For at least six years before Haldane’s murder the group of five had planned to combine eternal life with earthly power. They meant to grasp it by putting mankind into a state of competitive anarchy, breaking up the open intelligence network and restoring government by minorities. They planned an alliance with a military élite amidst the chaos of a worldwide food and energy famine. That is why Meg, their chief agent, got work with a circus which specialized in celebrating military triumphs. So Meg Mountbenger’s seduction of Wat Dryhope was both personal and political. She hoped to seduce him into her plot. Failing that she infected him against his will.
When Wat Dryhope returned from his Ben Nevis quarantine to Ettrick he worked hard at planting, hoeing, mill building et cetera between fierce bouts of drunkenness. Women stopped liking him and he seemed to have lost interest in them. He worked less frantically in the second year when the effects of plague were obviously being mastered. He boozed more but wrote A History Maker. Having given it to his mother he said, “Now I’m going for Meg.” His mother told him the open intelligence had found no news of Meg Mountbenger so she was most likely dead, probably by suicide. He said, “Meg is too brave and too competent to end that way. She’s done what I would do if I were her — turned gangrel. I’ll track her down, Kittock. I’ll kill her for what she did to me, then I’ll kill myself.”
He left Dryhope house and has never been seen since by any who admit knowing him.
Page 153.
But Meg Mountbenger is another kind of woman altogether. She’s also your … The unspoken word, of course, was sister.
POSTSCRIPT BY A STUDENT OF FOLKLORE
WHEN FEDOR HAKAGAWA WAS recording folksongs of the Irish vagrants in Donegal several years ago he encountered the following rhyme:
O Wat was a nasty old tinker,
And Meg was his nasty old wife,
They hated none more than each other,
They lived in contention and strife.
He battered her when he was sober,
She kickit him when he was drunk,
The broken-nosed toothless old gangrels
Yelled, fought, fornicated and stunk.
He glowered at each look that she gave him,
She spat at each word that he uttered,
Each hated the other so hotly,
They didnae think other folk mattered.
Hakagawa noticed that rhythm, diction and sentiments were more Scottish than Irish and was told it commemorated a couple of travellers who had lived in dens and sea caves round the northern shores of Scotland and Ireland, drifting with the currents across the strait between Kintyre and Antrim in borrowed or stolen boats. They were noted for almost total silence when forced into the company of others by hunger, foul weather or accident. They were also noted for being violently quarrelsome when they thought they were alone.
Researchers in Scotland have learned the couple had been known (though only to other gangrels) as far north as Caithness and Sutherland, as far east as Buchan and Fife, as far south as Clydesdale, but had always avoided the Scottish — English borders, a region most travellers like for its fertile commons and hospitable homesteads. This was also the region where Wat and Meg’s affair had become a popular legend of love that had shaken the world. A version of the song recorded near Freuchie, in Fife, has a verse not known in Ireland.
When one broke their neck in a tumble,
(It doesnae now matter just which)
The tither, with naebody else to detest,
Starved to death in the very same ditch.
All four crude verses are now added to Wat Dryhope’s and Meg Mountbenger’s intelligence archive with a question mark following it. They were probably composed after the couple described got buried in unmarked graves. Nobody can be sure they were the hero and villain of this tale, but such an ending for Kittock’s son and daughter seems as likely as murder and suicide, and more in keeping with modern notions. We prefer the comic to the tragic mode.
Altrieve Cottage,
home of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd,
looking toward Mountbenger
around 1820
About the Author A HISTORY MAKER
Alasdair Gray is a fat old asthmatic Glaswegian who lives by painting and writing. His other books include Lanark, Unlikely Stories Mostly, 1982 Janine, The Fall of Kelvin Walker, Lean Tales (with James Kelman and Agnes Owens), Old Negatives (verse), McGrotty & Ludmilla, Something Leather, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland, Poor Things and The Ends of Our Tethers
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 1994 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This Canongate edition, originally published in 2005,
has final changes which the author wants reproduced in future editions
This digital edition first published in 2014
by Canongate Books
Copyright © Alasdair Gray, 1994
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The book is dedicated to the late Chris Boyce who suggested nearly all the science and some of the fiction. It is also indebted to Margaret Mead whose Coming of Age in Samoa suggested a kindlier society than her critics thought possible; also to Bruce Charlton for medical advice and Scott Pearson for scholarly research and proof correction
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 702 0
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