They sat on through the evening while outside the changing sounds recorded the time in the street. Children clattered past on imaginary hooves, shooting from inexhaustible guns, their voices changing from whoops to raucous argument because someone refused to be dead. A lawn-mower whirred spasmodically. The whistling of an ice-cream vender shifted deceptively, farther and nearer, elusive as a grasshopper. Sounds became less frequent. The voice of a strident mother called her laggard child back home to his bed in the gathering dark. Someone whistled jauntily up the dark street, his heels clanging metallically on the pavement. A drunken man sang a broken verse of nostalgic song. Milk bottles put a full stop to the night in someone’s house. Still they sat on, watching the man in the bed, who lay in troubled sleep, drawing up strained buckets of breath from an emptying well. Occasionally, he gasped and shuddered like a landed fish, hooked mercilessly to his own dying. They sat like children in church, concentrating on a solemnity that was awesome, incomprehensible, and not to be evaded. All evening no one had moved except one woman who rose every so often, wet her forefinger in whisky, and rubbed it round the dying man’s mouth. This was Aunt Ella, a condor in bombazine, circling round their lives, alighting where trouble was, feeding on the carrion of other people’s lives. She was Uncle John’s widow, one of the family’s professional mourners. Broken marriages, accidents, illnesses, deaths, they were all meat to Aunt Ella. She came in corbie-black and took her perch in sick-rooms and broken homes, zestful in grief, avid in consolation. She knew what had to be done in times of trouble the way other women knew how to turn the heel of a sock or the best way to remove a stain from clothes. Now she was officiating here with her bustling, busy sadness. When she got up to perform her ritual again, a harsh voice stopped her half-way to the bed.
‘For God’s sake, lea’e him alane!’ Charlie said.
She sat back down and closed her hurt upon him like a door. But her pursed-lipped umbrage was lost on Charlie, whose attention barely flickered from his father. All evening he had sat concentrating on his father dying, not missing an agonized breath. He was hardly aware of other people in the room. Only his father lying on the bed was fully present to him. All other thoughts and awarenesses were incidental, mere doodles on the margin of his mind. Everything that happened in his father’s body was transcribed to Charlie’s mind, the soft hiss of air oozing from the raddled lungs, the features knotting on a sudden pain and unravelling slowly, the frequent spasms that took possession of the body, causing it to convulse as if labouring to give birth to death, each macabre detail meticulously recorded. It was as if he was keeping an account. Why he should do this never occurred to him. But his mind of its own volition entered everything that took place as if against some future reckoning.
After Aunt Ella cloistered herself in her hurt pride, Charlie’s father lay easy. Every time the whisky had been put to his mouth, he had girned under its touch, like someone not wanting to be wakened. Left alone, he seemed less troubled, except when the pain reached its spasmodic climax. The pain seemed to attack him like that, to hit him suddenly, rack his body for a time and then leave him. His body wrestled on the edge of the grave and it was impossible to tell whether it was struggling to hold on to life or gain possession of death. Often it seemed as if he couldn’t die, as if all the pain was because he couldn’t make his body yield to death. It went on into the early morning, fierce bouts of pain, until the watchers sensed the last struggle coming. They rose and gathered round the bed as if to lend him their strength. Hands reached out to touch him. Pain arched him upwards from the bed and they took him in their arms. Some of the women were moaning and keening, urging him to die. For a long moment, wet with their tears, he hung on to life by a thin chain of breath that rattled in his throat until the last link snapped and he was gone. Death shook the body as a dog shakes a rabbit and then dropped it, broken and empty, back into their arms.
In that moment all the grief that had stayed dammed in them during his dying seemed to break. It was as if his death, which had been happening through many hours, had all the time been unexpected. Women wept terribly. Their faces, abandoned to the distortions of grief, ran with tears and their mouths gave out an inhuman wailing. It reminded Charlie strangely of a word he had always remembered from a Latin textbook at school – úlulare – to wail. The sound they made was what it meant. The men stood silent, though some of them too were crying quietly, trying to comfort their women. Gradually they filed past the bed, laying their last respects like wreaths beside him. Some touched him gently.
Downstairs, the women went into the living-room and sat nursing their sorrow and commiserating with Elizabeth, who was inconsolable. The men went through to the kitchen. It was done by ritual, as though the two groups had separate functions to perform. A bottle of whisky was produced from somewhere and drinks were distributed. They made a strange tableau, standing sombre in the little kitchen, as if drinking a dark toast to the dead man, while on the table the uncleared remains of a meal testified to the normalcy that would soon resume.
‘He wis jist wan o’ the hardest wee men in Kilmarnock in his day,’ Charlie’s Uncle Hughie said, his eyes moist with memory.
The others nodded and some said ‘Aye’, and they listened, looking at Hughie looming above them, while he talked of his prowess as a fighting man, which in his young days had been considerable. Hughie was brother-in-law to Charlie’s father, married to his older sister, and he had probably been closest to him. They had been born within a year of each other and no more than two pubs and a pawnshop apart. They had experienced the same social crises from the same position. They had both been too young to be fully aware of the reverberations of the Sarajevo bullet. They had gone on strike from the pits and queued at soup-kitchens. They had gone in groups up Sunday morning roads and watched greyhounds chasing hares. They had stood at bookies’ corners, following the progress of the favourites through the card more concernedly than the fate of nations. Something of the waiting at corners and the months without work and the long grass-chewing talks in the park had always remained with them. It was as if all their lives they had waited for things which had never happened, for the Utopia prophesied in bothy and barroom, for the chimerical equality of men, for the manifestation of God’s grace through the treble chance, or for the smaller miracle of the three-cross roll-ups that would give them independence. And as Hughie spoke, telling of small incidents from Charlie’s father’s life, those who remembered added other parts from that past. They took their farewell of him, remembering what was best in him. It was their own funeral service.
When they were finished, they went through to the living-room. John had phoned for the undertaker and went upstairs with him when he came, to lay out his father and dress him for burial. Charlie stayed in the living-room with the others. From time to time he could hear John and the undertaker move quietly upstairs, arranging his father’s body, plugging in the smell of decay. In the living-room grief was slowly exhausting its first throes, but there was still the unbearable weeping of women, wrapped in their elemental misery like a shawl, rocking back and forth, cradled in sorrow. Only Charlie was apart from it in a way he couldn’t understand. He had not wept at any time, had not come near to doing so. He could not come to the easy and honest emotion of his Uncle Hughie. That seemed somehow a self-indulgence, a luxury he couldn’t afford at the moment. His feelings were somehow too serious for tears. What he felt was like grief, yet more still than the others’, quieter, unable to make itself seen or heard, like tears dripping inwards.
Chapter 5
‘LET NOT YOUR HEART BE TROUBLED: YE BELIEVE IN God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.’
The voice rose and fell with mechanical regularity, dispersing its words like seeds from the hands of a sower. Rigid as rock, Charlie stood by the window, trying to take the meaning of the words to himself. The others in the room seemed to form a unity with the wo
rds of the minister, and one of which Charlie did not feel himself a part. They sat in hypnotic sorrow while the minister gave articulation to their grief, and the old words gave meaning to their misery. Some of the women were crying, but in a restrained, an almost formal way, so that no one’s personal grief obtruded, but their weeping had a choric dignity. The men were very still and stiff in dark clothes, impassive as befitted death’s retainers for a day.
The whole thing seemed curiously irrelevant to Charlie. The etiquette of death was new to him, and he had waited throughout these strange proceedings for something that would enable him to endorse their validity, to accept them as an expression of what he felt. He was like an unbeliever in a church, witnessing the elaborate ritual of a service, waiting for the experience that would change him from onlooker to participant. He wanted a sign, anything that would strike a responsive chord in himself and bring him into harmony with the others here, enable him to share their acceptance, make what had happened bearable.
But nothing that had taken place in this room seemed to have any connection with the man who had lain upstairs with his private agony. All of this decorous ceremony was like a deliberate mockery of what his father had been. It suggested a fulfilment and a culmination that belied the desperate and unfulfilled longing that had been his father. It was a pretence so contrary to the truth that Charlie couldn’t begin to accept it.
Nothing here had any relevance to his father. The minister who presided over their sorrow had remained for Charlie no more than a kind and considerate man, administering mouthfuls of solace from his markered bible. He quoted beautiful archaic words at them. He gave up prayers of thanksgiving, raising his hands in benediction, quoting verses in his pulpit voice. But he didn’t know for what he was giving thanks. He didn’t know the years of suffering, the unnecessary despair. He thanked God. But God was not the only one to whom the thanks were due. You couldn’t just make out all grief to the Almighty and expect Him to honour it. That was too easy. Your involvement went a lot deeper than that. Grief was your responsibility as well as His, and it wasn’t enough to put it all to His charge.
But that was what they seemed to be doing. There was a vagueness about the whole thing, as if it didn’t relate to anyone personally, but was merely a dismissal of anonymous remains. The minister’s inaccurate and generalized eulogy typified it. This was a service dedicated to some uncertain and idealized image of a man that bore no resemblance to Charlie’s father. Charlie tried to go along with it, but he couldn’t recognize his father in any of it. He found himself wondering if this was all there was to be. He wanted desperately to accept this, to believe in its significance as the others seemed to. But by the time the minister brought his service to a close, Charlie was still unconvinced.
The men filed out into the waiting taxis and they moved slowly through the top part of the town with the traffic giving them precedence, and an old man at the kerb taking off his cap. The cars stopped just inside the gate because where the grave was could only be reached on foot by a narrow path. The cemetery was wet and very green after the recent rain as they came out and took the coffin. They carried it upwards to the new grave which was half-way up the hill, and laid it on the ground while the minister spoke. Charlie remembered what the card given him by the undertaker had said: ‘Please take cord 2.’ They lowered the box, and the minister dropped dirt on to the wood. While the minister spoke for a few moments they stood around awkwardly, each with his own thoughts.
Charlie heard the minister’s voice taking place far away, listened to rooks in the near-by trees, saw the clouds move together dark, conspiring rain, heard the horns of the traffic which passed, one graveyard away, and it wasn’t enough.
Nothing here was enough. Something more than sanctimonious mutterings was needed over this grave. It was like a confidence trick to keep his spirit quiet. It would have been more honest to try to summon his ghost from its grave to haunt the actions that lived after it until it was blessed with meaning and had been given justice. Anything would have been better than this hypocrisy.
Charlie looked round the others at the grave. Their faces were as impassive as masks. What was taking place behind the masks? Did they know what had happened to the corpse that was lying in that coffin? Did they know what he had been and what he had been made into before he filled a box? Were they prepared simply to accept it as the way things were? Their faces showed nothing. They stood in their dark clothes like sentries barring the way to honesty, guardians of indifference and pretence.
Charlie felt antagonistic to their very presence. They were part of the lie that had destroyed his father. Their impassivity was a denial of what had happened. They thought it was enough to stand for a little while round this grave down which they flushed the refuse of their lives. But there was more to it. Death wasn’t an end in itself. Lives were more than boxes of worm-food or elaborate manure. People mattered, and accounts had to be kept.
The minister was finished, and two men in overalls started to fill in the grave. The others began to leave slowly like oxen yoked to an invisible burden. Charlie still stood beside the grave.
‘Come on, kid,’ John said to him quietly. ‘It’s finished.’
‘It’s no’ finished,’ Charlie said, shaking his head.
John did not know what he meant. He could see the others moving towards the gate, outside which the cars were drawn up, waiting.
‘It’s no’ enough,’ Charlie said simply.
On a plot of waste ground opposite the cemetery, two boys were calling to their careering dog.
‘Sheena, Shee-na, Shee-na!’ They yodelled through cupped hands.
It ran in crazy circles, cornering into the sound each time they called, tethered to their voices.
One of the men filling the grave glanced up at Charlie, and John touched his arm.
‘Come on, Charlie. Come on.’
‘Ah’m tellin’ ye, John,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s no’ enough.’
Chapter 6
‘AYE, MAGGIE GOT A QUICK CALL, TOO,’ HIS FATHER said. ‘Big Tam fairly went doon the brae after that. He used tae be a great case before it. Mind it was him that showed us yon trick wi’ the egg, Charlie?’
Remembering the scene, Charlie was able to recall it complete, existing as it did bright and separate in his memory, like a room where the same people sat for ever saying and doing the same things. All he had to do was re-enter it and set them into motion. His memory, like a skilful stage director, established time and place, arranged them in their positions, gave them their cue. Saturday night. He had come in after seeing Mary home. In the living-room, his father, Uncle Hughie, and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, reading a magazine with that air of detached concentration as if something else was happening at the same time, like having her hair done. His father and Uncle Hughie sitting at the fire with the coffee table laid between them. They collided intermittently on Saturday nights, about half-a-dozen times a year, as if under some planetary influence, and inevitably finished up here, counteracting alcohol with tea. The crumbs on the tablecloth and the ash in the saucers indicated how far they had travelled towards cold sobriety. Charlie sat between them, listening to them pontificate on the General Strike, and local worthies, thoughtfully repeating names from the past, paging images through rooms of memory. Then, in the middle of the perfunctory conversation, his father’s remark about the egg suddenly opened up a whole new moment. It was one of those ‘open sesame’ remarks through which the trivia of a night suddenly fall apart to reveal something memorable. One moment they were seated by the fire talking with perfect sanity, and the next were witnessing something utterly unforeseeable and magnificently ludicrous.
‘What wis this about an egg?’ his uncle Hughie asked. He had an insatiable passion for all tricks, riddles, and feats of general curiosity.
‘Ye must’ve seen it done,’ Charlie’s father said. ‘It’s just a matter o’ tryin’ tae break an egg longways.’
‘An egg?’ Uncle Hughie said incredulo
usly.
‘A comming or garding egg,’ Charlie’s father said, warming to the fact that it was new to Uncle Hughie. ‘Ye just haud it at the two tips between yer hands. And ye canny break it. That’s a fact.’
Charlie’s father demonstrated the prescribed method of holding the egg.
‘Ach, get away wi’ ye!’ Uncle Hughie’s lip curled sceptically.
‘That’s as sure as Ah’m sitting here, Hughie. Ah’ve tried it maself.’
Uncle Hughie appealed to an invisible synod. As he looked back at Charlie’s father his scorn was tempered with sympathy.
‘Ye mean tae tell me, John, that you’re goin’ tae sit there, a grown man, an’ tell me that ye couldny break an egg?’
‘Ah’m tellin’ ye mair than that. You couldny break an egg, if ye haud it the way Ah’m talkin’ aboot.’
The slur on his manhood was too much for Uncle Hughie, six feet in his woollen socks, half as many broad, with arms like pit-props, reputed to be one of the strongest men in the shire in his prime, who had made a habit of lifting derailed hutches loaded with coal back on to the lines single-handed, who had once carried a huge concrete ball thirty yards from one gatepost to another, whose party piece was so to fill his jacket-sleeve with a flexed forearm that you couldn’t move the cloth a millimetre (though some of the family were cynical about the last achievement, believing it to depend on the connivance of Uncle Hughie’s tailor). Uncle Hughie’s past prowess rose crowing in him like a cock.
‘Ah’ll lay a’ the tea in China that Ah can break every egg frae here tae John o’ Groats. An’ the hens that laid them.’ The last thrown in as a magnanimous afterthought.
‘Ye can have London tae an orange,’ Charlie’s father said adamantly, not to be outdone in generosity.
Remedy is None Page 4
