Docherty (31 page)

‘A wis jist wi’ some o’ the boays,’ he managed.

‘Boays o’ yer ain age, Ah hope.’

‘Hiv ye goat their birth certificates oan ye, son? Yer mither wid like tae see them,’ Tam said.

Among the laughter, Tam put up his arms, defending himself against Jenny’s wrath. Her look flashed on him for a second before her own laughter extinguished it.

‘He’s jist new turned sixteen,’ Jenny reminded them.

‘Since first I saw the lovelight in your eyes.’ Tadger’s inspiration became a duet with Wullie Manson. They all went on about Conn, roughing him verbally in a clumsy, animal affection. Woven in with their remarks, each heightening the other, Conn was still vividly conscious of where he had just been. His memory of saying cheerio to his mates an hour ago was involved with the gentle heavings of Wullie Manson’s enormous frame. His father’s laughter sheered like a light across the place where he had met Jessie Langley in the darkness.

‘Where exactly’ve ye been, Conn?’

How old was Jessie? In her thirties, he had heard people say. For him, a fabled distance away. Legendary as Jezebel. Murky with the past, veiled in whisperings. She walked among bitter mouths, ‘tail’, ‘hoor’, ‘the merry widow’.

‘Say nothin’ till ye see yer lawyer, son.’

The suddenness of her appearance in front of him. Wearing shadow, making an accessory of darkness. The innocence of her deception. ‘Could ye tell me the way tae Fleming Street, son?’ The strangeness of talk. Her words leading him, manoeuvring him with threads until he came incredibly to be standing on the wasteground with her.

‘Jist roon’ aboot.’

‘Where’s roon’ an’ whit were ye aboot?’

He welled where she touched him. And his own hands, led along her, discovered continents among her clothes. Breasts and thighs distended on his palms, undulated from him, became journeys he must make.

‘He’s no’ drunk, is he?’

Her softness was the past, the residue of other men. How she underpinned the welter of his feelings with ceremony, made the savagery gentle. She forbade the final meeting. Smiling, shaking her head. Why? Stories of disease stirred, caved within his head. Taking, she was giving. She left him himself as a gift.

‘All Ah’ve drunk is waiter.’

‘No’ guid fur ye.’

‘All right in moderation.’

He laughed among their faces, and hers was one of them. He felt defined by all of them. All the furtive stories, the jokes told in the park, the impossible facts relayed by boys who wanted to know from his reaction if they could be true, the haemorrhaging shames, they were a code translated into benignity on her body. The secret examinations of himself, the desperate masturbation in empty places, they hadn’t been dirty, but ordinary and innocent. Prayers about to be answered. He sensed that, if nobody else knew, what had happened between him and her was good. It was just their own.

‘Ye still hivny told us, Conn,’ his mother said.

He looked at her, laughing.

‘Well, mammy. Whit it is, me an’ ma’ gang broke intae a’ the shoaps oan the richt haun side o’ the main street. Next week we’re daein’ the left side. There’ll be somethin’ in it fur yerself, mammy.’

The reaction of the others demolished Jenny’s last chance of seriousness. All she could manage was, ‘There’ll be something in it fur you tae. A guid hidin’.’

His father said, ‘If ye come in as late as this again, Ah’ll skelp yer bum wi’ a tea-leaf tae yer nose bluids.’

Chaos was restored. Given something to eat (‘He’s loast his appetite. An’ fun’ a hoarse’s,’ ‘Aye, hunger’s guid kitchen.’), Conn was allowed a glass of ginger wine and the privilege of staying up. Jack sang. Tam coaxed Kathleen to sing ‘The Donegal Wedding’. Mick appeared with old Mary Hawkins, she had no one to spend Ne’erday with.

The situation’s intensity became like an abstract of the way they lived, a celebration of themselves, a persistent buoyancy flexible enough to pass through retrospective calms, shallows of tiredness, bleak and sudden memories of the future, and stay intact. Their present transmuted past and future without seeking to deny either. They became philosophical with the same naturalness as they laughed, sadnesses being controlled by the fact that they could give them shape.

For a time they talked about people they had known who were now dead. And even that was pleasant, not remotely morbid. They moved through that area with conspiratorial nods and nudges and muted laughter, like a procession of dignified drunks revisiting in secret catacombs that weren’t officially known about. Their shifting words illumined a face here, a posture there, and all around them the dead seemed defiantly themselves, presenting gestures that mocked the accepted heraldry of death, winking in their shrouds.

Only once did their deft conversation, knowing its way by instinct in the dark, uncover not a reassuring facsimile of death, made homely by familiarity, but a real dying, the echo of the scream still on its face, still close enough to living to be its obscene parody. In spite of Jenny’s careful charting of their direction, somebody inevitably mentioned the peace, and the peace meant the war. Mary Hawkins broke down, instantly and noisily. Her self-control, like something she had carried around till it became too heavy, fell from her, shattered, and the room seemed immediately awash with her grief.

The shock of it froze Conn. The only feeling he could get hold of was embarrassment. It was the first time he had seen an adult cry so openly and the physical impact of it obscured everything else. It was an ugly performance. The dignity of her face unseamed, the eyes crumpling, the prim mouth retching up astonished sobs of pain. His surprise was enlarged by the calmness of the others.

His mother said, ‘Aye, Mary, aye.’ Tadger and Wullie Manson looked stoically into the fire. Mick, sitting beside her, put his hand on her shoulder. His father, leant forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped, watched her, his eyes moist but unblinking. She was saying wild things that never fully formed, words ill-shaped and changing and meaningless yet measuring something of elemental force, like cloud-wracks in a big wind. It was ‘Ma boay, ma boay’ and ‘They took him awa’ fae me’ and ‘The finest son that ever Goad put braith in.’

‘Talk it oot, hen,’ Tam said. ‘Talk it oot. He wis a guid boy.’

‘He wis the best boay,’ Mary said. And as she went on, the embarrassment no longer mattered for Conn, became like his reflection in a piece of glass he was looking through. Through the others he simply accepted that this was happening. What people ought to do is a feeble affront to what they have to do, like a lace handkerchief held against a wound.

Mary wept. She was old, alone, her husband long dead, her relatives far away, and every day rose on the absence of her son. Her natural inarticulacy refined by events to utter incoherence, she raved against everything, the war, ‘that swine Haig’, shells, growing up, having sons, the aimlessness of her accusations indicting the accuser, like a madwoman trying to formulate charges against those who have made her mad. Having withstood so much, she had at last been bewildered into a child again in her sixties.

Mick understood more than the others. He had learned to hate the simple way in which a person became a fact in the army. Now all those statistics which governments had neatly stacked away as if they were finished with, must breed like bacteria, able to find a real existence only in the private lives of people like Mary Hawkins. Mick let the others feed Mary’s sadness till it glutted and then he started to talk about Danny, as he had done to her often enough before. His description of their friendship in the army with some of the things Danny had said normalised his death for her to some extent. It was Mick’s betrayal of his own experience, something in which he was already practised, something that would help to define him as he grew older. Faced with someone like Mary Hawkins, all you could do was protect her from the truth. Like most returning soldiers, for the rest of his life he would be fighting a rearguard action against admitting the truth of what he had experienced into their private lives.

Together, they all made an ikon of Mary’s son for her. She became calm and their talk, eddying for a while, finally moved on to other things. But it wasn’t until Angus came in that the mood she had induced was left behind.

Angus had friends with him, a retinue of three, and he didn’t so much come in as he entered. He had reached that stage where the lambency of first maturity can make the most ordinary features striking, and he was in any case not unhandsome. Tonight his mood seemed to put him in primary colours, the black hair blued with health, the greenishness of the eyes heightened. A couple of glasses of beer had set him on stilts. He shucked his jacket on to one of the set-in beds and slipped tie and collar over his head in a piece. The shirt, collarless, with sleeves rolled under the elbow, was an effectively simple frame for his torso, offsetting the firm neck, the tapering forearms.

‘Hoo are we daein’?’ he said into the greetings of the others.

He went first to his mother, hugged her, embraced Kathleen, gently shook hands with Mary Hawkins, was deliberately respectful in shaking hands with Jack, kidded progressively through his good wishes to Mick, Wullie Manson, Tadger and Conn, until he reached his father. With Tam his handshake had the prolonged quality of a reluctant farewell. Both did a very brief double-take and it was as if the automatic gesture had accidentally been charged with something real, a small shock of recognition of something they had both known but had needed this formal moment to admit. Angus’s shrug and smile seemed to suggest that’s the way it goes. It was the kind of smile a victorious boxer gives the loser.

Angus’s friends followed him round the company. They were all respectful enough but their self-confidence was somehow so gaudy that they couldn’t help making the others feel that they were bystanders at a procession. Like the soldiers of an army that has never been defeated, they didn’t know how to come into a place without taking it over. They were still finding stray bits of laughter among themselves that must have stayed with them from wherever they had been, like ticker-tape caught among their clothes. They contrived innocently to convey the impression that the rest had only been waiting for their arrival.

‘Oh, Ah can place ye noo,’ Jenny said to the young man who was shaking her hand. ‘You’re
Rab
Morrison’s boay, no’ Alec’s. Yer mither wis a McQueen tae her ain name.’

‘That’s richt, Mrs Docherty.’

‘An’ your name’s . . . ?’

‘Rab as weel.’

‘Goad aye. Ye’re just yer feyther ower the back. Ye couldny lift wan an’ lay the ither.’

‘Except for acroass the een, Jenny,’ Mary Hawkins said. ‘He’s goat Lizzie McQueen’s een. He’s goat her een.’

‘Hoo’s yer mither gettin’ oan withoot them, Rab?’ Angus asked.

They all laughed, but Angus and his friends laughed differently, together making a schism of their amusement, a private joke about the quaintness of their parents’ generation. The others felt their separateness, each being partly defined by not being one of that vigorous group who wore their smiles like badges. Angus Docherty, Rab Morrison, Johnny Lawson and Buzz Crawley seemed to have taken out a joint lease on the 1920s. Conn was impatient with his own youth, feeling a couple of Hogmanays behind the place where things were happening; for Jenny and Mary, tracing the features of the parents through the children, it was as if their pasts had been relet; Kathleen felt she was almost as old as her mother; Mick nursed his arm as if he had just lost it; Jack remembered what he had been like a few years ago and was glad that they wouldn’t be long till they learned. The older men felt that the room was crowded.

It was a moment ordinary yet profound, such as are found in long-established rituals. For implicit in their casual coming-together in that room was the acknowledgement of the ruthless terms to which they were contracted, the hard philosophy that underlay their lives. They were physical people, their bodies almost all they had – to a degree that could have been called ascetic, except that they were too ascetic ever to have needed the word. When the body started to go, they had no recourse in the occupational therapy of art, the bathchair of intellect, the artificial stimuli of theories.

Their only tenable reality was themselves, and it was a harsh one. There was childhood, brief as a dragonfly. After that men worked, women had children and kept house. The closest thing to freedom lay between, in those few years before they put their bodies into hawk for their families, when the young men paraded in loud groups, poached for the hell of it, went to late dances looking for girls and fights, when the girls couldn’t walk down a street without knowing they were desirable, found many things exciting, were happiest waiting to find out who would be their husband.

In having a choice between different forms of the same necessity lay the illusion of freedom. It was the best time, when they could imagine that the intensity with which they burned presaged continuance instead of its opposite, penny-candles with delusions of galaxies. After it there was a lifetime’s darg and the struggle of each to retain as much of that imagined amplitude as possible. And every successive time the mystery renewed itself, as it did tonight in the persons of Angus and his friends, the older ones could measure against them how much they had lost.

Tadger was measuring, not bitterly or spitefully, just honestly, with a seriousness that was a compliment to the young men. They would have understood his thoughts and appreciated them. In this game the one rule was that you were beaten when you believed you were. They were young but he had learned some things. Mentally, he confronted them in the pit, in bed, in a fight. He would, he decided, hold his own. Not bad considering he was giving away a twenty-odd year handicap.

But he had to admit to himself that he wasn’t counting Angus in his calculations. He didn’t even allow himself to plead age as an excuse. Baulking at the thought, he imagined a team battle, old versus young. They might pull that off. But Big Wullie only needed to fall and it would take a couple of Clydesdales to get him back on his feet. There were problems there.