25.

□ Later that same day while Heery boiled the hairy tatties that the anarchists called their lunchtime meal, I wandered to the front door of their house and walked down the street, a few experimental metres towards the city. The Victoria Bridge which led from Torry to Aberdeen flashed with cars and lorries, scraps of painted metal which passed at the same speed and in the same direction. I looked to see if I was being followed. I could see the ruined block that Heery, and those others, called a home. It was charming, like a half-broken piano. The upper windows were cracked and the roof was laden with weeds. It was the sort of place officialdom despised because it had no address. It was a house in only a few respects, but I imagined that it had once been very grand. Somewhere in there, Heery (banging on the potlids, blowing in the kettle) sang his praise of green fruits, and I tramped quietly out of the town.

There are different kinds of suicide in this world and only a handful of them result in immediate death. Some suicides drink themselves to death over a forty-year period. Their theatrical side materialises in the emptiness at the end of each drinking bout and in the stagecraft of their decline. Other people, like Liska, are able to get it over with in less than forty seconds.

The sky was chalky and for a moment I was wonderfully unfamiliar with who I was and why I was heading towards the suburbs of Aberdeen, where the city housed its mighty car parks, and the endless ranges of its shopping centres. I arrived at the dual carriageway of the Aberdeen City bypass, or what is more commonly referred to as the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route — and Liska blinked, sensitive to the spray of the sea — she choked in both her stomach and in her throat, hands upward. Soon it would be her funeral and I didn’t want to be around for that.

Trucks hammered along and I followed them for several hours, enough to put distance between myself and those that might want to speak to me. I blasted down the mud of the verge and felt in control once again, my thoughts drowned by the noise of the traffic. The bypass was a satisfying place to grieve, as if the relentless vehicles could give me a real break from people. Only on the bypass did I find within myself the meditative peace that I needed.

cf. Robert Morris : Continuous Project Altered Daily (1969) Castelli Warehouse, aluminium, asphalt, clay, copper, felt, glass, lead, nickel, rubber, stainless steel, thread, zinc. A world of non-containment.

I stopped when I reached the service station at Clinterty, just as night dawned on the country. The services were a head of brightly-lit concrete, nestled at the foot of Kirkhill Forest. A car park and forecourt were scratched into the evening, and a short row of trucks grimaced as the light failed behind them into the hill. The name of an oil conglomerate pierced the scene from on high, in lines of green brocade, and underneath, lay a tender pattern of grass and bushes.

I walked across the car park, ignorant of the customs of the night and was nearly run down by an expensive motor. Car tyres crept along the ground and shivers ran through every organ. I made it behind the service building and approached the steep area of grass where there was no light — and that’s where I lay down — up a grass slope and behind the cafeteria.

I crawled to sleep. This was my bush for the night, a warm six-legged stamen of a root with a flowered head of green. It was comfortable but the moment that I dozed, under the pins and needles of the night, I heard the mourning voice of Liska.

My eyes wouldn’t close, you see, it was as if the lids would only rest, and although it was night time, there was still too much light intruding. My feet buzzed, fortified with bad blood, all the protein of the day settling in my soles like fatty acid. My teeth stuck together like their wood had melted with sugar. It was the first time Liska properly visited me after her death, and she was ready with the question I most feared.

“Why didn’t you jump when you had the chance?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t figure it out. I was in love with you. I wanted to be an artist.”

“Not until you’re dead,” she said. “You can’t be an artist until you’re dead. In the meantime, artistic lifestyle is a contradiction.”

“Don’t say that,” I said to Liska. “I feel so guilty.”

I watched Liska float across my vision and wondered if she was right.

An engine blew to life in the car park and I opened my eyes in time to see a silo-sized bubble of lead exhaust blow up from a nearby lorry. I didn’t dare think about being forgiven for what I had failed to do, and so I dozed in that old bush at the back of the service station, settled on the damp ground within earshot of the road. The sound of the road became that of an organ pipe, it rose and died and renewed like the drone of an emergency warning — and I was at rest — almost at home, having found limbo once again.