Remedy is None

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Ah think she’s maybe cornin’ back through tae Kilmarnock to live. She might do that.’

  Charlie nodded blankly. It was as if he had no right to think or feel about things any more. He had forfeited his involvement in everything except the action he had done. John had not known what his own reaction was to the possibility of his mother’s returning to Kilmarnock. After what had happened, he wasn’t sure that she had the right to do it. Some sort of blame for what had happened derived from her and he felt they were somehow betraying Charlie if they had anything to do with her. And he was afraid that if she did come back to Kilmarnock, she and Elizabeth might see a lot of each other, might even live together again. It should have been unthinkable, he knew. But somehow it wasn’t. He could see it happening, all right. Elizabeth was desperate enough to hang on to anything that offered shelter. She needed a mother so much that even her own mother might do. Regardless of what the two of them had felt in the past, their mutual need might easily be enough to bring them together. You don’t ask who else is in the lifeboat before you let them pull you in. John had not been sure what he ought to feel, anger at Elizabeth or hatred for his mother. What had happened had been so numbing that all he felt was an uncertain sympathy for both of them. He had been prepared to wait and endorse Charlie’s reaction to it all. Now he couldn’t bring himself to draw Charlie out any further, because it was obvious that Charlie had no reaction to it. It was simply a fact which Charlie accepted as he accepted every other fact that was imposed on him.

  ‘She might even be considerin’ living with Elizabeth. Ah don’t know. She could be. Or maybe they’ll get another hoose. We’ll just have tae wait an’ see.’

  ‘Aye, John. We can see what happens.’

  The words were not communication, but the rejection of it. They clicked mechanically into place like bolts going home. John stared at the enigma of the face across from him, sectored into fragments by the wire. It was hopeless. Coming from the trivial actions and the aimless conversations that took place beyond that door, he couldn’t bring anything into this room that wasn’t a mockery of what Charlie was going through. The brutal truth was that they had nothing to say to each other. They were brothers, but they might as well have been strangers who didn’t even have the same language in common. The different places that they came from beyond those two doors were irreconcilable, warring opposites, and they couldn’t bring them to an understanding. John sat in painful dumbness, wanting to speak, but with every remark shamed into silence by the sight of Charlie. John found the quietness racking. But he had nothing with which to break it. He could only sit and wonder how much more terrible the quietness must be for Charlie.

  But, in fact, Charlie hardly noticed that John wasn’t speaking. The absence of John’s voice still left plenty of others, for Charlie’s mind snowed with voices, and whether he was sitting here or in his cell they recurred endlessly. His thoughts were constantly grooving in the words of other people, his father, Elizabeth, Jim, Mary, Mr Whitmore, Mr Atkinson, John. Gradually over the past few weeks, he had achieved something like his own understanding of things, although it was perhaps not understanding so much as faith.

  And it was a faith which enabled him to endure the long misery that lay ahead of him. It wasn’t that he had come to accept these years in prison as any sort of logical sequence to what he had done. But he understood that there was no logical sequence to what he had done. Whatever this imprisonment might mean to those who had imposed it on him, it had its own meaning for Charlie, just as any event can only become coherent when translated into the terms of the people involved. For Charlie it was simply a penance to which he saw no end. There could be no end to it because the guilt he felt was absolute. Only in the act of experiencing guilt could he be absolved. To forget was to become guilty again, because the guilt was most truly not that of action but that of omission, not of doing, but of failing to be.

  He was guilty of killing a man, it was true. But that was merely the pebble by which to gauge the depth of the chasm. Behind it, swallowing it, lay an infinitely vaster guilt, one of cosmic omission. He was like a hunter who sets out to snare a bird and finds that the bird is bait belonging to a mammoth. He had become the quarry of his own chase. In seeking to punish the guilt of others, he had found that guilt neutralized, swallowed up in his own.

  By some terrible paradox, Charlie’s action seemed to absolve his mother and Mr Whitmore of their guilt and put it on his own shoulders. Charlie had exacted payment out of all proportion to whatever it was that Mr Whitmore owed, and now his guilt multiplied itself on Charlie’s back. Charlie had played at being God, had in a moment of wilful divinity released the thunderbolt, and now he was left with what seemed an eternity of retrospect in which to contemplate his action, in which to learn the harder attributes of godhead, love of the unworthy, endless participation in the agony of others, infinite understanding.

  The last of this trinity was lacking, and always would be. Charlie could never understand what had happened. But in his desperate attempt to arrive at understanding, he had achieved something else which negated the need for understanding. He had discovered the sympathy with others that makes for love. The price of that love was his own guilt. For it was not until he had taken the blemish of their guilt upon himself and reincarnated in them his father’s suffering that he could see them as he had seen his father. Only then was he capable of love for them. Only then could he feel for them the sympathy he had felt for his father. It took his own injustice to them to show him that they were not the wilful villains in what had happened to his father, but his fellow-victims. They were sufferers with his father from an injustice which ranged much wider than their own petty misdemeanours, making them seem innocent.

  It was this injustice that Charlie had involved himself in, and it made his guilt not familial or parochial but universal. Blinded by his father’s suffering, he had been guilty of the very injustice for which he had blamed others. If they had failed to realize how much his father mattered, Charlie had failed to realize how much they mattered. It was only now, when he had irrevocably denied their significance, that that significance came home to roost tenaciously in his mind. For the first time, he felt not just what it must have been like to be his father, but also the silent desperation that must have held his mother like a cage. He realized how narrow her life must have been for her, what restless dreams must have walked holes in her comfortable domesticity. He sensed what inarticulate urgency must have led to that vivid reflowering of the flesh, the heedless consummation of a new identity. The same thing had driven her as had driven his father to take refuge in pathetic dreams and had driven Charlie himself to murder. Like them, she had been unable to take life in the terms that she was given, because she had more to offer than her life could adequately express.

  He saw his father and his mother and Mr Whitmore not as mutually opposed individuals but as sharers in a failure so painful as to make the distribution of blame an impertinence and an unquestioning sympathy the only valid gesture. Each stood equidistant in his compassion, seen in the perspective of their common humanity. They were simply people, and like all people they were the victims of their own nature. Like all people, they had dreams that were too intense ever to be realized, and losing their own dreams, lost compassion for the dreams of others. Being more than life could ever make them, they took from life what they could, and if they sometimes did it cruelly, the cruelty was no more than retaliation. Finding little truth, they learned to deceive, to spread words and actions around them like camouflage until they wandered lost in their own deceptions and other people’s. They might have been different. In failing to have what they wanted, they might have learned to want what they had. But it was an alternative that would have debased them in the taking of it. By that criterion the bird would take the cage in preference to the sky. If they had been different, they would have been less.

  Their fulfilment lay in the destruction of what was best in them, and Charlie had played his
part in that destruction, not just in killing, but in denying people the right to fail on their own terms. He had been guilty towards everyone, and now the remorse he felt was universal. But such remorse is difficult to observe and Charlie made his private pantheon before which to do penance. He held in his mind the images of the people whose lives had been affected by his action, and these images were complete, as if the people they represented were dead. Like an obituarist, Charlie remembered only the good in them, and his thoughts recorded their worth like rows of headstones. Their individual natures were reiterated in his mind like masses sung for the souls of the dead in a chantry.

  This ritualistic thinking occupied Charlie’s mind almost completely. The rest was insignificant, an incidental mortification of the flesh. Nothing they did to him could have much effect. Just as they had been unable to help him realize the vision he had needed before, they could not now take his private vision from him. It wasn’t the vision he had hoped for but it was his, forged from his commitment to his own ideals, its intensity measured by the intensity of what he had felt, harrowing, lonely, and incommunicable. To John or anyone else.

  ‘It won’t be as long as it sounds, Charlie,’John said in sudden desperation. ‘The lawyer says probably no more than ten years.’

  Looking at him, John saw the denial of his own words. The sentence was for life. They couldn’t have set Charlie free now if they had wanted to.

  ‘No,’ Charlie said.

  The warder was stirring restlessly. John stood up and Charlie stood up with him.

  ‘Well,’John said. ‘Elizabeth’ll be cornin’ up tae see ye. An’ maybe some o’ yer mates. An’ Ah’ll be back up, Charlie.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘Ah don’t know when they’ll be able to make it up.’

  ‘That’s all right. There’s plenty of time,’ and Charlie smiled wryly.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Charlie. Jesus Christ,’ John said.

  ‘Ah’m all right, John. Don’t worry about me.’

  John stood staring at him, finding it impossible to leave, and eventually it was Charlie who said, ‘Ah’ll see ye, John,’ and turned away.

  John made as if to wave and the gesture withered on his wrist. He watched Charlie being led out before he turned and left himself. When he came back out into the streets, Charlie’s face seemed to overhang the whole day like a question mark, a question mark that attached to everything these people were doing, to everything that John himself would do.

  As he sat on the bus that was to take him home, he closed his eyes and Charlie’s face loomed huge, like a terrible totem. It would have been better to forget that face. But he couldn’t forget. It belonged in some way to all of them. He wondered how they could reconcile that face to their own lives, what they could do to appease its suffering.

  ‘That’s a funny man, Mummy,’ a small voice said. ‘Look. He’s sleepin’.’

  John opened his eyes and saw a small girl staring into his face from the seat in front before her mother smiled apologetically at John and turned her round to face forward. John thought of his own son, suddenly feeling how vulnerable he was. He wanted to be home quickly. He thought of the things he had to do, at his work and at home. He thought of them over and over again, like someone fingering a rosary.