69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess (9 page)

Alan grew bored of ventriloquism and tossed the dummy to the ground. He pulled an apple from his rucksack and munched thoughtfully upon it as a young couple joined us on the peak. Once the 20-somethings decided they wanted to return to their car, Alan picked up the dummy and Dudley observed that Boswell and Johnson should be held personally responsible for the flood of romantics into the Highlands. Scott, Keats, Mendelssohn, Turner, Wordsworth, each was worse than those who’d proceeded them. Lowest of the lot, according to Dudley, was Lord Byron, who’d attended Aberdeen Grammar School. Dudley claimed William McGonagall’s account of his trip to Balmoral was superior to all the crap written by professional romantics. There was only one other writer whose views on the Highlands Dudley valued and that was Bee Jay, a man who held the honour of being the missing link between McGonagall and the ‘immortal’ Bruce Chatwin. I have Alan’s copies of Bee Jay’s books before me as I write, signed first editions of
And It Came to Pass
,
The End of the Rainbow
,
Sunset on the Loch
,
Highland Pearls
,
Ardvreck’s Shame
and
Scotland’s Shangri-la.

Before moving on, I should perhaps note that my first edition of
Scotland’s Shangri-la
is not only signed, it still boasts a postal wrapper addressed in the author’s hand to ‘Mr H. Thorns, 5 The Grove, BISHOPTON, Renfrewshire’. The final two words are both underlined with ‘Renfrewshire’ ranged considerably below and to the right of ‘BISHOPTON’. The wrapper is printed with the following information: ‘
Scotland’s Shangri-la.
If undelivered return to S. Barker Johnson, Strath, Gairlock, Ross-shire.’ Affixed to the letter are three stamps, two at three pence and one at seven and a half pence. All three stamps are franked and feature the head of Elizabeth II and the Scottish Lion Rampant. Inside are two letters from the author to Mr Thorns dated 29/11/67 and 24/10/72 respectively. Both letters are on headed stationery, the earlier bearing a stag’s head, the latter the black outline of a stag on a mountainside. Both are hand-written in black ink and feature several eccentric underlinings. The letter from 1972 even boasts one particularly emphatic underlining in red felt pen.

I don’t remember everything Dudley told me about Bee Jay on that first climb up Mither Tap, but I do recall that he disapproved of the author’s comments about women drivers and the hand motions allegedly made by Italians when they are excited. Dudley’s favourite Bee Jay book was undoubtedly
The End of the Rainbow.
In this work the author relates in unbelievable detail certain conversations he had while courting his wife Fiona. Dudley was particularly fond of the banter between Bee Jay and his future wife during their first encounter on the Isle Of Mull. Bee Jay explained that he was the author of a published book – being careful not to describe it too accurately as self-published – and that he was thinking of writing another tome. Fiona replies: ‘Oh how interesting.’

Dudley found Bee Jay’s treatment of time in
The End of the Rainbow
very curious, particularly in view of the fact that inscribed in black ink beneath the author’s signature on the flyleaf of Alan’s copy were the words: ‘This is a true story. S. B. J.’ According to the narrative in
The End of the Rainbow
, Stanley Barker Johnson or Bee Jay, began courting his wife Fiona after he’d self-published
And It Came to Pass
in 1962.
The End of the Rainbow
was self-published in 1964 and yet the author confidently concludes it with the observation: ‘After a prolonged honeymoon in Southern Ireland (including a visit to Blarney Castle, five miles out of Cork, to kiss the magical Stone of Eloquence!) we returned to the Dream House at Gairlock. As I have said elsewhere, we have suffered no disillusionment; age has not withered, nor have the years condemned our great love.’ Dudley therefore insisted that regardless of whether Bee Jay was conscious of the fact or not, he was a proletarian post-modernist since his unreliable first-person narration was conclusive proof of the fact that he had no desire to constitute himself as a centred bourgeois subject. Several days later Alan repeated this observation virtually word for word while describing
Four Acres and a Donkey: The Memoirs of a Lavatory Attendant
by S. A. B. Rogers.

Having by this time read a good number of Alan’s books, and thereby taken on much of his mind-set or subjectivity, I felt more than ready to counter Dudley’s arguments. I suggested that rather than being a proletarian post-modernist, Bee Jay was actually a Bergsonian. Instead of treating time as homogenous, Bee Jay felt the intensity of his relationship with Fiona more than justified the claim that they’d been together for years, despite the fact that the period in question is unlikely to have exceeded twelve calendar months. Dudley wasted no time in denouncing the notion of durée as utterly irrelevant, insisting instead that Bee Jay was resorting to clichéd narrative conventions. Certainly, the sheer unbelievability of Bee Jay’s prose made it more than likely that he was either completely deranged or else having fun at the expense of credulous readers.

Reading back over what I’ve written, it strikes me as more than probable that incredulous readers have long had a great deal of fun at Bee Jay’s expense. Clearly much of the ‘adulation’ Christopher Isherwood received belonged to the hoary tradition of ‘mock praise’, and Bee Jay might easily be another instance of the same phenomenon. It is difficult to believe that Alan was being sincere when – after throwing Dudley limply to the ground – he insisted that
And It Came to Pass
was a classic, since in the introduction to this book Bee Jay makes it plain that he enjoyed a glass of Glenlivet. Although Alan was partial to a dram of Macallan, he certainly didn’t like Glenlivet and was quite incapable of treating seriously any author who rated it as a whisky.

As far as I recall, the reason Alan carried Dudley up Bennachie was to test the credibility of K. L. Callan’s narrative in
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess.
The author of this scurrilous text claimed that Princess Diana’s death in Paris was faked and that she’d actually been strangled to death Thugee-style at Balmoral by an unknown assailant. The security services were extremely embarrassed about being caught short in this fashion and had handed the body over to K. L. Callan thinking he’d come up with an inventive means of disposing of it. Callan decided to take Diana around the Gordon District Stone Circle Trail as a means of luring tourists to the prehistoric delights of ancient Aberdeenshire. Of course, being a bit of a fanatic, he started off doing the Stone Circle Trail but ended by adding 58 places of interest to his original eleven-stop itinerary, hence the rather unfortunate title of his tome –
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess.
Callan, of course, insisted he wasn’t a necrophile but many of those who’d never read his scholarly text and knew it only by reputation unnaturally assumed that he was the last man to give the people’s princess a proper seeing to. Alan wanted to test the feasibility of Callan’s claims and so he’d weighted Dudley down with bricks and was attempting to repeat the heroic journey detailed in
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess.

After consulting Callan’s peculiarly constructed narration and checking it against
The Stone Circle: Gordon’s Early History
, I now realise that Alan reshuffled the order in which Callan made his pilgrimage to various ancient monuments and that even the author of
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess
tended to wander off the trail that had been laid out for tourists. As far as my own narrative goes, what I’ve failed to mention is that between leaving Archaeolink and arriving at the Maiden Stone, we’d taken in the small symbol stones to be found in the grounds of Logie House. The day then proceeded pretty much as I’ve described it and this was in fact the first day Alan and I spent on the Stone Circle Trail, but the monuments we saw Callan visited on his second day of doing Gordon’s ancient sites. For reasons best known to himself, Alan had decided to reverse the order of Callan’s first two days with the corpse. Likewise, both Alan and Callan deviated from the instructions in the Stone Circle Trail booklet in deciding to take the steep rather than the gentle climb up Bennachie to Mither Tap.

Stone Circle Trail tourists are lured up Mither Tap to look at the Iron-Age hillfort just below the peak. Alan and I didn’t bother with that. Alan laid me out on a flat rock at the peak and I had to pretend I was dead. He arranged my skirt around my waist and my knickers around my ankles. It was quite an effort to resist the urge to suck when Alan pushed his erect manhood into my open mouth. This was an experiment from which Alan hoped to discover what it was like to 69 a stiff, so I didn’t chew despite an almost overwhelming temptation to do so. However, as Alan flicked his tongue over my clit I couldn’t help writhing around a bit. Eventually I had an orgasm and pretty soon afterwards Alan shot a wad of his spunk into my mouth. We adjusted our clothing and Alan weighed Dudley down with the bricks that had come loose during his ventriloquist act. Once the dummy was strapped over the top of the rucksack on Alan’s back, we made our way back to Esson’s Car Park. I asked Alan what it was like getting a blow job from a corpse and he dismissed the query by saying it’s a mighty peculiar sensation.

Having got back to the car and set off for new adventures, I began to think the Stone Circle Trail was a bit of a drag. We headed through Insch to the Dunnideer hillfort. Compared to Bennachie, Dunnideer is a tiny little hill. From the car park it only took us five minutes to get to the top, even with Dudley strapped to Alan’s back. There were the ruins of a medieval castle as well as an Iron-Age fort at the summit. The remaining arch of the castle had looked better from the road as we’d approached it and the hillfort retained fewer of its stones than the one we’d just left at Mither Tap. After taking a few photographs, we made our way to the Picardy Stone a couple of miles to the north of Insch. Fortunately this Pictish stone wasn’t a disappointment since it contained three symbols that were well delineated and easy to make out. Stupidly I didn’t make any notes and I’m unable to remember what we saw carved into the stone.

I fell asleep in the car on the way back to Aberdeen. When Alan woke me I was still knackered. I’d not slept much the night before, so after a light meal at Owlies I went home alone. I hit the sack and although there was a lot of light streaming in through the curtains, it was only a matter of seconds before I was dreaming. Weary and sick, I arrived at some huts an hour’s walk from Mither Tap. I realised these were the reconstructions of Iron-Age dwellings built as part of the Archaeolink complex, although the visitor centre they’d stood next to had disappeared. Dudley emerged from one of the huts carrying his genitals in his left hand. I lay on my back and Dudley lay on top of me. He put his prick in my hand. It was large and stiff. Letting the head pass through my fingers, I drew back the soft covering skin and I felt it bound in my hand.

Dudley shifted his weight. I felt his dick rub the moist lips of my cunt. It passed up me extending each humid fold and sensitive crease of my vagina. Then Dudley rammed home his prick with desperate energy and with a low moaning cry shot forth a torrent of hot spunk. I felt my cunt filled to overflowing. His molten genetics bubbling around my clit. Then I looked up and instead of Dudley I saw Alan. I closed my eyes and felt an orgasm wend its way through my body. When I opened my eyes I saw Dudley dressing in the thickening twilight. Once I’d adjusted my clothing we made our way into a hut where we came to a mutually beneficial agreement. I’d introduce Dudley to several of my sex-starved single friends if he’d help me kill Alan.

SIX

I WOKE
early and made my way up Union Street to Union Grove. The rubbish was being collected that morning and so the streets were lined with bin bags. As is their wont, the local sea gulls had broken into the sacks awaiting collection in the hope of finding tasty morsels. As a result, the streets were strewn with litter. Alan’s car was parked outside his tenement and Dudley was sitting up on the back seat. I hoped he hadn’t been left out overnight without so much as a blanket thrown over him. Books were spilling from a rubbish bag close to Alan’s car. I clocked various titles by Christopher Burns –
About the Body
,
The Flint Bed
,
The Condition of Ice.
I shoved the books back into the bag and placed the sack at the bottom of the stairwell that led up to Alan’s flat.

I got Alan out of bed and chided him for throwing out books as if they were just rubbish. He insisted Christopher Burns was rubbish, as were all the other literary – and Alan stressed literary – failures he’d treated as refuse. After a few minutes of verbal ping-pong Alan dressed. As we left the flat he picked up the bag of books I’d dragged into the stairwell. I made Alan drop them and as he did so the Christopher Burns paperbacks fell to the floor. I retrieved the spillage and said I’d collect the rest of my swag later. Alan told me that the Old Aberdeen Bookshop wouldn’t buy works of this type. I said they’d be welcomed by Oxfam or Cancer Care. Alan sneered that you couldn’t even give away these forgotten men – and he said men, not men and women – of literature. He pointed at the strapline on the cover of
The Flint Bed
: ‘Shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 1989’. Burns was one of the reforgotten. He got close but never broke through, it was his misfortune to be more talented than the likes of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

We got into the car and headed for Inverurie. I flicked through
About the Body
, came across a story that featured an Elvis Presley imitator. Alan dismissed Burns’ prose as mannered. As too self-conscious to appeal to anyone who understood trash. Unfortunately he was right. We discussed the way in which the labour of unsuccessful writers, artists and musicians valorises the best-selling efforts of those who succeed. Burns had negotiated his way through to publication and respectful literary reviews. But having opted for the literary genre, there was no way his books could really rock. He wasn’t going to pick up a hard-core following or sell over the long term like Guy Debord and William Burroughs. He had no devoted readership and little chance of remaining in print for long, let alone being republished in 30 or 40 years’ time. In short a typical mid-list author.