Docherty (8 page)

‘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.