On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  There’s the old lady who lives alone with her cats and reads every nineteenth-century novel she can lay her hands on: Dickens of course, always Dickens with his multitude of voices, Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope and the Russians. She lives in another century, which lives again in her mind: she suffers, weeps, laughs, longs and learns from all those many people imagined long ago in accents different and stilted now, and she lives perhaps a fuller life than some in this small sample and beyond.

  There’s the middle-aged manager at the bank who travels from branch to branch, troubleshooting and sorting local disputes with Solomonic zeal. Always and even while he dispenses judgements and coolly resolves disputes others take to heart, he keeps his eyes busy on another task: appraising the shapeliness of female forms squeezed into tight and tartaned suits, and choosing which should share his bed for a few nights of fun that become a way of life. Fun is drudgery when sequentially repeated on and on till the spring of original desire is quite dry but still imperiously demands that its needs be met. Lothario forgets but somewhere still recalls a purpose which is not only this. His love of women can no longer be love of a woman. Or does he delude himself in every case that this is the one? Three nights in his imagined world belong to lives of imagined closeness wedded to an ideal ardour each more ideal than all the others that have failed. Can humans indulge in such self-deceit? Of course, it is the larger part of what we do.

  There’s the accountant who most carefully keeps the books of his own assets and liabilities, who checks his statements as they come and checks again to feel the fullness of his moneyed self. He lives in times most suited to himself, and is the archetype of our modern philosophy – a man who closely adheres to his economic self-interest carefully assessed with skill and knowledge of what he speaks. He loves those figures on the page that bulge and lengthen like a promise of future health, like paradise postponed, but here on earth.

  There’s the mother who waiting at the school gate gently rocks the pushchair with later offspring loaded and ready to wail. She loves with a love so great it heartens us and give us hope for future years in these most hopeless times. She renews, and in renewing fades so fast her sisters scoff and call her dumb. Her patience is the fragile plant on which our societies all are built, and its dying embers produce so many outcomes we cannot list them all: pride, envy, desolation, regret and anger at unexpected ingratitude that cannot fail to come.

  There’s the driver who delivers cockles for the master of a gang – of poor souls. People who trudge on beaches bared by the tide and pick the slimy black fruit of sand and sea. They sleep cramped and huddled in a foul and frigid flat steeped in the fatigue of fragmented human lives. The driver is paid by the delivery and always speeds to fund his family in Morocco – one like so many others whose poverty carries all the weight of progress. When you live your life as fast as the driver, you do not live at all. Where is the pause to nourish an existence condemned by circumstance to brevity?

  There’s the couple: he a thirty-year-old English teacher and she, two years older, a translator of legal documents when her cystic fibrosis allows her to work. The disease’s moods govern their daily lives, and yet the eleven years they have lived together have been much happier than most relationships are. A consistent happiness, but the disease’s slow, erratic but inexorable development threatens it.

  He wanted to say that they were alone against the world, against others, against society and above all against cruel nature. But instead he said pathetically, “I couldn’t live without you.”

  “I know, but you will have to learn,” she responded with a mixture of irritation and compassion. She felt his pain – his tongue-tied pain – and it provoked in her a desire for merciless frankness. “You will have another lover – more than one, I expect.”

  “How can you?”

  “Easy. A dose of reality is required. There is a reason why they look askance at us. Because they, like you, think that ideal love is a constant, but no such love exists. Love lives in a moment, and if it is rekindled, it can survive into the following moment and eventually into weeks, months and years. I don’t doubt your love – I never doubt it for a second. I can feel it and am strengthened by its intensity, but no amount of rekindling will keep a fire alight if there’s not oxygen left in the air. When I am gone, your love will have no oxygen. For a while you will feel as if you’re suffocating. You’ll hate people for coming round to commiserate and you’ll hate them when they don’t. Very slowly you’ll start to breathe more freely. The periods in which you’ll forget me will lengthen.”

  Here he objected angrily, but she would not have it.

  “Let me finish! There’s nothing wrong in all this. It’s entirely natural. Sooner or later you’ll have to pull out a photograph to remember what I look like. Some years later still, you won’t seek me out, but when you happen across a photo in a drawer or between the pages of a book, I’ll stare out at you from a past that’ll feel like another life. Remarried with children and their daily problems, you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about. You’ll marvel at the passion and think yourself a fool.”

  Tears ran down his face. Their cause was not self-pity, compassion or sorrow; it was fierce, blood-boiling anger that could find no other outlet. The world we inhabit is so hard, unjust and unremitting. In fiction and in childhood, some Deus ex machina or parent is meant to step in eventually and say, “You’ve had your punishment, order has been re-established and now you can go out and play happily ever after.” But this would never happen. She wanted to savour the time she had left, and wanted him to forget for now the long years of life that would follow her death. She was not jealous of the women to come; she wanted him to live in the present as she was obliged to do.

  “It’s unfair. Unfair on you,” he protested weakly.

  “Life isn’t fair,” she laughed, “didn’t your parents teach you that? The most important lesson they can give. But life mitigates its gross unfairness by distributing hidden, paradoxical compensations. We have no need to burden ourselves with property, as do so many of our age. No mortgage, no collections of expensive porcelain, no investment plans. We live for the moment, knowing that there will not be that many. Perhaps I’m being selfish: pensions are of no concern to me, but they will be for you. We should live for the maximum pleasure any moment can give. Right now, I’m feeling good. I think I’m fit enough to walk five hundred yards and pretend that I could go further. We do what gives us pleasure. No sucking up to get promotion, no pleasing parents just to satisfy their ambitions for us, no kidding on that I can defeat this disease.”

  “You can. Medical science …”

  “Don’t go there. If things turn out better than expected, fine, but I’m not living my life in the belief that one day I’ll be pruning the roses in my garden at the age of eighty-five. I want to get the most out of the life I know I’ll have. Not big things but small and many of them. Just now, I’d like to go to that piano bar on the avenue.”

  “Let’s go then.” They laughed as they put their coats on. He feigned misery and said, “Your negativity is a real killer.”

  She took his head between her hands in a manner that belied the weakness in her arms, and he allowed her to draw his head towards her so that she could place a brief but extravagantly passionate kiss on his thin lips. “You’re a prick,” she said, “but you’re my prick.”

  “It’s good to be wanted,” he laughed again, and they walked out onto the street, whose dampness glistened now an expanse of unvarying blue had pushed away the mottled monochrome clouds. Hope, like the Glasgow weather, is an unstable condition. She hugged his arm and gave him a look that unnecessarily reassured him that she had only been joking. “I’m the one who couldn’t go on without you. I was falling and you caught me. You’ve made life sweet.” He smiled his embarrassment by way of a reply.

  An elderly woman stepped out of a garden and addressed them in a commanding Kelvinside accent, the dreary vowels stretched as though it were an effort to
force them out. “Have you seen a cat? A white one. It has a torn ear – from fights, you know. It’s called Herodotus.” The final item of information was entirely redundant, unless the cat could speak. More likely the woman simply wanted it to be made known that her cat was special and therefore deserving of an exalted name. They looked at her in surprise and immediately assessed her as dotty but amiable.

  “We haven’t seen any cats, I’m afraid,” he asserted so firmly, you’d have thought that he’d left the house with the express purpose of checking and monitoring all feline presences along that stretch of road. “We’ll keep an eye out for him. Rest assured,” he added condescendingly.

  “Oh, don’t worry too much,” she said. “I’m not. At least not yet. The little rogue usually comes back home when he’s hungry.”

  They started to walk, but she stopped them immediately. “Have you read Thackeray?” she asked.

  They said that they hadn’t.

  “You should, you know. He’s very good.”

  He asked the old lady if this author writes detective stories, and she laughed. His girlfriend said she would look him up when she was next in Waterstone’s, but the old lady’s mind had moved on.

  “You look such a nice young couple. In love, I hope. You probably think I’m a silly old woman stopping you on the street and talking to you like this. No one talks any more, you know. I was born before the days of television and computers, you see. When I was a child, people talked to each other incessantly. About absolutely nothing. It was wonderful. Don’t you think? You probably don’t.”

  They were, in fact, lost for words. The old lady could not have known that they were desperately searching for them, but they would not come.

  “I understand,” the old lady said. “I’m keeping you back. It has been lovely meeting you. You know where my house is now. Drop in for a cup of tea any time you want.”

  The old lady then turned purposefully, as though she too had a pressing engagement, and walked with great dignity back into her garden where a rubber kneeler and a trowel lay on the grass close to a partially weeded flower bed.

  They exchanged a confidential smirk and continued their walk. A baby was screaming as though it had finally understood the heroism of mortals and saw before it the great hill of life it had to climb. More probably colic was working its monstrous magic.

  The mother stopped and walked round to the front of the pushchair, where she unstrapped the baby and lifted it up tenderly. All the while, a boy of about nine was explaining to her the complicated plot of the latest Ben Ten movie. She nodded to him absently at intervals, devoting the rest of her time to the more complex task of cooing and bouncing the baby.

  “I’d never want a sprog,” she told her boyfriend. He looked less convinced. “You’re mad,” she added.

  As they got close, the mother looked up and muttered an apology, probably over the amount of pavement she was taking up. Her face was young, but her eyes were old. She was alone in so much company.

  As they chatted about children and the darkness of the world into which they’re now born, our narcissistic youth came jogging up behind them and as he passed, he inadvertently glanced her slender shoulder, almost toppling her and galvanising her fragile lungs. Her boyfriend shouted something and the youth briefly turned with a look of incomprehension and possibly hurt. Then as he looked in front of himself again, he saw the chance to cross the road just ahead of a stationary bus which a few elderly passengers were unhurriedly getting off. There are two lanes each way on the avenue, and he seemed unaware that a car might be passing the bus.

  The sound of a thin metal shell hitting the soft tissues of the human frame is remarkably loud – horrifyingly loud – and leaves a tremor in the hands of those who hear it. Suddenly they saw the indiscernible thread that holds us up and keeps us straight. Suddenly they felt the thinness of a second that divides one reality from another. Having now heard that sound and seen the unkind trajectory of a human body catapulted into the air and falling cruelly on a hard surface designed to grip, she clung to her boyfriend’s body, wanting its support but also needing to reassure herself of its physical presence, which was no less fragile than that of the poor youth out on his run. The body stirred and someone groaned. It must have been him; it contained such hurt that no one could touch or balm.

  The driver got out of the van that hit the youth. He was a tall man with regular features and a sallow complexion: an Italian, a Spaniard or possibly an Arab. His expression was one of horror. He walked as we might expect someone to walk in their sleep. He was slow in his movements and uncertain what he should do, but he felt drawn towards the injured man. Someone had called an ambulance, which quickly appeared, and a crowd was formed around the scene, temporarily confining the couple to the spot where they stood when the accident occurred. Two policemen escorted the driver back to their car and checked his papers. “Shouldnae be here,” one notified the other, without addressing the driver at all.

  “Shouldn’t be here,” said a grey man in a grey suit who was standing close by. “In other words, an illegal immigrant.” The driver was standing still. Stillness had finally taken hold of his life. The same second that had broken the bones of the healthy youth had also brought the driver’s hectic life to an abrupt halt. Everything he’d been fearful of happening had happened, and all that was left was compassion for the man who had bounced off his vehicle and landed not twenty yards away. He was responsible. He’d come all this way and suffered so many humiliations for this. What would they do with him?

  In that moment he felt the grey man’s hard finger stabbing his shoulder just under his collarbone. He passively accepted the pain this produced, as though the grey man was kindly wanting to wake him from a bad dream. “You come over here and look what you do,” the grey man screamed, and the crowd divided between those who were gladdened by the sight of a man being humiliated and those who were repelled. But all remained silent except the itinerant bank manager who had been pushing busily through the press of bodies until his eye fell upon this scene. Normally he was not a man to intervene in public altercations, given his long experience of adjudicating private ones, but suddenly he was gripped by a compelling certainty that here at last was a case in which all right belonged to one party and all wrong to the other. Addressing the policemen as though they were clerks at the office, he asked, “Are you detaining this man at the moment?”

  “Well, yes,” a policeman answered with untypical sheepishness for a policeman, impressed no doubt by the dress, carriage and presence of the man who spoke, “just while we check his documents.” Many of these were foreign, and the officers of the law looked genuinely perplexed.

  “Why, then, are you allowing him to be harangued by a member of the public?” the bank manager asked with crushing logic. The policemen were nettled, and now aware that they had failed in their duty in a public space. They remained silent as they mulled over the possibilities. They could have aggressively dismissed the man, but felt he was like a gambler who knows he has a good hand and is always willing to raise the stakes. The only alternative was to express some kind of humiliating apology and deal with the situation. Fortunately for them, the situation was saved by the grey man’s reaction.

  He left the driver and moved towards the manager with the leering fury of Sir James Goldsmith at the mention of Private Eye, carrying his finger before him like a weapon. He assessed the weight of the other besuited man and decided not to use it for anything but the occasional flourish in the air. “These people are flooding the country, and you’re defending them.”

  “Flooding? This isn’t Holland and Bangladesh, where they’re crushed like sardines. This is Scotland, most of which is a soggy green desert – full of empty glens and treeless upland. And it’s not a flood; it’s a trickle. What do ‘these people’ do? They work far too much for far too little.”

  “There’s nothing worse,” the grey man said, “than a do-gooder in a suit.”

  The manager regretted e
ntering this argument; he saw that it would be difficult to extricate himself without losing his dignity. You cannot debate with the irrational. The accountant ignored figures when it came to this subject.

  But the manager realised there was no way back: “Besides, we’re not talking of people, but of one human being making his difficult way through life. What just happened to him could have happened to anyone here. The runner came out into the road without looking – an act so irresponsible that he must have been distracted. Now he’s paying a terrible price for that momentary lapse, but the blame cannot be placed at the door of this young man who was going about his daily business.” He felt the rhetoric rising within him. He believed in what he was saying, but he believed in it more strongly now that he was saying these things so publicly. Momentarily, this was who he was: a champion of the poor and mistreated and a scourge of racists and bigots alike. “What kind of country do we want to be? One in which the colour of your skin counts more than justice and the rule of law? How many of us saw what happened? We mustn’t observe injustice and just pass by.”

  When he had started to speak, the party of revulsion was perhaps in the minority, but as he argued rightly but, most important, magisterially, the crowd began to shift, and as he came to the last line, it clapped its majority opinion quite clearly. The grey accountant observed in horror and slipped into the anonymity of the concourse that thinks as one and can shift in either direction. The policemen sensed that the crowd was losing interest, and waved it to disband, reassuming their professional superiority: “There’s an injured man who has to be removed from the accident area. Please move on.”