The Words of the Mouth

  ******

  I've always known lots of rats. I think I'm drawn to the devils in this life, rather than the grey, respectable people in between the extremes. I prefer them partly because they are dangerous and 1 enjoy the excitement that brings, but also because, to me, they seem more sure of enlightenment than most of us; they learn from everything they do, all the hard knocks teach them lessons.

  The King of the rats was Dougie, a charming rogue whom 1 met just after we'd started working on the restoration of the Mill and its outbuildings. A friend sent him up here from Edinburgh, thinking we might give him a job. He had just come back from Australia where he had spent three years in jail for smuggling vast amounts of LSD.

  Dougie had an open, innocent way of speaking. He was like a Viking, strongly built, with thick bushy hair and very dark, impenetrable eyes, the whites obscured by flecks of blood. With him came Ed, a twenty-stone, hulking he-man who couldn't read or write. Ed was like Dougie's possession, he would do whatever his master told him, like carry heavy loads of drugs across borders on foot.

  Dougie saw people in two classes: there were the people with power, the Barons, and everybody else was a serf, a peasant. He saw himself as a baron, of course, and he tried to cultivate anybody whom he thought was also a baron. He believed I had a lot of connections and power in the area, so he tried desperately to keep in with me.

  After he had been here a few weeks, I started hearing stories about his past; how he'd charmed people into giving him money which they would never see again, how he seemed immune to arrest, despite building up a large operation selling hashish while arrests were being made all around him, how he was an informer because he had been seen being picked up by the police, put into their car and driven away, then released with no charge.

  It was also said that he was a chronic gambler, that he once lost five thousand pounds at the bookie's in a single day, that his yearly losses amounted to at least a hundred thousand.

  Up the road from the Mill, in a cottage near a forest, lived a couple named Andy and Jennifer, the society lady living with the woodcutter.

  Andy was the first person to warn me about Dougie, although he had never met him and wouldn't have known him on sight. One day he came to visit me and began telling me about another treacherous act of the notorious Dougie, who was actually sitting at my kitchen table just then, rolling a cigarette.

  "Andy," I said, cutting him off, "This is Dougie," Andy was so embarrassed that he rushed out of the room. But the next time I went up to his cottage, who was there but Dougie, selling him a piece of dope.

  This was how he got power over people; he knew they wanted dope and he would sell it to them no matter what they said about him. Andy had compromised himself buying from the very man whose treachery he had warned me against.

  Dougie always confused everybody he dealt with; he was totally unpredictable, one never knew where he was going to be next. Someone would phone up to say, "Dougie, where have you been? We were expecting you today."

  "Ooh, the car's broken. doon," he would explain, "Ah'll be over later," Then he would turn up at the house of people he hadn't made an appointment to see. Or someone would say, "I'm on my way over to see you."

  "Aye, Ah'll be there in ten minutes," he would reply, as he hung up.

  One day I heard three successive stories about Dougie, all bad. I began to consider whether I should be more careful with him. That afternoon, he was again sitting at the table when Don walked in, having driven up from Edinburgh. Don had a violent past and many criminal connections.

  "This is Dougie," I said, introducing him.

  He had never met Dougie, but he knows everything about anybody in Scotland, who's got form, and he knew all about Dougie's reputation. I could see him figuring out which Dougie this was out of all there are. Don reacts instinctively to what he senses in people and his hackles began to rise. He stared hard at Dougie, whose eyes are difficult to look into, fixing him with a cold, reptilian glare and leaned menacingly across the table until their faces were almost touching.

  Dougie drew back into his chair first in surprise, then alarm.

  Suddenly, Don screeched at point-blank range: "AAAHHRG!" causing Dougie to half-fall, half-scramble from the chair in horror, gasping and trembling as he picked himself up and fled from the room. In that moment the .mask came off his face and I thought ‘That's the real you, Dougie, just a worm.’

  I followed after and found him in the yard, shaking from head to foot.

  "Wh - who the fu - fuck was that?"

  At the same instant, Don stormed out of the house past us, his clenched fist clutching an imaginary knife, which he stabbed repeatedly into his own back as he went. When his temper is up, he takes himself away very smartly, but he was warning me about Dougie as well as signalling his intentions towards him.

  After that, I cut Dougie. "I've heard too many things about you," I told him. "I'll meet you in the street, I'll say hullo to you, but don't step through my door again."

  He took a long time to get the message; he kept turning up drunk, hoping I'd relent.

  "Get out, Dougie You're not coming in," I had to say more than once.

  Don and I started to grow a, crop of cannabis, then we decided to give most of the young plants to Andy and Jennifer. Later that autumn, after Andy had harvested several pounds of leaves, the drug squad raided a friend of his living not far away. Immediately, he thought Dougie had told the police and that he would be next, so he secretly moved the bags of grass to a nearby church, hiding them in the back of the ruined building. The next time he went there to check on it, all three pounds had vanished.

  Soon, Dougie came by the Mill and spoke to me, "Ah've just found all this dope, bags o' it. Is it onything tae dae wi' you?"

  "No, it's not mine."

  "Well, Ah want tae gie it back."

  "I know whose it is, but I'm not telling you. I'll tell him and he can see you about it."

  I went to see Andy and told him, "Dougie has your dope. Go up and get it back from him."

  But he wouldn't, he was afraid to.

  As I became more convinced Dougie was an informer a.nd concerned that something must be done about it, I decided the best thing was to get everyone I knew to cut him out of their lives, so I went round visiting people, saying, "If you continue to see Dougie, I won't see you. Any more dealings with him, and that's it."

  There were two friends of mine in the area, partners who dealt in large amounts of smuggled dope; one lived in a cottage in Fife and the other, Alex, lived near Kinross. I went to visit Alex and who was in his cottage but Dougie.

  I hadn't warned Alex yet, and I felt at once that he was in danger. I pretended to be surprised.

  "What the hell are you doing around here, Dougie?"

  "Whaddya mean?" he said innocently.

  "I don't know what you've been up to, but I've been getting all these phone calls from angry guys looking for you, really heavy guys trying to find out where you are. You'd better keep out of sight."

  I turned to Alex: "As for you, I don't know why you've let this person into your house."

  The feeling I had about Alex didn't go away, and a few weeks later 1 felt certain that something was going to happen to him, so I drove down again to see him. It was night and as I sped up the country lane I ran over a hare. The death of the hare was like a horrible premonition, and when I got to the house, the two of them, Alex and his wife, were about to leave to pick up a dope shipment. There was something lithe and graceful about Alex which reminded me of the hare.

  "Don't leave," I said, telling them of my fears, "There's something terribly wrong."

  "This is going to be our last load," they reassured me; then they'd stop.

  And that very night they were busted with forty pounds of resin. Alex got the rap for everybody, the heaviest drug sentence in Scotland: ten years in prison.

  After Alex went to jail, Dougie continued to hang around his house long enough to get his wife pre
gnant and charm her into giving him several hundred pounds. Then he went away, faded from the scene.

  But four years later, I heard that he had come back to north Fife, that he had bought a farmhouse up the road, a big, expensive baron's house, that he was married, and, it was rumoured, that he had one hundred and twenty grand stashed in the woods.

  'Hell,' I thought, 'I'm going to have to meet him sooner or later.' Sure enough, he came to the Mill, but I wasn't there. Eventually I decided that although I knew he was a scoundrel, I would treat him exactly as I found him at the time, but I would have no business dealings with him.

  So when we did meet, 1 said, "Look, Dougie, I think you're a grass",

  and told him exactly what I thought. "Well, everybody changes," he said.

  I interrogated him for two hours about his activities but couldn't get a clear picture of whether or not he had been an informer.

  "Ach, well, whan yer haundlin thoosands o' poonds, aabody gets verrae paranoid."

  So I left it at that, let the past be past.

  Then he told me he wanted to compensate Andy for the bags of grass he had found behind the church years ago. I had helped to cut him out socially, and now he wanted to get back in, to make himself acceptable, so I agreed to be his spokesman. We went to Andy's cottage, but when Andy came into the room, he stopped abruptly and stared at Dougie, saying nothing.

  "Ah'll gie ye a poond o' hash tae mak up fur that grass …"he began, but Andy turned sharply and went to another room. I began to feel a little sorry for Dougie who was trying to change and make amends.

  Some months later, 1 heard that the police had arrested him and charged him with conspiring to sell dope which reportedly wasn't even his.

  At his trial, they had to get an interpreter to translate his Fife accent. He took it all in good humour, drawing cartoons of the judge and passing them around the courtroom. He went to jail, of course, leaving his wife to survive on the buroo, all his money blown away, alone in his baron's house.