‘We’ll get hame just as soon as we’ve had oor supper,’ Joan said. ‘Bill will bring the car tae the door here, won’t ye, Bill?’
‘Aye, door-tae-door service, that’s me,’ Bill said. ‘Eh, what aboot that car sinking in the swamp, though? Wi aw that money in the boot. What a waste, eh?’
‘I thought it wasna gonnae go doon,’ Don said. ‘It stuck for a minute. I thought he’d had it then.’
‘It wasna just the money in the boot,’ Joan said. ‘She was in the boot, poor thing.’
‘Ach, she shouldna have stolen the money,’ Bill said. ‘That’s what ye get if ye’re dishonest.’
‘She didna deserve that,’ Joan said.
‘I didna say she deserved it,’ Bill said. ‘But it was like that’s what happened tae her because she was on the run, because she checked in at that motel …’
‘She would hae taen the money back,’ Don said. ‘Ye could tell that was what she’d decided tae dae. But it was ower late.’
‘I’ll tell ye one thing,’ Liz said, and because she’d been so quiet they all shut up and turned to her expectantly, ‘as long as I live I will never go in one of thae things.’
‘What, a car?’ Bill said. ‘Ye’ll need tae if ye’re coming hame wi us.’
‘No, a shower,’ Liz said. ‘I could never get in a shower and pull the curtain shut. I’d be thinking somebody was gonnae come at me wi a knife every second.’
The waitress arrived with two platefuls of fish and chips and peas, a scliff of lemon on the side of each plate. She went away and returned with the other two plates, for the men, and Bill picked up his knife and made repeat stabs in the air above his fish while imitating the screeching violins from the soundtrack. There was a bottle of tomato sauce on the table and he shook it and splattered a quantity on his chips. ‘Blood, blood!’ he squawked. ‘Oh God, blood!’
‘It’s not funny, Bill,’ Joan said. But she was trying not to smile and then she couldn’t stop herself, she did laugh, and Don knew she’d enjoyed the whole experience, including having the wits frightened out of her. She was different from Liz. He wished …
In a couple of days it would be Halloween. The boys would go out guising, in black cloaks and hats, and ghoulish flour on their faces and trickles of red sauce strategically placed. Billy was really too old for it now. This would be his last year. He’d go because Don would tell him to, to keep an eye on his brother. Not that Billy had any control over Charlie, it was usually the other way round. When Billy sang songs or recited poems or told jokes he did it with anxious, imperfect effort but folk applauded and handed over sweeties, sometimes even a few pennies. Charlie wanted a reward just for chapping the door. He knew a couple of poems and he delivered them without fault, machine-like, but there was a kind of edge to the way he did it, a threat. You’d better pay up when I’m finished. Don had seen it when he’d gone with them two years back, standing in the background as they performed. Even then he’d been worried about Charlie. Now he worried even more. Some kids got into trouble on Halloween, used it as an excuse for a bit of mayhem. That was why Don wanted Billy out with his brother, this year at least, as a witness. Charlie didn’t like witnesses.
He wished the English nurse could have been cuddled into him in the dark cinema. Ten years on, yet she still came into his mind. He’d never seen her again.
There was comfort in the good, hot food. The four of them ate, saying little. And then Don voiced the other thing that had been bothering him. ‘I ken it’s no right,’ he said, ‘but I felt sorry for him.’
‘Who?’
‘For the son. For Norman. I feel sorry for him.’
‘You’re as sick as him then,’ Bulldog said.
‘Can we talk aboot something else?’ Liz said.
‘His mother sent him round the bend,’ Joan said. ‘I didna feel sorry for him, but he was mad, so I suppose it wasna his fault.’
Bulldog speared a long, thin chip and held it up. ‘They should’ve sent him tae the chair. Fried him like this chip. But I suppose he’ll spend the rest of his days in the loony bin. The doctors say he’s no right in the heid so he gets away wi it.’
‘I don’t think,’ Don said, ‘he got away wi onything much. He was a tortured soul, a misfit. He didna fit in at all.’
‘Don aye feels sorry for tortured souls,’ Liz said. ‘Like Jack Gordon. He felt sorry for him tae.’
There was a brief silence round the table, as everybody considered Jack.
‘Dae ye ever hear frae Sarah?’ Joan asked Liz. ‘That’ll be, what, two, three year since she left?’
‘Aye, aboot that. She sent us a caird the first Christmas, but that was it.’
‘The lassie, she’ll be half-grown up noo,’ Bulldog said.
‘Barbara,’ Don said.
‘Same age as oor Billy,’ Liz said.
‘And what aboot Jack?’ Bulldog said. ‘Never a trace of him, Don, eh?’
‘Never a trace,’ Don said.
He shook his head, and as he did so he saw a look on Liz’s face that he didn’t understand, but it was the briefest of moments and then she glanced away and the talk shifted to some other subject.
It was only later, back home, with the boys away to their beds and Liz making a last cup of tea while he had all the shoes out on a newspaper and was polishing them up, that she suddenly said, ‘I saw him, ye ken.’
‘Saw who?’ he said, hardly looking up.
‘Jack Gordon. I saw him.’
He stopped his brushing and stared at her. ‘When?’
‘Aboot four year syne. Maybe five.’
‘Five years? But Liz, that was … that was afore Sarah got the court ruling. How did ye no say onything?’
‘I didna ken if it was really him,’ she said. ‘I was gaun intae Drumkirk, and the bus had stopped at the lights and I looked oot and there he was, gaun in the other direction.’
‘What, walking?’
‘Aye, walking.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Just the same, only thinner if that’s possible, and kind o scruffier. He had a lang coat on, that’s all I really noticed. But I saw his face, and it was him.’
‘But how did ye no say? If he was there in Drumkirk, and ye never said onything?’
‘I thought it couldna be him,’ she said. ‘He’d been missing for years by then. It was just a glimpse I got, and then the bus moved on again. I thought it couldna be.’
‘So, what are ye saying, it was or it wasna?’
‘It was,’ she said.
‘But did ye no think tae get aff at the next stop? Did ye no think, Liz? Did ye no think aboot Sarah, wondering if he was alive or deid?’
‘Aye,’ she said, ‘I did think. I thought aboot aw that in the space o a minute and I stayed where I was. It was just a glimpse, he was like a tramp, it probably wasna him at aw, that’s what I thought. And then I thought, even if it was him, she’s better no kennin. She’s better wi him deid.’
‘Och, Liz,’ he said. The empty shoes and the brushes and the tins of polish lay without purpose on the paper. ‘How could ye?’
‘I thought,’ she said, ‘if it was him, it was his ghost.’
This was so far removed from the practical, hard-headed, no-nonsense Liz he was married to that he almost lost his temper at her. And then he thought of his own false sightings, the way Jack haunted him, and he calmed down. He said, ‘But why are ye telling me noo?’
She said, ‘This is gonnae sound ridiculous, but see at the end o that film, the body in the cellar – there was something aboot it that made me think o Jack that time I saw him. If I saw him. He was aye that thin, but when I saw him that day he was like a skeleton, his cheeks had fallen in and his eyes were like caves. That corpse in the film minded me o him. Otherwise I wouldna hae said onything. Maybe I shouldna hae. Ye’re mad at me, aren’t ye? I can tell ye’re mad at me.’
‘I just think, when ye saw him back then, ye should hae said something.’
‘I thoug
ht I saw him,’ she said. ‘And if I’d said something, what would hae happened?’
‘Maybe I could hae tracked him doon.’
‘What for, Don? What would hae been the point o that?’
He looked at the shoes needing polishing. ‘I dinna ken,’ he said. ‘But if he’s alive …’
‘He walked oot,’ she said. ‘If he’s alive he disna want tae be here, or wi Sarah. If he’s deid he’s deid. But if he’s alive he might as well be deid as far as she’s concerned, so dinna be stirring it aw up again, Don. It’s ower late noo.’
‘He was my friend,’ Don said.
‘He walked oot on you and aw,’ Liz said.
He bent to pick up the black-on brush. ‘I wish ye’d tellt me,’ he said. Back then, he meant.
‘I wish I hadna,’ she said. Just now, she meant.
They looked at each other across a void.
‘Here’s your tea,’ she said. ‘Dae the shoes efter.’
‘Aye,’ he said. He felt suddenly exhausted. She was right. Or she wasn’t right, but he wouldn’t fight her about it. He watched her as she steadily, purposefully poured the tea. He was forty, she three years younger. He wished he still loved her the way he once had.
§
More and more, as the boys grew up, Don found himself gnawing away at a question, or the question gnawing away at him. Was it all settled – your character, the kind of life you’d lead – by the time you were five? Before you even went to the school? Maybe earlier, when you were two or three, before you were speaking properly? He didn’t believe it, he didn’t want to believe it. He believed in nurture because what else was socialism but nurture, improving people’s lives and improving the people as you did that? And yet whenever he looked at the better lives he and Liz were giving their two sons – better by far than the childhood he had had – he wondered if, in the end, it made any difference. If, in fact, you were happy or sad, good or bad, despite, not because of, your circumstances. A voice nagged in his head: See your nurture, your socialism? – I’ll bloody show ye. Was that the voice of fate? He didn’t believe in fate, but he watched Billy and Charlie turning from boys into teenagers, from teenagers into young men, and he thought, I could have mapped out their paths, their characters years ago, virtually while they were still in nappies. And he knew – and this was worse because it felt like betrayal when in fact it was only truth – he knew that all the way back there’d been one he liked and one he didn’t; one he trusted to grow to be decent – feckless maybe, but decent – and one who’d be out for himself and God help anybody who got in his road. And he hated the idea and hated himself for having it.
Decent was a word he valued.
And like was not the same as love between a father and a son. Like was about mutual respect, give and take. So you didn’t like your own son? That was sore enough but how could you not love your son? You couldn’t not love him, however much you might not like him. And that was what really hurt with Charlie. The love that he felt for him even as he saw him turn bad. The love that couldn’t stop it happening. The love that raged at him and that seeped out, a little less each time, whenever he had to yell at him, threaten him, take his hand or his belt to him. Till eventually the love would be gone, and all he’d have left would be the empty space it once filled.
Sometimes he thought about being in the hospital with the English nurse, and if she could have made a mistake. If she’d picked up the wrong bairn to show him, or the bairns had got mixed up some time before, or later, and Charlie wasn’t his at all, because how could he be so different from Billy? They didn’t even look alike. But then as they grew it became obvious that Billy favoured his father while Charlie favoured Liz, so they did both belong, but in different ways. He asked Liz once, did Charlie feel more like hers than Billy did, because of the looks? She said of course not, what kind of question was that to ask, and gave him a hard, accusatory stare. But Charlie still didn’t feel like his son, he just didn’t, and Don wondered in weak moments if – the daftness that had come on him that night, the daft emotion he’d felt towards the English nurse – if fate, in which he didn’t believe, had reached down and punished him for it even though he’d done nothing, they’d done nothing, there had just been the kiss, but fate had seen something pass between them and said, I’ll bloody show ye.
He deplored violence. He’d intended never to have to raise his voice or his hand against his own children. But with Charlie, sometimes, he had no option.
The English nurse. As if he couldn’t remember her name. As if it wasn’t in him like an old lover’s carved into a tree. Marjory Taylor.
§
Charlie lifted a bike from where it was leaning outside the post office, rode it halfway to Drumkirk, crashed it into a dyke and buckled the front wheel, then abandoned it. It only emerged later that he was the culprit because Bill Drummond, driving in the other direction, had spotted him freewheeling downhill.
Charlie used a neighbour’s greenhouse for target practice with a slingshot.
Charlie put a cricket ball through the window of a moving bus.
This was Beano stuff, the kind of thing most kids do, or miss doing by luck as much as choice, or narrowly get away with. What Charlie didn’t get away with, he got leathered for by Don. But every year he got away with more. What was scary was the stuff he wasn’t caught for, the stuff for which there was no proof. It didn’t matter whether it was Liz, Don, a teacher or a policeman doing the interrogating, Charlie never cracked. It wasn’t Charlie who fired the hayricks at Hackston’s, it wasn’t Charlie who vandalised the school or tortured three cats to death. And even when one of the small gang of followers he’d gathered around him confessed to some misdemeanour or other, he never shopped Charlie. He had a power over them, partly physical and partly psychological, and they feared or admired or envied that and the way they showed it was through silence.
§
The grandparents were dying. First Liz’s mother went with cancer, just shrank away to nothing in a matter of weeks, it was in her stomach, her spine, bones, everywhere; then her father, who’d never had a day’s illness all his working life, caught the flu and before a fortnight was out was dead from pneumonia. Liz felt the loss greatly. Both of them gone in eighteen months, and neither of them seventy. She felt, too, the final loss of her childhood: without them there, Hackston’s Farm wasn’t her territory any more. Every weekend she had walked the two miles and back to see them. Now, with no reason to go, she stopped going.
Don had sometimes gone with her. He liked walking for the sake of walking, whether it was out to the farm or up in the woods. There didn’t always have to be a destination, an objective. You could just be, out in the fresh air, the countryside, the moody weather. Couldn’t you?
Liz said, ‘What’s the point?’
In Drumkirk, the council finally knocked down the tenement where Don had grown up, and built a new scheme on fields out at Granthill. Don’s parents, Will and Molly, moved there, into one of the four-storey blocks dotted like Lego across the open spaces. Their two-bedroom flat had windows looking north to the hills and west into the prevailing wind and rain; the living room was big and bright; the kitchen and bathroom full of shiny new appliances. Their own bathroom! At first they loved it, despite the few shops and the infrequent buses into town. But after the first winter the problems started: the condensation, the ill-fitting window frames, the thin walls and the neighbours’ bairns with nowhere to play. Then the old man suffered a heart attack, clung greyly on to life for a few months, and died. Now only Molly remained, a captive of the radio, television and her weakening legs. Don visited every week, taking the messages that were too heavy for her to carry. He did what repairs he could to keep the decay and wild kids at bay, complained with little success to the housing department, and feared for what would happen next. Granthill lost its shine in just a couple of years. People in Drumkirk started to use the name as shorthand for everything that was going wrong with society.
Molly sa
id it wasn’t too bad but then she didn’t go out much, she didn’t see the deterioration. Her mind wasn’t what it was. Perhaps she’d have to come and bide with them. But how could she? They didn’t have room for her. She had a couple of neighbours who kept an eye out for her, but they could only do so much and Don didn’t blame them. They were not to blame. Nobody was to blame.
§
Billy, as a teenager, got into folk music and Ban the Bomb marches. Don approved, even went with him to a rally in George Square in Glasgow. He didn’t believe unilateral disarmament was sensible, or feasible, and they had long discussions about that, but he respected and admired Billy’s convictions. They were convictions, though curiously unimpassioned. It was good that his son had a cause, and that it was a left-wing cause.
He remembered talking with Jack about how Jack wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t dropped the Bomb. But Jack wasn’t there. Were the rest of them still there because of the Bomb or in spite of it?
Then Billy went to the Holy Loch to protest against Polaris, and away down south in the school holidays to march from Aldermaston to London. Liz grew nervous. What else was he getting up to, tagging along with a bunch of strangers? Kids with wild ideas and grown-ups leading them God knows where. What if he was arrested? Or abducted? Don told her to relax. Billy could look after himself. Liz raised her brows at him. ‘Ye think so?’
Meanwhile, Charlie curled his lip and mocked his big brother for singing ‘baby songs’:
Oh ye canna spend a dollar when ye’re deid.
No, ye canna spend a dollar when ye’re deid.
Singing Ding Dong Dollar, everybody holler,
Ye canna spend a dollar when ye’re deid.
He did a devastating imitation of Billy being both earnestly adolescent and pathetically childlike. Don disliked it intensely, because it was so accurate. Such cynicism in a twelve-year-old was disconcerting. Liz excused him: he was too clever for his age and easily bored. She was proud of him, as Don was proud of Billy.
Two brothers. You expected them to fight. You expected the older one to bully the younger, but it was Charlie who intimidated Billy. At two, five, seven, Charlie knew how to work his brother, trigger his sense of fairness or guilt or fear or generosity to get the toy, the food, the attention he wanted. At first it was amusing, intriguing, like watching monkeys socialising at the zoo. By the time it stopped being entertainment it was an established routine. Charlie’s key weapon was his willingness to resort to violence, not something that exploded berserker-like out of tantrums, but a sustained, deliberate, controlled violence. Billy had to try to manage being exploited. Fighting back didn’t work because Charlie had an appetite for a fight, whereas Billy thought the best form of attack was defence. The fact that they had to share a room didn’t help. They had territories with invisible but very real boundaries – their own beds, their own drawers for clothes, their own shelves, their own routes to and from the bedroom door. These had been worked out over time but because they were invisible they weren’t fixed, and Charlie was skilled at extracting further concessions in return for staying off Billy’s ground.
And the Land Lay Still Page 49
