 
The Words of the Mouth

By Ronald Smith

Published by Ronald Smith at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Ronald Smith

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CHAPTER ONE

I sold cannabis to students at the University, outside the Appleton and the David Hume Towers - jarring modern glass and concrete shoe-boxes looming over one end of a once elegant Georgian Square with its central green still intact.

My first real ambition had been to study at Art College, but, incomprehensibly, I had failed the entrance exam; incomprehensibly, because I had been the most talented student in my art class at Edinburgh's Napier College, according to the teacher. I was sure I had done well in the exam and the result was a shattering blow: a cruel and malicious rejection of my youthful dreams.

I had a friend, Ian, who got a summer job with the Scottish Education Department filing exam results, and I asked him to find out what went wrong, since the results for the separate papers were kept secret. He looked up my file.

For Line Drawing, I had been awarded the top mark in Scotland.

For Design, my abstract, futuristic entry had earned me no more than a pass.

In Composition, the set theme - 'The Dictator' - had inspired me to do a painting of Mussolini making a speech. I recalled that the art master had said to me, "Will, you should be doing A level art, not Higher; keep this painting for the A-level,"

But I submitted it anyway, and got well over a pass.

Then came the question: "You are to hold an exhibition which can include any paintings in the world; which ones would you choose?"

Naturally, I decided that over half the pictures would be my own; I was developing my own style and I wasn't interested in what other artists did; something in me blanked off when I tried to look at their paintings. But I did include a token Dali, and a Picasso.

My answer must have infuriated the examiners.

Although I had an overall pass mark, there is a clause that states if a candidate fails any one part, he can be failed if the examiners so wish it.

And that was what they did.

It was the last straw; I had had enough of their rotten system which had frustrated and humiliated me all through school, and now this.

I decided to become a drug dealer.

I had several friends who did the same, but our operations were somewhat cramped because of a plainclothes policeman who had been hanging about the George Square area since a minor student occupation in 1968, the year when fashionable "revolution" swept the student world and they rioted, invaded offices, and burnt files. Vietnam protests were big that year.

The plainclothes man in his white mackintosh was almost a permanent fixture, except that he wasn't allowed in the buildings – strictly speaking, the police should not have been on campus at all; but we got used to him.

I was in a bad mood on Monday, and he had just followed me from the Hume Tower to the Library.

"That bastard's been really annoying me," I complained to three friends I had joined in the coffee room. "But I've got a great idea; I'll report him to the police for molesting me," They laughed and playfully bantered the idea back and forth, with enthusiasm and mischief.

I phoned the nearest police station.

"I'm a student and I've just been harassed by a man in a white mackintosh who tried to sell drugs to me."

My friends joined in.

Jane phoned the station in Torphichen Street and. said she had been sexually assaulted by him; another told the University Security Police that he was selling obscene photographs - and so on.

Then we all went out, a small crowd of us by now, as the word had spread of what was happening, and saw him still standing there, outside the library,

Laughing and talking, we all watched him.

He became uneasy as he noticed our amused attention, and walked away up the square past the older Georgian buildings.

Then three policemen ran out from behind the library, necks stretching as they looked around, like dogs on a scent.

Mad Phil darted down the steps and shot out his arm in an accusing gesture towards the retreating figure, conspicuous in his white mackintosh.

"That's him!" he cried,

The plainclothes man looked backward and began to walk faster; the policemen broke into a run and rushed after him. He panicked and sprinted around the square, the police in hot pursuit.

As he came into the last lap past the Hume Tower, police vehicles simultaneously arrived from all directions, disgorging constables who ran here and there, looking for various types of perverts, some joining in the chase.

After a complete circuit of the square, one of the pursuers brought the man down with a valiant rugby tackle on the cobblestones right in front of the library from where he had started.

A cheer and applause broke out from the audience of students, and from windows full of onlookers in the nearby buildings.

"I'm a policeman!" he exclaimed petulantly, struggling with his captor.

As the others caught up with him, they began kicking and striking him for his impudence, while the assembled throng cheered them on.

Suddenly a little Morris pulled up, and three men got out, walking briskly towards the melee, obviously high ranking policemen.

One of them flashed a card, and everyone stood to embarrassed attention. Then they all hurried away, ignoring the standing ovation.

That was the end of the plainclothesman on Campus, and our business prospered.

I had acquired an exquisite Chinese water pipe with a Cloisonne base of Chinese enamel, a box for opium, and a set of tweezers.

One night, after sitting up late, playing chess and smoking dope in the pipe, I cycled back towards my parents' house with the pipe in its box, but stopped at an all-night bakery to buy some hot pies.

As a couple of cops came in, I took the pies and walked out to my bike. They followed after me.

"Your back light's not working," one said,

"Oh, thank you for telling me; I'll walk it home," I said with studied politeness.

"No, you put it in the back of the van," he commanded brusquely; "You're

coming doon to the station."

While I climbed in, the other cop spoke up. "What's the point of lifting him

"These fuckin' student bastards are all on drugs," replied the first one.

As well as the pipe, which was in itself illegal, I had about half an ounce of dope with me. I swallowed as much as I could, and hid the rest in their van.

But I couldn't hide the pipe.

Inside the main police station, I was deposited and left to stand there with my bike. I could hear cries and thumps downstairs, the sounds of people being beaten up.

Several police sauntered by; one remarked, "You're in for a doing tonight, son".

Then some others came over. One had a bright idea: "Let's search this guy".

When they found the pipe, their interest quickened, and they took me away for a thorough strip search.

Then I was charged with riding under the influence of drink or drugs, riding dangerously, riding without a light. I fumed at the injustice; they hadn't even seen me on the bloody bike.

Spotting the friendly cop who had been against lifting me, I buttonholed him and asked him to phone my parents.

The others returned to their interrogation, standing around me at the desk,

"Do you want to see a doctor?"

"I'd like to see my doctor,"

"Answer the question, yes or no; do you want to see a doctor?"

"Whose doctor?"

"Ours,"

"I want to see mine,"

So they wrote down: "Subject refused to see doctor,"

"I didn't refuse; I want my doctor."

"No, you refused."

"O.K., then I'll see him."

The dope I had swallowed was taking effect, the station became strange and

dreamlike and I worried that I might look as I felt. I thought, 'How does a totally innocent person look?' After some meditation on this question, I stood myself against the wall, carefully crossed my arms, arranged an apprehensive expression on my face, with my eyes slightly closed, and concentrated on chewing my lower lip and tapping my foot. Occasionally I let out an impatient 'hmph',

The police doctor, a stocky, grey-haired man in a rumpled suit, came in and looked me up and down for less than half a minute from twenty feet away; then turned and sat down and wrote a three-page report on my condition. Disbelief rose in me as I watched him write on and on. Next, he had a friendly cup of tea with his old crony, the desk sergeant. Their laughter, I thought, was indecently gleeful, gloating and conspiratorial.

My father and mother arrived. He is very military and official in his manner. After I had reported what had happened, he asked to use the phone, but the sergeant wouldn't let him; so he sent my mother outside with the instruction to phone our family doctor.

He wouldn't come.

She phoned another doctor she knew, who, as it happened, was Edinburgh University's Lecturer on Drug Abuse.

By this time I was in a cell and very stoned indeed, and, of all the doctors in Edinburgh, this drug abuse expert came in to examine me.

He shone a light in my eyes, I realised that my pupils would be dilated, so I tried to control my reflexes by conscious effort.

"Pupils, contract!" I told myself.

He tapped my knee. There was absolutely no reflex.

"Leg, Forward!" I commanded, and it shot forward.

He stepped back, pocketing his instruments, "You're not under the influence of drugs You are in complete control of yourself."

I couldn't help wondering whether he really knew, but I never found out.

In due course I came to trial for the ridiculous charges of cycling -already mentioned, plus possession of an illegal pipe, and possession of cannabis, traces of which had been found in the 'box' of the pipe.

The Procurator-Fiscal was a right-wing, drug-hating maniac who had just returned to Scotland from Rhodesia, and it was very important for him to win his first case - me.

I had borrowed money from my great-uncle Bertie to hire my solicitor and the best Queen's counsel I could get, Nicky Fairbairn.

The water-pipe was on the table as exhibit A.

I took the stand.

The Fiscal launched four questions at me, all strung together, which stunned me into a mental paralysis and I couldn't comprehend them. However, I pulled myself together and put on my most charming voice.

"If it would please the Court, instead of answering these questions, it would be more helpful if I explained something about exhibit A which is central to the case; then I'll come back to the questions."

The judge nodded in agreement, while the Fiscal spluttered and fumed, "This is most irregular, you can't..."

"Could you please pass over exhibit A?" I asked.

"What we have here is a Tang dynasty Cloisonne water pipe, only smoked by members of the ruling classes. One can tell this by these decorations."

This was a complete fiction made up on the spot, but the judge was very interested in antiques, and leaned forward, becoming fascinated by my imitation of a learned dissertation.

"Now to return to the Procurator-Fiscal's questions; the reason I had this pipe with me was that I had received it as a gift and, recognising that it was valuable, I took it to a. Chinese scholar. We sat up all night discussing it in his antique shop."

The Fiscal returned to the attack. He had a thoroughly disagreeable trick of directing a burst of rapid-fire questions in one sentence. If you said 'yes' to one, you might be incriminating yourself by seeming to agree with the others.

I tried to slow him down, to avoid becoming confused. "Could you rephrase that, please? I didn't understand."

Before long, I heard him setting a trap for me.

"Are you saying that the police are liars?" I had contradicted their statements, of course, but I sensed at once that to say 'yes' would be to turn the court against me.

"I'm not saying that; I say what happened. It is up to the Court to decide who is lying."

"Answer this question! Are you saying that the police are lying?"

"I refuse to answer that question."

He rose to a furious crescendo of accusation: "I put it to you that it was you who rode this bicycle while under the influence of drugs, that it was you who obtained this opium pipe for the purpose of drug abuse, and that you were in possession of illegal drugs !"

"And I put it to you. Sir," I replied, mocking his manner, "that THE BOOT WAS RATHER ON THE OTHER FOOT." The whole courtroom cracked up with laughter, including the judge.

Four police witnesses, including two sergeants, took the stand and maintained that I had deliberately delayed them so that my doctor had examined me after the effects of the drugs had worn off, which, of course, was precisely the opposite to what had happened. And they had altered the times in their evidence. The last witness was the one who had phoned my parents, the weakest of the four.

Nicky let him go after a few easy questions, during which I could see he was uneasy to be telling a pack of lies. As he was leaving the stand, Nicky said, apparently as an afterthought: "Oh, ahh, one minute - could you come back for just another question? Is it correct," he looked archly all round the court, playing with his watch chain, "am I right in believing that policemen keep a diary of everything that happens during an incident? And is it true that a policeman must carry it when on duty?"

'The policeman looked worried, "Yes,"

"Do you" - again the sweeping survey of various objects and persons in the room - "Do you by any chance, have it on you at the moment?"

The cop looked imploringly at the judge, "Uh, do I have to answer that?"

"Mm hm," the judge nodded, fascinated by this new twist in the legal game that was being played.

"Perhaps you could, ahh, read out your notes of the arrest?" Nicky said with carefully poised nonchalance.

Again the cop looked at the judge like a puppy being ordered from the room. Reluctantly he pulled the notebook from his pocket and began to read, hesitantly and badly.

"Could I have a look at this?" asked Nicky with a predatory glitter in his eyes.

"Show it to him," urged the judge to the unwilling constable.

The QC looked at several pages with a severely critical arching of his eyebrows, "Ahh, Why don't you start from the beginning this time?" He made as if to hand the notebook back, then seemed to change his mind, "No, I'll read it out," he announced, with severity.

He read the times I had said, not the ones in the police statement of earlier. That broke their evidence.

The police doctor had given a modified version of the report he had written in the station, saying I had been under the influence of drugs, because I was swaying and my pupils were dilated.

"Did you sign the Hippocratic Oath when you became a doctor?" asked my Q.C.

"Yes."

"Is it part of your oath that you will not examine a patient without his consent and against his will?"

"Yes,"

"Did you have Mr. Sangster's permission to examine him?"

"No,"

"Do you attach any importance to what you have just said in court?"

The doctor could only reply "No." Their case against me collapsed.

But I was still technically in possession of an illegal drug, since traces had been found in the pipe, A complex legal discussion between the judge and my Q.C. ensued, centred around a precedent involving a person found with a bottle of cocaine pills which looked like aspirins. Since he could see the pills, rattle them, and open the bottle, he was found guilty. Even though he didn't know the pills were cocaine. I could neither rattle the pipe nor look inside, Nicky said, and there was no way I could tell what was in it. The judge followed all this with complacent agreement.

"I have to find him guilty, but I am satisfied there was no intention to break the law and that Mr. Sangster is an upright person. His presentation of the evidence was commendable,"

All the while, the Fiscal was hopping from one foot to the other, clutching a piece of paper. In Scottish law, previous convictions are not admissable as evidence; and the judge's face went beetroot when he read that I had been done for drug possession before. He began speaking about a fine, but Nicky triumphed once more.

"May I protest, my Lord. I must press for an admonishment; you have just said before the Court that the accused is innocent."

The four policemen who gave evidence were all demoted because they had been caught lying, and the Drug Squad had to return my opium pipe.

It was the only legal pipe in Scotland.

******
CHAPTER TWO

I had to leave home because of mounting tension between me and my father.

My entire adolescence had been a guerilla action against his hysterical attempts to break my will and rape my mind by forcing his ideas down my throat. But the more he battered, the more defiant I became.

I was constantly being criticised and attacked as he tried to organise my life, refusing to let me be myself, trying to dominate me, and everybody around him, and viewing everything, so it seemed to me, through the wrong end of a logical telescope.

While pouring out a stream of logical drivel, he was himself the most illogical of beings. During WW2, he was nearly court-martialled for mutiny because he had refused an order, declaring stoutly, "I can't do that, it's against my principles." Fortunately he had an understanding officer who saved him.

Another time, an acquaintance of his declined a whisky for fear of being breathalyzed by the police as he drove home. My father had an appalling revelation : the man actually did not care that he might be breaking the law or that he might cause an accident; his only concern was to avoid being caught. A stern and impassioned sermon lashed his hapless ears.

There was no harmony in the family; every mealtime would end with him flying into an illogical rage, slamming his fist on the table, his eyes glaring and his moustache bristling, and me shouting back at him, my mother weeping – total bedlam.

While his idea of morals and ethics was that I should support the law and the state, he didn't seem to care, paradoxically, about what I did, as much as my reason for doing it. When 1 was about nine, I had thrown some rotten apples at a neighbour's boy, in retaliation for his throwing them at me from his garden. He then threw over some pebbles, so I picked up a brick and whirled about like an athlete putting the shot. But the brick flew off at an angle, hitting the supporting timber of his father's greenhouse and the whole side of it crashed down with much splintering of glass. I ran off to hide, while the boy's father, a minister whom my father heartily disliked, phoned our house.

"Your son has just smashed the side of my greenhouse!" he declared indignantly.

"Did you have it insured?" my father demanded.

"No."

"Well you bloody well ought to have had!" And he hung up, I was not chastised; I think he was secretly very pleased.

He lived under the shadow of his own father, a son of the Manse and a man of staggering intellect who read over twenty languages. And he was haunted by his mother-in-law; he saw her as a raving nutcase, the archetypal hellish woman.

Terribly energetic in an off-putting way, she was an ardent feminist who wandered around barefoot in wild dresses she made from colourful fabrics sent from India, She was a gardener with the proverbial green thumb, she cast pottery, painted pictures, and sang fervently in a dreadful soprano voice at the Episcopalian Church where her husband had been the curate. She had started off one of the first contraceptive clinics in Britain, and had tramps staying in the barn.

She insisted I didn't wear shoes, made me sleep in cold rooms and wouldn't let me have a hot water bottle. She gave me horrible things to eat like skimmed milk, rennet pudding and over-cooked game stew made from dead pheasants she would find on the road. For breakfast, she had muesli, ate vitamin C, drank volumes of codeine cough mixture and was perpetually speeding on caffeine pills.

My father had a maniac loathing of her, a greek legend kind of hatred.

My father wanted me to go to Sandhurst or enter one of the professions, so I was sent to George Watson's School. It slowly dawned on me that, far from being an educational establishment, the real purpose of this place was to destroy the minds of its inmates. We were constantly being reminded of how much our parents had sacrificed to keep us there, how privileged we were, and of the responsibilities we had. Beneath this screen of 'noblesse oblige',bullying and general nastiness flourished in the numerous group activities and sports we were forced into.

I was always near the top of my class until they tried to make me write with my right hand, which I couldn't do. And I had to write with an ink pen which always made blots, no matter how careful I was. I would work on ink exercises until two in the morning, sometimes weeping with the effort and blotting my paper with tears as well. To no avail; everyone else in the class would get stars on their work except me. It wasn't that I got the answers wrong, I just made blots. I felt strongly that I deserved some recognition for effort at the very least, and I was becoming neurotic and ill with my futile attempts to please the masters.

I began to hate the school; I manufactured illnesses, convincing myself I was sick, studying how to describe symptoms which would get me off school, but being careful not to say that the pain was in a place which would cause the Doctor to send me for an operation. I 'developed' asthma and hay fever to keep me out of swimming and games where the bullying was at its worst. I began staying off regularly on Mondays and Fridays.

My form teacher, Mr. Gumming, also my French master, hated me and began making sneering remarks about me to the other boys when I wasn't there. He caused a lot of trouble for me by using by using his power to manipulate the attitudes of the others. He also deliberately gave me the lowest mark in French, even when my work was good.

"I don't feel well, sir," I would frequently announce, to keep up the appearance of being sick.

"Well, go outside for a quarter of an hour, boy,"

I was careful to come back in exactly that time, but would still get a row for being too long away.

After I had seen my G.P. about being ill, I asked for a certificate to cover my absence.

"Why do you want that?"

"My form teacher tells everyone I'm not sick, I'm skiving classes,"

"He says you've been skiving? He's saying I'm a liar," the doctor exclaimed with some heat. "We'll see about this."

He was on the Board of Governors, it happened, and he not only complained strongly to the Headmaster, but brought the matter up at the next meeting of the Board, calling for Mr, Gumming's dismissal.

Realising he couldn't touch me, Gumming shut up, but he never addressed another word to me again.

All my good grades died; I rebelled and vowed never again to work at school, to do only the minimum I could possibly get away with. The injustice of the place rankled, and I began to skive in earnest. My parents caught me and wrote a note to the Headmaster saying, "We found our son deliberately missing school," and made me hand it to him. Imagine; their own son!

I gave him the note and he read it while I stood, waiting,

"Why were you skiving, Sangster?" he said grimly, turning to face me,

"No matter how hard I work, I somehow never get good marks, I stay up late at night trying to please the masters, I'm getting ill, the pressure is too much for me," and I burst into tears.

He instructed the masters to stop giving me homework. That was great, except that it made the other boys very jealous and resentful. But I always had an excuse; I had doctors, psychiatrists, even dyslexia experts, all examining me and testifying to my problems.

Occasionally, I was genuinely excited by a lesson, as in Science one day when the master began explaining about atoms and molecules. I had been thinking about them already and understood the philosophy behind them.

"Sir, they're just like planets, aren't they?" I asked, enthusiastically.

"Sangster, you think you know it all, don't you?" the master sneered. "Just go and sit in the back of the class and shut up."

Art was my best subject; it was the only class where I was the pet. I was allowed to do whatever I wanted: pottery, painting, drawing. I would come in at lunch or after school to do extra work. On the first day of art, Mr. Coull, the teacher, spoke to us: "I can tell what you've been thinking from what you've drawn. I want you to paint me a picture now. If, after what I've just said, you try to hide what you're thinking, I'll know even faster what you've got inside." I thought that was a fantastic thing to say.

He walked up and down between the desks, stopping next to Keiller and Ritchie, a loathsome pair of bullies and sneaks who ingratiated themselves with all the other teachers.

"As for you two miserable specimens, I KNOW YOU. Any trouble out of you and.... WHACK!" went his ruler on their desk.

I was made to drop art; instead they gave me technical drawing, which

is the worst thing for an artist, and accounting. Mr. Coull was unable to prevent it, as he was locked in a power struggle with the rest of the department because of his left-wing views. I got a glimpse of this during one of his lessons when we were using rulers. The Head of the Art Department came in and said, "Students are not allowed to use rulers in the Scottish Certificate Examinations, they must work free hand."

Mr. Coull flew at him in a rage, his meter stick upraised: "Get out, get out" he roared.

They refused to accept me as a person; they were trying to destroy my

talent. O.K., I decided resentfully, I'm bad, I'm not a good person, I'll just be a criminal, then. Fuck them.

And so I left school with no qualifications.

I believe this decision kept me healthy. My badness was in fact good; what they saw as arrogance, selfishness and willfulness was me refusing to be beaten and lie down under their jackboot heels.

I went to Napier College to get the Highers I needed to go to Dundee Art College. Most of the girls in my class were accepted by Edinburgh, and I passed the preliminary entrance exam into Dundee. For this, I had to bring in a portfolio of my paintings, which included one canvas seven feet by six feet. Afterwards, I found it was too big to fit in the taxi, so I asked the lecturer: "Is it all right to leave my portfolio here until tomorrow?"

"Yes, it'll be safe," he assured me. But when I returned the next day, they

had burnt my entire portfolio, put it in the furnace.

How dare they?

I was appalled and embittered; violent fantasies involving bombs boiled up in my head.

At the end of term, the final blow fell: I was refused entry into Art College.

But by now, I was beginning to enjoy the underworld existence the system seemed to have destined for me. I got a delightful dead-end job as a scaffie down in Portobello. The other workers and I used to spend a lot of time and effort picking up seaweed and driftwood from the beach, starting around 7.00 a.m. By 11,00 we were pushing our barrels between holiday-makers from the Glasgow Fair. We would collect the seaweed in a barrel, then wheel it up to the prom, where it was transferred to a bigger barrel which would be wheeled along to a depot in Pipe Street, There we would dump our gatherings in the middle of the yard; soon there would be a twenty-foot high hill of rotting seaweed and other rubbish. Then a huge digger would come from the Central depot in Kings Stables Road, pick up all this stuff in its great bucket, and take it down to the sea at low tide, where it was dumped.

The following day, all the seaweed would be swept up on the beach and we would spend the next week cleaning it up again, I would recognize bits of wood and old durex, and boil over with fury at the pointless futility of what 1 was doing.

"Why don't you sell all this seaweed to farmers for fertilizer?" I complained to the gaffer, "or make it into ice-cream; do something useful with it?"

"Think yer fuckin smart, you student types, know it all. This is the way it's been done, and this is the way it's gonna be done."

At school, I'd had an English teacher called Baston, who would pick on me. "Sangster," he used to say, "you clarty, scruffy swine, the way you're going, you'll end up just being a scaffie."

There I was, several years later, a scaffie, having a cigarette on the promenade, dressed in an old plastic mac and a hat, the rain drizzling down, when who walked around the corner but old Mr. Baston and his wife. Gleefully, I walked up to him and said, "Don't recognise me, do you?"

"No," he gulped apprehensively, alarmed by my familiar manner.

"It's Sangster. You were right. I'm a scaffie," I laughed.

********

I came to know a man in Edinburgh, whom I realized was a supreme rationalist. I began to admire the way he used logic to control those around him. He had been a dope dealer for twenty years and had never been busted. His house was virtually open, he dealt with the most dangerous people, with freaks and criminals coming and going night and day; and yet, in the crazy, uncontrollable world of cannabis, he led a very organized family life. He set rules and had an honourable code; he believed dope was good for people, but he would not sell cocaine because he thought it was bad. His trick was that he successfully dominated all the people around him and got them to behave towards him in just the way he liked, earning a lot of respect in the process. He would play the Devil's Advocate, employing logical thinking to support almost any point of view he adopted.

"I always argue against a person," he told me; "I respect what he says if he can back himself up with a good argument." Most of the time, the other person would lose because he kept at them mercilessly.

Since he didn't smoke roll-up tobacco, and I'd often be out of cigarettes, I'd have to ask him for one, to roll a joint, and he would say: "For Heaven's sake, haven't you even got a bloody packet of cigarettes? How in God's name can I make any money if I always have to be giving you fags?"

One could never fault what he said. One time, I was waiting for him to return, and his sister was in the room.

I reached for an L.P. cover to roll a joint on. "I wouldn't do that," she warned.

"Why not?"

"He doesn't like people to use album covers for that."

"Why not?"

"You might burn the cover." He had trained her to think as he did. He was like the sun with moons going around it; the only male in an otherwise female household, he subtly dominated them all. He was, I began to comprehend, what my father was trying to be.

After I'd come home from an uproarious weekend near Stonehaven where my friends and I had consumed a lot of drugs and scampered about on the high cliffs overlooking the North Sea, I sat down to dinner with the family and began describing a walk along the cliffs, leaving out the drugs, of course. I mentioned that there had been a strong wind from off the sea.

"From which direction was the wind blowing?" my father asked. He would refuse to let me talk unless I was precise.

"From off the sea."

"From which direction?" he barked. 1 knew what he wanted me to say - from the North East - but I wouldn't give in.

"From off the bloody sea."

"WHICH BLOODY DIRECTION?" He banged the table so hard the cutlery jumped.

"FROM OFF THE BLOODY SEA, YOU OLD CUNT!"

It was then I left home.

******
CHAPTER THREE

Although I had left the family circle, I was staying only sixty yards up the road. I wasn't speaking to my father, but sometimes I'd sneak back at night to get bits of food my mother had left out for me.

A great storm warning appeared on the news one evening. I was staying overnight with Alistair, with whom I often smoked dope and listened to music.

"Let's wait up for it," I suggested to him. "I'd love to watch a storm. We can go out on Arthur's Seat."

As the storm approached, the voltage in the power lines began to go down; the record player would hardly revolve. Outside, the street lights were flickering: tension was building up, but no storm had appeared.

At 3:00 a.m. we went outside to see what was happening; it was eerie and still, like a vacuum. As we walked up the rocky hill of Arthur's Seat, it seemed to me that two fluffy white clouds, one shaped like an eagle, the other like a buffalo, were following us along the street and up into the park.

We climbed half-way up the slope, to a point overlooking Salisbury Crags and Hunter's Bog, facing west over Edinburgh. The sheep that graze there were apprehensive, moving about and coughing. Above was a clear sky full of bright stars, save for a few wisps, but all around us was a ring of dark rolling clouds, blotting out the street lights in the outlying parts of the city. We were in a vortex.

To our right, and below us, in Hunter's Bog, there was a sudden brilliant flash, as if a dark glass had been jerked aside, revealing a huge bonfire complete with flames; then abruptly, it vanished.

Towards Corstorphine, where the clouds were most dense, a great fan-shaped pattern of electricity shot out from a point, like fronds of a huge . palm tree, containing complex lines, circles and balls of fire. As this happened, the banks of flickering street lights winked out altogether. Again, and again, this terrifying shape flared out from the point, a fainter, leaf-shaped version on the other side. My eyeballs were imprinted with its fearful whorls, so that for hours, whenever I shut my eyes, I could still see it.

But Alistair was never again the same; he went silent for days and seemed to age suddenly, refusing to speak about what he had seen, he no longer wished to know me; he cut his hair, got a job, and from that night onwards smoked dope no more.

My artistic ambitions were far from extinct, despite the antagonism I had attracted, and 1 pretended to he a student at Edinburgh College of Art, using the facilities there with great enthusiasm. I had no one to show me what to do, but my first etching was bought by the Arts Council and included in an exhibition of print-making.

In the Studios, I soon became obvious because I was the only person using the equipment in earnest; most of the actual students seemed to be elsewhere, probably drinking, or smoking the dope I had sold them. The lecturer checked up, found I was not enrolled, and threw me out; but he said if I joined a night class, that would enable me to use the equipment.

I joined, but then he took me aside and said the Head of

Department had ruled that I wasn't to use the facilities, and it was as much

as his job was worth to let me.

I was despondent about the future. I wanted out of selling dope, and I didn't want to work in an ordinary job. I was the despair of my parents.

I had only £5 left.

How could I make some money legitimately? I was puzzling over this problem when, passing a shop window, I saw a mould for garden gnomes, costing only £2.

'I'll make garden gnomes and sell them,' I thought.

I bought the mould, spent another £2 on plaster of paris, and half a quid for paints, and I was ready. I made several gnomes and painted them. Immediately, someone bought a gnome and put it on his window ledge in St. Stephen Street, which was becoming infested with arty, hippie types.

Next morning, there was a photograph of it on the front page of 'The Scotsman'. Enquiries began to come in.

Hey! I was in business.

There was an Ideal Home Exhibition on in Edinburgh. I thought 'I'll have an ideal gnome exhibition,'

I rushed home.

"Mum! I've got a great idea. I'm going to hold an exhibition."

She seemed to perk up at once. "What a marvellous idea! What are you going to exhibit?"

"Gnomes'."

The garden gnome was the abyss of bad taste to my mother; she detested them. "Oh dear...oh, that's very good," she replied weakly, "Where are you going to hold your exhibition?"

"In your front garden, Mum."

I frantically made four gnomes a day for two weeks, until I. had around fifty, all painted by hand. Also 1 bought some frog moulds and cast about two hundred frogs. I made several big, fibreglass toadstools and, the crowning glory, a nine-foot high Gnome-poleon, with his hand tucked into his waistcoat.

I published a card saying "You are cordially invited to the Ideal Gnome Exhib- ition, lovingly presented in...

" I filled the garden with gnomes, frogs, and toadstools, set up speakers for music and erected signs in the neighbourhood, I organized a double-page spread in one newspaper, and I even went about Edinburgh for several days on a motorbike, dressed as a gnome.

On the first day I sold out half of my work. Mum had set up a coffee stall and took in £16 for Christian Aid, The newspapers all reported the exhibition with light-hearted animation. In one was the headline "If everybody had their fantasies, there would be gnome more wars." The next day, rain fell in sheets, and it rained solidly for a week. I was washed out.

I had a few gnomes left. I sent one to the BBC, and they put me on a

television interview about the gnomes, with Magnus Magnusson. I sent another to 'The Observer' in London, but omitted to say whom it was from, on the package. I phoned the next day and asked, "Did you get a gnome?"

"Oh, it was you who sent it? We thought it was a bomb and evacuated the whole building.

"I'm terribly sorry," I began contritely, "I would never have sent it if I had thought..."

"Oh, don't worry, we loved it. The sun was shining, everybody, enjoyed themselves, Can we send a team up to do a full colour report on your gnomes?"

"I'm afraid hot," I said regretfully, "there's none left."

But there was one.

Edinburgh Town Council at that time had just spent £100,000, tarting up The closes in the High Street, in readiness for a royal walkabout by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, They had done nothing for the people who lived there, and I was disgusted by this extravagance.

"I'll give Her a gnome," I said, half in jest, to some friends at a party,

"That's brilliant!" Yvonne jumped excitedly at the idea.

We wrote a note to one of the newspapers saying that a gnome would be presented to Queen Juliana, and signed it - Mr. Cairo Egypt.

The next morning, the day of the Royal visit, Yvonne came to my flat at nine a.m. and woke me, "Right, Will, are you ready to meet the Queen?"

'Oh, shit,' I thought as I rolled myself out of bed, still groggy from last night; 'What have I let myself in for now? I suppose I've got to go through with this...'

I wrapped the gnome in brown paper, along with a cushion, put on my long tartan coat, and we went up to Chessel's Court. I saw a little girl standing there.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Susie."

"How old are you, Susie?"

"Seven."

"Well, Susie, you have been chosen by all the people in Edinburgh to present Queen Juliana with a gnome," She was very pleased, her blue eyes flashing with delight.

"I want you to ask your parents and if they say yes, come back here,"

She returned eagerly in a little while, beautifully turned out in a Scottish Highland Dancing costume covered with medals she had won. Her parents were thrilled to bits, she said.

People were lining the street waiting for the procession which began at Holyrood Palace, down at the foot of the High Street. As we mingled with the crowd, I felt extremely noticeable in my long frock coat of green and blue tartan, hugging my large paper package under one arm, and clutching the kilted little girl by the hand. There were cops everywhere, and one, I noticed, was already watching me suspiciously, I began to worry about being stopped by them, and tried to behave inconspicuously, like any normal tourist.

Backed into a doorway, we watched the procession of dignitaries move up the steep, narrow street. I explained to Susie that she should hold the cushion like a tray, with the grinning gnome balanced on it, walk up to the Queen, curtsey, and present it to her.

"That's the woman," I pointed, "on you go, now," guiding her through the standing spectators. But, nervously glancing over her shoulder at me, she went towards the Lord Provost's wife, and I hastily dragged her back; nobody seemed to notice, fortunately,

I saw now that we would have to get ahead of the procession and try again. I still felt like the centre of attention in my elegant coat of Hunting Stewart tartan - a fitting garment to greet a visiting monarch, I thought - and I tried to conceal the bulky parcel under my coat, still clutching the little girl by the hand and pushing through the craning, staring throng.

The plainclothes policemen mingling with the crowd were looking for me, I realized with a shock, because of the letter to the papers. A couple of them had sighted me now and were trying to push through the thousands of people standing five deep on both sides of the road; I dodged into a close and lost them, but they knew now what I looked like.

By this time, Susie was a little confused, so I explained again to her how to hold the cushion with the gnome on it, walk up to the Queen and present it to her with a curtsey.

The Royal party neared where I was hovering at the edge of the crowd; they were about six feet away,

"How the hell am I going to do this?' I wondered indecisively. It seemed the only way would be to push ahead of the procession once more, then walk right across the road when Queen Juliana was nearly opposite. So we wormed our way further up to a point beside 'The Blue Blanket' pub.

But now one of the cops I had shaken off earlier had spotted me and began shoving his way towards me; another cop from the other direction was only a dozen feet away.

It was now or never.

I pulled Susie with me as I pushed to the front of the crowd, the medals on her brown waistcoat wagging from side to side, and walked across the street propelling her in front of me. It. was a very dramatic moment, and everyone in the procession stopped in their tracks to stare uncomprehendingly at the unexpected apparition.

Susie curtsied beautifully and held out the gnome, balanced on a blue velvet cushion,

"Your Royal Highness," I intoned gravely in a loud voice, "on behalf of the Scottish Nation, we present you with this gnome."

Automatically, the Queen took it. Probably a conditioned reflex from a lifetime of ceremonies, but nevertheless, her wide-open eyes registered panic as she looked into mine. A message came to me through her eyes: Is this a bomb?

Her hands began to shake and the gnome trembled precariously on its cushion.

With an enigmatic smile I sent back the message: I'm not telling.

Queen Juliana then turned and tried to hand the gnome to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh. He raised his hands in horror and backed away; so did everyone else. In that moment of truth, she must have realized she was on her own, no one else would help her when the chips were down.

I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder; instinctively, I rammed my elbow back, feeling it strike something hard and metallic, and set off at a run down the High Street, then dodged into a close and made my escape.

The police took my gnome to Holyrood House where they blew it up. A pity; it was so nicely painted, too, with letters saying, "To Her Royal Highness Queen Juliana of the Netherlands".

A dapper, polite plainclothes policeman wearing an old school tie, appeared at the flat of friends of mine, and enquired in a frightfully well-spoken voice: "Police. Is Mr. Cairo Egypt in?"

Geraldine, who is extremely highly strung, reacted hysterically; "Oh my God! Why do people ask these questions? I can't handle it!" and darted from room to room like a nervous bird.

Chillum George, a long-haired freak, ambled in, noted the visitor, and asked Geraldine, "Who is that?"

"Oh, it's the police about the wretched gnome."

"Come abaht the gnome, 'ave you?" said George affably, "'As it blown up yet?"

I knew I should turn myself in, so I went to the police HQ, in the High Street and asked at Reception, "Special Branch, please." The Receptionist was thrown into confusion by this request. "Oh, um, just wait here a minute."

Then a guy came in, from off the street, up to me.

"I'm Sangster, also known as Mr. Cairo Egypt," I announced with a smirk.

"Ah," he said, "We're not actually supposed to have an office here. Come with me." We went out and around to the basement, into a warren of rooms, and entered a chamber with a deep carpet and a silver tea service on a table.

'I've got to think fast,' I told myself as he led me in. 'It's probably safest to appear as a right-wing nutcase.'

"I must tell you before we begin that I've got a drug conviction," I informed him. But he waved his hand dismissively: "That's irrelevant."

"Well, I'm forming the world's first practical joke agency. This was my first joke. I intend to do more, as publicity. I'm quite old-fashioned, really. I believe in free enterprise. Let people do whatever they want," I waffled on about laissez-faire capitalism in the style of a nineteenth century Tory.

He asked if I had any connection with the Dutch Kabouters, a radical underground movement of hippies.

"Oh no, no, absolutely not."

I realised with a smile he was thinking in terms of an international conspiracy involving gnomes.

"What are you interested in, Mr. Sangster?"

"Actually, pyramids." I had just read a book filled with esoteric nonsense about pyramidology. I quoted some of its weirder speculations about the measurements of the pyramids predicting the rise of Napoleon, the Second World War, and so on.

His ears pricked up. He followed me very closely and began asking searching questions which showed he was quite well versed in pyramid lore himself. I could feel him testing my understanding of the subject and feared that he was about to see through my ruse.

"Do you know," he began significantly.

"What?" Apprehension welled up in me.

"Are you aware," he reiterated with even more intensity.

"Tell me, please," I was on tenterhooks.

"Do you realise that if the great pyramid were dismantled, the stone would build a wall around Paris ten feet high?"

Here I was, being interrogated by the Special Branch in their secret headquarters for blowing a major hole in the security arrangements, and this guy was completely sidetracked into occult balderdash which he took quite seriously. Where was his head at, I wondered? Was he a Freemason?

"Well, Mr. Sangster, please give us a warning before you do something like this again. Heads are already rolling because of you. And if it had not been for the little girl, the security guards would have shot you. They were afraid of hitting her."

******

Several weeks later, the police raided me.

Next door to me lived a dealer named Jack, an upper-class twit who had no street sense and carelessly kept his stash in his flat. I would buy from him for some of my street-wise and villainous friends who wouldn't go near him. One evening I had a feeling he was going to be raided and had tried to persuade him to hide his stash, which was then about seven pounds of cannabis resin, somewhere outside. But he wouldn't listen.

'Plum' had been visiting me, and on his way out he saw the police massing at the police box. He nipped into a nearby telephone kiosk and phoned Jack.

"The police are on their way up. You'd better go out the window."

Jack was half way out the window with his bag of dope when they burst through his front door. The bag split, some of it falling outside, the rest scattering on the sill. The police, however, rushed about the flat saying, "Where's Sangster?" They thought that I lived there, that I was the dealer they were after.

"He lives in the next stair," Jack's wife told them.

Meanwhile I had tidied up any incriminating evidence because of my premonition, and was on my way down the stairs, a large lump of dope in my pocket. I heard the stampede of policemen coming up the steps, and quickly swallowed the dope, but carried on downstairs nonchalantly.

At the head of the group of police was Shag, a highlandman with whom I had had a run-in before. I pulled out the keys to the flat.

"Here's the keys." I looked him straight in the eye. "You're ten minutes late; I thought you were never coming. The house is clean, so you're wasting your time."

Shag looked at me malevolently. I had heard he believed in the evil eye.

"I'm psychic," I continued with a knowing wink. "I can read your mind. And you'd better watch what you say to your colleagues. Little birdies talk," I added, just to sow suspicion in their ranks.

I could feel the lump still going down my throat, as I followed them into my two-bedroomed flat. Anticipating a police raid, 1 had broken all the lights in it, to make searching difficult. There was only one bulb on a forty-foot flex. If I wanted to cook, or read, I would just trail the light after me.

There were eight policemen crowded into the cramped, dark flat, completely at sixes and sevens, trying to search the place with several tiny torches. Two London policemen were amongst them; they spent their time looking at the books on my shelves, noting my interests.

During the search, I recalled that in the past I had been very paranoid about the police and had thought, 'Who is the symbol of my paranoia? SHAG!' So I had made a little badge painting of him, with the body of the Incredible Hulk. I'd put it on the wall and drawn a circle round it, which I would punch in anger whenever I felt badly about the police.

I turned to Shag. "I've got something to show you." He followed me to the kitchen, expecting me to reveal where I had hidden my dope. I showed him the badge; it was a brilliant likeness. His eyes widened in consternation.

"If you like, I can stick a pin in it," 1 suggested, picking it up and reaching it out towards him. "I mean, so you can wear it as a badge, "I added, as he backed away, horrified. I couldn't resist following after him, holding the badge up in both my hands, like a priest exorcising the devil, until he shrank helplessly against the wall.

On a table in the sitting room corner, was a small box containing a beautiful stone. "Don't touch that," I sternly commanded, as one constable reached forward to pick it up. He drew back in obedience.

"Thank goodness you didn't open that," I spoke with relief.

"Why?"

"That's my Ju-ju," I explained mysteriously, adding another dimension to my improvised weirdo act.

To my amazement they didn't open the box. Shortly after, they left, having found nothing.

I recalled that I'd eaten a huge piece of hash, and I tried to make myself sick, in order to regurgitate it; but to no avail. Instead I made myself go to sleep to avoid the effects. This was the worst thing I could have done. I awoke hours later, drenched in sweat, to see a man run out of the ceiling and into the floor. Hours and hours of unstoppable hallucinations commenced now, which seemed to be projected from a beam centred in my forehead, to wherever I looked. I discovered that I could control these by simply desiring a picture, which then appeared. There was no rest, as waves of pictures swept over everything around me, I could see devils; the curtains swirled about the room; as I walked, my shadow changed into various people. It was as if Pandora's box had opened, I felt like King Midas when everything he touched turned inexorably to gold. These visions profoundly influenced my paintings for years thereafter.

The next day I went out to a respectable bungalow in the quiet suburb of Corstorphine, where Plum and his friends lived. I had been given an SOS to come and find their dope stash, which they were too spaced out to locate. I'd done this on several occasions before, usually working out fairly quickly where it was, from their vague recollections; this time, however, I couldn't find it. But for some reason I persisted for a couple of hours and eventually came across it, in a plastic bag, buried in the garden.

I had an impulse to fill the bag up with earth and rebury it in the same spot, after I had removed their dope.

That night, a huge raid, led by Shag, and involving some twenty police cadets, along with a van carrying a generator and portable flood- lights, descended on Plum's home. The lights were set up, the cadets formed a line across the garden and began to dig it from one end to the other. If you are feeling lazy, then I suppose a good way to get your garden dug is to tell the police that drugs are buried in it.

Plum and his friends were confidently relaxing in the sitting-room, thinking they were clean, when they heard a great hoot of triumph from the police outside. Their spirits abruptly sank.

Among the policemen, an argument ensued.

"It's soil'."

"It can't be; who would bury a bag of soil in the garden - there MUST be dope in it."

"Get a sheet and empty it out."

On the sitting room floor they meticulously fingered through the earth, then took some of it away for analysis. Their raid was totally wrecked, and they knew it.

As they were about to leave, Shag's eye fell on one of my gnomes; his face contorted with recognition.

"Look!" he raged, "It's one of that fuckin' Sangster's gnomes! I hate him! I hate him!"

******

I bought a dilapidated flat in the High Street in Edinburgh for only £400, because. the building had a demolition order on it. It had one window which was touched by the sun only on the longest day of the year; only on the summer solstice would direct sunlight shine briefly through it.

At that time the Council was using its powers of compulsory purchase to buy people's flats and force them to move out into dismal council estates; then the Council would do up the flats and sell them to wealthy people.

I wanted to modernize the flat, but I couldn't get the Council to pass the plans. I tried everything I knew, even camping in the local authority's office, but I could make no progress. I went to see my friend Joey Buchanan who had an awful father he hated, a corrupt architect who erected shopping centre monstrosities in Dundee and Edinburgh while sailing untouched through a series of career-devastating political scandals which had jailed or disgraced some of his associates. He told me to ask one of his father's architects to help.

"I've got this terrible problem; I can't get the plans for my house

through," I said to him.

"No problem," he said,

"I can't pay you any money."

"Don't worry, I don't want any money," he reassured me. He made a phone call - one call - and two days later the plans were passed.

Once I got my plans through, I talked to all the other tenants and told them what I had done, so they bought their flats, too, and submitted plans for doing them up. That is today one of the very few buildings in the High Street where the original local Edinburgh people still live.

Joey was a really great friend who stayed with me in the flat for a while. He had beady eyes and a thin moustache, and went about barefoot, usually dressed in a see-through gown and a mongolian hat. I thought he looked like Ghengiz Khan. His talk was full of catch-phrases which he'd invent, like 'Paisley it' (far out), or 'up your nostrils' which he said to everybody.

He would never comb his hair except with his fingers; as he was going bald, hair would come out and he would shake it distastefully from his fingertips, somehow without shedding his aura of languid elegance.

He was a very talented silversmith who pioneered the fashion for reproduction Celtic jewelry, and his originals are still some of the finest specimens ever made.

He lived in a castle in a highland glen, north of Blairgowrie, nicknamed 'Little Balmoral' because it had been designed by the same architect as had Queen Victoria's castle.

Dalnaglo was a secluded retreat surrounded by bleak, lonely hills. There was a huge standing stone nearby, where you could look down the glen and see for a vast distance with what seemed like empty space below because the ground fell away so sharply. It was, he claimed, an accursed spot where he had once heard the banshee, and had been the site of human sacrifices in byegone days. He called it the place of the black moon. Oddly, it was inhabited by a breed of black rabbits peculiar to the area

Under his tutelage, the castle became a commune where huge parties were

held, wild scenes with dope and hallucinatory drugs, and freaks wandering .about out of their skulls - an archetypal sixties infestation. There were demon drink mixtures, black magic brews that punched out the back of your head. Some of his guests once included Hailie Selassie's bodyguards, and Rastafarians, whom nobody had heard of at that time. The Dundee mafia, tried to get in on the act and sell drugs to his guests, but Ghengiz chased them off the estate by firing a shotgun over their heads. He did the same to some tax and excise people who came to investigate his business.

He kept a lot of legal guns in the house, but I heard he looked after a secret weapons stash belonging to the Scottish Liberation Army; they had whole bunkers full of rifles, grenades and bazookas. This armoury had been collected at the end of World War II; and the SLA quartermaster , who knew of its hiding places, had been mysteriously killed by an eastern bloc interceptor as he was flying behind the Iron Curtain to pick up more weapons.

His son wanted to join the Hell's Angels in Fife, but they wouldn't admit him unless he gave them something for his initiation. He found a secret drawer in his father's desk which revealed the whereabouts of one of the gun stashes, removed a revolver, and took it to the next Hell's Angels meeting. He slammed the gun on the table, saying "There's a gun for everybody if I can ride with you."

Armed to the teeth, they had a big shootout down in England with a rival bike club, and as a result the police began trying to find the source of their guns. The SLA secretly hid them in the castle grounds, with Joey's connivance.

Joey drove about in a very fast black Jaguar, which only ever had about five bob's worth of petrol in it. Once I was in the Jag with him and we were going to deliver a few ounces of dope to some Glasgow friends. We got the directions completely wrong and found ourselves in a really rough Edinburgh housing scheme called Craigmillar.

The. Jag stalled right in front of a police station which had a wire mesh fence around it and had been boarded up like a Belfast RUC outpost because there had been riots outside.

We began to push the car, but it was very hard work. Joey said, "Go and ask the police to bloody give us a shove."

I was dressed in a matador's jacket, knickerbockers, striped socks, and a pointed Russian hat on my head.

"For fuck's sake, Joey..." I began.

"Don't be so bloody paranoid',"

"I am not paranoid," I retorted, and stormed into the police station. I walked up to the counter.

All the policemen stopped whatever they were doing and looked at me in disbelief, taking in the details of my odd costume.

"Our car's broken down outside; can you give us a push, please?" They just looked at me. Finally, the guy behind the counter said sarcastically, "What's your name then?"

I said the first thing that came to my mind - "Riddle" - and it was a riddle.

He replied knowingly, "I've heard that name before."

"You have not," I retorted, with an amused show of indignation.

"Oh, yes 1 have."

"You haven't."

"I have."

"Are you going to give us a push, then? No? Well, then," and I walked out.

A favourite game of his was to cruise around Edinburgh at about two a.m., looking for a cop on the beat. When he found one, strolling down the empty pavement unselfconsciously, he would drive slowly up from behind so the policeman would be aware of the car's presence just enough to realise that it was a black Jaguar - the police had identical cars at that time - and assume it was his superior keeping an eye on him. He would start noticing everything, testing doors, looking in windows, everything except what was most obvious: two long-haired lunatics smoking a joint just behind him. He would become more and more tense as the Jaguar shadowed him until, when he was almost at breaking point, with a scorch of black rubber and a laugh, Joey would accelerate down the street too quickly for his license number to be read.

We would sometimes drive up to the entrance to Edinburgh Castle, park next to the sentries and start smoking a joint, while fantasizing loudly how we would capture it and hold it against the authorities.

He was totally outrageous. Once he saw two drug squad detectives across the road, at a time when he had a lot of dope in his pockets. He rushed across and accosted them, demanding aggressively, "Why the hell are you scroungers following me around? Why don't you get an honest job?"

I tried to learn from how Joey behaved, and not let things slip as he did. I decided I was never going to be caught out as he was. He blew out a whole cooperative venture simply through being careless. He used to barter his silver jewelry, so as not to use money at all, and get involved with incredible forgeries. But it all collapsed and he fell from the sky like Icarus

He was busted for a colossal tax bill and thrown into Perth Prison, His wife told me the bail was £300, a very high sum for a tax offence in Scots Law. I knew that in Scotland you have to put cash on the table for bail, so I went around Edinburgh and raised the money from friends.

I put on a suit and a smart school tie which I had borrowed, but left on my silver boots. Ghengiz and I used to spray our boots with silver aerosol paint which looked really chic until it wore off. I put £200 in one boot and £100 in the other.

I drove up to Perth in an unlicensed car. I didn't have a license, either, for that matter. His wife and four kids were with me, and there was a quarter pound of dope in the glove compartment.

Entering the Procurator-Fiscal's office alongside the River Tay, I said, "I've just flown in from Australia and I've just heard my best friend Joey Buchanan is in custody, I don't carry cash around with me, but I do have collateral: a flat in London, a yacht. How much is the bail?"

"The bail is £300, in cash."

"Only £300? Just one minute; I'll have to consult my bank manager,"

I put one foot , encased in the silver boot, on his desk and pulled out £200, He stared blankly at the wad,

"One moment, and I'll consult the other bank manager," and I stood the other foot on his desk, withdrawing the £100. I tossed the pile of banknotes onto the table.

"When can I get him out?"

"You can't get him out until six p.m."

"I must get him out now," I insisted.

So the Fiscal wrote a letter to the Governor of Perth Prison authorising his immediate release. I asked him to phone the Prison and let them know we were coming.

We sped down the road to the Prison, and I went through the gate in the high stone walls, into the main hall. There were about forty blue-uniformed screws standing around, all looking at me with hostile faces, I gave my letter to one of them and he took it over to an office where a guy glanced at it, then stared at me as if he wanted never to forget my face. He handed the letter to another screw who also gave me a good look before walking away.

Then Joey was brought in, looking very relieved. Outside, he said to me, "Ah, Will, they were just about to start beating me up when that letter arrived,"

After dropping off Baba and the kids at the castle, and picking up his car, we were driving along the Dundee road back towards Perth at about 100 mph. when we saw that we were being followed by a SAAB which then overtook us and slowed down to take a look inside. There were three guys in it, and I noticed they had two mirrors in the front for viewing people behind. Then their car accelerated rapidly and shot off, leaving us standing. Those must be really heavy special cops, I thought; that car should only do 100.

Just then Joey slammed his foot on the juice and the Jag went WHAP!- right up their arse. They tried going faster, but he stayed right on their tail, about two feet away. We hit 140 and they couldn't go any faster. I was playing the guitar and smoking a joint, grinning and laughing. It was a bright and. cloudless summer day and there were patches of mist lying in the valley, and on the road ahead was a layer of mist about one hundred yards thick. Almost instantly we were into it, totally without vision while travelling at an horrendous speed, which is the most terrifying situation a driver can be in.

He snapped on the headlights. The three men in the SAAB were visibly agitated by the two maniacs behind them. We shot through the mist and out into the clear sunlight, still bumper to bumper, the landscape blurring past. Another band of mist appeared and we were through it before we noticed anything,

Joey followed them right up to Perth before he slowed down and let them pull away.

He was in a bad state of mind after that. He had a nervous collapse, a total paranoid breakdown. He began saying that he was going to be killed, and talked of suicide. The police came to the castle and took all his guns away from him. There were rumours of intruders with binoculars on the grounds, and the castle was probably under surveillance.

Then he was found outside, lying dead from a gunshot wound. There was a gun beside him nobody had ever seen before, according to his gunsmith, and a friend who was familiar with all his firearms.

The police said he had shot himself. They reported that he had broken into a cottage and stolen the pistol, not knowing of the secret armoury he had hidden in the castle. But Joey did everything with finesse; he would have chosen a clean shot from a small-calibre gun, not a massive slug that tore his head off.

If a person commits suicide, there is a public inquest; but only a private inquest was held which returned an open verdict.

Unknown to anybody, Joey had apparently insured himself a year previously, and although insurance companies don't pay up in cases of suicide, the insurance was quietly paid.

His ashes were taken by a friend up to the Stone of Justice, an enormous rocking stone high up on the hill which had blood rivulets cut into it, the place he believed to be damned.

As I was walking alone across the moor just before I heard of his death, I was gripped by a godforsaken pang of loneliness. I felt the sky had fallen in and I was gazing, utterly appalled, out into Eternity; there was nothing between it and me, and it stretched on and on, forever.

******
CHAPTER FOUR

Without really intending to, I had lapsed hack into buying and selling dope; it was essentially the social currency of the circles I moved in, and dealing carried a certain amount of prestige and glamour, like being a gun runner or a resistance fighter; a kind of outlaw romance masked its basically commercial nature.

I was seeing one of my art college girlfriends, Mairi, more and more.

She had a wide-eyed innocence, a winning smile, and I was flattered by the warmth of her attention. She also had a yellow Triumph sports car and lots of money, coming from a wealthy family on the west coast of Scotland.

Although she had a public school background, she was drawn to the bohemian life I was leading, and enthusiastically offered to drive me down to London so I could score some dope from a couple of contacts I had picked up.

My first contact was called 'Chelsea Charles'; I phoned him when we reached London arid announced I was coming over. His house was near a bus stop, a ground floor flat on the Chelsea Road.

I knocked; the door opened cautiously a couple of inches, and a nose poked out.

"Yeah?"

"It's Will; I phoned a few minutes ago."

"Actually, I'm frightfully busy," replied a posh voice, "I'm in a business meeting, can't see you just now,"

"Look, we've only come to London for a couple of hours, we have to go back to Scotland tonight," I persisted, although we were really staying for several days with my pal, Jim,

"Oh, very well, come in," the voice conceded petulantly,

I told him I wanted to buy some black dope, "Black is just for beginners," he informed me with a superior air.

"Oh, give him some of that Paki black, Charles," said a very assured young lady with long, straight blond hair, evidently his manager, and reeking of money herself. Dealing with ignorant provincials from North Britain was apparently beneath their dignity.

Charles rooted about in a drawer and produced a matchbox-sized, black lump, wrapped in clear plastic film, which I paid for; then I was immediately shown to the door.

As Mairi drove me away, I started to roll a joint and unwrapped the packet. It contained black shoe polish.

The next day I bought a small quantity of genuine stuff, however, and promptly got very stoned before we drove away.

"You drive," I begged Mairi, "I'm too ripped to manage," We were approaching Hyde Park Corner, and as she moved to the inside lane, the car went bang into the side of a big, diplomatic limousine. We both stopped, blocking the traffic, which was at its rush hour peak. Angry horns began hooting at once.

A little man jumped out of the car and rushed furiously over to my window, grabbing me by the collar and trying to drag me out through the window, shrieking hysterically in Italian.

Three large ladies also emerged and tried to hold him back, arguing volubly, I climbed out and tried to calm him down.

"It's our fault, we drove into you."

"We getta tha police! They draw tha white-a line arounda tha car!"

"Take it easy," I urged, "our insurance will pay. We can just exchange names," I was afraid the police would find the grass I had bought.

"OK," he agreed, and we copied down each other's particulars, while a wall of sound from the horns of three lanes of traffic deafened us. He noticed my address in Edinburgh.

"Hey, you come-a from Scotland? When-a you go back?"

"In a couple of days."

"No, we getta tha police!" He began ranting again, "We draw tha white-a lines."

At last we persuaded him not to worry, and started the car. The Triumph was one of the last chassis-built cars and was made of very sturdy metal, but the front bumper had bent in under the impact, rubbing against the wheel. We turned right as we drove around Hyde Park Circle, but when we tried to turn left to get out of the circle, we couldn't ! We drove around the circle, Mairi pulling desperately at the wheel. Then both of us dragged forcibly at it until the car abruptly cut across the road in front of the traffic, brakes screeching around us.

We parked on the edge of the road and got out to look sadly at the bent bumper and front wing. There was a thick fog, and out of it loomed a huge policeman, over six feet tall, and almost as broad, his size exaggerated by his tall helmet and his cape, like an apparition from a Jack the Ripper film.

"Oh, ho, ho, what have we here, then?" he said, a parody come to life.

"We've just banged into a crazy Italian diplomat, and we can't turn the wheel to the left."

"If I was you, sir, I'd report this to the nearest police. We'll soon have this sorted out," He took off his helmet and placed it on the ski rack, took hold of the bumper with both hands, placed his foot on the wheel and slowly, with great strength, pulled the bumper straight.

I was very impressed. "I can't thank you enough, constable," I said with real feeling.

"Think nothing of it, sir," he replied with a nod, and a hand raised in salute. I jumped in the driver's seat and started to drive away.

"Stop, Stop!" I heard him shout, and in the mirror I could see him running madly along the pavement after us, waving.

His helmet was still on the ski rack, I realised.

'I've always fancied one of those bobbies' helmets,' I thought jubilantly, and shoved my foot hard on the accelerator.

Instantly, I was struck by remorse as I reflected that he had helped us, and I stamped on the brake.

'But I could have the hat,' rejoined the voice inside me, and I accelerated again, triumphantly.

'But he helped you' it echoed with self- reproach; this time I braked to a halt and gave him the helmet.

Mairi and I drove around London sightseeing, with Jake, who was also from Scotland, an expatriate artist. It was a warm, sunny day, early in May, and we spotted a delightful strawberry cake which we bought for his kids back at the house. It looked so delectable that we cut a slice for ourselves, then another, and finally we consumed it all.

Then the impulse came to us to go boating on the Serpentine. We had hired a rowboat and were on the water in idyllic sunlight, when suddenly all three of us were stricken at the same moment by the onslaught of dreadful food poisoning; retching violently over the gunnels and almost capsizing as we writhed on our seats.

We tried helplessly to pull at the oars, but rocked and spun aimlessly beneath the cloudless sky, like poisoned insects.

*******

Unable to find the quantities of dope I was looking for, Mairi and I left London. The journey had been expensive and I resolved to pay her back, not wanting to take advantage of her open-handed generosity. I was feeling tender and protective towards her - it wasn't actually love, but I sensed something vulnerable in her which seemed to lean its head on my shoulder whenever I was around, and I knew that a deeper bond than mere conspiratorial friendship was growing its invisible tendrils between us.

Back in Edinburgh, when I climbed the stairs to my flat, an adrenalin shock of surprise gripped my chest as I saw the door was not closed. Pushing it open, I felt suddenly sick and violated - my flat was totally devastated: wreckage of furniture, clothes and pictures was strewn everywhere and desecrated with paint. My antique curios were gone, including the cloisonné opium pipe. The stink of urine permeated the jumbled rooms.

Burgled.

I had been independent of Mairi, keeping my own house, but as a result of the break-in, I moved into her flat. Soon we began having blazing rows which ended with me saying, "Right, I'm leaving!"

"Oh, come back, don't go," she would cry penitently.

We stayed together from then on. I had been penniless and dejected until I had met this delightful girl who drove me about in her sports car and gave me breakfast in bed; life now seemed marvellous and full of promise.

My artistic output began to attract attention; I got to know a number of other artists in Edinburgh and I held several exhibitions; people bought some of my pictures, a sense of impending fame fanned the flames of my ego, and I even managed to arrange an exhibition in Germany.

To make my flat less vulnerable while I was away, I decided to fit some heavy locks on the door, and to fix a steel plate on the inside so the police couldn't kick it in. The job called for a blacksmith and I raked through my mental list of acquaintances for someone to do the work.

One of these was Black Bob, an artist whose paintings I had admired, as well as a blacksmith. He had acquired a truly evil reputation as one of the most pathological villains in Edinburgh, much feared because of his maniac psychotic rages, and his associates who were small, mean, and quick with knives. Very large and muscular, he had a rounded bullet head which looked like a turnip, and he went about with a fearsome mohican haircut. Bob was heavily involved in drug-dealing and violence - just the man for the job, I thought.

So Black Bob came up and fortified my flat; while he was there, he also repaired a large coffee percolator I had found in a junk shop. Soon after, I bought some finely ground coffee to drink with Mairi and two friends, and used the percolator for the first time since he had fixed it.

It had been bubbling away on the stove for some time but the coffee had not come through, so I wrapped a towel around it, held it under the cold tap and tried to wrench it open, clasped against my chest.

There was an explosion like a bomb, which blew out a window ten feet away, and knocked holes in the wall. The point of the lid impaled my right temple, making a deep hole. The towel directed the blast into my face, embedding coffee grounds into my skin and under my eyelids, scorching the corneae.

Horrified, Mairi and her friends helped me to their car and rushed me to the casualty department. I had been about to leave for Germany but instead, found myself in the Eye Pavilion, unable to see, fearful that I had been blinded.

There was only one surgeon on duty and he had already been on call for fifteen hours, but he immediately performed an emergency operation which dragged on for five hours.

I knew, inside the blackness, that I had to cooperate if he was to save my eyesight. I lay on the table trying to relax while his hand trembled with fatigue. He couldn't use an anaesthetic, and the pain was terrible.

I detached myself, from it, attempting to look down on the searing, burning waves as from a distance.

I noticed that the surgeon spoke with a foreign accent and asked, "Are you from Pakistan?" I knew at once that was wrong. "No, no, don't tell me, I'll guess... Iceland."

He was astounded I had got it right.

While he gingerly removed my eyes and cleaned out the coffee grounds, I told joke after joke, the best ones I had ever recited, as if my life depended on it. He completed the painstaking task by putting twenty-seven stitches like fine needlework into the gaping hole beside my right eye.

I could see again.

The explosion was perhaps only a coincidence, caused by coffee grounds blocking the holes in the percolator, but I wasn't sure. Black Bob felt it was his fault and was very upset, and I didn't see him again for several years.

******

There was a terrible shortage of dope in Edinburgh; none of my friends had any, so I decided to travel down to Manchester on my own and score enough to make up the money we had wasted on the London jaunt.

My contact in Manchester, Brian, who was taking me to a dealer he knew, had been busted two weeks previously and was completely eaten up with paranoia as a consequence. He told me nervously that there was a National Drug Squad Conference in Manchester that very week, which very soon infected me with a similar apprehension; I began to worry that I would be seen and recognised by Edinburgh cops who knew me.

He was driving me across town to the dealer, and I was counting my money, when he pulled out his own wad and thumped it on my lap, saying, "Count it again. This guy won't stand any messing about; everything's got to be perfect,"

I was becoming really annoyed at the funk he was in, but I said nothing.

I was counting both lots of notes, my lap covered with hundreds of pounds, when I glanced out of the side window.

Alongside was a car full of plainclothes policemen, looking over at us.

I looked to the front, and there was another carload of cops; and right behind us was yet a third car full of them: we were surrounded by four or five cars full of drag squad police.

I glanced anxiously at my driver who was intent on the traffic, he hadn't noticed them yet, and 1 knew that if I mentioned it, he would be out of the car and running.

"Listen," I said vehemently, in my best Edinburgh criminal accent, "you just keep your eyes to the front and don't even look around; one move and I'll chib ya. There's cops beside us."

He started trembling, and gibbered, "I don't wanna get busted, I don't wanna get busted, oh god, I don't wanna...

"Shut up, you bastard, don't move, just keep driving," I snarled.

He turned right, and miraculously all the police cars swept on ahead, going on to their conference.

The deal cost more than it was supposed to have, taking all my cash, but I still had my return ticket for the train to Edinburgh, so I said to Brian: "Just drop me at the station. Don't worry, I'll get back OK."

I had forgotten that the railwaymen had declared a national go-slow because of an industrial dispute, and when I strode, up to the guard and said, "Where's the train to Edinburgh?" he looked at me incredulously.

"You must be bloody joakin, mate!"

"What do you mean?"

"There's a bloody go-slow on. There hasn't been a bloody train through here for hours."

I looked around: hundreds of agitated people were milling about; the station was in chaos.

I cursed with annoyance: I had only five bob left in my pocket, I didn't know where in Manchester my friend stayed, I had been without sleep for two days and was beginning to come down with flu, the city was teeming with drug squad cops, and I was carrying a plastic Marks and Spencers bag containing three weights of hashish.

I turned to the guard. "Well, can I get further up the line?"

"You can take the commuter train." He indicated the platform. I stepped onto a train that was just leaving, now totally paranoid, and desperate to get home. In the next station, I was able to get another commuter train, and another, and eventually reached Preston, feeling wretchedly ill and wound up with nerves because of what I was carrying.

To my horror, the station at Preston was full of troops embarking for Northern Ireland, and dozens of policemen were in the crowd. Outside, the rain lashed down. There was a near panic atmosphere among the hundreds of people, some of whom had been waiting ten hours for a train from London; nobody knew where his train was leaving from, as trains were coming into the wrong platforms, and not running according to schedule.

Amid this pandemonium, I saw a drunken Scot lurching along the platform; he was trying to sell, or give, steaks to people, from a bag of frozen meat he had stolen from somewhere. Because he was so disgustingly drunk, nobody would go near him, so I attached myself to him for several hours; in my state of mind, he seemed to offer some cover or protection; a familiar voice, at least.

Finally, to my immense relief, the train from London arrived and I managed to struggle aboard. But when we reached Carlisle, a guard announced, "Everybody off! This is as far as we're going!"

I staggered from the train, now dazed and dizzy with flu and exhaustion; everything had gone so wrong so fast; I was convinced that my arrest and imprisonment were imminent. But I simply had to sleep, so I went into the station buffet, which is a large one, and had at least five hundred people crowded into it; I collected three empty chairs from various tables and lined them up to make a bed; then I stretched out with the bag of dope as a pillow.

A nightmare ensued. I was driving a car very fast, too fast. Ahead of me, someone was on a zebra crossing and I ran him down. I woke, screaming, and fell off the chairs. I didn't know where I was, and hundreds of people were looking at me.

'Oh, my God,' I thought in dismay, 'the dope !'

I snatched up the bag and ran headlong out of the buffet, to see a train at the platform, about to leave.

1 jumped aboard. The train, I discovered, was going non-stop to Inverness. Thank goodness! Back in Scotland.

But at Motherwell, the engine caught fire and it stopped; desperately, I jumped off and ran along the platform to a blue line commuter train leaving for Glasgow, the only one of the day.

The sliding doors were just closing as I ran up to it; I swung the bag of dope between them; they caught it and automatically slid open again.

When I arrived in Glasgow, there were mobs of clamouring, shoving people thronging the station, and one train about to leave for Edinburgh. I managed to get aboard, but even the corridors were jammed with standing passengers.

By this time I had been eighteen hours in the trains and I couldn't face standing; I pushed my way into the first class carriage and to my amazement found it completely empty. I went into one of its compartments and relaxed, my feet up on the seat.

Then I saw a guard go by; noticing me, he stopped and came back, pulling the door open. "Ticket, please."

I sat up defiantly. "Listen, mate, before you start, I haven't got a first-class ticket. I've been on the trains for eighteen hours now because of your go-slow, and I don't mind. But do you know what this strike is about? It's about first and second class citizens; it's about first and second class tickets. So if you start on me about this bloody ticket..."

"Don't you worry about that, mate," he exclaimed with fraternal warmth, clasping my hand and shaking it strongly, "If anybody comes along, you just tell 'em that Jock the Guard says you can sit there."

At Haymarket, I rushed out and caught a taxi, arriving at Mairi's flat in an elated, exhilarated state; we went straight out in the car and sold all the dope in three hours.

Then I collapsed in bed for a week.

******

Mairi and I got engaged without really intending to. My parents threw a party to which they invited all their friends and a lot of relatives; dozens of respectable, straight professional and middle-class types, all standing around with drinks and eating snacks.

Some of the snacks, however, were cakes we had laced with cannabis resin, and soon an unmistakable hilarity began to show in their behaviour.

"Let's announce that we're engaged," I suggested with a giggle to Mairi, and she, being as stoned as I was, thought this was a fantastically funny ploy.

With my arm around her shoulder, we went up to my mother,

"Mum, we're getting married."

She began to weep with happiness, her dearest wish - that I would turn out all right in the end - had come true.

She rushed to tell my father, my relations; they gathered round to congratulate us, shake our hands, clap me on the back. The joke had become reality, too real; there was now no chance to recant.

We set the wedding for the spring, and planned a monster nuptial feast, complete with rock bands and all the acquaintances we could muster, an act of faith to cover up the inner doubts that we both harboured but refused to acknowledge. And so it came to pass that we were married.

We decided to abandon Edinburgh and go to live on the West Coast, on the island of Jura, to start a new life living close to the land, to be artists, to be free of the cloying social games and the neurotic attitudes of the city.

We began moving my things out of the High Street flat; I had our VW van parked and was loading boxes into it. There is a law which says you mustn't take more than ten minutes, I was away only three minutes, but when I came back, two cops were there to charge me, I recognised one of the sergeants who had been demoted for lying in evidence at my trial. He had been looking for a chance to get even, and here it was.

When the police charge you, they ask if you have anything to say.1 thought I would make the longest statement they had ever heard, one that would go into the Guinness Book of Records, After three pages they got writer's cramp and stopped I insisted they go on: "I've got a right to make however long a statement I want."

But I never received the summons; the tenant of my flat failed to pass it on, and I forgot all about it in the excitement of setting off for Jura.

On New Year's Day, months later, I came back to my old flat after a long walk in the country, and I saw a police van parked in the same spot where I had got my ticket. Up the stairs, the door was open. I went in, and a big policeman, swaying drunk, said, "Are you Mr. Sangster? "

"Yes."

"Yer under arrest."

"What for?"

"A parking ticket; you didn't answer the summons,"

I was shocked, but I asked, "Well, can 1 get some things?"

He agreed, so I collected a sketchbook, pens, cigarettes and food. Then we went down to their van. I was furious that they were parked with impunity in the very spot where I had been booked.

I concentrated all my anger on their motor; 'Don't start,' I willed it.

To my delight, it wouldn't start. They considered jump-starting it by rolling it down the hill, but the traffic was too heavy. It was decided to walk me to the station.

"Just give me your hands; we'll put the cuffs on,"

"You're not putting handcuffs on me for a parking ticket !" I retorted, with all the dignity I could muster.

1 was put into a cell, which I proceeded to sketch. Then my mother arrived with Mairi, and a New Year's Day meal in a big thermos, along with napkins and cutlery. They persuaded the Inspector on duty to let me have it. I was there in fine style, thoroughly pleased with myself, when there was a change of screws; I could hear the new shift going along, opening the cells. My window opened, and there was a gasp of fury, "How the hell did you get all that? Who brought it in?"

"The Chief Inspector," I replied airily.

******

Mairi's parents lived on the coast of Argyll in a large, decaying Victorian house full of antiques. Samurai swords, and dry rot. They lacked the imagination or will power to repair it, abandoning whole rooms to decay and the weather, which came in through unrepaired windows during the frequent Atlantic gales.

They never expressed any love, or indeed, any emotion. At dinner one evening, Mairi accidentally said "Fuck"; there was a moment of shock when everything stopped; then they carried on as if nothing had happened.

Her mother has a black hole in her mind into which she shoves anything new or different or threatening. She hates the channel tunnel scheme because she says "it will allow communism to seep into the country". One of her neighbours is a famous writer whose house is full of books and visitors from all over the world, but she won't have anything to do with 'that' woman, who is the honorary head of an African tribe.

"Oh, that communist", she exclaimed dismissively when I glowingly described a visit I paid the authoress.

I could see that Mairi had been starved of affection by her parents, who had sent her away to boarding school, and that despite her warmth towards people, she was materialistic and possessive like them, although she tried hard to counteract this tendency,

I had urged her parents to have the house treated for dry rot and had even arranged for Rentakill to inspect it and send an estimate. The day after the estimated bill for £9000 arrived, her father died of a stroke.

He left £100,000, a quarter of a million in securities, and a large estate with at least a dozen houses on it.

All Mairi's mother's relatives turned up for the funeral; condescending, disdainful superior people who talked about the weather, cricket, anything trivial except this man who had just died and what his life had been about. My father came with us to the funeral; he brought a bottle of whisky and tried to turn the gathering into a wake, but they all prattled on about money. The oppressive feeling of death and insanity was intolerable. Alongside these dull, not-alive people of his generation, my father seemed radiant and vital, exuding life and spirit, keeping the talk going. Suddenly I perceived what a magnificent man he really was.

Later, when no one was about, I went out on the beach and found a really nice stone and placed it reverently on Colonel MacDonald's coffin.

The service was in a large, chilly hall. The gathered relations sang the hymn 'My Father has many mansions', I looked around at their blank faces; 'Bastards! Not one of you believes in what the words are really about.'

I wanted to kill them all, even Mairi, to put a bomb under the house and blow the whole lot up.

Afterwards, I went down to the beach and ran furiously along the water's edge, screaming my rage into the wind, until I collapsed, and the roar of the surf slowly restored me.

******
CHAPTER FIVE

Jura was only a temporary refuge until we could find a place of our own. We were staying with a poet, or wordsmith as I called him, named Andrew. Mairi and I wanted to start some kind of workshop - we didn't as yet have a clear idea of precisely what - where she could work on her tapestries and make preserves, and I had a lot of ideas free-wheeling around my head about painting, music, computer animation, greetings cards, and films.

We had to return to Edinburgh, but we continued to look all around Scotland for a place we could buy. Months went by and nothing suitable turned up; then Andrew, who was still in Jura, sent us a newspaper cutting describing an idyllic Mill in North Fife; there was an old farm-house, a couple of cottages, outbuildings, five acres of land, and even a wood with a stream flowing through. It seemed too good to be true.

Another couple, Harry and Sandra, had been sharing in our fantasies, and we had made a tentative arrangement to buy a place together. They were as enthralled by the advertisement as we were, and we decided to set off at once, to see the place.

That same afternoon we all crowded into the VW van. First I had to pick up Sandra and her kids on the south side of Edinburgh, which meant we were running late. My impatience mounted as we headed north down Causewayside. Ahead was a bus overtaking another . bus, both coming towards me, and a third bus was parked on my side, I was going too fast to stop, and the space between them was narrowing

rapidly. I floored the accelerator and whooped as the van shot into the opening, both wing mirrors snapping flat against our sides as we scraped through. Sandra covered her head and screeched with alarm, and I laughed delightedly - this was a sign, I thought; nothing was going to stop us, we would squeeze through every obstacle.

We drove at top speed into Fife and beyond Auchtermuchty into the rolling hills with their grassy fields and long strips of woodland, liking the countryside more and more. The looming pyramids of the Lomond Hills were behind us now, and we were soon passing Lindores Loch, lined with trees. Each time we saw a big house or a farm, we wondered excitedly 'Is that it?'

Then we came down the hill towards the Tay estuary, and marvelled at the faraway vista of the mountains to the North, where clouds gathered above the Grampians.

Suddenly, there it was: a square stone mill three storeys high, and a stone farmhouse.

We slowed and turned up the gravel drive into the courtyard, the two cottages just ahead with their red-tiled roofs, and the wooded slope of a hill behind them. It was deja-vu. I felt I knew the place; I loved it at once. We explored building after building, like bees in a flower-bed, exclaiming: "I'll take this house, you can have that bit; we'll do up the mill for our workshops." We were high on each other's enthusiasm.

While I knew nothing about building, my confidence was unbounded; Harry was a builder with lots of experience in doing up houses. His attitude was 'No worries, nothing is a problem; we can handle everything.'

The buildings certainly needed a lot of work; Mairi and Sandra both suggested getting surveyors' reports. "Fuck surveyors; we can do it, I know we can," I interrupted, "I don't want anybody saying 'It's too expensive' or 'it can't be done'."

Mairi and I had £5000 her father had left her, and my flat. Harry was waiting to sell a house and didn't yet have any money; he wanted to come in with us, but he felt we should put the offer in our own names.

"You can just decide the final amount yourselves; I'll go along with it," he said breezily.

We offered the owners £8000 with a 24 hour closing date, hoping to rush them into taking it off the market before any more offers came in, but they held out for a week. We waited until the last day; then we went to the solicitor's address and hung around outside until almost five p.m. to see if anybody else was coming in with an offer. No one appeared.

The full sum we could raise was £10,000. "I think we should bid it all," I told Mairi, She wavered, dubious. "It's our only chance," I insisted, "we'll never find another place like this. Make up your mind; do you or don't you want this place?"

"Well," she hesitated. "...I suppose you're right..."

With only five minutes to go, I entered the lawyer's office: the other offers were on the table. I could see one was for £10,000, "We're IN for £10,000," I told him.

The other offer which matched ours was from a group of Cistercian Monks who wanted to turn the Mill into a monastery. When the owners, who were staunch Church of Scotland people, saw it, they decided not to sell to Catholics and accepted our bid. The Mill was ours.

Harry did not come up with the money, and weeks went by; then I heard, to my consternation, that he had bought a concrete yacht. I went to see him.

"What's this about a concrete boat?"

"Well, I want to sail around the world. But it's OK about the Mill, I'm still going to buy it with you."

"But what about our doing up the place together?"

"First I want to sail around the world in my yacht, then we'll do it. I'll do my share, don't worry,"

"All right, then," I agreed, but with misgivings; I didn't like his tone, and he wasn't looking me in the eyes.

Later, he let me know as a by-the-way that he had bought another house and wouldn't be joining us after all, I felt betrayed; we would not have put out all that money on our own. Defiant and resentful, however, I told him, "Great, I'm glad you're out. We wouldn't have got on together anyway."

Secretly, I was glad, too; it was to be my castle, my creation. I didn't want to share it with anyone except Mairi and whomever we invited to stay.

The immediate task that now faced me was modernizing my High Street flat so I could sell it; then Mairi and I would be able to move into the Mill and devote ourselves to remaking it around our dreams. But I needed help. I went to see an old associate named 'Vile' MacVinish, a plasterer; he lived on the fourth floor of an old tenement near Leith.

Listen, Will," he told me, "I'm doing up my own flat. If you give me a hand, I'll help you with yours. I need you to help me put up scaffolding."

"I've never put up scaffolding in my life; I wouldn't know what I was doing."

"Ach, I've put up so fuckin much scaffolding in my time I know it backwards. I did the High Rises in Wester Hailes, I used to be a parachutist in the Army, nae fuckin worries, I'll keep ya right. Just come around on Saturday morning."

I arrived at his flat around 9:30 but he wasn't even awake yet. The scaffolding he had hired was piled on the pavement outside. I shook him and he groaned like a rusty door hinge, peering resentfully at me through bloodshot eyes.

"Vile, the scaffolding's outside; are you going to get up?"

"Ohh, Jesus, I had a rough night. Will. I've gotta have a joint first," He sat up, still in his clothes from the night before, and began to roll a huge joint, eight inches long, of Manali dope, one of the most potent in the world.

"Hey, take it easy,Vile; we've, got to climb up scaffolding,"

"Nae worries. Will," he assured me, inhaling copiously, then coughing.

I refused to smoke any; I wanted to keep my head clear. He smoked it all, and staggered unsteadily to the toilet; the sound of a long and heavy urination gurgled through the flat.

Vile clumped unevenly ahead of me down the stone stairs, pulling on his leather jacket.

We had erected ahout two storeys when he threw down the piece of pipe

he was holding.

"Fuck this, I gotta get a bottle of whisky. You into sharing a bottle?"

"I'm not drinking. Vile, you can have the whisky." I followed him back up to the flat, where he drank half a bottle in surprisingly few swallows, then smoked another joint, while I watched with growing concern.

By the time we went back down the stairs he was almost legless, and incoherent. How he didn't fall as we climbed the scaffolding, I don't know. But the scaffolding went up.

A couple of days later, I returned to help him take it down. A gale was blowing and the structure swayed precariously; it was only held by one tie on a third floor window. We had disassembled one level when he began cursing:

"Ah to Hell with this. I don't care about this bloody scaffolding We'll just chuck it doon. You go below and stop the traffic."

"There's cars down there," I protested, "and people are shopping."

"S'all right, we'll chuck it doon."

It's your job, your scaffolding, I thought, and went down to the street, waving people back and stopping cars.

Scaffolding pipes were bouncing all over the road, bending under the impact, knocking holes in the pavement. Women cowered in doorways, and I wondered whether the police would come.

Then, when all the pipes were down. Vile remembered that he had forgotten to do the most important job, the reason he had hired the scaffolding in the first place: to knock a hole under the kitchen window for a drain. So I had to hold him by his boots, hanging upside down from his fourth storey window, as he swung a pickaxe at the solid sandstone wall, the wind howling around us.

******

When the High Street flat was completed, several months later, we went back to Fife to begin work on the Mill. It was now June, and we bought a packet of seeds, intending to start by digging a vegetable garden. Vile came with us. He had this very annoying habit of coming up to me when I was working at something and saying "That's no how ya do it", pushing me aside and. grabbing the tool out of my hand, bashing away to show me the right way.

I soon saw that if I didn't protest and just hung about, saying "Oh, is that how you do it?" he would do all the work.

As soon as I stuck the spade in the ground, Vile started: "That's no how ya dig; here, this is how ya do it."

"Oh, yeah, I see, very good," I said appreciatively, stepping back and folding my arms.

After a while, when he had dug a couple of square yards, he asked me the time. I lied, telling him only a few minutes had passed. It was one of those long, clear June days which never ends. As the afternoon wore on and Vile continued to dig, I lied about the time again and again.

Around nine p.m., when he thought it was only four, he dropped the shovel and gasped, "Oh Man, I'm beat!" and lurched off to lie down.

The next day he was ill from exhaustion from too much digging. But that summer we had a superb crop of vegetables.

By autumn we had made the farmhouse habitable, and Mairi and I moved in. We invited an architect friend to come and stay with us while he drew up plans. It took us about a month to measure every room, every wall and window in all the buildings, and about five months later we were ready to begin construction - except that we had absolutely no money. I had paid the architect with a number of my best paintings. I had a blind faith that we would find enough money somehow, and went to the local authority to apply for all the grants we could conceivably be eligible for.

Then a brown paper envelope came through the letter box, addressed to Mairi, from a legal firm; my intuition told me even as I lifted it that my prayers had been answered. Inside was a letter informing Mairi that she had inherited £25,000 from an uncle she scarcely knew.

The biggest problem now was that I didn't know how to do anything. I had been the worst pupil at school in woodwork, and my father had never shown me even how to use a saw; I didn't see myself as a practical chap getting things done; my intention was to do deals to pay for others to do the work. I asked everybody I met, as if the whole world was my brain.

Next door to us was a quarry office; the quarry itself was in the bowels of the hill behind our property. I began my campaign to exploit its resources by going over and having tea with the Manager, Mr. Nibblet.

I liked his name because he sort of nibbled at the hill. Nibblet was a collapsed fat man, a ghastly bag of skin and bones, originally from South Africa, who had run the Quarry with a rule of iron for the last thirty years. When he had first taken over, the Quarry had been a hotbed of agitation, indiscipline and thieving. He quickly noted that the most popular as well as the most honest worker there, was twenty-one year old Sandy, whose wife was expecting a baby.

Nibblet invited Sandy into his office. "I'm making you supervisor in charge of all the men."

Sandy was horrified. "I won't do it; these are my mates."

"Well, if you don't take the job, you're sacked."

So Sandy became Nibblet's right hand man. He drove out the Unions, stopped the thieving, prevented men with silicosis from the rock dust from claiming compen sation, and became the biggest bastard up there.

For some reason, the dour and taciturn Sandy liked my mischievous ways; I would borrow tools from their workshop and he would just stand there, saying nothing except, "It's that fuckin Sangster again." I'd wink and carry on, and gradually I got free run of the quarry, taking loads of gravel for the courtyard, even borrowing their JCB digger for a fiver instead of the going rate.

Adjoining the Mill itself was a slightly smaller, square building I dubbed 'The Hall', It had a balcony around its inside walls, like an Elizabethan theatre. The previous tenant had kept pigs in it and he had constructed a warren of extremely well-built pig stys; thick concrete walls reinforced with granite chips and steel rods.

These had to come out, I decided, I hired several men from the village and some compressed-air jack hammers. But when we began drilling in the confined space, the noise was unbearable, echoing and reverberating from the concrete. To make it worse, trying to hold the heavy road drills at an angle was utterly exhausting.

I couldn't stand the noise, so I went up to the quarry and asked their demolition expert if he would blow up the pig stys. He drilled some holes, laid his charges, set the fuses, and we retreated across the yard to watch.

WHOOM! The detonation shook the massive building, a dense cloud of dust billowed out, and all the pantiles on the roof rose vertically on end and flapped down again. With sinking heart, I realised the entire roof would now have to be retiled.

But at least it was now easy to break up the fractured stys with pickaxes. The result was 120 tons of rubble, piled in pyramids outside the Mill, far too much for me to dispose of on my own.

Brazenly, I approached Mr. Nibblet and told him I needed a couple of lorries. To my surprise he acquiesced, and Sandy merely stood by as we dumped the heaps of concrete fragments in a corner of the vast pit made by the quarry operations.

"It's that fuckin Sangster again," was all he said.

The Farmhouse kitchen was too small, divided from another room by a ridiculous wall which was my next target.

Driving back from Edinburgh in the rain one afternoon, I had a puncture which I had to repair; wet to the skin, I was steaming with annoyance when I returned. My attention hit on the unwanted partition, like one of the Furies in a Greek myth,

"Right, get everything out of the kitchen, because I'm going to start on this bloody wall NOW," I ordered Mairi.

She hadn't even finished shifting the pots when I stormed back in with the pickaxe and swung it furiously at the wall. Immediately, to my horror water gushed from the hole. It was hot; I'd punctured the hot water tank.

"It's too small anyway," I told Mairi as a hasty improvisation; "We'll need a lot of hot water,"

But despite my energy and confidence, I was becoming more and more awed by the enormity of my task and the profundity of my ignorance of even the simplest practical jobs. I had been relying on Harry's experience and connections to renovate the cluster of derelict buildings cheaply and quickly; now I began to have nightmares of unending labour amid vast, ruinous halls from which there was no escape.

I was desperate for help. In my extremity, I went back to Edinburgh to see Harry's sometime partner. Drew, His appearance should not have inspired my trust; gaps between his broken teeth, one missing eye, and

unkempt, straw-like hair which gave his chiselled face a distinctly criminal expression.

The devious underworld of building, where men lived by a different code, where cash in the form of backhanders is the language, was as yet unknown to me. I was walking in like a lamb to the slaughter.

Back in the heady days just before we had bought the Mill, Drew had assured me he could restore the cottages in a mere two months. But now he was about to go to India for a prolonged holiday on the profits he had gleaned from the sale of two decrepit flats he had done up at break- neck speed, which would put him conveniently out of reach when the new owners discovered what lay behind the whitewash.

"I need someone who can stay at the Mill and lead a team of builders," I told him, "guys who know what they're doing, I don't want a bunch of ignorant locals,"

"Jamie Bothwell is just the man," Drew told me, "I can send him up to you this week,"

I clutched at the straw, "Fine, thanks a lot, Drew,"

And so Jamie came to the Mill. Full of fun and childlike abandon, he had a waggish doglike charm, eager to please and flatter.

"Fuckin magic, this place," he gushed as I showed him around. "An I've got just the guys for a crew; they'll really be intae it, ken. We'll dae a professional job for ya, get the materials real cheap, only cost ya £9000."

I liked Jamie's conspiratorial sincerity, and the price was music to my ears. I took him on without much further thought.

Jamie, Andy, Dancer and Wilson moved into the farmhouse with us. The work started off well enough and I was pleased with its progress, but our private life became unbearable as these four took over our kitchen. They drank beer, went off to the pub in the village, came back drunk and then threw up in the sink, roared with coarse laughter at dirty jokes, and stayed awake all night having press-up competitions.

Mairi had a deep natural goodness; she made everybody feel welcome, sitting and chatting warmly, trying to please them, making them tea and treating them like members of the family, but becoming a domestic martyr to the rude and objectionable crew. I reflected ruefully on a proverb:

There are two tragedies: one is not getting what you want; the other is

getting it.

Then I found Jamie and the rest were hijacking timber from the building merchant. Jamie had an arrangement to pay the yardmen £300 and they would permit him to drive in with a truck and load up £1000 worth of wood. The truck was hired in my name. I confronted him: "What's the idea?" I demanded.

"Look, we're daein this oor way. If we want to rip off materials, that's oor business; that's us gettin them cheap for ya, and we're making a wee bit extra as well," he returned sharply; too sharply for my liking.

"Well, I'm not happy about you hiring motors in my name and stealing. I want this to stop. The next lot of wood you get, I want you to buy it straight. I'll give you the money."

"Aye, OK, Will, it'll no happen again."

But one night several weeks later, a lorry laden with wood roared headlong into the drive and slid to a halt in the gravel yard; in a state of total panic Jamie and his crew scrambled out of the cabin and ran for the house. Breathlessly, Jamie related how they had broken into the timberyard and filled the truck with £5000 worth of stolen planks; then several security guards had pounced on them. They fought their way free, kicking guards off the cab as they crashed recklessly through the gates while other guards tried to lock them in.

I was furious but also frightened because now I was unwillingly implicated in their crime.

"Let's get the wood out of here right now. You take the lorry and follow my car," I ordered. We drove off into the night with the stolen wood, leaving parts of it with people I knew here and there; then I abandoned the lorry and drove Jamie back to the Mill, to await the police and look as innocent as we could.

Astonishingly, they never came. The only likely explanation I could come up with was that the management of the timberyard were also stealing and were afraid of being found out if there were an investigation.

******

Jamie and I were out in the car one day, looking for an isolated farm cottage in deepest Fife, when we lost our way and encountered what seemed to me a weird series of coincidences.

I said absently, "We should ask at number twenty-one" - and noticed we were passing a house marked twenty-one. Just then a car drove by with the license plate ASK 21,

I remarked to Jamie, "Something's going to happen because of all these odd coincidences."

Then we came to a place that had apparently been a brickworks; it was an area of rolling dunes made of an even-textured black slag, an incredibly bleak, desolate place. I looked at the skyline and saw a man standing there motionless in a black suit, with a crow on his arm.

He looked exactly like the Devil.

"This can't be real," I laughed, "it's like a joke, I've got to go and ask him if he is the Devil."

I crunched over the cinders to where he stood and told him why I was speaking to him. He didn't seem surprised, just stood there nodding, taking it all in, not batting an eyelid.

The old man was a miner, it emerged. He said he'd kept quite a few crows, that he raised young ones. As I put my hand out to touch the crow, it pecked me and I jerked my hand back. I asked him where the cottage that we couldn't find was, and he gave me directions. He was quite a well-preserved old man, and as he replied, I felt that something else was speaking through his mouth, some other spirit with a very powerful message vibrating through that moment.

It only took minutes to find the cottage, see my friend who lived there, and return past the bleak wasteland, but the old man and his crow had vanished. As we passed the spot where he had been, I looked down and saw an extraordinary stone, quite distinct from the slag.

"Stop the car," I said to Jamie, and went over to it. There were no other stones, not even pebbles; just this strange, dark piece which looked like the product of ancient vulcanism and felt peculiarly heavy, like ironstone, when I picked it up.

With a shock, I recognized the old man's face on it, but with two horns on his head. On the other side there was a dog. An uncanny feeling shivered through me.

I took the stone back to the house, but not because I liked it; on the contrary, it aroused my hatred. Wherever I put the stone, I felt compelled to move it, as if it were burning a hole in the carpet. Eventually I put it upstairs in the studio and drew a picture of it. A most remarkable, weird stone.

******

I began scouring around for second hand wood, and I soon heard about a demolition firm based in Dundee, called Ajax Metals, the largest in the area. I went to a site they were demolishing and arranged to buy a lorry load of beams. The foreman said, "Go down and select your wood and we'll put it aside."

"When will you deliver it?"

"In a couple of days,"

"How much will it cost?"

"Fifty quid,"

"Fine," But nothing happened. I did this again, and still no wood was delivered.

So I went to the office and walked in. Old Flynn, the boss, and a couple of his sons were there. He was a small, stout man with deep set, cunning little piggy eyes that watched everything.

"Listen, mate," I said, "1 don't know what sort of business you're running here, I came in and arranged to buy wood and it didn't turn up. Why is it so difficult to buy off you? Is this a front for something else? Are you able somehow not to have to sell stuff to people? What's going on?"

He was tickled by this aggressive approach, "O.K. Next time you'll get what you're after." I argued with him about the price, beat him down, and he gave me a good price, too.

The site was a huge jute mill, covering about seven acres. I walked about, asking the workers what sort of guy Flynn was. "Aye, he's quite reasonable," they all told me. Even though he had a reputation for being corrupt, I got the impression he was pragmatic and businesslike.

I was careful to make sure he trusted me; I never took anything without going to him and asking how much. I felt that he would know if I picked up even one little nut. The result was that I was left alone; nobody else was left to find his own materials as much as I was. I was very scrupulous to declare everything, never to try to pull the wool over his eyes in any way. I felt that he had an animal awareness of everything that went on, which was demonstrated one day when I took Jamie with me.

Jamie had picked up a little brass tap he fancied and put it in his pocket; it didn't show, but when we went to the office, Flynn said to Jamie, "What have you got in your pocket?" He knew.

"Listen," I said, "you know that I've never taken any stuff. I told him not to take anything."

"Aye, I know I can trust you, but I don't trust him as far as I can throw him."

There was a lot of material on the seven-acre mill demolition site that nobody wanted; stuff that would eventually be bulldozed away. So I approached Flynn, "You're a reasonable man," I told him, "you can't afford to remove a lot of this stuff, you can't sell it. What about us coming to a deal? I won't argue with you about the prices any more if you'll let me have that leftover stuff for nothing,"

He said yes.

I was very careful of my appearance when I went to see Flynn, dressing as any worker and avoiding the more flamboyant garments I sometimes adorned myself with. He was fascinated by me and would invite me in for chats and cups of tea, giving me interesting little bits of information; for instance, under Dundee there is a warren of tunnels; one which runs under the Law is big enough to drive a car along and would make a bomb-proof nuclear shelter.

I was careful always to deal with him, because he gave me a much better price than his sons did.

In one of his condemned factories I had found a marvellous table, fourteen feet by six, with a cast iron base; Old Flynn said I could have it for £20. I arranged for someone to be at the factory to have it open and help me remove it. On the way there I picked up a tattooist friend in Dundee, named Jimmy, to give me a hand, but when we reached the building, no one was about.

Damn. Anyway, I had bought it, and I knew my way around, so we climbed through a side window and up to the third floor. There was the table, but each part weighed two hundred weight, too heavy to carry down the stairs. Jimmy noticed I had a rope in the car, and suggested we lower it out of the window in bits.

"We'll tie one end of the rope around a pillar, lower it down, I'll climb down the rope and untie it, then I'll climb back up,"

Yes, I thought, but it's a busy street, just a question of time before the police turn up.

One of the pieces swung into the window of the RAF Club on the street; and broke it, but no one appeared to notice.

Just as we had lowered the last section and Jimmy was going down the rope, the police drove up.

"We're just moving this table which I've bought from Tom Flynn; you can phone him up to check it, only let us finish loading this last piece,"

But they couldn't get in touch with him, so I said, "You can come with us to Flynn's office."

I almost had them agreeing to let me follow them, but they made me lead as we set off, the table loaded into a trailer which was illegal - the tax had expired on the car for that matter, and the engine was inclined to overheat, so I was in some trepidation. And I was dressed very hippy : a quilted jacket with velvet trousers.

Dundee has an absurd traffic system consisting of one-way streets so one can't cut across town easily; another result of Flynn's demolition, I imagined. It was five minutes to five on a Friday evening, the rush-hour traffic in full flood. Ahead was a two-way street with no right turn allowed; if we entered that street we would have to go all the way into the centre of Dundee, through traffic jams, then up a steep hill which would cause the car to boil over.

I turned right.

We drove up to Flynn's office and got out of the cars; the cops came over to take me to task, but I opened first.

"Listen, if you're going to talk about that right-hand turn, you know as well as me we would have gone all the way into town, we would still be there, we'd be pissed off; I did the most sensible thing, I saved your time, didn't I?"

They had to agree.

As we walked towards the office, I suddenly knew what was going to happen, because of my clothes.

Flynn looked startled by my appearance, my hippy costume, "You know that table you sold me? Well, these policemen saw me loading it and thought I was stealing it."

Flynn looked blankly at me for a moment, and said "I've never seen him before in my life."

The cops looked at me, eyes hard and narrow.

"You bastard!" I burst out, "I was expecting that from you."

Then Flynn began chuckling; I laughed; and the policemen joined in too, I observed Flynn and the police; they watched his every move with deference. He was like their boss, I realised; he owned them.

Old Flynn presided over the destruction of Dundee, becoming, in the process, the most powerful politician there, finally the provost. He developed one of the largest debts of any city in Britain, even borrowing money off the Arabs. He would slap seven-day closure orders on tenements and knock them down for the corporation, making a lot of money. The corporation would sell land to him cheap, then he'd sell it back dear. This went on for ten years. Dundee was then the most corrupt city in the U.K.; if you were busted, you could walk into a bar and openly bribe a sheriff with a tenner so he would let you off the next day.

Flynn ran a brothel outside the city where he entertained the councillors. There was no pretence; it was all out in the open; he was like the Godfather of Dundee, Everything was in the family; most of his employees were relations; it was a sort of clan system.

Various people tried to get him. The Procurator-Fiscal once prepared a dossier on him; it went right to the highest level, to the Secretary of State for Scotland, and came back: 'No prosecution allowed.'

Dundee has an extraordinary history. A whaling fleet had been based there and a local flax-spinning industry. It was a good site for mills because of the sloping ground which provided water power. The Freemen of the town were organized into guilds and held all the strings, refusing to allow any competition to set up. The workers, Irish-Scots who lived in the town, were the unfree, virtually slaves. In the nineteenth century, a Dundonian went to Pakistan and discovered that the jute which was too coarse and brittle for weaving, could be softened with whale oil, and woven. Jute exports from Pakistan commenced and Dundee was transformed; it became the rope and sacking centre of the world, the richest city in Britain for a brief while: the mill-owners got richer and richer, spending their money on more grandiose factories, or sumptuous houses in Broughty Ferry, or across the river. But they didn't pay their workers any better; Dundee became the only place in Britain where the women died before the men, because they slaved under appalling conditions in the Mills; It also had the shortest people in the country, stunted by malnutrition.

Flynn came from the lowest class, the tinkers. When he took over, he did more damage than the Germans, demolishing the old city centre, and building huge housing schemes on the cold northern uphill side of the city, where there is today a high murder rate and runaway heroin addiction. The strange thing is that Flynn was loved by many people in Dundee.

But Flynn was just a front for Kerr, the architect, one of Joey Buchanan's father's associates, I met Kerr once, as a result of seeing am advert for a stove, in the 'Courier'; the address was Cash Castle, set in cemetery – like grounds: stagnant ponds, no flowers, just grass. The Castle had been converted at great expense, with a fantastic, Italianate door and costly hardwood windows, but on closer inspection I could see the window-frames and the door hadn't been fitted properly; there were gaps between the walls and the wood-work, and the door-handle was inadequate. Outwardly so ritzy, it was shoddy close up.

'I'll beat down his price for the stove,' I thought to myself. I rang the bell and Kerr opened the door. I took one look at his cold, dead, fishy eyes, and knew at once this was someone I couldn't bargain with.

Inside, the castle was lavishly and expensively decorated with mosaics, a library full of books on art, and a large collection of Scottish paintings. I could tell that he had bought them because of the artist's name, not because he liked them; the collection was a mixture , some great, others drab and awful. This was where most of Flynn's money had gone, siphoned from the destruction of Dundee into this lavish, yet strangely lifeless and gimcrack castle.

I bought the stove and left, with a shiver of disgust.

******

I've always known lots of rats. I think I'm drawn to the devils in this life, rather than the grey, respectable people in between the extremes. I prefer them partly because they are dangerous and 1 enjoy the excitement that brings, but also because, to me, they seem more sure of enlightenment than most of us; they learn from everything they do, all the hard knocks teach them lessons.

The King of the rats was Dougie, a charming rogue whom 1 met just after we'd started working on the restoration of the Mill and its outbuildings. A friend sent him up here from Edinburgh, thinking we might give him a job. He had just come back from Australia where he had spent three years in jail for smuggling vast amounts of LSD.

Dougie had an open, innocent way of speaking. He was like a Viking, strongly built, with thick bushy hair and very dark, impenetrable eyes, the whites obscured by flecks of blood. With him came Ed, a twenty-stone, hulking he-man who couldn't read or write. Ed was like Dougie's possession, he would do whatever his master told him, like carry heavy loads of drugs across borders on foot.

Dougie saw people in two classes: there were the people with power, the Barons, and everybody else was a serf, a peasant. He saw himself as a baron, of course, and he tried to cultivate anybody whom he thought was also a baron. He believed I had a lot of connections and power in the area, so he tried desperately to keep in with me.

After he had been here a few weeks, I started hearing stories about his past; how he'd charmed people into giving him money which they would never see again, how he seemed immune to arrest, despite building up a large operation selling hashish while arrests were being made all around him, how he was an informer because he had been seen being picked up by the police, put into their car and driven away, then released with no charge.

It was also said that he was a chronic gambler, that he once lost five thousand pounds at the bookie's in a single day, that his yearly losses amounted to at least a hundred thousand.

Up the road from the Mill, in a cottage near a forest, lived a couple named Andy and Jennifer, the society lady living with the woodcutter.

Andy was the first person to warn me about Dougie, although he had never met him and wouldn't have known him on sight. One day he came to visit me and began telling me about another treacherous act of the notorious Dougie, who was actually sitting at my kitchen table just then, rolling a cigarette.

"Andy," I said, cutting him off, "This is Dougie," Andy was so embarrassed that he rushed out of the room. But the next time I went up to his cottage, who was there but Dougie, selling him a piece of dope.

This was how he got power over people; he knew they wanted dope and he would sell it to them no matter what they said about him. Andy had compromised himself buying from the very man whose treachery he had warned me against.

Dougie always confused everybody he dealt with; he was totally unpredictable, one never knew where he was going to be next. Someone would phone up to say, "Dougie, where have you been? We were expecting you today."

"Ooh, the car's broken. doon," he would explain, "Ah'll be over later," Then he would turn up at the house of people he hadn't made an appointment to see. Or someone would say, "I'm on my way over to see you."

"Aye, Ah'll be there in ten minutes," he would reply, as he hung up.

One day I heard three successive stories about Dougie, all bad. I began to consider whether I should be more careful with him. That afternoon, he was again sitting at the table when Don walked in, having driven up from Edinburgh. Don had a violent past and many criminal connections.

"This is Dougie," I said, introducing him.

He had never met Dougie, but he knows everything about anybody in Scotland, who's got form, and he knew all about Dougie's reputation. I could see him figuring out which Dougie this was out of all there are. Don reacts instinctively to what he senses in people and his hackles began to rise. He stared hard at Dougie, whose eyes are difficult to look into, fixing him with a cold, reptilian glare and leaned menacingly across the table until their faces were almost touching.

Dougie drew back into his chair first in surprise, then alarm.

Suddenly, Don screeched at point-blank range: "AAAHHRG!" causing Dougie to half-fall, half-scramble from the chair in horror, gasping and trembling as he picked himself up and fled from the room. In that moment the .mask came off his face and I thought 'That's the real you, Dougie, just a worm.'

I followed after and found him in the yard, shaking from head to foot.

"Wh - who the fu - fuck was that?"

At the same instant, Don stormed out of the house past us, his clenched fist clutching an imaginary knife, which he stabbed repeatedly into his own back as he went. When his temper is up, he takes himself away very smartly, but he was warning me about Dougie as well as signalling his intentions towards him.

After that, I cut Dougie. "I've heard too many things about you," I told him. "I'll meet you in the street, I'll say hullo to you, but don't step through my door again."

He took a long time to get the message; he kept turning up drunk, hoping I'd relent.

"Get out, Dougie You're not coming in," I had to say more than once.

Don and I started to grow a, crop of cannabis, then we decided to give most of the young plants to Andy and Jennifer. Later that autumn, after Andy had harvested several pounds of leaves, the drug squad raided a friend of his living not far away. Immediately, he thought Dougie had told the police and that he would be next, so he secretly moved the bags of grass to a nearby church, hiding them in the back of the ruined building. The next time he went there to check on it, all three pounds had vanished.

Soon, Dougie came by the Mill and spoke to me, "Ah've just found all this dope, bags o' it. Is it onything tae dae wi' you?"

"No, it's not mine."

"Well, Ah want tae gie it back."

"I know whose it is, but I'm not telling you. I'll tell him and he can see you about it."

I went to see Andy and told him, "Dougie has your dope. Go up and get it back from him."

But he wouldn't, he was afraid to.

As I became more convinced Dougie was an informer a.nd concerned that something must be done about it, I decided the best thing was to get everyone I knew to cut him out of their lives, so I went round visiting people, saying, "If you continue to see Dougie, I won't see you. Any more dealings with him, and that's it."

There were two friends of mine in the area, partners who dealt in large amounts of smuggled dope; one lived in a cottage in Fife and the other, Alex, lived near Kinross. I went to visit Alex and who was in his cottage but Dougie.

I hadn't warned Alex yet, and I felt at once that he was in danger. I pretended to be surprised.

"What the hell are you doing around here, Dougie?"

"Whaddya mean?" he said innocently.

"I don't know what you've been up to, but I've been getting all these phone calls from angry guys looking for you, really heavy guys trying to find out where you are. You'd better keep out of sight."

I turned to Alex: "As for you, I don't know why you've let this person into your house."

The feeling I had about Alex didn't go away, and a few weeks later 1 felt certain that something was going to happen to him, so I drove down again to see him. It was night and as I sped up the country lane I ran over a hare. The death of the hare was like a horrible premonition, and when I got to the house, the two of them, Alex and his wife, were about to leave to pick up a dope shipment. There was something lithe and graceful about Alex which reminded me of the hare.

"Don't leave," I said, telling them of my fears, "There's something terribly wrong."

"This is going to be our last load," they reassured me; then they'd stop.

And that very night they were busted with forty pounds of resin. Alex got the rap for everybody, the heaviest drug sentence in Scotland: ten years in prison.

After Alex went to jail, Dougie continued to hang around his house long enough to get his wife pregnant and charm her into giving him several hundred pounds. Then he went away, faded from the scene.

But four years later, I heard that he had come back to north Fife, that he had bought a farmhouse up the road, a big, expensive baron's house, that he was married, and, it was rumoured, that he had one hundred and twenty grand stashed in the woods.

'Hell,' I thought, 'I'm going to have to meet him sooner or later.' Sure enough, he came to the Mill, but I wasn't there. Eventually I decided that although I knew he was a scoundrel, I would treat him exactly as I found him at the time, but I would have no business dealings with him.

So when we did meet, 1 said, "Look, Dougie, I think you're a grass",

and told him exactly what I thought. "Well, everybody changes," he said.

I interrogated him for two hours about his activities but couldn't get a clear picture of whether or not he had been an informer.

"Ach, well, whan yer haundlin thoosands o' poonds, aabody gets verrae paranoid."

So I left it at that, let the past be past.

Then he told me he wanted to compensate Andy for the bags of grass he had found behind the church years ago. I had helped to cut him out socially, and now he wanted to get back in, to make himself acceptable, so I agreed to be his spokesman. We went to Andy's cottage, but when Andy came into the room, he stopped abruptly and stared at Dougie, saying nothing.

"Ah'll gie ye a poond o' hash tae mak up fur that grass ..."he began, but Andy turned sharply and went to another room. I began to feel a little sorry for Dougie who was trying to change and make amends.

Some months later, 1 heard that the police had arrested him and charged him with conspiring to sell dope which reportedly wasn't even his.

At his trial, they had to get an interpreter to translate his Fife accent. He took it all in good humour, drawing cartoons of the judge and passing them around the courtroom. He went to jail, of course, leaving his wife to survive on the buroo, all his money blown away, alone in his baron's house.

******

I was up on the steep triangular roof of the hall, putting down sarking boards after we had removed all the pantiles which had been loosed by the blast that demolished the pig stys. It was too much effort to erect scaffolding, so Jamie and I hammered down a piece of two by two across the timbers, and stood on it while we fixed the planks. To put the last board down, I had to remove the two by two I was standing on, and spread myself on the roof so gravity and friction would hold me there.

I had a couple of two inch nails in my mouth, and I carefully lifted up the hammer with one hand to whack the board into place.

Jamie was standing further up the roof.

I started slipping. It was about forty feet to the concrete below. I gulped with fright and swallowed the nails.

To stop myself sliding, I had to flatten myself against the roof, flattening my back and spreading my weight. I felt the nails going down my throat.

'Guys can swallow swords,' I recalled in a flash, 'so I can swallow two nails.' They vanished inside me.

For a couple of days I looked in my stools, however the nails never came out. I briefly wondered if the metal detector at airports would go 'bringgg' the next time I went abroad. But it never happened.

******

Mairi and I went to Crete for a holiday. We badly needed to be alone together; the mounting stress and strain of the construction, the obnoxious presence of the building crew, and my almost daily forays in search of materials, had distanced us. I had begun to detect, occasionally, a hardness coming into her manner when she spoke to me.

After a visit to Knossos, we had travelled inland to a high, flat area about seven thousand feet up. The altitude was tiring, and the people there were different from the hospitable Greeks down by the sea; they were unfriendly and tense, and their attitude began to affect us - we had a really bad argument which nearly resulted in our separating to go different ways around the island.

That night I had a dream: I was alone in a graveyard back in Lindores, Fife. There were two small standing stones, one white and one dark, They had been moved by a farmer and one of them built into a wall. But these stones had originally been placed there in the distant past to mark the way for the Dead to walk; because they had been moved, the Dead didn't know which way to go, and the Dog of Hades had to come and fetch them. While I was standing there, the Dog came - for ME.

With a sudden leap of great swiftness, he sprang at me and knocked me down. I awoke, terrified, staring wildly around me for several moments in the unfamiliar hotel room, while Mairi slept on.

This dream preyed on me until I got back to Scotland. Curiosity compelled me to check out the stones in an Archeological Survey of Fife. To my great excitement, one of them was there, and it had indeed been put into a wall by a farmer. The photograph showed that it was covered with ring-and-cup markings, and some later Roman inscriptions.

Then I recalled that I had seen this stone a couple of years previously, after it had been removed from the wall and placed in a garage - but at that time it did not have any special significance for me. The identity of the other stone, however, remained a mystery which I continued to puzzle over.

A few nights later, I was: lying in bed beside Mairi, unable to sleep. Moonlight bathed the tiled roofs, the walls, and the earth with a pale dust. Something made me get up and go to the window and look across the yard.

With a start, I saw a black shadow shaped like a dog, but as large as a pony, loping down the hill towards me, past the animal shed. The terror of the original dream returned with a shock like a thousand volts; all the hair on the back of my head stood up and I cried out: "GET BACK! AHHH! GET BACK!"

The thing turned round, and I could see it was just a shadow, a pool of darkness, nothingness.

I was certain now that these visions meant something; that my unconscious was presenting me with a message; but what was it?

I crawled, shivering, back into bed and restlessly waited for sleep to come.
CHAPTER SIX

We had to build a septic tank. The JCB digger arrived on the coldest day of the year, late in January, and began scooping out a hole about eight feet deep in a spot where I reckoned there were no water mains. As the shovel scooped deeper into the sheer-sided pit, I watched numbly while a long, snake-like copper pipe at least two inches thick was wrested out of the earth; the pipe ripped away from its coupling and water gushed out, immediately beginning to fill the hole.

While the pit filled steadily, Jamie and I rushed about trying to find the toby to turn the water off. We found several, but all they did was to turn off other people's water.

I told the JGB operator to dig another hole alongside the first one, so that we could get to the broken coupling. But as soon as he had dug down to eight feet, all the water from the first hole rushed in, filling it as well. We were faced with a major disaster. I could see the flood eventually engulfing the nearby village.

At this point, the other three men turned to look at me with a 'what are you going to do now' expression on their faces. There are certain things people you are paying to work for you won't do; it was up to me to go in there, find the pipe, and bend it over. I recalled grimly how the day before, I had spent half an hour trying to bend and seal a half-inch copper pipe, and couldn't close it.

I snatched up a nearby claw hammer like a tomahawk and let out a scream of rage as I plunged towards the ice-filmed water, because I knew how awful it was going to feel. To find the broken pipe, I had to dive under about five feet of muddy, freezing water. I could feel it bubbling up, but I couldn't find the pipe. I had to go under again and again, for what seemed like half an hour, groping with my right hand which became numb and unfeeling, until I fumbled upon the pipe. Clutching it, I stood up with water gushing into the air and all over me, and bashed it three times with all my might, completely sealing it off.

When I crawled up the bank, I was blue with cold. There was no hot water in the house for a bath, because we had shut it off. Only my rage and heat from the exertion staved off pneumonia.

From that moment it began to dawn on me that everything was up to me, that I had to throw myself into whatever I did with no holding back.

I left the septic tank until summer, after that, because the hole had to remain dry long enough for the concrete to set.

*******

I had been shown how to do water divining with a pendulum, by a bloke who worked for the Gas Board and used it to find pipes, and I found that the front garden was covering an underground water system, and the water table was only down about two feet because of the burn that flowed past. Eventually, the pendulum revealed a spot between two springs where we dug the hole and laid the concrete foundations.

Then we dug trenches for the drainage system to carry away rainwater and sewage from all the buildings, and to hold the water supply pipes and electricity cables. The yard had been an old road and was metalled with strongly compacted stones, so hard, in fact, that the JCB broke its hydraulics on them. We had to use pickaxes and shovels, backbreaking labour which took months.

As the cottages and the Mill were higher than the farmhouse, we had to dig down considerably to get the minimum run of one in forty through the flat front garden, so the water could run freely to the septic tank, and from it to the burn.

However, the tank was lower than the burn, and because of this we had to dig across the road and through a neighbour's garden to get the correct drop into the burn lower downstream.

Not having a proper measure, we used a spirit level. Digging a trench across a road involves a lot of red tape which we short-circuited by unofficially getting road signs; it took us one day to cross the road and another to reach the burn. The drain was only two inches above water level, and when we later surveyed the trench, we found we had done it to the exact minimum drop, which was absurdly accurate luck considering that we had only used a spirit .level, and made me feel it was clear sailing ahead.

I had consulted planners and had the local water inspector come out to check the drains and pipes as we worked. After we had built manholes for access, I asked the Water Board inspector to approve our work.

The building regulations are like the Bible, in that you can interpret them any way you please. Throughout most of the country, a one-half inch water supply pipe is OK, but in Fife it must be three-quarters of an inch.

We had put in half inch pipes.

"Well, that'll have to come out for a bloody start," the inspector said.

I stared at him, aghast, "What do you mean? You saw me putting that pipe in."

"Ah, but you never asked me if it was the right size, didya?" He sneered and laughed.

'This guy hates me' flashed through my mind; 'I don't know why, but he hates me.' If I argue I'll only make it worse. If I try to bribe him, he'll bust me. There was fuck all I could do.

I walked away, filled with a seething rage. This was the worst.

Later I phoned the area manager. "I suppose you know your inspector was at the Mill today and refused to pass my water supply pipes?"

"Oh yes, I know about that."

"Before I tell you what I'm going to do, can you please answer a few questions? Can I appeal against this decision?"

"Oh yes, you can apply to the Secretary of State for Scotland, but it'll take five years, and you won't be allowed to live in the house until it's gone through; and I can tell you now that you won't win your appeal, anyway."

"Isn't there anything I can do about it?"

"No, nothing."

"Fine," I said. "You've heard the story about the straw that broke the camel's back? Well, I'm the camel and you're the straw. There's been a lot of straws piling up, and this is going to make me bankrupt,"

My voice took on a deadly-serious intensity. "I'm about to tell you something I've considered very carefully, so I'm in my right mind when I tell you this. I've decided to commit suicide. And I want to take some bastard with me. I've chosen you,"

The area manager stuttered speechlessly.

There is nothing personal in it," I continued icily, "but I'm going to kill myself in a very spectacular manner by jumping off one of the big road bridges. Before I do, I'm going to send letters blaming my suicide on you to all the newspapers."

He capitulated then and there on the phone.

The next day the local water inspector reappeared. His eyes jumped about in his head as he told me he had come to approve the plumbing.

"I don't know what ya fuckin done, but I'm goin ta fuckin take it up with my union!"

Two days later, he was moved to a different area.

******

From dawn till dusk, and often late into the night, the Herculean labours of the Mill obsessed me, and I failed to notice how Mairi and I had let ourselves drift apart by not spending time together and talking. She had placed herself completely behind me and given me total support, but at the price of neglecting her own tremendously creative abilities. She had found it difficult to argue with the single-minded domineering overseer and bully I was fast becoming. Now she was expecting a baby, and I had no time to give her between my journeys to Dundee, my battles with bureaucracy, and my increasing dissatisfaction with the work being done.

The team's work had started to go adrift and they became more and more careless; the brickwork was so crude I felt even I could do better; and the joinery was jagged and shoddy.

Jamie was drinking ever more heavily, and smoking dope constantly. Often, he refused to get out of bed, sleeping off his hangovers. I remonstrated with him, but he argued back: "I'm the boss and it's my job. You're paying us, but I say how things are done, I tell the crew what to dae. It doesna matter about me no being there."

He became completely lazy, staying in bed all day and letting his men do everything, Jamie hated work, it dawned on me; when he did any, there was no smoothness or pleasure in his handling of the materials; it was all smash and bang.

Next, he became ill. I was fuming with impatience and complained bitterly to Mairi, but he had won her sympathy,

"Poor Jamie," she said, "He's not at all well. You can't expect him to work."

While I had been toiling flat out night and day, hardly able to be alone with Mairi, Jamie had become her confidant, cleverly playing on her feelings of neglect, telling her how horrible I was to her, while she tended him. Her ingenuous innocence caused her to take people at face value; she wasn't cynical enough to see through them and consequently was a real target for hangers-on.

The work became more and more nightmarish: the whole place was dug up, and holes surrounded the house and criss-crossed the yard like trenches in Flanders, filling in with mud and water into which people fell regularly. Vast mounds of rubble were heaped everywhere. Concrete refused to set in the cold weather and fires had to be lit upon it.

While the cottage roof was being rebuilt, a blizzard struck and we had to work in the blinding, swirling snow.

One evening I returned to the Mill after being away for a couple of days. After picking my way precariously over the planks spanning various trenches, I walked into the kitchen in a filthy temper, to find it full of the usual louts hanging around doing nothing: Jamie, Andy, Wilson, and Charlie from the village. I began wrangling with Jamie right away, about a job he wasn't doing to my satisfaction, when I noticed with renewed fury, a complete stranger sitting in my chair with a cup of tea in both hands, watching me with amusement.

"And who the fuck are you?" I snapped, rounding on him.

"I'm Bob," he grinned disarmingly, a huge toothy smile I liked at once. "I came to help; sorry if I'm in the way."

He had just hitch-hiked up from Edinburgh, where he had heard about the Mill from friends of mine. "I don't know anything about physical work, but I'm keen to learn."

Bob told me about himself: he was a Cambridge graduate, but University life had become a bore because he had found exams and studying ridiculously easy; able to read quickly and understand at once the essence of any book, he came effortlessly to the top in all subjects, finding no challenge whatsoever. He then did law briefly, but soon decided it was utterly immoral, and left to become a tattie-picker.

When he heard about the Mill, he saw it as a chance to work with his hands, and he hoped I would let him start an organic garden and grow vegetables, in return for his contribution.

We quickly struck up a friendship and in no time he had established himself as a right hand man, an invaluable ally. With his support, I began to see, dimly at first and then in vivid detail, a monstrous debacle looming unless I acted decisively. In my despairing moments, it had seemed things had gone on too far to get rid of Jamie and his men and start again.

What was revealing itself was the sheer incompetence of these bunglers who were wasting our money on slapdash construction that would have to be done again. Pride and fury flamed within me and I cast aside my reluctance to be a builder, and took command of the work.

On New Year's Day, when the crapulous crew surfaced after their orgy of drunkenness, I greeted them with my newly-minted resolution.

"Well, that's the old year gone, boys. This is the New Year, and you're not gonna be here any more," I informed them sardonically.

But it was not so easy to shake off Jamie, His health took a nose-dive, and we both felt it was our duty to help him. My mind was still crippled with religious misconceptions from my mother's ecclesiastical family and I hadn't yet learned that helping others can he a terribly negative act if you don't know how to look after yourself.

I soon found that Jamie had cleverly persuaded Mairi to lend him money to buy a flat in Edinburgh, and told her to regard it as advance pay for work he would do. He had used his winning ways and his sleekit smile to charm Mairi, who was like a beautiful fish swimming in the sea, unaware that this lamphrey from the murky depths had leeched onto her and was feeding on her sympathetic nature.

As Mairi was expecting our baby, my sister arrived to stay with us and lend a hand. Anne is very Christian and full of good works; Jamie played the helpless, hounded invalid so convincingly that she turned on me for mistreating "the poor, suffering lamb."

It was becoming apparent that he had a hidden talent for turning people against one another.

Jamie had held up a mask to us, but now I could begin to see behind it. He worshipped booze and dope, and was completely heedless of his body, making himself sick with over-indulgence. He seemed to sober up only in order to get drunk again, to get well only to make himself sick and get more sympathy. It seemed incredible to me that I could ever have allowed this incarnation of the dark side of human nature to insinuate himself into my life and taint my dreams with his sickness.

The women would not allow me to say a word against him; every time I tried, it only made them more hostile towards me. To my consternation, I realised he was sleeping with my sister. He was still polite to me in front of the ladies, but alone, he had the boldness and effrontery to remark, "1 don't like how you treat your wife,"

I had to appear at the Sheriff Court in Edinburgh on a minor drugs charge. I had been busted for a tiny piece of hash weighing about one-tenth of a gram, which was really ironic when you consider how much I have handled. While I was standing around waiting my turn, a court officer walked over and greeted me warmly; I didn't know him at all at first.

"Hello, Will. How are you doing? Don't tell me you're here on a charge? What have they got you for?"

I recognised him as he spoke; he had been the local bobby on the High Street Beat; we had become close through his interest in art.

Two drug squad policemen came over to laugh at me, and he put his arm around my shoulders protectively.

"Listen, this is a personal friend of mine; you leave him alone, hear?" That made me feel a lot better; court can be very depressing if you're on the receiving end.

When I went into the courtroom, I saw with a disagreeable start that it was the same judge who had presided over the Chinese waterpipe trial years before, the one whom I had deceived with my show of innocence. And he recognised me right away, I could see from the frown that came over his face.

The trial commenced, charges were read, statements given. I listened,only a spectator, not really taking much interest. Then I heard something that focussed my attention promptly.

"I'm considering sending this man to jail," the judge declared.

"I protest," said my lawyer, "you can't send someone to jail for such a tiny piece."

You bastard,' I thought; 'if you put me in jail, I'll. . . put a huge curse on you.'

He stared severely over his half-spectacles at me for a moment.

"If you ever come here again, young man, I will put you in prison." He gave me a fifty pound fine.

Outside, I noticed a familiar, thickset figure, dressed in ragged jeans and a nondescript jacket; his rounded bullet head made him look like a bloated turnip. It was Black Bob, minus his Mohican hairstrip.

He told me he had married and had been living with his wife and three kids in a housing estate; then she had left him to bring up the boys on his own. I admired the way he was coping and thought 'My God, he's changed', although his appearance was not inspiring. I had always been attracted to him because he was a good artist, and he liked my paintings.

I asked him to come up to the Mill and help, confident that he had overcome his mental instability. He said he would, and brought the children with him.

He didn't get much work done; after he had been here a week he began drinking two bottles of whisky a day and started to behave more and more erratically. Matters got steadily worse.

One day as I was driving him up from Edinburgh, we began arguing and it escalated somehow into a violent shouting match. Suddenly, he smashed the bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale he had been drinking over the dashboard, and thrust the jagged edge an inch from my neck.

I stopped the car.

At that moment a police car spotted us and pulled up, and the constable came over.

"It's all right, officer, we're just having an argument," I shouted at him, and he turned away, perhaps wary of getting involved needlessly.

Bob wanted a drink, and I wanted to calm him down, so when we reached Gateside I took him into a pub. He began playing pool with several locals and immediately got their backs up by claiming he was the U.S. pool champion, which they laughed at derisively. He swore he was, and became aggressively boastful and overbearing, talking faster and more furiously, I could see a fight erupting at any moment.

"Look, Bob, just leave it out," I said, pushing him out to the car and driving back to the mill.

'What's happening?' 1 wondered.

I soon found out.

The next day, he shaved his head.

I should have realised this was a sign that he was going on one of his psychotic trips and got rid of him at once.

In my studio, a few days later, I found he had been putting bizarre additions on some of my drawings, trying to change my reality. Written on the back of some of them, were enigmatic remarks like, 'Now it's open'

That night I had a dreadful dream: I was in the darkened Mill, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light they revealed a congregation of every devil and demon that ever was, sitting around, watching me intently. An ominous sense of foreboding gripped me.

Late the following evening, Bob appeared at my door, stripped naked and covered from head to foot in smearings of black grease. My heart sank.

"I have come to purify you," he announced in a portentous way.

"Oh, fuck off." I snorted.

But he began running round and round the house, chanting and shouting "MAKOOMBEE, MAKOOMBEE'." He had evidently gone into total alcoholic psychosis and was trying Black Magic on me, which works through auto-suggestion; you give it power over you by being scared. His behaviour was a calculated terror campaign to get me under his power, but I knew it was all just an illusion, a trick.

I drew a mental ring round myself, Mairi and the child, and kept saying "Just shut up!" every time he came near the window.

He grew progressively more angry, shouting and bounding around in the night. He encountered Bob, who was staying across in one of the cottages, started a violent argument, and punched him in the nose.

I couldn't call the police, as it was then against my principles to get involved with them. I began to get rattled, unable to think what to do next.

When he seemed calmer, I ventured out and tried to talk him into leaving. It was about two in the morning, and as we walked across the dark courtyard, a bat flew around us three times, then vanished into the Mill, like a scene from last night's dream. As the bat flew out again, we entered the Mill, still arguing.

Abruptly, he began shouting wildly and clutched one of the square wooden pillars in a bear hug, trying to pull down the building, like Samson. He is hugely strong and I feared he would do it.

."Just shut up and stop that," I said impatiently, and he let go of the pillar, only to snatch up a knife lying on the workbench among the tools.

"I'm going to kill you!" he snarled, pressing it against my throat.

I was frozen, unable to respond.

"If you wanna kill me, go ahead, just make it quick," I said without expression. Seconds went by, filled by the pounding of my heart as he pressed the knife, watching me, his eyes focussing and unfocussing.

He grabbed my wrist and dragged me over to a vice, shoving my hand into it.

'He's going to torture me; what am I going to do?' I could see a Charles Manson-like apocalypse coming, newspaper headlines with "Hippy Violence", all my efforts and idealism crashing in ruins because of this madman.

"Take my right hand," I told him in a deadpan voice, "not my left; I draw with my left hand."

But he didn't tighten up the vice; instead he became hysterical and began to squeeze his own hand in it. My calmness had unnerved him. I noticed that I had clicked out of the freeze, that 1 could react. 1 should have grabbed a hammer at that point and brained him, but I felt sorry for him and said consolingly,"Don't do that, Bob,"

With a tormented cry, he jerked his hand out of the iron jaws and ran off into the dark.

In the morning I phoned up Jake and a couple of other friends and begged them to come over and give me moral support. Jake took Black Bob away to a pub in Newburgh, while Mairi cleared out.

The two of them returned, having had a lot to drink. They were alone in the kitchen, when Black Bob suddenly lunged at Jake from behind, like a bull.

Jake adroitly side-stepped and he ran headlong into the stone wall, stunning himself. Jake flew into a murderous rage and smashed a wine bottle over the stove, "One move and I'll kill you; I'll cut you to shreds I" he shrieked as he shoved the broken glass into Bob's face, cutting him slightly.

With blood trickling down his face, Black Bob burst like a rotten turnip, all the fury went out of him and he became pathetically apologetic.

We got a van the same day, and bundled all his belongings into it, while he begged me to be allowed to stay. But we shipped him and his kids back to Edinburgh.

"1 could have ended up doing life for what I almost did," Jake said reflectively when we talked about it later.

Then 1 began receiving threatening phone calls from Black Bob. 'How should 1 cope with this?' 1 wondered. The words 'You are a dead man' came to me in a dream, and 1 realised I would have to fight him on his own wavelength. I found a postcard of a Mexican death's-head skull, one I didn't like, and drew a black cross on it, then wrote the words and sent it to him. I heard no more from Black Bob after that.

His psychotic outburst had shaken me, however, and weakened my faith in myself. 1 had been buoyed up by a visionary belief in what I was doing, and I couldn't comprehend how decisions of mine could go so far wrong. I felt it was all my fault, and depression unlocked a gate to further misjudgements.

I had gone over to Kinross around January to visit Mick, and buy some dope off him. Somehow, 1 lost the key to my car. 1 tried to start it by fiddling with the ignition, but only managed to mess up the wiring. Mick generously offered me accommodation for the night, even giving up his own bed.

He and his wife were having a hard time, eviction was imminent, and when he asked me if he could stay at the Mill and do some work for rent, I said yes. I put them in the middle cottage while Mick was to search for another house. But he took a fancy to the hut up the hill and said he wanted to fix it up and live there.

"1 think you should stay where you are and we'll think about that," I told him noncommittally. "You can live here until the first of May."

The morning after he moved in, the police raided us, looking for drugs, probably because I knew some of the local dealers. 1 did have some dope lying around, but they didn't see it; instead, they caught Mick trying to throw away three-quarters of an ounce and busted him.

It was the first time he had ever been caught, and although it was his own carelessness, he blamed me.

The result was that he fell out with me right away. He really wanted the hut badly and was angry that I wouldn't let him have it. He was supposed to be doing fifteen pounds worth of work a week, but he worked grudgingly, and more uncooperatively with each passing day.

Three weeks after that night at his house, I found the car key in my pocket, where it had been all along. I wondered whether I was losing my grip on things, or if he had hidden the key and returned it later.

When the first of May came, and Mick had not yet found another house, he claimed I had said 'May', not the first of May, and accused me of changing arrangements. Referring to promises I was supposed to have made, he persuaded Mairi to believe him rather than me, which introduced more poison into our relationship. He took to bad-mouthing me to everyone, sitting in the yard and saying,

"See that fuckin Sangster, he's no artist at all, just a breadhead. Fuckin shithouse, this place,"

I felt as if I had dry rot of the mind, with him brooding over there, hating me and spreading distrust by twisting everything. I tried to push Mick into leaving, but he dug in his heels. He stopped working altogether and refused to pay rent or return the seventy pounds I had lent him.

When he told me he had been promised a house in June, I relented and let him stay for a bit longer. Then his case came up in court, his drug conviction featured prominently in all the newspapers, and the landlord refused to rent him the house.

"OK, you can stay another month," 1 told him, giving him the olive branch. But he wouldn't give anything in return; rigid, unbending defiance repaid my gesture. I resorted to harassing him, but there were limits. "My wife's pregnant," he complained, "She can't live with all this tension."

He was like a reed that would snap under too much pressure. If I got in the bailiffs or a team of heavies, it would break him, perhaps drive his wife to suicide. So I simply cut off the electricity and water and did nothing.

One day a lorry load of gravel arrived and the driver dumped it near the entrance to his house. He ran out, shouting and raving, convinced I was trying to seal him in, bury him alive. That finally spurred him into finding another house.

Mick was so busy hating me that it was disturbing everything he did. But in the end, I made him stronger; after his departure, he became much more successful than he had been before he came here.

He had abused me for being a 'breadhead' capitalist, yet now he was wheeling and dealing constantly, buying and selling for as large a profit as he could get. I suppose I taught him to accept that part of himself he despised and projected onto me.

******

We had been invited to a fancy-dress New Year's party. I put on glittering silver eye make-up, turquoise electric-blue trousers, and decorated my cowboy hat with a garish bandanna. As I got into the car I remembered that Bob had said to pick him up in the pub in Newburgh \- but he had not said which pub.

God, I thought, I've just got myself outrageously dolled up and now I'll have to go into all those pubs on Hogmanay and they'll be full of people.

The first pub didn't have all that many people in it when I put my head through the door, but everyone stopped talking and turned a shocked stare at me. No sign of Bob. I quickly backed out and drove up the road a bit beyond the next pub, parked the car, and threw the hat in the back thinking at least I could look a little less ridiculous. But then the cowardice of what I was doing struck me, and I knew I would not be able to look myself in the face if I didn't wear the hat, so I pulled it back on and walked back.

Just then a group of about twenty yobbos in leather jackets, noisy with drink, was crowding along the pavement towards me. I could see contempt and hostility taking shape on their faces; it was a dangerous moment.

I reacted by rushing boldly up to one lad I recognized who had been working at the Mill and threw him on the ground, enthusiastically pretending to beat him up. "Happy New Year, Davie !"

His mates were aghast, unable to move. I realized at that point everyone had been calling me 'Mad Will' so I turned it around.

"Yer all bloody mad, the whole lot of ya, yer all a bunch of crazies," I cried mockingly as I stood up and strode past them, tickled at the idea that the most crazy looking person was telling all these normal types that they were the crazy ones.

There was a sliding door leading into the bar which I pulled back dramatically.

As the inevitable hush fell and all faces turned towards me with surprise, I held up both hands as if they wielded invisible guns and growled menacingly into the embarrassed smoky silence: "Stick 'em up and don't move."

A man shifted and I took aim and shot him.

"Pow! Pow!"

Next I shot the barman.

Then someone started shooting back. We had a shoot-out. The whole bar full of men firing invisible guns blazed away at me. I backed out of the door, still shooting and blowing smoke from the barrels.

But we never did find Bob that night.

During the first two months of the New Year a lot of snow fell, smothering yard and trenches with velvety, white fluff that concealed the rubble, muffled the rooftops, and swathed the hillside with innocence; it also brought the work on the Mill almost to a standstill.

The work was costing about five hundred pounds a week, and becoming increasingly expensive. I had had just about enough, I needed a break. Somewhere warm and exotic. And it would be a good idea to get Mairi and our little girl away from Jamie, I felt.

"Look, Mairi, I think we should go to India for a while," I knew she had always fancied going there.

"Oh, Will, what a lovely idea. But we can't possibly afford to leave,"

"If we close the place down, we'll actually save money and be economising by going to India, It's cheap over there, and Bob can paint the end cottage so it'll be ready when we return, I can rely on him to keep an eye on things while we're away,"

"Yes," she agreed, enchanted by the prospect of escaping from her drudgery, "let's leave at once," I felt a quickening of the conspiratorial intimacy we had shared, which had all but vanished in the last months.

I phoned London and got a price on the tickets, I asked the bank manager to give us a giro credit, and telexed the money to the airline.

On the next day, the eve of our departure, I got stuck in a blizzard with Bob, high up in the Ochil Hills above Dunning. Struggling through the drifting snow, my mind was racing ahead: Mairi was waiting with our gear; we had to catch the train, pick up the tickets, and if I did not make the first connection we would never get to India. It was only the compelling vision of that faraway, fabled land which kept me shovelling snow and heaving the car over the blocked roads.

We set off that evening on the sleeper, collected the tickets the following morning, stayed the night in London, and rose at four a.m.; finally, by seven o'clock, we were on the plane for India, at Heathrow.

With us went two sacks of disposable nappies, which had been the subject of much disagreement. I had been adamant; I wasn't going to take bloody disposable nappies to India; but Mairi insisted, and she further insisted that we take the pushchair, which in the event, turned out to be a great boon.

At twelve midnight, we found ourselves in Bombay, having only made up our minds to leave three days previously, and not until three a.m. did we manage to locate a hotel.

My intention was to reach Goa, where my sister Jess was staying, because her birthday was imminent. Besides, 1 didn't want to get stuck in Bombay.

I asked the desk clerk at the hotel, "When's the next boat to Goa?"- that being the best mode of travel - and he replied in his up-and-down accent:

"It sails at ten o'clock sharp, sir, sharp," Then he added, "You must leave the hotel by twenty past nine at the latest."

So with extreme firmness, playing the colonial Briton, I said "Right. I want to be woken up at quarter to eight, I want the breakfast, and I want the bill ready."

"Oh, yes, sir, very good. We are very organised. I make sure."

In the morning, nobody came to waken us, but I rose early and demanded the bill first thing.

At twenty to ten I still hadn't been given it and I was becoming really angry. When we finally emerged from the hotel, I grabbed a taxi off the street and barked,

"Right! Quick as you can to the Goa boat."

At every set of traffic lights the driver turned off his engine; he coasted down every hill. I sat right behind the driver, my fist upraised, at the ready, urging him, "Faster!" and as I said Faster,he seemed to go slower. Then I did something I've never done before or since. I hit him: WHACK!

It wasn't a hard blow, just heavy enough to give him the idea of urgency, and I snarled, "Fuckin move, ya bastard."

He drove like a maniac, then.

We tore through the densely packed streets of Bombay and arrived at a huge structure, like an aircraft hangar, full of thousands of people. I could hear a hooter in the distance, as the clock chimed ten. Beyond all the people I could see a boat at the far end.

The taxi driver was shouting at me. Mentally gathering resolve, I threw some money at him, and with the little girl in the pushchair, and Mairi carrying the bags, I shouted "Charge!", and the crowd parted in amazed silence before us.

In the distance the gang plank was ready to lift. We rushed straight through the ticket collectors and as the gang plank began to rise, we galloped over it, into the boat. We collapsed on seats, next to a Persian guy.

"Hello, My name is Addy," he introduced himself, and we laughed about our close shave.

There we were, sitting in this damned boat, sailing off and I hadn't even paid for a ticket yet; it seemed a white man in India could do anything if he was really determined.

I looked around and saw a couple of hippies on the deck near us, looking very snootily in our direction, noting with disdain the baby, the pushchair, and the disposable nappies.

Then suddenly, I heard a shout of sheer delight:

"Hullo, JIMMY! Fuckin magic, ya nutter!"

As I looked behind in astonishment, a little round black guy was approaching with a huge grin over his face, repeating all the while, "Fuckin Magic." I looked at him. taking in the Celtic badges, the 'Scotland Forever' stickers, and the scots Tammie on his head – and he was an Indian!

He'd worked on the oilrigs, he told us, hence his feeling of kinship, and to celebrate his reunion with a couple of Scots he went away and bought us drinks, and returned to sit with us.

By now I was in a kind of seventh heaven, spaced out through not having slept for several days. The passengers were everywhere, sitting down very casually just where the notion took them. Then, at a certain moment, everyone just lay down and it fell completely silent.

But we walked the decks all that night with the child who was almost berserk with the temperature. By morning we were in a daze of pure exhaustion.

The boat came into Goa as the sun was rising.

We had no idea where Jess was staying. Mercifully, Addy took over. A Zarathustrian, he spoke seven languages, including the local Goa dialect. He cut through our muddle, suggesting we head for the biggest town, along the coast.

As we came off the bus in the town, Mairi brightly suggested checking at the Post Office to see whether our letters had reached Jess, and to ask where she lived.

I was standing in a queue in the little Indian Post Office when, behind me, a voice exclaimed in disbelief: "Will! Will Sangster!" I turned around to see who it was, and saw Barrie, an aquaintance from Edinburgh.

"Oh yeah," he said, matter-of-factly, once I had explained our situation, "I know where Jess stays," And then, as the surprise resurged in him, he grasped my arm and pulled me towards a café.

". Come away in. Let's go and have a have a joint, man. I've got the best dope in the world, man, the best!"

In the cafe where he led me, he proceeded to fill his chillum with about a quarter of an ounce of dope. Everything, which had been ticking over with reasonable smoothness until then, now went swiftly out of my grasp. Fighting an intense feeling of nausea, I went and sat outside the café. I dimly knew that we were waiting for some other friends of Barrie's to share a taxi as far as Jess's, but I didn't realise that it was midday now and the all-powerful tropical sun was glaring down on the back of my neck.

As I sat there trying helplessly to control the spinning in my head, I kept repeating to myself 'I've just had a quarter of an ounce of the best dope in the world; two days ago I was pushing the car out of a blizzard. Crazy.' By the time we reached the house where Jess lived, I was feeling decidedly ill.

It was her birthday and she'd received our card that very day announcing 'We'll be arriving sometime'; but she was extremely ill with hepatitis and my immediate reaction on seeing her was that she was dying; she'd lost a tooth, her face was thin, and there she was, stuck in the middle of a foetid jungle.

Her bloke, a big, heavy, dour bastard when he was in a good mood, was just coming off some drug and was surly in the extreme. With Jess in one hell of a state, and Kirsty, their kid , to look after, the last thing he wanted to see was his brother-in-law and family.

"Fucking Hell, what's all this?" he snarled menacingly, shifting on his rush bedding as we crowded into their little one-roomed Indian hut – Mairi, two bulky sacks of disposable nappies, the screaming baby – while Jess lay on the floor, barely able to smile weakly up at us.

In that climate, if you drop just one crumb of food, a column of ants will emerge from away over on the other side of the room and descend upon it; leave any food lying around and whole armies of them begin marching and counter-marching. If you are cooking and eating in a mud hut, it is an impossible place to keep clean and tidy and ant-free.

We had to sleep on rush mats which have tiny little slits that ants cannot cross. In sleeping, no part of one's body must reach over the edge. The only drawback is that the mats were designed for the Indians, who are very short and small, only about five and a half feet at most. I hunched into a little ball and went to sleep. Before long, my hand strayed over the edge and the first ant bit.

Staying with Jess and her man, Ricky, was not the formula for a good holiday.

Goa is a place which attracts all the western people who 'do' dope. It's a place where there are no laws. In the words of the Goanese guy Joe, from the oilrigs, "We Goanese are a really happy people. We don't mind what anyone else does so long as they aren't affecting the native equilibrium. You could stand in the middle of the market square and cut your throat, and it's your privilege to do that; nobody would stop you. Do absolutely anything you choose to yourself in Goa. But if you mess Goanese people about it's a different story."

For years and years, the Portuguese colonized the region and built up their little empire by creating lots of bastards and thus a half-caste population. Goa was a little Christian enclave, an area where most of the inhabitants were catholics, but with a history of promiscuity. The Portuguese went there for a good time, and the Indians go there for the same reason now, because of the absence of liquor laws – liquor is dirt cheap – and to buy cameras and commercial goods on the cheap.

Goa has this dark, abandoned aspect to it, and the hippies are simply the continuation of a long tradition, one in which the very soil is steeped. When freaks go there, they can choose their drugs, smoke openly, and behave freely; no one and no law is going to stop them. It's like a Hieronymus Bosch painting; any fantasy that people want to indulge is permitted, so long as the native pattern of life is not disturbed. You can party night after night on anything you please. It's like a Hell on Earth, an Eastern Las Vegas; but it's beautiful as well. We met people who were virtually dying, saw dead bodies washed up on the beach, and then happy people walking hand in hand, and then disappearing with laughter into the bushes; all amongst palm trees, the sand, and the sea.

We had to get out of Ricky's house in the jungle; our little girl, Sheena, was becoming sick with the heat, and we were desperate for some alternative accommodation. Most of the houses with rooms to rent were squalid, and were full up, anyway. However, Mairi and I noticed a really beautiful house set within its own little garden, with papayas, coconuts, guavas and other tropical fruit. When we went to enquire about rooms, a very quiet, lady-like nun came to the door. She gave us a thorough inspection lasting several minutes before finally agreeing "Well, you might be able to stay a night or two."

So we moved into this old Portuguese house, one of the most charming I'd ever seen. A balcony ran around the huge central room, with smaller rooms leading off it, and great spacious steps; it was all airiness and light, and with the jungle outside only ten feet away.

Life proceeded according to a very efficient system there. In comparison to our former lodgings it was like being in Heaven. A shower could be had out of a big earthenware tub and there was 1ighting from lanterns, if not electricity. The old custom of using cowdung on the floor was maintained; they got a man to beat it all down until it was shiny and the surface marked from the beating. Cowdung has a property which kills ants and if this is done every two months, ants won't survive. The two women who ran the house were so clean that not a speck of dirt was left to attract ants in the first place.

There was a morning when I was startled awake; I heard a soft 'Thud' and opened my eyes. Mairi was sleeping six feet away from me, and on the floor between the mats were two large scorpions which had fallen from the great wooden roof beams above us.

In a reaction of pure fear, I grabbed a book and hurled it down upon them. Then I was seized by an attack of the horrors: 'Christ! What do I do with them?' I picked up the black mass and tore outside with it, almost gibbering, but they were dead. By the time I'd fetched Alice, one of our two hostesses, an army of ants had already dismembered the scorpions and they were dragging legs away to their nest.

In Goa we met some terrible people; amongst them were a lot of Scots folk I'd run about with in my teens in Edinburgh, now all dealing dope and living in beautiful tents up on the cliffs. They sold Afghani and various other sorts of dope. There was a definite politic about that which everyone ascribed to. Someone fell out with me because I had naively mentioned that so-and-so's dope wasn't bad, imagining I was implying that it was better than his own, and so he refused to speak to me after that, as he had the best dope in the world, man.We were in restaurants in Goa where people were smoking chillums , and when they left, one could pick up a quarter of an ounce off the table from what they had scattered in their crumbs. They had parties and made hash cakes, putting half a pound in the cakes. Without exaggeration, they completely blitzed themselves on smack and other substances day after day.

There were Britons who had sold their passports, now trying to work out a way of staying alive; Italians who had been wandering about in a bubble of dope until it was finished, leaving them crazed and desperate; a guy who had picked up headlice and had had a hole bored in his skull, people who had lived in India for years, never combing their hair and going around like Indian Sadhus with great tangled balls in their hair, infested with insects. I saw three Scots arguing fiercely about the price and relative status of a ridiculous piece of dope.

It was pathetic.

I wanted to get out of it as soon as I could. I could feel my body going soft; I started doing press-ups and went jogging, had my hair cut short, and even wanted to buy a suit because they were all parading about in loin cloths.

I hated the whole scene; I felt myself becoming a reactionary; I refused all chillums, I smoked less and less dope, I fell out with the Scottish crowd . They were all sneering "He cannae tak his chillum" just the way they did back in Scotland "He cannae tak his pints", trying to get me as stoned as possible. But I refused.

The outstanding feature of Goa is the pig system. In the old house where we were staying, they had the traditional Goanese sanitary arrangements: there's a nice little outhouse that resembles a chapel. It has a fence around it, and there's a pig in this enclosure; it's a special pig – a shit-eating pig.

You go up the steps into the little whitewashed chapel. Inside, in the space to bend down, are two places for your feet, and a hole that stretches down to the outside. And if you're the first person to use the 'chapel' that day, remember the pig hasn't eaten since last night and is particularly, voraciously, hungry.

As you bend down, the pig shoves its head right up the hole, which is so designed that the animal can get his snout to within three inches of your backside, so that no fly can land on your shit before the pig eats it.

That first day, I had diarrhea. I squatted there with the pig squealing wildly below me, which was off-putting. But I needed to relieve myself. The correct mental attitude was, it seemed, for me to hate the pig.

"Right, you bastard! HNNNN!" I exploded – and the pig slurped it up like a living vacuum cleaner.

That is a very good start for the morning, as all your hatred comes out and leaves you ; but you must really hate that pig in order to achieve release.

Since these 'chapels' are scarce, the local sewage system has broken down somewhat because of all the Europeans in residence, and a number of pigs were running about wild, gobbling the dung of the incomers who just go into the bushes to relieve themselves.. For this reason, a stick should always be carried as protection against the pigs which try to attack and eat one's turds even as they emerge.

Even that system would be quite effective, only there is the problem of the freaks who live on the cliffs where the pigs can't go. Consequently, the place is a very unhealthy environment.

Bacon sandwiches were sold down on the beach.

Goa was a weirdly beautiful experience, but there was something very menacing about it, and I was impatient to get out.

The nicest people we'd met in Goa, and the most sane, were the orange people, the Sinyassins, who studied under Bagwhan Rajneesh. I found myself thinking we should go and see a bloody guru, as we were in India.

I had in mind a story about three Irishmen who went to Rome and had an audience with the Pope. He asked the first one "How long are you going to be in Rome?"

"A year" replied the man.

"Then you will find something out about Rome', said the Pope.

"Two weeks" replied the second.

"Then you will definitely discover something here."

The last man said "Just this afternoon, your Holiness." And the Pope nodded, "You will see all of Rome."

I had this feeling that if I'm in a place just for a very brief time, I will see everything; all that I have come to see. We had just six weeks, and I had to recognize that I was just a tourist, that I wasn't going to immerse myself seriously. So we went to Poona, where Rajneesh's followers had gathered around him in a colony.

I had an ambivalent attitude towards the Guru mentality. The followers of Rajneesh make excessive claims about him which he doesn't in fact make about himself, such as 'This is The Lord walking among us on the Earth'. Whatever the truth might be, I had no strong feelings either way. My response to such claims was 'OK, I wouldn't mind if Jesus Christ did come back; maybe it is him. I'd be happy with that.' I simply wanted to understand what the whole Guru scene was about.

At Poona I began by being an onlooker, just hanging about. I spent a lot of time speaking to an Indian guy who had been one of Bagwhan's earliest followers, but had been booted out of the Ashram. I thought that was a good sign; it is important that a Master can tell people to go away and think for themselves. if they are clinging, limpet-like, to him.

We went along to a couple of the classes. As we were dancing around the room, holding hands, I thought 'This is great'. But suddenly the leader gestured us all to the ground; everybody sank to the floor, and he proclaimed "Bow down to Bagwhan."

'Fuck this!' I thought, and felt rebellion rising in me, cutting me off from the group. I felt quite jealous of Bagwhan; I realized I would have liked to be him, to be the Big One, to have the glory.

We had only a week there, and we couldn't get into the encounter group without becoming Sinyassins; but one was allowed to ask a question of the Master, submitted in written form along with a photo of oneself. It was said that from one's 'aura', from the physical impression in the photograph, he could gain some insight into the questioner and tell what sort of existence his soul had and where it came from in the Cosmos. Or whatever.

We had our photos taken, wrote out our respective questions, and sent it to him in an envelope. My challenge to him was was a drawing of one half of a temple along with the question "This is one half of a temple; where is the other half?"

What I really meant of course was 'I can see all this around me, but where is the rest of it, where is it coming from?'

He sent me a really dumb answer: "It is a mystery. Go in and find out for yourself." But as I thought about it, I realized it was actually a very good reply. It was honest.

So I went to hear him speaking. He was a brilliant speaker, but unfortunately at that time he was giving Hindu talks. There he was, talking away in Hindi, all his orange people sitting around him. Everyone said that it was enough just to be there, that there was no need actually to understand the language.

He has an impressive technique of looking intently at every person in the audience; he scanned people with the most incredible effect. Some murmured breathlessly "He looked at me!" The sense of awe was real enough. There was a great calmness about him, mesmeric and very striking, a quality of control, fascinating to observe.

Other gurus tend to overdo the effects; too many flowers, for instance, but there was evidence of a brilliant tastefulness all through the Ashram; he had the balance just right, everything, right down to the literature, was perfectly done.

When he rose to leave, all his followers rushed forward, some to kiss the spot on which he had been sitting; and again, I was repelled by their excessively submissive reactions.

So I left Poona with ambivalent feelings. On the one hand I thought it was great that people were doing what they wanted, and in many ways his philosophy suited my own thinking; he seemed to have drawn bits from many places, from Zen, from Sufi dances, from various therapies and massage techniques. But still I felt it was not for me, the Ashram was not my kind of trip.

My friend Addy tried to remonstrate; "well, look, why not become a bloody Sinyassin," he reasoned, "You don't have to really mean it. Just find out what it's about – join the Ashram."

Thinking he failed to understand my objection, I explained that I couldn't even consider swearing an oath without meaning it. But he insisted "But why won't you? Because that way you'll find out. You don't have to bind yourself."

I didn't quite see what he was driving at then; but I do now. I would go and join them, swear as a means to an end. Because what does it really mean? Locked in my western mental attitude, I couldn't swear an oath lightly, but the eastern mind is different.

As soon as we reached Bombay, I felt the same sickening reaction: 'We've only got a few weeks left and we're stuck in this bloody city!' I hated it; once you're there, you can't seem to get out, chaos seems to take control. In desperation, we went to the station.

Bombay Station is one of the biggest in the world. It's actually several stations. The platforms are miles long; the trains themselves stretch on endlessly. Everyone in India travels by train and the rail system is consequently immensely profitable; it is about the only one in the world which makes such a profit, simply because the whole nation depends on it.

We hoped to catch the Bombay/Delhi train, but a ticket wasn't to be had for love or money. I scoured the entire station, tried all the ticket offices. Nothing. Then I had a flash of inspiration: 'You've got to bribe them! This is India, the land of Baksheesh; get it out and you'll have your ticket.'

I didn't know the art of bribery, but I returned to all the ticket offices, offering backhanders. The answer was still the same. Obviously, a ticket was not available at any price.

In India, there is a caste of people who are porters. They are giants, some almost seven feet tall, and they wear gorgeous scarlet turbans and clothes so that they are visible from a good way off. They arrive in the train where you are sitting, and you have only to raise a finger, and they have your bags – a colossal load of bags – on their shoulders, backs, heads, in their hands. It is humbling to watch such masters at work.

That morning I found myself watching an exceptionally gigantic porter, and thought 'He's the Boss.' He was a magnificent-looking individual, like a huge Pathan tribesman from the Himalayas. He spoke no English, so I commandeered a translator.

I wanted a ticket and I required two berths – I reckoned that was the minimum we'd need on a thirty-six hour journey – one for myself, and one for Mairi and the baby.

So we negotiated a price, and he nodded in agreement. In sign language, like that for the deaf and dumb, he indicated that I should stay where I was and that he would return. Pointing to the clock and imitating a hand going around, he signalled that we should stay there for an hour. And off he went.

An hour later, he returned and signed with his hands that we should all move up to a certain point on the platform – Mairi, the baby, me, and the bags, through thousands of people waiting on a huge long platform; no train yet in sight.

The place was mobbed. After some distance, he indicated to Mairi 'You stand here', leaving her with the bags; then he motioned for me to continue, emphasizing that I should bring my jacket.

All the way up the platform, through an endless sea of people, we kept walking, and walking. Then he gestured: 'Stop here'.

A train was arriving. It was several trains, engine after engine, vast and seemingly endless, perhaps three-quarters of a mile long. It rolled into the station at about ten miles an hour. I watched its approach, and as it went past the end of the platform up ahead, an Indian managed to grasp the door rail, with at least fifteen others hanging on to him and to other rails. But he couldn't get in, and they were all fighting and kicking, punching out at each other, hysterical because they were fighting for their families, fighting to get space on that train. As every door came level with the end of the platform, the same scrum erupted, while the train continued to roll.

Wordless with amazement, I watched all these people throwing themselves against the moving train, and I thought 'Hell! Someone's going to be crushed; why hasn't anyone been killed?' But maybe they do, perhaps people are killed all the time in just that way.

At the same time, I was hyperventilating, getting ready, sucking in great gulps of air, thinking 'I'm going to have to be up this', but with a sinking sense of despair as engine after engine rolled relentlessly past.

My big turbaned companion noted this and gestured 'No, no; calm down. No problem.'

The tumult continued as the train trundled by, bodies leaping at each oncoming door like hornets, and it went on and on and on. And then, suddenly, there was a lull, when the energy seemed to evaporate. In this same instant, my wise companion sprang into action – and we leapt into the train!

The carriage was full of all sorts of people running up and down, struggling to find berths; others were sitting with their legs hung over their cases and across the neighbouring seats in an attempt to reserve them. My guide motioned me to go with him, and we pushed our way down a long corridor. In a compartment towards the end, a really cheeky-looking urchin, no more than eight, was lying on top of a berth, with his foot stretched over onto the opposite one. These were our berths.

I jumped onto one of these and flung my jacket onto the other, and amid the frenzied scrabbling all around just lay there holding the position with the scarlet porter standing beside me.

With a jolt, the train stopped. And there was Mairi, directly opposite. Incredible! I was so impressed, I gave the porter double the baksheesh.

We only had two little luggage racks, but in India with even that space you feel like an emperor. The train filled up – and I mean filled up; there were people in the toilet, in the corridor, everywhere. The doors were permanently open because people were hanging out of them. And in the middle of all this, whole families were doing their cooking. People were lying against people like sardines. Indians don't appear to care much about body space, but I felt I needed at least a luggage berth or I would go insane. I may have felt like an emperor, but I also felt very, very harassed in that train. It was like a living nightmare.

Although the train was travelling, it stopped every fifteen minutes; sometimes it was totally dark outside with no lights, but always there were immense crowds of people walking up and down constantly, selling things, trying to get children to want sweets or some bauble. We stood out because of our white skins and were hassled particularly.

At one of these stops, a very affluent, would-be powerful woman of the Brahmin caste entered our apartment. Obviously accustomed to being in a position of authority, she demanded a share of our luggage rack. Being high-caste, she would not normally have been in such a position, but I was not in a mood to make exceptions.

"Chello!" I told her flatly. 'Chello' means 'fuck off'. All the lower caste passengers loved it; a ripple of applause spread through the compartment.

I had heard stories of people who returned to their seats to find some guy had sneaked in, demanding a share of the seat. Everyone else was squashed together, and I had a whole luggage rack to myself. I was constantly fending invaders off with my feet; if they got their arse on the seat, it was theirs. Going to the bog on that journey was quite a trial; you have to make elaborate arrangements to make sure your seat is covered.

As I was sleeping, I must have pulled my feet up; when I awoke, an Indian had sneaked a little space at the end of the luggage rack. I couldn't get him off; he didn't get any further on, but I never got rid of him.

We fixed a kind of hammock out of a bit of cloth tied to the two racks and hanging from one side of the car to the other, and we had the baby between us.

And so the journey wore on: stops every fifteen minutes, the incessant movement of countless bodies up and down, no lights, people stepping over one another while clutching trays holding cups of liquid. I felt I was nearing insanity and would go berserk; the crush of humanity was too much.

What I did was to imagine I was going a different way from the train. If I thought of it going one way and myself another, the result was that I drifted out of my body in a funny way, as if it were hanging between the carriages. It seemed like a good preparation for astral travel.

Everything became exquisitely beautiful; all the noises blended in, all the women chattering, deep throaty chants of "Chai, Chai" (tea, tea), the cattle and goats of the people living at the stations, the sound of the steam engines – it became a complex and intensely penetrating music, which I had to enjoy – or go mad.

In Rajistan, we got a lift from a German named Henning in a VW van. He was like a raving maniac, but we needed a lift badly.

"I haf been in India for years, but I haf to go and eat vestern food vonce a month!" He told us he would fly to Delhi and go to a european restaurant, no matter where he was, to get his monthly injection of european culture. "I hate ze India!" he announced. From time to time, he would run over dogs or small animals, callously and deliberately and brutally.

We arrived at a small town one night; he had been driving like one possessed, hell bent, and Mairi was feeling increasingly sick in the back of the van. I put my foot down: "Look, we've got to stop. We've GOT TO STOP!" Although he was against stopping, we persuaded him to pull over and cut the engine.

I said, "Let's go for a walk; then Mairi can be sick, and we can drive on."

"Ach ya, is a good idea, ja, OK."

So we got out for a walk, with the baby in the striped Mothercare pushchair.

It was a little Indian town where they hadn't seen much of the West. Little Sheena had blue eyes and beautiful, startlingly white hair. The pushchair was like some exotic moonbuggy; all the local women thought it was an extraordinary device and wanted one. With her colouring, Sheena was actually a living representation of Krishna; it was like little Krishna had come to town, and he was in a high tech Mothercare pushchair.

The attention we received was intense; Henning had never experienced anything like it before, as he'd been on his own and was, by comparison, unnoticed as he travelled. As we moved down the street, a swarm of kids ran about telling everybody "Look at that!" The villagers came out of their houses and followed us. It was like we were the Pied Piper of Hamlyn.

After we'd reached the edge of town and turned around, Henning began to panic. "Why all zeez people? Valking after us?"

It reminded me of the Pipe Band at Murrayfield countermarching during the interval of a rugby match; when they reached the end of the field, they had to turn by marching back through their own formation. The crowd was still moving with us and we had to reverse our steps through the masses of people, stepping high with heads up like royalty. I began really to enjoy it; so much so that I felt almost anonymous when we were away from the crowd later.

An Indian pop star I met later told me that the only way to deal with so much attention is to enjoy it, use it for your own benefit. As he said, "when I travel I'm just as weird as you are; people will look at me, so I convert it into interior energy. I feed on their attention."

So I was wheeling the pushchair ahead of me, grinning and really getting a high out of it, while Henning was gabbling in a high-pitched voice, almost freaking out. Then we saw the van. It was surrounded by a similar crowd. As we came closer, there was Mairi behind it, trying to be sick, screaming "Get away! Get away!" trying weakly to fend off the people . But she couldn't get enough space to be sick.

"Look, Mairi," I said firmly, "You've got to be sick. Go ahead and do it."

"But why are they all looking?" she screamed in anguish.

"Why zeez people? Why all zeez people?" Henning gibbered frenziedly.

Dispassionately, I told her "I'll make some space for you. Just go ahead and be sick."

I pushed against the crowd. They were quite passive, not in the least aggressive. I simply put my hands against them and shoved firmly; soon I created a space of ten feet around the side of the Volkswagen van.

Everyone fell silent and watched, fascinated, as Mairi threw up.

Then Hennig shrieked " I vant to get out of zis place!"

As we drove away, I was thinking what a good thing the Mothercare pushchair turned out to be. If we'd brought a supply of them, what with the money we'd been offered for it, we could have made a fortune.

Back in Bombay, we managed to get a room at the YMCA where I collapsed with exhaustion while Mairi did some shopping in a nearby market. I'd had enough and could not leave Bombay soon enough, but it was impossible to avoid spending some time there, and the YMCA seemed the best place; like Henning's monthly injection of western culture, I suppose.

*******

Back in Scotland, I experienced a bizarre sense of culture shock: ten thousand quid's worth of bills, and the trenches were still there, muddier than ever. On top of all that, the Inland Revenue hit me with a demand for eleven thousand pounds. This was because of our failure to pay any tax over the last eight years.

Knowing how tenacious the tax people are, I feared the worst: the end of the road for the Mill. But through an accountant, I arranged a meeting with the tax officer.

On our way to his Office, I noticed a flowerbed outside brimming with daffodils.

On impulse, I picked eight.

As we entered the office of the senior inspector, I mustered all the coolness and savoir-faire I had and presented them to him.

"There's some flowers for your desk," I said, and added jokingly, "and there's a fiver up every stem."

He seemed about to burst into tears.

"Do you know that I've worked forty years as a taxman and now I'm about to retire and I've been offered colour televisions, stereos, holidays in Barbados – but nobody has ever given me a bunch of flowers."

He started telling story after story about all the things people did to avoid paying tax. Many of them were things I had done. I began to fear he had rumbled me, that this was an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse, so I said nothing, sitting there with arms crossed defensively.

When he had finished, he presented us with a revised bill. The total was eight pounds.

I like to think acting on that impulse saved us from collapse.

******
CHAPTER SEVEN

Dougie told me of three good joiners in Leuchars, and a stonemason called Donald who was also an excellent brickie. Unfortunately, this paragon lived some twenty-five miles away, so picking him up in the morning and taking him home at night meant a one-hundred mile round trip every day.

When I arrived at seven a.m. he would greet me warmly, "Hullo Will, how are ye the day?" – nauseating me with the putrid smell of his breath. Donald was totally deaf in one ear and looked like a Neanderthal Man, with beetling brows and a strong, squat body. His wife was a wee thin woman with a speech defect, but he was so terrified of her that he jumped at any chance to work late or over the weekend, rather than return home.

Donald had the craftsman's touch with all his materials; when he was building a wall, he always picked up the right-shaped stone; if it wasn't just right, one blow with his hammer would break it to perfection. But he was so crazy that no one would carry his bricks or mix his mortar; he had to be his own labourer.

"Ha ha! I'm the wicked Fu Man Chu!" he would chortle while trowelling the wet cement onto a brick.

Once a month he would boil over, shrieking "Ah've hud enough! Ah've hud enough! Ah'm no havin ye shout at me ony mair!" and run down to the main road, where he would wait for me to beg him to return. But I used to ignore him and eventually he would come back, sulking, to take up his trowel again.

I soon discovered how to humour Donald; he could not hear me walking up behind him until I was right next to him; then he would start suddenly, exclaiming "EH! Ye geid me sic a fricht!" I began playing games, creeping up on him while he was laying bricks and saying "BOO!" Although he would screech and go into a nervous flap, he enjoyed the attention.

The squad of joiners from Leuchars were the best tradesmen I worked with. Every weekend they came up and repaired all the bad work done by Jamie's crew, then forged ahead with the other buildings. All week I would work tidying up from last week and getting whatever materials they needed and doing odd labouring jobs to have everything ready for them.

After an ex-convict told me of the joinery workshop at Saughton Prison, I arranged to have doors and windows made there at half-price, by telling them I was a Charity Organization. Periodically I appeared with my van to pick up orders, dressed in a suit and my hair neatly brushed because I was apprehensive about attracting the attention of policemen who might recognize me and check up.

But when I became bored with this routine and turned up one day scruffy and unkempt, the man in the office glanced aloofly in my direction and went on writing, ignoring me for the next twenty minutes or so, just to demonstrate his authority and power over someone of my apparently lowly rank. I hate supercilious officials who use their position to humiliate people.

When he eventually called me over, I told him my name and said "I've come to pick up two window frames on order," he looked aghast as he realized I had official backing and he should have taken me straight through to the workshop.

Seeing this crack in his armour, I struck hard in my most authoritarian tone: "Never ever keep people waiting like that! If you keep me waiting again, I'll report you to the Governor and have your hide." Smugly I thought to myself that he will never be quite sure someone is of inferior status again.

******

Many lunatics with their own dreams were being drawn to the Mill, hoping to earn the right to stay by helping me. I would hear people say "I'm really into it," and I believed them. Being an enthusiast myself, I felt they shared my vision and I let them stay.

But these tranced idiots often weren't as much help as they imagined. They wasted vast amounts of my time and hardly ever made a positive contribution. I began to grow increasingly intolerant of people who wanted to join me and have a say in how the house or the Mill should be built, yet paid no rent and could walk away whenever it suited them, leaving me to pick up the pieces.

There was Jane who sent me a pleasant letter, adorned with flowers, saying she was a member of The World Peace Organization and volunteering to help me. We allowed her to move into our blue caravan, next to the farmhouse. She didn't believe in paying rent, she told us, but as she was on the dole she would pay as it was really the Government's money. Her contribution would be a compost heap, she decided. Appropriating timber that cost me three pounds fifty a yard, she devoted a week to constructing a timber frame which she painted red and blue. After a few week's use, it fell to pieces. Next, she undertook to repair her landrover which took her all summer and still it wasn't done properly – a competent mechanic could have done the work in four hours, but she wouldn't have that. To make suggestions or to offer criticisms of her work was to attack her personally.

Jane professed to despise possessions and people who lived in houses, and would contrive to let you know how intelligent she was, that she was a member of Mensa, for example. In order to toughen her body, she would roll naked in the snow. Her life was guided by Astrology and the Tarot deck. She refused to acknowledge British Summer Time and lived by Sidereal Time. While I liked her determination to do things her own way, getting around her ridiculous ideology was an effort.

The Convoy was a group of nomadic anarchists who travelled the road in Hell's Angels tradition, having confrontations with the police, putting up tents and holding festivals where they had their own laws. Jane was a member of the hard core of these wolves, who lived by social security frauds and shoplifting, and I suspected she was trying to open a way for others of her clan to move in, when she mentioned that some of them might come to visit her.

"You're not having any others staying here," I emphasized; "You only." There was always the danger that these armed maniacs would take over and refuse to leave, as I had heard of them doing to other unfortunates who had been foolish enough to allow them in. For a couple of years I tried to persuade her to move on, but there were always astrological or mechanical objections.

A joiner named Robin came up from Edinburgh and announced he wanted to help. He came with his wee boy whom he had to spend most of his time looking after. I had met no one so meticulously particular about keeping his tools in order as Robin, but he never actually did anything with them. He would spend half an hour lacing up his Doc Martin boots, in which he took immense pride.

I found him one day stoking up the fire with new wood I had bought. 'For Heaven's sake," I told him in exasperation, "Use the scrap." Somehow, such remarks always spiralled into existentialist conversations about the meaning of God, wasting incalculable amounts of my time.

Then his wife decided to rejoin him, with their other child. She had become a born-again Christian, so now I had two religious nuts trying to convert me. Mairi could never say no to them, always making them feel welcome, and I had to conceal my irritation for fear of arousing her disapproval.

But in the end I packed Robin off, imprisoned in the back of a van driven by his wife with their kids in front. "Goodbye Robin!" I shouted jubilantly, banging on the rear door as they trundled down the drive, to start a new life in Milton Keynes.

Jake came to visit shortly after we returned from India; he wanted to use part of the Mill as a studio to do some painting. So I installed him in the top floor with its skylight window and grand view over the Tay estuary to the Sidlaw Hills.

He would observe things very closely and see details that no one else took in. It was Spring, and the swallows had returned to nest in the Mill. He noticed that one pair had built its nest inside, on the ceiling of the ground floor workshop. The outside door cleared the floor by about four inches, and when it was closed, the parent birds would dive and skim at top speed in and out between the concrete and the door.

Soon three baby swallows appeared on one of the rafters, sitting equidistant from one another, waiting to be fed. They always sat in the same place, and every so often a tiny dropping would fall in a straight line to the floor. Each dropping would land exactly on top of its predecessors with pinpoint accuracy. Jake loved this.

There was a dog staying at the Mill, a spaniel. One day he saw the dog standing outside the closed door, watching intently. A swallow swooped from under the door – straight into the mouth of the dog, who chewed and gobbled it noisily.

Jake was horrorstruck.

I listened to his story with a chill of foreboding creeping over me. It was the Dog, its presence haunting me, returning yet again.

Jake was extraordinary. He just painted one thing, really: the sea and the sky, or the land and the sky – a horizon with maybe a rock in the middle. If you watch him painting, you realize that for him, painting is an unending process; maybe the light lightens, or a hill moves across the horizon, or the rock disappears, painted over.Every bit is hallucinogenic; examine a square inch and there are marks, almost like the pores in pigskin. There are paintings secreted all around his studio. If he gets a painting back for repair, he starts painting it again. His paintings never really end; they have to be physically taken away from him.

They're mysterious paintings and fascinate people; but while he has had many chances to become famous, he has spurned them all. When he was twenty-four, he had his first exhibition in London booked. But when the day of the private viewing came, there were no paintings; he had sold them all, every one. With the five thousand or so that he made, he buggered off to Spain for a few years, until his money was all spent. Ever since then, he has always messed up other opportunities. Ironically, his work is as good as an old master's; his paintings will last for centuries because they're meticulously done, with oils and varnish. But, essentially, he is bored with painting which he thinks is just a joke. He prefers dancing.

The idea that he might be a reincarnation of Rembrant occurred to me when I visited him in Amsterdam the summer after Mairi and I went to India. I had got as far as Dover, where I met Garry; he had just lost seventy thousand pounds at a pop festival he had organized and was very depressed. He gave me a lift across the Channel and into Holland, but he was driving like a madman, so I was glad to part with him and go to visit Jake.

It was the first time I had been to Amsterdam and I really loved it. Transported by a return of my youthful enthusiasm, I put my back out of joint playing Frisbee, but even that couldn't put me down; I went Disco Dancing and raving every night. I felt as if I had been there before, that I knew the city.

Naturally, I went to the Museum and saw Rembrant's most famous painting, "The Night Watch'. I could see that Rembrant had really hated doing it. I knew that he had painted the picture to pay off all his creditors, and he had put them into it, dressed in sinister black. There was also a portrait he had painted of his son Titus. I thought it looked remarkably like me.

Imagining that there might conceivably be such a thing as reincarnation, I tried to envisage what Rembrant would be like if he came back. Considering all the trouble he endured, I thought he would be fed up with painting – he might paint, but would be sick of it at the same time. He would avoid every chance of publicity and never again allow himself to become famous.

Jake had been in Amsterdam for only a couple of months; he had a studio there paid for by the Arts Council. Yet he knew where every bar was, or where you could get anything you wanted. I felt he had a much more intimate knowledge of the city than he could have got in that short time.

We were sitting in a café one day at lunchtime and he was telling me a story about a statue in the Royal Park. It represents a guy who did not have the gift of oratory; but one day while he was asleep, a bee flew into his mouth. There is a Dutch superstition that if a bee lands in your mouth, you receive the gift, you become a great speaker.

Just at this moment, when Jake was relating the story, a telephone rang in the back of the café; I looked up, and saw on the wall a painting of two people lying in bed, a man and a woman, both sleeping. A bee had squeezed in behind the glass and died. It was right over the man's mouth.

Just as the picture on the wall was a reflection of what Jake was saying, so the telephone's ringing was echoed by church bells chiming somewhere in the city. It was a mythic awareness that these images symbolized something, hinted at some deeper meaning, and my mind slipped out of the present for a moment.

Jake and I had had a long association, and he had always been like a father to me, at least in terms of painting. I had first become intimate with Mairi in his house in Edinburgh. Now, when I looked at Jake, I felt that he had the same birdlike eyes as Rembrant, the same nose, the same character; that he had been Rembrant, and I had been his son.

Then the reverie dissolved. I spoke up brightly: "Jake, I think you're a reincarnation of Rembrant. And I'm a reincarnation of Rembrant's son."

He looked at me blankly, uncomprehendingly.

"You're just like he would be if he came back. Just think of it – we could write to some millionaire and say 'You think that Rembrant is dead; well, I can tell you he is alive and living in Edinburgh...' "

"Don't be so fucking stupid!"

"But look over there at that painting, there's a bee in the guy's mouth..."

"Look, I do NOT want to talk about it. At all." He snapped, irascibly.

Nor was I ever permitted to bring up the subject again. Just what Rembrant would have done, I thought.

******

By the end of that autumn, only the farmhouse, the Mill and the hall remained to be done, so I rewarded myself with a long dreamt-of trip to Egypt, before the all-out effort to complete the buildings. A flight to Cairo was booked, and I was off, leaving Mairi in charge. Bob was still working away, and Jamie had returned, to work off the money he owed her.

In London, the night before departure, I went into the tube to Hampstead down a long narrow corridor, where I found myself having to step over four struggling bodies – two skinheads and two Pakistanis. One pair of combatants was rolling about, wrestling for control of a big iron bar.

Like everyone else had done, I walked past; then I reached the platform and glanced around at the rows of indifferent commuters, and disgust rose in my throat.

I returned to the fight and assumed my best Glasgow accent: "Right, ya cunts, if yur gonnae fight, fuckin dae it proper," I lectured them, 'Either ye dae it or ye dinnae. Gies that iron bar."

They stopped. The two on the floor got up and gave me the bar. When I finished my harangue, they returned to scrapping, but half-heartedly.

I snarled at them, "Why don't ya really get stuck in and fuckin kill each other? Here, take this," and I presented them with the iron bar. But the two skinheads disengaged themselves and retreated down the corridor, shouting defiantly " Fuckin Paki basterds!" with me following until they were gone.

Having brushed themselves off, the two Pakistanis resumed their roles as ticket collectors, and waved my through the barrier, taking no money.

I arrived in Egypt at 5 a.m. and checked into a hotel in Cairo's equivalent of Piccadilly Circus, and afterwards headed straight for the Egyptian Museum. Inside, five thousand years of Egyptian society had been piled into heaps: mummies, statues, paintings, all covered with dust and shoved without order into a musty old building. I came out with a terrible headache.

That evening I needed a drink, and went looking for a bar. But my purple quilted hippie's jacket wasn't quite right for Cairo; as soon as I went into the bar of my choice, I felt a really hostile atmosphere one could cut with a knife. Naturally, I was drawn like a magnet to the most hostile person there and sat facing him, directly across his table. He was drinking brandy.

I ordered a beer. Alcohol is very expensive in Muslim Egypt, about ten times as much as a meal on the street which cost only ten pence. At least it was a big bottle, nearly a pint. But I wanted only half of it, so I left the rest in the bottle and rose to leave, indicating to the Egyptian that he should finish it.

He accepted and immediately waved the barman over and ordered two brandies. Each glass had about three inches of spirit in it.'

'Oh Christ, here we go' I thought, 'I want out of this bloody bar but I'll have to buy him a drink first, a big one, on top of this.'

I knocked the brandy straight back – he did as well – and waved for another round. It came within seconds. I gulped it down, and leapt from my chair for a getaway, but he already had his hand up for a third round, which appeared at once.

This went on until I was reeling. 'I can't take any more' I confessed, gesticulating my defeat, and rose unsteadily, the antagonism transformed into a cordial glow of fraternity, as I lurched towards the door.

There is a background of hatred for western people because many Egyptians are dissatisfied; having been educated but unable to get jobs, they see the affluence of the West projected through the media and they hate it, fiercely and neurotically.

I was in a bazaar and entered a packed restaurant. Noticing three empty seats in a row, I sat down in the middle one. Then two fat Egyptians came in, one of them was very large and oily; they seemed to me like villains, hoods perhaps, and I sensed they were powerful, that they perhaps owned the bazaar. I moved respectfully to one side so they could sit together. The large fat one called over the waiter and made him clean the seat where I had been sitting. The muscles in my stomach tightened in frustrated anger at the insult; I could only glare back with rigid hateur.

Next, I climbed one of the pyramids, which is forbidden. I had made friends with a guy, and we set off together. From the bus, we could see the pyramids looming up; they seemed close, but oddly, we were a long way off. The receding point at the top distorts the perspective. When we got there, at first we were thrown off by an armed guard who angrily refused the baksheesh I offered him. When he moved away, we made a run at it, to get too far up for him to call us back. We had to scramble up each stone, one at a time.

As I came to the topmost level, I was taken aback to see a naked bum going up and down. It was a guy buggering another effeminate-looking bloke. I tried to ignore them and concentrated on photographing the view. Then my friend clambered up.The guy finished, pulled up his trousers, and came over to us. "Hey," he said to me, "I like your friend. Why don't you take mine and I'll take yours?"

The inside of the pyramid had been desecrated by the piss of centuries; it stinks of the urine of the thousands of tourists who go in there and relieve themselves, and it has never been washed since it opened. Piss, buggery, and bats' droppings – it seemed an appropriate counterpoint to one of the most mysterious and mystical buildings on earth.

In the Great Pyramid, there are thousands of tourists, each waiting for his turn to go up a narrow step into the King's Chamber. Wishing to be in there alone, I arrived at the entrance between two tours. As I was waiting for the first group to clear the chamber, an American woman stepped over and said, "Gee, don't be disappointed, there's really NOTHING in there."

'That's it' flashed through my mind, 'That's it!'

"Lady, you're so right," I replied gratefully, as a whole series of connecting images cascaded into consciousness: this huge pile of stone, this empty room with no carvings, the bare slabs of rock – why?

It was a geometric statement of Nothing. This was why mystics and cranks have always found it so easy to project crazy idea onto the pyramids. Could it be the best sensory-deprivation chamber ever made? Literally nothing gets in there: no light, no sound, very little radiation.

In one chamber, I switched off all the lights, but some illumination was filtering in from the corridor. I wished the light outside would go out – and abruptly it did! The intense, mind-blowing shock of absolute darkness, the total blackout, took me completely by surprise.

I imagined a drugged, somnolent Pharoah being carried in and laid in the sarcophagus as preparation for an out-of-body experience in which he might travel anywhere, even to faraway stars, and return with strange revelations...my own mind began to drift; then with another shock the lights came back on.

After the pyramids, I went directly to Luxor and Thebes. On the train, my eye was caught by an Egyptian who radiated self-control and repose. He seemed outstandingly in control of himself and those around him. Throughout the journey I continued to steal glances at him and wonder who he was.

I arrived in Luxor in the evening, and the place was packed with tourists. There was the usual crowd of Egyptian hustlers offering to find the passengers accommodation as they disembarked. Normally, I would avoid such types and find my own place to stay, but this time I gave in when accosted by a delightful young chap called Ali and agreed, "OK, you find me a room."

He led me past endless rows of identical mud-brick houses and found me lodgings with a christian family, which I thought was unusual and would be easy to find later.So I left my bag, gave Ali some cash, and suggested we have a meal together.

Ali said he had been to America, and described Chicago to me in an American accent. But the truth was that he had never left Luxor in his life, he travelled only in his imagination.

'Do you want a guide for tomorrow?" he asked. Captivated by his eager charm, I said yes and agreed to meet him.

"I can't remember where exactly the house is," I said as we separated.

"Don't worry," he reassured me, "Just go down that street, turn left, and there it is."

The houses were hopelessly unfamiliar; all I could recollect was that some roadworks were beside the door. I knocked at a house, but the doorway filled with unfamiliar Egyptian faces and I retreated apologetically. Eleven o'clock had come, everyone was going to bed, and the streets were becoming more and more deserted.

Anxiously I tried several other doors, disturbing sleepy families. No one was now in the street except several mean-looking Arabs, eyeing me up. My passport and suitcase were in one of these indistinguishable houses, while all of Egypt was closing its shutters for the night. I returned again and again to the roadworks, looking for a clue.

An Egyptian Priest came along the street with another man. 'The family is Christian,' I recalled, 'He is bound to know where they live.'

"Can you help me , Father?"

"Oh yes, certainly, I will help you."

"I'm staying with a Christian family but I've forgotten which house they live in."

"Was it up there?"

"No, near here."

"All the people here are Christians, many thousands of Christians live here. And do you believe in the Lord?" he asked, taking a pastoral interest in me.

"Well, yes, I'm a sort of Christian, but..."

"And do you take Christ Jesus into your heart?" He continued as if he sensed my soul needed salvation and quite forgetting my need for a place to sleep.

"I'm just trying to find my house, Father."

"You are lost, my son, and I am a Christian. I must help you to be found again. For if a man loses one of his sheep, does he not go looking for the missing one?"

The other man interrupted. "Why don't you come along with me? I'm going to my hotel. They may put you up there."

'Great,' I thought with relief; it's difficult to get into a hotel at night as they are in walled enclosures which are locked against thieves.

As we entered the hotel compound, dogs barked. Inside, the Lebanese owner was having an argument with an American from The Bronx with whom he was playing cards. The American, a nervous, highly-strung youth with huge, bulging eyes and pin-point pupils had just arrived in Egypt on his first trip out of the States, and craved acceptance from these people. But the Lebanese suddenly snarled at him aggressively, "I don't like your eyes!"

"What's wrong wid my eyes?" the American cried with pained alarm; "Why doan you like my eyes? I can't help my eyes!" He retreated to his room, raving "What's wrong wid my eyes?'

"Don't worry, I'll fix you up, you can sleep here," the owner assured me. "You can sleep in this room with him, he added, pointing into a room where a fat, poofy-looking Egyptian was rolling out a mattress.

'Yes, you can sleep with me," the guy said, too invitingly for my liking. 'What am I letting myself in for, ' I wondered, knowing the reputation of Egyptians for sodomy.'Well, I'm as big as he is, and I need a place to sleep, so I'll just have to chance it. What can he do? I'll just punch him and tell him to get off if he tries anything.'

I hate to sleep in my clothes, so I took off my trousers and got into bed; then he climbed in with his clothes still on. I tried to keep a distance between us, but he kept moving closer. 'What's going on?' I moved away and he edged up nearer, and this went on for what seemed liked hours, as he insinuated himself into my body space, until I had recoiled against the wall.

Tense and watchful, I waited for the unmistakable signs of intimacy which would be my signal to say 'Get off' but they never came. Eventually I fell asleep.

Later, I heard from Ali that this fat man thought it most peculiar of me to remove my trousers on the coldest night of the year and that he was trying to keep us both warm by sleeping close to me, but I kept edging away. Each of us had misread the other's intention.

The next morning I returned to the roadworks and found the door of my lodgings right there beside them.

Ali was waiting at our rendezvous with three Americans, two men and a girl, to whom he was effusively demonstrating his most bewitching manners. Coming over to me, he explained, "I said I would show you around, but I can make more money if I take these people too. It's up to you, but if they come along it'll cost you less and they will pay for the taxi," It was my first day and I didn't mind, "Yeah, OK, why not," I replied.

The first tomb we entered contained a wall painting which, unbelievably, was the same scene that had decorated wall curtains in my room when I was a kid, figures I had grown up with and now recognised like old friends; I felt at home.

The Americans were doing a tomb every ten minutes, while I wished to linger and absorb the atmosphere. One of them seemed to know all about the markings, explaining from the guide books what everything meant, as he moved briskly along.

As I listened to him prattling on in a self-satisfied, know-it-all tone, a great anger rose in me. My intuition told me what the hieroglyphics meant; I knew they were intelligible even to the least educated Egyptian of that era because they were a visual language of familiar images, but they also had additional layers of meaning through geometrical and mathematical dimensions, I realised why I had worked so long with music, paintings and drawings together, to express a single idea; I was trying to evolve a similar language.

"That is NOT what these pictures mean," 1 interjected with quiet intensity. "The guy who had these painted is expressing that he loves his wife and his family," It was like the Egyptian of the tomb was speaking through me, brushing aside the superficial interpretations of these deluded foreigners

******

I inspected the hotels to see which would be the best one to stay in. The Medinet Habu was the last hotel before the desert, standing next to a temple. One of the guests I recognised was the self-possessed Egyptian from the train journey, a presence which instantly recommended the place to me, and I checked in. Before long, we met.

"My name is Samir," he told me. "I am a professor of Egyptology at the University of Cairo. And where is your home?"

"Scotland."

"Ah, the Celts; are you psychic?"

"What do you mean?"

"What was your impression when you entered a pyramid?"

"It was like a disgusting urinal, actually," I replied cynically, always suspicious of mystics.

"But what do you feel like when you first enter a tomb?"

"Blankness, nothing at all. But I have a definite game. I say to myself as I enter a tomb, 'I've died', and when I leave, 'I'm reborn'. Yesterday I died and was reborn six times."

The first night after I moved into the hotel, I noticed a pack of dogs sniffing around the buildings huddled next to the hotel. Wild dogs in Luxor are like muggers in New York's Central Park: nobody walks at night because of them.

I woke before sunrise and walked out into the desert for a mile, to watch the sunrise; its light revealed a pack of dogs between me and the town. I watched the biggest dog as he trotted, nose down, following a scent which meandered across the road.

With a shiver of fear, I realised it was my own scent.Picking up a few stones, I climbed a nearby hillock. With the big dog in the lead, the entire pack came scampering up the slope. I took a deep breath to puff myself out, and look, as I hoped, intimidating; the stones would be saved until the last moment.

Then the big dog, wagging his tail, came up to me and licked my hand.

******

I awoke one morning to find myself weak and trembling, scarcely able to move; I had come down with a bad case of 'flu. Chafing impatiently after a wasted day in bed, I rose the next morning before sunrise, in spite of my illness, and cycled for miles towards the Valley of the Kings, following a road that climbed out of the Nile valley, a steady killing incline leading into the foothills and the desert.

There was no shade. Soon it was over 100 degrees fahrenheit, and the temperature was rising every minute. My head was spinning and I felt ill and tired, but I was determined to get there and I knew I would be unable to go on if I stopped.

The intense heat, the exhausting effort, the aching dizziness of the 'flu were all at war with my fanatically stubborn refusal to give in.

Suddenly, with the heat and stress, I began to hallucinate: I saw a vista of many generations of people like a thread of individuals, stretching from 5000 years ago in Ancient Egypt, across Europe to Scandinavia, and from there to Scotland, 1 was the last person in the thread. I felt all my ancestors were within me, wanting to become alive again, warring for control of my personality. I knew that all their potential was mine as well, but I had to undergo physical ordeals in order to learn to trust in my abilities and to purge myself of all that was rotten and overbred. My father's family had specialised in literary scholarship, and my mother came from a long line of classically-educated ministers: the hothouse intensity of the cerebral tradition I had been born into was poisonous to me; my dark side was fighting with blind ferocity against it.

Somewhere inside, a transmuted self was awakening.

I came to and discovered myself to be cycling with invincible power up this slope, filled with renewed strength.

But after I had visited several tombs, the euphoria wore off and I felt drained. A hidden ravine beckoned to me, and I slumped against a rock to rest.

In the tombs, in places all over Egypt, the rocks were covered with carved graffiti from around the world: Greek, Roman, Turkish, French, German, English - but I had seen nothing from Scotland. 1 wanted to leave a sign from Scotland, something small that would not deface. All around me the rocks were bare, and as I gazed blankly before me, my eyes picked out a little square, only a couple of inches across: it contained a St. Andrew's Cross and the words "TAM SCOTLAND 1978"

Astonishing! It was exactly what I had in mind; no need to bother now; someone had done it already.

At the Medinet Habu, there were French, German, Swiss and Egyptian people staying. The predominant language was French, and I was the only English speaker, apart from a secretive English artist of great talent who refused to talk to me because his girlfriend, a Bedouin named Lorna, who had been to England and cast aside the veil, spent a lot of time in my company, having intensely interesting conversations with me, while he glowered intolerantly in my direction.

One girl, from a party of Swiss secretaries, wanted me to go to bed with her, and when I didn't show interest, they all took offence. I began to feel like a focal point for hostility.

I had befriended a young Egyptian man who offered to show me around several tombs. The night before the tour, we wandered along a track through fields of sugar cane, chewing on pieces of cane, talking,..and remarking on the beauty of the stars. Then he announced: "I am going home to make love to myself,"

"Oh, really? Well, good for you; have a nice time."

"I want you to come with me."

"No, see you later," I said, disentangling myself as quickly as possible from his. company.

Unwisely, 1 kept our appointment the next day, because I had said I would be there. He was offhand and unmannerly. I noticed him having secretive conversations with Arabs, sniggering and pointing at me. He grew more and more disrespectful, then went away.

Before long, everyone in the small, closely-knit community began treating me rudely, sometimes laughing and sneering when I was near. It simply no longer was possible to have friendly relations. He must have gone round saying I had slept with him, making sexual jokes at my expense; there was nothing I could do to repair the damage; denials were impossible.

I had warm and friendly feelings towards all these people, but the adverse reaction I was getting began to depress me; I felt vexed and vulnerable, and began to think of moving to a different hotel. The Arabic mind is very probing; it looks at you, picks out any weaknesses, and works on them. I feared that my emotions would be showing on my face, that they could read me.

"You haf the strange face of a European," said an Egyptian guest at

the Medinet Habu to me, out of the blue. Something in my mind went click - These people do not understand me at all ; I was a complete mystery to them; they could speculate, but at any time I could explode their theories by whatever outrageous or theatrical impulse I had, and justify it as a European custom, or as just me.

I felt free, I didn't care any more. Every time I have gone abroad, there has been a perception like this, a veil I have had to pull aside in order to understand what I am being taught.

Next to the Medinet Habu is one of the oldest temples, one which I had overlooked, so on my last night there, I resolved to pay it a visit, even though it was closed at night. Knowing there was a watchman about, I removed my shoes and crept into the darkened building. Snakes, I remembered, inhabited the ruins, and I put my feet down carefully.

I was crossing an open area when my senses warned me, 'There's something alive up ahead.' Cautiously rounding a corner, I saw a pack of about forty wild dogs. I froze, thankful I was standing in a shadow,and a gentle breeze was blowing into my face from the dogs.

Then one looked directly at me, the silhouette of his ears and head exactly likethe wall paintings of Anubis, 'I don't exist,' I projected, 'I'm a ghost.' The dog looked away. With the utmost care I stepped back silently the way I had come.

******

The last purchase I made in Egypt was a pile of dates wrapped in a page torn from a school text book. It contained a colour diagram of the human circulatory system and the heart. It was like a sign telling me I had got to the heart of the country.

******

Back in Cairo, on the night before I left Egypt, I decided to have a farewell drink, getting really high on a local spirit, I knew I had to be at the airport sometime after midnight, but the time of departure on my ticket was smudged. I couldn't make out whether it said 1.50 or 3.30 a.m. I had to go, so I rushed out and hailed a taxi,

"Quick, quick, the airport," I urged the driver, and he sped off, impelled by my fear of missing the flight.

He apparently took a shortcut and got lost, because we drove into an army encampment, I looked out and saw soldiers everywhere, Egyptian men with guns, looking at us with surprise. The nearest one waved us down.

"Diplomatique ! Diplomatique ! Airport! Fuck off !" I shouted, and he jumped back as if given an order; the cab sped past as others now called out to us. We narrowly avoided what could have been a three hour delay.

At the airport, I rushed through the passenger entrance and registered at the airport office, to find there was plenty of time, then went into the departure lounge. There were quite a few policemen about, who for some reason, looked at me with suspicion.

I had some Egyptian money which I meticulously spent, leaving myself with only a Scottish ten pound note. Then 1 sat down next to a man I seemed to recognise from a dream the night before, an airport policeman. He told me he was the only Christian working there and that the other cops gave him a hard time.

"You are my brother," he told me warmly.

"I'm not the same kind of Christian."

"Does not matter - you are my brother."

I told him I was leaving on the flight to Britain, "Have you paid your airport tax?" he asked.

"What tax?"

"You must pay a tax. You cannot board the plane unless you pay it,"

"But I've just spent all my money," I protested with alarm,

"No matter, I shall give it to you,"

"How much is it?"

"Three pounds," He was offering me about a week's wage,

"No, I can't take that much from you; I have £10 in Scottish money, I'll change that."

But none of the banks even knew what it was, nor did the airlines. My Coptic friend had gone, so I went over to a couple of the other policemen.

"I'm stuck, I've spent all my Egyptian money and I can't change my foreign currency,"

They laughed in an evil, unsympathetic way.

"Why are you laughing? Do you think this is funny?"

"Yes," they gloated, "Ha, ha, ha, yes, very funny."

"Do you want to see me miss my plane?"

"Ah, ha, ha, ha, yes, yes ."

"You'd like to see me locked up, wouldn't you?" They abandoned themselves to unholy glee,

"You think I'm a nobody, don't you?" They nodded, smiling coldly.

"But you're making a big mistake. You don't know who I am." The smiles vanished.

"I could be anybody," I snapped my fingers. "Tomorrow, telex, more money than you earn in ten years. In my pocket," which I patted as if it contained a fat wad. Still they made no move to help, but watched me narrowly.

"My godfather is the British Ambassador to Egypt, Yes, it is true, and he has the ear of Sadat. Tomorrow," I made chopping gestures at my throat and pointed to them, "your heads will roll." I demonstrated with my hands, a head falling to the ground, and gave it a football kick for good measure.

They looked down and away, beaten at their own poker game, and walked to another part of the lounge.

I approached several tourists, but they were no more helpful than the banks. One offered me three Egyptian pounds for the tenner, which was worth seventeen,

'If that is the best I can do, I'll find my 'brother' and give it to him,' I decided.

When I located him, I said, "I've got to have the three pounds, so I'll give you this,"

"No, no, no, no," he, refused, taking out his wallet,

"You take it, I don't want that tourist to have my money," I insisted, stuffing the note in his shirt pocket.

Immediately the other two cops reappeared and clapped their hands on his shoulders, arresting him. In Egypt, it is illegal to change money, although in practice everybody does it, I had just got my friend into trouble; he would be fined and lose his job, all because he had helped me.

They began to drag him away, "Right" I shouted, "We're all going to the Airport Controller." A crowd of perhaps eight people had gathered and we marched off together.

In the office they directed a torrent of Arabic at the Controller of the airport, obviously painting a dark and criminal scene.

I cut in, trying to sound like indignant Royalty, naming myself resoundingly. "I am from Scotland, My godfather is the British Ambassador," I added. "This man here," I gestured towards the crestfallen Christian policeman, "is the finest man I've met in Egypt, the most honourable person. He offered to give me a week's wages so that I could pay your airport tax. In return I gave him the Scottish note." I handed it to the Controller. He looked at me.

"I have been to Scotland, I have played golf at Gleneagles," he said, smiling kindly. He began commending my friend profusely in Arabic. Then he turned to the other two, his voice becoming a whip, a rod, a bastinado, beneath which they cowered and flinched.

"I insist that the airport pay your tax," he said to me, proudly.

"And I insist that he take this," I replied, giving the policeman my ten pound note.

And so I was able to leave Egypt wth honour.

But the plane stopped all over Europe - Athens, Bucharest, Budapest, Vienna and Copenhagen -before depositing me, limp, travelworn and broke, back in Britain.

I stopped off in Edinburgh, where I went to visit a legal friend I've known for years, who had long sung my praises as an artist; he thought I was the greatest artist in Scotland. It happened that he was going to a Knights' Templar Ball in the Surgeons' Hall, and he invited me to go with him.

I'll do anything, so 1 went to the Ball, wearing red velvet trousers. I met a guy there who was eighty-eight years old, and became friendly with him, talking about pyramids and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

He got onto the subject of leylines and told me he used his knowledge of them to cure people. He specialised in helping people who came to him because they were dying of a mysterious cause which doctors couldn't identify. He related their sickness to their 'type' and to where they lived - they might be living in a magnetic current on the earth which they were allergic to. He told me. he could tell just from the map if an area can cause sickness.

So I told him the story about my encounter with the old man and the crow, the Devil Stone, and the dreams about the Dog. He listened intently, then said the stone must have been magnetite, and that I had been doing instinctively what Freemasonry teaches.

Scottish Freemasonry, I learned from him, is centred on a secret relating to Edinburgh; they apparently believe Edinburgh is actually Jerusalem.

Personally, I thought this was a load of bullshit, just right-wing madness, but I listened.

The story went back to the Emperor Constantine who adopted Christianity and Christianised the Eastern Empire as a defence against the Barbarian Hordes pressing in on all sides. He had a British wife who went searching for the new Jerusalem in Germany and in Gaul, but failed to find it; what she was looking for was a city inhabited by the Gnostics, which had been razed to the ground when the Gnostics were suppressed. There was supposed to be a seventeen-foot-high statue of an Emperor on the spot, but the location of this city had been lost.

He told me about a book called 'Edinburgh is Jerusalem' by someone named Comyns Beaumont. It predicts that Edinburgh will be wiped out when Halley's Comet passes by, that the Comet is actually the Wandering Jew. He also revealed that he was honorary president of the USA Beaumont Society, which is backed by the CIA, because they want to prepare people for Planetary disaster.

This story caused me to recall my encounter with the CID after giving a gnome to Queen Juliana, 'They're into these occult ideas, too,' I realised; 'maybe the entire top echelon of the country thinks like this. And they say I'm mad!'

The old freemason confided to me, with the air of a great secret being revealed, that a part of a stone leg, seven feet from the foot to the knee, had been found near St, Giles Cathedral,

The Freemasons shoot people for revealing secrets like this, I recalled hearing somewhere.

"Come and stay with me," he invited with disconcerting candour, "and I'll teach you, I'll instruct you in the craft."

"I couldn't keep a secret," I demurred with a smile, "I won't be bound by an oath, I'd tell other people."

"I'm a member of the Alchemists' Lodge. We can arrange for you to join without the oaths."

"I don't know," I stalled. "I'll have to think about it."

Then he said, "I know the area where you are staying. There's a quarry next to you, isn't there?"

I nodded, surprised, looking at him quizzically and with a quickened interest.

"I used to be an engineer. My theory about people works on machines, too. They get arthritis and rheumatism in their ball bearings. I can predict when a machine will break down. I supplied a couple of machines to the manager of that quarry, a Mr, Nibblet. I predicted to him that one of those machines would break down in five years, four months and six days, at 10 a.m. Mr. Nibblet laughed, but 1 noted the date in my diary. Five years, four months and six days later, I phoned him at the quarry, "Has that machine broken down yet?"

"Actually," he replied, "it broke down yesterday at the end of the shift."

******

I never took up his offer, but what he told me put my mind back onto the Devil Stone and the quarry. I had begun to hate the quarry because they had been putting in too much dynamite, causing stones to rain down on our property. What was worse, bulges had begun to appear in the wall buttressing the railway line that ran between my land and the quarry; these were, in my opinion, caused by the new blasting patterns and by water pressure due to bad drainage inside the quarry.

British Rail planned to build some new buttresses, but the real problem was the quarry itself. It was like an evil dragon, digging into a hill which had once been the site of an ancient fort, and polluting the area. I wanted to close it down. The quarry company had to apply for new planning permission, and when I heard of this, I decided it was my moral and ethical duty to object. The last two explosions had caused our house to shake. I went to see Mr, Nibblet and harangued him with my catalogue of complaints.

"I'm going to do all I can to shut you down, I will object to your application for new planning permission." I declared war. I wrote letters, lengthy objections to the Regional Council, saw people, agitated whenever I could. I was the only agitator, however. I caused a lot of trouble, but I didn't succeed; the new permission was granted, to my chagrin.

******
CHAPTER EIGHT

Mairi was less than welcoming to me when I returned.

"So you've decided to come back," she said, dryly. No embrace, no kiss; she was apathetic as I tried to express my delight in seeing her again, pushing me away to return to the bread she was making when I grinned and hugged her, as if to say, 'Come on, it's me, I'm back.'

I sat down at the long kitchen table to drink tea from a chipped mug. It was one of my favourite mugs, with Persian designs on it, and I recalled with irritation that it hadn't been chipped before.

The table was the usual jumble of jam jars, ash trays, breadcrumbs and small plastic animals which little Sheena was lining up on her plate of half-eaten vegetable moussaka. Everything was as it had been, I noted, apart from the chip; yet something was different.

Jamie sat there opposite me, listening to my stories of Egypt solicitously, his eager eyes seeming as always to beg forgiveness for some unspoken sensual excess. But Mairi only gave me half of her attention, as if I were an awkward visitor come at the wrong moment.

The little girl's bedtime came; she was yawning, but struggled wilfully with Mairi as she attempted to separate the plastic horses from the sticky fingers which paraded them along the plate.

"Come to bed with Uncle Jamie," he said to her, sliding up beside Sheena and leaning his head down on the table, to look imploringly up at her. She raised her hand and flapped it crossly on his nose, and he rolled away in mock agony, crying out, "Ohh, ma nose, you've busted ma nose'." She laughed and slid down off the bench to slap him again while he rolled about like a playful dog.

"Ha! Now I gotcha," he exclaimed with a triumphant laugh, bearing her aloft and out of the room before she realised what was happening.

Bob and I sat up until late, talking about my adventures and his plans. He had decided it was time he moved on, he told me, and he had fixed on South America as his next destination, somewhere in the Andes.

Sadly, I felt how his absence would diminish me, how he had dispelled chaos from my life and gently insinuated his methodical sense of purpose into my undisciplined strivings. He had become my ally whose integrity was a powerful counterpoise to the madmen and thieves that came to the Mill, drawn by an unspoken myth. I remembered for a moment the eighty-eight year old Alchemist who wanted to teach me the Freemason's craft because he said I instinctively thought as they do; he had set me to thinking about the mystical meaning of leylines in spite of my skepticism. The fort on the hill which the quarry had demolished was an ancient Celtic site. Monuments to the Celts were all around me - Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh, where the electrical storm had imprinted as yet undeciphered visions in my mind, Ben Arthur to the west of Loch Lomond, Arthur's tomb was perhaps in Angus, I had heard, and Guinivere's castle, and the leylines connecting these old focal points of Scottish culture converged at the Mill. It was like Camelot, my castle, and I was Arthur, Mairi was my Guinevere, Jamie was Lancelot, and Bob was Bedivere, the trusted knight who remained faithful to the end.

"After you go, Bob, you'll still be here," I said to him quietly, "You'll leave me more than I was before you came."

I walked with Bob over to his cottage and said goodnight. When I returned to the kitchen, Mairi was still there, alone. She seemed uneasy, then she came out with what was burdening her.

"Will, I've fixed up the flat next door so you can sleep there. I don't want you sleeping with me, it's just impossible; I can't go on pretending to be your wife. My heart's just not in this any more, my life has been taken over and I need to be on my own to think about what I want to do,"

It was like a door slamming shut in my face,

"Look, I know I've been neglecting you because of the Mill, but we'll work it out, everything will be OK once we finish," I pleaded.

"It's no use, Will, my mind is made up. I don't even want to try. I just feel cold towards you." There was an iron tone in her voice which chilled me. "You're just impossible to live with, and you've run through all my money and we're still nowhere near getting this place together. I've got to start thinking about myself."

It was pointless to argue with her; her mind seemed locked in a spasm of rejection. Disconsolately, I walked along the stone paving and opened the door to the self-contained flat at the south end of the farmhouse. All my clothes had been heaped in the bedroom, and there were sheets and blankets on the bed.

My mind was in a turmoil. This was a totally unexpected blow, yet when I reflected on the last couple of years, I could see that she had been becoming more and more alienated from me and what we were doing together. Still, there was hope, I thought, 'She doesn't really know what she wants, she'll get over it, I'll bring her round.'

I remembered when we had first met, one April day in Edinburgh, on St. Steven's Street, I had been carrying one of Jake's children piggyback, and Jake had stopped to talk to her. She was a final year art student, and he introduced us. She had thought the child was mine, I recalled.

A few days later a friend of mine who was a cobbler came to stay in my flat. He had just split up with his wife, and I told him he could use the empty room to set up his shoe factory. He had only been there a few hours when he started to feel ill; he quickly became so unwell, that he asked me to take him home, back to his wife. The next evening, I paid him a visit, and who was there but Mairi. We smoked some dope together and became friendly.

"Let's go to the University dance," she had suggested, and we drove off together in her natty little yellow Triumph sports car with its ski rack on the back.

Afterwards, we had gone back to her flat in Glen Street. At that time, I had decided to remain celibate, I had even entertained the notion of becoming a monk, so our relationship developed on a platonic level. And now here I was, celibate again, deserted by matrimony.

The winter came while we were putting a new floor in the hall. I worked doggedly, throwing myself into the work to keep my mind off what was going on between Mairi and Jamie, They were as thick as thieves; it was as if he had taken my place. At first, I was numb with disbelief that she could have turned so against me; then I understood that this was her way of getting even with me, that she had taken up with my erstwhile right hand man out of resentment and despair. But it was more than just a flirtation to make me jealous, since he was always in the farmhouse with her. They must be sleeping together, I realised. He had played on her feelings of neglect, fanned the flames of her frustrated ambitions and now was warming himself at the fire, at my fire.

There was little 1 could do. The house, everything in fact, was in Mairi's name, since she had put down most of the money. And my respect for her prevented me from stepping in and throwing him out. In any case, violence was a recourse I had always hated. But my ideal, that a person should be allowed to do whatever he or she wants, was taking a battering; it is all very well to believe this, but when someone you love does the one thing that hurts most deeply, then the real test comes.

I decided the best thing to do was ignore it, play my role, and pretend nothing was happening. I would rise above petty emotions, keep on with the work, and hope for the best. Suffering is strength; the Christianity of my ancestors lingered on, all those ministers and clerics whose heritage I had raged against were still a part of me.

Mairi was revealing an aspect of her personality I hadn't seen before, a hard, callous side, utterly selfish and grasping, so it seemed to me, I squirmed and wriggled like a hooked fish but she bore down ruthlessly whenever I appeared.

"I want to get out of this. Sell the place and give me back my money," she nagged over breakfast.

"Don't be ridiculous, Mairi, you know I can't sell until it's finished. And anyway, it would be better to hire it out and make money. I don't want to part with the Mill, it's my creation, I've put years of my life into getting it together."

"You can do what you like with it," she retorted impatiently, "just give me seventy thousand pounds and I'll leave."

"You know 1 haven't got that kind of money," I raged, "just be reasonable, will you? I can hire the studio to film people, maybe run it as a health farm or a rehabilitation centre. It's got a lot of possibilities."

I racked my brain looking for ways to raise money so I could buy off Mairi, but nothing came of my search. 1 began to feel like a berserk mechanism with spools of tape unreeling out of my head as I hammered and sawed, or drove at eighty miles an hour around Perthshire and Fife, looking for contacts, friends, anybody to distract me from the despair I felt about Jamie and Mairi.

Then a dreadful blow fell: a heavy frost descended on the country like an ice age and everything everywhere came to a standstill. 1 couldn't work out how to turn off the water, and all the pipes froze solid.

I could do nothing except wait for the thaw. To pass the time, I began to think about the leylines the old Alchemist had told me about. I didn't believe or disbelieve his theories, but I was interested to see if there was something to learn, so I pinned up an Ordnance Survey map of the area and marked the points where there were cairns,

forts, tumuli and very old churches. Visitors would look at the map and say, "Oh, I know a place." and I would go out to look at it, and mark it on the map if 1 thought it was significant.

An example of this was the wood on a hill opposite the Mill, where someone told me I could find two lumps shaped like tits, that weren't on the map. They seemed to be some kind of earthwork, so I marked them in. Then I put pins in all the points marked and stretched string between them. There were dozens of lines criss-crossing all over the map . I had no idea what they meant. But one thing was very obvious:the Mill was right in the middle of the lines, many of them passed through it. I noticed one line which connected the Mill, an old church, and the battlefield of Bannockburn.

The main axis of lines went straight through the quarry, which, I remembered, was the site of an ancient fort. Some very rare Egyptian pottery had been found there in an old excavation, I recalled reading in an archeological survey.

Jane became very interested in the map. She saw herself as an earth goddess and was particularly knowledgeable about Tarot cards and divining, and the occult aspects of the leylines excited her. She raved on about astral planes and other mystical jargon, and 1 began to get annoyed at the pseudo-scientific house of cards she used to explain herself.

As she talked, 1 realised I was struggling to move away from the irrationality that she and many others wrapped themselves in, fighting to get some rationality into my life - which the straight leylines seemed to symbolise - and thus escape from my troubles which were largely brought on by my illogical behaviour in the past.

"Your dream about the standing stones," she was saying, "is an ancient belief-structure which comes to you telepathically from the old, prehistoric inhabitants who are trying to reach through time and guide you to repair what has been altered."

"Well, I think that's a lot of bullshit," I answered her quietly,

Jane was shocked; I had uttered heresy. "Well, if that's the way you feel, I'm going back to my cave ," she declared defensively.

A mental flash like the air burst of a miniature atomic bomb illuminated me. I saw Plato's cave, in which he described people who were chained with their backs to the entrance, unable to see the real world outside, except as passing shadows on the wall before them.

"That's IT, Jane, that's just what I mean: your cave ! That's the whole trouble," I laughed, jumping up from my chair like an old tutor whose most hopeless pupil had just expressed an unexpectedly intelligent idea.

Jane retreated from the kitchen, puzzled, and still in a huff. I couldn't believe in what she had just said, but neither could I deny that the biggest thing on the map which had been changed was the fort where the quarry now was, like a cancer eating away at a vital organ.

The black stone upstairs in the studio suddenly appeared to me as the key to all my troubles. It had been given to me for some purpose, I felt, and this was it. The heavy, misshapen lump of magnetite was the missing standing stone from my dream in Crete, or at least, it was the equivalent of something that had been taken away by the quarry:

I must replace it.

I ran out to get Jane, who immediately understood what I meant. We collected the heavy stone with its devilish portrait and dog-like aspect on the other side, and set off up the frost-covered hill towards the quarry, Jane carrying her Tarot deck with her.

Thick white crystals of hoar-frost crunched beneath our feet on the rock hard ground. We passed through a dark railway tunnel which was festooned with huge hanging stalactites of ice, any one of which was big enough to kill us if it fell. Some had detached themselves and lay on the tracks like shattered logs of ice. Twenty degrees of frost had frozen everything to the solidity of iron.

We clambered into the deserted quarry, and Jane began fumbling with her cards."

What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm trying to find the best place to put the stone."

"No, I'm going to find the spot with the pendulum," I replied, thinking at the same time, 'I don't believe any of this but I'll go along with what happens.'

With the pendulum, I found two points which I used to pace out a line in the frost; then I found two more places where it twirled about, and to my surprise the second line intersected the first.

"Here, we'll put the stone in here."

There was a crack in the bed-rock, and I shoved the devil's stone deep into it.

"This is a place where the quarrymen will probably blast," I told Jane, "and if they destroy the stone, it will be on their heads. There is a tribe in the Sudan which doesn't like to kill snakes or scorpions, yet they are sometimes bitten or stung. So if they come across a snake, they catch it and put it in a bag and wait until a scorpion turns up, which they also put in the bag, and the two kill one another,"

She looked doubtfully down at the crack.

At that moment, an appallingly harsh hooting noise tore through the icy air and assaulted our ears, like some demon crying out in rage. It was an unholy moment and in spite of myself I felt an uncontrollable rush of cold fear surge through me.

Then I recognised it: the hooter at the quarry works.

On the same day, the frost lifted and the thaw began.

In all the buildings, the cottages, the farmhouse, burst pipes began to spray water, flooding rooms and soaking carpets, damaging plaster, dripping through ceilings, devastating years of work.

I could not remember a time when I had felt so utterly desolate; this on top of Mairi and Jamie's betrayal was more than 1 could bear, and in a whirlpool of self-pity, I began thinking seriously of suicide.

The best course of action at such times is to get another perspective, a second opinion, preferably from an old friend. Andrew, who had sent us the original newspaper clipping of the Mill from the Isle of Jura, was now living in the Sidlaw Hills behind Dundee; I drove over to see him.

He offered to do a Tarot reading, to see if the cards would give us any insights. There was no pretence of occult wisdom with Andrew; it was a genuine gesture of concern, so 1 accepted.

What came up was all the swords of the pack, and right in the middle was a guy huddled up on a bed with his head in his hands. It was me, a perfect representation of how I felt.

I decided a walk in the hills would make me feel better, so I set out, following a narrow sheep track through the short heather and grass. The tops of the Sidlaws, although not very high, were sufficiently wild to dispel the crowding tensions in my head. Before long, as I strode along the grassy ridge and looked across the rounded tops which resembled giant frozen waves on a petrified ocean, a song began to go through my head, in that repetitive, nagging fashion which refuses to go away. It was 'Climb every Mountain'. There seemed an endless succession of hill-tops around me.

"Hell," I objected out loud, "I'm bloody well not going to climb every mountain. If I do, I'll go mad."

Just over the next hill, although it was still daylight, a single bright star shone absurdly and poignantly. It reminded me of a drawing I had done called 'Evolution', in which I had tried to represent the unfolding and developing of my spirit.

"No,' I thought, 'I won't go down, I'll go on from here, move on to new things. Everybody and everything is at my throat. Screw the bastards, I've got to give the place one more chance, I've got to do it'.

I couldn't face the depressing chaos back at the Mill, so I drove instead over to the east coast of Fife to visit George, a musical friend who played guitar with his own band. I found him staying in a cottage between St. Andrews and Anstruther.

George had a very sympathetic way of looking at me with eyes full of concern, and I told him of my woes as we smoked several joints, distancing myself from the unhappiness by transforming it into narrative.

Soon we became ravenously hungry, but there was no food in George's cottage, so we decided to drive to a village in search of chips. As we drove along the coast road, 1 noticed a sign which read,

ST. FINIAN'S CAVE

Open 9 to 4

Keys at Number 9

"Hey, look," I exclaimed to George, "let's go see that."

"It's after four. Will, it'll be closed."

But I stopped the car and went up to the cottage anyway, and knocked on the door. A little old lady opened it, and I asked, "Have you got the keys for the cave?"

"Ehh, ye're no really supposed tae go in after four," she replied querulously.

"Ah, come on," I beamed at her, "I've never been in a cave before."

"Ach well, I suppose it's all right. That'll be ten pence."

We walked across the field towards the sea cliffs, and down the slope to the cave. There was a wooden door across its entrance which I unlocked. The cave had once been used as a dump by a nearby farmer, but now the rubbish had been all cleared away to reveal a beautiful cavern with enchanted sparkling walls caused by flecks of mica in the rock, A clear spring bubbled up in the floor, and I gazed admiringly around, entranced by the aura of the cavern.

Outside, clouds which had scattered rain were blowing eastwards across the grey North sea, and slanting sunlight from the west lit up their blue-grey retreating ramparts, and the straggling curtains of misting rain beneath them. The prism-like blue, yellow and red hues of a rainbow began to appear, then something1 had only read about happened.

The rainbow formed a complete circle in the sky.

We stood and watched it grow, then fade, feeling awed and privileged. "That's a Coolie, George; you're very lucky if you get to see even one of them in your lifetime."

As we went back towards the cottage, George seemed lost in thought, his head bent over his chest. He looked up and said, "Will, you know my last name, Maclennan, do you know what Maclennan means?"

"No," I replied.

"It means 'Son of Finian.'"

That night back at the Mill, I had an unusually vivid dream: I was fighting my way out of a cave. Its floor was covered with pools of blood, and littered with severed heads, over which I continually stumbled, as if trying to walk on footballs, I was dragging behind me a professor of archaeology whom I had rescued.

In the morning there was a phone call from Barrie, now an organizer of pop concerts. "We're doing UB2 in Dundee tonight; come on over and I'll give you some tickets," he invited.

I took Jane along. She decided to wear an outlandish Hell's Angels' jacket with a grinning skull on the back. By contrast, I looked quite smart in my blue blazer, but I brought along a wide-brimmed straw hat with a red bandana around the crown, just in case I felt like wearing it.

We met Barrie outside the Caird Hall, and he took us to excellent seats right in the middle of the auditorium. As the lights dropped and the band appeared, I was flooded by a feeling of awe such as I had never felt before: the flood-lit stage seemed exactly like St. Finian's Cave,and the cave in last night's dream.

The band began with the song 'You can only put me down so far', which seemed incredibly apt; it summed up my feelings exactly, I sat there exultant, bathed in pure, shining truth. An uplifting sense of renewed purpose filled me: I'm not going to give in and leave the Mill. To hell with having no money. I'll get rock and roll musicians and turn it into a music studio.'

At the interval I found Barrie, who didn't seem to be enjoying the concert; I knew it was because he was so preoccupied with organizing hundreds of events and putting up with criticism and opposition that he hardly ever has time to enjoy what he provides for the pleasure of others, so I threw my arms around him and tried to put all the good feelings I had picked up from the band into the hug I gave him.

After the concert, he caught my arm as we were leaving and said,"There's a party for the band at the Angus Hotel in the West end. Come

along and I'll see you there,"

"Right, Barrie, I'll be there," I assured him.

But I had arranged to meet some other people and give them a lift back to Fife, and I felt too euphoric to bother with a party. Nothing could top, or even equal, what I had felt at the concert. However, at midnight I found myself outside the Angus Hotel and decided I might as well go in.

The Angus is a dismal glass-sided modern building, and there were a lot of policemen milling around the entrance. Something had obviously happened, perhaps a fight, and they were agitated.

I looked askance at Jane with her cropped hair and ragged denims emblazoned with outlaw biker insignia, "You wait in the car. I'll go in, and I'll come back and get you, OK?"

I tried to enter, but one of the policemen stood in my way and

said "No."

"I've come to the party."

"What party?"

"The band's party."

"What band?" It was an immediate brick wall. There's no arguing with a dumb cop; I wasn't in the mood to try, anyway.

I went back to the car and removed my jumper, revealing a striped t-shirt, put on the blazer and pulled the straw hat low over my brow to make a quick disguise.

"Come on," I said to Jane, and we went back to the hotel entrance.

I had about half an ounce of hashish in my pocket.

By this time the police had gone into the foyer and the glass door was shut. As we went up to it, a couple from inside tried to get out, but couldn't. The door was jammed. They pulled at it, then a policeman came up behind them, but found that he couldn't open it either. After a

long struggle he succeeded, and let them out.

I was standing there, arms crossed, tapping my foot impatiently; I glared hard at him,

"What about the fire regulations, then, eh?"

He looked dumbfounded.

"What happens if there's a fire in this hotel, eh?"

Confusion worked in his face, "Err..."

"GET SOMETHING DONE ABOUT IT. NOW. And I don't mean put it off till later'."

"Eh, are you...?"

"OFFICIAL? That's RIGHT'."

"Are you ...?"

"Coming in? That's right." And in we both walked, past the same man who had just barred me, Jane like a Hell's Angel and me in a loud hat.

They were trying to impose their idea of order on the scene, and here was Mr. Anarchy walking through them. We went upstairs and found the band slumped in a horrible hotel suite, looking thoroughly miserable, I gave them all my dope, which cheered them up tremendously, and they started rolling joints, Garry came over, delighted to see me. "How's about coming over to my room for a couple of lines of coke?" he invited.

"No, coke makes me really logical, and I'm into the illogical tonight."

"Ahh," he exclaimed with mock seriousness, "chained by reason."

The phrase reverberated in my head. I thought it was a reference to Plato's 'Republic' (a misquote, as I later discovered), to his image of humanity chained in a cave, unable to see the world outside, which a comment of Jane's had brought to my mind before the thaw.

Whole areas of meaning began to stir and shift as I connected Jane's cave of the occult, the cave of my grandfather's Greek scholarship, my father's cave of logical obsession, the cave dream I had just had...

This reverie was interrupted when one of the band members came up to me and said, "I think there's something really important about your coming here tonight. I've got this strong feeling that I should give you my pass card so you can get into any place where we're playing."

I was touched by his gesture, which confirmed my ideas that rock music was the way to raise money to pay off the huge debts hanging over the Mill.

In the band there were two brothers named Campbell. "I'm a bit of Campbell, too, through my father," I told them. Then it hit me: 'I'm married to a MACDONALD! Oh my God, it all fits in; everything that's been happening to me is the revenge of the Macdonalds, This is terrible.

******

A few days later I decided to travel down to London to explore the possibilities, perhaps to meet someone who knew of a band that wanted to hire a studio for practising.

I set off in our little Renault. I was driving down the motorway through south-west Scotland near Kirkpatrick, when I began to worry about the battery being flat and noises the car was making, and came off on a side road to find a garage, I had bought a battery and was heading back when I saw a sign which read

'Bruce's Cave'

Christ'! So of course I went to visit it, followed a path into the woods and into a river gorge, along a wooden footpath on the side of a cliff with a drop of fifty feet below.

Through the square cut entrance was a stately cave containing a big room. It must have been an invisible hiding place back in Bruce's day.

Inside, all alone, I thought of Bruce on the run from his enemies, everything was going wrong for him, and yet in the end he succeeded. So I said a little prayer: 'just let me do this thing, get the Mill organised as a music studio.'

Then I walked back to the car and drove on south to Huddersfield, where I stopped off to visit a Peruvian friend named Manolo, who was my daughter's godfather.

He came with me the next day as I set out for London, but as we were leaving he said, "I've got to sign on at the Unemployment Exchange before we go."

"Look, I can't wait, I've got an appointment in London and I can just about make it,"

"Won't be a minute. Will," I dropped him at the entrance where there was a huge queue of about two hundred people. He skipped ahead of the queue, signed on, and was back in a matter of minutes, and we were away,

I was driving at eighty miles per hour through worsening fog, straining my eyes to see ahead.

"I've got to keep going," I said grimly, and stubbed out the joint we were smoking.

Then ahead I saw two cars spinning around, and a man by the roadside frantically waving his arms, I shifted down through the gears, stopping only five feet from the cars.

At that instant I got an overwhelming feeling of an avalanche bearing down on us.

Manolo at the same moment shouted, "Move the car!"

I couldn't at first decide which way to go, but just as I pulled over to the side, a huge bus roared past, right through the spot where we had been, smack into the cars ahead, knocking them out of the way as it careered off into the mist.

Manolo and I leapt from the car and ran along the embankment, towards the bus. Ahead, we could see fires flickering through the fog, and a mixture of diesel oil and petrol was flowing along the tarmac like a long fuse under the stopped cars. In the distance, a car exploded into flames, and a BBC cameraman hurried past.

"How the hell did you get here so quick, you vulture?" I called out in anger.

"I was just on my way to work," he squeaked apologetically.

"Ha Ha!" I retorted ironically, turning to the now stationary bus.

We kicked in the damaged door of the bus to release the passengers – a party of young schoolgirls and two teachers, whom we led over to the roadside, out of danger.

Then we continued along past the log-jam of cars, Manolo on one side and me on the other. He was soon in the heart of the pile-up, comforting people who were shocked, getting warm coats for the injured, helping someone to an ambulance. I told people to stand clear of the inflammable liquid spreading across the motorway; droves of them were wandering around or standing like sheep, some with lighted cigarettes, oblivious to the mixture of spilled fuel trickling under their feet.

In the centre of the chaos, a lorry and a car were impacted together, fire from the burning lorry spreading around its load of metal drums.

"Stand by your cars " a policeman was bawling through a loud-hailer.

I went up to a cop and said, "I can get fifty people and we'll lift these vehicles aside for ambulances and firetrucks to get in."

"No, you're not allowed to touch any vehicles or the insurance companies won't pay up."

"But look at that lorry; what's in these barrels?"

"We don't know."

"That could be explosive, that could give off poisonous gas and take out all these people."

"STAY BY YOUR CARS" continued the loud-hailer.

I could not passively watch such insanity; my awareness was very acute, prompting my survival instincts, although many people were uncomprehending of the danger around them. But I was also enjoying myself thoroughly by this time.

After about an hour, there were signs that the cars were going to start moving: passengers climbed back in, drivers started their engines. I was returning to my car when I saw the school party on their way towards the bus; one of the schoolteachers was still weeping hysterically, being supported by the other, followed by the children, many of whom were also crying.

I stopped the first girl and gave her a big hug, saying "Look at all those colours and all that smoke; isn't that fantastic?" She stopped her tears and looked around, with a sniff.

"There's nothing wrong with you, is there? Weren't you lucky you didn't get hurt?"

She nodded with a smile. I gave a big hug to every kid who was crying and spoke to her about the kaleidoscope scene and her good fortune, wanting to counteract the lesson these teachers had given by their example on how to react in a crisis.

Manolo appeared with a very tall American whom he had dragged unhurt out of a flattened car in the wake of the bus. He was going to Uxbridge, so Manolo, typically, had offered him a lift with us. He tucked the lanky young man, stunned and pale from being sandwiched by the bus, into the front seat, and then jumped in the back, from where he directed a mischievous commentary on my driving.

"Did you see that? He almost hit that car! I wouldn't sit in the front with him. God , Will, watch where you're going."

The unhappy passenger began to flinch, and press his foot on a non-existent brake, as I sped south, making up for lost time.

"Shut up, Manolo, I'm driving this car."

When we reached Uxbridge, the guy took out his wallet and produced a sheaf of banknotes. "How much do I owe you?" he asked, obviously one of these independent types who doesn't want to owe anybody anything. Manolo was virtually penniless, but he replied with some heat, "Listen, mate. Don't pay us; if you're ever in this situation again, just help another person like 1 did you."

Manolo's purpose, in coming to London with me, was to find a drummer from New Orleans named 'Stretch', who could get him a job with a band, but he didn't know where to look. We stopped in Maida Yale to find a pub I knew about, the Prince of Wales, and as we were trying to locate it, Manolo spotted an ancient crone and asked her the way,

"I don't know where anything is," she lamented in a weak, spidery voice,"I can't find my daughter, I don't even remember my own address." Manolo was suddenly all solicitude. "Can I help you? Where does she live?"

After two hours of driving around London attempting to follow her fragmented directions, a growing dread that we would be looking after a doddering 80 year old woman for the next two weeks, began to haunt me. Scrawled in the back of her address book, which contained a strange variety of addresses, mostly abroad, I saw a house number which was just round the corner; she said it was her nephew's.

We knocked on the door. A scowling, unshaven face emerged.

"Mr, Murphy?"

"Yeah, whaddya want?"

"We've brought your aunt, she was lost when we met her."

"What did you bring her here for?" he growled unwelcomingly, "I don't want her,"

"Well, she's your problem nowl" We retreated hastily to the car.

"Right, Manolo, don't even TALK to anyone else," I ordered, as we drove off.

Inside the Prince of Wales, I looked over Manolo's shoulder and there was 'Stretch', the very man he was looking for.

Enthusiastic greetings were made, exclamations about amazing coincidences offered, and soon we were swept along with a convivial group of musicians out of the pub and into the streets of London.

Before long, I found myself in a theatrical party in a place I thought of as 'Toad Hall', one of those upmarket gatherings where everyone knows everybody else and they are all hustling one another, trying to make connections, get jobs. There was the usual sprinkling of pop stars, joints being smoked, and cocaine in the bedroom.I was the only person who didn't know anybody, I just stood and watched.

London seemed like a colossal prostitute - they were all selling themselves like whores. I stood in the middle of the room and willed myself to be fantastic, put a secret smile on my face, as if I knew something no one else did. That, plus my gift of the gab, got me the offer of making a film with the BBC before the evening was out.

The next few days I went around on a hunting trip, visiting Computer Animation Studios, meeting various people, seeing the work they were doing, trying to learn their terminology, their way of thinking, just letting my curiosity lead me on.

I wandered into a boardroom where people thought I was from another department, commented on what was being said, listening and learning all the time. I found an Animation and Film Graphics Company in a place called 'Sangster House'. Standing in the centre of a room, I called out to them "This is my house. My name is Sangster. Get out, you bunch of squatters, " and laughed. They showed me their computer room and offered to let me work there. If I had had something concrete to offer, I could have made some deals, but at least I made several connections in films and music and met several promoters whom I told about my studio, before I returned to Scotland, confident now that something would turn up.

******
CHAPTER NINE

Back in Edinburgh after nothing tangible had emerged from the London escapade, I walked into the St. Vincent Bar. There, perched on a bar stool was a London dope dealer I knew as 'the Priest', because he'd been studying in a seminary before he turned onto drugs.

"Small Minds are looking for you," he said enigmatically.

I groped with this idea.

"Bruce, their manager, wants you to call him,"

Bruce, I thought, Bruce's cave ? My mind was off on a tangent.

"He wants to hire your studio for the band to practise in." No sooner had the penny dropped than I was dropping coins into the phone at the back of the bar.

Bruce described the last place the band had used for practice; the owner's wife hadn't liked them to play after midnight,

"Look, Bruce, there's no worries up here, they can play all day and all night if they want to."

"Can they really? Great, What about soundproofing?"

"That's no problem, we're out in the country."

"We'll be right up to have a look," he said.

I drove like a man possessed back through Fife, paused at the Mill to hurl orders at Mairi : "Get the place tidied up ! Sweep out the hall! We've got a band coming to see the place ," and sped off to Perth to buy caviar, real coffee, French bread, brie, and wine.

When I got back, she was indignant as I piled the food on the kitchen table. "You're stupid. You're mad. Caviar? Who do you think they are? They'll never..."

Her tirade was cut short as the gravel outside scrunched under the wheels of Bruce's red Volvo pulling up beside the house, Barrie and Pete, a sound engineer, were with him.

Bruce just adored caviar and Brie. Then they had a tour around the building and admired the hall with its balcony like an Elizabethan theatre. 1 talked enthusiastically of how musicians need to separate themselves from the distractions of the city, how boredom from nothing to do often pushed people into creative work. Here, the boys could go to the pub in Newburgh, take a few walks in the country, then they would have nothing else to do but come back to the hall and play.

The-Tibetans give an artist whatever he wants - fine clothes, food, a woman - while he is working, because they consider art to be an expression of their religion. The artist himself doesn't need any possessions; when he finishes what he is working on, he leaves it all behind. I wanted to provide the band with that kind of freedom and stimulation.

"I'd like to hire this house, too," said Bruce, "Can you have it all ready by next week?"

"Oh, absolutely," I replied, not really knowing if I could. But I knew I had to say that, this was my only hope, the only glimmer of light in the darkness, and nothing was going to stop me.

When Mairi heard that the band was to live in the house with us, she blew up. "Don't you dare do this to me. Will Sangster! There will be wretched pop musicians using my kitchen, all over the place."

'Just like a housewife,' I thought.

"Well, don't you dare put a spoke in the wheel and wreck my plans'." I volleyed back. "Just accept it, go along with what I'm doing. It's the only way we'll recover your money."

As Bruce left, he said, "You'd better tell the neighbours across the road, in case they get alarmed."

"I'll do that," I said, smiling broadly and waving while they drove

off.

Then I went mad with the cheque book, spending nearly £500 I didn't have, to hire some unemployed local tradesmen : two joiners, a plasterer,

and an electrician. I also recruited Neil and Richard from down the road, two good men who gave me solid support. We began repairing the frost damage and installing a wood stove in the hall, working flat out at a terrific pace, completing work that would have taken months if this crisis hadn't appeared.

Then the phone rang; it was Bruce. "Look, the boys don't really want to live in someone else's house, they'd be uncomfortable and feel in the way. We'd like to have the end house near the hall, only it's frost-damaged; can you get it ready?"

'He'll call it off if I hesitate,' I thought. "Don't you worry about that, Bruce, I'll get it together, it's OK," I assured him breezily, wondering meanwhile if it was possible.

So we switched our efforts over to the end house, repaired the burst pipes, repainted it entirely, working round the clock in sheer desperation. Mairi, glad to have Bruce on her side, put back all the carpets we had dragged out to dry.

A big Lancia sports car roared in to the yard, containing Frankie and her cousin Nigel. I had not seen her for years, and as she flounced breathlessly into the kitchen, she was caught up in the whirlwind of manic energy.

"God, Will, Why didn't I know about this place before? This is just what I've always wanted, this is absolutely my dream - oh my God, and I'm on my way to Australia - Oh, look, I'll come into the business with you."

"Look, Frankie, there's a huge hassle on; I don't even know if I've got a business yet."

She was getting terrifically enthusiastic about the place, already identifying herself with it. I could feel her starting to put emotional blackmail on me. "You've got to tell me whether we can do this, because if not I have to go to Australia in three days."

"I can't commit myself to a partnership, Frankie. And I can't make up your mind for you; I don't want to be your excuse for not going to Australia, I don't want that responsibility."

Frankie can plunge into huge depressions, weeping for hours and having to be held and comforted. I felt protective, and I found myself attracted to her, since Mairi had thrown me out of her bedroom and I was wanting a woman. But a little reflection didn't make entanglement with Frankie seem a good idea; anyway, I didn't feel she fancied me in the slightest, so a flirtation seemed harmless enough. I went along with her fantasies and even started making half-hearted advances.

She threw herself into making plans. "You've got to have a video, Will. You've got to have tapes for the band. And you've got to have P.D.'s."

"What the fuck are P.D.'s?"

"That's what you keep in the fridge. You keep it stocked and take a note of what they consume and charge them for it on their P.D.'s. You've got to do it this way."

"What the bloody hell are P.D.'s?" But I never found out.

Frankie then dashed off to the Highlands to steal things from her mother's hotel : downies, coffee percolators, ashtrays, and towels. Next, she produced a video and some electric sandwich toasters she had bought

But she was still in a state of flux, unable to decide whether to stay and help or go to Australia, trying to manoeuvre me into giving her a definite commitment, which 1 refused adamantly to do.Only one hour before her plane's departure, I had to phone the airline in London and cancel her ticket. To make sure she got her money back, I spoke in a grave voice to the ticket clerk: "This is Mr. Wiseman, Miss Reid's family solicitor. Her mother has just died, and she has just learned that her cousin has been killed in a car crash. Miss Reid is in deep shock and is heavily drugged." This last remark was not so far from the truth, as she had a lot of cocaine with her. A few days later, the refund cheque arrived.

Mairi and I were now screaming at each other and arguing bitterly, while still working really hard to finish the place in time.

"You two go ahead and build up your business together, I want to get out of it all now. Give me £70,000 and I'll leave."

"For Christ's sake, Mairi, where the hell am I going to get £70,000?"

Jamie had fallen from favour and Mairi's latest boyfriend was hovering about, a long-haired gentle Canadian named Don, who specialised in computerized music. I quickly summed him up; he was nothing but a paper man, a fiction, all talk and no substance, and she would soon tire of him.

"I won't stand between you and Mairi," I told him, "but I love her and I want us to get back together."

"I'm sure you will," he simpered. "I can see that you really care about the lady and when you're around, I promise I'll keep out of the way."

I laughed to myself; ' the naive wimp actually thinks he's got a chance with her,' and it was a double pleasure to observe Jamie's jealousy. Typically, he resorted to a massive intake of drink and drugs. I soon noted scornfully that he had added heroin to his list. Junkies earn my unqualified contempt; I hate them.

The wooden floor of the hall was unvarnished. Only a day before the band's arrival we decided to risk using several old cans of varnish I had found in a Dundee jute mill. As well as Neil and Richard, I dragooned a friend Sonia, and her teenage son Crispin, into helping, when they dropped in to visit one afternoon. I was becoming quite unscrupulous about making use of anybody and everybody.

Crispin was learning to play the drums and it happened that Small Minds was his favourite band. The first thing he asked was, "Does the band need a drummer?" It was plain that they were his heroes, so I told him I'd let him watch the band as a special favour, although I had intended keeping everybody out of the way.

The varnish stubbornly refused to dry. "Open the doors," I told the others, but soon began to worry that the frosty night would make the hall too cold for the band. We borrowed a large, space-age electric heater and turned it full blast onto the floor, "This will dry it in no time, lads'." I announced with delight, but to my horror, a huge area of varnish erupted in large blisters, and still it would not dry.

We shoved the heater aside and replaced it with a smaller one. Gradually, the varnish grew less tacky, the blisters slowly subsided, and our blood pressure with them. The atmosphere in the hall had become more airy and light since we had painted it and varnished it, I noticed.

"Haven't you checked the soundproofing in the hall?" said Mairi. "Don will do a sound check for you," She certainly knew how to rub my nose in it now that she had found another substitute for me.

"To hell with Don," I snarled, "I don't even want to know about soundproofing, I haven't got time to think about it." 'They'll just say that it's not going to work, I thought, but it IS going to work. Screw the lot of them,'

Frankie began complaining: "Oh Christ, I wish I'd gone to Australia and not got involved in this total madness. It's just one flaming row after another between you and Mairi with the kid screaming in the background ."

"I told you to go to Australia, If you want to go, then go, I can't give you a definite promise about this business and say whether or not it will go on," I disclaimed testily.

Then the band arrived.

Two enormous lorries full of sound equipment squeezed up the narrow drive and into the yard, filling it with their bulk. I took one look at all that equipment and panicked: 'OH MY GOD! SOUNDPROOFING.' I drove in feverish haste up to the dump to get old mattresses, carpets, anything 1 could stuff in the windows to kill the sound.

The neighbours went wild when they saw the lorries. The phone rang with alarmed enquiries. I went across the road to calm them down, explaining that we had soundproofed the hall and the noise would be minimal because the building was well back from the road, behind the mill. They seemed pacified, so I confidently brought one woman over to show her all we had done.

Her manner changed abruptly when she saw the equipment; there was a whole wall of speakers. "We're going to the police'." she announced.

"If you're going to take that attitude, you can do what you like. I'm going ahead anyway," I retorted defiantly.

The band hadn't even started playing and already the weazels were closing in. So I said to the boys, "Look, we might get some hassle; in fact, I'm expecting it, But that's my problem. Don't let it worry you. If it gets heavy, I might ask you to think about turning the music down if you want to, until we get some better soundproofing organised."

"Yeah, yeah, that's OK, man, we'll keep it down if you ask us." Don offered to do a sound check. I turned on him: "You promised to keep out of my way. Go and have your scene elsewhere, not right under my nose."

So he and Mairi left; at least that was one irritation out of the way,

Frankie took the band ponytrekking while the roadies set up the equipment. They work with amplified sound and need plenty of volume. As soon as they began playing that evening, the music blasted out over the entire area. It was clearly heard in the middle of Newburgh and was absolutely hellish across the road. But I thought it was beautiful. I could feel the music rattling all the dust out of the buildings, the gorgeous rich elfin quality of the sound creeping through the misty woods. It felt as if the whole land was in sympathy; the music the Minds played was like the land itself: elfin, graceful, light.

The neighbours, however, went on the offensive. Some phoned, and others came to my door to complain, "I'm getting the hall soundproofed," I assured them, but they refused to go along with me any further. It was war.

I told the band to turn it down a bit, which they did, but we couldn't understand why the din was still so loud. Then we realised the whole roof was vibrating like the sound board of a guitar and was actually amplifying the music, while the hill behind reflected it all directly at the neighbours' houses.

There was an awkward dilemma building up, I know what artists need; ideally they should have nobody telling them what to do, or telling them to stop what they're doing, because if one does, then the anarchist in them starts resisting, triggering off a negative process. They should have everything done for them, anything they want, so that after a while the pleasure palls and there is only creativity left.

I had made the boys feel at ease. There was a table in the hall covered with food and the best hash. I had sat in the kitchen with Mick and Jim saying, "Lock, if there's any trouble, just relax, keep cool and don't worry. I've told you that you can play all night and I'm sticking by that. I'm going to soundproof the hall while you're away on 'Top of the Pops', If the police come, I don't want you to get hassled; just relax and keep an eye on the drugs."

It was twelve midnight and the band had been playing for six hours when the first cop arrived, louping into the yard like a dog.

What had kept them, I don't know.He had gone up to the entrance of the hall and was standing on the raised loading platform when I came up behind him, a couple of feet lower down. He went straight into the attack: "Get that bloody noise off!"

"Listen, if you're going to talk to me, would you come down to the level I'm standing at?"

"I will not." So I jumped .up on the platform right in front of him, face to

face.

"Get that noise off!" I could see that he was not going to listen to anything I might say.

"I will not," I repeated, "I'll get it down, but I will not get it off. This is my property."

"I'll get my superior," he spluttered.

"You get your superior, get him," And off he went.

In a little while an Inspector came striding across the yard. I went out to meet him and said, "The problem is not up here, it's down at the road, down at the neighbour's property,"

He agreed, and went back to the road.

I popped inside the hall and said to the band, "Keep playing, but keep it down for a bit," then followed the Inspector down to the gate. There were two other policemen with him, and several of the neighbours were watching from their doors.

"I don't think that's too loud," I told him,

"1 do," he replied. A car drove past.

"I can't hear the music over that car," I told him.

"Well, I can,"

"You're on shaky ground."

"What!" he exclaimed, startled by my effrontery, "Shaky ground? What do you mean?"

"I know I am, but you are, too. You don't know it, and that's worse. We wouldn't have put up all this investment without checking a few facts and figures. There's an organisation behind this; I'm just the front man."

"I still think it's too loud."

"That's your opinion, but you've got to argue against a machine. There are specifications in law about sound levels. You don't suppose we would do all this without keeping ourselves covered, do you?"

"I don't care. 1 think that," - he pointed towards the Mill which throbbed with music, - "is a breach of the peace."

1 felt like King Canute ordering back the tide, holding them back by sheer will power, talking fast to mix them up. "Look, you've got to be very careful what you do here, because this band is rehearsing for their appearance on 'Top of the Pops' tomorrow."

"Ahh, rubbish, they are not."

"They ARE," I emphasized.

Another carload of policemen arrived, joining the group. Some of the neighbours began crossing the road to swell the crowd. The pressure against me was increasing.

A second car drove by.

"Listen, mate, the music is no louder than that car." The Inspector and his men seemed uncertain.. As they hesitated, I thought that perhaps I had them under control.Then the band turned the volume way up, and the blast of sound blew my act apart, 'Shit',' I thought, 'I'd better move fast'.'

"I'm going up to turn it off," I shouted over the din.

"Oh no" he roared, "We're coming in," And the whole mass of policemen rushed up the drive towards the hall.

I managed to get ahead of them and scramble up onto the platform at the entrance.

"Stop right there. Listen to me, the whole lot of you! I have offered to turn the music off. You are all out of order, because I have consistently offered to turn the music down to an acceptable level, and now I'm turning it off. I want to declare that if any of you come any further I will be quite within my rights to defend my property, and I am going to register a protest about your conduct."

They paused, looking at me. "I am now going in to turn the music off," I said, staring back at them.

"You do that," said the Inspector.

I had won.

I walked calmly and deliberately to the door, shut it behind me, and strolled nonchalantly over to where the band was, waiting until they finished the number they were playing. "You'll have to stop, boys. It's either that or we get arrested, not just me, the whole lot of us"

They exchanged glances. "We may as well get to bed since we're going to London in the morning. Yeah, right, it's OK, we should stop now anyway, it's cool."

The next morning I drove them down to Edinburgh in their van to catch the lane for their gig. They were really excited: "This is our big break!

"Good luck, guys," I said to them at the terminal as they went to board the jet, shaking each one by the hand, "You can do it."

"Thanks for everything," they shouted back, "We'll put one of your drawings on our drum kit for luck."

I drove back to the mill thinking I really needed a break, and decided to take the day off. We had about forty-eight hours to get the entire hall soundproofed and I needed a rest before tackling that. But Frankie had organized a public relations exercise; she had made an appointment for us to see the Head of the local police force.

I went to the station at the time, but there was no sign of Frankie, so I went in alone. I said to the Chief "We're going to have the Hall completely soundproofed, the noise will be totally silenced. We had to have the sound up really loud to see where it was getting out. Last night was part of an experiment, but we've got it under control."

He started moralizing in a disapproving tone. "This sort of noise damages people's ears and minds all over the country..."

I cut in: "Do you realize what would have happened last night if I hadn't stopped your men from coming in and arresting the band? Do you have any idea how much publicity you would have created for them? The boys finally get their big break and then you prevent them from appearing on 'Top of the Pops'. The entire pop music industry, all the media, would have seized on the story, there would have been enormous publicity. They would have been absolutely delighted; they would have sold so many records that each one of them would have made more money than you'll make in ten years. And can you imagine how you would have been written up in the press?"

The Chief looked reflective. Then he started on a different tack: "Do you have planning permission for all this?"

"Of course we do," I said, lying blandly, with an expression of surprise at his naivety. Telling him not to worry, I left, as the band was coming back that night.

I ran into Frankie outside; she was dressed in her most respectable best, intending to charm the Chief, and was annoyed that she had missed the meeting, but she consoled herself by planning another pony trek with the boys when they returned.

The next day I phoned the only insulation company in Scotland. I got an answering service, to my chagrin. But I soon located the manager's home number and said to him, "You'd better get up here straight away because we have to soundproof an entire building in a hurry,"

He arrived half an hour later. I showed him the hall and described the problem. He looked at the large, high room and said, "Your roof is like a big sounding board, that's where the noise is coming from. You need a layer of compressed plastic board over the rafters, then leave a gap and put on a second layer of fibreglass with protective sheets."

I looked at him hard. "Will it work? You'd better be right because I've got no time to check it out."

"It'll work."

''Right, when can you get it up here?"

"In a couple of hours."

I jumped in the car and shot off to Perth to get nails. I scoured the town for washers but they were in short supply and I couldn't get as many as I needed.

Back at the mill, I was down to only three helpers. Frankie had just injured her ankle by falling off a horse while pony-trekking with the band. Her cousin Nigel was so short-sighted he could only see a couple of feet, and he was also very clumsy. Richard was blind in one eye, and Neil was scared of heights.

The insulation arrived, huge piles of it. I organized some scaffolding. Richard set up a tape deck in the hall to provide music while we worked. I sang lustily to a Van Morrison track "I been working so long". Frankie hobbled about the kitchen, making cups of tea and rolling joints to prepare us for the mammoth task that lay ahead.

At first, there was bedlam, with everyone rushing about saying "Do this', Do that." I had to be in a hundred places at once, running furiously back and forth, working at breakneck speed, inhaling fibreglass dust because I couldn't work fast enough with the protective mask on.

Everything went smoothly once we settled into working as a team. But after we had finished the walls and began on the roof, we began to run into snags.

The roof was uneven and had to be made level before we could put on the second layer of insulation. Then we ran out of washers. Improvising desperately, I cut up my old pictures to act as washers. As I banged in nails, I could see images from them, like 'Snake woman'.

Next, the team began to fall apart because I had to leave Richard in charge while I went off in search of more washers. The power went to his head; acting like Der Furher, he ordered people about, making them resentful. The way to lead is not to stand there telling people what to do: instead you do it yourself and they follow.

I escaped into the kitchen to contemplate what lay ahead. Everything was beginning to go haywire. We were only one third of the way through the most difficult part of the job and there were only a few hours left until daylight, the deadline, when I said it would be ready for the band. I could hear Bruce saying to me, "Look, man, if you can't get it together we'll have to go away."

The whole adventure seemed to be collapsing and I slumped back despairingly in my chair.

Then Paul, the roadie, started hassling me. I'd been using their van to collect materials, but I had put more petrol in it.

"You owe us fifteen quid for petrol, mate," he demanded aggressively. He makes sure everything works out for the band, trampling on everyone else.

"I don't owe you anything," I replied wearily.

"Yes you fuckin well do."

"I don't."

"I'll fuckin gob ya," he threatened.

"Tell you what, I'll toss you for it. You can call the toss."

Taken aback, he said, "All right, you're on."

He won the toss. "OK, here's fifteen quid." I reached for my wallet.

He looked at me, "No, man, you can keep yer money. Get me a hat, some goggles, a pair of gloves, and overalls, and I'll help ya."

I gave him the wide-brimmed Clint Eastwood cowboy hat I had worn to the UB2 concert, lending his small stocky frame and rubbery face a macho appearance.

At that moment, an acquaintance named Lennie Love wandered into the kitchen. "Want some speed. Will?" He had a lot of it in his pockets.

"I've never taken amphetamines in my life, Lennie, but now is certainly the time." I put a lot of the powder into my tea, then began snorting line after line greedily.

Frankie grew alarmed.

"Stop," she shook my shoulder. "You'll kill yourself. Nobody can take that much speed."

Then Paul and I went over to the hall to finish the ceiling.We hadn't time to erect proper scaffolding, so we balanced planks on tables, boxes, the balcony, making a geometric structure as we moved across the roof, handing pieces of fibreglass sheeting to one another,bending and twisting into the most awkward positions, being careful not to step on unsupported ends. Several times I put my neck out of joint, but just gave my shoulders a twist and it returned to normal. The pain grew almost unbearable, but I worked on. Whatever tool I needed was always in my hand before I could ask for it, We were linked by pure telepathy, so totally together that there were no barriers; it was like the most intense sexual experience. I've never known anything remotely like it.

On the fourth day the police gave up. They were now afraid to raid us because of the publicity, and they started telling the neighbours to stop bothering them with any more complaints.

By this time I thought I couldn't take any more; I began to think I was going mad, I'd been through several weeks of manic exertion, taken enough speed to kill me, and I began to have a recurring phobia about knives – every time I saw a knife, I could feel it and see it cutting throats, wrists, balls

When Sonia and her son Crispin had been helping to varnish the floor, I had told him he could come and watch the Minds practise. I had kept everybody out of their way, but now it was their last night here before they went off to London to record their LP, so I told Sonia to bring him over. I'd spoken to the drummer about other people playing his equipment, and he said he didn't mind if they knew what they were doing.

So when Crispin asked me "Do you think I could get a shot of their drums?" I knew they would agree. But I said to him, "I think so, but you'll have to ask them." He was a tall, gawky, self-conscious boy and he squirmed with embarrassment. "I can't."

"Go and ask them, Crispin," I said sternly.

"I can't; what will I say?"

"I'm not telling you what to say, just go over and ask them."

"But what will I say?"

"Go and do it, I refuse to help you," I repeated, kicking him ut of the kitchen.

Three times he came back in an agony of shyness; each time I drove him back.

Sonia began to get concerned and protective, but I assured her they would let him join in.

Soon we heard the muffled sound of a drum playing. "Oh, that must be Crispin'," She jumped up excitedly and wanted to rush over to watch him.

"Wait a bit," I told her, "we'll go over when he has settled down. But don't say anything to draw attention to him and make him feel embarrassed.

We went in through the Mill and on to the balcony. There was Crispin, battering away at the drums while Mick was operating a drum machine. The boy was extremely nervous, locked into a tense, repetitive riff, and Mick was trying to knock him out of it by hitting him with different rhythms to change his pattern. Then the rest of the band strolled in casually and began picking up their guitars and playing along with Crispin, who went wide-eyed with amazement, still thrashing away, almost in a panic at first.

After a quarter of an hour, Mick took over. It was a sort of initiation for Crispin; he came out declaring he was going to be a drummer with a rock group.

When we returned to the kitchen, Jane was there, "I've just had a phone call from some friends," she said. "They want to park their bus up here,"

"Wait a minute," I said, suspicious suddenly. "What bus? How big is it?"

"Oh, the pips were going and they didn't have any more change, so I told them just to come on up."

"You did what?"

"Oh, don't be so inhospitable. Will," interrupted Mairi. "There's plenty of room."

Full of misgivings, I turned to Sonia, who wanted to watch the band. "I'll take you back over, but you must appreciate that they are doing very serious work and the vibes in the hall are very strong, so don't do anything to make yourself obvious."

But as soon as we were on the balcony overlooking them, she started getting into a flutter of excitement. Down on the floor, Mick's foot was quivering with high nervous energy as they played chords and riffs. "Oh, look at his foot," she exclaimed to me.

Mick couldn't have heard her over the noise, but immediately his foot stopped and he jerked up his head to look at the drummer, who stopped playing. The others all reacted by stopping or losing the pace of what they were doing as the vibe shot around the hall.

I took Sonia out, explaining, "Look, these guys are just about telepathic. You'll disrupt them if you stay in there. What you did was draw attention to his foot, particularised it and broke the flow. There's an incredibly strong atmosphere in that room, but it's also very sensitive.

" To compensate her, I took her on a guided tour of the buildings and the grounds, recounting the saga of the construction.

As we neared the house again, a bus about forty feet long was pulling up alongside the Mill, It was covered with psychedelic designs and provocative slogans like 'Legalize Dope' and 'Fuck the Pigs'. Inside were two families calling themselves 'The Agents of Chaos', and a pack of alsatians, lurchers, and whippets.

Sonia went over to the house while I watched with mounting irritation. The inmates stepped down and stretched their legs, a wild, unkempt-looking crew who immediately began complaining about police harassment on their way here. I could sense that they were trying to move in, make themselves at home. I wanted them to feel as unwelcome as possible, so I said, "Look, you're not staying here, this is not the place for you. And stay out of the way, keep to this area. Don't go near the band, don't let them even see you,"

I feared that this was a long-planned invasion by Jane, her move to get these people to squat on my land and take over.

On another level, I knew they were just desperate people looking for a place to stay and thinking 'This is good'. But I'm Jekyll and Hyde, part of me gets the horrors about people's intentions.

I stormed into the kitchen and took Jane aside, "They are not staying here and that's that. I'm not having the band disrupted by this lot, these people are nothing but trouble, they'll have to leave."

Mairi flew to Jane's defence: "For heaven's sake, Will, they've just driven miles to get here."

"I wouldn't have allowed Jane to invite them up here in the first place ." And rounding on Jane, I said, "So you've just wasted these people's time and money by telling them to come without asking me. What you've done is totally disgusting,"

Jane and Mairi began shouting and protesting, and a hellish argument erupted, Jane had an absolute abhorrence of authority and the state. She tried to live in a system of reality she had constructed around astrology and Tarot cards; a mystical cave I had become increasingly intolerant of.

"They can't leave until the twelfth because the aspects aren't right."

"You do things despite the stars, not because of them, Jane."

"You're behaving like a fascist'."

I blew up at that jibe.

"You and your friends out there have a fascist superiority belief that everyone else is like a turnip, an idiot," I ranted to her, "You have a tribal loyalty like a pack of dogs, sharing each other's craziness, putting on festivals and having confrontations with the police, creating problems for yourselves." I gestured towards the Agents outside. "They drive around with 'Fuck the Pigs' plastered on their bus and then they're surprised they get hassled. That's not subtle. Look, I dress up, I cut my hair, 1 live in the world as it is. I want to romp through it, not create opposition,"

"It sounds to me like you've sold out to the state," Jane commented contemptuously.

"No, Jane, you've got it wrong. Here, we've pushed back the state a little, widened the parameters. But the Agents of Chaos are like secret weapons of the state to destroy places like this. Their minds are hardly their own. They've been broken down into a jumble of hatreds and reactions and they go about fucking up other people's scenes."

"Since you moved up here, Will, you've become a tyrant." Mairi threw the remark at me like a dagger.

"I have to become like a tyrant to make sure things don't go wrong. By being open, I attract these leeches and the disorder they bring with them. They're like Pavlov's dogs, they don't respect me unless I show some teeth. It's impossible to keep order unless people respect you," By now I was wound up, and my disillusionment began to flood out.

"I wanted to build a system where people could borrow a book or a tool. But again and again they misuse this privilege, borrowing things and not returning them, or losing tools, I've had to develop a horrible alter ego through having to put up with the pressures of creating this place. My friends can see through it, but others can't."

I paused and glared at them, not really noticing or caring whether they were following me. "This place was to be a home for projects where people could be affected by what's happening, the more floating in and out the better. But I have to say 'This is only temporary, you stay here until it's the right time to move', because products of the state like the Agents are always wanting to settle here, put down roots and make it their home. Then I have to sort out the problems they bring, winkle them out."

But they were both lost to my reasoning. All the frustrations and anger of the last months boiled up in me and I knew for the first time that I was capable of murder, that I could batter Mairi to death in a rage. Holding my tongue, I left the kitchen and went outside.

I walked across the yard, towards the Mill, It was dark and the Agents had settled down for the night in their bus, curtains drawn, chinks of light showing from within. But the dogs were outside; they were guarding the camp. When they saw me, they formed into a pack that advanced slowly with ears flattened, growling lower and lower, like a rusty door hinge slowing down. It was a menacing moment; when that growling stops, they are ready to spring. Only my knowledge of dogs saved me from being savaged; like an even bigger dog, I growled my anger back at them in the same way: "G-ehhrr-r!"

And they backed away.

******

The Minds came here initially for two weeks. They were really knocked over by the experience of being out in the country; they had been on the road for a long while, ceaselessly voyaging from city to city, living in hotel rooms. Here it was like another world, a romantic vision that began to infect their playing. 1 maintained that illusion for as long as I could, and they liked it so much they stayed for an extra three weeks.

They lived together and had evolved a sort of group mind, more than the sum of each player. They composed together, whereas in the past people like Bach worked on their own, composing in solitude. An unconscious telepathic awareness was developing; one would hear something in his head and try to get the others to play it in a particular way.

But they had reached an impasse, musically. They had a communication problem which I could see as soon as they started to practise. Even if they had been technically articulate musicians, which they're not, it wouldn't be good enough to say 'Play a C sharp', because electronic music is on a different level. Maybe by hit or miss the others would get the message, but it wasn't really clear. One of them would say, 'I want to make it a bit more - you know what I mean?'

I said, "You've hit a ceiling; you've got to start trying to think of what you want as a picture, visualize what is in your mind: a cloud? a story? Then you have an analogy, a better way of explaining what you want.

" We would talk about clouds and waves and what a colour sounded like. Art and music are both part of the same expression. I gave them books on ancient Egypt, or the Picts, or science-fiction, to read and think about. I would dance while they were playing. Coming in pale and worn out at four in the morning, sometimes I would roll a joint or just stoke the fire and sit, listening. In a way, I became part of the band.

They began to develop their own private language, and when I saw Jim nine months later in London, he said, "See what we did at the Mill; now when we're in a recording studio they think we're weird because I'll say, like, 'Give it a long green one' and we all know what it means; we get a whole fantasy going where we can see a picture, maybe a landscape with a track leading away. Our music broadened right out."

They could probably have worked for years in studios and never really have reached that point; it was the best possible in terms of energy and commitment. But one can't maintain that intensity indefinitely; eventually it would have gone off the boil.

******
CHAPTER TEN

After Single Minds went away, Frankie decided to go to Australia, since 1 still could not give her a definite promise about running a music studio. And I didn't want to run the business myself. My idea was to get another couple to handle the organizing; but Bruce told me, "It only works when you're here; your personality is what makes it right."

Mairi wanted me to sell the studio as a going concern. She didn't block what I was doing, but she kept urging me, "You've got to sell now. I want my money so I can clear out."

I got another band from Phonagram called 'End Games' to hire the hall. The name seemed all too apt a comment on the way Mairi and I were headed. When I found a third group, 'Fantastica', Mairi became even more bitter, and I could see the last vestiges of our relationship tottering on the brink. She owned the Mill, but she was morally trapped by my efforts and indecision. I was about to enter into long-term business arrangements with agents in Edinburgh, and I had to think hard about what I was going to do.

The experience with Single Minds was pure epic, the best possible. We might never reach that same pitch of creative tension again. The next two bands had been an anti-climax, and it seemed pointless to go on.

One day I drove over to Dundee and up Balgay Hill in Dudhope Park. I found an old observatory there which I had never seen before, so I went in and looked through the telescope at the Mill across the Tay Estuary.

I thought about Mairi. I wanted to get back together with her, and I couldn't really ask her to live with the pressures of running a music studio if she didn't like the way of life. Saving my marriage was more important than the business.

The Mill looked far away, like a completed picture, 'No, that's it,' I decided, 'no more bands.'

When I came out, 1 noticed for the first time the name over the door; it was 'Mill's Observatory'.

******

I was down in London a few days later, having breakfast in a hotel frequented by some of the pop bands. It also caters for parties of American tourists, and the dining room was partly occupied by about twenty or so straight middle-class couples, tucking into their first English breakfast.

In came a group called 'The Exploited', the most disgusting, nauseating punk band I've ever seen. One of them is huge, about twenty stone, with a shaved head and a bristling mohican haircut. They and their clothes were positively fungoid; God knows how long since they had washed. The tourists tried hard to ignore the decadent spectacle sprawled around them.

When I got back, Ded Records phoned to say 'The Exploited' wanted to hire the studio, I knew then I had made the right decision.

******

Charley was a vacant-faced local youth who had hung about the Mill for years, battening onto us like a leech. He was always around somewhere; in the kitchen, in the yard, in the sitting-room if there was a gathering of any kind. In the company of other people, he said nothing, gave nothing, just sat there looking miserably from face to face.

He was standing beside the kitchen table watching me, as I put down the phone after saying 'No' to The Exploited.

"Look, you bastard," I burst out in irritation, "you just stand there like a drain. If you don't contribute, you're out on your ear," He looked as if he were about to cry, and sloped off in the direction of the sitting room, where Mairi was entertaining some friends.

Several days later, I came back from a trip and Mairi came up to me as I entered the kitchen, full of concern.

"Charley's in the bedroom. He thinks he's the Yorkshire Ripper.He arrived last night and he's been up there ever since. He wants you to hypnotise him."

"Well, I'm not going to see him," I fumed, "All he wants is attention so he'll feel important."

"You can at least talk to him, get him out of my bedroom," she insisted.

"He's a weirdo and should be locked up."

"Talk to him!" She was becoming more assertive and autocratic with me every day.

"All right," I relented. I called up the stairs, "Come on down, Charley'"

His eyes were red and swollen as he entered the room apprehensively, like a beaten dog. After a smoke, he confessed to having periods of amnesia which coincided with lurid dreams about two of the Ripper's recent murders, in which a hammer had been the murder weapon. He had become convinced that the police were hunting for him and had seen his car, a Morris Minor, so he had driven it down to the edge of the River Tay and pushed it into a deep pool. Now, he was about to go on the run.

I cut him off irascibly. "Listen, Charley, I don't want to bloody know. I think this is really boring. There's nothing exceptional about your dreams. Thousands of people think the same thing."

Charley was a very weak person, incapable of standing up to a man of his own size, but quite capable of being a tyrannical bully to a woman weaker than he was. He had lived with several girls and had been rejected by them. One of them had even punched him, whereupon he had collapsed and wept like a child. His frustrated desire to hurt these women had simply emerged in his dreams and gave him a sense of identification with the Ripper who assaulted prostitutes, women he despised.

I started thinking about the Ripper, myself. In a dream, I saw him standing by a dockside, draped in chains, his head crimson with blood, waiting for a galleon prison ship to take him on board. All the little windows at the stern of the galleon were TV screens.

The meaning of that dream became clear to me when the Ripper was caught and talked about his reasons for the killings. He claimed that he received messages from God and from various people.

I felt that he actually did get messages, that he was psychically connected with the thousands of men who had followed his crimes in the media, horrified but at the same time fascinated by it all, because of their violent hatred of women. The Ripper was like the head of a boil, a bloody Christ who took other people's sins on himself and made them manifest by doing what many other men secretly wanted to do to women.

Charley believed that he was psychic, and in a way it was true. He was so scattered that he was hardly in the here and now; he was like a radio tuned into the Ripper during his amnesia, picking up his murderous thoughts.

******

I had tried to claim from our insurance company for the damage done by the burst pipes, but they rejected the claim, saying that the cause had been my own negligence.

I had a long talk with Roland, my lawyer in Edinburgh, and we decided to sue the company for loss of income; the idea was that because they had not paid up promptly, I had been unable to hire the Mill to various musicians and bands until the damage was repaired. And when I had hired it out, I had been getting at least

five hundred pounds a week.

Lawyers are sharks; they love a kill, and it makes them blood-thirsty. Roland drew up a nasty letter demanding ten thousand pounds, and outlining our plans for litigation, and to my amazement - I didn't really have a leg to stand on since it had been my fault that the water was left on - they wrote back offering a couple of thousand. This was a sign of weakness, Roland decided, and asked the manager of the department we were dealing with for a meeting.

"Just act insulted by their derisive offer," he briefed me as we went to the Company's office.

"My client is outraged by the way you've treated him," he began. I clenched my fists and narrowed my eyes.

"We've been more than generous," protested the Manager, who was a prissy, white-haired man with an effete way of smiling and fluttering his eyelashes, "If you're going to continue pressing your unreasonable claims, I'm going to call in the General Manager.

He reached for the phone and began pushing buttons on it.

My lawyer looked at me with a smirk, "Will, did you hear about the poof who propositioned a friend of mine in a gay bar?" he said, in a loud, public voice.

The Manager went beetroot and put down the phone abruptly.

"I'll make it three thousand. But that's all you're getting,"

Outside, Roland laughed, "It was just a hunch, but it worked like a charm.

I put a cheque for half the money in an envelope addressed to Mairi and enclosed a letter:

Dear M:

I ask you to give me something

Not much

one thing

only one

thing

A chance to complete this cycle

with style

with love

not of the physical kind

but the love that exists between two friends

who've got through that

into another space

where friendship counts

a certain unity

a shared

dream

You can be queen at the party

and I the erstwhile king

I'm afraid to write this - like sound like a beggar but you see it seems to be very important to me how one does a thing - you are my lady and I your man of this cycle this epoch where we have reigned in our lives

The idea of kingship comes in this way.

a young man considers this beautiful young lady to be

a princess and all the other small beautiful words

jewel, gleams a jewel of women lets say he

the humble supplicant finds his life transformed into

the celestial he is transformed into the young beautiful prince from this frog.

But now he is a

prince he has to do all these new terrible things -

slay dragons everywhere, build castles, conjure with

madmen, consult seers on matters of statecraft -

in other words the supplicant who is really a humble bum has to become a

king; now inside this king is

a young humble bum

******

It made no difference; she was determined to sell the place and go away on her own.

The wind had gone out of my sails. I no longer cared about the Mill, and with a heavy heart I turned my mind to advertising it in the real estate sections of the newspapers, I wrote descriptions of the buildings, made drawings of them, had photographs taken, prepared a brochure as a handout, and waited for interested enquiries to roll in.

At first it was degrading trying to interest buyers in the solid expression of fantasies that had dominated me for years; I alone knew how much of my life had been hammered and trowelled into the walls they looked at so casually, I wanted to take them by the lapel and say, "Look, this is my blood."

Then I grew to appreciate the extent to which the property had become my opium: I was caught up by material possessions, the trap I had always persuaded myself I would never fall into, 'Let it go,' I thought,'you only get to keep what you-would not lose in a shipwreck;, if you try to keep it you will lose more besides,'

I had the experience, the knowledge of building, of wheeling and dealing, the person I now was; this was all that really mattered.

The old urge to travel now reappeared; I wanted to leave Scotland, walk away from, the debris of the past, travelling light.

"I'm going to Australia," I said to Mairi as a by-the-Way, the next time I saw her. "You can sell the place and keep what you get. That's it; I'm clearing out,"

Her; freedom had been restricted by my efforts to raise money through hiring the Mill as a studio; now it was all up to her, an offer she couldn't refuse because it was in fact a fait accompli.

Two days later, she came to find me, "Halloween is at the end of this month. What about having a farewell party for everyone - Could you stay for that?' We can have a fancy dress party, get in several bands, make lots of food."

That was what she really liked doing, organizing parties, having lots of people around. And it appealed to my theatrical sense, also my nostalgia for the old days that were gone. "Right, And I'll leave the next day."

In the solitude of my bachelor flat at the end of the farmhouse, I began painting a little picture of a dog baying at a star. It was like an icon, dark warm colours and stylized shapes, almost Egyptian.

Each night, I felt compelled to add to it, or change it, until gradually I had painted over the dog's body and only his head remained. The overall effect was a little sinister.

Late one night while I was carefully brushing on some more opaque water colour straight from the tube with a tiny camel-hair brush, the front door opened, and Mairi entered in her nightgown, distraught with wide frightened eyes.

"Will, something dreadful has happened," she exclaimed, with a helpless sag of her mouth.

"What is it?" I replied.

"It's Jamie, he's been horribly battered. Somebody attacked him

in the sitting-room and his head's all bloody. I've just been washing him at the sink."

"I'll have a look," I said, rising from my chair and following her back over to her part of the house.

Jamie was in a sorry state; his head was swollen and bound with cotton, and I could see red bruises beginning to appear on the parts of his face that were not covered. He was very drunk and could barely speak, We half-carried him back up to the sitting-room and laid him on the sofa, where he lay groaning.

The next day, Mairi phoned a homeopathic quack - she had little faith in conventional medicine - who came over and sprinkled white powder on Jamie's cuts and contusions and gave him white pills to suck.

He had been drinking heavily in a pub in Newburgh and attempted to cycle home, but fell off his bike onto the grass, too drunk to go any further. He had managed to crawl as far as the Mill, although he now stayed several miles up the road, letting himself in and crashing out on the sofa, while Mairi had been sleeping upstairs.

Someone had followed after him, someone bent on revenge for a drunken insult or with an old grudge to pay off, and stalked him into the house and up to the sofa, beating him about the head with an iron bar as he lay there in a stupor.

It was an old tinker's trick, and I had a couple of ideas about who was responsible, but I felt cold and detached, as if this were merely the enactment of the words of a sentence passed long ago.

******
CHAPTER ELEVEN

On the night of the party, vehicles of every sort choked the yard and the lane, and spilled out on to the road. Young men carried amplifiers, speakers, and microphones into the hall, where they unpacked electric guitars and keyboards.

Impudent, over-excited children, dressed as clowns, gipsies and supermen, swirled about the entrance, accosting each new arrival: "What are you, what are you?"

Dressed as a Scottish Viking, and resplendent in horned helmet and kilt, with a long wolf's fur cape and a chain mail shirt for period effect, I welcomed guests as they came into the yard.

One floor of the Mill was given over to food and drink; crumbling hand-sliced loaves of home-made bread lined one table, behind large trays of yellow and red quiche and pizza. Two metal kegs of ale lay on their sides on another table, red plastic tubs below the taps already swimming with brown spillage, in which a half-eaten apple lay drowned. Dark bottles of various ancestry held home-made wine from a dozen kitchens, already being decanted into a superabundance of white plastic cups.

A knight-templar in evening dress and long flowing white silk robe, bearing a red Maltese Gross on one shoulder, made urbane conversation with a Nazi officer whose peaked hat was casually tilted back on his head. In a corner, George, wearing a gipsy headscarf and a dark Arab tunic, was bent over, beating time and playing his fiddle with energetic concentration, while his tartan-clad sidekick. Poacher, stamped and hooched through his bushy beard, the rakish pheasant tail feather in his bonnet jerking and wagging.

Even some of my enemies were there, old quarrels now behind us. Don came as a wizard, his gown sparkling with stars and celestial shapes. Mick grinned from beneath the broad-brimmed hat of a cavalier, his long flowing locks dangling over a red tunic with a blue Scottish Saltire on the chest. Charley, his personality deceptively inflated by a t-shirt bearing a picture of Bob Dylan, tried to help Richard chat up a couple of blond German girls.

Mairi was belle of the ball, elegantly clad in a flowing eighteenth century gown complete with high wig and black facial beauty patches. I caught sight of her leading little Sheena across the yard, bearing a chamber pot aloft in one hand.

Two policemen arrived, ineffectually trying to pass on a complaint from the neighbours about the bagpipe noise, and were baffled 'by the exotic array of the costumed guests. When I heard of their intent, I exclaimed triumphantly, "Pipe music is perfectly legal; only electronic music can be too loud!"

The band started to play and dancing began in earnest; a white-robed bearded monk with a nine week old baby strapped to his chest, jigged and pranced. Flora MacDonald, in tartan, doublet and lace, danced with Spiderman. Jake bopped, totally absorbed in the complex rock and roll steps he executed with his wife, rolling and catching her as he turned, A coal miner with blackened face and red knotted neck scarf, holding a white plastic cup, watched sardonically.

People leaned over the balustraded balcony to watch, or slumped back on sofas and mattresses to lose themselves in the ritual of joint-building and smoking. Several large dance studio mirrors leaning against the walls reflected the leaping revellers. I saw myself cavorting, and grinned hugely; I was dancing with everybody.

During an interval, a magician appeared and conjured coloured scarves from his sleeve, his ear, and from the ears of the squealing children who crowded up to him.

A joint floated towards me, connected to a hand, a white sleeve, and a pair of red, heart-shaped spectacles propped on Vile's nose. A bearded hermit, dressed as Dr Who, with a long, knitted scarf, described to me his latest religious experience which had resulted in him being heavily sedated and locked up in a mental hospital.

Trying to descend the stairs against a stream of people coming up, I edged past a young man in a denim jacket slumped over the steps, either being sick or attempting to roll a joint.

Outside, the nearly full moon had risen above the trees to the south. Guitars were being played by youths leaning against a car. Groups of tireless children ran between the Mill and the farmhouse, where a secondary growth of the main party had developed. In the kitchen, women were discussing childbirth, hippies in Afghan hats were swilling wine, and Jamie lay incoherently drunk on the dog's blanket.

Drowsiness finally began to embrace the children, who were borne away to cars or to beds in various rooms. Cars extricated themselves from the huddled throng in the yard, A sleeping body lay in the grass where a heroic but doomed struggle with alcohol had been fought; his victorious bottle still clutched in his hand. I lifted it gently and took a swig.

When the last band had packed its instruments into its van, and only a few straggling survivors remained, the brightly-lit windows of the Mill were emptier than ever I had seen them, emptier than when Mairi and I had first looked through them and peopled the rooms with our imaginations; now only the spent after-glow of our life together shone out into the night. Our dancing days were over.

Mechanically, I entered the empty hall and surveyed the wreckage of cups, balloons, and cigarette butts. Log embers still burned in the iron stove, as when I had sat beside it while listening to Single Minds. There was a large floor brush under the stairs, and I began pushing it across the floor, sweeping the rubbish into a heap.

If Mr. Baston could see me now: a scaffie once again. A bit of a poem he had showed us floated into my mind;

When I reach the bottom

of bottomlessness, there will be

no broken wings beside me

no chariot of the sun

and no crystal battlements

will infinitely shine above me

I will be left with only

the loneliness of falling.

******

When Sheena awoke the next morning, I sat on her bed and explained that I had to go away for a long time. I took a rounded stone from my pocket and handed it to her.

"This is a magic stone, Sheena. If you miss me, all you have to do is hold it and think of me and I'll be there. But don't do it too often or I'll get cross."

"But where are you going, Daddy?"

"I'm going to look for a magic mountain, which has a green giant living in it, and he wears a funny hat," This explanation seemed to make perfect sense to her, and she exclaimed, "I've seen the mountain, I know where you're going!"

"Draw me a picture of it, then." And she took the paper and crayons I offered her and began to draw.

Most of my things had been given away, lent to friends, or put in storage. There-was nothing holding me now from the final step.

I got in the Renault, and Mairi came over to stand by the window,

I looked up at her, raising my eyebrows.

"You know I love you," I said.

"I love you, too," she sighed from depths of weariness and resignation.

I looked at her closely, questioningly - Was this a change of heart?

No; her expression still held me at a distance.

"Well, I'm off, then," and I switched on the engine.

************

Acknowledgement

Poem by Norman MacCaig

from 'The Collected Poems of Norman MacCaig',

Polygon Press
