairn,’ said the minister. ‘Whase bairn is he?’

  ‘His faither’s deid,’ somebody said. ‘His uncle is Mitchel the packman.’

  ‘Mitchel the pauchler,
’ said another. There was laughter, and the boy’s face burned with shame. He wanted to change the subject.

  ‘Whit will happen tae him?’ he said, pointing at the Irish, who was watching the exchange with a blank and bewildered face.

  ‘He will be punished,’ the minister said. ‘Gie me yer hand, James.’ They stepped out of the road, and the minister waved the soldiers on. The prisoner was jerked forward on the rope. As he went he turned his head and fixed his eyes on the boy until the horses behind him obscured his view.

  The minister clapped James’s head. ‘He thinks you are the cause o his punishment. But ye’re no. You are only God’s instrument, delivering his enemies up tae him. Noo, let’s see if we canna find yer uncle.’

  James pulled away from him, in the direction the soldiers had taken. ‘I want tae see whit happens,’ he cried.

  ‘It’s no for your een. Come awa noo.’

  But the boy struggled harder, echoing back the minister’s own words. ‘I delivered him up tae God. Let me see where they’re takin him.’

  The minister seized him by both shoulders and lowered himself to his level. The blue eyes above the grey hairs on his cheeks seemed like pools of ice in deep caverns. The boy saw himself reflected in them.

  ‘Ye want tae witness God’s fury? Very weill then. But mind you are jist a bairn. Ye dinna ken yet whit God has in store for ye. He micht hae Heaven or Hell laid up for ye. Ye’re ower young tae ken. Sae think hard on whit ye see, James. I think ye are a guid laddie, a Christian laddie, but only God can look intae yer hert and ken the truth o it.’

  Then they were striding after the soldiers, towards yet more folk coming in the other direction. There was a silence on these ones like a heavy load. A man was staring at the ground as he walked, shaking his head.

  The minister began to call out as they went through them. ‘If it had not been the Lord who was on our side,’ he shouted, ‘if it had not been the Lord who was on our side, saith Israel, when men rose up against us, then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us.’