The Words of the Mouth

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  Mairi's parents lived on the coast of Argyll in a large, decaying Victorian house full of antiques. Samurai swords, and dry rot. They lacked the imagination or will power to repair it, abandoning whole rooms to decay and the weather, which came in through unrepaired windows during the frequent Atlantic gales.

  They never expressed any love, or indeed, any emotion. At dinner one evening, Mairi accidentally said "Fuck"; there was a moment of shock when everything stopped; then they carried on as if nothing had happened.

  Her mother has a black hole in her mind into which she shoves anything new or different or threatening. She hates the channel tunnel scheme because she says "it will allow communism to seep into the country". One of her neighbours is a famous writer whose house is full of books and visitors from all over the world, but she won't have anything to do with ‘that’ woman, who is the honorary head of an African tribe.

  "Oh, that communist", she exclaimed dismissively when I glowingly described a visit I paid the authoress.

  I could see that Mairi had been starved of affection by her parents, who had sent her away to boarding school, and that despite her warmth towards people, she was materialistic and possessive like them, although she tried hard to counteract this tendency,

  I had urged her parents to have the house treated for dry rot and had even arranged for Rentakill to inspect it and send an estimate. The day after the estimated bill for £9000 arrived, her father died of a stroke.

  He left £100,000, a quarter of a million in securities, and a large estate with at least a dozen houses on it.

  All Mairi's mother's relatives turned up for the funeral; condescending, disdainful superior people who talked about the weather, cricket, anything trivial except this man who had just died and what his life had been about. My father came with us to the funeral; he brought a bottle of whisky and tried to turn the gathering into a wake, but they all prattled on about money. The oppressive feeling of death and insanity was intolerable. Alongside these dull, not-alive people of his generation, my father seemed radiant and vital, exuding life and spirit, keeping the talk going. Suddenly I perceived what a magnificent man he really was.

  Later, when no one was about, I went out on the beach and found a really nice stone and placed it reverently on Colonel MacDonald's coffin.

  The service was in a large, chilly hall. The gathered relations sang the hymn 'My Father has many mansions', I looked around at their blank faces; ’Bastards! Not one of you believes in what the words are really about.’

  I wanted to kill them all, even Mairi, to put a bomb under the house and blow the whole lot up.

  Afterwards, I went down to the beach and ran furiously along the water's edge, screaming my rage into the wind, until I collapsed, and the roar of the surf slowly restored me.

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