For Faughie's Sake (12 page)

Poor Betty. Poor, poor Betty. She was getting pelters; dog’s abuse as she was being mercilessly papped by the local newspaper. Bobby shouted into her face, spittle flying.

‘And does it say in the contract,’ yelled Bobby, ‘the contract that
you
signed,’ he jabbed an accusing finger at Betty, ‘that they can put up a fence?’

‘No!’ was the horrified response of most people, including me. I already knew about the fence but I was caught up in the atmosphere. Being part of a mob was an exciting new experience for me.

‘Aye,’ Bobby confirmed with a grim nod, ‘they put it up this afternoon; a big barbed-wire fence all the way round the machair. They’ve locked us out of our own property.’

‘Nothing a good pair of wire cutters couldn’t solve!’ Walter shouted from somewhere behind Jenny.

Mob outrage, in broad agreement with the fence-cutting option.

‘We are getting right royally shafted and you just stand there, Betty Robertson, with your head up your arse!’

Cue more booing. Betty Robertson didn’t have her head up her arse but that might have been safer. People were sneering at her, pointing and yelling. The hysteria grew, reaching a crescendo, when someone hurled a shoe. A welly, in fact. Luckily, Betty was quick enough to duck and it bounced harmlessly across the table.

‘Hey!’ yelled Jenny, but no one was listening. ‘Hey, hey! Don’t blame her. Betty signed the agreement on your behalf. With your approval. We voted on it, remember? You were all quick enough to take the money, weren’t you?’

And then, when no one answered, she bawled, her face turning purple, ‘Weren’t you!’

The noisy barracking faded to muted resentful muttering. We had voted in favour, accepted the cash, that was the inconvenient truth, and no one could argue.

‘But my milkers,’ pleaded Bobby, close to tears, ‘they need fresh grazing, what am I going to do with them?’

Bobby went on to describe the horrible chain of events that would surely happen if the cows couldn’t graze. No grazing, no milk, no income, no feed. His herd would slowly starve. The hall fell silent as Bobby painted a grizzly picture of his famished cattle with their ribs showing, their bellies hollow, their big lips mooing their distress before they keeled over and died with their legs in the air. He was quite the storyteller and he grossly embellished the yarn with a vivid description of carrion crows pecking at the eyeballs and innards on the bloated corpses, tugging on a particularly stringy sinew.

‘Come on now, Bobby, it’s not that bad,’ said Jenny, ‘we’ll get it back in ten days’ time. We’re obliged to let them film their scenes, which we agreed was to take not more than ten days. That’s in the contract.’

‘Aye,’ said a familiar voice near the front, ‘I know for a fact, because I have a wee friend in the production office, and she told me they’re only scheduled to be on the machair four days. Barring bad weather, that is.’

The voice was Jackie’s, no mistaking it. The mention of the
wee friend
, no doubt some silly woman whose head was turned by a handsome Highlander swinging his kilt, was no surprise either.

‘See, Bobby?’ said Jenny. ‘You’re panicking for nothing. It’s only going to be four days.’

With the news that Bobby’s scenario of famine and pestilence wasn’t imminent, the tension in the hall eased. I felt and heard
sniggering, shuffling of feet and a collective letting go of breath. I wouldn’t lose my B&B income after all. A flat somewhere in Glasgow still had my name on it. I would be kissing the Highlands goodbye at last. Thank you Jesus.

‘Could I just ask,’ said another familiar voice, this time a woman’s, ‘if the contractual ten days includes time taken to rectify damages or alterations?’

Jenny looked to Betty.

‘Betty?’

Still shocked from the welly-hurling incident, Betty stood open mouthed and glaikit.

‘We’re not sure,’ said Jenny, ‘we’ll get back to you on that, Brenda.’

So it was Brenda, from Ethecom. I hoped she wasn’t about to complicate things. The meeting was going just fine.

‘I’d like to volunteer my services,’ said Brenda. ‘This is an area where I might be of some help.’

‘Thank you, Brenda,’ said Jenny, her voice a bit clipped.

Jenny probably thought that Brenda’s help would be in the art and crafts department. But Jenny, and most people in the hall, were completely wrong.

Now I remembered that before ‘Fat of The Land’ and Ethecom, Brenda had been a corporate lawyer, a specialist in property law.

‘For God’s sake, Brenda,’ said Jenny when Brenda explained this, ‘why didn’t you tell us before? Please, everyone, let her through.’

The crowd squeezed and shifted and I caught sight of Brenda wriggling her way to the front. Jenny and Betty tried to haul her up on to the table but they hadn’t the strength. My Jackie, gallant as ever, pushed through and came to the rescue. He tried lifting her into his arms, but there wasn’t room for that. Then he pressed his shoulder under her bottom and pushed upwards. Brenda making it onto the table was by no means certain; she wobbled a lot and, like a strongman lifting a truck, Jackie’s cheeks wobbled too. Everyone wanted to help. Many hands volunteered to support Brenda’s bottom until eventually she arrived on the table, red-faced and adjusting her underwear.

Once she got her breath back, Brenda was impressive. If we could establish that we had been induced to enter the contract by misrepresentation, Brenda said, this would put us legally in a much stronger position. I noticed Betty nodding her head sadly at that. She suggested that Faughie Council call in the Environment Minister to assist in this dispute, after all, that was the government’s job, although she was confident that an amicable solution could be found. However, she had concerns about clause 5b. The clause apparently allowing ‘preventative action’ might mean that G.I. could stay on the machair – and keep us off it – indefinitely. It was in our own interests that the filming be achieved as soon as possible with no avoidable delays.

‘I know in a farming village what I’m about to say is blasphemy,’ she said with a wee smile, ‘but if we want the machair back soon we’d better pray it doesn’t rain.’

Brenda counselled that, at all costs, we must act within the law. As she fixed a piercing look on Walter she reminded us all that tearing down the fence would allow G.I. to claim criminal damage, hold the machair for longer, and take the moral high ground.

The mob seemed suitable chastened by that.

‘For the meantime,’ she said with a gentler tone, ‘we have two fallow fields that we can offer. You’re welcome to bring your sheep or cattle for grazing if it helps. And of course when I say
we
, I mean the Ethecom community. Some of you might have the idea that we’re a bunch of hippies.’

That got a great big guffaw.

‘But community co-operation was Ethecom’s founding principle.’

This was met by a barrage of warm approval. Smiles, nods and ‘Hear, hear!’

‘Good on you!’

Amidst all this optimism I suddenly felt miserable, and I wasn’t sure why. I couldn’t understand it, my B&B was safe, why did I want to cry? Maybe it was Brenda. She was more of an outsider than I was, she was English for god’s sake, and yet she had done what I had spectacularly failed to do: made friends of these people and gained their respect.

That week’s
Inverfaughie Chanter
ran with the headline ‘
Local council intellectually defenceless
’ above a photo of Betty Robertson trying not to look like a toddler baffled by simple arithmetic. The quote was from a meeting that took place between Global Imperial and the council’s newly appointed legal representative, Brenda. Brenda was making the argument that as G.I. had used unnecessarily complicated jargon and stratagems beyond the council’s limited understanding, the agreement should be null and void. The council had been hoodwinked, ambushed by its intellectual superiors, a pretty embarrassing defence I thought, especially for Betty, but it didn’t do to gloat.

Brenda had asked that everyone leave their phone number and email address if they wanted to be kept up to date. Was she kidding? This stuff was mother’s milk to Highlanders and there was no one who didn’t want to guzzle on the teat of Inverfaughie gossip.

From that point onwards I was bombarded with information on an hour-by-hour basis. If it wasn’t text alerts telling me that G.I. had now employed security guards, it was radio bulletins from Andy Robertson with the news that Knox MacIntyre was buying Faughie Castle. There was an email from Jenny warning that the security guards were not to be molested. The Scottish Minister was arriving for talks with G.I. Then, because of the dispute, Knox
MacIntyre was rumoured to be pulling out of the Faughie Castle deal. There was any amount of speculation that he was bluffing to get the price down.

The next crisis was that the grass had run out; despite Brenda’s generous offer, the cattle had hoovered Ethecom’s field in hours and now the farmers needed more pasture. Brenda appealed on Andy’s show, offering a free ‘eco-organic lawnmower’ to callers. This was in fact a cow to come and eat the garden grass but Brenda was so charming and persuasive that even I found myself calling in. I hosted Donal and Mhairi, who chomped their way across my lawn in an afternoon and made a tidy job of it. I only hoped Global Imperial would find Brenda as persuasive as I had; their Accommodation Manager wasn’t returning my calls.

Andy had a phone-in about Faughie Castle and people called to say how worried they were that the deal might not go through. There were going to be jobs created from this polo resort, all the more important once the movie eventually left town. Walter phoned in to say that Knox MacIntyre was only angling for tax breaks, sweeteners from the government to locate his business here. The airwaves were fairly crackling with the rumours and scandal. Inverfaughie was generating more political intrigue than the West Wing.

Despite Brenda asking everyone to pray that it didn’t rain, it poured for the next four days. The following day it dried up in the afternoon and then started again after tea time. The whole village became avid weather watchers. All except its most recent resident: Steven. Waiting for the dispute to be over and the extra work to start again, he moped in his room.

Against Brenda’s advice, Jackie continued to organise a picket line at the gates to the machair. It was almost pointless as, due to the persistent rain, nothing was happening there anyway. The security guards turned out to be Keek and The Bell Boy, two brothers from Annacryne, the next village. I had no notion why The Bell Boy had such a strange and unwieldy nickname but it wasn’t hard to work out why Keek was so called. One eye on the fireplace and the other one up the lum – not a great asset for a security guard, Jenny
sneered. I’d met them a few weeks ago at a drunken party with one of Jackie’s pals, Spider. They were probably related to half the village; that’s why G.I. had employed them, said Walter, in another round of angry emails. Divide and conquer, he said, it was a tactic that had been successfully employed in earlier Highland clearances.

The biggest shockaroonie of all was that lots of Global Imperial staff, or at least all the local staff, were laid off with immediate effect. Even the Claymores. G.I. were obviously trying to hit the village where it hurt, in the wage packet. Thank god the lads were paying me for their dinners, but as far as their accommodation went, who knew when or even if I’d see the balance? I phoned every day but only spoke to an answering machine. Did this mean my contract was cancelled? Could they do this without telling me? Everyone in the village was in the same position. A minister came up from Holyrood and held a pow-wow with Jenny and a few of the council worthies, but nothing as yet had been resolved. Brenda counselled villagers not to put their guests out; they expected the dispute to be settled imminently and everyone should sit tight. It was a waiting game. Worried that I might lose my escape route back to Glasgow, I was sitting so tight I could have yanked the cork out a bottle.

The Claymores weren’t the type to sit tight, certainly not Rudi, who seemed to have particularly industrious insects in his underwear. He made the rest of the Claymores go out and train all day in the rain, while he looked for alternative work for them. He asked all the local farms if they wanted help bringing the harvest in, which they did, but the rain was holding that up too. Word must have gone out on the jungle drums because on the fourth day Walter popped round and sat in my kitchen with Rudi.

‘Would you know if any of the Global Imperial people are still up at the old village on the hill?’ Walter asked him.

Walter was up to something. I sat down at the table and lingered over setting out the tea things.

‘Nah,’ said Rudi, ‘they struck the set the following day. G.I. moved everything down to the machair. There’s nothing up there now; the place is deserted. Why?’

‘Och, it’s just that when we were up there I noticed there were some good peat bogs.’

‘Yeah?’ said Rudi.

‘And this is the interesting part,’ said Walter, leaning forward and talking quietly out the side of his mouth. ‘Since all this carry-on with the machair, I’ve had occasion to study the land register, checking our entitlement.’

Walter raised his eyebrows and sat back in his chair, ‘And so forth.’

‘Have you now?’ said Rudi, aping Walter’s mysterious manner.

‘I’ve looked up the records on the hill village and there’s no registered owner. I’ve always assumed it belonged to Trixie’s friend, Lady Murdina, like everything else in this damn place, but no. There’s no registered owner. Most irregular.’

‘Yeah?’ Rudi repeated. He was obviously as baffled as I was. ‘I thought you were a local expert, Walter, I thought you would have known this area like the back of your hand.’

‘Well, I do and I don’t,’ said Walter, scratching his chin. ‘The lochan and environs, I don’t like that place, I’ve never taken much of an interest, but during our guest star appearance in the filum the other night I got a good look at the village. I’m no geologist but it looks to me to be hoaching with peat. If I was a younger man I might have gone up there and cut it myself.’

Rudi shifted in his chair, making it screech on the kitchen floor.

‘I might have dried it and brought it down. And, who knows, I might have made some money.’

The penny finally dropped. I caught Rudi’s eye and nodded. He returned my nod. We looked at Walter and he joined us in a communal nod.

‘Walter,’ said Rudi, breaking the spell, ‘thanks for thinking of us, it’s a great idea, but we’ve never cut peat before. We wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘Och, there’s nothing to it; I can show you how it’s done. All you need is your tosg – the cutting tool – and I can lend you mine. Trixie, you’ve a few tosgs in your shed you can let them have. Och, if it comes to it you could use your old medieval weapons, it’s not complicated. Now, I won’t lie: it’s dirty work, and back breaking, but a good cutter can cut a thousand peats a day. A few strong young lads might make a lot of money.’

‘Yeah, that does sound interesting. And where might these strong young lads sell this peat?’

‘Ah now, that’s the shame of it. They couldn’t sell it.’

Rudi looked at me again, but there was no more nodding.

‘They would need a wholesaler. A fixer, if you will, who might have contacts with a third party.’

‘A whisky distillery?’ asked Rudi.

Walter smiled.

Who knew he was such a wheeler-dealer? With his unstinting voluntary work on behalf of the village I’d always thought Walter was a man of high principles, but it seemed that he, like everyone else in Inverfaughie, wasn’t above a bit of jiggery-mac-pokery.

‘So is it ok just to go up there and take it?’ asked Rudi.

‘Och, I wouldn’t say it was illegal,’ said Walter in his sneaky sing-song Highland lilt. ‘There’s no registered owner, so there’s no one to complain, but I wouldn’t say it was entirely legal either. It’s maybe as well to keep it under your hat. Just our wee secret.’

Walter began a knowing nod, ‘Between us three,’ he added to include me.

‘I must say I’m surprised, Walter,’ I blurted.

‘
Is treasa tuath na tighearna
,’ he continued, ignoring me, ‘the slogan of the Highland Land Law Reform Association. The first mass political party in Britain; they sent four MPs to Westminster.’

‘Sorry, I don’t speak Gaelic, Walter.’

Which Walter knew very well, and I really wasn’t in the mood for yet another of his impromptu history lessons.

‘The people are mightier than a lord,’ he explained, puffing his chest out. ‘Or in this case, a global corporation. We’re only doing our duty.’

‘I’m not sure I’m comfortable with …’

‘Sorry, Trixie,’ said Walter, getting to his feet, ‘it was wrong of me to involve you in something …’

‘No,’ I said, cutting him short.

Walter had come to my house and proposed something potentially illegal, but he’d trusted me. ‘No,’ I said again more slowly, trying to recalibrate, ‘
I’m
sorry, Walter, please stay. Really, I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure what you meant with all your Gaelic slogans. This is more excitement than I’ve had in ages.’

Walter sat back down and a smile passed between the two men.

‘Not that kind of excitement,’ I said, slapping them both on the shoulder, ‘but seriously, I don’t get it, what’s the duty you’re talking about?’

‘Och, nothing really,’ Walter smiled, ‘just a wee bit of what the young people used to call “sticking it to the man”.’

‘Exactly,’ said Rudi, ‘let’s have a dram.’

He stood up, bounded out of the room and a few moments later bounded back in again with a bottle of Auchensadie’s finest and three glasses. I glanced at him, trying to transmit my anxiety. Had he forgotten he’d never seen me take a drink or had he just never noticed? Apart from that tiny snifter I’d taken from Dinah, I hadn’t had a drink in what seemed like months. I’d really beaten myself up about that, promising myself I’d never touch it again, but, given the deal that was about to be sealed, how could I refuse?

This was a landmark moment: the first time I’d been involved in an Inverfaughie secret. There were rituals to be observed, honour amongst thieves. Here I was, aiding and abetting criminals, rebelling against authority, breaking off the shackles of the bourgeoisie and sticking it to the man. In this radical atmosphere, what was the harm in a wee nip of the old giggle water?

Rudi ceremoniously poured the Auchensadie into three glasses. I briefly wondered if this bottle was produced from the mash tun I’d spewed into. The memory brought the taste of bile to the back of my throat. The idea of drinking my own processed vomit was giving me the dry heaves. And yet.

As the golden water of life glugged out of the bottle a powerful drouth overtook me. I licked my top lip. The peat smoke smell stung my nostrils and revived me. Walter and Rudi lifted their glasses and, after a second’s hesitation, I joined them.

‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Rudi, holding his glass aloft. ‘To sticking it to the man.’

I clinked glasses with them both. ‘To sticking it to the man,’ I repeated solemnly.

I breathed deeply and threw my head back, a junkie taking a hit on a crack pipe.