Docherty (32 page)

Finally, Tadger chose champions. Angus against Tam. It was a brilliant piece of matchmaking, he saw at once, a contest for connoisseurs. He thought his way around it, gathering form. At first it looked all Angus. He was young. You could be hitting him for a week. He must be faster. He was one of the strongest men Tadger had ever seen, and that made him very strong. He could lift Tam off the ground and throw him away. But then what would Tam be doing in the meantime? And where could he throw him that was far enough? It would have to be off the face of the earth. Tadger remembered them talking about Tam once at the corner after he had fought the Irish labourer. Sam Connell had said what was possibly true. ‘Tam Docherty? Ah could bate Tam the morra. But whit aboot the next day. An’ the day after that? Ah’ll take Tam as an opponent any time. But fur Christ’s sake don’t gimme ‘im as an enemy. Ye’ve goat tae bury that kind tae bate them.’ Tadger decided he knew which way he would bet.

It wasn’t too long until his odds looked more than speculative. Angus had filled out beer for his friends and himself. Talk had slowed a bit, like a vehicle that has taken on an extra load. Angus’s mates tended to glance towards him a lot, as if nudging him with their silences. After a time he stood up.

‘Heh, listen,’ he said. ‘We were at Rab’s hoose there. An’ they sterted tryin’ a thing. Somebody sits in a chair an’ ye have tae lift the lot, man an’ chair. Who’s gemme?’

Standing there, his eyes bright with challenge, he crystallised instantly the vague sense of competitiveness most of the men had been feeling. It was definitive Angus. He had always had a talent for creating borders across which to confront other people.

There was a pause in which the need to do something slowly expanded, pushing them out. Tadger looked at Tam. Benign with beer, he was smiling. Wullie Manson rose deliberately.

‘Right ye are, son,’ he said quietly. ‘You called me oot. An’ here Ah come. Up a meenit, son.’ He took Buzz Crawley’s chair, placed it ceremonially in an empty space. ‘Ah’m gonny lift this chair wi’ a man
and
a wumman oan it.’ There was silence. Wullie placed two figurines on the chair and hoisted it with one hand. As they laughed, he said, ‘Conn. Rin doon tae oor hoose an’ bring up the wally dug an’ the cheeny cat. Ah’ll lift the hale bloody menagerie.’

While Angus tried to re-establish the seriousness of the feat, Tadger said, ‘Richt, Angus. Ye can show us hoo it’s done.’

Clearing away the ornaments, Tadger sat Wullie Manson on the chair. The others laughed.

‘Aw, noo,’ Angus said. ‘Ah said
wan
man.’

‘Aye, ye’re richt enough, son,’ Tadger agreed. He knocked lightly on Big Wullie’s chest. ‘Come oot wan by wan. We ken ye’re in there.’

But Angus had the patience of an assured victor. In the end he had Buzz Crawley, the smallest and lightest of his friends, on the chair. Slowly, tensely, he lifted the whole thing fractionally off the floor and set it back down, showing more veins in the process than Conn would have thought they had among them.

‘Oh my Goad, son,’ Mary Hawkins said.

‘Ye’ll damage yer hert wi’ that cairry-oan,’ his mother said.

Knowing the others had disqualified themselves, Angus turned to Tam. ‘D’ye fancy a go, feyther?’

‘Son,’ Tam said. ‘Ah’ve mair in ma heid than the kaim’ll take oot. Ye never play at somebody else’s gemme. If a man says, “Richt, we’ll fight wi’ wan haun tied behint wur backs,” don’t entertain ‘im. He’ll hiv been practisin’ fur years. Staun’ up a meenit, Buzz.’

Tam placed his right hand round the seat-edge of the empty chair and then positioned his left hand carefully on the ridge of the chair-back. With a flick of his feet, he was Standing on his hands on the chair, right arm rigid, left arm bent so that his left shoulder almost rested on the chair-back. Instead of equalling Angus’s achievement, he had neatly shifted the terms of the contest. It was a victory for politics over force. From his position of authority, Tam talked.

‘The question is, son. Can you dae this? Muscles don’t mean much. Hoarses hiv them, but they don’t dae
them
much guid. It’s whit ye can dae wi’ them.’

‘Well, that’s no’ goin’ tae solve a lot o’ problems, either,’ Angus said, and Tam laughed agreement.

Angus felt cheated. The chair trick was a family fixture. All the sons had had it before them for a long time, like a wall mark of their father’s height. Since none of them had ever been able to do it, its irrelevant persistence annoyed them, like a physical equivalent of ‘When you’re as auld as Ah am, ye’ll think different.’

‘Ach, ye ken Ah canny dae that,’ Angus said.

But since it was new to the other men, it effectively diminished Angus’s show of strength. His friends were particularly impressed by the way Tam seemed able to hold his position indefinitely, as casually as if this was the purpose to which he always put a chair.

‘Ah feel guilty daein’ this when the rest o’ ye hiv tae staun’,’ Tam said. ‘Come oan. There’s plenty o’ chairs in the hoose. Take wan the piece.’

When he descended among them again, they wanted to try it. With each successive attempt, advice grew more general, assisting hands more numerous. ‘It must a’ be connectit wi’ yer centre o’ balance.’ ‘Naw, yer left haun’s at fault there.’ ‘Ah’ll haud yer feet till ye find yer hauns.’ ‘Swing yerself up, man. Yer arse must be made o’ cement.’ But at the end of it, all they had achieved was a working knowledge of how not to stand on your hands on a chair. Johnny Lawson had been unable to get his feet more than a few inches off the floor. Wullie Manson was forbidden to try, on the grounds of cruelty to chairs. Tadger came nearest, so near that he swung right over, bruising his shinbone.

They sought compensation in other ploys, each introducing the contest he thought he could win, until they had spontaneously devised the indoor Olympic Games. The women talked among themselves, prices and wayward husbands and strikes and illnesses, their talk an ominous gloss on the garbled noisy nonsense of the men. The competitions grew defiantly more ludicrous until they were all engaged in a knockout version of hand-wrestling. Tam and Angus met in the final.

As a generator runs down, the jocularity died, and in its absence, like a sound always present but not fully heard till now, seriousness occurred. The women were no longer talking.

‘Gi’e folk a chance, Wullie,’ Tadger said. ‘You staun’ at the back.’

‘Whit dae ye think Ah’m daein’?’

‘Hell, man, when you staun’ at the back ye’re still at the front.’

But nobody laughed. Tam and Angus joined hands, elbows pressed down on the table where empty glasses had been pushed back unevenly to make a space, among the dried beer-stains and the crumbs of black bun, for serious business. Tadger was official. ‘The final’s best o’ three,’ he said.

The first was over instantly. Angus powered his father’s forearm down until the knuckles of Tam’s hand cracked on the table. The second lasted longer, until Tam, who still hadn’t forgotten how to be a bad loser, had laid the back of Angus’s hand, almost pore by pore flat against the wood.

There were mock cheers. Angus nodded, bored his backside into the chair, checked the angle of his body. Tam’s eyes ignored everything around, waiting for his determination to set. Their hands ingratiated themselves one with another until Tadger gave the signal when they locked. The expectancy of the others was first a pause, then a wait, finally a wonder.

The tension in the two hands grew like a glacier. They inhabited a six-inch axis as absolutely as if it had been fenced, and the areas beyond were private property. The pressures were more than physical. Angus was utterly unyielding but there played across the hardness of his eyes a kind of bafflement, as if he knew that there could never be any discoverable reason why his father’s arm didn’t buckle. Perhaps for the first time in his life his idea of what strength was, lost its certainty, became too complicated for his understanding. Around their clenched hands, their eyes moved thoughtfully, taking in the table, their wrung knuckles, the wall, as if looking for where the most strength was. When they met, Angus’s were questions, dilating with incredulity. Don’t you know I’m stronger? Don’t you know I’m younger? Don’t you know you can’t keep it up? When will you accept it? Tam’s were strangely absent, black as all the pits he had worked in, bleak as slag. He hardly seemed present as himself, had become his arm.

Anxious to catch the decisive moment that must come, the others stared till everything else went out of focus, and only those crossed arms remained with the clarity of an emblem, cabbalistic handshake, reducing everything else to a setting for themselves. They assumed the stasis of sculpture, making it seem silly to expect a resolution. Tadger stepped forward, putting a hand on each wrist.

‘It his tae be a draw,’ he said. ‘We canny a’ be here tae next new year.’

The onlookers didn’t plead the rules because it’s only games that have rules. Angus looked angry for a moment then let his hand twitchingly prize itself open. He said, ‘A’ richt, feyther. But ye canny get ony better. Wi’ me the longer the stronger.’

Tam rubbed his hand gently, as if thanking it, and smiled. That’s richt enough,’ he said, really looking at Angus for the first time since they had started. ‘Ah’ll no get ony better at playin’ gemmes. But we’ll no’ aye be playin’ gemmes.’

The night had found its core. The commemorative urge that hides in parties, that magi-complex that haunts the edge of situations, hoping that if it waits long enough it will witness their miraculous transformation into events, was satisfied. Something had taken place. As always, the ability to infuse the trivia with a vision lay in their common past and wasn’t communicable. But they had all been a part of that ambiguous nexus where the muscles of the two men were simultaneously opposed and complementary, measuring mutual strength.

At first they had been partisan, Rab Morrison wanting Angus to prove something, Tadger needing to go on believing in Tam. But in the end watchers and protagonists were together in a conspiracy, an experiment to prove how formidable they were. For them what had happened was the equivalent of a poem or a play – like those, over-simplified, but still a celebration of themselves. For a moment they could innocently believe that those joined hands squeezed everything into irrelevance but their own joint strength, that that was all there was. They could almost convince themselves that they weren’t just dupes, that they didn’t spend their lives in self-defeating conflict with one another merely because they were stupid but because they were themselves the only ones worthy of their own antagonism, that they were set apart not by their ignorance and their folly but by their honesty and a knowledge from the bone, abjuring as they did every day any meaning but a life.

Their satisfaction in this pointless contest had the same ancestry as their love of gambling, drinking, fighting. It wasn’t only, as the socially conscious were inclined to say, the pathetic desire to escape from their condition. They were, much more profoundly, the expression of that condition. They gambled to gamble, they drank to drink, they fought to fight.

The mystique of habits they practised went beyond reflexes conditioned by capitalist oppression, came closer to primitive rites for exorcising the power of the bastard god, economy, originated in an impulse that antedated Factory Acts. Like the adherents of a persecuted faith, they had endured long enough to acquire the sense not just of the unmerited privileges of others but of their essential worthlessness as well. Many of them, like Tam, felt militant in the face of these injustices. But it was difficult to mobilise that just resentment because so many carried deep inside themselves, like a tribal precept, a wordless understanding of the powerlessness of any social structure to defeat them. Their bondage admitted them to the presence of a truth from which their masters hid, because to live with necessity is the only freedom.

It wasn’t surprising that the champions of reform, calling them to their cause, found them intractably engaged in inconsequential arguments over a pint, stealing a hare when they could have had the acres that it ran on, pursuing private vendettas. For they believed that the hare was all they would be needing till the next time. It was a fundamentalism frustrating to the more sophisticated, whether he was the owner elevated by his interest in painting or the political theorist baffled by their reluctance to animate his theories. What the socially superior failed to see was that they were the least conditioned members of society.

Like the inheritors of an ancient black art, they could conjure real presences out of very thin air. A place behind a pit-bing and two pennies made a sport. A corner and some men was everywhere, debating-chamber, funeral-parlour, coffee-house, confessional, where they gave thoughts, hopes, laughter, words directly to the wind. Any open space was where two men could finally come to terms. Since they had learned how to become themselves under any circumstances, the exact nature of those circumstances was something they found it hard to care continuously about.

That they were going to have to learn to care, perhaps only Mick, of all the people in the room, fully realised. For the rest, nights like tonight were their own meaning. The abrasiveness there had been between Tam and Angus was already receding. What stayed was the moment they’d made out of it. They all drifted away into their own thoughts and conversations like a crowd dispersing.

The rest of the night was improvising elegies. Somebody sang ‘John Anderson, my Jo’. Andra Crawford came (‘Ah saw yer licht in, Tam.’) and wanted to talk about Keir Hardie. Into a growing silence Big Wullie Manson gently interjected, ‘Ah uset tae be ten stane nine.’ Angus’s friends all left. Mick saw Mary Hawkins home. Kathleen and Jack went with them, one of the weans in the shawl and Jack carrying the other one wrapped up, with Tadger saying, ‘Hoo much wid ye take fur wan o’ yer weans then, Kathleen?’

Standing in the doorway before going through to his bed, Conn looked into the room and the image halted him. He saw its texture. It was as rich and strange as a painting. He took delight in the room for its own sake, the dying fire, the glow of the mantle, Wullie Manson meditating slimness, Tadger sprawled in comfort threatening never to go home. The scatter of empty glasses formed a mysterious pattern, a Tightness that could never have been achieved deliberately.