Читать книгу Docherty - William McIlvanney - Страница 12

1

This’ll be a guid clear nicht fur the poachin’,’ Tam said. ‘Are ye up the road the nicht, Dougie?’

‘Naw. It’s temptin’, mind ye.’

‘Up by Silverwood wid be the thing. Whaur Barney saw the ghost. Ye mind?’

‘That wis a nicht.’

It was a Saturday evening in summer. Tam and Jenny Docherty were out at the entry-door and had been joined by Dougie McMillan and his wife, Mag. The women sat in the two chairs Tam had brought out. Conn, still too young to have the wider tether of Mick and Angus and Kathleen, who were over in the park, was playing quietly at their feet, already wise enough to forestall bedtime by being unobtrusive.

‘We’re aboot due fur the “Store Races” again,’ Jenny was saying.

‘Aye.’ Mag shook her head.

It was a term coined by the corner-wags for the beginning of the Co-operative Stores quarter. Jenny lamented the chance it would give certain people to exploit what she called ‘their fella bein’s’. The method was simple enough, though not without its risks.

Since the dividend was good, usually above two bob in the pound, some members made a habit of allowing non-members to buy goods in their name, with the proviso that the dividend from the purchase came back to them. Since such an order was on tick and didn’t have to be paid till the end of the quarter, the non-members could enjoy a brief Utopian sense of luxury without cost.

‘The day of reckoning,’ Mag pronounced.

‘Aye, an’ the cost isny jist in money,’ Jenny said.

Living next door to the grocery, Jenny had seen the effects often enough: families ‘racing’ to the shop at the start of the quarter, descending like locusts on the counters, to take away provisions in clothes-baskets, hand-carts, bogeys. The crunch came at the end of the quarter. Furtive visits were paid to people like Suzie Temple in New Street. She was fabled to have wealth (though she lived in a house where strips of margarine box were nailed across the frames of old chairs). The eyes of certain women took on a desperate, preoccupied look. ‘Store Fever’ it was called.

They say Suzie Temple’s no’ keepin’ too grand,’ Mag said.

‘Christ, yon wis some nicht.’ Dougie had been re-creating it in his memory. ‘Ye mind Ah wis sittin’ oan the bankin’ at the side o’ the road. Stringin’ the rabbits. Ah had them roon ma neck.’

‘Barney had been et the dancin’, had ‘e no’?’

‘Aye. Nae moon tae speak o’. Ah gets up an’ says, “Barney. Whit time wid it be?”‘

Tam was starting to smile.

‘He stoapped died. A’ he could see wis the white o’ the scuts. Swingin’ in the daurkness. An’ he’s away.’

‘Oot o’ trap wan. Through hedges an’ fields. They tell me you coulda stertit a ferm wi’ the muck that came aff his troosers.’

‘Wi’ his ain brand o’ manure thrown in, nae doot.’

They had coaxed themselves to laughter, Tam leaning on the wall for support.

‘Your time has come,’ Tam said. That’s whit he said the ghost said tae ‘im.’

Along High Street other families had brought out chairs and were chatting in the mellow sunshine. A well-to-do family – husband, wife and two daughters – were strolling towards where Tam and the others stood. That was a common enough occurrence. Quite a few families from better districts made such a walk a Saturday evening event in summer. It could be very interesting.

On this occasion the man was pointing things out to his wife as they went past. A phrase of his talk drifted towards them – ‘people actually living there’. The girls looked mostly at the ground, blinkered with apprehension. The man’s hand patted Conn’s head lightly as he passed. Looking up, Conn felt his father’s hand fit tightly, like a helmet, over his head.

And his father’s voice cleft the calmness of his play like a lightning-flash.

‘Why don’t ye bring fuckin’ cookies wi’ ye? An’ then ye could throw them tae us!’

Conn’s mother hissed, ‘Tam!’

Immediately Conn had a feeling he would forget but would experience again. It was a completely familiar and secure happening transformed instantly into something foreign and frightening. He saw and heard but couldn’t understand.

The man stopped without looking round.

‘Aye, sur,’ Tam Docherty was saying very quietly. ‘Come oan back, then.’

‘Please, Tam. Please,’ Jenny was whispering.

The woman’s linked arm took her husband on. Jenny’s face was flushed.

‘Is somethin’ wrang, Tam?’ Dougie asked and felt himself contract in the look Tam Docherty gave him.

‘Ye mean tae say ye hivny noticed? Whaur the hell dae you leeve, Dougie?’

Some of the dust of that brief, explosive moment settled on Conn for good.

2

High Street was the capital of Conn’s childhood and boyhood. The rest of Graithnock was just the provinces. High Street, both as a terrain and as a population, was special. Everyone whom circumstances had herded into its hundred-or-so yards had failed in the same way. It was a penal colony for those who had committed poverty, a vice which was usually hereditary.

High Street and its continuations of Soulis Street and Fore Street made a straight line to the Cross at the centre of town. Together, they had at one time been the main street of the town, a residential district for the rich. But when this predominance was taken over by the roughly parallel line of Portland Street and King Street, the older area, like a tract of land gone marshy, had been abandoned to the poor. Among the less impressive flora and fauna that were now to be found in it, there remained the occasional ghostly reminder of a more grandiose past, like a monument among weeds. One of these was the name people gave to one of the buildings in the Foregate, as Fore Street was more commonly called. The building was known as Millerton Close and was said to have been the town house of Lord Millerton, who had a large estate near Graithnock. During Conn’s early years Millerton Close contained at various times in its musty recesses an alcoholic, a family with rickets, and a consumptive mother of six.

In that harsh climate people developed certain characteristics common to them all. Where so little was owned, sharing became a precautionary reflex. The only security they could have was one another. Most things were borrowable, from a copper for the gas to a black suit for funerals.

Wives looked in on one another without ceremony. The men gathered compulsively each night at the street corner, became variously a pitch-and-toss school, a subdued male-voice choir, a parliament without powers. Especially in summer, they would stand long, till the sky had raged and gloomed to ash above their heads. The children, when not at school, were seldom in the house during the day, but could be found indiscriminately deployed among backcourts and doorways and corners of the nearby park, as if they were communal property. The authority of the nearest adult was understood to apply to them all. Conn learned early that when any adult asked him to go an errand, his parents’ authority was backing the request, even in the case of old Mrs Molloy (secretly called ‘chibby heid’ by the boys because of the strange lumps that covered her scalp), who invariably encouraged his compliance with the words: ‘Heh, you wi’ the big heid an’ nothin’ in it.’

Underpinning the apparent anarchy of their social lives and establishing an order was a code of conduct complex enough to baffle the most perceptive outsider yet tacitly understood by even the youngest citizens of High Street from the time that they started to think. One of its first principles was tolerance. Being in a context where circumstances blew up the ordinary trials of life into terrible hazards and seemed to have them arranged with the unexpectedness and ingenuity of a commando assault course for living, people learned to accept the crack-ups it led to. Behind every other trivial occurrence lay a stress-point upon which poverty or despair or a crushing sense of inferiority had played for years. Consequently, frustrations tended to explode in most of them from time to time.

Sometimes men would disintegrate spectacularly, beating a wife unconscious one pellucid summer evening or going on the batter with cheap whisky for a fortnight. Such bouts of failure were not approved of, but they also never earned a permanent contempt. They were too real for that.

High Street was very strong on rights. Though these might not be easily discernible to an outsider, they were very real in the life of the place, formed an invisible network of barriers and rights-of-way. It was morality by reflex to some extent, motivated often by not making the terms of an already difficult life impossible. Yet there was as well behind it a deep if muffled sense of what it meant to be a man, a realisation that there were areas which were only your own, and that if these were violated formidable forces might be invoked.

Adultery, for example, was a rare phenomenon. This was partly because the public nature of private lives and the sheer drudgery of coping with large families legislated against the contrivance of such situations. Overwork is a great provoker of chastity. But it was mainly because such a step took you on to a dark and slippery ledge, and out of earshot of the predictable. Whereas in more polite society such an action might mean the dissection of a private pain in a public place, in High Street, where a divorce court seemed as distant as the court of the Emperor must have seemed from a fortress on the Great Wall, the direction was reversed. The situation became more private, was injected to ferment in one man’s skull. People averted their eyes, awaiting an outcome. The commonest one was what they called with chilling simplicity ‘a kicking’. And they would have found it hard to blame a man who forgot to stop. It was simply that they understood men as bundles of conflicting and frequently immeasurable impulses, usually imperfectly contained by a fraying sense of purpose. Whoever slipped the knot would have to abide the hurricane.

For the rest, where the offence was venial, the violence was formal. Two men would go up a Sunday morning road to a handy field. Shirts off, they would punch the affair to a settlement. But such manual litigation was seldom. Relationships were so well charted through countless small daily contacts and endless conversations that there had evolved an instinctive hierarchy ranging from those with whom most remarks or attitudes were permissible to those it would be unwise to provoke. Near the top of it was Tam Docherty.

Tam was very much liked and they would have liked him more if they had known what more in him there was to like. But he was largely in shadow. Forbidding and indistinct attitudes relating to the Church and working-class life and conditions of labour obscured the clear contours of his nature, like clouds of vaguely thunderous potential. At the corner, talk of the priesthood seemed to aggravate the phlegm in his throat, so that the parabolas of spittle became more frequent, but he would say little. His name wasn’t a pleasant sound to more than one pit manager in the district. He lived very much in a personal climate of squalls of sudden temper, spells of infectious pleasure that couldn’t be forecast, brief winters of brooding isolation that were apparently unrelated to events around him.

Conn himself sensed this even in his early years. He learned to live comfortably among the mad swoops of affection which left him spinning in his father’s hands above a ring of laughing faces, the still silences, the instant angers which his mother was expert at earthing. The anger was the more frightening for being usually incomprehensible.

But for Conn, High Street was a second mother who had secret ways of dispelling every worry. He learned the repeated moods of the place like a favourite story, savouring, dumb with delight, the parts he loved the best: the Saturday morning muster of groups of children, when the big ones were there, romantic as convicts in their freedom from school, fabulous with unimaginable experience, making involved plans that put him in an ecstasy of fear, while the week-end stretched before them like a continent; the time just before tea when the men the grown-ups called ‘the heavy squad’ came down from the Townholme forge and their boots made sparks on the cobblestones; when the men stood at the corner and they might box him, or his father, hunkered against the wall, would make of his legs a place where Conn could crouch and nothing could touch him; the street giving itself up to darkness, a mother leaning out of her tenement window, lassoing her son by his name in the thickening dusk.

At the top of High Street you could walk down Menford Lane, a street that died, like progress, in a factory. To its crevices clung the smell of wool and dye and human sweat, a fungus imparting dark dreams of manhood. Machines gnashed behind black windows, chewing shouts and laughter. A woman’s song drowned. After its shadows, the street bruised your eyes with its brightness. The place they called The Gates was good. You went between houses, under an arch, along a causeway, through a gate. It was all grass behind the buildings where the washing was, green hummocks dropping towards the river. Soldiers bivouacked under dripping blankets. Pirates parleyed in the wash-house. Mothers came, following their own shouts.

Crouching, as if you were looking for something on the cobbles, you could see into Mitchell’s pub. The door was always open. In the dimness men moved, miles away. They dipped their mouths in tumblers. Voices curled like smoke out into the street. The words lingered strangely before they disappeared, exciting and unremembered. Sometimes a man coming out would stop and laugh and look into his pockets for a penny. The window of Mrs Daly’s shop was low enough to let you look in, your tongue wandering in imagination through boxes that made neat segments of colour like toy orchards. Inside she moved about in a gentle fuss of rustling clothes and sibiliant words, chapping nuggets of vinegar toffee on to a scrap of paper, counting out Jap Desserts or aniseed balls, or handing over a lucky tattie into which you bit expectantly.

Opposite the Meal Market, a huge tenement at the corner of Union Street, was the opening to the park. It was down a dip, so that you had to run and, crossing the bridge in a group, you became a herd of horses. Below you, running along the backyards of High Street, the river was visible for a hundred yards of Amazonian variety. At the top beyond the mill it churned down over the Black Rocks, then planed into a pool where men and boys swam in summer. The water was black – over twenty feet deep, they said. Dripping water on the bank, they told stories of dogs down there. Flowing on, the river took blue bilge from the mill and whorled it into fantastic, vanishing shapes, broke into a thousand freshets on the rocks, before, just as it passed under the bridge, stretching tight as a skin and sheeting over a three-foot drop to a sapple of bubbles, from which in season a trout would sometimes volley into the air. Then it slung itself under the railway arch and away. The bridge led into the Kay Park, a bowl of grass with a bandstand as its centre.

In one of the yards in Soulis Street they made wheels. When you stood in it, you breathed wood-pollen, like being inside a tree-trunk. On the days when you felt brave, you could take a friend and creep into the stables under the railway arch that marked the beginning of the Foregate. Behind each door dusk was stored in huge warm slabs, veined delicately with sun-streaks. Straw fissled, inventing shapes in the darkness. A snuffle was a horse, invisibly inhabiting its breathing. A hoof threshed, and you ran. And always around were the people coming and going, a forest of faces.

Home was safety. The Dochertys were lucky in having two rooms, unlike most people in the street. There was the living-room with its two set-in beds, in one of which Conn slept, while his mother and father had the other. The kitchen which led from it was minute. The small room at the back was where Mick and Angus slept. Kathleen used the bed that folded into the press behind the outside door. The fire was a permanence and the area around it was centre-stage, where all the best things happened, where his father told him stories, where the others sat at night talking while he pretended to be asleep, where he could watch his father’s body bulge from the zinc bath as the water turned black. The sheer regularity with which the same things happened every day in this house was his greatest comfort.

It was as well that he had the underlying stability of such a routine, for his relationships with his family were mainly confusing. Only his mother and Mick were always themselves. His mother’s lap was the best place he knew, and usually available, and even when she was angry it simply meant that a bonus of affection was coming up. Mick was patience on legs. He would let Conn wrestle him, punch him, threaten him, and his only retaliation was laughter.

But his father was several men, not all of them nice. Kathleen frequently treated Conn’s presence like a bit of accidental lumber and often tried to sweep him out of doors. Angus was the worst. Playing with him was for Conn like trying to work a machine he didn’t understand. Every so often his fist would come out like a piston, and Conn couldn’t tell which lever he had pulled this time. Whenever he was around Angus, Conn kept in trim for flight.

Yet even these uncertainties became a kind of fixture. And the first few years of Conn’s life taught him that things were unchangeable. All there could be was his father coming in from the pit, his mother roughing his hair as she put him to bed. Time was High Street, Angus bullying, Mick laughing, Kathleen bustling.

Then he had to go to school. It astonished him that the simple expression of his unwillingness to go didn’t banish the necessity. Out of the rubble of his old security he picked some weird new perceptions: that Kathleen’s chest was getting bumpy, that Mick could touch the top of the door if he jumped, that Angus could lift a full pail of water off the ground. His having to go to school was just part of the general strangeness.

So he went. Very soon he accepted it. It didn’t occur to him that Angus was the only other one of the family who attended the same school at the end of the street. It didn’t occur to him that Mick and Kathleen were going somewhere else.

3

Not long after he started attending High Street School, Conn came in from playing one evening, resignedly expecting to be sent to bed. But two things about the room threw routine out of joint: his father, who had come home late from the pit and wasn’t long washed, stood still stripped to the waist and heating a clean shirt against the fire which faceted his body into planes of brightness; Grandpa Docherty sat beside the fire, smoking a blackened clay pipe. Conn liked his Grandpa. He was brown and thin, with enormous hands and a gentle voice that didn’t belong here. When Conn’s family visited his house, he would talk almost exclusively to Conn and, if his father wasn’t there, would let Conn play with the strange, worn beads he carried in his jacket pocket.

Now he winked an invitation to Conn and stood him between his legs. He just sat there staring at Conn with a kind of mournful affection the boy couldn’t understand. The hugeness of his hands obscured the pipe-bowl completely, so that he seemed to be grasping fire. Conn writhed uncomfortably, sensing the unfamiliarity of the room. It was as if it was no longer one place but sectored into different areas. His father was taking too long to heat his shirt. His mother was completely absorbed in folding the washing in her basket. His grandfather watched him hypnotically. Kathleen sat on the stool, staring interestedly at her grandfather.

Conn was glad when his mother said, ‘Oan ye go oot, son. An’ play a wee while longer. Kathleen, you watch the wean.’ Kathleen tutted but took him out, his grandfather releasing him reluctantly.

With the children outside, Jenny Docherty put aside her basket of washing, pushed a loosened bang of hair behind her ear, and said brightly, ‘Well. Ah want a word wi’ Aggie. Ah’ll see ye before ye go.’

‘Right, Jenny,’ Old Conn said.

‘Right, nothin!’ Tam’s voice stopped her. ‘Ye’ll wait, Jen. This is your hoose. Y’ve a richt tae hear whit’s said in it.’

‘It’s aw richt, Tam.’

‘Of coorse it is. So jist content yerself.’

Conn’s feet clattered in the entry below them. Then the room filled slowly with silence. Jenny went back to her washing, teasing and folding the clothes repetitively and needlessly. It soothed her, faced as she was with the futility of what was about to happen. This at least was something which offered an immediate return, the comfort and warmth of her family.

It was still light enough outside but the small windows acted as a filter, adjusting the day marginally at both ends, so that dawn was delayed and darkness, as now, was anticipated. The room was already drowning in dusk.

‘The nichts is fairly drawin’ in,’ Old Conn said.

‘Aye. Winter’s no’ faur awa.’

Jenny felt sorry for him, but it was a pity caged in the resentment she felt against the atmosphere he had created. She watched Tam tuck his shirt into his trousers and hoped that he wasn’t going to be upset by the conversation that was ahead. Ladling out his enormous plate of soup and setting it on the table by the window, she felt a helpless love for him. He had been drinking. She knew that was why he had been late. It hadn’t been much, but he did it so seldom that even a glass of beer showed. Each eye glowed with an almost imperceptible fuse of temper.

She had learned to recognise these times and understood them. At first she had tried to oppose them but not now. They were infrequent and, since he disliked them as much as she did, all you could do was minister to them like a nurse until the pain passed. For pain was what lay at the centre of them. Tam despised the way drink was used in High Street as a means of escaping from yourself. There were occasions when he enjoyed having a drink, and that was all right. But there were others, which both of them recognised, when the drink was a toast to his own despair. Of these he was always ashamed.

Tacitly both understood that there was in him a kind of malignancy, a small hard growth of bitterness which lay dormant most of the time but would spasmodically be activated by an accumulation of imperceptible irritations. When that irreducible nub of frustration discharged its pus, it created in him an allergy to his own life. The result was anger against whatever was nearest to him at the moment. It wouldn’t last for very long but, while it did, it was like being locked in with a thunderstorm. His rage might flash out on anything, one of the children, herself, an inanimate object. They still had in the house a clock which his fist had petrified at ten past nine. It lay in a drawer as a bit of family history, an antique of anger. It had become a secret joke between them. Sometimes when his anger was swelling, she would say quietly, ‘Aye, it’ll soon be ten past nine, Tam.’ And he would give himself up to self-conscious laughter.

Another salve she used was to say, canting her head to have him in profile, ‘My! Ye’re gettin’ to look awfu’ like Gibby Molloy.’ Old Mrs Molloy’s only son, who lived alone with her, two entries along from them, was the local exemplar of pointless fury. Every once in a while on a Saturday night he drank himself into a state of revolutionary ardour. Coming home, he would methodically set to work – to a stream of background noises which included an obscene roster of his personal enemies, repetitive denunciations of ‘them’ and ‘youse’, and spontaneous slogans of vaguely proletarian bias – battering down the door of the outside toilet. Every Sunday morning after such a night, he was out early, quietly and efficiently replacing the curtain on that small tabernacle of public decency.

Anyone seeing him on these occasions found him at his most benign and pleasant. He never alluded to the previous night but went about his work with pleasant forbearance, as if he was repairing damage from a very localised storm. Nobody tried to analyse what dark neurosis related Gibby periodically to his toilet in alternate conflict and reconciliation. It was a release which bothered nobody, since the toilet was out of commission for a few hours of darkness once in the space of several months. It became an accepted social phenomenon, an occasional talking-point. Someone might say, ‘He’s surely gettin’ mair regular, is he no’? Wis it no’ jist at the end o’ last year the last time?’ One of the communal jokes was that Gibby was working at the fulfilment of a secret ambition to be a maintainer of toilet doors.

By categorising Tam’s anger with Gibby’s, Jenny could sometimes negate it. But the effectiveness of her kidding was dependent on her knowing the times when it was an impertinence. She was afraid that this might be one. As she watched him sit at the table, his hair still damp from the washing, his hands tearing pieces of bread and dunking them in his soup, she tried to console herself with the thought that if he was entering one of his black phases, he would make up for it later. For afterwards his mood tended to be as expansive as a meadow, and it was like when she had first known him. Placatively, she turned to Old Conn.

‘Wid ye like a plate yerself?’

‘Nah. Thank ye, Jenny. But Ah’m no’ long bye wi’ mine.’

She went back to folding her clothes, abstracting herself from their presence. Old Conn communed with his pipe. Tam ate. The only sign that everything was not normal was that the paper, which Tam usually mouthed over painfully during his meal, lay unread on the table.

‘Weel, feyther,’ Tam said. ‘Whit is it?’

‘Oh, Ah wis jist walkin’, an’ Ah thocht Ah’d look in.’

‘Aye. Jist the same wey as ye hivny done fur a year or twa.’

‘Ah’m no’ as young as Ah used tae be, Tam. Ah don’t get aboot as much.’

‘Naebudy’s complainin’.’

The terms of their exchange were stated. Tam was refusing to meet him anyhow except frontally. Old Conn was habitually a slow talker. Every sentence tended to be the harvest of long thought. He punctuated the silences with words. His inflections, the ghost of slower days in Connemara, made even argument a wistful air, against which his son’s guttural Lallans was a jarring discord.

‘Ye’re a sair hert tae yer mither, son,’ Conn said, still wanting to seduce a response from him rather than demand it. ‘She’s that worried.’

‘Ah see ma mither every week. Ah ken hoo she feels.’

‘Do ye? Aboot the wee one?’

‘Aye. Ah thocht that’s whit it wis. Because he’s no’ et the Catholic schil.’

‘Why is he no’, Tam? Angus wis bad enough. Noo that’s two o’ them at Protestant schil. Why d’ye send them there?’

‘Because it’s nearer.’

‘Oh, Tam!’ The old man gave the words a profound sadness and at the same time a terrible finality, as if they were an excommunication. He seemed surprised that Tam, with such blasphemy scarcely cool on his lips, could still rise from the table, tear a spill from his newspaper, cross to the fire and light a cigarette.

As far as there had been a conversation, it was finished. Old Conn had come up against a familiar opacity that to him was fathomless and frightening. Whatever thoughts he had once had were long since stultified into attitudes, and these were all he could offer a situation which hurt him brutally. He retreated behind them now with a kind of glazed automatism. These formalised exchanges were an area of earned articulacy between them, being a frequently experienced conclusion to their attempts to meet each other on this issue. While Old Conn read his son the sermon of his wayward self, Tam, tying on his good boots across the fire from him, gave him the ritual responses.

‘Whit’s happened to ye? Sometimes Ah think Ah should never hiv left Ireland.’

‘Naw. That’s richt. Then we could all’ve starved in a state o’ grace.’

‘Where d’ye get yer thochts? Yer blasphemous thochts.’

They grow in pits. Ye can howk them oot wi’ the coal.’

‘Nae wonder ye’ve had trouble gettin’ jobs. The way ye talk. Ye’ve never known yer place.’

‘Ah’ve still tae find it. In the meantime, ma place is wherever Ah happen tae be.’

‘Look roon ye! Ye’ve a hoose an’ a family an’ a guid enough joab. Ye don’t know hoo lucky ye are. When Ah came over here

‘Ah ken, Ah ken. Ye chapped the door o’ Kerr the builder. An’ he let ye sleep in a shed fur a fortnicht. An’ ye worked two weeks fur jist the price o’ yer meals. Did he chain ye up at nichts, feyther?’

‘Tam!’ Jenny’s voice as she turned from her washing surprised them both, the shock it expressed providing an objective measurement of the distance between them.

Tam stood up and when he spoke it was an indirect plea to his father for a truce.

‘Luk, feyther. We’ve had a’ this afore. Ah ken ye had it rough. An’ Ah’m sorry. So there it is. But that’s nae excuse fur kiddin’ oan this is comfort. It’s mebbe better, but it’s no’ guid.’

‘Ye’re too taken up wi’ the body. Instead o’ the soul.’

‘So are a few folk, feyther. Ah don’t see mony priests wi’ malnutrition.’

‘Whit aboot the wee fella? He’s got a soul too, ye know.’

‘Then let Goad fin’ it.’

Old Conn retracted from him, as if not sure how closely God could localise his thunderbolts. He shook his head in disbelief. Tam put his white silk scarf round his neck, collected his jacket and cap, wanting to avoid further abrasion.

‘Ah’m awa doon tae the corner, Jen. Ah’ll no’ be long. Dae ye want tae hing oan, feyther? Or wull Ah walk ye doon?’

His father said nothing. He stared at the fire, Jetting Tam and Jenny look at each other across a silence. His eyes looked watery in the firelight. Having sounded the depth of his bafflement, he looked at Jenny, but spoke at Tam.

‘Ye never learned talk like that fae oor family,’ he said softly, deliberately.

Tam’s voice hardly ruffled the stillness: ‘Whit does that mean?’

‘It’s a’ richt, Tam,’ Jenny said quietly. ‘Forget it.’

‘Whit does that mean?’ Tam shouted.

The old man looked back at the fire.

‘Ah mean whit Ah mean,’ he said.

‘Naw!’ Tam was bending over him. That’s the last thing you mean. You mean whit Father Rankin tells ye tae mean. See that.’ He pointed at Conn’s head. There’s nothin’ in there that belongs tae you. They confiscated yer bloody brains at birth. An’ stuffed their stinkin’ catechism in their place. Auld man. Whit gi’es you the richt tae think bad o’ ma wife? Because she’s Protestant. Damn yer stupidity! Look!’ Old Conn’s right hand was in his jacket pocket, and Tam yanked roughly at his arm until the hand emerged, the rosary beads he held in it spilling out roughly, like entrails. Tam took them from him. ‘Bloody toays! Ye’re still playin’ wi’ yer bloody toays!’

Tam and his father stared helplessly at each other across the rosary as if it was a frontier. On the one side was Old Conn’s unassailable acceptance of his life. On the other lay Tam’s personal experience, a wilderness of raw ideas and stunted dreams, a desperate landscape which this instant set before him like a map. He read in it his own despair, understood it, not rationally, but more deeply than that, because he had learned it in his blood. He saw the bleak terrain of his own life stretching before him without stint. The one oasis was his family. The rest was work that never blossomed into fulfilment, thought that was never irrigated with meaning. The absence of certitude made a moor of the future, and inarticulacy lay over everything like a blight. He felt a grotesqueness in his efforts to impose himself on the forces he was up against, the pettiness of his fights with pit managers, the ludicrousness of a family that had two religions. He had perceptions that enabled him to feel the pain, but not the words to make it work for him. He could only endure.

In this moment the rosary seemed to divide him from a mysterious contentment, perhaps brought over by his father from the rural Ireland he had never seen, born as he had been among the factories and workshops of Graithnock. Beyond that line was a safe place inhabited by his father. But it wasn’t his, and he couldn’t live there honestly. He realised with sudden hurt that the volume of his voice hadn’t meant anger or conviction, but simply uncertainty. Gently he gave back the rosary, and it was as if he was returning to his father every gift which Old Conn had ever given him.

‘Ach, feyther,’ he said. His hand touched his father’s shoulder awkwardly. ‘It’s a’ wan. It disny maitter.’

He cleared his throat and made an attempt to smile at Jenny. Fumbling for a formula, he said to his father, ‘Hoo’s ma mither keepin’ onywey?’ And then as their alienation from each other swallowed up the question – ‘My Christ!’

He turned at once and was going out when Kathleen brought Conn back in, informing her mother, ‘Mick an’ Angus are jist comin’, mammy.’

Their father bumped against them awkwardly. And for a second they were all floundering strangely in the gloom. Then Tam touched Conn’s head in his favourite gesture of affection, and went out, leaving on Conn’s scalp a message he couldn’t understand and which his father couldn’t express.

4

Tam didn’t go immediately to the corner that night. Keeping to the opposite side of the street, he cut off down the Twelve Steps, a dark alley, the steepness of which was periodically eased by short clusters of steps that occurred like locks in a canal. It led down to the riverside. He sat on the dyke and watched the water.

He was waiting for what had happened in the house to catch up with him. What he had said to his father had been not so much a deliberate expression of his thoughts as a stumbling discovery of them, as much a revelation to himself as it was to anybody else. The confrontation had brought from him secrets he hadn’t openly acknowledged in his own mind, attitudes he hadn’t consciously formulated, but which had become a part of him because of the climate of his life, contracted like a virus from the slow talk of his friends, embedded like the pellets of black powder from the pit-blasts in his face. Now he had declared these attitudes in words and he had to measure himself against them.

The step of doing so wasn’t an easy one to take. His mother and father had done their work well. Woven into the whole texture of his boyhood were formative memories of the crucifix on the wall, family pilgrimages to nine o’clock Mass, the catechism, priests whose casual opinions became proverbial wisdom for his parents. His three sisters had made good marriages. The four brothers he would have had if they had lived had all been baptised Catholic. He had always been told to pray for them. Now it seemed like a profanation of their infant corpses to abandon the faith which had buried them.

When he had married Jenny, it was simply because he had wanted to marry her, and the feeling was hot enough to make fuel of anything that got in its way. He had felt no conscious antagonism towards the Church. And since their marriage Jenny had never tried to influence him. When Kathleen and Mick went to the Catholic school, she accepted it. When Angus and Conn attended High Street school, it was his own decision, one made brusquely, as if he didn’t want to consider its implications. ‘It’s nearer’ was all he said.

Now at least one implication of that decision was forming slowly in his mind: perhaps he wasn’t a Catholic. He felt cold without the word. It had happed his thoughts as long as he could remember. Whatever misery, anger, bitterness, despair had come to him, it had still been vaguely containable in the folds of that loose word, to be thawed to a sort of comfort. Even now he wasn’t sure that the word didn’t belong to him. He merely suspected that it might not, as if the deciding of it wasn’t up to him. He could not make the intellectual choice. He could only sense that he somehow had to be himself, whatever that might be, and it might not be a Catholic. What he felt profoundly was the uncertainty of himself, simply that he had to meet life without protection.

The thing in him as he sat on the cold stone of the dyke, with the river flecking at his feet, wasn’t a thought but an emotion. He had buried a part of himself. So he sat accepting the void, without having any good words with which to decorate it, without a reassuring thought in which to enshrine the past. It was as if above him his own cold star had come out. Ill-equipped as he was, he would follow it. Rising, he felt suddenly the complexity of the night around come over him like a blackout. He needed company.

The corner wasn’t so much a place as an institution. It had its own traditions and standing orders. Small groups formed round different topics of conversation by a kind of spontaneous cohesion. In the course of an evening, a casual activity, like sparring or conundrums, would isolate certain people in it as if it was a games-room. But a precise observation or a new anecdote would be relayed from knot to knot like an announcement. The various groups remained complementary to a central unit. Solidarity was what it was all about. A typical expression of it had been the night a stranger with a Glasgow accent came to the corner.

He had been drinking, not enough to make him unsteady, just enough to activate his malice and crystallise it in his eyes. There would be perhaps two dozen men at the corner, lined unevenly along the wall of the Meal Market.

The stranger stopped at the first one and said, ‘Good evenin’, bastard.’

Although his voice was casual, the reaction, even among those who couldn’t have caught what he actually said, was instantaneous, like an electric charge passing along them. Twenty-odd men stiffened.

Somebody muttered, ‘Naw. Naw, sir,’ almost pleadingly.

The stranger walked slowly along the line, mixing his insults with the measured deliberation of someone trying to brew a riot. The silence of the others was a debate. He was a big man. From his jacket pocket a bottle protruded. He might be too drunk to know what he was saying.

‘Fine,’ a voice said. ‘That’s fine! On ye go hame noo.’

‘Ah’ll fight any one of ye first. In a fair fight. Jessies! A bunch o’Jessies!’

The main problem was a technical one. His malice was indiscriminate and they couldn’t all answer it. The stranger drew lots for them.

The Pope’s a mairrit man,’ he said.

He had reached the end of the line.

‘A meenit, chappie!’ a voice said.

It was Tadger Daly, father of ten. A champion had been chosen. The big man turned. Tadger was walking towards him.

‘That’s a nasty thing tae say, chappie. Noo . . .’

The big man’s right hand was easing the bottle out of his pocket. From about four feet away, Tadger took off. In mid-air his head looped so that it hit the big man’s nose, which opened sickeningly (‘Like the Red Sea,’ somebody later suggested). When the big man lay on the ground, there was a moment in which the physical ugliness of what had happened almost became dominant, until someone said matter-of-factly, That’s whit ye call doin’ penance, big man.’

And another remarked, ‘You were the richt man fur the job, Tadger. As the Pope’s auldest boy, ye were the natural choice.’

The incident was in perspective. Water and a cloth were brought from a nearby house. Tadger helped in cleaning up the big man. Then a couple of the men conducted him, wet cloth still held against his nose, to the end of the street, off the premises, as it were, and faced him towards the railway station. The whole thing had the quality of a communal action, and had been conducted without rancour.

That night became part of the history of the corner. Any memorable incidents, remarks or anecdotes would be frequently gone over in the nights immediately following their occurrence, like informal minutes of previous meetings. Later, they would recur less often, having been absorbed into the unofficial history of their lives, the text of which was disseminated in fragments among them. Any man who stood at the corner had invisibly about him a complex of past events like familiar furniture, the images of previous men like portraits. The corner was club-room, mess-deck, mead-hall. It was where a man went to be himself among his friends.

5

But tonight it was quiet. A dozen or so were douring the evening out. Tam joined Buff Thompson and Gibby Molloy, who were standing in silence together.

‘Aye, Tam,’ Gibby said.

Buff nodded and winked.

‘A clear nicht,’ Tam said.

And each stood letting his own thoughts feed on him.

Their silence was the infinity where three parallel despairs converged. Over the past few years Buff’s whole nature had contracted. The gradual recession of his physical powers had taken with it his defensive reflex of wry humour, and left him stranded on the hard, unrelieved futility of his own life. With only a few years ahead of him, he was clenched round a frail sense of purpose that was diminishing to nothing. Gibby’s natural habitat was moroseness. Living alone with his mother, held in a net of trivia, his life consisted of occasional spasms of wildness contained in a long inertia.

For Tam the moment was a funeral service for a former self. Tam Docherty, Catholic, seemed finally dead. He couldn’t resist going back to memories of his boyhood, like holding a mirror to the corpse’s mouth. But no strong doubts came to cloud his thought. There was in his head a clarity, a cold emptiness. The talk of the others at the corner seemed less related to him than the sound of the river had.

He still hadn’t spoken by the time Dougie McMillan came up. Dougie wasted no time.

‘Ah’m lookin’ fur a local lad wi’ a notion o’ the game,’ he said. He flashed his jacket open to show that he was wearing his professional pockets. This is a nicht that wis made fur poachin’, boays. Ah’ can smell the salmon. They’re lyin’ doon at Riccarton Water waitin’ tae surrrender. Noo Ah’ve a couple of vacancies. Wan oan the net an’ wan tae be steerer. Who’s it tae be?’

The others laughed.

‘Who’ll pey the fines?’ Buff asked.

‘Ma lawyers attend tae a’ these wee things. Noo, come oan, boays. Don’t make a rush like this. Form an orderly queue. Buff, Ah’m sorry Ah hiv tae turn ye doon. Ye’re guid but ye’re auld, son. Tam Docherty. There’s ma man. The finest hundred-yards melodeon-player in Ayrshire. Tammas. Ah guarantee success. Riccarton’s yer oyster. I will make youse fishers of fish.’

Since Tam’s mood was unemployed, and since this was a night for picking out the lining of your pockets, he felt interested in any diversion. He let Dougie banter him into the idea of a poaching expedition. Gibby, who had been wilting with boredom for more than an hour, suddenly bloomed with enthusiasm, and insisted on offering his services. Conscious of the danger involved in using somebody subject to such unpredictable fits of not unobtrusive violence, Dougie was doubtful. He only agreed after making clear the special terms of Gibby’s contract.

‘Nae brainstorms,’ he cautioned, as if they were a hazard as avoidable as taking matches down the pit. ‘An’ if we pass ony shithoose doors, fur any favour shut yer een. In case ye get the notion.’

Gibby nodded soberly, guaranteeing sanity at all times. Now that the outing was fully manned, there was an atmosphere of expectancy as they waited for darkness. Gibby especially was impatient. He had suggested that he should go up and let his mother know, in case she worried. But when Dougie replied that she might not let him out to play again, Gibby abandoned the idea sheepishly. Dougie had the net and a couple of rough towels in the special pockets that were sewn inside the jacket, so that there was no need for anybody to bring more gear. Even Buff caught the fever. While they waited, he recounted a long, involved story about how he had been taught the art of guddling salmon. He looked a little forlorn, mulling his memories, when they left him in the gloaming to walk down through the town.

As Tam went with them, the night that was coming seemed to mute the hardness of the town with an influence like a woman’s, draped a corner with shadow, made a back lane pungent with the breath of trees. Blowsy with summer, scented with a thousand subtle mysteries, it seduced him from his loneliness and made him feel right simply to be walking towards the dark. The smells he moved among were like an aerial language, incomprehensible to him yet instinct with memory as if, could he decipher them, they would tell him who he was. He let their soundless babble break over him, feeling quicken far within him vague sensations, half-thoughts.

He remembered the summers of boyhood, not as a continuity, a part of his own history, but in one small instant ecstasy of pain, as if a bubble of blood were bursting in his heart. Borne on the air, it seemed, like dragonflies, as faint, as glimpsed, as fleet, came his regrets for what he had been, was, would never be. But they were gentle with him, as if to acknowledge them was partly to atone. Irrelevantly, the three of them walking brought back to him another night, and miners walking. He had been only a boy, ten, twelve years old, but he was there among them – miners, thousands his memory made them, walking through the darkness towards a hill. They held a meeting.

That memory still held him, when they emerged from the town along the river’s edge. The darkness was waiting for them like a friend. Having made the night’s acquaintance at moments in his journey through the town, Tam was still unprepared for the immediacy of its full embrace, the ripeness of its breath, the sweetness of the grass. The focus of sounds shifted, whispers magnified. The river, gagged by the town, survived its interruption to resume myriad tonal changes, like the articulation of infinity. Along the sound they walked in single file, Dougie in the lead, interpreting for them scutters in the grass, a baffle of movement somewhere in the dark.

Dougie was in no hurry to begin. He walked them long and when he found a place (a comfortably grassed chaise longue between two trees that was invisible till flattened, so that his skill had seemed to invent it), he sat down and took out his cigarettes. They smoked and talked, their voices moling gently back and forward in the darkness. It was good to listen to Dougie. He talked about poaching, stories of legendary whippets, wayward ferrets, night fishings when the catches had been Galilean. More than the anecdotes themselves Tam enjoyed the idiom in which they were expressed. Apart from the creativeness of his memory, Dougie made liberal use of expressions like ‘It was that quiet ye could hear the snails breathin’,’ and ‘The waiter wis oily, throwin’ the sun like arra’s in yer e’en.’ He was savouring the prelude to action, content to initiate them slowly into his joy in what he was doing. He didn’t lech after the salmon; he loved them truly.

The first part of the ceremony over, the baptism followed. They undressed quietly, sloughing three heaps of clothes among the trees. Phosphorescent with pallor, their bodies separated, flickering like tapers through the leaves. Tam and Dougie moved down river, Gibby in the opposite direction. The uncertainty of the surface they were crossing dehumanised their progress, feet raised and lowered jaggily, arms wavering for balance, so that they seemed like three enormous birds which had never fledged. Tam felt the coldness of the night film on his body like frost.

The method was simple. Taking an end of the net each, Tam and Dougie insinuated themselves into the water, which compressed the muscles of legs, torso, and arms in turn, like a torture box, until the coldness located the genitals and clenched there like a bulldog. Then they teased the net into a gentle curve behind them and started to swim very smoothly upstream, towards where Gibby should be. A strangled gasp located him. The noise didn’t matter, since his function was to cause enough disturbance to drive the fish towards them. He performed well above and beyond the call of duty. The water boiled above them and among the threshings, his curses and agonised pleadings played like flying fish. The impression was of a man acting in self-defence. Tam and Dougie felt small impacts take place within the steady pull of the river, like pulse-beats being missed. Slowly they swam the ends of the net together and hauled it out.

It was all done twice, with an interval for Gibby to offer up prayers of intercession to the god of poaching for the preservation of his manhood. They caught eleven good salmon and six or seven miscellaneous midgets, which Gibby wouldn’t allow them to throw back, saying he had a client for them.

Buffing his body back to warmth under the towel, Tam experienced a profounder feeling of accomplishment than he had known for a long time. When they were dressed and walking back along the river with their catch, he watched Dougie, a cigarette in his mouth, the smoke drifting round his nostrils like incense in the stillness of the night. His face reminded Tam of the way his father’s used to look when the family was returning from the Mass. Tam felt envious of the relationship Dougie had established with his life. With the chaos around him he had made his separate peace. Tam was wondering if he could do the same. The well-being he felt at the moment seemed like a promise.

Under the Riccarton bridge, Dougie cached eight of the salmon in a hole beside the river, to be taken to the back-door of the fish-shop in the morning. That gave them one each for the house, and Gibby still had what Dougie called ‘the meenies’.

‘Whit the hell d’ye want wi’ them?’ Dougie asked as they came through the backstreets.

‘They’re fur ma boss, see.’

‘Are ye aff yer heid? They widny make a breakfast fur a bumbee.’

‘They’re no’ fur eatin’. Mair a sorta food fur thocht. Ah’m goin’ up this wey.’

Gibby made a strange, internal noise of merriment, laughter in the dark caves of his cunning. They had halted on a corner.

‘Ye ken hoo holy auld Devlin is?’ The other two nodded. The factory-owner’s nickname was Jehovah. ‘When he peys the wages, he always has a wee service. Hymns an’ prayers. An’ by the look o’ the wages Ah think he chairges us fur them. Always talkin’ aboot “The Plan”. Everythin’ that happens has a purpose. Well, let ‘im work this yin oot. Hauf a dozen fish lying’ oan his porch at eicht in the mornin’.’ Walking away from them, Gibby had started to cackle. He shouted back, ‘If he disny stert buildin’ an ark in the back-door, it’s no’ ma faut.’ He bellowed, ‘Salmon! Fresh Salmon!’ twice, and merged with the shadows.

‘The bastard’s daft,’ Dougie said, not without reverence, and they walked on.

Coming in, Tam had the momentary sensation of having been away for a long time and yet felt the room fit around him like familiar clothes. After a couple of hours spent with the width of the darkness breaking across him like an ocean, the house seemed more minute than ever. Yet in some strange way this room was bigger than the night, absorbed it into itself until the excitement of the darkness disappeared.

Instantly, what they had been doing was in perspective. The vague notion Tam had had to take up the poaching seriously, to cultivate the pleasure he took in it, dissipated. He felt a little guilty, as if he had been a boy playing truant. He didn’t want to be like Dougie. Poaching was a nice enough way to pass the time. But being a man wasn’t a hobby. That was what they would like you to do: work your shift and take up pigeons, or greyhounds, or poaching, and hand your balls in at the pay-desk.

He looked round the room, grateful for its pokiness, its poverty. It was a place that couldn’t help being honest about who he was. In the glow from the fire the moleskins shone. He listened. Every breath drawn in this house made him bigger, both told him who he was and put demands on him. He heard Conn sigh in his sleep and wanted to see him grow up overnight. What would he be? An office worker? A teacher even? He listened to Jenny’s breathing, steady, peaceful – the pulse of his family. How in the name of God did she manage? His wonder was confused with her voice and her laughter and images of her body in bed. He felt an enormous upsurge of identity, and grew aggressive on it. He almost wished he could fight somebody now on their behalf.

Instead, he laughed to himself and started to make a cup of tea. The salmon lolled in the pail of water near the fireplace. There would be some for Buff and Aggie too. As he moved about, taking off his boots and jacket, buttering a piece, masking the tea, he was all the time making small superfluous noises. ‘Aye’, ‘Ah weel’, ‘Uh-huh’. It was a dialogue with his own contentment. In a few hours he would be back in the pit and tomorrow night he would come home like a dead man, having paid for his loss of sleep. But for the moment time was under control, his servant. As he champed his bread and scalded his mouth luxuriously with great slurps of tea, he was startled by a noise outside, and then recognised Gibby’s gentle, chuckling laughter. The sound seemed somehow lovely in the stillness, was like a rose blooming between the cobblestones of the street. And Gibby’s amusement pollenated Tam’s own little moment, until he found himself rocking with suppressed laughter, shaking his head, a soggy mass of bread held precariously in his mouth.

‘Tam?’ Sleep made the word an almost indecipherable wedge of sound.

The pressure of Tam’s pent-up good humour siphoned itself off into a smile. He had someone to share it with.

‘It’s King Edward, Mrs Docherty. Ah jist drapped in fur a cup o’ tea. The fire’s oot in the palace.’

She stirred against an undertow of sleep, trying to ask about where he had been. The sensuous slowness of her movements brushed like silk against his senses. ‘Ah’m no’ sure,’ he said to her half-formed question. ‘But Ah ken where Ah’m goin’.’ He rinsed his mouth out with the last of the tea and hissed the dregs on to the banked fire.

In bed he had a moment of doubt. She must be tired. But the gossamer hair of her arm breathing against his naked body blessed his urge, absolving him from choice. He won her slowly and gently from sleep, led her up out of the recesses of whatever dream had held her, to meet him. The covers tented above them, encased him with her coilings and the lush sweetness of her sweat. Only once she stinted, whispering, ‘We’ll waken the wean.’ The words were a ridiculous irrelevance, like a naked woman trying on a mutch, and he almost laughed. He brought her to fusion and lay back quickly, muttering, ‘Ah’m sorry, son,’ to his spilled sperm, ‘but we hivny the room.’

Out of the darkness, complete, as if it had been waiting for him there, came what he had remembered earlier tonight -miners walking in their droves towards a hill. He had been sleeping the night with his uncle, Auld Spooly. To keep him company, for Spooly was a bachelor. And Spooly had taken him with him on the march. Just about every pit in Ayrshire went spontaneously on strike. They marched to Craigie Hill and held a meeting.

What he remembered was the sheer awe of looking at their numbers. They had seemed to him enough to do whatever it was they wanted. They still were. The thought of it struck him with the force of a conversion as if he had just realised that he had once been present at a miracle. The void he had created earlier tonight talking to his father filled suddenly, wondrously, with men. He seemed to see again the opaque bulk of their bodies, massing like a storm cloud round the crest of Craigie Hill, to hear again the rumble of their voices, like frustrated thunder, to catch again the name that passed among their tight mouths like a password: Hardie. Keir Hardie. The name fell upon his mind now like a benediction. Keir Hardie knew the truth and was down there, telling it to the big ones. There was hope. Tomorrow he would go in among whatever was waiting, water, slag, bad props, and fetch his coal. And Keir Hardie would do his talking for him.

With the satisfaction of a man who has established the terms of his employment, he turned over on his side to go to sleep.

‘Aye, Jenny,’ he said, thinking of a detail overlooked. ‘Conn goes through wi’ the ither boys the morra.’

And the firelight caught his smile and showed it to nobody.

6

Just by his moving out of the box-bed beside his parents’ to the same room as Mick and Angus, Conn’s life entered a new phase. The change involved no more than a few yards but in Conn’s private geography he had crossed a frontier.

The strangeness of things fed his sense of exploratory excitement. The very darkness of the room was different. When he lay in it, there was no fire, no gaslight burning. For a couple of hours or so every night, he was alone in it with the voices of the others reduced to a background music, and in his house solitude was a luxury. At these times he ruled the room, his whimsy was law. His bed was ship, plateau, stockade; storms blew up out of the corner by the window; Captain Morgan boomed in whispers; the packs of wolves ran round the walls; and an enemy was beaten until exhaustion reduced him to a pillow.

Night after night his fantasy made a weird ante-room to the reality in which his family moved beyond the wall. Coming in to check on him, his mother would often find him lying on top of the covers, his body buckled awkwardly as if he had fallen from a height, an Icarus whose wings had melted into the mundanity of rumpled bedclothes, drab walls.

But most exciting of all were the times when he managed to stay awake until Mick and Angus came to bed. He shared a bed with Angus while Mick lay across from them in the isolation to which his rank entitled him. The talks they used to have affected him like a fever. Mostly he didn’t really listen to their words, he simply absorbed them like microbes, until they induced in him delusions of manhood.

Mick liked to talk about places he had heard of and would like to go to. The names unfurled like bright colours in the darkness. His gentle voice, self-absorbed as a prayer, put into Conn’s mind garish maps of impossible places. Mexico, he said. And Canada. The outback. Bush. Crocodiles that were mistaken for logs. Cannibals. Spittle that was ice before it hit the ground. (If you cried, would your eyes freeze?) Dancing snakes. Conn shuddered ecstatically.

Angus was more immediate. He talked most about himself. His favourite subject was the boys he had fought, closely followed by the ones he would fight. He had always seemed to be physically in advance of his age, and already he gave the impression of a man’s strength compressed into a boy’s body. Conn, much slighter, jocularly called ‘the shakings o’ the poke’ by his father, listened to Angus with awe, admired him extravagantly, and surreptitiously tested his own biceps below the bedclothes.

Occasionally, Conn would say something himself. But he so often unintentionally evoked laughter, kindly from Mick, rather hooting from Angus, that he found protection in silence. The transmission of each one’s secrets to the darkness, the process of almost mystically hallucinating the future – these were part of a complicated rite, in which he was only a novitiate. Letting the other two act as a filter to his own confused experience, he found a temporary perspective through their eyes. They gave more definite shape to his growing pantheon of fears and doubts and hopes. With their attitudes pontificating and his own experience giving tentative responses, there started up in him a dialogue between himself and the circumstances around him. He began, quite simply, to become himself. By trying on his brothers’ attitudes he was beginning to measure himself.

At first, he was content to masquerade as them. He accepted Angus’s measurement of his father just as somebody who was tougher than anybody else, who could ‘easy win’ any other man in High Street – which pretty well made him unofficial champion of the world. Conn enjoyed carrying that knowledge around with him like a secret weapon which could get him out of any crisis.

He faithfully filed away Mick’s description of old Miss Gilfillan across the street as ‘a right lady’. It didn’t help much, since he wasn’t clear about what a lady was, and watching Miss Gilfillan like a detective didn’t clarify things. She remained a grey mystery in the funny way she walked, as if she was on wheels, her lips, which seemed to be sewn together (if you looked very close, you could see the little lines the stitching made), the special look she always gave him no matter how many other children were there, as if they had a secret. (Once she had given him a penny, coming out of her house just to do that. He had played outside quite a lot after that, but she never did it again.) Still, he kept those two things, side by side, Miss Gilfillan and ‘lady’, like someone memorising a dictionary meaning he doesn’t understand. Knowledge is knowledge.

He took over, without modification, his brothers’ opinions on a whole range of different subjects. From them he knew that football is the best game, a bee dies when it stings you. Ben Nevis isn’t the biggest mountain in the world; the biggest one’s in Africa. There isn’t a man in the moon. You don’t clipe on your friends, or anybody else.

But they also had certain positions he couldn’t take up. Their contempt for school always puzzled him. He enjoyed it. Miss Anderson was nice. She told you a lot of things you didn’t know. When Mick and Angus occasionally compared their different schools, taking each one room by room and scrawling their hatred across it like vandals, Conn was hurt. He was hurt for the school (especially Miss Anderson), for the way his brothers felt, and for the fact that he was different from them. The confusion depressed him.

Similarly, when it came to posh folk, he could share neither Mick’s quiet dismissal nor Angus’s aggressive desire to engage every boy in nice clothes in combat. Conn simply didn’t see any difference in them. He was happy as he was, and that was enough for him.

Worst of all, his brothers’ talk about churches took him out into chaos and abandoned him there. He dreaded the subject coming up and when it did he used to try to will himself to sleep. But their thoughts still wormed into his mind, coiling there into grotesque and fantastic shapes of fear. Though Mick and Angus exchanged Catholic and Protestant images of God with all the aesthetic preoccupation of two boys swapping cutout pictures, their words innocently invoked in Conn a welter of lurid contradictions.

His fears were intensified by the news of God he picked up from other places in incompatible bits and pieces. In spite of the fact that Catholic and Protestant lived together harmoniously in High Street, in spite of the fact that his brothers and his sister were singularly unconcerned about any religious differences, Conn contrived to worry a great deal about whether God was a Protestant or a Catholic. He was never quite clear which side Jesus had been on. His amorphous doubts made him too vulnerable, so he crystallised them into an irrational fear of priests, who weren’t an unfamiliar sight in High Street. Every time Conn saw one coming, he vanished up the first convenient close.

7

It had been raining. Having become intolerable in the house, Conn was allowed out as soon as the rain stopped. For quarter of an hour or so he had been scuffing about the almost empty street, where road and houses were still black from the rain, trying to get his idling imagination to move. Without seeming to have noticed it at any given moment, he became aware of a dark figure coming up from the Cross towards High Street. Conn paused and stared. The dull mother-of-pearl glare of the sky seemed so low as to make a tunnel of the Foregate. The figure came nearer, carrying a stick. It was a priest.

He was already spinning for cover when he saw his father standing in shirt sleeves at the close-mouth, smoking a cigarette. Wondering how long he had been there, Conn gravitated casually nearer to his father and became very interested in a chipped part of the tenement wall where the rain had softened the crumbling inside of the stone.

Sure enough the priest stopped at their entry. Conn stared in awe at the large figure. Father Rankin: a big man, in his early forties, prematurely grey – commonly known as the Holy Terror. He was said to go round certain houses where the husbands were known to lack religious fervour, and hound them out of their beds with his stick to go to Mass.

‘Guid day, Father,’ Conn’s father said politely.

‘Not for you, Tam Docherty. Not for you.’

Conn noticed his father’s lips purse and his eyes begin to study his cigarette. It was a familiar moment for Tam. For years priests had been coming periodically to the house, to do battle for Angus and Conn over souls the boys didn’t know they had. Usually they came in twos, a regular one and a new one, rather like an experienced doctor introducing a medical student to an unusual and particularly difficult case. Tam rather liked their visits. They always helped him to sort his own thoughts out. With a couple of them he had a pleasant, half-bantering relationship. And there was one whom he admired profoundly, Father McDermott, who called Tam ‘Doubting Thomas’ and insulted him pleasantly while sparring with one of the boys. But Father Rankin was different. When he was angry, his eyes beheld the damned. He felt no need of reinforcements.

‘And it won’t be a good day for you till you become a proper Catholic again.’

His father glanced at Conn and it was as if he was trying to explain something which Conn couldn’t understand. Conn didn’t know the significance of the words but the tone of them conveyed a reprimand, even to him. It was the first time he had ever heard anyone speak to his father like that.

‘You’re a pain to your mother and father. To your whole family. More than that. You’re an affront to God.’ To Conn the whole day seemed to drop dead, and they were three people standing in a desert of silence. ‘Well? Have you nothing to say for yourself?’

‘It’s still a guid enough day, Father.’

Conn thought he had never seen anybody as angry as the priest. The stick quivered indecisively and when it suddenly swivelled to point in his direction, Conn hung where he was, impaled on the gesture.

‘Is this your son?’

His father’s voice came very quick and very small, its smallness measuring the force which was compressing it.

‘Keep yer mooth aff the boay, Father.’

The priest’s eyes enlarged, looking at Conn’s father. ‘Right,’ he said, and moved towards the entry. Almost accidentally, it seemed, his father’s hand came up to lean on the wall, so that his arm just happened to bar the way.

‘Where wid ye be goin’, Father?’

‘To speak to your wife.’

‘Ah’d raither ye widny.’

‘I’m not concerned with what you want.’

‘Naw, but Ah am. Slightly.’

The pressure of their confrontation was so intense that it would have seemed impossible to walk between them. Conn stared.

‘I’ll have to speak to her about all this.’

‘She his a lot o’ worries, Father. Ah don’t think you wid help them any.’

The priest stepped back. The stick went horizontal in his hand. His face was tight with anger.

Tam Docherty,’ he said, ‘I have a duty to perform. You’re interfering with it. If you don’t step out of my way, I’ll take my stick to you.’

Conn’s father released his breath painfully and shook his head, his eyes closed. Conn couldn’t understand what it meant. Despair. Tam was suddenly exhausted by the complicated terms of his life, utterly baffled by the impossible acts of equilibrium it called for. They wanted you to respect authority when authority had no respect for you. They told you what your life meant, and asked you to believe it, when it had nothing to do with what was happening every day in your house and in your head. While your wife slaved and your weans were bred solely for the pits, like ponies, and your mates went sour, the owners bought your sweat in hutches, the government didn’t know you were there. And God talked Latin. The rules had no connection with the game. You came out to your door for a smoke and a man walked up and threatened to hit you with a stick. Where did he live? Conn’s father opened his eyes and looked steadily at the priest.

‘You do that, Father,’ he said, ‘an’ Ah’ll brek it intae inch-long bits across yer holy heid.’

The priest seemed hypnotised by what he saw in the other’s eyes. Tam’s frustration had become almost impersonal to Father Rankin. The priest was no more than the catalyst for many disparate perceptions, of furtive men who turned their masonic certificates face to the wall when they saw a priest coming, drunken women who would rather send their weans to the chapel than see them properly fed, his own father thankfully embracing his life like a galley-slave kissing his oar. The priest shook his head, deciding that philosophy was the best method of defence. He nodded towards Conn.

‘The sad thing is. Children tend to follow their parents. Even to the gates of Hell.’

‘We’ll be company fur each ither then.’

The priest shook his head again, as if Conn’s father had unsuccessfully been trying to answer a question.

‘What would your father say?’

‘Exactly whit you tell ‘im tae say. Ye’ve maybe made a blown egg o’ the auld man’s heid. But mine’s still nestin’. An’ ye never count yer chickens till they’re hatched. Ah’ll let ye know.’

The priest shook his head again, thought for a moment, turned suddenly, and walked away, back down towards the Foregate. Conn looked after the priest, elation mounting. His father had won. Turning to share his sense of victory, he saw his father’s face inexplicably bleak as he flicked his cigarette stub on to the wet road and went back into the entry.

But even his father’s strange lack of satisfaction couldn’t curb Conn’s delight. The giant who came to their door had walked away an ordinary man. The street resumed its own identity, became again simply a good place for playing in. Conn carefully lifted the discarded butt of his father’s cigarette. It was damp, and spilling shag. He held it gallously between his thumb and the middle and index fingers, and walked around impressively, exhaling manly clouds of air. He felt both security and excitement. It was a stimulating mixture, a boyish version of a sensation quite a few adults had known. If you were a friend of Tam Docherty, his proximity could be exciting. It was like being friends with Mount Etna. The lava never touched you.

That night Conn had something to tell Mick and Angus. It gave him importance. They listened carefully, asking him a lot of questions, and where he didn’t have an answer, he made one up. It was one of the first things he had hoarded up to share with them which wasn’t diminished by their reactions. He felt as if that one incident had bestowed a status on him.

He never fully lost it again. If not yet the equal of either of his brothers, he was at least an initiated member of the secret lives they led in the darkness of the bedroom, someone with a separate identity. The separateness thrilled him, but it was a pleasure which had to be paid for. There came a phase when he lay awake at nights, drowning in waking dreams, while his brothers slept. He lost himself down strange thoughts, stared for minutes into frightening and bottomless possibilities, got himself trapped within incomprehensible fears where he wrestled for release in a sweating panic.

One night, so long after he had started to sleep in this room that he had forgotten he had once slept somewhere else, he suddenly remembered the box-bed beside his parents’. Mick and Angus were asleep, Mick restless and making strange breathing sounds like a language Conn didn’t understand. Conn had been poised for more than an hour on the edge of terror. The room welled with a darkness that lived. Desperate with loneliness, Conn thought of the box-bed, the safety of having his mother and father. He wanted to be there.

Rising, he felt his way out of the room. The coldness of the floor made marble of his feet. He stepped stiffly around Kathleen’s bed and saw the fire red below the dampened dross, seeing it not as a fire, something with edges and form, but just as a redness, an inflammation on the dark. Its reassurance weakened him. Wanting to cry and luxuriating in his security, he wondered whether he should just climb into his old bed and be found there in the morning, or should waken his mother and have her voice to comfort him. He had started to move into the room when a strange sound halted him. He realised at last where it came from: his mother and father’s bed. But they weren’t in it. It was voices which weren’t voices, noises only, eerie, involved secretly with each other. He looked towards the darkness of the set-in bed, seeing it like a cave. Sounds soughed in it, a strange, underground sea whose murmurings frightened him.

Standing alone there, he was a stranger among strangers. He could hear the breathing of his brothers and his sister, whispers in the darkness, strange sounds like deformed laughter from whoever lay in his parents’ bed. A train clanked and snuffled somewhere, weird as a dragon. What was happening?

Cuddling his own dread to him like a doll, he went back. He lay beside Angus and a thousand miles from anyone, rigidly nursing himself to sleep, and weathered the long night like a fever.

8

Strange demons haunted the edges of their small lives – periodically exorcised in print. News from chaos. For philosopher, astrologer and shaman – the papers.

To Jenny it was all merely baffling and depressing. She sensed portents and dangers to them all moving clumsily behind the words, trying to break out. She wondered what it could possibly mean to her mother and father that they should make the paper the highlight of their day.

Every evening, Angus would come down for half-an-hour or so to his Granny’s single-end in the Pawn Loan just a few doors down from his own house, and read the paper to them. Granny Wilson could read, though her husband wasn’t too good at it (‘Ah only went tae the schil when they caught me,’ he used to say), but her eyesight was failing, and anyway, Jenny suspected, she liked the excuse for seeing at least one of her grandchildren for some part of every day. Before Angus did it, it had been Mick who read to them.

They made a ceremony of it. The reader sat in front of the fire, on the footstool. On one side sat Mairtin, smoking; on the other, hands folded on her pinny, Jean (‘Jean Kathleen’, she would tartly inform those who wondered why her granddaughter hadn’t been called for her). Custom had assigned them distinct roles. All news relating to politics and international affairs must await the seal of Mairtin’s attitude. Taking deep puffs of worldly wisdom, he would send out his dicta to Jean like smoke-signals. ‘That Churchill’s no’ a freen’ o’ the workin’ man.’ ‘Turkish swine!’ The human-interest stories were Jean’s province. She sighed readily for others, appended proverbs to her pity, descanted on the ubiquity of misfortune.

Perhaps that was wisdom – learning to play again like children among the chaos. But Jenny didn’t have that capacity. She was too aware of how their lives were overhung with threats they couldn’t control. It didn’t occur to her directly in terms of what one nation might do to another, of international crises. It came ciphered into small things – prices, the mutterings of the men at the corner, Tam’s growing desperation. She sensed that the small pressures they felt, the twinges that affected every day, related to something bigger, the way that tiredness can mean consumption. She didn’t begin to understand it. She only knew that somehow something was wrong.

To that extent she felt older than her parents. They had a simplicity of response to what was going on around them which she envied. God knew they had endured enough themselves. Their lives had been spent among the kind of hardship that didn’t exactly nurture naïveté. But perhaps they had lived so long with the imminence of dire happenings that for them it was house-trained.

They had learned to leave the bigger things to those who understood them. Unlike Jenny, they weren’t fearful of the incomprehensible equations of chance that tried to resolve themselves around their lives. Jenny remembered how when King Edward died, the photograph of him which her mother kept up on the wall had been reverentially taken down and shortly replaced by the face of King George V. That was how much it all meant to them. An old bearded face melting into a younger bearded face. The numerals behind the names changing according to some ancient, inscrutable law, like a mystic calendar that measures aeons. When one guardian angel left, another took his place, staring down on them while the children read out the confusions of the times, his oracular mouth buried in his beard, his steady eyes absorbing the mystery of it all, giving it meaning. Jenny preferred simply not to hear the news, as if ignorance of the possibilities paralysed their realisation.

But tonight, being Thursday, wasn’t so bad. This was the night of the week Jenny chose to come down herself for an hour or two. It was on Thursdays that her mother sent Angus to Dunsmuir’s shop for The Dundee - a weekly paper of addictive sentimentality. In the world it depicted there were no major issues and no doubts. People were ‘bodies’, anger was ‘Goodness Gracious!’, consternation was ‘Help ma Boab!’, and events were what happened when the cat got lost. Bought compulsively by many families in the West of Scotland every week, its pages were a triumph of placative ignorance. It was the highlight of the week for Mairtin and Jean.

Listening to Angus read from it now, Jenny noted for the umpteenth time that he spoke as if he was repeating a message-line for the Co-operative stores. He was fed up with the whole thing. It had been growing in him for some time. She suspected that the only reason he hadn’t openly rebelled against having to do it before now was the shilling that came at the end of it. She worried about Angus. She worried about all of them, but Angus was already forcing her vague, all-enveloping mother’s concern into a particular shape.

He was too hard, too much himself so soon. There was nothing frightened him, or at least nothing that would make him admit he was frightened. Not that that was bad. But just as fear couldn’t be detected in him, so there wasn’t much he would offer in the way of any uncertain feeling. He just returned responses. What lay behind them was his own business. Prodded, he closed up like a hedgehog. Doubt he couldn’t endure. Placed in it, he would grasp a wilful decision and cudgel his way out with it, no matter what. His aggressiveness was already well known in High Street. She often felt that he was challenging something to happen to him. He seemed to get into so many fights, and win them, which perhaps was worse. He had never turned his tongue on her, and Tam’s forcefulness had kept him a polite and biddable boy, as far as they knew. It was the extent of what they didn’t know that worried. Even so young, he was chafing, she could tell. And soon he would start work.

Hearing his bored voice as an indirect insult to her parents, she was glad she had brought Conn along tonight. He could try to read a bit for them. He should be able to, he was doing so well at school – top of his class. She had even once received a note from one of the teachers – a Miss Anderson – saying that Conn was ‘something special’ and was to be ‘given every encouragement’. She still kept it, at the back of a drawer, like an IOU from the future.

Watching Conn’s face as he listened, she saw the difference in the two boys. The words that Angus gave out grudgingly, so that his voice’s meanness seemed to make them worth nothing, were transformed by Conn’s receptiveness. His expression seized them, smiled over them, went into a conspiracy with his Granny, and everything was enlarged in his reaction to it. Angus’s flat insensitivity to things and Conn’s vulnerability to them were a contest.

When Angus paused at the end of an article, Jenny said, ‘Here, Angus. Take a wee rest. We’ll let Conn read a bit.’

Angus was canny.

There’s only the Jean McFarlane bit left, noo.’

It was her parents’ favourite column – written in the first person by Jean, a saga of trivia about the doings of herself and her husband, John. Helped by the name, Jenny’s mother identified with the writer. Conn would be starting at the top of the bill.

‘Aye. Ye’ve done well, son. Let Conn dae some work noo,’ Jean said.

Conn became immediately excited about it. Jenny understood the momentary reluctance with which Angus handed over the paper. He was trying to calculate what proportion of a shilling the Jean McFarlane column was worth. Conn settled himself on the footstool.

‘Noo,’ Mairtin said, ‘wan mistake an’ ye’re fired, wee yin.’

He made several. He started too high, had to modulate in the middle of a sentence, mispronounced some words. But finding his confidence, he read well. His voice really animated the small happenings it described. Mairtin and Jean responded well. They laughed, interpolated That’s a guid yin’. They were like a congregation which has suffered long under a minister apathetic enough to be an unbeliever, and suddenly rediscovers an old commitment in a new voice. Their enjoyment was refreshed through Conn.

Jenny recognised a success and knew that Thursday evenings were entering a new era. It saddened her a little – not for Angus, who would be glad to get free of the duty, if not the shilling. She simply saw in this minute shift of routine another sign that her family was growing up. Which was good. But along with the growth went the loosening process that frightened her, the loss of the difficult equilibrium of security in their lives which she had somehow managed to maintain. Development meant the shifting of their postures, the need for her family to put themselves one by one into positions of danger to themselves, to move out of the range of their parents’ protection.

Kathleen and Mick were already working. Kathleen was an attractive girl, getting big in the breast, subtly secretive about the eyes. She had started going to dances, being with boys. With that blank belief in the mysterious power of a faith which those who don’t believe it can best indulge, Jenny cloudily hoped that Kathleen, as the only practising Catholic in the house, had special protection. Mick was least worry of all to her. He seemed happy working at the mill in Menford Lane, where Kathleen also worked. He hadn’t wanted the pits, and his father was glad. Kathleen said that all the men liked him. He was so easy-going, pleasant, kind. He possessed some secret store of good nature, of unflappability, that had eluded the others. Perhaps it came from her father, whose favourite he was, and of whom he reminded Jenny.

It certainly didn’t come from Tam. Tam still had, it was true, the most instinctively generous nature she had found in a man. She believed him simply the man most worthy of love she had ever met. But more often now she felt him at times recede from her, become opaque. Having seen men go mean with the pits many times before, she dreaded what might be happening in him. It troubled her how ferociously he held to certain hopes. One of them was Conn. Vaguely Tam had decided Conn would go on with his education. She feared the time when that vagueness would have to form into something concrete. She could see no way in which it was possible. Financially, they lived on the edge as it was.

That disillusionment was one of the dangers she sensed ahead. She quite frequently experienced a deep but inexplicable sensation of catastrophe to come. It wasn’t something you could relate to specifics. Sometimes things were going smoothly when she felt it. It was like being on a river. The boat was sound enough. Everyone was reasonably well secured. Sometimes there were rapids, but you got through them with some fright, a bump here, a bruise there. Often there were nice times, good weather, easy talk. Yet always there was something else. A premonition. Heard faintly beyond laughter.

Conn’s voice, a small complacent contradiction to her fears, finished off. There were kind words for applause. There was milk with home-made biscuits, the traditional follow-on from a reading. They all had some. In spite of Jenny’s protestations, it was decided that Angus should still have his shilling, and Conn a sixpence. Both were pleased.

When Jenny told them to go straight home, Mairtin went out with them to see that they did. This too was traditional. He would wet his whistle in Mitchell’s pub before coming back. Jean didn’t approve of the drink. She went kirkwards every Sunday without fail and was well informed of the Lord’s opinions on the subject. But short of the Lord putting in a personal appearance, nothing was likely to change her husband. Mairtin was Mairtin. She had learned to accept him as such, and he in turn, though he might tease her with it, was tolerant of her holiness, which, in truth, tended to be more obtrusive than his drink. He usually drank little, but, having been staggering drunk on quite a few occasions, he always found that Jean had wrapped cloths round the smoke-board of the fire by the time he got back.

‘To protect them that canny protect themselves,’ she used to say.

But he suspected that it was all meant as a wordless gesture on the degrading evils of drink, and his favourite response was to go into a parody of drunkenness, swaying her into vision, missing his footing, reaching unsteadily for things. Since she could never tell whether it was real or not, it always got her hooked.

Jenny and her mother sat chatting for an hour. Their experience was so much a common factor that their conversation was a monologue for two voices. In the quiet of the house, with the evening settling softly around them, mother and daughter talked like two women teasing out a ball of wool between them. There were only a few, brief snagging moments when one knew something which the other didn’t.

Conn was coming on well, wasn’t he? Jean still regretted not having been able to help at his birth. She had been ill at the time. At least she had done something by taking Kathleen out of the way and letting her sleep here.

Jenny asked her if she had seen Johnny Hose’s latest poem. She hadn’t. He was a milkman who came round High Street, and he pasted verses to the back of his milk-cart. While he filled a half-pint or pint measure from the tap in his churn, and then poured it into your jug, you could stand and read his most recent offering. ‘Nae extra charge, ma bonny lass. Ye can’t put a price on genius.’ Every other morning at the mill gates, he could be seen waiting patiently, unconcerned with sales, while mill-workers crowded round his cart, some of them trying to memorise the lines they liked best. Usually they were funny, occasionally about women or nature. Jenny tried to tell her mother bits of the latest one. It was about prices.

Suzie Temple was rumoured to be ill. But then Suzie Temple was always rumoured to be ill. Miss Gilfillan almost certainly was ill, though she had mentioned it to nobody. A proud old woman. She couldn’t be feeding herself.

Gibby Molloy, they both agreed, was getting worse. He should be married anyway. His mother was the only one who could control him. His brother Alec – and wasn’t he a well-doing man – had an awful life from him. Wasn’t that a terrible thing the last time about him challenging Alec to fight. Alec’s wife, Mary, had been telling Jean the true story. There was Alec laid up in bed, his ribs in plaster. An accident at the work. Some kind of wheel and ratchet thing breaking off. Alec could tell you the way of it, Mary says. There’s Alec, then, in bed. Mary sitting at the fire. The knock comes to the door. Gibby. ‘Mucky fou,’ Mary says. His eyes like penny-bowls. ‘Sen’ oot yer man,’ he says. Forces his way in, is making for Alec. And Alec not able to move hardly off his back. ‘A monkey fur a brither,’ Gibby says. Too lah-di-dah fur me noo, aren’t yese?’ Mary’s frightened Alec will try to rise. She tries to wrestle Gibby out the door. He’s gentleman enough not to put a finger on her, just digs in his heels. Then he falls between sideboard and the table, roaring like a bull. Mary knows that if he rises, the house is wrecked. She puts one hand on the sideboard, one on the table. And she dances on his stomach. By this time Gibby’s mother has been told. She comes round and leads him away like a lamb. The next morning Gibby’s round first thing to apologise. ‘The drink,’ he says. And give him his due, he thanks Mary for protecting his brother, and says he admires her courage. ‘Wan last thing, Mary,’ he says at the door. ‘Ye stertit wi’ a military two-step. But wis that an eightsome reel ye feenished wi’? Ah couldny follow the steps.’ You have to laugh. There’s a likeable bit about him, too.

Jenny remembered Tam saying he had seen Gibby in the pub just a short while back. Tam had said at the time that Gibby was slowly going to pieces. He had taken on the daftest bet you ever heard. Matt Morrison had said, ‘Your attention, please. Gentlemen, my learnt friend on the right will now endeavour to swally the sword.’ And Gibby had started to chew his tumbler, spitting out glass and blood. Brains had never been his strong point. But he was sure enough getting worse. His mother must be wishing they were back in the old days when breaking down the toilet door once in a blue moon was her biggest worry. He wasn’t a well man at all.

That was Buff Thompson away then. It had been a blessing at the end. It was sad to watch when their spirit went before them. Crying like a bairn. And saying some terrible things to Aggie. She would have her own to do now, poor soul, with her son’s wife not giving her the life of a scabby cat. She wouldn’t be long behind him. But he had been a good man, and that was a hard enough thing to be, God knew.

As Jenny left, her mother was methodically wrapping cloths round the corner of the smoke-board. The air of contained expectancy about her gave the impression that she was looking forward to Mairtin’s return. At the mouth of the entry, Jenny bumped into her father. He had had a fair amount, but seemed quite steady.

‘Here, Jen,’ he said. ‘His she got her claiths on the smoke-board yet?’

Jenny nodded.

‘Aye,’ Mairtin sighed. ‘By the time Ah get tae the top o’ these stairs, Ah’ll be awfy drunk.’

‘Och, feyther.’

‘Not tae worry. She enjoys it fine. Makes ‘er feel holy.’

He winked and went in. Climbing the stairs, he broke into loud and surprisingly tuneful song:

There’s nane may ken the humble cot

Ma lassie ca’s her hame.

But though ma lassie’s nay-hameless

Her kin o’ low degree-hee-hee,

Her heart is warm, her thoughts are pure

And aye she’s dear tae me . . .’

Throwing open the door, arms outspread, his voice rising, scouring the ceiling:

‘Her heart is warm, her thoughts are pue-hure,

And aye she’s dea-hear tae me-e-e-e-e-e-e.’

Jean looked sideways at him, lips pursed, nodding as if she read in him a moral she agreed with. He realised quite suddenly that he really was drunk, but not so drunk that he couldn’t retain sufficient craftsmanship to perform his condition with some degree of style. He closed the door, came into the middle of the floor, swaying slightly.

‘Ma bonny Jean,’ he said, waiting for inspiration. ‘Ma bonny, bonny Jean. Ah was once in Graithnock twice. Today a small boy was found lost late last night. Wearing his bare feet and his father’s boots on. Hurling an empty barrow full of straw. The reward will be a fish-supper, a poke of plates, and a bottle of scones.’ Sitting down. ‘Ah could take a bite maself, Jean. A wee pie and a bottle o’ ink wid be lovely.’

‘Ye’ll have the whusky-hunger, like enough.’

They took it from there. He told King George’s photograph what was wrong with the country. She suggested that Mairtin himself was Britain’s biggest problem. He sang ‘Ah’m wearin’ awa’, Jean, Like snaw when it’s thaw, Jean,’ and then gagged. ‘That’s me awa’ noo, Jean.’ She was sure she would be away before him, and he would have been the death of her.

It was a complicated ritual by two people who would never surprise each other again but found pleasure in the repeated patterns of the past – a conversational dance of death, perfected, nicely timed, delicate as a minuet.

9

For Conn, the house at times assuming strangeness: the furniture like props that didn’t fit the action, inappropriate in its cosiness and complacency; established routines giving suddenly like locks, to show the frustrations that padded in them; a frequent and sometimes frightening sense of transit – to where?

A mid-summer evening, first dark. The top halves of the windows had been taken out, left on the floor. The remains of a long hot day decomposed outside, stenching the house sweetly with the exhalations of the park across the river. In the boys’ bedroom, Angus and Conn lay, steeping in tiredness. It was a Sunday. All day they had ‘run the cutter’, as their mother mysteriously called it, as if rehearsing for the holidays, which would be soon. Angus had been examining the hardening skin on the soles of his feet, pleased with the thought that a fortnight would bring them to their summer toughness, and he wouldn’t need boots again till winter. They spoke little, content to be crooned at by soft sounds, the river quietly coughing over stones, a dog worrying distance.

Kathleen and Mick, with the privilege of earners, could be heard still through in the living-room with their parents. Jenny was sewing, making alterations to a dress which Kathleen had been trying on, and, as she did so, was talking to Kathleen. The dress was for a dance and, using it as an excuse, Jenny was gently finding out about the boy Kathleen was going with – Jack Farrell. They seemed serious about each other and Jenny wanted to know what he was like. She knew the family slightly, they were Catholic, though that wasn’t important to her. To Jenny, a man’s credentials were his nature, and she was concerned simply to deduce the true lineaments of the boy from Kathleen’s inevitably idealised picture. Mick was crouched over the fireplace, whittling a boat-shape from a piece of wood, having ignored his father’s mild observation, addressed to the room, that That boay does a’ his work in et the ribs. He’s goat the ausole like a sawmill.’ Tam himself was finding his way through the paper with a kind of patient bemusement that wasn’t just a matter of failing light. He finally put it down like a parcel he couldn’t get into, saying, There’s nothin’ in the papers nooadays.’ It was as if he half-sensed some plot to keep out of print the things that were really happening.

The street was almost asleep. Through the open window drifted the murmur of the few men who were still at the corner, their faces white, upturned blotches in the shadows.

The sound, when it came, took some time to register, it was so alien to its setting. Tam was first on his feet and over to the window, looking down.

‘Aw Christ,’ he said. ‘No’ that.’

The other three had come to stand behind him. What they saw made the sound they had heard meaningful in retrospect. A big man was crouched against Miss Gilfillan’s window, visible in the faint light that came from it. His hands were held side-on to the glass with his face between, so that he could see into her house. The window was slightly lowered from the top. What they had heard was Miss Gilfillan calling for help. She shouted again, a thin whimper of a word, like the sound a hare makes when it knows the greyhound has it.

‘Yer Peepin’ Tom,’ Tam said. The auld sowl’ll be frichtened oot ‘er wits.’

He waited, looking over towards the corner. Things seemed to have gone quiet there, as if a conference was in progress. The big man tapped slowly at Miss Gilfillan’s window.

‘When dae they make their bloody move?’

‘She’ll likely be in bed, the pair auld sowl,’ Jenny murmured, and at once regretted it, for Tam was already moving.

‘Tae hell wi’ this,’ he said as he crossed the floor.

Tam. Ye’ll stey where ye are.’ She caught up with him at the door. ‘There’s men oot there. Let them see tae it. You’re bidin’ here.’

‘Go in the hoose, wumman,’ he said angrily and was gone.

They heard the rattle of his heavy boots as he went downstairs. Angus and Conn, who had been unaware of anything happening in the street, had caught the echo of it in their own house – first in the unnatural silence of the living-room and then in the panic of their mother’s voice. They scrambled out of bed, Angus in the lead, and came through in their nightshirts – old shirts which had belonged to their father.

‘Bed, you two! Bed!’ their mother shouted.

But she seemed to forget about them again at once, was too distraught to follow up her threat. They stayed. And in a moment the stray particles of an ordinary night had been precipitated into imminent ignition.

Angus and Conn had arrived at the window in time to see their father emerge from the entry below them and cross towards the man at Miss Gilfillan’s window. The whole family stood looking down on a scene that appeared more distant than it was, stylised, with a formal inevitability: Tam approaching the man, the men at the corner waiting and watching, utterly silent now except for one voice somewhere saying, Tam Docherty’. Behind the children, their mother muttering, ‘Oh my Goad! Can ye no’ get sittin’ in peace at yer ain fire-end. Is this no’ terrible?’

The stillness of the street made every sound audible. The man had turned to glance down at Tam and then resumed looking in the window. His indifference squared with the fact that he had chosen a window that faced out onto a street that wasn’t empty. He seemed to believe that inches gave immunity.

‘Here, sur,’ Tam said. The mode of address was ominous, habitual with him when he was roused. It was the formality of a duelling challenge.

The big man turned slowly to face him, luxuriating in the action.

‘Hm?’

‘Here, sur. Whit d’ye mean tae be et wi’ this?’

‘I’m lookin’ in this winda’ here.’ The accent was Irish.

‘That’s a maiden lady in there, sur. An auld budy. Ye’ll be frichtenin’ her tae daith wi’ this cairry-oan!’ Tam remained a good yard away, not wishing to provoke the big man. His voice was perfectly pleasant. ‘Noo, wid ye no’ be better tae go oan tae where ye’re goin’.’

He looked Tam over as if measuring him for a coffin.

‘Bogger off, little man. Before I fockin’ fall on yese.’

Something happened instantly to the situation which was almost audible, like a safety catch unclicking.

‘Noo, noo, sur,’ Tam said. ‘These is sweary-words ye’re usin’. That’s no’ nice.’

The big man turned fully round now. He understood. An agreement had been reached. He looked down at the ground, shook his head, lunged suddenly at Tam. Tam ran backwards. As the impetus of the other man’s rush made him stoop, so that his arms dropped, finding nothing solid, Tam came back in at full throttle, and hit him twice, flush on the cheek-bones, right hand and then left. The big man went back a couple of yards and stopped dead. He made a sound that suggested contempt and flicked one hand across his face, dismissing the blows like cobwebs.

Watching him, Tam had a revelation about what he was up against. If this man hit him, he would be having an early night. Before the Irishman could set himself, Tam had moved right into him, hooking ceaselessly. His fists bounced the man’s head off each other as if they had it on a string. It took an awful long time, and his arms were tiring, before he felt that infinitesimal relaxation, the thaw of muscles that precedes the mind’s unmooring from consciousness.

He didn’t stop. The man had subsided against the wall, blood spattering from his nose and cuts on his face, and still Tam punched, following his head as it slithered to the ground, rabid with anger. As the man fell, Tam kicked him once in the stomach and his leg was flailing back a second time when Jenny’s voice screamed, ‘Tam! Fur Goad’s sake, stoap! Stoap!’

Tam’s body froze. The men were round him, about five of them. They moved him back, one of them saying, That’s enough, Tam. There’s nae need fur that. That’ll dae ye noo.’

‘D’you want the same?’ Tam was too high to recognise who it was he spoke to. He snarled at a shape. ‘Ya fat-ersed bastard! Whit were you daein’? Hidin’ in a bloody coarner?’

‘Ye were oot before we could make a move,’ somebody else said.

‘Jesus. He was at it fur meenits,’ Tam said. ‘Beggin’ fur boather. Whit were yese waitin’ fur? Invitation cairds? There were enough o’ ye tae move the bloke oan withoot a blow bein’ struck. Ya useless bastards!’ He looked down at the man, whose head rested on a pen in the road, while two of the men examined him. ‘Hoo is he?’

The big man groaned and came to, as if offering an answer.

‘He’ll be a’ richt, Tam,’ somebody said.

‘Who is he?’ Tam asked.

‘He’s leevin’ in the Model.’ The Model Lodging House was situated at the opposite end of Soulis Street from High Street. It catered for a mixed migrant clientele, mainly labourers. ‘He was in Mitchell’s earlier oan. Threatenin’ tae dae terrible things tae onybody that goat in his road. Then he went fur a walk. Must’ve came back.’

‘Oan ye go in noo, Tam. We’ll take ‘im doon tae the Model.’

The big man had been helped to his feet, and they cleeked him off down Soulis Street. Tam came back in. Miss Gilfillan hadn’t emerged and he thought it best to let her recover on her own.

The house was a strange place. The family was reduced to a stunned solemnity. The scene outside, seeming a triumph for Tam in its occurrence, had, in the retrospect of a few moments, negatived to an x-ray plate in which they saw the sinister shadows formed at the centre of Tam’s self. He was aware of it, avoided their eyes, like a patient who didn’t want to know the worst.

‘My Goad, Tam,’ Jenny said. ‘Ah thocht ye hud killed ‘im.’

Tam sat down suddenly, giving himself up at once to despair, and rested his head in his hands.

‘Ah think Ah wantit tae,’ he said. ‘Oh Jesus. Why did Ah hiv tae hit ‘im sa hard? It was a’ bye a while before Ah stoaped. Ah widny let go. Ah widny let go.’

Jenny and Tam were only conscious of each other in the room.

‘Naebudy can jist turn it oan and aff like a spicket,’ she consoled him.