A haar is a wonderfully Scottish kind of thing. It caters for a furtive, reticent temperament: for folk who like to keep themselves to themselves. It only occurs on the coast and is something to do with the temperature of the air and the sea. It’s not a fog and it’s not a mist and it is certainly not a fug. It’s a haar and it can limit visibility to just the tenements across the street. This particular morning it is so thick that from Portobello beach you can see no sign of the East Neuk of Fife or Berwick Law. One feels one can lose oneself in a haar…
Why did he have to use such pretentious language asked
Twaddle to himself? ‘One feels one can lose oneself..!’
This was typical of him: always trying to show off. Language,
music, humour, it was all the same. I’m the best, look at me! It is an attitude
that does not serve him well. Even the folk at the spooky church were less
welcoming to him than perhaps they could be, and, who knows? maybe even folk on
the spirit side were tired of his presence. To be shunned by the undead. Wouldn’t
that be the ultimate brush-off?
The Mark of Cain which he had never been able to brush off
alongside this showoffiness proved a socially toxic combination. Cain had been
cursed by God for killing his brother which is indeed rather a weight to carry
through life, but Twaddle felt he had been cursed by something far more subtle i.e.
his own best intentions. His own personal Mark of Cain was his eagerness to
please and impress. He succeeded in the first in being a friendly and
personable figure but really quite quickly pushed folk away by ‘over-succeeding’
in the second. Thus, if he played his wee set, for instance, at the local MIND café
in town of a Saturday, he showed himself to be TOO funny and charismatic and SO
bloody talented and accomplished that pretty soon the regulars wished he’d stop
turning up at all as he made them all feel more depressed/insecure/insufficient
than they had been when they woke up that morning.
So that was the undead and the mentally unwell taken care
of. Who else could he be disenfranchised from?
What if I were to tell you that even cats gave him the cold
shoulder. Towards the very arse end of his last doomed relationship, he shared
a small flat in an ancient building with a reluctant girlfriend and her two
cats, one of which was a runt and the other the veritable Marilyn Monroe of
flouncy moggies. Twaddle tried everything to endear himself to these beasts (probably
to win favour with their owner) but even the runt avoided him, and the Marilyn
Monroe would literally fart in his face, an emanation which produced a stink so
noxious that it woke you up if you were sleeping, your eyes stinging as if
assaulted by teargas.
His paranoia knew no bounds by this time, and he became convinced
the cats were acting under his girlfriend’s orders in a further attempt to
prise him from her life (she’d already broken a prized mirror very violently
and made him sleep on the living room couch).
His problems with women stretched back further than this. The difficulty was that he charmed them so much initially that it was impossible to maintain the performance and they quickly saw that behind the veneer was a mass of complicated insecurities and a character so frail that it could barely cope with the fortitudes of life at all and was merely looking for a mother-figure to look after it. They wondered if maybe he was actually a typically Italian male with a Scottish accent!
