THE WHISKY DREAMERS
by
Kirsti Wishart
AUCHENTOSHAN
The first bottle of whisky they drank together Kathy couldn�t believe its name; she thought Alan was teasing, making fun of her lack of whisky knowledge. But its softness, its sweet maltiness over-ruled such concerns and after a third of the bottle was gone they resolved to pay the distillery a visit, to write sonnets and odes celebrating the people who worked there in the hope of free drink.
They had both retreated back to Alan�s flat after another dreary meeting of Queersoc, the name alone enough to make them shiver in unison. They had bonded instantly, noticing the other�s eyebrows rise in exasperation as another plate of chocolate digestives was handed round. Nervous boys mostly, Kathy noted with disappointment, their wicker chairs squeaking in unison during a talk on sexual health in the Quaker meeting room. Faced with the prospect of the Student Union afterwards Alan had taken her by the arm as they left saying �Fuck this for a laugh,� and taken her to his room in the loft of sprawling house owned by two elderly Classicists.
Underneath a sloping ceiling every available surface in the tiny space was covered in books and magazines and papers. Even the sink was filled with paperbacks and, although she had only known him for an hour and a half, Kathy knew she had entered the inside of Alan�s head. He was tall and skinny and had to crouch down to fit. Seeing him sit on a seat too low for him brought to mind walking silver birches and mutant stick insects. His hair was cut short at the back and sides with a fringe of thick black hair that he would rake back from his forehead when it flopped down during one of his rants. He looked like a member of Kraftwerk in black with a blank red badge on his jacket lapel.
What with him being a third year while she was only a fresher he should have been intimidating but there was something so eager about him. She had never met anyone so curious, in every sense of the word. He was the type of person she had dreamt about meeting at university only to be sorely disappointed. And when she spoke he listened attentively in a way that confirmed he had three sisters along with a hollow-cheeked handsomeness and disdainfully camp manner she found irresistible.
She wondered how he could afford the extensive drinks selection on display in an old cabinet he�d rescued from a skip � Polish vodka, Portsmouth gin, absinthe from Prague, authentic Mexican tequila with a grub curled up at the bottom and whisky. Lots of whisky. Five bottles of single malt and a bottle of Famous Grouse. But when she saw his shock, his stern disapproval when she confessed she�d never really liked the stuff and he had earnestly told her why this should be remedied, why a good single malt was one of the few things that restored his faith in humanity, she understood why he used up his grant in this way. For Alan not to buy whisky would be like a great butterfly collector not heading off with his net to the woods or the hills at every opportunity.
Alan described the process of making whisky, the use of different barrels, the waiting for other drinks to be bottled before the true drink could be made. He described it as though drinking it was the culmination of a long, slow ritual. And as the fumes wafted around her head and the liquid made its hot way past her heart, Kathy felt the whisky bonding them together, drawing them closer. She took another sip and tasted newly cut wood, years of waiting and tender checking and was converted. She left clutching the remainder of the bottle, a parting gift, along with five of Alan�s poems and the first three chapters of his novel.
Remembering the way Alan had described his first taste of Laganvullin in a bothy in Glencoe with two Irish brothers, his drunken eloquence, she was a little fearful when she sat down to read them. She was sure she would be disappointed. She poured herself a good measure of Auchentoshan before lifting his writing from her bedside cabinet where it had sat for five days, enough time to ensure objectivity. Two hours later she let the last poem fall to the side of her chair and surprised herself by not feeling jealous at all. She lifted her glass in thanks for finally meeting someone who had the potential to be read by thousands. �Typical,� she thought as the liquid stung her lips and throat. �I go to pick up girls and fall for a bloke.�
KNOCKANDO
The next bottle of whisky they drank together was six years later in her small flat in Brighton. Kathy had moved there with her first serious girlfriend, got a job in a London publishing house and been dumped shortly afterwards. She�d suffered from depression for a week but found it difficult to be seriously depressed in a place with such fine piers. She�d kept in touch with Alan but it proved as difficult to maintain regular contact with him as it had during her degree. He�d a habit of disappearing for weeks and then turning up on her doorstep with souvenirs from Tokyo, Madrid or Dublin. He was always touring round southern Ireland meeting up with second cousins.
He left university with a 2:1, a surprise to many who predicted a first but not to those who knew he�d been travelling around Algeria in the weeks leading up to his finals. He�d carried on travelling, taking up jobs in bookshops and had somehow managed to set up a literary magazine called �Zut�. It was no surprise that through charm and audacity he persuaded some big names to contribute. Kathy had been sent a couple issues and when she�d come across one of her own early efforts, given to him years ago, she felt the same strong feelings of irritation and affection she always felt when she thought of Alan.
She�d had a few poems published in other places, slowly building up a collection. At times she worried about how much she preferred working on a stanza to another evening in the pub with lesbian ramblers but never enough to make her leave her flat. She�d send her work to Alan�s parents� address as they forwarded on mail and he would write back long letters with postmarks from Paris, Prague and Monte Carlo. They�d be filled with precise criticism and stories about the latest men he�d met in saunas. The Slovakian violinist, the researcher working on a programme about spoons for Radio Four, the breeder of Dalmatians who named his puppies after the men he�d slept with.
Then one Friday night Kathy�s buzzer sounded insistently. She�d thought it was her friend Jackie having another girlfriend crisis but instead there was Alan shouting through the intercom, �Open the bloody door! S�freezing out here!� before stomping up the steps a bottle of whisky in one hand, a book in the other. �Got my novel published the other week, thought I�d bring you a copy rather than you seeing it on a bookshop shelf. And I got you this. Girly whisky but it�ll do.� Their letters always had a paragraph devoted to whisky and he knew Knockando was her favourite though he scorned it as too soft.
They sat together on the couch and, after Kathy had hit him on the arm a few times for daring to get published before her, they fell back into their old way of talking. Kathy held the book for a while before opening it, examining the cover; what looked like an Irish landscape veiled by the drizzle of a �soft� day, with a beach in the distance, a small, dilapidated hut in the centre. The title, The Hidden Man across the top of it and his name underneath. There was a tiny flicker of jealousy before pride filled her chest like the first big sip of whisky.
�There are words in it, honest,� he told her. �But the words you�ll like best are at the front. Here.� He took the book from her and opened it at the first few pages. �Thought you�d kill me if I didn�t,� and there she read, �For Kathy.� She hugged him to disguise feeling tearful and for the first time felt how skinny he was and wondered who there was to look after him when he left her again. And although that night was as wonderful as their previous nights spent drinking she couldn�t help but notice how thirsty he was, how determined to escape his sober self.
In her living room in the south of England the whisky brought to mind warm lodges and cold hills, sitting in front of log fires as the wind battered against the window pane after having spent the day walking across moorland. They both knew it as a fantasy, that they would ever walk across a moor together or visit a Highland lodge, but the thought of it brought them comfort, their nostalgia for lives that weren�t theirs encouraging another dram from the bottle.
LAPHROAIG
After that night spent drinking it was another five years before a bottle of whisky was shared again. During that time their contact had become more erratic, Kathy sometimes having to wait six months before getting a long reply from Alan. She tried to get him interested in email but Alan refused to have anything to do with it, fulminating on how it was corrupting language. Kathy agreed in some ways. She used notebooks for rough drafts of poems, spending months, sometimes years composing them, letting them grow between the covers. But she wouldn�t have given up her lap-top for anyone, not even Alan.
The Hidden Man was short-listed for several prestigious prizes, winning one for best first novel. It was compared to the work of Flann O�Brien and early Beckett for its surreal telling of a nameless narrator�s travels across southern Ireland for his bike, Molly, stolen from outside his local one drunken night. Although Kathy agreed with the reviewers on how funny it was she felt they had missed its sadness, the moments in which the narrator became aware of the madness of his quest. After reading it she�d written him a long letter, finishing it with a reminder that if ever he was in difficulty and needed a place to stay he could always stay with her.
After the initial shock she became used to seeing Alan on TV or hearing him on the radio reviewing the latest books or films. From his media performances it was clear he was enjoying the attention with a wry detachment, something to get out of the way before getting back to his real job. Another novel appeared a couple of years later, delivered through her letterbox after a long period of silence. The stamps were Spanish, the postmark illegible and inside was a slip of paper written in Alan�s familiar scrawl. �Hope this makes up for all those missed conversations, write to me soon and tell me what you think. I have a bottle waiting for you.�
The Whisky Drinkers was dedicated to �The Only Drinker Who Counts� and was darker in tone than The Hidden Man. Each chapter could be read as short story although the reader soon became aware they were interlinked, characters reappearing, influencing stories outside their own. And each story was related to drinking in some way, be it the production of it, the pubs and clubs and restaurants where it was drunk, and the after-effects, the hangovers, the mistakes made. The characters, mainly gay men, visited bars in Aberdeen, County Mayo, Chicago, Kyoto and Helsinki, each place described with the same woozy intoxication, the same drunken lyricism.
After she�d written a letter in response she�d been sent three letters in quick succession. �Who is this guy?� asked her girlfriend Rachel as she brought the last letter through to the bedroom one Saturday morning. �You�re not having an affair with him are you? He seems pretty intense.�
�He�s the writer guy I was telling you about. Alan.�
�Ohh�him. The alcoholic. Have you told him about your book yet?�
�He�s not an alcoholic. He just really appreciates his drink. And it�s not a book though is it? More a pamphlet.�
�Stop with the self-deprecation. My girlfriend, the published poet.�
Things had improved for Kathy over the years. She�d been promoted, met Rachel at a dinner party and had more poems published. After one of them had won a national competition she�d been made an offer for her first collection by a well-respected publisher. After the meeting settling the deal Kathy had wandered the streets back to her flat in a daze, recovering long enough to buy a bottle of Laphroaig. Rachel didn�t drink the stuff and had given her a look when she�d told her it was for when Alan next visited.
And so here she is, about to start reading out a second poem to an audience in a public library as part of a showcase of �new writing talent�, when she sees Alan grinning in the back row. She stutters a bit on the first line before hearing his voice in her head, how he would rather file his teeth with a rusty nail than attend a poetry reading, and her voice grows louder and more confident with happiness as she recites to an audience of one.
Afterwards, he took her by the arm said, �Fuck this for a laugh�, and she enjoyed the looks they got, the whispers of recognition before striding back to her flat. Rachel was at a conference and by the time she phoned to find out how the reading had gone the Laphroaig was a third empty. Kathy could hear a note of disapproval in her girlfriend�s voice. �You�re already drunk, what sort of state are the two of you going to be in tomorrow?�
�But we�re drunk on success! And Alan�s here. This is what we do! Drink whisky and talk.�
But while they still laughed until Kathy got hiccups and the conversation flowed along at an easy rate, Kathy knew something wasn�t right. There was a manic edge to Alan, references to medication and he was thinner than she�d ever seen him, his face shadowed angles and planes. His nails were bitten to nothing and she noticed when he lifted the bottle to fill both their glasses the knuckles on one hand were scraped and scabbed.
He told her he was thinking of moving to Ireland, he had a friend there who had a caravan next to a beach. �A caravan?� she�d laughed and he�d replied �Well, can�t be sleeping on other folks floors all my life, can I now,� in a way that caused them both to fall silent. When she asked him about his writing he snorted. �I�m taking a break from that. Not the writing, can�t get rid of that. It�s hardwired, would be like giving up the drink. But the whole publishers, circus animal stuff�See, when travelling sometimes you find these people. Just guys or women in pubs or front rooms and all they do is talk and gather in stories and it makes you realise. Some of these folk are barely literate but their stories�it�s the real thing, them and the words and people listening. There might be a fire going and it�s like something from the past, hundreds of years old and it�s there in front of you and you realise that�s it and the rest is just�the rest is nothing.�
And when he�s finished she joins him on the couch where he�s sitting, his eyes turning red and she gives him a hug. Both hold on to each other and think of the years they�ve been together and they hold on to each other against the future. She feels how thin he is, as pared to the bone as his prose and how warm he is, how his twitching energy gives off heat. Eventually she pulls away and when they look at each other Alan says �Best hope Rachel doesn�t walk in,� smiling but his eyes elsewhere. Kathy lets him go and reaches for the bottle filled with the smell of peat and the sea and smoke.
ARDBEG
Although the barmaid in the pub of the small town had been helpful enough after she�d told her she�d been friends with Alan since university there had still been an undercurrent of suspicion. She�d wondered if he�d done something that had upset the locals until she realised they felt protective of him. �He�s had trouble from journalists before, people looking for autographs,� the barmaid told her. �We try to take care of him but I don�t know how he manages. I think he needs more friends visiting him,� and while her smile was supportive Kathy couldn�t help but feel guilty.
She�d been told to drive along the road until it petered out and a sandy path took over. Then she�d been told how far along the bay she would have to walk, past the dead tree and an old rotting fishing boat and then a bit further. But she hadn�t been told just how wet the drizzle of one of these �soft� days could be. The bottle of Ardbeg 1977 in her rucksack that had cost a fair portion of the advance she�d got for her third book of poems seemed to gain a pound for every step she took. Her lack of sleep since the letter she�d got from Alan a week ago, the raging argument she�d had with Rachel before driving off to get the ferry to Ireland and the excitement of seeing him again, all of it crowded in on her when she finally caught sight of the caravan hidden in a dip of land before the beach.
She stood, catching her breath and opened her mouth to let the rain wet it after it dried in panic. The caravan had such a derelict look to it, one of the windows broken and replaced by plastic sheeting. Pieces of junk lay strewn about and an image of Dorothy�s house blown up by the tornado came to mind. Alan�s home stood at an angle to everything but then she noticed a light flickering from behind the sheeting. She didn�t know whether to feel pity or relief but when the door swung open, barely held by its hinges and Alan ran across the grass to meet her with his arms open, relief won out.
He was wearing navy trousers and a thick woollen navy jumper and had grown a beard, or as much of a beard as Alan could ever grow. It gave his face a smudged appearance as though the artist drawing him had decided to start over again. He had the same fringe flopping down over eyes that, perhaps due to the further hollowing of his cheeks or the dimness of the light, seemed especially dark. The inside of the caravan matched the thrown together feel of the outside and Alan told her how his neighbours, the people in the town, had donated furniture. Sometimes people came to dump stuff on the beach and he pointed to a small stool, its flimsy legs bent under the weight of an Oxford English Dictionary. He told her how a bad storm a few months ago had blown off a section of the roof but tinks from a nearby camp had helped him out and she felt grateful for the care he�d had from these strangers.
The ordered chaos of notebooks, magazines and books reminded her strongly of that attic room where they first got drunk together. As she sat on an ancient armchair that released the smell of seaweed she knew she hadn�t had to worry as much as she had. Perhaps her eagerness to get here had been less for Alan�s sake than for her own. When she brought out her latest book and handed it over to him he smiled at it in a way that almost embarrassed her and she felt a stab of anger when she realised this was the look she�d wanted from Rachel. To distract herself she pulled out the bottle of Ardbeg but it was a while before Alan would look away from turning the pages. When he looked finally she was disappointed when his eyes barely registered the whisky. But she handed it over to him and when he read the label his eyes and smile turned wicked.
She�d thought he�d open it at that moment and was shocked when he set it down next to his chair. He laughed at her surprise. �I thought we could share it later with some friends of mine. Would you like a cup of tea instead? My own blend, there�s this shop in town that�s got teas from all over, the owner�s got a mania for it.� And while he tried to coax the gas stove into life she thought how safe it felt here, perched on the edge of the sea with thin walls protecting them.
He handed her a mug and it was the most refreshing cup of tea she�d ever tasted. Then they started talking, talking properly. It was damp and dark when they left the caravan to retrace her walk back to the car and they clung on to each other over the uneven ground, stopping every once in a while to listen to the waves beating out time.
She drove them back to town and then walked to the pub where she had asked for directions. Alan was a regular and it took a while to get settled as he was called over and she was introduced to old men and young couples, who joked about seeing him in here with a woman. After they�d sat down, two pints of the creamy Guinness in front of them, a log fire burning in the corner, she realised what it was that made the place such a pleasure. Although it wasn�t crowded there were people enough to create an atmosphere, one that welcomed everyone in. She could tell from the snippets of conversation she heard that everyone was telling stories; things that had happened to them when drunk one night, the ghost a friend of a friend had seen, the story of what had happened when the neighbours went to Africa. Alan and Kathy were happy to sit and listen, talking quietly but without the urgency of before. For a while they were happy to let other people do the talking.
Then after an hour or so Alan asked her for the Ardbeg from her rucksack and went up to the bar. �A glass for everyone�, he told them and while a tray was passed around he began telling them his stories and he held them with his voice. Kathy sipped the whisky that had all the flavours of the sea and thought of it as a kind of ritual, of Alan the magus at the centre of it, giving them stories to ward off the darkness outside, to bind them all together against loneliness. And each time she looked down at her glass that night it was full.
� Kirsti Wishart
Reproduced with permission
STEVEN MILLHAUSER
BEN KATCHOR
IAIN SINCLAIR
MICHAEL CHABON
PAUL AUSTER