Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘We could beat the English,’ mused the tall one.

  ‘At what?’

  ‘At anything we tried. You name it.’

  ‘No you.’

  ‘Me name it?’

  ‘Name the thing.’

  ‘Wars, like.’

  ‘But we fight on the same side, usually.’

  ‘But if we fought them again we would beat them, right?’ the boy said. He sniggered and walked from the burning drum. He stood with a group that had drifted away. They seemed to pass the bottle more freely over there.

  The boy Caesar walked with me to the hole in the wall. Someone had sprayed words on the stone: ENTER HERE ALL APACHES WHO DARE.

  ‘Fucking half-wits, man,’ said the boy, looking back at his friends. ‘At least in England I bet they don’t burn the Guy before they make a bastarding penny. They tossers burnt the Guy as soon as it was ready. No a toss-pot in England would have done that.’

  Little Caesar, I thought.

  ‘Here,’ I said, giving him a big English note. ‘Don’t spend it all in the one shop.’

  His plastic bag was swinging off his wrist. He stretched the note between his hands and then pressed it against his painted lips.

  ‘Beauty,’ he said. The light at his back. The note at arm’s length. And the face of Charles Dickens stranded in space. A water-marked face, clearly there. Stranded in space between the boy’s grin and mine.

  ‘So cool. The Queen Boot.’

  The boy was looking at the note’s other side. A West Highland terrier leapt at his feet.

  ‘See you, Elvis,’ he shouted back. Tiny lights flashed on the heels of his trainers as he moved away to the guising crowd. And peeping past the buttons at the back of his dress, the green and white bars of a Celtic strip.

  My grandfather’s block was called Annick Water. It stood in the middle of a row of six. Twenty-four high. Reinforced concrete. Cement cladding. Balconies on four corners. Top of the line in their day. Each was built in a month and a half. Looking up, I heard Hugh’s voice, his lessons on wind displacement.

  ‘You can build a strong core at the tower’s centre. Like the one in here. It works like a ship’s mast. The floors just hang off this central pillar, you see? It keeps the tower stable. Or you might want to think of a steel tube. The force of the wind hits the sides of the block, and down it goes, down a run of steel beams, until the force is displaced into the foundations. That is where the strength is: in the foundations.’ He would point with a ruler. Show me a ship.

  And the wind blew hard on the tower and me. Once that block had been pure perfection. Made by those modernist angels: the engineers. And my granda Hugh was the local Saints Peter and Paul. He just wanted towers stretching all over Scotland. Tower after tower, a legend of progress. Most of the high-rises on the west coast of Scotland were made, or inspired, out of Hugh Bawn’s zeal, and his tireless days as a housing boss. A priest of steel decking and concrete was Hugh. And now he was up on the eighteenth floor. My eyes rose up. The lights were blue at the top.

  At moments I still see the beauty in those towers. A thing of wonder, they stretch to the skies, and can seem for a time great catacombs of effort. They stand for how others had wanted to live, for the future they saw, and for hopes now abandoned. I had torn many down in recent years. But even to me there was beauty in them.

  Proud like a Soviet gymnast. Flakes of snow in a smirr overhead. A face of iron looking out to the future, over the fields and the roads below, and so firmly her mouth was set on future glory. The high-rise future. A land of pure belief and honest work lay somewhere up ahead, where swooning towers would dot the land, as Annick Water and her well-built comrades. Our lives: a matter of fresh air and open space. Immaculate at last.

  There it was.

  We had studied hard. These towers had everything of us. My heart was there. And the need to destroy my heart was there. My granda, who lay behind one of those glowing windows, had devoted his life to these buildings. This was our modern way of life; we had said goodbye to the tenement slum, and rid the world of the single-end. And here was what he had taught me to live for. How beautiful and sad it looked to me then. With flakes of snow: our frozen aspiration. We shape our buildings, afterwards they shape us.

  The sliding door of the ‘Evens’ lift was trapped in a mangled pram. The other lift was busted somewhere in the stratosphere. Some poor bastard’s car windscreen lay about the hallway in nuggets.

  Another day ended.

  At the back of the hall the light was dim. The wall was plastered with glue. A red door rattled in the wind. The door was daubed. The words in black. A forlorn janitorial script.

  The Night Stairs.

  On the other side of the door, at the foot of the stairs, the light had near gone altogether. Most of it came in through the window. The floor was a carpet of aerosol cans, and crumpled bags, and tins of lager. The air was thick with glue and piss. It was 10.45. You couldn’t hear much. There wasn’t much sound, just now and again, the slam of a door far above.

  The night stairs. They went up for ever. A small window on each floor let me watch the world receding, and see the far light coming to greet me. Holding the wall as I held myself, passing the tenth, twirled at the pin, and lifting my shoes, the fourteenth floor, the back of beyond, and into my eyes come the hanging stars, the sickle moon, the far-gone mysterious gust of thin air, the pop of the ears, and every ache of the heart goes out, the rush of the climb, a long lost memory of terra firma.

  And over the sixteenth floor there are shadows to watch. Up there the tower seems to move as you move, and sway as you sway, holding on to your Liverpool bag. You pause at last on the eighteenth floor. Stop at the bannister, short of breath, and no longer yourself, but somehow thankful and somehow alive, yes deeply alive, and staring out there, a fearing of height, and all of your life has come to this.

  The moon hung over the quiet sea. I don’t know how long I waited there. I stood there a while. And then I turned. My grandmother’s tin peacocks were fastened to the door. And underneath them a plastic nameplate: BAWN suspended in tartan.

  I saw what is meant by time passing. There on the step my watch seemed to freeze. Maybe I’d never imagined this moment. Maybe I’d really imagined no other. But in that cold stillness at the door my own world seemed to turn and look back, and all the dead minutes of my life seemed at once to live, and to speak, and to justify this being at the door, on this wet night, with a man’s hands and a boy’s eyes, and those tin peacocks the very picture of faith.

  Margaret near fainted at the opened door. She made me weak. She pulled my head down to her timid perfume, and she kissed me a halo. ‘Jamie, my own,’ she said. ‘My plenty, you came right away.’

  My grandmother’s hands were always fixing herself. She could straighten her cuffs and primp her hair in the middle of any chaos.

  ‘Look at the length of you, Jamie,’ she said. ‘And your hair that wet. You’re welcome home here, son.’

  ‘I’ve missed you, Granny.’

  ‘Come here, son,’ she said. And spread out her necklace. ‘You have never been a day out of this house for me.’

  And with that she drew me inside. The light was out in the hall: She took my hand. She tugged my bag free in her style. She led me not to the sitting room but through to the back bedroom. I could tell it was hers. The sort of world built by herself. Her own things quietly arranged there. ‘And did you come from England the day?’ she asked.

  ‘It was easy, Granny,’ I said, sitting in one of her wicker chairs. ‘The train was good.’

  ‘I was looking through the window,’ she said. ‘I never saw a taxi coming up.’

  ‘No, I just walked it, over the pavilion. The gangs are out.’

  ‘They’ve been at the door half the night,’ she said. ‘Looking for money and apples and whatnot. Let me get you a towel, son, you’re soaking.’ She turned up the fire. She closed the door at her back.

  Yes Margaret, she breaks my heart. Jus
t fixing herself all the time. Her hair is full of the Atlantic roar, and grey. Her head goes from side to side as she listens in to all you can say, and swift is the head-shake as she sits by the radio, a hard smiling about her, and listens to reels from the country dancing.

  ‘My bones are liable to snap,’ she said.

  Coming in with a lurid towel she caught me watching her room. The bars of the fire glowed orange. Every surface was covered with mats of white lace.

  Whitework.

  Her small table. The backs of two chairs. The board at the top of her bed. Plaid rugs were laid out here and there. Little flowers in drinking glasses. She’d a mantelpiece clock too big for the room. The place was strange. Like a room for articles saved from a flood. But it was orderly and clean. There was much evidence of her knitting. She seemed so calm in that room. Four books lay on the cabinet next to her bed. A Bible, an old mass missal, a Burns, and a tattered paperback, a Mills & Boon. The cover showed some brown-bodied Adonis in a bandanna scooping a girl on to a horse. I smiled at my gran.

  ‘I see you’ve been adding to your library.’

  ‘Oh that daft thing,’ she said, picking fluff from her cardigan. ‘Pure rubbish. You can read them in your sleep. The school has coffee mornings. There’s a book stand, mostly rubbish, but you can buy them up for pence.’

  We sat saying nothing for a minute or two.

  ‘How is he, Gran?’ I said to the carpet, and then to her eyes. ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s no got long left, Jamie,’ she said. He is going to die you know.’

  She too dropped her eyes to the floor. There was nothing to hear but our breath and the clock.

  ‘But he’ll no die the day,’ she said. ‘Dr Riccarton said two months.’

  ‘Are the spirits high?’ I asked. And then all of a sudden I felt how foreign that phrase would sound to Margaret. I paused and remembered. ‘Can he … can he thole the pain?’

  ‘Aye there’s the pain,’ she said, cleaning her nose.

  ‘Can he manage that now?’

  ‘He can thole the pain, Jamie son. The thing is no the pain. Your granda never worried about any pain. For a long time now your granda and me have been living at opposite ends of this flat. You know he’s no for going easily? Hugh still wants the world to hear him, Jamie. The hearing of him … it’s the hearing of him. That’s what keeps him going, my plenty.’

  ‘What is it he wants to say?’

  Margaret stood up to make tea.

  ‘I have willed all the saints down on top of him, son,’ she said, ‘to help him bide away from that question. And I canna answer you what he wants. I don’t know what a man wants in his condition, except peace. His lips are dry. But you’ll see yourself how he fashes and rattles on his stories, and his buildings and whatnot. Morning, noon and night, the devil is at him. Oftimes he dreams it out loud. He speaks overmuch on the rent-strikers. You’ll hear him yourself. He’s made that room so’s I barely go through, except to change him, and do for him, and take him his dinner. Not that he’ll eat much now of what I give him. It will ease you none to hear of this, Jamie. But it’s right you came. Stay there, and I’ll bring you in your tea.’

  I could hear his coughs in the faraway room. They had seemed to grow in size. He had one of those coughs encroaching on pain. His wheezing enfolded a deep and ominous rattle. Old Hugh was mired in decline back there. I could hear the warp and woof of his life. And now the wind in his arid chest. So what to begin to say of his end. We sat with the sound of his coughing. I was buried there, at the end of the hall, at pause with my grandmother’s tea. I blew in the cup for courage.

  I dreaded to see Hugh’s wild, deserted face, or to hear his cracked voice, with all his words so long now baked in the family hatred.

  He had once been a young man smiling and great. His voice was pure, and moist was his throat, for the singing, and for the talking. He could lift a crowd with a heave of his tongue.

  Look, look, they might say, the mighty Hugh Bawn is gabbing the gab for us, singing the song for us, making the sound for us, young Hughie Bawn, look, look.

  And up would go the eyes. Young Hughie Bawn’s golden speeches to the people.

  King Larynx.

  Enlightenment, oh yes, and passion going together in the soft words of our good man Hughie of old and today.

  The women’s eyes.

  And today. Who was like Hughie now? Were there men with high foreheads, with suits in the press, and larynx and love on their side? Was there a Hugh-like maker of bridges? But why would there be? Why should there need to be? We had our own ways now; our world had its different glories. It’s just that Hugh’s kind was so suddenly going or gone.

  Hugh’s young self was a self no more. Not just for him, but for all of us. There were no young men like Hugh any more.

  They raised the roof, his battalion of coughs.

  But weren’t they trapped in their ways from the start?

  A writing slate cracked from the beginning in a granite school.

  An Indian summer of strong drink and Woodbines.

  A young lassie drawn from her first things. Tutored in sorrow or the arts of support.

  A family illness made royal and changeless. All new character swept aside.

  A son who couldn’t cook and could hardly breathe.

  A daughter-in-law quite hated by the fine lad’s mother. And all for her threat of future happiness.

  And now a man like Hugh must lie with his regrets. The lingering doubts about roads not taken; the fire in the heart; the necessary lies; the craving of pity, but not so’s you’d notice; the deadening wisdom of the clan chieftain …

  Yes, yes. Our fathers all were poor, poorer our fathers’ fathers.

  The clan chieftain. Going down now to a place where his certainties would finally be honoured. And the tears down below, the sadness of wives and weans who have come now, but only too late, to an understanding of the great man’s worth.

  Oh hell for them that couldn’t show love without feeling loved themselves.

  Oh hell is in their hearts all right.

  And cast your eye to the mantelpiece. How crowded it is with pictures of our good men, whose hearts gave out to disease in the end. And here we are, alone, bereft in front of this metal fire, looking now at the pictures there, our grey-faced men in horn-rimmed specs, and wise cardigans, and hair lotion. And we think of them now as we look at them, and all around we are told they were right. They were right. Oh yes they were right.

  And the smell of them about us.

  One of these days you’ll be old yourself.

  ‘I’m sorry, Granny,’ I said. ‘I missed what you were saying there.’

  ‘I was saying his cough can be better than that.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  My granda was alive in the other room. Not going easily. There was no going easily from a life like his.

  One day I saw my granda swim across the River Doon in spate. A thick-bodied man of sixty, he stood that day on the northern bank, his shirt and waistcoat, his woollen trousers, stranded among the yellow of the gorse bushes. And how he smiled into the onrush. The clouds overhead were black. On all sides the grasses were soaking wet and the air smelt of all that sodden turf and burnt leaves and people stood there in their rough balaclavas waiting for the old man to tumble in. The river was dirty and swollen. We knew it well. And that day all the eels and sticks and stray paint pots rushed past on their way to the sea. My granda stood there in his simmet and drawers. He had silver in his hair. Up went a roar as he plunged headlong into the stew. And right away his arms were thrashing; the water coming on with a mighty slap. He was carried downstream, a dozen yards at a time, but up he would swim on the diagonal, tumbling with the mad rivulets, pushing his body against the tide with a force unknowable. At times the water would seem to gain on him, challenging all his breath and ripping into his swimmer’s art, and even with all that water so taunting his efforts, the crowd would holler and laugh at the cheek of the man.


  But not me. I watched the river appearing from nowhere, and saw his face bob over the spray. The look on his face was partly of fear. He battled the scoosh and the onrush. He made it back each time he was forced downriver. But the look on his face was not as people said. They said he was only determined. I knew there was more than that. The fear was alive, the fear that was in me too.

  The water was mad in itself. To me it seemed set on every revenge. The river was happy to play with my granda, but then it seemed ready to make itself known, and cover my da, to quieten those idle spectators. That day I thought it would rip him away, and carry him off to be lost in the sea. But the great Hugh Bawn would suddenly appear on the other bank, his chest heaving in the gloaming, his hair spiked like porcupine quills, and every person there present would be cheering as if there were no tomorrow.

  I hate tea. It’s piping brown neutrality made me sick as a boy and it makes me sick still. A swill of inane weather and riverbank mud. Margaret would never give you tea and no biscuit. Tunnock’s teacakes and Bourbon creams were spread on a plate. Tunnock’s: a nebulous, fondant dome of sugar, an intense spot-welding of chocolate.

  ‘He was asking who was at the door,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Did you say?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I told him Hallowe’eners.’

  My granny drank her tea like it really soothed her. She would always take it in a cup and saucer; the rest of the world got a mug. ‘It’s good to get a cup of tea on a cold night,’ she said to fill the space, and then, ‘In Liverpool, Jamie, do they leave the tea-bag in the cup?’

  ‘Some of them do, yes,’ I said. ‘They like their tea in Liverpool all the same.’

  ‘And do you call yourself James down there?’ she asked, out of the blue. That was my granny’s speciality: soften you up with a tea question, then hit you hard with something strange.

  ‘Yes,’ I said with a stupid laugh. ‘They tend to say James. But I don’t know why you couldn’t get through on the phone. Maybe the accent up here confuses them.’

  ‘But they can follow what you’re saying?’

  ‘Mmm.’