Between the Bridge and the River Read online

  Margaret felt the back of her neck tingle.

  This could be her ticket to London.

  Oh my God.

  Much later, when he lost his sight, Fraser thought how odd it was that Margaret never at any point asked if the allegations against him were true or not.

  Tracy Flood had never slept with Fraser but she wanked him off one Christmas. It was back at the Evening Times when he was on the sports desk and she was Big Bruce Patterson’s assistant. She’d been drunk, of course, everyone at the Evening Times was drunk all year. The Christmas party just meant they were slightly more drunk with paper hats on. Fraser had put his arm around her in the Press Bar, had called her doll and said that Big Bruce couldn’t find his fucking jacket without her doing it for him.

  He had talked her up in front of the nasty wee damp men of Scottish journalism as they stood in their coven in front of the bar clutching their lagers and whiskies (always two drinks—one for each face). He even stood up for her when Jack Trampas, a ridiculous old buffoon who wore a trilby and wrote a restaurant column in the style of Raymond Chandler, suggested that she was shagging Big Bruce and that’s why she’d become the editor’s assistant.

  She’d been grateful, not grateful enough to blow him or fuck him, but she’d performed a perfectly adequate hand shandy in the back of a mini-cab and the deal seemed fine with Fraser, who had then stumbled off into the night, leaving her to pay her own fare home.

  She held no grudge, this wasn’t personal. It was nothing to do with back then. The only thing she had against Fraser was his success. He was ripe for cutting. That was her job. She filed her copy. She knew it would get page one.

  THE LORD’S LAYER!

  Horny Holyman in Sexy Backstage Rites

  Exclusive by Tracy Flood

  TV cleric Fraser Darby has been revealed as a sex-mad pervert by former Scottish Television makeup lady Julie McGrade. Julie, who worked at Scottish Television for five years before leaving last week due to personal problems, says the randy reverend forced his attentions on her and many of the other employees he worked with.

  Animal

  “He’s an animal!” said Julie. “He liked me to pleasure him orally before he did his programme. As I was doing it, he liked me to hum Psalm twenty-three, ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd.’ He said it put him in the mood for God. At first I thought he wanted a relationship, but I realize now he was just using me for sex.”

  Endowed

  According to Julie, the pervy priest, who is NOT EVEN a real clergyman, is endowed with more than a gift for gab. “When I first saw his manhood, I was afraid. It was so big, but he just laughed and told me the Lord would protect me. He is obviously a very sick man, but I still hope that we can work things out and maybe one day get together and have a relationship.”

  Jumpers

  Julie is only one of the many women who have fallen victim to the Rasputin-like attentions of the lusty TV vicar, who hides his rampant desires beneath his trademark fluffy jumpers.

  Charlotte Cameron, an innocent nineteen-year-old student who worked on Darby’s programme during her summer break from university, where she is studying modeling and media studies (see pic on page 3), said she is considering filing a sexual harassment suit against the star, claiming that he FORCED her to bend over his desk when she was handing him his morning coffee so that he could look down her blouse. “He said Jesus could have done better feeding the five thousand with my boobies than using some old bread and stale fish. It was disgusting. I’m a Jehovah’s Witness, so what he said really shocked me.”

  Investigation

  The star was unavailable for comment last night, but TV boss Gus Magoogan said that an investigation into the allegations would begin immediately.

  “We are a family network,” said Magoogan. “If these allegations are true . . .”

  More on pages 6, 7, 8, and 10.

  * * *

  They hadn’t used any of his publicity shots. Instead there was an old picture of Fraser that had been taken by an amateur paparazzo as he was leaving his local supermarket. He looked fat.

  George missed the whole scandal; by Sunday he was in London. He could have got the Scottish Sunday papers there, of course, but he would have to have gone to a big railway station or the airport or a Scottish pub, none of which he fancied. He thought he felt the first stab of the cancer but it was just the intestinal complications of having eaten a three-week-old meat pie at Watford Gap services. Old offal and nerves will play havoc with your system, although he couldn’t imagine why he was so jumpy. Jumpy, ha-ha.

  He had already established that there was no afterlife, at least he thought he had. He had already convinced himself that there was no hell to look forward to, and even if there was, they’d have to have a pretty fucking lax door policy to let him in.

  He tried to figure out what was scaring him about his impending death. Was it pain? No, not really, he was fairly convinced that he’d pass out during the fall. He figured that maybe what really scared him about dying is that maybe he’d be missing something.

  He’d already missed a healthy dose of Schadenfreude that would have warmed him to the core of his being. Reading about Fraser’s humiliation and disgrace would have reached him like Karen Carpenter to a coma victim. But he didn’t know that he had missed it, because he had missed it.

  He parked the car on a double yellow in Soho and took a taxi to Tower Bridge.

  Fraser got drunk on Saturday night. He bought the early edition of the newspaper and drank almost two liters of Russian vodka alone, sitting on his couch weeping in self-pity and shame.

  He was asleep in a pool of his own urine when the postman slipped the golden embossed invitation envelope through his front door.

  They don’t normally deliver on a Sunday.

  IN DREAMS

  FRASER HAD NEVER LIKED FLYING but since September 11 it had gotten much worse. Obviously.

  What the hell was wrong with these people anyway? Fucking Arabs, flying planes into buildings and strapping dynamite to their shoes. Fuck!

  One night in the Press Bar, Jack Trampas put forward the theory that the reason the Arabs were so angry was because they were so ugly. Howls of derision from the left-wing politically correct alcoholics he drank with, including Fraser, but Trampas persisted.

  “Look at that shoe bomber guy, he’s a freak. The mug shots of these hijackers, they’re like the fucking Addams family. They’re mad because they see pictures of the beautiful people in Hollywood and they’re jealous.”

  “Nobody looks good in a mug shot.”

  “What about Zsa Zsa Gabor? When she smacked that cop?”

  “She was cheatin; she’s almost 90 percent Teflon.”

  “Winona Ryder?”

  “Och, she’s just a ratty wee junkie. Anyway, she never hurt anyone, she just stole a cardigan or somethin.”

  “Jack, you are a hideous specimen of humanity and I don’t see you blowing things up,” squeaked Robbie, the camp barman, as he poured himself an Advocaat.

  Fraser laughed. “That’s because he attacks the West with his god-awful literary style. Restaurant critique as jihad.”

  “Say what you like, but if these guys had a decent dental plan and took a bath every now and then, they’d be less likely to commit mass murder.”

  “Wouldn’t we all,” Robbie agreed.

  Ewan Grayston, the taciturn sports writer from the Herald, who was annoyed that the conversation had turned away from the intricacies of Scottish league division football, decided to end the conversation with the coup de grâce to Jack’s theory.

  “I can prove you wrong in three words, Jack.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “Andrew Lloyd Webber.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Ugliest bastard that ever lived, never hurt a fly.”

  “Aye, but he’s rich. Anyway, I would disagree that he never hurt anybody. I went to that fucking Phantom of the Fucking Opera when I was in London, and I felt a distinct pain in my wa
llet. Plus I was bored to death with that prick with the Halloween mask swinging on a light and singing the same song for three fucking hours, and my fucking ears were bleeding by the time I left. When I think about it now, I should report the cunt to Amnesty International.”

  And so they continued.

  There was always someone who was being raked over the coals in the Press Bar. They would be laughing at him now, thought Fraser as he sat in the back of the rattly, cold taxi on the way to Glasgow Airport.

  Bastards.

  The taxi slowed to a halt in the damp, wet traffic jam that consistently clogged the Kingston Bridge. Fraser, hung over and achy, fell into a light sleep. A white-haired old man in a red Indian costume appeared as if by magic. He sat next to Fraser, unnoticed by the taxi driver, who had turned into a dog-headed minor ancient Egyptian deity. Fraser turned and saw the old man in the outfit of a Comanche shaman.

  “Bloody hell, Carl, Halloween already?”

  The dog-headed taxi driver turned around.

  “What’s that, pal?”

  The old man disappeared. The taxi driver lost his beautiful canine head and returned to being a thick-necked Glaswegian. Fraser was awake.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking out loud.”

  Fraser had been undergoing psychoanalysis for nearly two years. He hadn’t sought out his therapist, rather it was the other way around.

  Frasier had climbed the journalistic ladder with some ease. From working on the sports desk at the Times he had gotten a job as an on-camera reporter for Scottish Sports Roundup on Saturday afternoons, covering such Earth-shattering events as a goalless draw between Partick Thistle and Albion Rovers in the second round of the Scottish Cup. The producers of the local sports show, who also covered the news, were impressed with his easy charm and cheeky way with the camera. Soon he was promoted to weatherman on the nightly news, and like all weathermen, he pretended he was responsible for the weather, apologizing when it was raining and taking credit for the occasional sunny spell. It was a strange conceit but an industry standard. All weather-men do it.

  Usually the banter is helped along by the anchorman or -woman or both, who pretend to be angry if they’re not getting nice weather from the weatherman. This, of course, is insanity but it’s also the media, so it doesn’t matter. It’s all lunacy. Mob rule. Bread and circuses.

  One night before Christmas, Fraser was in the Press Bar enjoying much drink and ferocious calumny when he got a call. All cell phones had to be turned off in the bar and it was a strict rule that no one received a call on the bar phone unless it was an emergency. This Christmas Eve Fraser got a call from Gus himself. He was panicked.

  “Fraser, are you drunk?”

  “Not yet. Why?”

  “Get back to the studios. Morris has just had a heart attack, he’s been carried off in an ambulance.”

  “Jesus, okay. I’ll be right over.”

  “Fraser, not a word of this to those fucking hyenas in there.”

  “Of course, Gus, of course.”

  Fraser hung up and announced to the entire bar that he had to go because Old Morris had had a heart attack and had been carried off in an ambulance.

  The hyenas who were sober enough rushed to file copy. Morris Cuskerton had been an institution in Scotland for decades. He presented a variety show called The Three O’Clock Gang on Scottish TV in the fifties, then news, then a talk show where he interviewed local celebs and the occasional movie star who was passing through on the way to St Andrews for the golf. He was Scotland’s Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, and Dick Clark rolled into one. Real old-timey television. For the past ten years he had been farmed out to the late-night religious spot, which was meant to be a bridge to retirement, but it became popular because it was live (Morris insisted on working live—it was the only way to do TV, he said, like the old days) and he occasionally would make fantastic blunders or be tipsy as he delivered his “Thoughts for the Day.” On one memorable occasion he made a reference to the Virgin Mabel. People loved this shit, and the Christmas Eve broadcast was the most popular because he would almost certainly be hammered and make a complete tit of himself. All of the country would be watching except the Diogenes club in the Press Bar, who had no festive spirit.

  Fraser was being called to fill in for Morris. This was the call to glory. Sink or swim, live or die. Live TV, no script, no net.

  Fraser, the charmed, the lucky boy, was in the right place at the right time with just the right amount of alcohol in his system. He was relaxed, sexy, and confident, so when the word came through, only seconds before Fraser went on air, that Old Morris had died on arrival at the hospital, he took command and broke the tragic news to a shocked nation.

  He was magnificent, he spoke with reverence and just the right amount of sadness. He recalled Morris’s glittering career on Scottish Television, remembering shows that even Gus had forgotten, like Cartoon Company, which Morris had hosted in the sixties, a cheap throw-together using Hollywood animated shorts like Tom and Jerry or Woody Woodpecker, where Morris pretended he knew the cartoon characters and “talked” to them on the phone even though they were in America.

  He would put his hand over the receiver and say, “Daffy Duck wants to wish Stewart MacDougal of Falkirk a happy eighth birthday and a big hello to his Grandpa Sneddon.”

  Fraser talked of Morris’s love of the Glasgow Rangers Football Club, and steered clear of the dead man’s reputed fanatical allegiance to the bigoted and medieval Orange Lodge, a band of über-Protestants who had a very confused allegiance to William of Orange, a noted pederast and Dutch monarch who had successfully suppressed Catholics some hundreds of years previously. He talked of Morris’s charm, his wit, and hinted at his fondness for strong alcoholic beverages (which is seen as a great character asset in Scotland). And then, the stroke of genius.

  He finished with—

  “—so as we are hanging up our stockings tonight and leaving carrots and whisky out for Santa and his reindeer, Morris Cuskerton will be arriving at the pearly gates. A Christmas present for heaven.”

  A grieving country was grateful for his words.

  Fraser had landed the God spot. The G spot.

  It was about this time that the late Carl Gustav Jung started working with Fraser. Jung, of course, had died in 1961, which was the year before Fraser was born, so the conditions under which they met were slightly unconventional, but as Fraser had never had any form of treatment before, he had nothing to compare it to. It seemed normal to him and was certainly much cheaper than paying a living therapist, who, chances are, would be nowhere near as good as Carl.

  Fraser had gotten drunk on fame and champagne after the broadcast of Morris’s death. The next few days he was lauded in the Scottish press as a hero for capturing the mood of the nation. He was a star, and by the end of January the following year he had his own show. Every night. People wanted him to talk about God, so he did. For cash.

  As it is with success, sometimes he got too excited to sleep. He thought about taking pills to help him but he didn’t want to get hooked on anything, so he just drank whisky instead. One bright night in April, Fraser concluded that he was drinking too much. He had become a little concerned about how much he was throwing down, and the last thing he wanted to do was end up in some crappy rehab or “show business hospital,” as Jack Trampas called it.

  He decided that he would abstain for two nights a week. The first night, a Tuesday, was rough and he didn’t drift off until seven A.M., when the sun was peeking in through the heavy crushed-velvet drapes of his West End flat. As soon as he was asleep he found himself in a lovely meadow in Switzerland. A round tower was off to his left and he felt an urge to walk toward it; as he did so he became aware that instead of getting nearer to the tower he was sinking underground.

  He found himself in an underground chamber that had curtains not unlike the ones in his flat. He opened the curtains. But instead of sunlight behind them, he saw a giant penis, about the size and color
of a bull African elephant, veiny and erect and pointing to the sky.

  Carl appeared behind him.

  “Do you mind?” said Carl in a deep voice, laced with a sweet accent.

  “Mind what?” said Fraser, without talking. He just thought it but he knew the old man could hear him.

  “Do you mind not looking at my penis!”

  “This can’t be your penis,” Fraser thought.

  “It bloody is,” said Carl. “Stop staring at it.”

  “But it’s about a hundred times the size of you, it’d never fit in your trousers.”

  “I don’t want it in my trousers. I like it in this big hole in the ground.”

  “You’re nuts!”

  “No, just the penis. My nuts are in my underpants. Boom-boom!”

  Fraser woke up in a flop sweat. He checked himself. He had a massive erection.

  Jesus, thought Fraser, but he was wrong.

  Fraser and Carl met in the oddest of places. Carl, being dead, didn’t have an office and could only appear to Fraser in his dreams, which in itself was very Jungian. He would only appear if Fraser had taken the requisite break from alcohol, so in a way Fraser could control the visitations, drinking when he wanted peace and stopping when he felt like therapy.

  Although the dreams were Fraser’s, he got the distinct impression that the old man chose the venue and implanted it in his psyche. They met in ancient Greece, in Studio 54 at the height of the cocaine seventies. They chatted as they walked through no-man’s-land between the besieged armies in Ypres in 1917 (Carl had a fondness for the years 1914 to 1918, as, during life, he had had a bit of a breakdown during this period and felt he had missed a lot of what was going on in the temporal world, although he had been extremely busy elsewhere). The collective unconsciousness was their oyster.

  Jung took full advantage of living in dreamland to appear in any guise he wanted, because Fraser would always know it was him, although Fraser put his foot down when he appeared as a ferocious grizzly bear.