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Authors: Stewart Home
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graveyard we went into the Maryculter Hotel and had coffee. Alan paid, and if I recall correctly I was horrified by the price. In retrospect it is very difficult to place everything in order, my own memories have become confused with things Alan told me and incidents I read about later in his books and diaries. I’m sure we went into the kirkyard before going into the hotel but I’m not sure whether we hit Maryculter before Portlethen. Anyway, at some point before heading back to the Granite City, we visited four stone circles to the west of Portlethen. Craighead Badentoy was our first stop. This much-disturbed four-poster belonged to people running dog kennels. We knocked at the door and once all the dogs had been brought in from the field we were given a tour of the stones by a very friendly woman. The circle had a nice feel to it, the raised bank making it particularly enticing as a location for an outdoor shag – although there was little chance of having sex at the site given that most of the time it was overrun by dogs. After thanking our guide for sharing her knowledge of the site with us, we walked down the hill and through an industrial estate to Cairnwell. This is a Clava ring cairn that has been moved a few hundred yards to provide a feature on an otherwise featureless industrial estate. Alan carried Dudley on his back to both these circles.
Having retrieved the car, we backtracked to Auchquhorthies, only a mile and a half from Craighead Badentoy. At some point we made love under a waning moon at this monument. As far as I can recall our first visit to this recumbent stone circle was made while it was still light. We didn’t bother asking the farmer’s permission to go into the field since Alan generally preferred to trespass. The circle was comprised chiefly of red stones although the recumbent and the one remaining flanker were of quartz-streaked granite. A mere 300 yards away was Old Bourtreebush, and all we had to do to get to this badly damaged circle was cross a field. It was while traversing the field between these two ancient monuments that I began a series of ongoing conversations with Alan about horror and slasher films. Alan was fascinated by low-budget celluloid of the 70s and 80s, not simply because he’d grown up watching this trash, he was morbidly obsessed with the way their mainly male audiences identified with female victim-heroines.
I remember one time I went out to Old Bourtreebush with Alan’s ventriloquist’s dummy and it might have been the books I’d been reading, but I ended up dressing the dummy in garlands of grass and trying to get a cow to eat it. Alan always carried the dummy around in the car and I guess we had it with us that first time we headed out to Auchquhorthies. Anyway the cows wouldn’t eat the dummy despite the fact that it was dressed in a fine suit of grass. Alan said cryptically that I’d end up eating him. Or perhaps this was when I first declared my intention to make a meal from Alan’s mortal remains, or at least began planning to do just that. I’m jumping ahead of myself here but what Alan was doing to me with all his talk about books and subjectivity was like rape and in the end it more or less killed me. It wasn’t that I wanted to murder Alan, the script simply made his death inevitable, that’s the whole point of a rape-revenge narrative, the rapist has to die.
By the time we got back to the car, Alan was talking about a novel called The Hackman Blues by Ken Bruen. While Alan thought the book was competently executed, he wasn’t interested in getting inside the mind of a psychotic criminal, particularly when the first-person narrator manages to constitute himself as a centred subject despite the fact that he’d been medicalised in a way that makes it clear he was highly resistant to bourgeois norms. A dog howled at the moon and Alan mentioned his real beef about Bruen’s book. The narrator, who has zero taste when it comes to booze, at one
Having retrieved the car, we backtracked to Auchquhorthies, only a mile and a half from Craighead Badentoy. At some point we made love under a waning moon at this monument. As far as I can recall our first visit to this recumbent stone circle was made while it was still light. We didn’t bother asking the farmer’s permission to go into the field since Alan generally preferred to trespass. The circle was comprised chiefly of red stones although the recumbent and the one remaining flanker were of quartz-streaked granite. A mere 300 yards away was Old Bourtreebush, and all we had to do to get to this badly damaged circle was cross a field. It was while traversing the field between these two ancient monuments that I began a series of ongoing conversations with Alan about horror and slasher films. Alan was fascinated by low-budget celluloid of the 70s and 80s, not simply because he’d grown up watching this trash, he was morbidly obsessed with the way their mainly male audiences identified with female victim-heroines.
I remember one time I went out to Old Bourtreebush with Alan’s ventriloquist’s dummy and it might have been the books I’d been reading, but I ended up dressing the dummy in garlands of grass and trying to get a cow to eat it. Alan always carried the dummy around in the car and I guess we had it with us that first time we headed out to Auchquhorthies. Anyway the cows wouldn’t eat the dummy despite the fact that it was dressed in a fine suit of grass. Alan said cryptically that I’d end up eating him. Or perhaps this was when I first declared my intention to make a meal from Alan’s mortal remains, or at least began planning to do just that. I’m jumping ahead of myself here but what Alan was doing to me with all his talk about books and subjectivity was like rape and in the end it more or less killed me. It wasn’t that I wanted to murder Alan, the script simply made his death inevitable, that’s the whole point of a rape-revenge narrative, the rapist has to die.
By the time we got back to the car, Alan was talking about a novel called The Hackman Blues by Ken Bruen. While Alan thought the book was competently executed, he wasn’t interested in getting inside the mind of a psychotic criminal, particularly when the first-person narrator manages to constitute himself as a centred subject despite the fact that he’d been medicalised in a way that makes it clear he was highly resistant to bourgeois norms. A dog howled at the moon and Alan mentioned his real beef about Bruen’s book. The narrator, who has zero taste when it comes to booze, at one
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