Monument Maker, page 58
A few months before my arrival, sometime in late December, there had been the widely reported Double A disaster, where the floor of an old school hall that had been hosting an all-ages discotheque had suddenly given way, resulting in the deaths of five youngsters. Though I have little sympathy for disco dancers and their ilk I took an interest in the story when a pen pal, Token Bob, sent me a newspaper clipping showing the carnage that coincidentally provided a tantalising glimpse of the subterranean tomb that had claimed the partying idiots. He had included a blown-up photostat of a tag on the wall of the complex, the letters S I R K alongside a number that remained indecipherable, and in the accompanying note—written, I might add, with all of the letters slanting to the left—he claimed that SIRK was a well-known acronym used by special military ops that stood for Secret Initiatory Realm of Knights, who were in charge of constructing and maintaining an entire hidden infrastructure, almost a mirror image of everything that exists around us up here on the ground, only down there, beneath our feet, ready, in the event of disaster, to go to ground and repopulate.
At the time Token Bob—that’s how he was known, named after his wife’s attitude to him or a wound he received through unpaid gambling debts, it was never clear which—was an up-and-coming star of the discipline, a discipline now given a veneer of academic respectability through the increasing exposure of the work of tedious lefties like Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem (not to say the rediscovery of the work of John Dee and Edward Kelley, in reality our truest guiding spirits), but back then one that would have got you laughed out of the changing rooms, if you know what I mean. Still, here’s Token Bob filling A5 stapled journal after A4 fold-out poster book with some of the most groundbreaking fieldwork of the day, mapping the course of subterranean streams, writing letters on behalf of sorry twentieth-century defence architecture, shimmying his way up chimneys or burrowing down tiny sewage pipes in search of lost worlds, or, more accurately, temporarily forgotten domains. So his word held a lot of clout (this was some years before the whole “Dark Lochnagar” UFO flap that effectively destroyed his reputation), and as the papers circulated amongst the community the decision was made to host the first-ever societal AGM of the Second Church of the First Stone at Burntisland, as we named ourselves in tribute to the secret society founded by our favourite subterraneans, the architect Pierre Melville and author Max Rehberg.
As I walked along the front, as I travel there once more in my mind, I am struck by three characters, three still lives, more appropriately, that have stayed with me to this day and that I still struggle to make sense of.
The first was a girl in a long flowing skirt and a crop top dancing with a hula hoop. Every so often she would raise one of her hands in the air and manoeuvre the hoop until it was spinning around her wrist. To say I was both captivated and repelled would be accurate, but not quite. I stood there watching her for some time, spellbound, you might say, like a detective at a crime scene. I recall that I began to sweat slightly and I fancy that my heart may even have skipped a beat—it may have been the caffeine, I had treated myself to a black coffee from a small seafront cafe along the way—when I realised that the girl was in fact blind, that what I had taken for the kind of obnoxious oversized sunglasses favoured by disco dancers was in fact a cover for her dead eyes. Right then her mother, at least I presume it was the girl’s mother, put her hand out and through the hoop in order to stop her gyrations—is she deaf too? I wondered—and guided her into taking a cup in her hand.
At that moment I looked away, over towards the grass verge that runs along the promenade, and saw a homeless person asleep with a filthy rucksack for a pillow, his shoes by his side but still wearing socks, ghastly woolly socks more suited to mountainsides than seasides.
And then along from him a young couple, the girl lying on her back in a green bikini, the boy leaning over her, his body raised up on one elbow, the pair of them kissing in the keen way that is the preserve of the eternally young. At that moment I felt as if all three tableaux were related, like I was being shown three potential futures: the blind dancer, the sleeping hobo, and the young lovers. I hope it would be obvious which one I chose.
The conference was big news amongst the community. Up until that point we had all existed as a faceless network of typed or handwritten pseudonyms: Chubby Nightstick, The General, Token Bob, whom you have met, Approximately Toxic, sometimes simply XX, The Plug, The Flashlight, The Grey Wolf, The Lightning Bolt, cursed Jack Frost, The Pink Panzer . . . My own pseudonym I choose to withhold. Arthur McManus—I still refuse to call him Aha—was, of course, The Grey Wolf.
Token Bob and The Flashlight were in charge of proceedings. Going by their list of conquests, everything from the large sinkhole behind Niagara Falls—very much the “holy grail” of waterworks enthusiasts and, until their infiltration and privately circulated field report, reputed to be physically impregnable, though now it’s a tourist attraction, good God—through the mapping of the abandoned artificial islands off the East Neuk of Fife that provided cover for what at the time were some of the most advanced undersea battle stations ever invented by the crackpot wing of the British army, I had half expected a pair of geeky hyperactive teenagers. But as I arrived at the church hall that had been hired to host the proceedings—an unfortunate architectural monstrosity that should have been shipped directly to the Western Isles—I caught my first sight of the pair of them in the lobby and was relieved to see that they were in fact conservatively dressed, almost to the point of invisibility, the kind of people that can disappear in the corner of your eye or pass you by without ever impressing themselves on your memory. Magicians, I thought to myself.
The Flashlight was smoking a pipe—they were both wearing name tags so I knew who was what—while Token Bob combed what was left of his hair in a hand-mirror and pulled at the lapels of an oversized tweed jacket. And you might be? The Flashlight asked me. Token Bob’s huge face peered over his shoulder, sizing me up, trying to get my number, a wolf or a star or a sword or a sudden darkness? I’m William Scotia, I announced. They both nodded in approval. We meet at last, Token Bob said. This is a great honour. He extended his hand in greeting. I’m a fan of your work, The Flashlight informed me. I’ve read all of your publications. Likewise, I said, cursing myself for such an idiotic reply and for so immediately surrendering the higher ground. I made a mental note to regale him with one of my adventures as soon as the opportunity presented itself and then to walk away with a leer on my face.
Once inside I was greeted with the expected mix of dark tragic poets, plumbers of the depths, middle-aged explorers, social misfits and even a few young people—an unfortunate rarity in this profession, a calling that most commonly has its first stirrings in the black hole that opens up (I should say reveals itself) in the mid-thirties—most spectacularly Jack Frost, who was either an extremely malnourished ancient or an anorexic child, probably the latter, I decided, due to the constant presence on his cranium of an oversized baseball cap.
He caught my eye immediately. There was something in the curve of his spine that made me think of the shrivelled corpse of Tutankhamen, and in our company that was worth more than gold. For a second it crossed my mind that he was the living embodiment of what we were all searching for, a tomb dweller, a true subterranean. At the same time, he projected a grotesque appearance, a crippled man-child whose sole purpose was to make a mockery of us all. Aside from a notorious series of letters published in The Complex that attacked the upper echelons of established fandom as a bunch of armchair explorers, I knew nothing of his work.
Then there was The Grey Wolf. At first, I confess, knowing nothing of his current proclivities, I likened him more to a Grey Owl, someone with an intimate knowledge of the dark but with the kind of equivocal attitude that comes with eyes that you could watch the moon rise in. I hadn’t seen him since 1991, when he had seemingly disappeared, into the dark of his own researches, into his quest for the perfect timeless abyss, after warning me to watch my body for any signs of loose talk.
At one point during the round-table debate—we were discussing that perennial chestnut, Arbitrary Division, a token-based monetary system that had been the darling of the political fringe during the 1930s and which was once more experiencing a revival (we saw ourselves as social revolutionaries as much as tomb raiders; sincerely, what is the difference?)—Jack Frost stood up, teetering on frail legs, and made a stand. He called us nostalgists, accused us of being practitioners of kitsch. Next you’ll be issuing a manifesto, he said, looking pointedly in my direction. At the other extreme, The Plug argued for a statement of ideology—not a manifesto, he insisted, under pressure from Frost—that had less to do with national renewal than with national decay. I’m expounding the politics of rot, he exclaimed, to much hilarity. But his basic tenets were sound: full colonisation of the underground, the widespread creation of mirror cities, veneration of the war machines, the equilibration of the gods, etc. All the time The Grey Wolf, The Silent Owl, sat between them. Occasionally he would glance over at one or the other with a look that I can only describe as imperial pity, a haughty emotion that was beyond sorrow, love or anger. Later he told me it was the child of suffering that had raised up its hand and instructed him to remain silent.
Recess was called, and we made our way along the front to an old-fashioned tavern that at first glance appeared to be someone’s house. Our hosts reassured us that it was in fact a drinking establishment and that a table had been reserved for our party in the garden.
Along the front I spotted the same young lovers as before, but now they had been joined by an older man wearing nothing but a pair of pink bikini bottoms. He was lying on his back in the grass while the young girl balanced on his leg in the air, her arms spread out as if she had taken flight. The boyfriend looked on approvingly. I looked around at my comrades but no one else seemed to have noticed them.
As we seated ourselves around a large wooden table, there was much jostling for position and I could see that already alliances were forming and hierarchies were falling into place. I vowed to have nothing to do with it. Instead of fighting for a seat I opted to walk inside the bar and peruse the taps.
Sure enough, there was a fine selection of ales: milds, stouts, porters, a wee heavy or two. A figure perched on a stool next to me—I didn’t deign to turn around—made some comment about the presence of the riding cap on my head, so I took my walking stick and laid it on the bar in the way that I would a weapon. Typically, I heard no more from him. Right then The Grey Wolf appeared at my shoulder. I recommend a low-alcohol beer, he said. You might want to keep your senses about you. I nodded, silently, and suppressed a shudder.
Outside, the discussion, somewhat inevitably, had turned to childhood epiphanies. If you leave these people alone for five minutes with nothing but a pouch of tobacco and a bar tab, the talk will almost certainly stray towards an analysis of what exactly it was—in their DNA, in the circumstances of their youth—that first set them on the path. The sound of artillery, the air raid warnings, the smell of old gas masks, the sight of bombed-out buildings, the solitary walls raised up to heaven with single panes of glass still tantalisingly preserved but forever out of reach, I’ve heard it so many times that the birth canal itself might as well be a hastily dug escape tunnel.
It was the Clyde Blitz that did it for me, The Pink Panzer said. Fifteenth of March 1941. It’s the incendiary devices I remember the most, the huge warehouses on fire by the water. The whole of my childhood had been spent waiting for a meteor to come screaming through the skies and wipe out my entire family, flatten the rotten lot of them, he said. In comparison Glasgow at war had been like a playground, a place of unpredictable adventure. I remember when the grain silos were hit, he said, we lived on Dumbarton Road in Partick and had a bird’s-eye view. The rat population had fled, some of them still on fire, flaming rats coming in this wave from the Clydeside. The next day I found one asleep, still smouldering, in my father’s shoes, which he would leave outside the door in the close each night.
I saw the water on fire, The Lightning Bolt said, an older man with a jowly, liver-spotted face and flat cap. It was just like the Styx, the waters of hell, all of the fuel from the depots had leaked into the Clyde and erupted in this wall of impenetrable flame, but even so there would be these young daredevil fighters, these plucky Germans, who would deliberately swoop down and tear through the fire. Back then I thought to myself, they’re thinking of the children, they’re putting a display on just for them. It was marvellous, this acrobatic release of energy, and being a child that was how I saw it, the best fireworks night of my life.
Token Bob posed the question. Do you remember your first night underground? The topic was passed around the table. The Grey Wolf remembered the silence, he said. You all talk about explosions, bombs, detonations, but what of the aftermath, he said, what is it that you’re really after?
What you are really seeking—correct me if I’m wrong—is some kind of death-in-life, some kind of perpetual profanity. What more, then, than the silence of the tomb? That’s what I recall most of all in my time spent in the buried subterranean complexes, he continued, in the bunkers and bomb shelters, miles deep in the abandoned munitions depots and underground railways, running off, an infinite silence, the eternal presence of nothing: eternal life. Isn’t that the reason we have chosen to spend our lives desecrating graves? We may go down, he insisted, but don’t forget, we take the world down with us.
An awkward silence fell upon the room, a silent bruise, like he’d smacked us backwards into the grave right then and there. I looked over as he swatted a fly off his arm with a grand gesture. It was precisely the kind of spiritual melodrama I had been looking for.
That night my wife and I dined at our hotel along the front. Next to us an elderly Japanese couple complained about the steak. Too black, they said. After several bottles of wine and a few surreptitious whiskies supplied by the doorman, who beckoned us into his den at the back of the hotel—more of a glorified shed, really, complete with nude pictures cut out of magazines and pinned on the wall and a single bed that seemed as if it was designed to fit a small child curled up like a shell—we took an evening walk along the promenade.
My wife seemed upset. It was that man, she said. You mean the Japanese? I asked her. No, she said, the doorman. He was staring at me the whole time he had me in his den, she said. At one point he flicked his tongue out at me. I told her I had noticed nothing of the sort. You’re naive when you’re drunk, she told me. I love you, but sometimes it’s difficult. I changed the subject and told her about the young lovers—keeping the rest of the day’s tableaux to myself—how the girl had balanced on the foot of the older man like a mermaid. We combed the beach for the best part of an hour in search of them, but they had long since disappeared.
The morning’s activities were scheduled to start at 8.15 A.M. We were told there would be a tour of the disaster scene, the hollow shell of the Double A, with the tantalising possibility of a glimpse of the bunker below. For some reason no one else at the conference seemed to be staying at our hotel, despite it being recommended in the brochure. In fact, the majority of attendees had opted for a gone-to-seed hovel in the backstreets which they had dubbed The Land Without a Name because the landlady was suffering from early-onset dementia and so would regularly forget where she was and who she was welcoming. I dubbed our hotel Uncle Stephen’s in retaliation, but no one got the joke.
I arrived outside the venue at 8 A.M. sharp and was surprised to find that I was the first person in attendance. I went for a coffee and came back and soon I was joined by the rest of the group, most of whom seemed a little worse for wear. The Plug and The Lightning Rod arrived arm in arm. Fun night? I asked them. One of them made a sign with his hands that I won’t repeat. The other sniggered. Is this what the hobby’s come to? I thought to myself.
Then The Grey Wolf appeared, no longer acting like a wolf or an owl but more like a bat, his great cape billowing behind him. He swept past the main group and fell into concerned conversation with The Flashlight. It was apparent that there was a problem. Our appearance in the village had not gone unnoticed. The Pink Panzer mentioned something about a protest, a blockade. That’s when the abuse began. Vultures, someone shouted, and as if from out of nowhere a battalion of locals, mostly purple-haired old women but with a few village toughs and what I was later led to believe were concerned parents, began to bear down on our party. Grave robbers, someone shouted, murderers, someone else said. At one point a young man with sticky-out ears picked up a handful of sand and threw it at us but thankfully it dispersed in mid-air. The Flashlight stepped forward. Hear me out, he said. The entire crowd collectively inhaled. We are here because we believe that military negligence resulted in the death of your children.
He was well versed, I thought to myself.
We are here because we believe that the disco was built on unstable ground, he said. We have come to conduct a fully independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of your loved ones. Now, if you will allow us to proceed, perhaps we can get to the bottom of this tragedy. There were murmurs within the crowd. Someone shouted out, you don’t look like detectives! That’s why we’re so successful, The Flashlight countered. Then the crowd opened up, still with some muttering, and we made our way towards the bunker.
