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.
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.
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