Cloudminding
‘CAPTAIN’S LOG: STARDATE 5818.4,’ BOB ANNOUNCED AS WE clambered awkwardly into the transport for our trip to the country.
Our chauffeur, Robin, had recently acquired new ‘wheels’. Unfortunately, the wheels were attached not to his skinny body but to an old hearse. The hearse didn’t appear to have been decommissioned in any way, I noticed — it still retained its bier, for example, thus making it rather difficult for people travelling in the back unless, like Bob, they were eager to lie horizontally and rehearse being a corpse. Terri settled for riding shotgun up front with Robin and brooding darkly for the entire journey. Now that she’d achieved her goal of a lift out to Balniddrie she had no intention of treating Robin like a human being.
As I squeezed myself reluctantly into the wreath-space at one side of Bob’s prone carcass I suddenly thought of Senga, cabined in her coffin in the Catholic church and now, presumably, locked away for ever underground. Andrea and Shug crammed themselves in opposite me so that we might have been at an Irish wake, but with no drink and a corpse that occasionally said to itself things like, ‘Can you repair the ship’s engines in time, Mr Scott?’
Driving a hearse didn’t worry him, Robin explained (although nobody had asked him to), because being a Buddhist he was phlegmatic about death, ‘Because I know I’ll come back.’
‘What as?’ Terri asked. ‘A protozoa?’
‘I think you’ll find,’ Robin said, ‘that protozoa is a plural form, it would have to be protozo on.’ Perhaps Robin was on such a tedious karmic journey that he would just come back as himself. I’m sure it was no coincidence that his name was almost an anagram of ‘boring’.
‘Reincarnation,’ Shug said hoarsely. ‘What goes around, comes around, eh?’ He lit up a joint that immediately filled the all-too-small space with a fug of acrid smoke. If we crashed how would the circumstances of my death ever be explained to my mother? (Or, rather, the woman who has masqueraded as my mother for the last twenty-one years.) Perhaps it would be some comfort that I had eliminated the middle-man and saved her the undertaker’s fees.
‘If you can say what it is, then that is not it,’ Robin said sententiously and apropos of nothing as far as I could see. Terri twirled her moth-eaten parasol menacingly in his direction.
‘Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other,’ a gnomic Bob contributed.
‘Pythagoras?’ Robin puzzled.
‘James T. Kirk.’
Robin manoeuvred the hearse away from the kerb and Bob shouted happily, ‘Warp speed, Mr Sulu.’ What a simple creature he was. If only my needs were as lacking in emotional complexity as Bob’s.
‘Eastern stuff,’ Robin said bobbishly, ‘it’s like so much more in touch with what’s really real. Stripped of materialism and intellectual bullshit. Look at the haiku.’ Robin thumped the steering-wheel of the hearse enthusiastically. ‘Compare that to the moribund structures of English poetry.’
‘What’s a haiku?’ Andrea asked.
‘It’s a three-line poem of five, seven and five syllables,’ Robin said, ‘so simple, so essential. The plural of haiku is haikai,’ Robin said, warming to his subject, ‘or at least that refers to a related series of haiku. The haiku was originally—’
‘The enormous dog stuck in a beautiful vase of white peonies,’ Bob said.
‘What?’ Robin gave Bob a worried look in the rear-view mirror of the hearse.
Bob lifted his shaggy head off the veneer and metal of the bier and declared, in a ponderously poetic way:
‘That’s a haiku. I’m a poet,’ he laughed, ‘and I know it.’
Bob himself had once tried to become a Buddhist — the sound of one hand clapping kept him occupied for days — but had given up in the end because he couldn’t see the point of it. Of course, much of Bob’s behaviour had a curiously Zen quality to it and if you viewed some of the things he said as koans rather than nonsensical rubbish he might have almost seemed wise. Almost. Take slugs, for instance, a genus of the animal kingdom particularly despised by Bob’s father, a keen vegetable grower. Wouldn’t it be less hassle, Bob Junior suggested, on a home visit during which Bob Senior was setting out endless beer traps for his pesty foe, wouldn’t it be less hassle if they simply bypassed the vegetables and ate the slugs?
‘And meditation,’ Bob said, staring at the ceiling of the hearse, ‘that ought to be easy, it’s just thinking about nothing, isn’t it? But when you try to think about nothing . . .’ Bob lapsed into a mystified silence, aided by the Curly-Wurly he’d just found in his greatcoat pocket.
We were accelerating along the Perth Road at a speed much faster than is normally associated with exequies and therefore causing considerable consternation amongst our fellow motorists, especially when we overtook them. A sedate Wolseley sedan containing an elderly couple mounted the pavement in distress and a rogue nun along Riverside crossed herself in horror. To make matters worse, we were in convoy with another of Balniddrie’s inhabitants, a fey former Harrovian called Gilbert who was driving an old ambulance — so it seemed as though we were hurrying to the aftermath of some dreadful disaster, rather than going for a simple trip to the country — although Bob, for some reason, seemed to be under the impression that we were on a starfleet expedition to collect the element zienite.
‘God,’ he said, once the Curly-Wurly allowed him to speak again, ‘do Buddhists believe in God? And what is God anyway? I mean, who’s to say I’m not God?’
‘There are standing stones at Balniddrie, you know,’ Andrea said, ignoring this metaphysical prattle. ‘They’re supposed to be seven sisters who were dancing on top of this hill and were turned to stone by an angry wizard.’
‘Why was he angry?’ Shug asked.
‘Oh, they always are,’ she said glumly.
Considering they lived at Balniddrie, Robin and Gilbert seemed woefully lacking in any understanding of how to get there so that we crossed and re-crossed our own path several times, even finding ourselves at one point driving through the flatlands of the Carse of Gowrie (or the boundaries of the Romulan Neutral zone, depending on who you were). The occupants of the hearse were no help with navigation as it appeared that none of us had a sense of direction. Bob had once famously caught the circular bus and been trapped on it for hours and I, of course, have been lost all my life.
‘Wow,’ Bob said, peering like a curious cadaver through the window of the hearse, ‘cows.’
Andrea frowned at him and said to me, ‘He doesn’t get out much, does he?’
Robin executed a death-defying U-turn at the Errol turn-off. Not long after that it began to hail, huge mothballs of ice clattering against the windscreen. The hailstones began to accumulate, obscuring the view of the road because the windscreen wipers of the hearse had long since given up the ghost, as it were.
The purpose of two lengths of hitherto mysterious string was now revealed by Robin. One of the pieces of string came in through the driver’s window of the hearse, the other through the passenger window. Robin tugged at his piece of string and one of the windscreen wipers jerked towards him.
‘See?’ Robin said hopefully to Terri. ‘Your turn now.’ Her reply was succinct and negative.
Robin eventually gave the hearse its head and it nosed patiently through the hinterland of the Carse and along the long straight avenues of trees that are the back roads of Angus.
‘Wow, sheep,’ Bob said.
Finally, the hearse made a left turn at a sign that said ‘Wester Balniddrie’, and progressed up a rough road to a boxy old farmhouse that was harled and painted a darker shade of sky, which is to say grey.