Remedy is None

by William McIlvanney

  The rather intractable geographical dimensions of the wager were scaled down to the more finite terms of an even dollar, and four bright half-crowns were tiered ceremoniously on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ Charlie’s father said. ‘Would ye go through an’ bring us an egg, please, hen?’

  ‘Oh that’s no’ fair, Father,’ Elizabeth’s lips pursed righteously. ‘You ken fine it canny be done.’

  ‘Are you anither yin, Lizzie?’ Uncle Hughie looked like Samson among the Philistines. ‘You go through an’ fetch me an egg, an’ we’ll see if it canny be done. This man’s got you as bad as himself.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Elizabeth said, ‘we don’t hae eggs to throw away like that.’

  ‘Ah’ll buy ye a dozen eggs wi’ ma winnings, hen,’ Uncle Hughie promised.

  ‘Yer egg’ll go back the way it came, Elizabeth,’ Charlie’s father said. ‘Don’t fash yourself aboot that. I’ll have it for ma breakfast first thing the morra mornin’.’

  ‘I’ll get ye an egg,’ Charlie said.

  ‘All right. All right.’ Elizabeth could hold out no longer against a united front. ‘I’ll fetch it for them.’

  Uncle Hughie took advantage of her absence to pivot on his chair and fart thunderously, as if it was some kind of inbuilt fanfare-system.

  ‘Well, if ye haven’t burst yer farting-clappers already, Hughie,’ Charlie’s father said jocularly, ‘ye’ll do it when ye try to break this egg.’

  ‘Better wi’ a toom hoose than a bad tenant.’ Uncle Hughie said cryptically, taking off his jacket prefatory to combat.

  ‘Homespun proletarian wisdom,’ Charlie said.

  But his Uncle Hughie was absorbed in his preparations. He was rolling his already rolled-up sleeves even higher.

  ‘Ye’d better strip to the waist, Hughie,’ Charlie’s father said seriously. ‘It’ll make an awfu’ mess when that egg bursts.’

  Uncle Hughie took him at his word. He peeled off shirt and vest as one, and stood naked to the waist, revealing a huge craggy torso with fine dark coal-scars running over the left shoulder, and tattooed forearms. On his left forearm what looked like some sort of dancing girl stood with her arms tirelessly upraised, a faded relic of the romantic past who had aged with Uncle Hughie. On his right forearm two pale pink hearts had grown anaemic with the years.

  Elizabeth entered like a handmaiden, carrying the egg. A space was cleared in the middle of the floor, and Elizabeth sat down beside Charlie on the settee like a ringside seat. Everything was done with formal propriety, as if it was all according to the eggbreakers’ handbook. Uncle Hughie was set in the middle of the cleared space and Charlie’s father stood with his hand on his shoulder, giving him a brief run-through of the rules. Uncle Hughie was nodding quietly, not missing a trick. Charlie almost expected to see him shake hands with the egg, and started to give a tense sibilant commentary in Elizabeth’s ear.

  ‘I want a good clean fight,’ he was saying. ‘And break when I say “break”. You both know the rules. I won’t hesitate to disqualify either you or the egg. So come out fighting and may the best egg win.’

  Uncle Hughie was ready. He laced the fingers of both hands carefully together and held them cupped upwards while Charlie’s father painstakingly placed the egg between his palms. Uncle Hughie’s hands closed impatiently on the egg, but Charlie’s father halted him and ran his fingers lightly round the edges of the egg to make sure that it was being held only by the tips.

  ‘Right, Hughie,’ he said. ‘Away ye go.’

  Uncle Hughie started to press.

  ‘Feeling is running high at the Garden tonight,’ Charlie resumed in Elizabeth’s ear. ‘This is something of a needle match, Hughie versus The Egg. Human dignity hangs in the balance.’

  Uncle Hughie was now visibly putting on the pressure. The dancing girl writhed sensuously. His right forearm had angina pectoris in duplicate. Huge veins rose and fell on his neck like organ-stops. His forehead, ploughed with effort, slowly took on a faint dew of sweat. His body, like an overheated boiler, became suffused with an unnatural red glow, as if combustion was imminent. And at the middle of this gigantic exertion, in the still centre of the hurricane, lay the egg, a tribute to the grit of Danish hens.

  Uncle Hughie relaxed and took a breather. His palms glittered decoratively, sequined with sweat, and he wiped them on the seat of his trousers.

  ‘Ah wouldny have believed that,’ he said.

  ‘There y’are,’ Charlie’s father said, vindicated. ‘Ye’ll maybe no’ be so cocky the next time.’

  He resumed his grip on the egg, with Charlie’s father sitting confidently watching. Charlie became aware that Elizabeth was struggling to hold in her laughter. She snittered once briefly, like a horse neighing, and cut it short. Glancing at her, Charlie saw her lips twisting nervously in an attempt to suppress the laughter which showed beneath her composure like a kitten under a coverlet. Then he felt laughter lit like a slow fuse in himself, rising steadily, coming nearer to ignition, until it flashed and exploded from his mouth, simultaneous with Elizabeth’s. Just at that moment the egg slipped in Uncle Hughie’s perspiring hands and burst. Egg-yolk exploded dramatically like shrapnel, and catherine-wheeled in all directions. It spattered sideboard and mirror. It clung like a canker to an artificial flower. A fragment of it fried merrily in the fire. It spotted Uncle Hughie like an exotic acne. The laughter of the other three overtook the last particle of it before it found a resting-place. They hosed Uncle Hughie mercilessly with laughter, while he stood in the centre of the floor, dripping egg. They laughed and coughed and gasped for breath and laughed again. Charlie fell off the settee on to the floor and lay there helplessly, epileptic with laughter.

  ‘For my next trick . . .’ Uncle Hughie said.

  And they became a quartet of laughers in unison, modulating, improvising, giving new interpretations to the situation through their laughter, until Uncle Hughie went through to get washed and returned spruce and eggless. While he was putting his shirt on again, Charlie’s father tried to give him back his money but he insisted it had been fairly lost. In the end it was decided that the money should be given to charity, namely Charlie and Elizabeth. The incident had generated laughter that lasted throughout that night and beyond.

  As he remembered it, Charlie’s smile was an ironic echo of that laughter. Lying alone in his room, he thought himself through that occasion and others like it as if it were a form of penance. Since his father’s death he found himself brooding over past incidents like that, fingering them over and over in his memory, like rosary beads, as if mysteriously they could somehow help him to understand what had happened to him, help to resolve the enigma his feelings had become even to himself. Something about all of these moments drew him, seemed to promise to help him come to terms with the amorphous feeling of utter deception that he felt. Somewhere in them was the reason for his inability to participate as he had done before in his own life. And the incident of the ludicrous egg-breaking contest was typical of them all.

  He remembered how they had all felt after it. They were all conscious of having made something among them. A night had been baptized. That was The Night That Uncle Hughie Fought The Egg. It was salvaged from the anonymity of other nights. It would be remembered, along with The Night The Dog Took A Fit, when John, playing vets, muzzled Queenie with an elastic band, and its head inflated ominously and it frothed like a drawing pint, charging chairs, butting sideboards, running a canine reign of terror until his father came in and unloosened the elastic; The Massacre Of The Chickens, when his father put a hundred day-old chickens in a ramshackle hut with a floor like a sieve and during the night the cats pulled them down through the floor like manna and his father came out next morning to a cenotaph of feathers; The Siege Of The Lavatory, when Elizabeth locked herself in the toilet and couldn’t get back out and the rest of the family spent most of an hour huddled round the door broadcasting instructions to her and sending messages of hope, and in the end his father had
to climb the rone and break a window to get her out, tear-stained and penitent; The Quest For The Canary, when the pet canary, which had the run of the house, flew out of a window inadvertently left open and the scheme turned out to watch his father, holding aloft a cage and rattling a packet of birdseed, wander the streets calling ‘Joey, Joey, Joey’, to the roof-tops until Joey alighted on his head and he nudged him back into his cage and returned home in an aureole of Franciscan awe.

  To their canon of occasions another night had been added. That was how they had felt. That was how they all remembered each other, haloed in a certain incident, incarcerated in an anecdote. They met each other fitfully, in the cleft of a phrase, in casual moments. When Charlie thought his way through the past six years, trying to place the terrible image of the father he had found in that death-room, trying to match it with another, he could not. All he could remember were those brighter rooms, moments of laughter, incidents that refused to be taken seriously. He could remember many things about his father, but almost all of them seemed redolent with humour. He could remember the time his father had risen at three in the morning to listen to the world championship fight from America. He made tea and sandwiches, arranged his armchair by the wireless. He filled a pipe meticulously. He sat with his tea before him, the quilt from the bed draped round his shoulders, the wireless tuned in, and, with the match raised to light his pipe, the fight was finished in the first round. Charlie remembered his father sitting there, resplendent in bedclothes, the match burning his fingers, his face sagging with disbelief, crowned with rumpled hair, King of Incredulity. He remembered the time his Uncle Hughie had interrupted their record session with some folk-singing of his own. They had all been listening to the records which seemed to have been in the house before they were, when his Uncle Hughie had dropped in, almost literally, and insisted that they should listen instead to his own repertoire of favourites for inebriates. He asked them, with unconscious irony, what was their pleasure, and proceeded to sing his own. ‘The Lea Rig.’ He rearranged himself in his chair, coughed the loose phlegm from the back of his throat, and swallowed it, kneaded his lips, fluttered his eyelids, and started to sing (with Charlie’s father descanting at the ends of lines and interpolating ironic commentary, ‘On ye go then . . . Can ye beat ’im . . .? Awfu’ guid . . . Clear as a bell ...?’):

  ‘Whe-hen owes the hull yon eastren staaar

  Tells bughtin’ ti-hime is near my Jo-ho . . .’

  His Uncle Hughie never actually sang a song. He simply shouted the words as loudly as he could and left the notes to fend for themselves. His eyebrows assumed an acrobatic existence of their own, lifting and lowering with random suddenness. His Adam’s apple bobbed alarmingly like a float under pressure from a porpoise. His eyes scuttled in their sockets like mad mice. Convulsive breathing made a bellows of his body, and huge arms were liable to be flung straight out at any moment in massively dramatic gestures. To anyone new to the experience it must have been a fearsome prospect, like the death throes of a mammoth. But through it all there was a ponderous sincerity to his performance. He was able to let a song possess him utterly, like an insane demon, so that once started nothing would stop him till the last line had been exorcized. He sang on relentlessly and where he didn’t know the words he simply improvised with a weird keening mouth-music of his own, or else stretched one word out like elastic until it filled a line:

  Down by the burn where yon birk trees

  Wi’ dew are ha – a-a-a-aangin’ . . .’

  That ludicrous sound had never faded from his memory. It was strange how he could remember so much that was casual and trite. He seemed to move among memories of his father that mocked the enormity of his dying. He found only trivia to recall. Broken fragments of small enjoyment littered his memory like a child’s discarded toys, aimless and inconsequential, seeming to have no connection with what had happened in that final room, with what must have been happening for years inside his father, while no one had been taking any notice. To have had laughter was good, but when the banter and the jokes were set against his father rotting twice in that little room – when they were all there was to set against it – they seemed a bitter insult to his dying. It was like a conspiracy of smiles against the truth. Something terrible had happened to his father, perhaps because six years ago his wife had left him, perhaps because of other things, perhaps because of many things. But it had happened. He had been destroyed as a man and the fact had registered nowhere except in himself. His own family had not even acknowledged it. Their lives had gone on superficially while he had lived at that awful depth, completely alone.

  He thought of his father nursing the broken pieces of himself and being jocular. Even when he talked of himself as he did sometimes, perhaps sitting by the fire with Charlie, he would talk mainly of times far in the past, as if at some point something had happened that negated himself and he had only those things to remember from a better time. When he talked like that it was like a ritual. The same stories recurred and Charlie came to learn them, his father’s private mythology, the accidental debris of a man that he took out from time to time to look at and be nostalgic over. They were pathetic in their motley variety of the funny and the ridiculous and the gently sad. He might recite the one about Lubey’s fabled methods of obtaining drink. How he once told a barman that for a half of whisky he could rid him of the flies which came in plagues from a rubbish-dump behind the pub. The barman, like most figures of authority in legend, must have been somewhat gullible, for he duly set up a half. Lubey downed it, jumped back, put up his dukes, and said, ‘Send the buggers out one by one’. There was the series about Alec Nine-toes, whose boyhood must have been like a sort of re-enactment of the plagues of Egypt. He was a walking monument to human vulnerability. He broke limbs as casually as matches. He once broke both legs simultaneously, jumping a wall to evade the police. He got his nickname from the time when he was looking down a pen for frogs and the grid fell and consigned a fair proportion of his big toe to the sewers. He went on from boyhood to manhood, living always between the plaster and the poultice, weaving uncertainly along his private zodiac, until one night, when he was drunk on the money from a modest pools win, he and a double-decker bus converged on King Street and it was as if all his past life had only been a rehearsal for that moment. He was the incarnation of the god of chance in the private pantheon of Charlie’s father, and the evocation of his image was always accompanied by reverential shakings of the head, as if to appease his spirit.

  But the part of the past Charlie’s father returned to most frequently was properly not one story at all. It was rather a small plexus of memory, and to touch any part of it would stir a series of connected responses. It concerned Sanny, the younger brother of Charlie’s father, and it was sensitive to a variety of pressures. You might touch upon it by an incidental reference to the past or by reiterating a saying which for Charlie’s father belonged essentially to his brother’s canon or by mentioning the war. The war was the commonest point of contact. Sanny had been killed at Monte Cassino and Charlie’s father still kept the last letter he had written – a letter Charlie had seen many times himself-on thin, unlined paper fraying along the folds so that you had to open it very carefully, in pencilled words that the years since the war had all but erased, in illegible handwriting,"/>but erased, in illegible handwriting, with wrong spellings, and with almost no punctuation, but suffused with a courageous unconcern that made it for Charlie’s father like an illuminated manuscript. Usually when he spoke of it he would rise at some point to fetch it from the drawer that held the photographs, bringing as illustrations to its text a dun photograph, scarred with handling, that showed Sanny in battledress, flanked by two anonymous comrades, all three grinning determinedly out from a frame of flags. He would hand you the letter as if it were an undiscovered manuscript of the Apocrypha. When you had read it for yourself, he would read it to you. And when he came towards the end where it said not to worry because Sanny didn’t think the German w
as born that could kill him, Charlie’s father always commented that that was right enough because he had been killed when the British mortar he was loading backfired and exploded in his face. There was no sense of bathos or ludicrous irony in it for him. It was simply a vaunt fulfilled.

  Charlie had often enjoyed listening to his father talking about these things. Taken together, these anecdotes of his father and those Charlie had garnered for himself had formed a sort of composite picture of his father for him, had provided a fixed point from which to see him and understand him. But listening to his father as he died had pulled the pin away on that image, had somehow shattered it. Now when he drew these thoughts from his memory it was like picking bits of shrapnel from himself. Their familiar composition had been destroyed in the explosive experience of sitting in that death-room with his father. They had shifted into unfamiliar positions, no longer rested comfortably in his mind but rubbed and irritated there, barking against each thought, suppurating in his subconscious. Their former levity and ease of acceptance were the very things that made them seem alien now that their coherence had given way to a tunnel of doubt, to the dark hole blown in them by his father’s death. It was this dark void that Charlie was aware of facing him when he thought of his father’s life. It was this void he was concerned to penetrate, to follow wherever it led.

  Did his father’s suffering have no meaning? It could have no meaning if everything else was to continue exactly as it had done. Was it simply to be accepted with the reflection that this was the way things were? Did a man’s life mean so little that it was not even to be acknowledged? A man had been destroyed through no fault of his own. He had been made to believe devoutly in his own worthlessness, in his personal failure, and he had been made to believe in it simply because he could not conform to the rules which had been set for him. Because he could not succeed in terms which were not his terms at all, the only terms allowed him had been those of utter failure. If this injustice was final, if nothing could be done to right it, then nothing was meaningful, nothing was worth while. Was that truly all there was to life, circuitous conversations, the fragments of gossip chapped into a pallid fleeting flame, people dying word by word, aimlessly, casually, in communal loneliness, while the canary chirped, and more coal was needed for the fire, and someone went out to the van for the wafers? Was there nothing more dynamic than this to connect those two images that haunted Charlies’ imagination: the image of one man peeled of flesh and illusions, a skeleton of bitter hopelessness, lying in a lonely room; and the image of two people somewhere in another room living in quiet content? For he knew that for anything to matter these two images must be made to meet, must fuse to one.