nothing but a set of eyes for stars: New Writing Scotland 41 is the latest collection of excellent contemporary literature, drawn from a wide cross-section of Scottish culture and society, and includes new work from thirty-nine authors. Read of the short stories featured in the collection, ‘Fall in Love and Buy a Horse’ by Kevin MacNeil.

Nothing But a Set of Eyes For Stars
Edited by Kirsten Innes and Marjori Lotfi
Published by the Association for Scottish Literature

Kevin MacNeil

FALL IN LOVE AND BUY A HORSE

‘It’s half giraffe, half anteater, half horse, half deer and half some more giraffe.’ The man crouches, leans over the dark mass, prods it with a hesitant finger. ‘And definitely dead.’

Macy Starfield bends down beside the stranger and regards the heavy black shape on the pavement, her forehead wrinkling in disbelief and pity.

‘I mean, what was it?’ says the man.

*

Shall I buy a new book, she thinks, or a carbon monoxide alarm? In her thirty years on this Earth, she’s read eleventy squillion books. She loves the vicarious experiences they give her. She has travelled to other planets, razed cities to the ground, sought enlightenment, shot a great many deserving men. Perhaps, she muses, there is a story out there about carbon monoxide that is so compelling it makes you immune to CO poisoning. That is how life should be.

Macy puts the laptop down on the coffee table in front of her and stands, her lower back momentarily flaring as she straightens. Her breath clouds in the icy air of her flat. Macy’s feet are like corpses in sleeping bags; her hands, now that she has stopped hammering at her keyboard, are already growing icily painful in their fingerless mittens. Like silence, the evil cocoon of cold and damp seems to emphasise her loneliness. She walks feeling back into her feet by padding in slow, heavy rectangles around the living room like one of those mindful monks – only, if her mind is full of anything it is full of sadnesses and self-criticism and choruses from songs she hates. Instead of earworms, why can’t she have text-worms, where profound and eloquent insights from great authors come alive unbidden in her head instead?

Mind you, Macy has concluded that absorbing so many books throughout this life has expanded her self into a much larger and vastly more varied entity than it would otherwise have been. Alas, resulting in a more complex and more miserable self. She envies the happiness of her distant friends who live a simpler life, working in an angst-free supermarket, neatly stacking tins on shelves, facing packages towards the customer in neat rows. Macy was a shelfstacker herself during her teenage years and still considers that the most satisfying job she’s had.

Macy Starfield.

To her fading family she is mouse-quiet, awkward, sullen.

To some friends she is the wittiest person they’ve met.

To others she is a brooding, humourless, judgemental party-killer.

To alcohol she is a genius and a menace.

To those in her book group she is enviable and invisibly loathed.

I grow tired of exaggerating my part in other people’s lives – is a thought that arises in her mind regularly.

Recently her reflections have taken a morbid turn. If I do kill myself, she thinks, and determination has anything to do with it, I shall will myself to come back as a sunflower.

The first condition of happiness – is that how it goes? – is that the link between humanity and nature should not be broken.

Meanwhile she is striving to be good, positive, and caring.

Everything I understand, I understand only because I love.

Well, then I must love, she determines.

Still. She has heard the word ‘altruism’ spoken out-loud eight times in her life. Has seen it put into practice fewer times than that.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves.

It’s so cold in here she decides to take a walk outside, where, counter-intuitively, it might be a safer world for her, outside being, also counter-intuitively, a bigger place than her mind currently is.

*

‘I mean, what was it?’ says the man.

On this crisp dark autumnal night in the Riverside area of Stirling, officially-a-city-but-really-it’s-a-town, in the middle of Scotland, two strangers have tacitly agreed to solve a small mystery. Macy is assessing the guy beside her as much as the dead animal. For him, the question is what this animal was; for Macy, it’s how did it die. And also: ‘Wait, you’ve never seen a greyhound before?’

‘Is that what it is? Was, rather,’ says the man, looking baffled in the anaemic streetlighting. His eyes glint vaguely. ‘I’ve heard of them; I mean, I know what they are.’ They both feel what he said fill the air between them with stupidity.

He has the melancholy of a man doing his failing best to battle something unyielding but grim – perhaps illness, or middle-age. But now he disarms Macy with ‘Then let’s do something about it. The creature’s still warm. Ish.’ He glances round. He puts a brave face on, to combat the inane remark he made. ‘There!’ He nods towards the group of shops a few yards up the pavement. There is a newsagent’s, a chiropractor’s, a veterinary practice, and a dental surgery.

‘It’s ten at night,’ says Macy, shaking her head. ‘The vet’s closed.’

‘No – there!’ says the stranger, rising to his feet and rushing along the pavement towards the intermittent blinking of a light on a wall.

Macy is thinking about the flashing light and Morse code and how some strangers are indeed very strange and as she does so she semi-consciously lays a hand on the deceased greyhound – it feels glossy and warm; the hair is thin, and its body heat seems to suggest that the dog died only a little while ago. Seems unfair that such an elegant animal should be dead. It has no collar. Could be microchipped? Macy strains to see what the man is wrestling with on the wall—

Oh! A defibrillator. She hasn’t seen one in public since she skulked about the skulls and skeletons of the deathly grey catacombs beneath Paris. Bravo, if people have campaigned to start dotting these life-sparker machines around the streets of Scotland.

They get to it, she and the stranger, and perform the nearest thing to a miracle she’s ever witnessed . . . they only shock the greyhound back to life!

The greyhound is now breathing by him – Macy looks – no, herself. The in-breaths and exhalations are swift and heavy, but not unnatural.

Amazed, Macy and the stranger look at each other for a long moment.

Macy shakes her head, marvelling. ‘We did it.’

The stranger blows his cool by trying to be cool: ‘Easy peasy lemon squeezy.’

Barely needing a moment to think, Macy outsmarts him: ‘Chest-compressed lemon zest.’

He gives a dry, almost confused, laugh. Pauses. ‘I don’t know what to do with him.’

‘Her.’

‘Ah, see? You’re the expert.’

‘We can’t leave a resurrected greyhound out here in the street. You gotta car? Take her home with you.’

‘I’m homeless,’ the man lies.

Macy gives the man her laser-beam stare. ‘Uh-huh,’ she says. ‘Homeless. That’s why you’re wearing a golf club tie.’

‘I have a cat and a wife who’s allergic to dogs,’ the man lies.

‘Why don’t you just admit, “My willingness to be kind doesn’t actually go that far”, ’ says Macy.

‘I think you’d be a good mother – or owner – or whatever – of this dog,’ says the man and it is difficult to tell if he is lying, perhaps because what he is saying happens to be true.

‘There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness and truth,’ says Macy, channelling her beloved Tolstoy to the man, who is now convinced she is batshit crazy.

No matter. Macy, in fact, has already decided that, having brought the greyhound back from the dead, she will now bring it into her life.

*

Later that night she sets out a bowl of water and a dish of plain boiled rice for the greyhound. The internet claims they like rice. She will buy proper dog food tomorrow. Meanwhile the greyhound strikes up a conversation with her. This is how things are.

After gobbling the entire mound of rice in seconds and slurping at the water for about a minute, the greyhound looks around the barely furnished room, gives a snort, and climbs up onto the sofa, where she walks in a circle three times, lies down, stretches out and says: ‘So. You gotta name?’

Macy is forced to press against the arm of the couch. ‘I, uh, I’m Macy. Macy Starfield. Um – you?’

‘I’m Luna the Greyhound.’ The dog scans the room. ‘Your flat is colder than a fish’s heart. Find me a blanket. What do you do?’

‘Nothing. I’m nobody. A failed checkout operator turned failed fishing-boat captain turned failed writer.’

‘Oh jeez. Someone call the vet. I’m gonna be the first ever dog who was voluntarily put to sleep.’

‘Talking of vets, you do realise I just brought you back from the dead?’

‘I wasn’t dead. I was . . . hibernating.’

‘And by the way, same question; what do you do?’

‘I greyhound.’ Luna pauses. ‘You gonna buy some kibble – the decent kind, not the cheap stuff – tomorrow? I mean – plain rice on its own? Would you eat that?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, what would Her Highness like to eat?’

‘For now, I’d even settle for a carrot slathered in peanut butter. Fetch the blanket first. Off you go. Then the peanut butter. And I do mean slathered.’

Luna the Greyhound is not grey but black and is the most colourful character a depressed Hebridean woman in Stirling could meet. Even her laziness is helpful. Macy’s life takes on a new dimension. Luna the Greyhound sleeps seventeen hours per day, which improves Macy’s night-time sleeping pattern as she begins to consider eight hours of sleep a cinch by comparison. The pair eat together, go on meandering walks, read serious papers and literary journals, and watch films while trading smartass comments. Macy and Luna the Greyhound watch Groundhog Day every evening until they grow sick of it. They view Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho numerous times. They read and re-write verbatim Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’.

Luna the Greyhound begins to show more of an interest in Macy’s life. One night, she asks Macy, ‘If your island was so great, why did you leave it?’

‘For the same reason most folk are homesick for the present moment.’

Luna hesitates. ‘I – what?’

‘Minor hermits go to the wilderness, major hermits go to the city.’

Luna the Greyhound learns that, much like herself, this human has depths.

The winter months draw them into an exponentially closer friendship. Their minds grow more lively. One famous evening, for example, as Luna the Greyhound reads to Macy, they invent Tolstoy Night. Luna the Greyhound, with an impish glitter in her eyes, recites an excerpt from the diary of Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, who wrote on the twenty-fifth of January 1851: ‘I’ve fallen in love, or think I have. Went to a party and lost my head. Bought a horse which I don’t need at all.’

Luna the Greyhound slams down the book, launches off the sofa, dizzies herself with room-zoomies, and, panting, plants four handsized paws on the floor in front of Macy, tail still a blur. ‘Check the date!’ says Luna the Greyhound, breathless. ‘Twenty-fifth of January! I’m starting an alternative to Burns Night for those with an aversion to haggis and middle-class kitsch. Every January the twenty-fifth everyone will be encouraged to fall in love and buy a horse.’

Macy grins. ‘Yes. An unnecessary horse.’

Luna the Greyhound glowers: ‘No horse is unnecessary.’

Macy pets her sleek glossy head, nodding, and says, ‘There could be speeches loaded with quotations from the old Russian master.’

‘Yes! And songs. We’ll take the words and make them into songs. “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves.” Or, “True life is lived when tiny changes occur”. ’

They sit, human and greyhound, in loyal silence for a moment, contemplating Tolstoy Night. Macy realises that just like pop music ear-worms, readers’ brains can indeed accumulate textworms, and if one reads well and listens well these can be healthy and beneficial. Luna the Greyhound does not – and never will – overtly thank Macy for saving her life, as if this whole episode is a test of Macy’s decency (an unacknowledged kindness being more powerful than one that is witnessed, publicised, or bragged about).

In the future, they will debate about who saved whom.

And what of the man in the golf club tie who claimed he had a cat and a wife who was allergic to dogs? He did belong to a golf club, and he did have a wife once upon a time, but she has long since divorced him. He works in middle management at a supermarket, and his Saturdays are now and then enlivened by a visit to his football team’s grounds. His evenings are empty.

He has not been saved – but he is thinking about salvation. The night he helped rescue a greyhound has taken on a fable-like quality in his mind. He supposes this might be the kind of thing that Japanese novel he read was getting at.

One night in late January, feeling acutely alienated, he urges himself to dream of a resurrected greyhound. Instead, he sees a half-dozen frantic doped greyhounds bursting in fluid cheetah-leaps around a racing track, while he stands hunched at a barrier beside a desultory group of grey-haired men who stare cursing at the dogs with adrenalised animosity, ruing the chances they took and those they did not and, at their most lucid, wondering whether their own life’s mechanical lure, money, has not been a fix, a lie, a decoy. He wakes up with an unexpected urge to fall in love and buy a horse and to rid himself of fixes, lies, decoys. But as he moves about his day, the dream wears off, and he begins to doubt everything. He reasons that he will never in this life be able to afford a horse. Instead, he will look into getting a retired greyhound from a charity and he will spend the little money he has today on a carbon monoxide alarm and a new Murakami. He will learn Japanese. He will bring himself back from the dead.

Nothing But a Set of Eyes For Stars is edited by Kirsten Innes and Marjori Lotfi and published by the Association for Scottish Literature, priced £9.95.