He took over, without modification, his brothers’ opinions on a whole range of different subjects. From them he knew that football is the best game, a bee dies when it stings you. Ben Nevis isn’t the biggest mountain in the world; the biggest one’s in Africa. There isn’t a man in the moon. You don’t clipe on your friends, or anybody else.
But they also had certain positions he couldn’t take up. Their contempt for school always puzzled him. He enjoyed it. Miss Anderson was nice. She told you a lot of things you didn’t know. When Mick and Angus occasionally compared their different schools, taking each one room by room and scrawling their hatred across it like vandals, Conn was hurt. He was hurt for the school (especially Miss Anderson), for the way his brothers felt, and for the fact that he was different from them. The confusion depressed him.
Similarly, when it came to posh folk, he could share neither Mick’s quiet dismissal nor Angus’s aggressive desire to engage every boy in nice clothes in combat. Conn simply didn’t see any difference in them. He was happy as he was, and that was enough for him.
Worst of all, his brothers’ talk about churches took him out into chaos and abandoned him there. He dreaded the subject coming up and when it did he used to try to will himself to sleep. But their thoughts still wormed into his mind, coiling there into grotesque and fantastic shapes of fear. Though Mick and Angus exchanged Catholic and Protestant images of God with all the aesthetic preoccupation of two boys swapping cutout pictures, their words innocently invoked in Conn a welter of lurid contradictions.
His fears were intensified by the news of God he picked up from other places in incompatible bits and pieces. In spite of the fact that Catholic and Protestant lived together harmoniously in High Street, in spite of the fact that his brothers and his sister were singularly unconcerned about any religious differences, Conn contrived to worry a great deal about whether God was a Protestant or a Catholic. He was never quite clear which side Jesus had been on. His amorphous doubts made him too vulnerable, so he crystallised them into an irrational fear of priests, who weren’t an unfamiliar sight in High Street. Every time Conn saw one coming, he vanished up the first convenient close.
7
It had been raining. Having become intolerable in the house, Conn was allowed out as soon as the rain stopped. For quarter of an hour or so he had been scuffing about the almost empty street, where road and houses were still black from the rain, trying to get his idling imagination to move. Without seeming to have noticed it at any given moment, he became aware of a dark figure coming up from the Cross towards High Street. Conn paused and stared. The dull mother-of-pearl glare of the sky seemed so low as to make a tunnel of the Foregate. The figure came nearer, carrying a stick. It was a priest.
He was already spinning for cover when he saw his father standing in shirt sleeves at the close-mouth, smoking a cigarette. Wondering how long he had been there, Conn gravitated casually nearer to his father and became very interested in a chipped part of the tenement wall where the rain had softened the crumbling inside of the stone.
Sure enough the priest stopped at their entry. Conn stared in awe at the large figure. Father Rankin: a big man, in his early forties, prematurely grey – commonly known as the Holy Terror. He was said to go round certain houses where the husbands were known to lack religious fervour, and hound them out of their beds with his stick to go to Mass.
‘Guid day, Father,’ Conn’s father said politely.
‘Not for you, Tam Docherty. Not for you.’
Conn noticed his father’s lips purse and his eyes begin to study his cigarette. It was a familiar moment for Tam. For years priests had been coming periodically to the house, to do battle for Angus and Conn over souls the boys didn’t know they had. Usually they came in twos, a regular one and a new one, rather like an experienced doctor introducing a medical student to an unusual and particularly difficult case. Tam rather liked their visits. They always helped him to sort his own thoughts out. With a couple of them he had a pleasant, half-bantering relationship. And there was one whom he admired profoundly, Father McDermott, who called Tam ‘Doubting Thomas’ and insulted him pleasantly while sparring with one of the boys. But Father Rankin was different. When he was angry, his eyes beheld the damned. He felt no need of reinforcements.
‘And it won’t be a good day for you till you become a proper Catholic again.’
His father glanced at Conn and it was as if he was trying to explain something which Conn couldn’t understand. Conn didn’t know the significance of the words but the tone of them conveyed a reprimand, even to him. It was the first time he had ever heard anyone speak to his father like that.
‘You’re a pain to your mother and father. To your whole family. More than that. You’re an affront to God.’ To Conn the whole day seemed to drop dead, and they were three people standing in a desert of silence. ‘Well? Have you nothing to say for yourself?’
‘It’s still a guid enough day, Father.’
Conn thought he had never seen anybody as angry as the priest. The stick quivered indecisively and when it suddenly swivelled to point in his direction, Conn hung where he was, impaled on the gesture.
‘Is this your son?’
His father’s voice came very quick and very small, its smallness measuring the force which was compressing it.
‘Keep yer mooth aff the boay, Father.’
The priest’s eyes enlarged, looking at Conn’s father. ‘Right,’ he said, and moved towards the entry. Almost accidentally, it seemed, his father’s hand came up to lean on the wall, so that his arm just happened to bar the way.
‘Where wid ye be goin’, Father?’
‘To speak to your wife.’
‘Ah’d raither ye widny.’
‘I’m not concerned with what you want.’
‘Naw, but Ah am. Slightly.’
The pressure of their confrontation was so intense that it would have seemed impossible to walk between them. Conn stared.
‘I’ll have to speak to her about all this.’
‘She his a lot o’ worries, Father. Ah don’t think you wid help them any.’
The priest stepped back. The stick went horizontal in his hand. His face was tight with anger.
Tam Docherty,’ he said, ‘I have a duty to perform. You’re interfering with it. If you don’t step out of my way, I’ll take my stick to you.’
Conn’s father released his breath painfully and shook his head, his eyes closed. Conn couldn’t understand what it meant. Despair. Tam was suddenly exhausted by the complicated terms of his life, utterly baffled by the impossible acts of equilibrium it called for. They wanted you to respect authority when authority had no respect for you. They told you what your life meant, and asked you to believe it, when it had nothing to do with what was happening every day in your house and in your head. While your wife slaved and your weans were bred solely for the pits, like ponies, and your mates went sour, the owners bought your sweat in hutches, the government didn’t know you were there. And God talked Latin. The rules had no connection with the game. You came out to your door for a smoke and a man walked up and threatened to hit you with a stick. Where did he live? Conn’s father opened his eyes and looked steadily at the priest.
‘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 happe
ned 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.
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