Docherty (26 page)

‘Must be removed! Bloody interlowper.’

Tosher was moving quietly into the darkness. His self-absorption was total.

‘Leevin’ aff the back o’ the worker, eh? Nut at a’. Oop, ya bastart!’

It seemed to Mick that Tosher was taking off his clothes.

‘Ye micht as weel gi’e yersel’ up. Ye’ve nae chance. Must be removed.’

Just when Mick was considering intervention, the truth of it came to him, Tosher was on a louse-hunt.

‘Whit dae ye think this is? The bloody Pairish. Ah’m no charity.’

Listening with understanding, Mick found himself laughing noiselessly into the darkness. Hearing Tosher’s moment of triumph, ‘Goat ye, ya Hun!,’ the noises of satisfaction, the gradual subsidence, Mick experienced a small revelation. Like Tosher’s campaign against the louse, Mick’s war was a private one.

He understood what had so often jarred his sense of honesty in the way the papers talked about the war. They said things like ‘honour’ and ‘self-sacrifice’ and ‘indifference to personal danger’. They didn’t understand. What the war taught was selfishness, a flame of pure necessity through which each man had to pass. And something strange happened to most of them who went through it. It connected them to others. They became so expert in caring about themselves that they comprehended that same care as it existed in others, could judge it with an emotionless neutrality. The result was that they discovered true generosity.

If a man gave up a share of rations to another or took over early from him, it was simply his expertise in the pressures they lived among telling him that he could afford to do that at that time and the other couldn’t. That was all. The gift carried no obligation. It was just an acknowledgement of both their natures. They existed beyond the power of stimuli like principles or ethics. Virtue and necessity were the same.

As the war progressed, living among these specialists in being human, Mick had learned. More and more he shed any unnecessary luggage of thought or speculation. He honed himself down to just being there. His sense of himself was in the third person.

So he tried to avoid what he knew he couldn’t handle. All the time he was experiencing things which he couldn’t allow to take place in him just then but which would have to happen later. His mind recorded them like undeveloped negatives. ‘Stretcher-bearer to the left!’, and later the man with half a face was carried past him. The feet of the rats across his body coded future nightmares into his mind. The trench in moonlight printed a plate of leprous beauty on his memory.

Survival could only be partial. What was happening didn’t happen to individuals. Catastrophe had nothing to do with being you. It was the result of fortuitous positioning, accidental decisions, momentary orders. It was what happened to people.

He moved beyond all sense of time, among what only his body could comprehend. Mindlessness was his routine. He was someone. Disaster was what would probably happen. When it happened, it would happen to someone. When it came, it came. The shell exploded. Something was moving through the air. The ground was battering someone. Someone’s pain was splitting the sky.

14

When they left the road, the ground seemed harder, conveying the strange sensation that asphalt was a cushion on the earth. They climbed a banking ferrous with frost and began to cross a field. It was still dark and shapes were different densities of black. Grass skinkled, the frozen filaments snapping as they stepped. Denied a visual perspective, they felt themselves defined by a sensory braille. A foot that had to adjust to an angle of the ground affirmed the bulk of the body. The weight of the things they carried, bumping, measured the motion of their walking like a metronome. Cold etched at their faces. Breath froze.

Not much was being said. Sliddering down another banking, they could see against the sky other shapes converging. They hit a dirt road where the struck stones didn’t budge. The crunching of their boots was absorbed in moments among the multiplying versions of itself. The sense of space was lost, first through sound.

The feet just a yard ahead of him took Conn by surprise. He looked behind and then to the front again. He was part of a crowd. Again his determination to take in every part of this day stage by stage had been defeated. His expectations had been ambushed so often by unpredictable realities that his powers of assimilation were scattered. So much had happened already.

There was the eeriness of Tadger’s whistle, calling his father and Angus, and himself for the first time, out into the darkness. The drugged movements of the men in the small roomful of ashen light, as if compelled to obey what they couldn’t control. The scalding porridge, his mother whispering, That’ll stick tae yer ribs.’ The harshness of new lace-thongs on his fingers, gouging him awake. Angus with boots and trousers on but still in his vest, slumped forward asleep in a fireside chair, his elbows on his knees, his forehead resting on the backs of his clasped hands, the shoulders bulging like a deformity, while his mother brought him food and shook him gently alive. His father pulling on his trousers, his lips crinkling to keep the cigarette in his mouth as he started to cough, the cigarette taken out as the cough became a seizure, and his father leaning on the smoke-board, his body working like a bellows, until he spat a knot of phlegm into the fire and his breathing subsided to a noisy wheezing. His mother saying, ‘Ah wish tae Goad ye widny smoke oan an empty stomach.’ Familiar things that seemed strange: the bottled tea, dark red; work-jackets over chairs, stiff-armed like suits of armour. The enjoyment of them walking with Tadger and his three sons through darkened empty streets, sentries guarding other people’s sleep. His mother’s last remark, ‘Goad bliss ye an’ the devil miss ye,’ and her smile that was almost shy, as if she was sorry to be saying something so silly.

The remembered fragments were confused with others. Coughing that broke out among the walking men, moving from one to another like a password in the black morning air. The lights at the pithead thawed the darkness into bleak random patches and gave what had been mysterious figures grey, ordinary faces. His father talked to a man whose eyes measured Conn disinterestedly.

The cage took four. In the blackness with only his stomach as a guide, Conn thought they were going up. A darkness enveloped them.

Tadger’s voice said, ‘Thank Christ we’ll hit some watter-leaf the day.’

His father’s voice wasn’t his father’s voice. It said, ‘Splint we’re oan. The hale bluidy country’s made o’ splint.’

‘Except fur the stane.’

‘Hiv ye some Alfred Noble?’

‘Aye. Ye can hiv some.’

Angus suddenly shouted, ‘Get ready, fower-an’-a-hauf! They’re comin’ up!’

‘Keep yer wind fur breathin’,’ Tam said.

‘Aye, if ye’ve ony spare,’ Tadger said, ‘jist pass it along.’ He put his hand lightly on the top of Conn’s back and thumbed the hair on the back of his neck in a gesture he would never have allowed himself in the daylight.

Somebody opened the door of the cage at the bottom and said, ‘Aye, boays.’

One big light burned near the cage, blue, gently palpitating, a poisonous flower. Like petals fallen from it, the lighted pit-lamps swayed away, settling into darkness.

‘Haud oan, ye’ll be pasted before ye stert yer shift.’

Angus held his arm to stop him. His father went on. Tadger was gone. Angus and he just stood.

‘Noo ye’re sure ye’ve goat everythin’?’ Angus asked. ‘Ye haveny left yer muscles in the hoose?’

‘Where’s ma feyther?’

‘Don’t greet, son. He’ll be back. That’s when it’ll be time tae greet.’

Angus leaned against a prop. Their father’s lamp appeared again and they followed it.

Coal was strange, more various than could have been imagined, black only sometimes, inclined to mimic rock, a place, an architecture, a record, an opposition, a measurement of time. His father muttered to it occasionally, ‘That’s aboot us.’ ‘Come oan, ya bastard.’ The swear-words were as soft as endearments. Dust was so much that you forgot it. The hutches were deceptive, not looking big but feeling like wells when you tried to fill them. Angus, cutting coal, loading a hutch, pushing it, was alone with his exertion. Bread tasted marvellous. ‘Pitbreid’, his father said, ‘is the only guid reason fur goin’ doon a mine.’ Behind the chink of axes, the infrequent dull explosions, the rumble of the hutches, the pit was secretive. Props sighed. Water whispered in inaccessible places. Rats leapt away from lights.

Learning to work there, Conn became part of a time-scale different from any he had known. The pit was something separate, an entity on its own. Anything that happened on the surface was just punctuation. Here the continuity was unbroken of hewing and propping and hutching and drawing. Day merged with day and events followed a sequence not dependent on time so much as an internal logic of their own, the cutting of new workings, the driving of props, the counting of hutches, the laying of rails, the lifting of rails, something as abstruse and self-extending as a mathematical equation. It was a self-justifying involvement, an expertise the purpose of which was itself. Day after day he mastered the skill of the others, the art of constructing tunnels that led to blank walls, like entombed men studying the aesthetics of escape. Behind them they left a Lascaux of dripping passageways, roughly sculpted chambers, perilous with water, foul with gas, upheld by rotting timbers, a folk-monument that undermined the earth. There, like a primitive religion most people had forgotten, they had practised painful genuflections, hard prostrations, lain in water, wrestled with rock, while the pit left its message in them like stigmata. Later, Conn thought there must have been a time when it was all new to him, but he couldn’t remember it.

The boy’s wonder petrified into facts, and they were all the man was left with of what he had been, like stones on which fern-leaf shadows can dimly be made out. The Blue Dan was the light that burned at the bottom. Water-leaf was the best household coal. You could see your face in it. It brought most money and was easiest to get out. Alfred Noble was explosive used for blasting. ‘Fower-an’-a-hauf was the weighman for the pit. He never allowed more than four-and-a-half hundred-weight per hutch, though a lot of the men claimed they held nearer five. There was a check-weighman to act on behalf of the men, called ‘Leg-an’-a-hauf because he had lost a foot in the pit, but he was known to be the other weighman’s echo. Each day the bottomer opened the cage for Conn.

Like a dogma accepted beneath the level of questions or comprehension, his experience there became a central influence on his life. Because of it, much else followed naturally. Like the others, he developed a love of the open air, green country. Washed, his first instinct was to get out. Whippets interested him, the chase became inexplicably a part of his heraldry – greyhound on a field verte. The old stories he had heard so often of the closeness of the men who worked down the pits took on new meaning. Even the superstitions that he had listened to his father dismiss seemed to him not stupid at all but like a code only the miners themselves understood.

Two or three weeks after starting in the pits, he saw Tadger stop in the chill morning air.

‘Hell,’ Tadger said. ‘Ah’ve forgotten ma piece.’

The seven of them stood in a dark, empty street. Tadger was thinking. There was still time to go back. It was a moment or two before Conn realised the problem, that it was unlucky to turn back for anything, that if a man had to return to the house, he should stay there. ‘You three’ll no’ be leevin’ as fat at piece-time the day.’ The others laughed, not without relief, and they all walked on.

In step with them, Conn thought of the pit they were headed towards, soughing, black, dangerous. He understood the place where Tadger had been standing. With gladness he realised that his wish had been granted. He was one of them. The implications of that wish were something he still had to learn, but for the moment his new experience was complete and absorbing in itself, so absorbing that when the official word came about Mick, Conn felt a small shock of surprise that real things were happening outside the sphere of his own life.

15

The best way to make the room was to start with the gable-end. That gave you a mainly blank surface, regular in shape. The two windows, it was true, were a difficulty. But by being careful not to focus on them directly, you could reduce them merely to shapes made of light, acting not as clarification but as a baffle to whatever was beyond them. This meant you had a rectangle inset with two smaller rectangles, and the effect was one of strengthening the sense of rigid form.

On such solidity you could build. Progress would now give the impression of being not lateral but vertical, for this was your foundation. Speed was variable. Sometimes you could move with quite surprising quickness from one familiarity to another, from the remembered dark brown stain on a brass bedstead to the indentation on the polished floor beside it. On such occasions you had the feeling that the entire structure was already there and only waiting for you to make use of it. But at other times the problems seemed insurmountable. It was so hard to maintain what you had made until it acquired the strength to stand by itself. An unanticipated noise could make rubble of half-an-hour’s work. The hump of bedclothes, carelessly allowed to intrude before the rest of the room was ready for it, could become a complex of ridges, where you were lost. This was frightening because there was no way of telling what you might meet there. To lose total control of the present was to stumble again on to that wilderness where events from the past survived like crazy anchorites, nurtured on their own monstrosity and hungry to impose their lunacy on whoever was foolish enough to come across them. The only refuge was the room, or rather not the room but the work of making it. There was even a way in which the mildly disgruntled consciousness of futility, that awareness of dealing with intractable materials, was not a bad thing. The need to go on with it was always there.

It was generally the case that progress was slow, for the room was a very long one. It could take Mick, say, a couple of hours of painfully sustained patience to complete the place, an achievement which was, indeed, remarkably rare. Mostly he was content simply to go on with the attempt as long as he could. Success was most validly measured in time passed. This attitude became so familiar, not to say comfortable to him that he frequently forgot altogether about the very possibility of completion. This probably didn’t matter, or if it did was most likely helpful, since the best thing that could happen wasn’t that he finished but that the burden of what he was trying to do was realised afresh as being intolerable and his mind, achieving an intense moment of recoil, shuffled the entire problem instantly, and won void – not that terrifying wilderness that pressed so often against the very walls of the room, but silence bland as unguented bandage, a glacial emptiness in which he was at peace. After that, the work could begin again.