The Sound of My Voice Read online

  THE SOUND OF MY VOICE

  With an international reputation as a prize-winning novelist, Ron Butlin is a former Edinburgh Poet Laureate. Before becoming a writer he was a barnacle-scraper on Thames barges, a pop-song lyricist, a footman and a male model. He has published nearly twenty books; his work has won many prizes and been widely translated. His novel, Ghost Moon, was nominated for the international IMPAC Prize 2016. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, the writer Regi Claire, and their dog.

  ALSO BY RON BUTLIN

  FICTION

  The Tilting Room

  Night Visits

  Vivaldi and the Number 3

  Belonging

  No More Angels

  Ghost Moon

  Billionaires’ Banquet

  Steve & FranDan Take on the World

  POETRY

  The Wonnerfu Warld o John Milton

  Stretto

  Creatures Tamed by Cruelty

  The Exquisite Instrument

  Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars

  Histories of Desire

  Without a Backward Glance

  The Magicians of Edinburgh

  The Magicians of Scotland

  The Scottish Book of Rain

  DRAMA AND OPERA

  The Music Box

  Blending In

  We’ve Been Had

  Sweet Dreams

  Markheim

  Faraway Pictures

  Good Angel / Bad Angel

  The Perfect Woman

  The Money Man

  Wedlock

  CHILDREN’S

  Here Come the Trolls!

  Day of the Trolls!

  THE SOUND OF MY VOICE

  Ron Butlin

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2018 by

  Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  1

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  First published in 1987 by Canongate.

  Copyright © Ron Butlin, 1987

  Foreword copyright © Irvine Welsh, 2001

  ISBN 978 1 84697 422 9

  eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 998 5

  The right of Ron Butlin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  Typeset in Verdigris MVB by Polygon

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives

  To Regi

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  The publisher is grateful to the Village Voice Literary Supplement for permission to reprint ‘Great Scot’ by Irvine Welsh as the foreword to this edition.

  FOREWORD

  If you ask any student of Celtic literature to name the classic works of fiction originating from Scotland in the last twenty or so years, the list would be pretty predictable. It’s a racing cert that Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing, William Mcllvanney’s Docherty, James Kelman’s The Bus Conductor Hines, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, and Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory would all figure prominently. One book which probably won’t be referenced by many people is a novel written by a Scottish poet called Ron Butlin, entitled The Sound of My Voice.

  To my mind this book is one of the greatest pieces of fiction to come out of Britain in the 80s and I’m still a little astonished at the way it has been neglected.

  Butlin’s protagonist, Morris Magellan, is an executive who runs a biscuit company. He seems to embody the narrow vision of 80s-style success: good job, house in the suburbs, nice wife and kids, conformist lifestyle. In short, Morris seems on the surface to be an embodiment of Thatcherite values. However, there’s one major problem: he is a chronic alcoholic, and, as we join his story, well on in the process of disintegration.

  Unlike the New York- and London-based antiheroes of the yuppie novel, Morris does not emerge as a mere victim of 80s excess. There is no prospect of him chilling out a little, taking it easy, finding his level, perhaps redefining his life values. Morris isn’t a coke-and booze-bingeing style victim in Manhattan’s Lower East Side or London’s West End, with perhaps one eye on the clock, hoping to meet Ms Right and acquire the two kids and the suburban home that will straighten everything out.

  He already has all this and it hasn’t straightened out anything. That’s what’s so genuinely subversive about The Sound of My Voice: the way Butlin ruthlessly and skilfully subverts the cosy oedipal trajectory, that tiresome but omnipresent fictional journey where the hero slays his demons and marries the beautiful princess. From the start, we sense that the guy is doomed. So Morris becomes a far more terrifying ghost at the feast of 80s consumerism than your stock McInerney-Amis character could ever be.

  The dissonant relationship between the central character’s internal life and the external world with its harsh lights and sharp edges is best bridged by alcohol, what he calls his universal solvent. Butlin’s book is a stylistic triumph, realising this relationship by utilising a second-person narrative that allows Morris’s inner voice to maintain a clarity as his life increasingly disintegrates.

  You had just begun to climb the stairs when you met her coming down.

  A moment’s pause, then you said, ‘Hello, I was just coming to wake you. It’s a lovely day outside.’

  She stopped a few steps above you. She had already dressed, but she could only just have got up. Did she believe you? It wasn’t really a lie, anyway: it was a lovely day, and it would have been a good idea to have woken her, to have surprised her.

  By adopting this device Butlin forces us to empathise with Morris, insinuating the reader into the core of his life, yet simultaneously, and strangely, producing a sense of distance. It’s as if the reader becomes the central character, yet has no control over his actions. This control, of course, rests with the drug. Butlin is too disciplined a writer of prose fiction to indulge in crude pseudo-psychological and sociological pontification as to the cause of Morris’s illness. His principal concern is to arrive at an understanding of its nature through its effects and his character’s attempt to manage it. Yet the skilful backdrop he paints affords us occasional glimpses of a man whose mind is moving too quickly, sharply, and restlessly for the banalities of bourgeois life, giving everything far too much of a jagged, cutting focus. The drug slows things down and smooths out the rough edges.

  Why was The Sound of My Voice not given its due credit when it was first published? Well, it’s decidedly not a feel-good novel. More importantly, it went (and goes) against the grain of the times in a quiet but ultimately implacable and uncompromising way. Every age exerts its cultural hegemony and Thatcherite Britain did this more rigorously than most. Butlin’s book was perhaps too ahead of its time for the 80s; its unremitting, if implicit, criticism of a spiritually vacuous, socially conformist age is far more unsettling than many of the more celebrated, overtly polemical works of fiction Scotland produced at this time.

  As we move very tentatively forward from this era, I anticipate that The Sound of My Voice will receive the recognition it deserves as a major novel of its time and type.

  Irvine Welsh, 2001

  THE SOUND OF MY VOICE

  1

  You were at a party when your father died – and immediately you were told, a miracle happened. A
real miracle. It didn’t last, of course, but was convincing enough for a few moments. An hour later, you took a girl home and tried to make love to her. You held on to her as she pleaded with you: even now her distress is still the nearest you have come to feeling grief at your father’s death. You are thirty-four years old; everything that has ever happened to you is still happening.

  Whenever you were driven from the village in your father’s car you would look out of the rear window to keep your house – a single-storey cottage – in sight for as long as you could. The road climbed a steep hill, and as more of the village, then the surrounding fields and woods, became visible, you strained to fix your eyes on the white walls of the cottage, trying not to blink nor look aside even for one second. There was never a point when the house actually disappeared, only the sudden realisation that it had just done so, as, for a second, though without meaning to, you relaxed your concentration and lost sight of it.

  Later, as your father drove back down the hill on your return to the village, you began anxiously to check off each familiar landmark leading to your house: the manse, then the horse-field, the wooden barn. ‘It might not be there, it might not be there,’ you kept repeating under your breath. By the time you came level with Keir’s orchard you had worked yourself into a state of almost unbearable uncertainty. Then, very slowly, you turned in the direction of your home. You prolonged this anxiety, this anguish, for as long as you could. It was, you knew, a measure of the joy that would come as soon as you glimpsed the white colour once more: your cottage at the foot of the hill.

  When the car stopped you scrambled out. Your parents got the shopping from the boot, quite unaware of the miracle happening around them: you had left and had now returned to the very same place. Everything you knew about yourself was once more affirmed: your pleasure at making the unoiled gate screech; your fear of the dog in the next garden; your anticipation of going soon to gather the hens’ eggs. In returning you home, your father had again restored you to yourself. You looked at the familiar surroundings, silently greeting each aspect of them in turn, then gazed at him in wonder and gratitude. He slammed the boot shut and went indoors.

  One afternoon he took you and your mother for a picnic. He drove twenty miles into the Border hills, the windows wide open to let in a draught of fresh air. Every so often he had to stop to allow the radiator to cool. The first time he took off the cap you saw the boiling water shoot into the air. You thought it great fun.

  ‘Will we get another fountain?’ you asked hopefully each time the car stopped. You were three years old and still believed he would respond to you.

  Eventually he took a small side road and climbed the last mile or so to a disused farm. The car was parked in the yard and the three of you got out.

  It was even hotter here and without a breath of wind. The snowcemmed walls of the abandoned buildings seemed themselves to be giving off heat. There were broken bricks and cobbles scattered across the yard like small hillocks, so overgrown were they with weeds and long grass. A harvester rusted in one corner, its paint flaked off at your touch; around it in the grass were several milk-churns, mostly on their sides. The windows and doors were broken, and it amused you to see small birds flying in and out of the house – one even perched on the window-frame for a few seconds and sang.

  ‘That’s his house now,’ you told your parents, for when you approached him he flew into the room and stared at you from the mantelpiece as you looked in through the window.

  It was dark and cool in the byre; there was a smell of hay and the roof had small chinks through which you could see sunlight and the sky. After a few minutes, however, you shivered. It felt chill suddenly, and you stepped back out into the yard.

  At first you thought that the ruin and collapse of the farm must have happened all at once. You imagined that the farmer in a fit of terrible anger one day had smashed the windows, torn the doors from their hinges; you could picture him astride the roof, ripping up the tiles, then, standing at his full height, hurling them to shatter on the cobbles below. In fact, you were afraid that he might appear at any moment – and if he himself hadn’t done all this, he might very well accuse you and your parents.

  You were about to leave when you noticed a large trough set on the ground near the byre doorway. It was like a wash-hand basin, but almost big enough to be a bath. The water in it was filthy, with a greenish scum on top. Although you felt frightened of leaning over the basin, of placing yourself so close to the green slime, you reached forward to turn on the tap. The handle was very stiff.

  You kept trying, but still it wouldn’t turn. You used both hands and stood with your legs apart – your whole weight and strength concentrated on opening the tap. You could hear your mother shouting for you to come but you wouldn’t give up, and kept tugging at the handle. Standing there in that hillside farm you could see across the entire valley; it was a clear summer’s day. You shut your eyes to make an extra effort.

  And suddenly it gave. The water gushed out at full force, splashing you, and giving you such a fright you stepped backwards – straight into your father.

  ‘Will you come when you’re told?’ he said angrily, taking you by the shoulders. ‘What are you playing at?’

  ‘I—’ you began.

  But already he had turned away from you and was closing the tap. A small trickle was left running, however – you tried to point it out to him but he paid no attention.

  ‘Can you not leave things alone?’ he continued. ‘Your mother’s been calling you. Come on, we’re going to have the picnic.’

  Over by a gap in the yard wall stood your mother, dressed in a billowy summer frock. She had the picnic basket at her feet; she was waving, beckoning. She is dead now – and so is your father, but they were there with you in that farmyard over thirty years ago. You walked across the fields with your father at your left, your mother at your right. You had given them each a hand and were keeping up as best you could: three steps to your father’s one, two steps to your mother’s.

  After a short walk you stopped on the slope of the hill. The rug was spread on the grass. Your mother unpacked the basket and then began laying out sandwiches, a tea-flask, lemonade and some fruit, while your father smoked a cigarette. The hill overlooked the main road, and after a few minutes you asked if you could go and play with the toy car and caravan parked in the layby below.

  Your mother laughed, saying that it wasn’t a model but big and full-sized. You didn’t believe her – you could see quite clearly that it was no larger than your thumb-nail.

  You got up and began running down the hill.

  They shouted after you to come back, to watch the road. Even now, over thirty years later, you sometimes sense your father stumbling after you, still trying to catch up with you. So you ran faster.

  The car and caravan are not far away now – and you can’t wait to begin playing with them. The car is blue and the caravan is white with a step at the door. Almost there, you run with your hands stretched out in front.

  The ground is levelling now – you are only a few yards away when all at once the car and caravan become full-sized.

  You stop in astonishment. Then you go back a few yards – and forwards again more slowly. Again they change size. A woman carrying a pail comes out of the caravan and, seeing you, halts on the step. She asks if you want anything.

  You stare at her, then retreat until everything has become small again. You pause briefly before approaching once more. Then retreat. Back and forwards you blunder along this critical distance until, by the time your father arrives, you are nearly in tears. You are too distressed to speak.

  Firstly, he goes and talks to the woman for a few moments; they glance over at you and laugh, then he takes your hand and leads you up the hill.

  You looked back only once – everything had returned to being small again. At the picnic place you sat on the rug, lemonade in one hand and a sandwich in the other, staring down at the layby and trying to understand what h
ad happened.

  You ate and drank without enjoyment, staring straight ahead. Your mother, meanwhile, began a series of explanations – and although you didn’t understand the meaning, you repeated the words she said inside yourself like a charm against your disappointment.

  ‘Things far away from you seem smaller than they are – but really they are the same size all the time,’ she told you, adding, ‘just like that farm you were in. See.’ She pointed back up the hill.

  You turned round, knowing already what you were going to see. You had walked across the courtyard, stood in the barn and the byre; you had been hardly able to reach through the broken kitchen window – and yet there was the entire farm in the distance, as small as the car and caravan below.

  ‘When I go away from here will I get smaller?’ you asked.

  Your father lit another cigarette and said that you were stupid.

  ‘Will I?’ you repeated anxiously after a moment.

  ‘No, of course not,’ your mother answered.

  But there was the farm you had explored, where you had turned on the tap – a full-sized house, sheds, harvester, a large yard – now a model farm. The tap was still running, you remembered, and for some reason, knowing this made you feel very sad, desolate. You continued your picnic, and whenever the memory of your disappointment became unbearable, you repeated your mother’s explanation, that charm, into yourself: ‘Things far away from you seem smaller . . .’

  Quite casually she then went on to tell you that the sun was really a thousand times bigger than the whole world – it looked small just because it was very far away, she remarked. After a few moments you asked: ‘Do people ever go to the sun?’

  ‘No,’ came the reply, ‘it’s much too hot.’

  So, you reasoned, the sun would always be far away and never get to its right size. Never. You were filled with a sense of injustice: some things would always get to be their right size, but the sun – never.