THE BIG SATURDAY READ:
The tramp was being replaced by the beggar.. young men who didn’t leave town
HE’S sold more than 20 million books worldwide as one of the biggest crime writers. Now, in the first of an exclusive three-part serialisation, Ian Rankin shares his gripping short story, Being Frank, featuring his famous detective, John Rebus. His novel, Westwind, is out in paperback this Thursday, June 11, 2020.
It wasn’t easy, being Frank. That’s what everybody called him, when they weren’t calling him a dirty old tramp or a scrounger or a layabout. Frank, they called him. Only the people at the hostel and at the Social Security bothered with his full name: Francis Rossetti Hyslop. Rossetti, he seemed to remember, not after the painter but after his sister the poet, Christina.
Most often, a person – a person in authority – would read that name from the piece of paper they were holding and then look up at Frank, not quite in disbelief, but certainly wondering how he’d come so low.
He couldn’t tell them that he was climbing higher all the time. That he preferred to live out of doors. That his face was weatherbeaten, not dirty. That a plastic bag was a convenient place to keep his possessions.
He just nodded and shuffled his feet instead, the shuffle which had become his trademark.
“Here he comes,” his companions would cry. “Here comes The Shuffler!” Alias Frank, alias Francis Rossetti Hyslop.
He spent much of the spring and autumn in Edinburgh. Some said he was mad, leaving in the summer months. That, after all, was when the pickings were richest.
But he didn’t like to bother the tourists, and besides, summer was for travelling. He usually walked north, through Fife and into Kinross or Perthshire, setting up camp by the side of a loch or up in the hills. And when he got bored, he’d move on. He was seldom moved on by gamekeepers or the police. Some of them he knew of old, of course. But others he encountered seemed to regard him more and more as some rare species, or, as one had actually said, a “national monument”.
It was true, of course. Tramp meant to walk and that’s what tramps used to do. The term “gentleman of the road” used to be accurate. But the tramp was being replaced by the beggar: young, fit men who didn’t move from the city and who were unrelenting in their search for spare change.
That had never been Frank’s way. He had his regulars of course, and often he only had to sit on a bench in The Meadows, a huge grassy plain bordered by tree-lined paths, and wait for the money to appear in his lap.
That’s where he was when he heard the two men talking. It was a bright day, a lunchtime, and there were few spaces to be had on the meagre supply of Meadows benches. Frank was sitting on one, arms folded, eyes closed, his legs stretched out in front of him with one foot crossed over the other.
His three carrier bags were on the ground beside him, and his hat lay across his legs – not because he was hot, but because you never knew who might drop a coin in while you were dozing.
Maybe his was the only bench free. Maybe that’s why the men sat beside him. Well, “beside him” was an exaggeration. They squeezed themselves on to the furthest edge, as far from him as possible. They couldn’t be comfortable, squashed up like that and the thought brought a moment’s smile to Frank’s face.
But then they started to talk, not in a whisper but with voices lowered. The wind, though, swept every word into Frank’s right ear. He tried not to tense as he listened, but it was difficult. Tried not to move, but his nerves were jangling. “It’s war,” one said. “A council of war.”
War? He remembered reading in a newspaper recently about terrorists. Threats. A politician had said something about vigilance. Or was it vigilantes? A council of war: it sounded ominous. Maybe they were teasing him, trying to scare him from the bench so that they could have it for themselves. But he didn’t think so. They were speaking in undertones; they didn’t think he could hear. Or maybe they simply knew that it didn’t matter whether an old tramp heard them or not. Who would believe him?
This was especially true in Frank’s case. Frank believed that there was a worldwide conspiracy.
He didn’t know who was behind it, but he could see its tentacles stretching out across the globe.
Everything was connected, that was the secret. Wars were connected by arms manufacturers, the same arms manufacturers who made the guns used in robberies, who made the guns used by crazy people in America when they went on the rampage in a shopping centre or hamburger restaurant.
So already you had a connection between hamburgers and dictators. Start from there and the thing just grew and grew.
And because Frank had worked this out, he wondered from time to time if they were after him. The dictators, the arms industry, or maybe even the people who made the buns for the hamburger chains. Because he knew. He wasn’t crazy; he was sure of that.
“If I was,” he told one of his regulars, “I wouldn’t wonder if I was or not, would I?”
And she’d nodded, agreeing with him. She was a student at the university. A lot of students became regulars. They lived in Tollcross, Marchmont, Morningside, and had to pass through The Meadows on their way to the university buildings in George Square.
She was studying psychology, and she told Frank something: “You’ve got what they call an active fantasy life.”
Yes, he knew that. He made up lots of things, told himself stories. They whiled away the time. He pretended he’d been an RAF pilot, a spy, minor royalty, a slave trader in Africa, a poet in Paris. But he knew he was making all these stories up, just as he knew that there really was