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- Herausgeber: Gothic World Literature Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
An Edinburgh advocate experiences humiliation and terror in a surreal Scottish Highland adventure. Donald Humbie, leaving behind his career and his wife in Edinburgh, heads north to familiar places for a short break. Unfortunately, the familiar places have become unfamiliar and increasingly hostile. Each setting, each character, each event is an unsettling side-step away from normality in a dark, surreal landscape that has Donald fleeing manically around the country. Fearing that his wife has been abducted, he seeks out MacNucator, a private detective, to find her. Meanwhile the Sinister Cabaret, led by the strange and unfathomable Mr Motion, pursues him relentlessly. John Herdman's characters inhabit a dark universe illuminated by his profoundly laconic wit. In the Sinister Cabaret he continues the exploration of extreme states of mind and ambiguous interior worlds with the Gothic imagination, which has led critics to compare him with James Hogg and R L Stevenson. Gothic, surreal, and type Jungian to the max, this hypnagogic novel from John Herdman will take you to the edge of reason. "The narrative combines a series of journeys and encounters, an atmosphere compounded of nightmare, comedy and erudition, which is uniquely Herdman... There is a quality of surreal experience, comic nastiness, metaphysical horror ... the always gripping narrative becomes intense and moving."An Edinburgh advocate experiences humiliation and terror in a surreal Scottish Highland adventure. Donald Humbie, an Edinburgh advocate of every kind of substance, undergoes an interior experience of humiliation and terror, totally losing his way in a surreal Scottish Highland adventure. Donald Humbie, leaving behind his career and his wife in Edinburgh, heads north to familiar places for a short break. Unfortunately, the familiar places have become unfamiliar and increasingly hostile. Each setting, each character, each event is an unsettling side-step away from normality in a dark, surreal landscape that has Donald fleeing manically around the country. Fearing that his wife has been abducted, he seeks out MacNucator, a private detective, to find her. Meanwhile the Sinister Cabaret, led by the strange and unfathomable Mr Motion, pursues him relentlessly. John Herdman's characters inhabit a dark universe illuminated by his profoundly laconic wit. In the Sinister Cabaret he continues the exploration of extreme states of mind and ambiguous interior worlds with the Gothic imagination, which has led critics to compare him with James Hogg and R L Stevenson. Gothic, surreal, and type Jungian to the max, this hypnagogic novel from John Herdman will take you to the edge of reason. "The narrative combines a series of journeys and encounters, an atmosphere compounded of nightmare, comedy and erudition, which is uniquely Herdman... There is a quality of surreal experience, comic nastiness, metaphysical horror ... the always gripping narrative becomes intense and moving." Isobel Murray, The Herald & Scottish Studies Review
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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“He continues a tradition of Scottish surrealism which has been around since Hogg and Galt.”
The Herald
“Herdman’s writing is a feat of great wit and invention.”
Scotland on Sunday
“Skillfully treads a vertiginous edge between satiric comedy and high seriousness.”
Scotsman
“A fiction writer of skill and ingenuity whose constant shifts and turns perplex and beguile his readers as he weaves prose narratives of surreal power and sharp satirical bite…. The Sinister Cabaret is an intelligent, disturbing, quietly compelling novel: if you have yet to discover Herdman’s work, pick up a copy, and treat yourself to something a little different on a cold winter’s night.”
John Burnside, The Scotsman
“The narrative combines a series of journeys and encounters, an atmosphere compounded of nightmare, comedy and erudition, which is uniquely Herdman… There is a quality of surreal experience, comic nastiness, metaphysical horror … the always gripping narrative becomes intense and moving.”
Isobel Murray, The Herald
J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage
Rimbaud
The Sinister Cabaret
Author’s Introduction
The Sinister Cabaret, first published in 2001, is the third in what I have come to think of as my “truth trilogy”, its predecessors being Imelda (1993) and Ghostwriting (1996). Whereas, however, those two earlier novellas were concerned with the difficulties, puzzles and obstacles involved in trying to establish the objective truth about narrated events, without — and this is crucial — conceding anything to the postmodern assertion of the mere relativity of truth (an assertion made in defiance of the very definition of truth as that which conforms to reality); this third narrative is concerned, instead, with inner, psychological truth and its relationship with the external world of conscious experience.
The protagonist Donald Humbie sets out on a journey which he thinks will be relaxing and beneficial to him in his condition of stress and overwork. Without being aware of crossing over into any different order of consciousness, he begins to have experiences which are at first simply odd and dreamlike, but soon take on the 8character of nightmare as he encounters a sinister group of strolling players who seem to threaten the very foundations of his life. Recommended to seek the help of a “detective” who may be able to make sense of his fears and confusions and rescue him from his tormenting pursuers, he sets off on a walk to find him, during which he has further inexplicable and frightening encounters in the wild Highland country he passes through. When he finally reaches the detective, he begins a new journey into the depths of his memory, which helps him to understand how he has come to be at the mercy of strange forces which he is unable to comprehend.
As the narrative reaches its climax, the question is implicitly posed of the relation between the world of Donald’s ordinary life and understanding, and the extraordinary experiences which he has undergone.
Contents
THE JOURNEY
A Short Break
Donald Humbie, a considerably successful advocate in his mid-fifties practising at the Scottish bar, was having a hell of a time driving along this narrow, downhill, winding, gloomy country road hemmed in by thickly planted pine trees. His neck was stiff, he felt short of breath and his steering was all to hell. There seemed to be something wrong with his car, too — a smart but unpretentious little 1998 Daewoo — though it had served him so well hitherto. The engine was roaring and screaming and protesting and the vehicle was jerking and veering wildly from side to side. His terror of those who were pursuing him was now matched by his horror at his own reckless driving and mounting fear of his seemingly uncontrollable car.
Then it flashed into his head that all this could be explained by the circumstance that he was in fact reversing, at great speed, looking over his left shoulder. When he had backed precipitately out of the forest track in the certain knowledge that they were close behind him, it had struck him that he would be wasting 14precious time by stopping to change into forward gear, so he had just shot off backwards down this desperately narrow, steeply declining, treacherous country road, without further thought.
What a thing to do! — even in those circumstances. This autumn holiday was not going so well.
He had left Edinburgh only a couple of days before. It wasn’t his usual time for a break, the courts were sitting, but — well, really it was on doctor’s orders. He wasn’t exactly ill; but he certainly wasn’t well either. Madeleine said it was the male menopause. She knew he needed to be off on his own for a bit, and the truth was that really she would be glad enough to see the back of him. Allowing each other their own space, that’s what it was called nowadays. Things had not been so good lately, between Madeleine and himself. But then they had not been so good within himself either. He acknowledged that. And when things are not right within yourself, it follows that they can’t be right with other people.
One evening recently he had been sitting in his study, putting off the work that badly needed to 15be done, and staring at his oldest and most faithful friends, the multifarious books on his crammed shelves, consciously willing them to explain what was wrong. The answer must be there, surely, somewhere among all those words.
‘How extraordinary,’ he thought, ‘that I have read all the books on those shelves, bristling with ideas and life, and they have all passed through me and become part of me, yet here I sit without an idea in my head or an emotion in my heart, dead as a doornail! Something will have to be done.’
The only thing he could come up with, though, was the thought that he must ‘get away for a bit’, which was not really very imaginative. And that was part of the trouble: he wasn’t in a very imaginative frame of mind. But he decided that’s what he would do anyway; he’d go away for a few days. Then, on the morning of his departure, he didn’t feel so well. He was in the bathroom when he was suddenly overcome by a deathly faintness and nausea, the sweat broke out on his brow and the world was running away from him. He sat down on the toilet seat and put his head between his knees, but for a little while he was not aware of what was going on and perhaps he even briefly lost consciousness. Then there was a curiously 16unnerving sense, for a moment, that he was travelling between two modes of existence and could experience both simultaneously. But it passed and he felt better, if rather strange and in an odd way detached from himself. A little shaken, he continued with his preparations for departure.
Then something else rather strange happened. He had already packed the car and was ready to set off and was saying goodbye to Madeleine when he quite unexpectedly felt very emotional and even thought that he was going to cry. He had his hands over his wife’s hips.
She said in a far-away voice, ‘I dreamt last night of the guillotine. They were going to execute me. It made an awful mess of me here.’ She raised both her hands and rested her fingers on the back of the neck. ‘You should have done it,’ she whispered. ‘You would have made a cleaner job of it.’
He was going to ask, ‘They — who were they?’ but before he could do so she kissed him passionately. Neither of them said anything more; Donald hesitated a moment, then he turned and left.
He thought he would head for the northwest. Something was niggling away at the back of his mind. Partly it was those strange words of Madeleine’s; but there was something else too. 17Had he failed to pack something vital? He racked his brains but couldn’t pinpoint anything. Yet the further he drove the more strongly did the troubling sense assert itself — a sense which he now realized had always been there but which up till now he had successfully repressed — that he was missing something. Not something in his luggage but something in his life. It wasn’t some large elusive generality like success, or fulfilment, or love, or God. Actually, he believed that he had some of those things, to some degree. No, what he was missing was something absolutely concrete and specific — something he had once had. He ought to be able to see it; he could almost touch it. Yet always it evaded him; it was just beyond reach.
That first night he had spent in a little hotel in Benderloch. The drive had been pleasant, the early autumn weather clear and fresh, he was enjoying being by himself, and but for that odd niggle at the back of his mind everything seemed to be all right. But as he dressed for dinner in his single room with the double bed he began to feel lonely and to wish that 18Madeleine were with him after all. The feeling was naturally accentuated as he dined by himself, the only lone diner in the restaurant. He drank a bottle of wine with his meal, which he felt was rather too much for one.
Perhaps as a result of this overindulgence, on an impulse he decided to phone Madeleine after dinner, and ask her to join him at their old haunt of Fliuchary within the next day or two. He went up to his bedroom to get this done before his coffee arrived in the lounge. There was the familiar pause and faint click indicating an answering machine, then a male voice speaking in a guttural Eastern European accent intoned:
‘You have reached the residence of Attila the Hun. I am sorry that I am unable to take your call at present, but if you care to leave your name and address, I will arrange to have you torn apart by wild horses as soon as possible. Please speak slowly after the tone.’
Dammit! — wrong number. He tried again. The same thing happened; but this time, after the voice had delivered its instructions, it 19laughed, quite briefly. The laugh was not a kindly one.
Well, that was not encouraging.
Donald decided to have a brandy with his coffee. What was he to do now? He really did want Madeleine to join him as soon as possible; he was almost sure of that. But how was he to get in touch with her when there was this problem with the phone? Then he remembered that he had his notebook computer with him. E-mail — that was the answer. Technology was a wonderful thing.
‘Darling, I’m missing you. I’m in Benderloch tonight but going on to Fliuchary tomorrow. I’ll stay there for at least a couple of days — why don’t you come up and join me? I need you. I’ll be at Tigh-na-Coille as usual. There seems to be a problem with the phone (ours, I mean). Love, H.’
H. stood for Madeleine’s pet name for Donald, which it really wouldn’t be fair to either of them to reveal. He posted the message and everything seemed to be fine. Technology was a great comfort.
When he checked the next morning there was as yet no reply from Madeleine. Probably 20she had not yet checked herself; she wouldn’t have been expecting to hear from him that way. He was confident there would be a response from her by evening. Or she might just decide to give him a surprise by arriving unannounced — that would be like her. He could see now the expression of childlike pleasure — a mute ‘Look, here I am!’ — she would assume as she waited for his mouth to open in joyful surprise. She still had that innocent freshness.
All the same, Donald felt rather depressed as he set off on the longish haul up to Fliuchary; or not so much depressed as disorientated. ‘It’s one of those days when everything’s different,’ he said to himself. It was a feeling with which he had been familiar since childhood, though he didn’t experience it very often nowadays. A sense of unfamiliarity within the familiar; everything was really the same, yet it contained within it an alienation that was imperceptible to the senses, as if the substance of the world had been infiltrated by something subversive and nothing was any longer truly as it appeared. It was usually brought on by some dislocating event, a kind of Verfremdungseffekt. No doubt on this occasion it was that bizarre message on the answering machine which had sparked this sense of strangeness. Who the 21devil could have been playing around with their phone?
He wondered whether Ken had been round to see Madeleine after he’d left. Ken was Madeleine’s much younger half-brother, and a great practical joker. A complete buffoon, in Donald’s opinion. Yes, that was doubtless the explanation.
All the same the feeling had not entirely dispersed when, around half-past five, he arrived at Fliuchary at the end of his long drive and pulled up at the familiar guest-house. Tigh-na-Coille — almost home from home. Donald and Madeleine had been coming here now for about fifteen years and the welcome was always the same. Here, at least, nothing would have changed. The whitewashed house, the two little lawns of coarse grass on either side of the pebbly path, the neat flower beds under the front windows, the sea-shells arranged around the porch, and the big stone roller for the lawn in its little niche. His feet crunched on the pebbles. He pulled the old-fashioned bell.
A man in his mid-forties who looked a bit like Clark Gable, dressed in a canary waistcoat under a loudly checked tweed suit, opened the door almost at once, as if he had been waiting for Donald, and stared at him impassively 22without speaking, a slight smirk on his features.
‘Is Mrs Macrae about?’ asked Donald, with an attempt at brightness.
‘Mrs Macrae’s dead,’ said the man. ‘I’m Mr Motion.’
‘Dead? Mrs Macrae’s dead? When? What happened?’
‘A little over a year ago, I believe. I don’t know the details. We took over in May. I think you’ll find that everything’s much as it was. Are you coming in?’
This man didn’t seem to think that it should matter to Donald that Mrs Macrae was dead! Clutching his bag, he staggered rather than walked over the threshold, not knowing what else to do, close to fainting with shock but already trying to steady his spirit to withstand the onflow of grief which must soon cascade over it. He followed the man up the stairs and into the familiar bedroom.
Yes, everything was much the same — in fact, absolutely the same. So much the same that it was positively obscene. Not only the decor and furnishings, even down to the bedspread, but all Mrs Macrae’s things, her little personal touches, yes, actually the family photographs too! Donald wondered whether the man was playing some kind of nasty practical 23joke on him, whether Mrs Macrae had just popped down to the post office and this unpleasant guest had taken it upon himself to show the new arrival to his room. But then he noticed one unfamiliar object: on the dressing-table stood a large, tasteless colour photograph of a rather vulgar-looking, heavily made-up woman with a cold smile, gazing at the camera through blue, narrowed lids.
‘Mrs Motion,’ said the man, observing that Donald was looking at it. ‘You’ll have the pleasure of getting acquainted with her later.’ There was something naggingly familiar about his voice.
Donald grunted non-committally. Some pleasure! he thought. What a piece of effrontery, to imagine that his paying guests would want to have Mrs Motion gazing upon their intimate lives throughout their stay! As soon as the man had gone he removed the photograph from the dressing-table and placed it face-down on the floor beside the waste-paper basket. He sat down on the bed, not wanting to stay, wanting in fact very much to leave. But Madeleine might well come. He got out the Toshiba; still no reply to his message. Well then, he would have to wait, and there was no saying how long. He knew that if Madeleine did come, she wouldn’t want to stay here now. How 24shocked she would be! — not only at Mrs Macrae’s totally unexpected death (she was a fit and healthy little woman, not yet 70), but at this disgusting usurpation of her home, almost of her life. How on earth could it have happened? She had a family — a daughter in Glasgow and a son somewhere in England. How could they have allowed this creature to take over their family home, wholesale, down to the last button? It wasn’t canny.
But what was he to do? He could try phoning again, he supposed, but … somehow he didn’t want to. To tell the truth, he was scared. He didn’t want to hear again the voice of Attila the Hun. The voice … Oh, God, the voice, the voice! That was why Motion’s voice seemed familiar! The room began to swim before his eyes: he had to lie down on the bed, and perhaps even momentarily lost consciousness once again.
When he had recovered a little he stood up and a convulsion of rage coursed through his spirit. He wanted to confront Motion at once and shout ‘Impostor!’ at him at the top of his voice. For that was all he was — a wretched, vulgar impostor!
Donald ran down the stairs and found the man in the private sitting room, reading a newspaper. He stood in the doorway for a 25moment, uncertain whether the other even knew he was there; then, instead of what he intended, he merely said:
‘I’ll be eating out this evening.’
‘That’s a sensible decision,’ replied Mr Motion, without even looking up from his newspaper. ‘We don’t serve evening meals.’
Utterly wrong-footed, Donald stood there awkwardly for another moment then left the house and walked quickly down the road. He felt as if he knew he had been infected with some deadly disease but was still in the incubation period, waiting with unutterable dread for the first symptoms to appear. In the meantime he had to carry on living because there was simply nothing else to be done, but it had all become meaningless. He walked on in the steadily encroaching twilight. The little details of life had taken on a feverish intensity. Ahead of him an old gentleman was irritatedly flicking litter off the pavement with inept, jerky movements of his walking-stick.
‘That’s me in twenty years’ time,’ he thought fleetingly. As Donald overtook him the old man turned sharply and looked at him and he was—just that. Himself in twenty years. To see one’s double — wasn’t that supposed to portend approaching death? 26
The Rag Doll
When Donald got back to his room later that evening after a bar meal in the hotel, the picture of Mrs Motion had been returned to its place on the dressing-table. He had not yet laid eyes on her in the flesh, nor had there been any sign of her husband when he got in. He was doing his best to blot the whole thing out of his consciousness. He went straight to bed, though without in his heart of hearts expecting to sleep.
But the unexpected was what happened: he was asleep almost before his head had touched the pillow.
If it could be called sleep. For immediately he was assailed by atrocious images, lascivious nightmares. They all concerned Mrs Motion; or it might be better to say that they consisted in a protracted assault on the part of Mrs Motion upon his body and his soul. But the fearful thing was that in these dreams Madeleine, his dear wife Madeleine, the love of his life, for whom he had served twice seven years, or damn near it, was confused, confounded, with the hideous vamp, Mrs 28Motion! Mrs Motion would put her arms around him, kiss him, seduce him, and he had to succumb because he knew that she was really Madeleine. ‘It is me,’ she insisted. ‘You know it is!’ And Donald replied — meaning it, too - ‘Yes, I know … I know your body.’ They kissed passionately and Donald began pulling Mrs Motion’s clothes off and making love to her standing up against a wall.
Then it seemed to the dreamer that he was awake and that Motion himself had come into the bedroom and was standing in front of the dressing-table watching all this going on. ‘I told you that you two would be getting acquainted later on,’ he observed smugly, smiling and nodding his head in approval. But Donald no longer had the heart to make love in these circumstances and he felt his sex turning to mush. ‘Well, that’s good,’ said Mr Motion, ‘because I’ve come to offer you a part in a pantomime, my dear.’ Madeleine - for the woman was now clearly his wife again — was all eagerness and immediately lost every shred of interest in Donald as she turned her attention towards this meretricious impresario. It was true, too, that in real life Madeleine took part in amateur dramatics. Donald was at once in a frenzy of jealousy but he was completely paralysed and could do nothing to change 29matters. The dream faded and altered, and after a little it seemed to the advocate — he was really convinced of it — that Madeleine, now once more in the form of Mrs Motion, was performing fellatio upon him as he lay still paralysed, unable to move so much as his little finger, and that Motion was watching it all from just outside the bedroom door.
But at last the dreams ended and after that Donald had two or three hours of sound sleep. It was after nine when he awoke. However bad things have been at night they always seem better in the morning, and he was actually ready for his breakfast. He dressed, washed and shaved rapidly, saying to himself as he did so that he was no longer going to take all this lying down; he was going to take matters into his own hands and let the Motions know that they could not get away with just anything. Exactly what he was going to say he wasn’t sure, but the occasion would tell him.
When he opened the door he nearly tripped over a tray. On the tray lay a plate with a couple of slices of burnt, leathery toast, a single portion of wrapped butter and a single individual marmalade; and a chipped Mickey Mouse mug of tea with a scum of milk on the surface, clearly stone-cold. This was too much. Donald purposely stood on the plate and kicked 30over the mug (after all, it was mere luck that he had looked down when he stepped out of the door) and, rage in his heart, stormed downstairs. But there was no-one about at all, not in the sitting room or the dining room or the kitchen; the house was as deserted as the Marie Celeste.
He managed to get a late breakfast in the hotel and then found a public telephone. With his heart in his mouth he dialled the number of the house in India Street. The answering machine was once more on; but this time the voice of Motion said only:
‘This is no longer the residence of Donald Humbie, Q.C.’
When he had laid down the receiver, Donald Humbie, Q.C. held his head in his hands for a few moments, trembling from head to foot. Then he set off walking wherever his feet chose to carry him.
By the time he returned to Tigh-na-Coille in the early afternoon he had made up his mind that the only thing to do was to call the police. This was no mere practical joke: he was convinced that Madeleine was in danger. What it all meant 31he couldn’t even begin to put together. The disreputable Motions had somehow invaded the very fabric of his life like an insidious illness, but how or why it was impossible to imagine. He had no doubt at all that it was Motion’s voice on the answering machine; but how could he have got to Edinburgh and back to put it there, in the time since Donald had left? At first he had thought the best course of action would be to drive back home at once to see if Madeleine was safe — but suppose she were not there? Suppose she should arrive here after he had set off and be delivered into the clutches of that corrupt couple?
No, no, he must at all costs get to the nearest police station at the earliest moment. How he would set about explaining the bizarre business so as to convey its real seriousness and moment, or even be believed, even be confident of convincing the police that he wasn’t crazy … well, he would have to cross that bridge when he came to it.
But he had to get there fast.
Motion was standing at the front door of Tigh-na-Coille — dreadful to think that it was the very same house which had welcomed them so often and so warmly — puffing affectedly at a cheroot in the hazy afternoon sunshine. 32
‘Ah, Mr Humbie!’ he exclaimed expansively, all his sardonic manner gone. ‘Your wife arrived about an hour ago. She was tired after the journey — said she was going to lie down and take a rest.’
‘Oh! — that’s wonderful!’ Donald’s heart leapt with joy and relief, the nightmare instantly dissolved. He positively beamed at the tasteless proprietor as he slipped past him to run eagerly up the stairs. He keeked through the door so as not to disturb Madeleine too soon: he wanted to sneak up and plant a little kiss on her cheek before she knew he was there. Yes, there she was under the duvet, her face turned away from him, her lovely rich brown hair — one of her very best features — spread a little over the pillow behind her. He tiptoed over, bent and pulled back the edge of the duvet to reveal the lovely soft cheek on which he was to plant the kiss, and … oh God, oh God, that ever this should be! … saw that what was lying in the bed was a life-size rag-doll.
It is impossible to convey adequately what must have been Donald’s feelings at that moment as, bending gently down to reunite himself lovingly with the wife whom he had feared the victim of sinister and nefarious wrongdoing, but who now appeared to be so unexpectedly and joyfully restored to him, he 33
