69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess Read online

  It was raining and the streets were not yet busy. I put the door on the latch. Moments later Karen pushed her way into my bedsit and handed me a curt note from one of my professors. I threw it into the bin. He wanted me to provide an explanation of why I’d missed a tutorial. I decided to lie and say I was sick. A terrible fever. I’d been laid up in bed for days. Karen made tea as I dressed. She poured me a cup and we exchanged pleasantries. She was concerned about me, said she couldn’t cover up my absences from college much longer. I told her I’d go in soon, but insisted I should stay off sick for one more day. I scribbled a note for her to hand in on my behalf. Karen giggled at her complicity in my skiving. I made toast and shared it with my friend.

  The rain eased off as I made my way up Union Street to Union Grove. I let myself into Alan’s flat. I don’t remember exactly when he gave me the key but I know it was some time before I had the dream about the burning sea. Alan was in bed, asleep with Rita. When I woke them Alan wanted a three-way fuck but I said later. We had things to do and bed-hopping could wait until it was dark. Alan resigned himself to waiting for nookie and got up. Rita wanted to waste time putting on make-up but I told her not to bother since we’d be climbing Tap o’ Noth later and she’d only sweat it off. Alan was out of both coffee and eggs, so we just jumped into his car and headed for Inverurie. I wanted to go to a café in the town centre but Alan thought it unlikely that any of them did anything but instant coffee, so we went to Safeway instead.

  Rita was embarrassed when we propped Dudley up in a chair at our table. The women doling out the fry-ups recognised us from the day before and were friendly. I used the toilets, which were spotlessly clean. We drove through Oyne, Insch and Kennethmont to get to Rhynie. Our first stop was the Old Kirkyard. This was a disappointment. The Pictish symbol stones had been moved into a horrid wooden construction to protect and preserve them from moss damage. The effect wasn’t hypperreal, it was mundane. There was no longer any aura of mystery about the stones. We spent a couple of minutes looking at them and left. There were more symbol stones on Rhynie Square, a very pleasant tree-lined village green. The atmosphere was picturesque rather than sublime and above all else pleasing. We lingered among these stones because one goes to such sites for the atmosphere as much as anything else.

  Scurdargue car park at the bottom of Tap o’ Noth was only a few minutes’ drive from Rhynie. Alan weighed Dudley down with some bricks and slung the dummy over his back. We had to explain to Rita that we were attempting to test the credibility of novelist K. L. Callan’s non-fiction work 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess. Rita found it hard to believe that anyone would even claim to have carted the corpse of a dead princess around the principal monuments of Aberdeenshire, let alone actually do it. Fortunately Alan had a copy of Callan’s tract in the car, so I was able to flash it at her. While I was doing this I clocked a bunch of film books Alan had stacked behind the driver’s seat. I figured he was intending to sell them to the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. I made a mental note to ask him about them before we headed back to the Granite City.

  We cut across a tree-fringed field. Then along a hedge-lined path and across another field. From there a path wound around the hill which was oval and extremely regular in shape. Alan complained that the ascent was boring. He preferred roughness and sudden variation. The local tourist board went to great lengths to stress that the hill was composed of Rhynie Chert, a rock that contains some of the oldest known fossils in the world, including that of Rhyniella praecursor, the earliest insect fossil. While this might have provided fuel for the imagination of a horror writer such as H. P. Lovecraft, it didn’t do much for Alan because the fossils were microscopic. Alan set a cracking pace despite having Dudley and a bunch of bricks strapped to his back. Rita whinged that the climb up the hill, which took all of 40 minutes, was exhausting.

  Our collective mood improved when we reached the vitrified hillfort that topped Tap o’ Noth. The views were spectacular and the Iron-Age stoneworks impressive. Having carried the dummy weighted with bricks up the hill, Alan quipped that he wouldn’t have wanted the responsibility of getting the thousands of boulders that constituted the fort to the top. The stones were ranged in an oval around the flat top of the hill, forming a defensive wall. Once the rocks had been put in place, brushwood was heaped over them and set alight to create the vitrification. Heated, they’d melted together to form an impregnable fortress. We walked around the wall of stones. The fortifications were even more impressive than those at Mither Tap. It was a great pity Tap o’ Noth’s regular features rendered it less impressive as a mountain.

  I’d studied the Stone Circle Trail booklet and as we stood taking in the view commented that we’d completed our itinerary. Alan laughed and said there were hidden features not included in the pamphlet, such as White Hill recumbent stone circle. When I asked Alan how he knew this he told me to check the notice board in the car park at the bottom of the hill. He’d glanced at it on the way up and spotted this extra attraction. Besides, my companion chuckled, White Hill is mentioned in 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, so I’d obviously not been doing my research very thoroughly. Rita, who was thumbing though Callan’s book, commented that having got the dummy up Tap o’ Noth we’d proved that it was possible to get a corpse to all the locations mentioned in this text. She then suggested that having done this, there was no point in taking Dudley to any of the other sites. In response, both Alan and I insisted that he’d definitely be going with us when we visited Sunhoney.

  Once we were sitting down on the edge of the fort, with a can of pop passing between us, I asked Alan about the film books in his car. As I’d surmised, he was planning to sell them. Alan explained that he’d not seen many of the Japanese sex movies described by Jack Hunter in Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood & Madness in Japanese Cinema, but some of the other tomes very accurately described his teenage cinema viewing in London. Alan had enjoyed reading Meat Is Murder: An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture by Mikita Brottman, since he’d been a huge fan of movies like Cannibal Holocaust and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when he’d been a kid. He lamented the steady loss of cinemas with the advent of video. He’d frequented flea pits all over London when he was young and now most of them had disappeared. The eminently social activity of going to the pictures had been replaced by the private vice of watching videos. The two things had very little in common. Alan insisted that he was unable to constitute himself as a bourgeois subject thanks, at least in part, to the influence of proletarian post-modernism in the form of horror films that lacked centred subjects.

  While Bev Zalcock utilised certain strands of feminist theory in defence of trash film in Renegade Sisters: Girl Gangs on Film, Alan preferred Carol J. Clover’s unashamedly ‘high-brow’ exploration of ‘low-brow’ culture in Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. For Alan, everything that was contradictory in Clover’s approach constituted her most productive critical contributions. He particularly appreciated Clover’s extended commentary on the flaws inherent in the notion of the ‘male gaze’, despite the fact that her arguments were still hopelessly enmeshed in the utterly discredited discourse of Freudian psychology. How anyone could believe in the unconscious was completely beyond Alan’s understanding. As far as he was concerned, superstitions of this type differed very little from traditional religion.

  Alan seemed to pass into a trance while describing in excessive detail the cinemas at which he’d first seen various trash films, so Rita and I put our arms around one another. As we petted I became quite excited and after Rita thrust a finger up my hole, I realised it was dripping wet. To excite Rita I drew up my things and poked my bottom out, hoping that she might suck and kiss it. My friend told me excitedly that my arse was splendid with its great fat cheeks bulging out on either side, and a most delicious randy-looking cunt gaping in the hollow between. Rita pulled open my lips with her fingers to view the rich carmine of my interior folds all glistening with the dew of love. Then drawing up her own dress
in a bid to attract Alan’s attention, she knelt before me and plunged her face between my wide-spread thighs, and kissed my cunt with such vehemence that I let out a loud moan of pleasure. This noise was enough to rouse Alan from his dreams and so Rita ate me out while our companion dropped his trousers and proceeded to work her hole with his throbbing manhood. After much grunting and groaning and many cries of pleasure, constituting a good 20 minutes’ worth of fucking, all three of us came together in an ego-negating simultaneous orgasm.

  After this orgy of lust we sat for some time contemplating the play of sunlight on the land spread beneath us. We descended Tap o’ Noth in a buzz of conversation, which flitted from movies to records and books. I don’t remember everything that was said but at one point Alan was gushing in his praise of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiography by Chuck Barris. This, Alan said, was a celebrity book with a difference. The tedious detailing of the Barris career from nonentity to the crowning glory of the The Gong Show was, of course, pretty much what you’d expect in a work of this kind. But rather than inducing passivity among his readership, Barris had constructed the book dialectically and in this fashion encouraged a critical attitude towards show-biz tittle-tattle. To do this Barris ran the narrative of his public career against a counter-narrative about his ‘secret’ work as a CIA assassin. Rather than offering verities for the faithful, Barris wanted people to question the veracity of everything he stood for. According to Alan, a similar device was used to even greater effect in Bad Wisdom by Bill Drummond and Mark Manning, where each of the writers offered a contradictory account of the same event.

  With this discussion still ringing in my ears we drove back through Kennethmont and Insch to Bennachie. I’d wanted to go to White Hill but Alan insisted that we had other business that needed attending to first. Rita didn’t seem to care where we went, she knew even less than I did about the stanes and was happy simply going along for the ride. Our first stop was Druidstone. Alan parked his Fiesta just off the road, weighed Dudley down with a few bricks and took off through a field. There were two guys with a dog, guns and a pick-up truck at the back of the field. They were loading up game they’d just shot and Alan fell into conversation with them. They weren’t sportsmen, they were local and intended to eat the birds they’d killed. When Alan said we were on our way to the Druidstone they nodded knowingly and gave detailed directions on where to find it.

  Druidstone is part of a ruined Bronze-Age circle. We had to trudge through a field of wind-damaged wheat before we found it at the bottom of a slope close to some derelict buildings. Bennachie looked beautiful as it brooded above us. I know brooded sounds as if it should be used with ‘sublime’ rather than ‘beautiful’ but I’m deliberately mixing my metaphors to express the contradictory emotions the mountain conjures up. Alan dumped Dudley by a stone at the edge of the ruined circle and when Rita cradled the dummy in her arms I felt jealous. Once Alan had taken four pictures of my friend canoodling the dummy, I insisted he take a photo of Dudley with his hand underneath my skirt.

  After returning to the car our next stop was Cothiemuir Wood. This recumbent circle wasn’t visible from the road but the men we’d met near Druidstone had said the path to the stanes was barred with a wooden pole and that opposite it there was an avenue of trees. I spotted a stone from the circle through some trees as we ambled along. This was a perfect way of coming upon a circle. First catching a glimpse from a distance and gradually getting to see more as we approached it. Cothiemuir Wood, within the grounds of Castle Forbes, seems originally to have consisted of eleven upright stones, mostly about seven feet high, forming a circle 25 yards in diameter. The two flankers were nine and a half feet high, and 15 feet asunder, the space between them being occupied by a massive recumbent stone upwards of five feet in diameter and thirteen and a half feet in length, lying on the west side of the circle. In the middle of the circle was a quantity of loose stones and near the centre, a slab of four or five feet square, covering a small pit open on the south side. The recumbent with its two flankers plus two uprights was still correctly positioned. The three other uprights that still stood were no longer vertical and these leaning stanes spoke of the ravages of time. At Cothiemuir Wood I took my skirt off and pulled my knickers down around my ankles, allowing Alan to take a picture of Dudley entangled in my arms.

  Motoring on, we saw the remains of Old Keig stone circle from the road as we approached it. However, the monument had disappeared by the time we parked at the far end of the avenue of trees in which it was located. We had to clamber over barbed wire to gain access to the avenue and rather than strapping Dudley to his back from the onset, Alan passed the dummy across this obstacle to me. At first our passage was blocked by recently planted saplings but once we got past these into the older trees the going was a little easier. Nevertheless, the path we picked up was quite overgrown and I rather wished I’d geared up in jeans since the brambles tore at my tights. The circle came back into view once we were up close to it. The monument, which was blemished by a great many more imperfections than Cothiemuir Wood, would have been 66 feet in diameter before its ruination. In the circumference of the circle there were two upright stones, the flankers, nine feet above ground, with the recumbent being about 16 feet long, six feet high and five feet broad at one end, of a quadrangular form and placed on the south side of the circle. Rita got her tits out before allowing Alan to take a photograph of Dudley embracing her.

  On the way back to Aberdeen Alan parked on a back road running off the A96. We walked past the ruins of Balquhain Castle, a large farmhouse and several cottages before cutting into a field of rape. The monument we sought was in the next field. Balquhain stone circle had suffered only slightly less damage than Old Keig, the recumbent and three uprights were still in position, the rest being scattered about nearby. Just a few feet from the circle was a quartz outlying stone and close up it was truly dazzling. Likewise, the view of Mither Tap from Balquhain was superb. All things considered, however, this circle was more impressive when viewed from the A96. At a distance the grass growing around the smashed-up stones stood out as a green circle in a sea of rape, giving the monument much-needed definition. Close up, this effect was lost and the stones were a disappointingly jumbled mess. Rita and I made a truce, so that when Alan took Dudley’s picture I sat on his plastic face with my skirt around my waist, while my companion simulated giving the dummy a blow job by positioning her head between his legs. After this Alan pointed out some cup marks on one of the stones. Rita asked me the time and then told Alan to stop fucking about. She needed to get back to Aberdeen because she’d promised to go to the cinema with her mum.

  Once we’d dropped Rita off we decided to go for an Indian meal. We thought we’d try The Jewel In The Crown since it had been voted best restaurant in Aberdeen several years in a row and neither of us had ever been there. The Jewel had a private car park for customers, so we headed straight to it in the Fiesta. Naturally, we had popadoms with chutney, Alan’s starter was mushroom bhaji, mine vegetable samosa, Alan had a spinach-and-potato curry with rice and nan, I had vegetable korma with rice and chappati. This was washed down with Kingfisher lager. We ate and talked about the places we’d been together: Alan was quite adamant that as long as he and Dudley were doing their double act, then we’d only visit historic monuments K. L. Callan name-checked in 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess. I lamented that this necessitated missing a number of very moody sites that were sometimes only a few hundred yards from the places we were visiting. I singled out New Craig, next to the Loanhead of Daviot circle, and the Balblair stone in the wood beside Midmar Kirk, as sites we really must visit after Dudley had been executed as Alan’s divine substitute.

  By the time the dessert arrived, Alan was talking about The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald. My companion considered this to be one of the worst travel books he had ever read. Sebald was a Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. This overpaid hack had t
aken the train from his academic base in Norfolk to the Suffolk border and then written an account of his travels south along the coast. Among other things, Sebald claimed to have difficulty imagining that tourists and business travellers would choose to visit Lowestoft. As Alan observed, it was through this type of half-baked rhetorical trick that the voyeuristic professor attempted to place himself outside the social system that his snobbish comments demonstrated he would never escape by dint of his own efforts.

  Alan castigated Sebald for telling the reader very little about Suffolk, and what he did have to say never rising above the level of clichés and inanities. Having stopped at the village of Middleton to visit his friend ‘the writer’ Michael Hamburger, Sebald not only considered it worth recounting that in the kitchen there were piles of Jiffy bags awaiting re-use, he even provided a photograph of them. Alan was scathing about this example of ‘anecdotal information’ from Sebald’s book, observing that one would imagine most writers are sent a good number of books – some for review, others as tokens of friendship, and yet more that may have been purchased by post for the purposes of research – and that many an author would save the Jiffy bags these books arrived in for re-use when they were mailing their own works to worthy and not-so-worthy recipients. After all, it was well known that most writers subsist on low incomes and that padded envelopes are expensive.

  Over coffee the conversation moved on to Napoleon’s How to Make War. Having talked about Suffolk, which was heavily fortified with Martello towers at a time when the British Government feared that Bonaparte would attempt to invade their dominion, Alan’s thoughts had turned naturally enough to the little corporal who’d transformed himself into a dictator. My companion possessed a recent English translation of Napoleon’s military maxims and he considered it to be the greatest manual on the art of seduction never written. Later when I skimmed the book I quickly saw how Alan had applied its lessons not only to the earthy relationship he enjoyed with me, but also in his dealings with other women. What Alan had discovered – or to put it more accurately, rediscovered – was that theory was not the practice of seduction. Indeed, those whose experience in the art of seduction was limited to the realm of theory did not even make good theoreticians. It is not enough to theorise the art of seduction, this art must be practised. However, for the practice to be effective it must be historically informed. To reduce Alan’s rich insights to a few words, the rake must constantly reforge the passage between the theory and practice of seduction. Ultimately, the seducer must be seduced by their art, so that the senses may become theoreticians. Strangely enough, Alan always insisted that it was the smells he gave off before bathing that proved he was not only a master strategist but also a cunning tactician.