Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

theoretical, as no such offer, and indeed no news
at all, from Asia or Africa appeared in today’s edition. I
rolled it up and decided to leave the national news until
later.
    Menial brushed crumbs from her lips and looked at me with
amusement. ‘You really look as though you’re paying
attention to all that,’ she said, picking up her leather
poke. I hitched my canvas satchel on my shoulder and we strolled
to the Glasgow train.
    ‘Well, I do follow the news,’ I said, somewhat
defensively, as we took our seats, this time facing each other
across a table. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
    Menial shrugged. ‘It’s so…
ephemeral,’ she said. ‘And unreliable.’
    ‘Compared with what?’
    ‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ she said.
‘I’m sure this, what is it -’ she reached for
the paper, and spread it out ‘ – Congress here is
real, and really did do what the article says it did. But it is
only a tiny part of the truth, and perhaps not the most important
part of what is going on there in Paris. Let alone what is going
on elsewhere in Paris. So that, and all the other such pieces
give you, really, a false picture of the world.’
    I could have been offended, but was not. ‘I’m a
scholar of history, remember?’ I said. ‘I understand
how newspaper reports, even documents aren’t everything
– ’
    ‘Oh, you don’t want to hear what I think about historical documents!’
    ‘So what else can you do?’
    She frowned at me, puzzled. ‘You travel around and find
things out for yourself.’
    ‘Aye, if only we all had the time.’
    She touched the tip of my nose with the tip of her finger.
‘It’s what tinkers do, and they have all the time in
their lives for it.’
    The train pulled out, the Moray Firth in sight at first, with
its kelp fields and fish-farms, and then nothing to see for a
while but the close-packed pines of Drumossie Wood as the train
turned and the engines took the strain of the long, slow ascent
to Slochd.
    A couple of hours later, maybe, after Speyside of the malts
and bleak Drumochter, we were in the long and beautiful glens
between Blair Atholl and Dunkeld. On one side of the line were
streams full of trout and turbines, on the other hillsides
buzzing with the saws and drills of workshops. The train stopped
for five minutes at Dunkeld. A small, old town of stone, still
with its Christian cathedral.
    Merrial looked out of the windows, around at the scene, and
sat back with a slight shudder.
    ‘A strange place,’ she said, ‘with the hills
around it like an ambush.’
    ‘But that’s why it’s a great place,’ I
said, and told her the story of how the Cameronians had held off
the Highland host and saved the Revolution to which they owed
their freedom. She listened with more interest, even, than my
telling of the tale deserved, and leaned back at the end and
said, ‘Aye well, maybe there’s some use to history,
after all. I’ll never be afraid of these hills
again.’
     
    It was two in the afternoon by the time the train reached
Glasgow’s Queen Street Station, and glad enough we were to
get off it. Sometimes two people who can fascinate each other
endlessly when alone together, and who can spark off each other
in convivial company, find themselves inhibited among strangers
who are unignorably in earshot, and find themselves growing shy
and silent and stale. So it was with us, towards the end of that
journey. I couldn’t even find it in my heart to talk about
the Battle of Stirling when we passed through the town.
    We both brightened, though, on jumping down on the platform.
The familiar Glasgow railway-station smell – of currying
fish, and curing leaf, and spark-gapped air, and old iron and
wood-alcohol and hot oil and burnt vanilla – hit my sinuses
like a shot of poteen. Menial, too, seemed invigorated by it,
taking a deep breath of the polluted stench with a look of
satisfaction and nostalgia.
    ‘Ah, it’s good to be back,’ she said.
    I glanced sidelong at her as we walked down the platform.
‘When were you in Glasgow? And how could I have missed
you?’
    She smiled and squeezed my hand. ‘Oh, I forget. Ages
ago. But the smell brings it back.’
    ‘That and the noise.’
    ‘The what?’
    ‘THE – ’
    But she was laughing at me.
    We crossed the station concourse, agreeing that, on balance,
pigeons were a worse nuisance than sea-birds (though, as Menial
gravely pointed out, better eating).