by Alan Spence
For Auld Lang Syne, my dear, for Auld Lang Syne.
As a child I thought Auld Lang Syne was this old old woman, a crone, the ancient Mother. And somehow all this celebrating was for her.
There is noise from every house, television and records all but drowned out by the voices, raised.
Every window is a separate world, a little capsule of light. Here and there where the curtains haven’t been drawn we can see right in; we can see a man singing; a glass raised in his hand; we can see a small family group round the TV; we can see a party, already well under way, a room and kitchen packed.
In the hospital too the lights are on and we see an old woman at a window peering out; in another ward a porter is playing a piano, and upstairs a young nurse is combing her hair at a mirror.
Further along the road there’s a crash of breaking glass and a window has been broken, from the inside. One or two faces appear at other windows, curious. But nothing else happens.
‘Look!’ says my wife, pointing over at a house across the road.
A woman has a young child caught up in her arms and she dances with him, round and round and round. Light on her feet she spins with him, her head thrown back as they laugh and laugh.
We come in and close the window now, warm ourselves at the fire.
The incense stick has burned down. A heap of ash. Fragrance.
For Auld Lang Syne, my dear, for Auld Lang Syne.
The Earth goes turning in space. First day of another year.
Blue
Looking up, I am lost in the drift of the clouds, moving, following their own slow dance, ordered, haphazard, without end. They move to the same breeze that touches me now, the breeze I remember from before. Back it takes me; back to when I was eleven.
Like today it was a bright, clear, February day, strangely mild with that soft breeze blowing. Only a week since it had been snowing, and now there was this warmth.
The night before I had sat up late with my father, the two of us talking and talking about football. He told me his legends, of the great Rangers teams of the past. He told me of Alan Morton, scoring a goal direct from a corner kick, of Jerry Dawson, leaping backwards to make an impossible save, of Willie Thornton, face down in the mud after diving full-length to head a last-minute winner against Celtic. It didn’t matter that I had heard it all before. These were the myths we shared. The fire was blazing in the hearth, and as we stared into it, my father was the teller of tales, he was the weaver of fables, and his heroes strode before me and were real.
My mother was ill, but that was nothing unusual. She had been ill as long as I could remember and the last few years she had been in and out of hospital. She had asthma and bronchitis and found it difficult to breathe. She had been in bed now for two or three days. Earlier she had been joking: ‘Football, football! Is that all you two kin ever find tae talk aboot?’ and we had laughed. But now she was feeling bad. She looked paler than I had ever seen her. My father went out to phone the doctor.
I had been cutting out a photo from a magazine and I pasted it into my scrapbook. It was a coloured photo of the Rangers team. The bright royal blue jerseys stood out from the grey page and from the other black and white photos in the book.
Blue was my favourite colour. The royal blue of Rangers. The pale grey-blue of the sky. The blue flame wavering in the fire when the coals were a red glow. There was a girl I liked called Maureen. She had blue eyes. Maureen was a Catholic and she had told me something special about blue. I had found a holy medal with a picture of Our Lady on it. The border of the medal was silver, but the centre part, the picture, was blue. I had given the medal to Maureen and she had told me that Our Lady always wore blue, that blue was the colour of Mary, the Mother of God.
But sometimes blue meant sad. There were songs, like ‘Blue Moon’, ‘Singing the Blues’. I had learned the words of that one with Jim, my friend, and we sang it at the Life Boys concert.
The moon and stars no longer shine
The dream is gone I thought was mine
There’s nothing left for me to do
But cry-y-y-y over you.
They were sad words, but it didn’t feel sad to sing it.
By the time the doctor came my mother was much worse. He said she should go to hospital and he sent for an ambulance. When it arrived I was sent next door to Mrs Dolan’s, to wait. My father went with my mother. I watched her being carried down the stairs in a stretcher. That was the last time I ever saw her.
My father came back much later and we went to bed. In the middle of the night a policeman came to the door and my father went again to the hospital. This time he came back and told me my mother was dead.
It was as if part of me already knew and accepted, but part of me cried out and denied it. I cried into my pillow and a numbness came on me, shielding me from the real pain. I was lying there, sobbing, but the other part of me, the part that accepted, simply looked on. I was watching myself crying, watching my puny grief from somewhere above it all. I was me and I was not-me.
Later, after a breakfast that neither of us felt like eating, I went out to the toilet on the landing. I still felt somehow outside myself, apart. There was a newspaper hanging behind the toilet door. I looked at it. On the back page was a picture of Ian McMillan, Rangers inside-right. I tore round it carefully.
Out on the landing I opened the stairhead window and looked out across the back courts. The breeze was warm. Everything was the same. It was very ordinary. Nothing had changed. The sun shone on the greybrick tenement buildings, on the railings and the tumbledown walls and middens, on the dustbins and the spilled ashes. It glinted on windows and on bits of broken glass. It was like something I remembered, something from a dream. Across the back a tiny boy was standing, quite still, blowing on a mouth-organ, playing the same two notes over and over again. Down below, two dogs were mating. Jim had told me that people did the same and that was how women had babies, just as bitches had pups. At first I hadn’t believed him but then he had showed me a book that explained it. For a while after that I had been doubtful of my parents. There was this feeling that somehow they had betrayed me. But that had passed. It was strange to think of it, that I had been planted inside my mother and had grown there. Her life was in me, and now she was dead. That was how the life went on. The breeze was blowing through everything. It touched my cheek. It stirred the piece of newspaper clutched in my hand. It scattered the ashes round the midden. It ruffled the hair of the two dogs and the clothes of the small boy, still standing, playing his two notes. In its warmth there was something gentle and soft, something infinitely tender. It touched all things and they moved to the one rhythm. It was almost sad, but behind the sadness was the faintest of smiles. I trembled on the edge of something eternal. The one flow. The warm breeze. My mother. All of it.
I closed the window and turned away, up the steps to the house. My father was occupying himself, tidying up, making the bed. I trimmed neatly round the picture of Ian McMillan and opened my scrapbook at the Rangers page. There was the coloured picture of the team. Was it really only last night I had pasted it in? My mother had watched me. I put the new picture beside it. Yesterday. Today. I turned to get the jar of paste and suddenly the flood of tears was on me again.
On the morning of the funeral we were getting the house ready for the people who would be there afterwards. My father was up on a chair, washing the windows. I was raking out the ashes from the fireplace. Dead ashes. My mother was to be cremated. She too was to be burnt, reduced to ashes, and the ashes would be scattered, spread by the wind. My father had told me not to think of the body as my mother. It was only a shell, he said, and she was gone from it. I had thought of the sea-shell, on the mantelpiece. It was big enough to cup in both hands and when you held it to your ear you could hear the ocean. I remembered listening to it when I was very small, full of wonder that something that size could contain the whole ocean, big though it was, for a shell. Depending on how you held the shell to the light, yo
u could see different colours in it, soft browns and purples, blues and greens, colours that seemed to fade away from you, layers behind layers. It had belonged to my mother since she was a young girl. I felt the sadness again. Ashes. I turned to look at my father. He was stepping down from the chair, but he didn’t look where he was putting his feet and he stepped right into the bucket of water he’d been using, soaking himself and splashing it all over the floor. It was like something from a film. The laughter swelled and burst out of me. I couldn’t contain it. It took control. I laughed till I cried, and through the tears I saw that my father was laughing too.
It was after the funeral and we’d all come back in taxis. Somehow I was standing apart, on my own, across the road from our close. At the corner I could see a few of my friends. Jim waved to me and I waved back. They would know by now about my mother. I gave what I thought was a brave smile. Again I had the feeling of watching myself. I looked across at the building. Home. Soon everything would be back to normal and nobody would notice that anything had changed.
I don’t know what I had expected. A sign. Jesus to come walking out of the close and tell me everything was all right. A window in the sky to open and God to lean out and say my mother had arrived safe.
I looked up at the sky, trying to lose myself in the shifting of the clouds. I focused on the shapes, willing them to change into something I could grasp. I half-closed my eyes. I could almost see a cross.
A dog barked and I looked around me. Everyone was crossing the road, going into our close. I looked back to the sky. The clouds had moved on and changed again. Through them I could see, for a moment, a patch of clear blue.
Later, after the meal, I was sitting on the floor with my cousin Jack. I told him about my father and the bucket of water and we laughed. Then I said I had a secret to share with him and I made him promise not to tell. And I told him I had seen her, dressed all in blue, Our Lady, the Mother of God, in the sky above our house.
After everybody had gone, my father sat for a long time looking into the fire. Outside it was growing dark. I closed over the curtains, shutting out the night, drawing in the room about us.
The table was littered with plates, cups, an ashtray, spilled crumbs. My father said we could clear it all up in the morning. I felt as if the day had gone on forever.
‘Aye,’ said my father, turning to me. ‘In the morning.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Spence is an award-winning poet, playwright, novelist and short story writer and is the author of six works of fiction, six collections of poetry and six plays. His awards include the Glenfiddich Award, The People’s Prize, Macallan Short Story Prize and McVitie Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. He is Professor Emeritus in Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen where he founded the annual WORD Festival in 1999 and was its Artistic Director for twelve years. With his wife he runs the Sri Chinmoy Meditation Centre in Edinburgh. In 2017 he was appointed Edinburgh Makar, the Poet Laureate for the City.
By the same author
Stories
Stone Garden
Novels
The Magic Flute
Way to Go
The Pure Land
Night Boat
Poetry
ah!
Glasgow Zen
Clear Light
Still (with Alison Watt)
Seasons of the Heart
Morning Glory (with Elizabeth Blackadder)
Playscripts
Sailmaker
Space Invaders
Changed Days
The Three Estates
No Nothing
‘A very fine novel’
The Herald
‘A meditative work of art that is finely honed as a samurai's sword’
John Burnside
