yes, let me tell you about magic, that would be relevant.
How does a magician make something disappear? Easy. He doesn’t, he just hides it. He will invite you to look for it in all the obvious places – up his sleeves, under the hat, inside the box. He challenges you to search in all the usual kinds of places, but when you do it is on his terms. So he turns his palms one way and then another, he waves the sleeve under your eyes, he lifts the lid on the box; and when you look you assume, because of the confidence he shows whilst doing all of this, that there really is nothing there, the answer must be elsewhere, somewhere else he is not showing you. This is not magic at all then, merely a trick, a confidence trick based on his confidence your thoughts will be elsewhere when he is actually showing you the only places where the item could be concealed.
The relevance of this? Well, it’s like someone having the confidence to walk up to a customs inspector in Goods to Declare and have the nerve to explain to him how a BCD works – or would work if it didn’t have three kilos of cocaine stuffed inside – and giving that man the headache of having to work out the import tax that is liable on the rest of the mess that’s been brought in when all he really wants to do is have a good rummage through everything and then piss off for lunch.
Go down deeper. My reflection is shunted out of view as the door re-opens and my fellow performer returns. He is perplexed, like an audience stooge who has to admit defeat to the delight of the rest of the crowd. Well I just don’t know, his shaking head seems to say, go on then, show me, where have you put it? But of course I’ll do nothing of the kind. A grim sort of smile emerges under his moustache. He’s fumbling for some sort of way out that doesn’t leave him open to ridicule.
‘Sir … You said most of this stuff was over a year old?’
I sense there must be a mountain of forms that he doesn’t want to fill in. Lunch is calling him.
‘About eighteen months … the purchase receipts are dated –’
He puts up a hand to stop me talking, he has no desire to hear the detail, he’s already made up his mind.
‘I guess we can let you through on this occasion, given the relative age of the goods in question. Is there anything else you wish to declare, sir?’
I’m beginning to like this guy but there is nothing else I feel inclined to tell him. He nods and with a wave of his hand I’m gathering up the gear again and walking out of customs. Abracadabra. I’m twenty-three years old and I’ve just earned more than he will ever make in his lifetime. I went deep down inside and was able to hold my composure. I’ve passed the test.
Originally I had studied to be an engineer, like James Watt. Engineering has a fleeting relevance to the events I’m about to describe so perhaps it is worth lingering on this subject and my studenthood in general for a moment.
So what can I say about it? I suppose engineering in itself was never something I had a particular fondness or aptitude for, aside from a bit of tinkering with bikes and boats – of which more later – but it was what I found myself immersed in during my very last teenage months and most of my twentieth year. Quite why is still difficult to fathom. In those days you finished school and you went to college or university in Glasgow and studied. The only way out was by being too thick for the process or such a genius that you by-passed any Scottish stop and went straight to Oxbridge. I fell into neither category. I fell into engineering after a two-minute interview with my careers teacher at the end of sixth year. An interview, I might add, with all the depth and interaction that you have with your average dentist whilst he’s giving you root canal treatment, and only slightly less pleasure. So it came to be agreed that I would enrol at The University of Strathclyde and in the autumn of 1984 I was to be found living in a tiny room, six feet by twelve feet, on the thirteenth floor of the art-deco splendour at the Baird hall of residence, downtown Sauchiehall Street. Glasgow might not have an awful lot going for it as a hedonistic metropolis but after nineteen years in Greenock it was like New York, believe me. Even my little cell with its white walls, single bed, wash-basin and desk seemed like a Manhattan penthouse suite looking down on the throbbing alleyways of decadence below when compared to the dormitory set-up back home. Far away now, though the memories of having to share everything – walls, air and light – with my older brother are still close enough, and all with the glorious sound of my father next-door snoring loud enough to warn the ships to keep from the shore of the Clyde. Yes, my student days were carefree days by comparison, even if they only amounted to barely three hundred. I didn’t know it at the time, it was just the way things were going to work out. A few hundred days of getting drunk as cheaply as you could, trying to get stoned as frequently as possible, and toiling to get laid. Just a hundred-odd shots at this bohemian debauchery before it was over. Sometimes myself and other like-minded souls even stayed up all night.
What would I have been like then, I wonder? Well, young I suppose, youthful and youthful-looking, no doubt in a wholesome and earnest way. The look I craved was that of an amphetamine-washed Iggy Pop, or a Satisfaction-era Keith Richards. Sadly, the face that confronted me in my bed-sit mirror would have had more in common with a tubby farmer’s lad reared on generous portions of Aberdeen Angus, rhubarb crumble and custard. A shy lad at that, boyishly shy, guiltily holding a tenuous notion of what it was he wanted – libidinous sex, a life of excess, high times – and an even more tenuous notion of how he might actually get it. A normal boy brought up in a normal west of Scotland household wanting the normal things. There were many others like me of course, and we sought each other out at the normal places; the student bars, alternative clubs and Cure concerts. We could tell each other by our spiky hair with long fringes, our grey raincoats, and our curious way of dancing, twitching our shoulders whilst gazing vacantly at our shoes like heavily sedated battery hens let loose on an electrified floor. Laughable now but normal then, ordinary boys expressing their individuality by dressing and acting the same. Where I differed I suppose was that I was more willing to push it a little further than the rest, always hungering for anything a little more intense on the basis of the timeless equation that more insane plus less legal equals more fun, a formula which must have marked me down at those times as mad, bad and interesting to know. For a while I wasted energy trying to take people with me before realizing that the most interesting journeys are those where you travel alone. Back then these were the first signs of the way my life was to go, back then this would have been one of the first opportunities to draw the line, to settle for what those around me wanted – the four years of harmless frolics as a Glasgow undergraduate, a decent degree, future wife and job at the end of it. I didn’t know I was rejecting it at the time, I only wanted to experiment for a while before taking it all up again at some point in the future. A naive assumption to go with the times. I would later come to learn that there is no such return option. Once a pirate always a pirate. Like Captain Kidd.
Then there is the other story, the one I read. The story I rewrite so many times in my head so that in the end I star in this one too. An adventure story. I will be thirty-five soon. You would have thought that I would have grown out of these things rather than into them but I suppose that’s the way it is with me, everything over and over if I’m ever going to learn any lessons. Anyway, I’ll share this tale as well, why not, I enjoy playing it through, rehearsing the cast. It’s meant to be over three hundred years old, and truth be told it is authentic to the period. I have read all there is to read so that you can be sure of that. So it is spring 1698, although what will happen is just as resonant to the here and now, just as relevant. It is how things maybe could have been.
It begins with a man walking on to a ship, one he knows will never reach its stated destination. He boards anyway. Why? It’s impossible to tell at first, maybe he doesn’t even know, except that he’s some kind of fugitive, a man on the run, a misfit born outwith his time.
The ship lies at harbour and is being prepared for a long voyage when he arrives. He travelled far
