Be Near Me (8 page)

'Come on, Dominic,' said another man. 'It's no' half as bad.'

'I'm no' sayin' it's bad,' he said. 'I'm sayin'
their view
ae it is bad. We've been listenin' tae it for hunners a years. They think we're a novelty act up here, just a bunch a people no' worthy ae the same kinna respect these people take for granted when it comes tae themselves.'

'Well argued,' said the bald man, his eyes wide, his moustache soaking wet and his face seal-like in its beseeching dumbness.

'Respect isn't a thing you just get,' I said, 'like free school milk. People earn respect by their actions. And sometimes by their words.'

'And what, Mr Perhaps,' said Nolan, 'if yer actions are limited by yer circumstances? What if yer thoughts urnay really yer ane? What happens if the state is organised tae undermine yer language?'

'That's paranoid,' I said. 'You've made a silk purse out of your grievances, Mr Nolan.'

'Now we're talking,' said his friend. 'You people come up here and buy houses and land. Not you. It's no' you I'm talking aboot. You're just a priest. But people like you. English people. Or else people from fucked-up places who turn up here without as much as a working radio. They want the world.'

'You're no' being very consistent, Dom,' said the friend. 'Either you don't like rich folk or you don't like poor folk. Make up your mind. Sounds to me like you just don't like anybody very much.'

'Inverted snobbery,' I said.

'I don't like people very much,' said Nolan. 'That's part of my charm. It's part of the national charm, is that not right, Father? You must have discovered that by now.'

'Whatever you say, Mr Nolan. It's your day.'

'That's right,' he said.

'It's your daughter's day.'

'Uh-huh.'

'And it's your country.'

'Ye better believe it.'

Nolan drained his glass and gasped as if to recognise that the taste was refreshingly horrible. He stroked his chin, looking around at the others in the room with a softening contempt. One could have sworn Nolan felt sorry for people who had the misfortune not to be in his shoes. He played the part of the dyspeptic father, the cynical husband, but I'd bet you anything he enjoyed the spectacle of his life in that town, the constant drama of his dislikes, his role as a man coming down hard on strangers and phoniness, all the while, I suspect, more strange and more phoney to himself than he ever thought possible. Such men have pride in their roles, yet they also hate the way things have gone, forever conjuring former worlds in which individual performance ceded to the collective habits of the community. That world had disappeared. Nolan knew it had disappeared and he didn't seriously mourn it. He liked to cast a cold eye on the present, though he, in fact, was the present, the coldness beholding itself.

'Our Lisa said you help her and her pals,' he said. 'Up at the school. She said you go places and that. Good for you. But jeest watch that lot. Oor Lisa could run rings round a matador.'

'She's very sweet,' I said. He looked at me with pale pink eyes. I thought we might be friends in a different world.

'Perhaps,' he said.

The man with the wet moustache leaned against the bar and exhaled his warm breath in my face. The women were still up on a dance floor entirely free of men. 'So, you'll no' be doing the Slosh then, Father?' he said, smirking at his watch.

'I'm still not sure what it is,' I said. 'An American-style barn dance for west coast of Scotland people who hate having Trident submarines nearby and aren't hairy-arsed warriors or haggis-eaters but who hate the English middle classes? Sounds fun.'

'Get lost,' said Mr Nolan.

The people who worked the shore were employed to tear out the mussels, leaving the petroleum-coloured shells in a mound against the seaward side of a low granite wall. The beach was strewn with rubbish of every description: one could see glass twinkling in the moonlight and hear the faint rustle of bags at the edge of the sea. The smell was so high it reminded me of the French poet's lily that soaks up blue antipathies. I looked behind me at the hotel, the disco lights, the sound of people becoming themselves again. Two young girls were lying on the bonnet of a car, drinking and talking. They soon staggered across the road dripping with bottles and handbag straps, their continuous laughter swallowed by the hotel doors, leaving us standing at the edge of the car park around the orange glow of Mark's cigarette.

Mark had approached me from behind as I stood in the cold. He seemed high on something but just smiled when I asked him what he'd taken. During my time with Mark and Lisa, around the housing estate or at the school, in playgrounds or at church events they had come to in search of trouble, they often smelled of glue and spoke to me as if I were a natural enemy of authority. They spoke of stolen money and air pistols and homemade cider. They went out joyriding at night while pretending to sleep over with friends. Over the months, I began to know worse things about them, how little they cared about life, how dehumanised they could be, yet I know I did nothing to oppose them. I gave in to every aspect of them, every aspect of myself. I watched them as one might watch people in a film, because he was beautiful, because I liked the way they seemed to think of me.

Late one night, Mark and Lisa appeared at the rectory in the company of a feral-looking boy they called Chubb. They stood in the chapel lane throwing gravel up at the window. I could hear them laughing as I came down the stairs, and when I opened the door, I saw full bottles of milk stood in rows across the path.

'What's this?' I said.

'Milk bottles,' said Mark. 'Just me and my homeys. Do you need any milk?'

'No, I don't. Where are they from?'

'People's doors,' said Lisa, giggling. 'We raided all the doors for milk and now we don't know what to do with them.'

'That's childish,' I said.

'It's funny,' said Mark. He looked defiant. 'It's gonnae be hell for them in the morning wanting their cornflakes. Can you imagine it?'

'Just about.'

'Can we come inside?'

'Certainly not. Take those bottles back where they belong.'

'No chance,' said Lisa. 'We need to sit down. We're tired.'

Rather bold in himself, the one called Chubb put his cold hand out for shaking when Mark introduced us.

'What kind of name is Chubb?' I said.

Lisa broke the seal on one of the bottles and started pouring milk down the drain at the edge of the path.

'He's good with locks,' Mark said.

The new boy wore a grin that showed his sharp little teeth.

'It's nae bother, Father,' he said. 'Just a wee laugh with the milk bottles and that, but no harm done, know what I mean?'

'It's theft,' I said. 'You should take them back before people wake up and notice they're missing.'

'Talk to the hand,' said Lisa.

The three seemed luminous in the chapel's shadow. When I returned upstairs I could hear their laughter in the distance, then the smashing of bottles over the road where they had stopped at the bus shelter. I changed into my clothes and drove out to find them on the estate, the four of us ending up on the steps of the school playground, just sitting together and smoking, talking about drugs that people used to take in the 1960s, the youngsters boasting about all the things they didn't care about. They expressed their hatred of teachers and their liking of me, drinking milk, and me drinking milk along with them, forgetting the time. In the houses people were sleeping, not missing us, and Mark reached over and wiped my mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. 'You've got a moustache,' he said.

They loved to practise driving in my car at an industrial estate situated in some fields next to the dual carriageway. Mark would twiddle through the radio stations until he found one that sounded illegal and black.

'This tune is butter,' said Mark. 'Eat it up.'

'I love this one,' said Lisa.

'Not too loud,' I said.

'God, I wish we had urselves a bottle of Tanqueray,' said Mark. 'Gin and juice and we'd really get our swerve on.'

A lot of empty factories up there, places where the young people could shout and their voices would echo from one end of the shed to the other. All the glass was broken. Our favourite used to be owned by a company that made denim garments. I think it was called Blue Bell. Anyway, we went there several times, and I can still see us sat down, smoking on the oily ground, Mark tossing lit matches across the shed, and Lisa dancing or jumping or running the length of the building, sometimes coming back with handfuls of metal buttons, the ones you get on blue jeans, which she found in some corner and gave out as tokens of her love.

That was how our friendship grew: nights like that. They fought in front of me and they sang stupid songs; they cursed and argued and we drove places in the car or ate chocolate that Mark had stolen from the Blue Star garage. Perhaps they knew me, in their careless way, much better than I did them. Their desolation seemed greatly addictive at the time, and I sat waiting for them to bring me into their world.

'I could teach you how to do the Internet,' said Chubb.

'That would be very kind,' I said.

'I could get you a cheap laptop, as well.'

'There'll be no need for that.'

The wedding night, Mark and I walked to the pier. He told me an endless story about the best man being drunk and locked in a room. I lifted my head and saw Ardrossan Castle standing bare and open on the headland, a window up there at the top, the dark wind rushing through. I imagined Mary, Queen of Scots appearing at the window, her eyes scanning the wrong horizon for France, her fierce, feeling eyes dropping to the sands, the stretch of beach now coloured with disco pinks and sapphire clouds from the hotel. We walked back to a car Mark held the keys of and sat inside with the music thumping behind us.

'It's no' fair,' said Mark. 'Why do you get to drive?'

'We're not driving anywhere,' I said. 'We're sitting.'

'I got the keys.'

'You're too young to drive a car.'

'That's what everyb'dy says. If you can drive you should just drive. I could get a job driving.'

'You could get a better job than that,' I said.

'Doubt it.'

The car had a terrible scent of vanilla air-freshener and something else, something bad. At one point Mark twisted round and gave an exasperated sigh. 'Jesus Christ,' he said, 'that's completely out of order.' I turned round in my seat and saw a dead, deflated bird lying on a blanket of wet newspapers.

'What's that?' I said.

'A dead seagull,' he said.

'What's it doing there?'

'One of the boys,' he said, smiling. 'I bet you it was Chubb. He'd be trying to wind Lisa up. This is his idea of a good windup.'

'But how did he get in here?' I asked.

Mark rolled his eyes. 'He's not called Chubb for nothing. He can get himself in and out of anywhere you like. Cars are no problem tae him. And he knows this car well enough.'

The bird was lying with a cold eye lighted in the dark. Its neck was soaked in blood. There was, to me, something terrible about its presence and its dirty feathers. 'That's really wicked,' I said.

'Yeah,' he said.

'Not like that. Not your sort of wicked. It's just a terrible thing to do to a living creature.'

'It's bad news, yeah,' he said. 'Some of the boys. Not my pals. Just people who live round here. It's sick. They fish off the pier and sometimes they—man, this is sick—they put chips on their hooks and cast them out to the birds, and sometimes the seagulls bite and the sick fuckers reel the gulls in and hit them with bottles.'

'You are joking, Mark.'

'No. They leave the dead ones at the pier or they throw them into the water. It's bad news, isn't it?'

'I can't believe it.'

'Chubb and the boys probably found this one. They put it here for a laugh. That's what they're like.'

We sat quiet for a moment inside the car's shadows. Mark began speaking again, but there was a new tone. He was recounting an experience, something that had happened, and he sounded altogether new as he said the words, speaking from somewhere I hadn't known and that caused him to tighten his slack manners. He spoke of being a child and going to the Auchenharvie baths. He spoke of one day in particular. It was raining that day—black clouds, he said, a long boring afternoon—Dalgarnock feeling strange, a place that seemed far away from the world. At Auchenharvie it was warm, and he said he felt great under the chlorinated water, seeing the white legs of other swimmers.

'Only white?' I said.

'Aye,' he said. 'Black people don't go to the swimming baths here. There are no black people around here anyhow. If there was, they wouldn't go to the swimming.'

'Why not?'

'How should I know?' he said. 'Black people don't like the swimming baths. They don't like dogs either. The chlorine burns the back of your throat. People dive for their rubber bands. The tannoy says: "Would swimmers wearing yellow bands please leave the pool now." The skin at the ends of your fingers gets wrinkled if you've been swimming too long. There's always shouting at the baths, and it sounds as if it's echoing inside you when you're under the water and watching the legs and swimming down.'

'Yes,' I said.

'I was sitting on the edge of the pool when I saw him.'

He was talking about his father. He remembered him coming from the changing room and standing at the metal steps. He was way fat, Mark said, the fattest man in Ayrshire. 'He knew I was coming to the swimming,' he said. 'He must have known I'd be there.'

'He didn't see you?'

'I saw him. Everybody saw him. They were all staring. He looked about and it was noisy and people were laughing at him. Doing the backstroke and laughing at him; diving in right beside him and laughing.'

Mark's father just swam through the jeers and the splashing. And Mark slipped into the water, held onto the side and dipped his face so that only his eyes peeped out of the pool. 'It was horrible,' he said. 'My dad was being shouted at and he just did the breaststroke. Even just swimming like that, because he was so fat he made waves that rolled right across and splashed my head. His face was bright red but he didn't seem bothered. I just hid from him. Imagine that was your dad.'