The Tartan Ringers by Jonathan Gash Page A

three blokes clinging to its sides and one man already in the cab struggling with the wheel.
    Headlights sprang. The green showed brilliantly. I snicked my wagon’s gear and the hand brake, then saw there were no bloody keys. As my vast wagon began to glide down the slope I fumbled desperately with the dashboard, failed to find the wires, crouched and fiddled. The sodding vehicle went faster. I fiddled faster. Somebody yelled. Boots clashed on the door. I dived, clobbered a bloke’s face and he fell off. Something clanged on the truck. Glass shattered. Men were yelling, running, throwing. I finally shorted the wires with my teeth as the giant vehicle juddered and careered down the slope. The engine boomed. I struggled up, cast the headlights and gave an appalled moan.
    It was like a battlefield. The slab carrier had caught some of Bissolotti’s assault men on the green. Two lay strewn. A third was pinned against the Caterpillar’s gearing where the lorry’s front had nuzzled itself to rest. Blokes were tearing about here, there, everywhere. I gunned the engine. Two strange faces appeared, one on the windscreen, I yelled at him in terror, drove crazily to shake him off. They vanished. I jolted round the field, slammed back through the Bissolotti convoy and glimpsed a street lamp in the distance.
    Putting the big wagon at the narrow street took courage, or terror. I remember bawling in panic as the wagon thundered through and out into a brightly peaceful main road. A line of waiting fairground lorries to my right, so swing left to traffic lights, green so on through, to anywhere. Behind was death in that ludicrous war zone.
    It’s hard suddenly pretending everything is normal, but I did my best, stuck up in that tall cab and trying to look like I knew what I was driving, where I was going. It was an interminable cruise in a puzzled Edinburgh, until I found a road that finally promised north by following the arrows. I was forty miles away before I stopped shaking.
    Telling myself I’d done it, I relaxed and let the road decide what happened next, meekly following the headlights to my fate.
    Quiet old life, antiques.

Chapter 10
    B EFORE I INVENTED sex, when the world was flat and weather constant, I had all sorts of ideas. Cycling round the entire country in a record-breaking week; going for gold in mountaineering; discovering uncharted continents; rescuing damsels. A lad does a lot of this daft imagining, never grows out of his dreams. Girls do, but don’t ever realize that the male is often miles away in his silly head being anointed king of a lost tribe in the Andes or whatnot. Women never learn to see blokes as we actually are, namely incurable dream-spinning romantics, because early in what passes for development women trade perception for appearances. The bird learns that her bloke could only go for Olympic gold in flower arranging. She starts assuming he’s only what he seems – a portly geezer wheezing when tying his shoe. The point I’m making is that people aren’t merely things. Never mind what politicians say. You can gaze at stones and tarmac, rivers and fence posts, with complete dispassion if you want. They’re no big deal. But you have to
think
when you look at people. You have to. If you don’t, you become a robot.
    One of my old dreams was knowing every town in the Kingdom, so that if some stranger mentioned a tiny village in, say, the Shetlands, I would casually say, ‘Ah, yes. Population eighty-one. Stands on the tributary of . . .’ I failed geography at school. Dubneath was therefore a mystery.
    The big transformer wagon’s petrol ran dangerously low in Clackmannan, though when I got out and inspected its container drums they showed half full. Perhaps you had to switch to reserve? Anyhow I decided to ditch it, before daylight revealed me in all my glory as the non-secret thief of the known world’s largest fairground transformer-generator. I entered Fife, and drove across Kinross in a