hired to read nightly at a local circus but the disturbances whenever he performed became so riotous that he was banned by the local magistrates from appearing in public.
The upper classes in Edinburgh preferred to mock McGonagall in a gentler fashion. Feigning admiration for his would-be immortal works and paying handsomely for his entertainments. It didn’t take the rich long to tire of McGonagall. They moved on to other things, leaving the poet to die in poverty. Alan considered many writers to be modern-day McGonagalls. The most perfect instance of this phenomenon was Joyce Cary. Obviously, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus elevated not only its nominal author but also her husband and collaborator Sylvere Lotringer to a similar status. Martin Amis fell into this category alongside all his scribbler friends. Sometimes it seemed as if there wasn’t a living or recently deceased author who Alan didn’t consider to be suffering from the McGonagall syndrome. Baudrillard remained one of Alan’s favourite examples since no one could take seriously a man who accepted Sylvere Lotringer as his translator. According to Alan, all these hippie hipsters could think about was getting other men to shag their wives.
After our meal we drove out to the airport. Well, not really to the airport. We drove along the edge of an industrial estate behind the airport and then up a rough track, curving around a field. We’d arrived at Tyrebagger Hill and all we had to do to reach the recumbent stone circle situated on it was climb over a gate and cut across a field. Abandoned electricity pylons towered above us while a constant stream of planes and choppers soared into the sky from the airstrip below. Oil had made Aberdeen a busy airport. The stones were in a circle of trees and the site was extremely ambient. A surreal juxtaposition of ancient and modern. The airport, the industrial estate, the abandoned pylons and the stone circle. Alan claimed this combination was a killer. Real magic. No wonder K. L. Callan kicked off 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess with a visit to this site. Since I hadn’t even looked at the book Alan had given me the previous evening, I didn’t know what he was talking about. However I did think it a little strange that Alan weighed down his ventriloquist’s dummy with bricks and carried it up to the monument. I didn’t know Alan well, so I refrained from commenting upon his eccentric behaviour.
Recumbent stone circles are made up from a large stone on its side with two tall flanking stones, then a ring of stones radiating around this point of focus. The recumbent stone at Tyrebagger was tilted forward and there’d been a fire underneath it. The ash was stone-cold. Alan turned me around and made me kneel in it. Then my ride dropped his pants. His Levi’s fell down around his ankles, his briefs only got as far as his knees. Alan had an erection. This didn’t surprise me. He spread his arms and leant forward, balancing himself against the recumbent stone. I shook Alan’s prick vigorously, then ran my tongue along its length. Alan groaned and the volume of his moaning increased when I sucked his cock into my mouth. I worked my lips gently up and down the shaft for quite some time and although Alan bawled his lungs out, he didn’t come. I decided to use my teeth. The harder I chomped the more Alan writhed and screamed. As he came I could see a plane taking off from the runway beneath us. After this, we swapped places and Alan licked me out.
Eventually we got back in the car and Alan drove down to the airport. We went into the terminal and ordered cappuccinos from a concession called Deli France. Aberdeen has a disproportionate number of French-style eateries because people with money to burn seem to consider brasseries sophisticated. The service in Deli France was lousy, the coffee wasn’t bad. After Alan made a purchase in the whisky shop we headed to the car. It only took 15 minutes to get back to the city centre. We high tailed it to Alan’s flat. He got out a Polaroid and made me act out his sexual fantasies with the ventriloquist’s dummy. The poses were pretty similar to those we’d struck in front of the professional photographer in Stonehaven. This time, however, books were obsessively rearranged on the shelves behind Dudley and me. Works by writers such as B. S. Johnson and Alain Robbe-Grillet were reordered as I threw generic pouts and acted out pornographic clichés in front of the camera. As he felt the sticky heat of the paperbacks with his palms, Alan told me that he found books extremely erotic. They made him want to shit in his pants.
After a while Alan threw the dummy across the room. He was feeling jealous. Then my companion started throwing books around. He tried to play football with Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing your Memoirs by B. S. Johnson. All the while Alan ranted about the irresolvable ambiguity of Johnson’s work. According to Alan, Johnson made such ridiculous claims for his prose that it was hard to believe anyone had ever taken him seriously. Johnson’s theoretical explanation of his output fell behind the premises on which his work was based. Alan considered Johnson to be simultaneously tedious and hilarious. He began ranting about the publicity generated by Johnson’s relationship with his mother, Johnson’s desire for his mother to appreciate his books. Johnson’s obsession with his mother. Alan denounced Johnson for Oedipalising literature. He bemoaned the fact that an incredible technical ability had been fettered by Johnson’s strait-laced mind. Alan denounced Harry Mathews and Raymond Queneau for suffering from the same vice.5 Then he announced that Georges Perec was the only OULIPO writer he rated. Eventually I got Alan to calm down. We had a dram, then retired to bed and had sex. Straight sex. Missionary position. Despite the fact that Alan was into virtually every erotic variation known to man, he always insisted that the highest of highs was post-coital sex. For Alan sex was primarily a mental phenomenon and he wished to exhaust himself with it.
That night I dreamt that we picked up Alan’s Fiesta from the airport car park and drove through the night to the Cambridgeshire village of Hilton. The rosy fingers of dawn were breaking through the clouds as we walked across the village green, which was allegedly landscaped by Capability Brown. An ancient turf maze was our goal and we walked the nine circuits of this unicursal labyrinth to reach the William Sparrow monument at its centre. Retracing our steps, we made our way out of the maze and lay down on the green. One thing led to another and it wasn’t long before we were making love in the dew. My pleasant dreams vanished and I awoke because the bed was shaking. I could feel hot breath on my face and I forced my eyes open. Alan was bending over the bed, adjusting the sheeting, he’d laid the dummy down beside me. I wanted to cry out but my voice caught in my throat. Moonlight was filtering through the undrawn curtains and I could see Alan’s eyes, they were closed. He was sleepwalking.
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