FESTIVAL FEATURES | Alan Warner
there. These shooting pips just go on and on. The copilot tries to take the grapes back from the monkey but he won’t let go and just spits a pip in the copilot’s eye. More pips are hitting the instruments and gauges until the pilot can’t take it any more. Okay, the pilot says, this monkey is a danger to the aircraft and I’m getting it out of here but I am a humane man so I’ll go as low and slow as I can and you chuck the wee bastard out. The copilot gets the monkey out the cage and that little spitter is screaming and wriggling, but the copilot gets the side door open and he chucks the wee bastard out. The plane climbs back up to its cruising height and they.’
‘Hey, hey hey.’ I placed my hand aloft. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I will go up onstage. I want to know what it’s like.’ Ewan McEwan looked down at me. ‘Well, your timing is a touch ropey Crelan. You sorta keep interrupting my stories here. It’s not an open mike night but there again it is an open mike night and I did invite you up. Every night is an open mike night and that’s the way it should be, anything else and it’s . . . oppression, isn’t it? It’s oppression, oppression by comedy.’ ‘Damn right,’ I said (we seemed to be picking up Americanisms in our diction along the way). ‘That’s what’s going on. Oppression by comedy. Imperialism of the microphone. Colonisation by Comedy.’
Marshall Draw suddenly stepped aside outwith the beam of that spotlight. Yet his voice continued, softer and cajoling, ‘You come on up son, you come on up and get a dose of . . . glory.’ His hands came back into the light. Only his moving i ngers, as if they were performing the sleight-of-hand in a conjurer’s trick and with dexterity he slipped the phallus of the microphone back into its clip at the top of the stand, the black wire curling down from the height like when Tidy puts her hair in a pony-tail. I found myself up on my feet. Tidy reached out and touched the i ngers of my own hand. ‘Crelan. Whatre you doin, man? Dont become one of them, dinnie dignify them.’
I whispered, ‘I have to. Just once.’ The seats in front of me seemed to have been abandoned but surely they had been fully occupied just some time
before? I had not noticed the en-bloc departures of the clientèle. I crashed ahead, pushing the white plastic chairs noisily aside and even toppling several of them as they juddered and protested on their thin plastic legs. I could feel the heat of the spotlight on my shaved nonce as I stepped up there onto that swarthy little elevation. I felt as if I were caught between two civilisations, one black as night and the other with a history of hard and brilliant illumination. That spotlight was afi xed to the ceiling. If I had done a victory punch – as I soon would – my big i st would have penetrated the low ceiling. This ceiling spotlight was like the sun that time we stepped off the plane in Tenerife. The sun was at this new angle of placement in a mad sky, a different place in the world – all wrong, like the strange air of another planet. I could feel that bulb’s power. It was impossible to see the audience – don’t they say that the sun itself is black at its very centre? I could see tiny dust motes drifting in the skyways of silver light. I put my ‘handy removable lips’ close in to the mesh striations of the microphone. When I spoke, my voice sounded unquestionable and as if it emerged from my sternum. ‘In Scotland we call a vest a semmit. I don’t like to wear a vest. Does this mean I am anti-semmitic?’ It wasn’t just silence, it was like a distilled essence of silence; surely electrons themselves could be heard buzzing in that silence? I understood the aphasia of laughter they all sought. Could I hear a micro-tonal buzz from the amp behind me? I was sure my voice arrived in the amplii er outwith myself and before I had spoken. ‘What do they have on their Christmas cakes in Glasgow? Temarzipan.’ I was encouraged by the single and brief chuckle of Marshall Draw out in that darkness but he sounded as if he had his mouth in a beer and only lifted his removable lips from it for an instant.
I said, ‘It’s me that is disappearing them. The comedians. They aren’t disappearing at all – I’m killing them, taking them up to the old boathouse behind the smithy and whacking them. Out goes a jab of the old hoof trimming knife and they don’t half start kicking, tied in the wheelchair. A horse doesn’t squirm like that. Tidy has to hose the wheelchair down outside at night. You know
26 THE LIST FESTIVAL 14–25 Aug 2014