(Dear Friedrich Nietzsche,
If God is dead, how could he ever have been God in the first place? And if he ever was God, how could he be dead? Did you find a body? Any photies?
Puzzled Reader, Graithnock.)
But he doesn't think such niceties would matter to Mrs Malone, even if you explained them to her. Quoting would still be blasphemy. (The teacups had rattled like forewarning of an earthquake. John Benchley had smiled at him. Mrs Malone hadn't.) Or perhaps she dislikes him because she knows that John and he secretly drink sherry. Or perhaps her hat is an evil-detector and she had always instinctively known about him then what has now been proven to be true, that he was destined for bad things.
‘Ah'm sorry tae bother you, Mrs Malone,’ he says. ‘But is John in?’
Her face wrinkles even more, from prune to raisin. Maybe those who have become wicked betray themselves in every subsequent act. She has found him out.
‘The minister,’ she says, and pauses. He understands the meaning of the pause: thou shalt not take thy minister's name in vain, which means familiarly. He has disrespected the sanctum. He has entered the mosque with his shoes on. Thou shalt honour the man with his collar back to front. ‘The minister is at a funeral.’
(Why do you want to interrupt the solemn duties of the great ones with your trivia?)
‘Any idea when he'll be back?’
‘He's a busy man. Mrs MacPherson's not very well. There's an elders’ meeting. He has things to do.'
The door shuts in his face. He imagines more bolts being shot home than the door of the Bastille had. He stares at the door for some time, absorbing its symbolic significance. He is despised and rejected of men. He turns away, disappointed and relieved.
For what could he have said to John anyway?
(‘Hullo, John. Good to see you. What it is. I've just been riding the wife of a friend and I thought we might have a chat about it. Any chance of a sherry?’)
It is hopeless. There is nobody he can tell about this. There is nothing to do but pace out the dimensions of his loneliness. He decides he will commit suicide.
The woods of Bringan take his mood into theirs. He has stopped on the Swinging Bridge and watched the waters writhe below, brown as beer and frothing white across the rocks. Recent rains have deepened the river but not enough. These aren't the waters of a grand oblivion and an abiding mystery thereafter, the insoluble grief of family and friends for the drowned. These are the waters of an embarrassing unconsciousness, maybe a fractured skull and three weeks in the hospital and the puzzled disgruntlement of his family (‘Whit the hell were ye tryin’ to do?' his father asks) and the need to pretend that you fell while trying to walk the parapet of the bridge.
Now he has passed on into the trees. This place is mythic for him. Bringan is where his boyhood came to commune with its dreams of a secret greatness only he knew about. This was his Chiron, a wild and living entity that taught him impossible possibilities and the strange, dark power of imaginings, that contradicted, every time he came, the banality of his daily life, that cured him, with leaves, of petty wounds the town had given him. Here his short trousers had become hose and kilt and buckskin chaps. Here his woollen jersey had been medalled jacket with braided epaulets and toga and doublet. Here his hair had grown piratically long in an hour. Here, still hiding out among the trees, like outlaws waiting for their time to come when he would finally identify with them, were Robin Hood and Wat Tyler and Robert the Bruce and William Wallace. Their ghostly presences shame him now.
For what has he become? A seedy adulterer, a betrayer of himself and everyone else. He senses his heroes, who were him in hiding, dead all around him in the dark places of Bringan, starved from the lack of the provisions he should have brought them. This place is haunted for him today, and not just by famous names or the possible versions of himself he had imagined. He is suddenly awed by stumbling upon memories much more immediate and real, as tangible as ancestral bones which embarrass his smallness by the size of them. These are his father's woods, his grandfather's woods.
He cups his hands and drinks from Moses' Well, a hidden spring his father showed to him, and the bad taste of him in his mouth has turned pure water sour. The thread of luminous liquid still runs as clear but when he breaks it with his flesh it is defiled. He spits it out.
The Soldier's Hole, the deep pool where Michael taught him to swim, is polluted by his presence. He feels that, if he stripped and dived into it now, his body would turn it to sludge.
He has made his decision. He will go home and collect the book Maddie Fitzpatrick gave him at the party. He will return it to her. He will say a final goodbye, no matter what desperate appeals she may make. Nothing will make him so much as pause in his purpose.
‘DON'T EVEN IMAGINE IT,’ his mother says.
The voice, coming from another room, sounds eerily preoccupied. It does not know that he is here, standing in the hallway outside the closed door of the living-room. He has in his hand the book he intends to return to Maddie Fitzpatrick. He has slipped into the house silently, using the key that hangs from a string inside the letter-box, wishing to talk to no one in his mood of grand despair. He has gone upstairs and found the book and tiptoed back down when the voice arrests him with his hand on the Yale lock.
‘Ah'm tellin’ you. Don't even imagine it.'
He takes his hand off the lock and stands very still in the lobby.
‘Oh, Ah think Ah can imagine it, Betsy,’ his father says.
‘Can ye? Well, Ah can't.’
He is transfixed. He knows himself to be eavesdropping and he doesn't like to be doing that. But he is compelled. This is news of something he doesn't know, he senses. News of what? He waits. A child's voice shouting in the street outside comes and goes without meaning, hieroglyphic as a bird blown past on the wind. The sunshine refracted through the frosted glass at the top of the front door steeps the hallway in soft light. The hanging coats and jackets seem instinct with an unknown future, waiting to be worn.
‘Why not?’ his father says.
‘Because it isn't what's goin’ to happen.'
‘You know that, do ye?’
‘Yes. Ah do.’
‘But it was good enough for Michael an’ Allison.'
‘Who says it was? It's what happened to them. That's all. Does that mean it was good enough?’
‘They seem to be doin’ alright.'
‘Aye. Ah think so. It wid seem so. Maybe they have what they were wantin’. But it's not what Tom wants.'
The realisation that they are talking about him gives him a strange sensation. He feels himself existing outside himself, as if he were somehow an event, happening in ways he doesn't know and can't control. He is aware of the solidity of his life in a way he hadn't imagined.
‘Ye know that, do ye?’
‘Don't you?’ his mother asks.
‘Ye're sure it's no’ what you want? Tryin' to make him somethin' he's not. For yer own sake.'
‘Ye know me better than that. Conn. If ye don't, who have Ah been sleepin’ wi' all these years?'
‘He seems happy enough in the brickwork. An’ it's money comin' in.'
‘Happy? Were you happy in the pits? Are you happy now? An’ Ah'm not tryin' to make him what Ah want. Just tae give him the chance tae decide what he wants. If he's a happy dustbin man, Ah'll be happy. But he'll be a dustbin man wi' vision. An' nothing'll curtail that, if Ah can help it.'
‘An’ the rest of us can plod on.'
‘What he does'll no’ detract from the rest of us. Just be an extension of it.'
He realises that his father has been suggesting they forget about his going to university and his mother is insisting that he will go. He feels strangely neutral about the question. He has thought about staying on at the brickwork. He has thought about taking up the place he has been offered at university. Both seem equally acceptable or unacceptable.
What intrigues him now, what holds him there - listening in the lobby wit
h open-mouthed concentration - is the significance of the choice, not just for him. He realises, awesomely, that he is part of the quarrel that is the shared experience of his parents.
‘Yer own father would have wanted him to go,’ his mother says. ‘He wanted you to go on at school.’
The silence is a man swallowing the bitter taste of his own past. Tam suddenly feels great compassion for his father. He remembers with sudden poignancy a moment he once shared with him. He thinks about himself there.
‘THE COLLEGE,’ his father says. ‘You could go there.’
It is bright sunlight. His father is sitting on the step at the back door. He is dressed in old trousers, collarless shirt. Tam is standing maybe six feet away from him, between two of the clothes-poles on the back green. The clothes-poles are goalposts, for Tam is practising to be a goalkeeper. He has decided that he has discovered what he is going to be when he grows up. He will keep goal for Scotland's football team. He is nine.
He has just solemnly informed his father of his final decision about his future and the training that will lead to the fulfilment of the ambition has already begun. His father has unearthed the size-five leather stuffed with paper, which has recently replaced the paper balls bound with string Tam has been using for years to play football with him in the house. His father has been throwing the ball to Tam, varying the angles cunningly to test his reflexes. Tam has been diving in all directions with outrageous abandon, no matter how close the thrown ball comes to him.
He is sweating heavily since, in spite of the heat, he is wearing his yellow polo-necked sweater knitted by his Auntie Bella, for that is what goalkeepers wear. His short trousers are standing in for football pants. His black sandshoes give him a supernatural agility. His actions are compulsive as a dance to music no one else can hear. Indians did rain dances. His is a dance to the future, a series of twists and turns and mysterious acrobatic leaps in his improvised costume which will oblige to happen what he wants to happen. Self-absorbed as a dervish, he spins in the sunshine, whirling beyond Dawson Street. The back green becomes Hampden Park. The random noises of the day become the roar of the crowd. Somewhere in a certain future a radio commentator's voice is talking with urgent reverence.
‘And Docherty makes another amazing save . . . I can't believe this . . . The crowd is going wild . . . Just listen to them . . . And again . . . And again . . . Now he is diving to the left . . . This is the most amazing goalkeeper I have ever seen . . .’
‘Ye don't fancy being a centre forward?’ his father is saying. ‘They score the goals.’
Tam rejects the idea with an impatient shake of the head. It isn't just that he is too fiercely concentrated on the task of saving Scotland to deviate into speech. It is that one wrong ingredient may spoil the charm. What you wish for you must wish for utterly. They score the goals? ‘Not against this amazing young goalkeeper, Docherty, they don't,’ the commentator says.
‘The college,’ his father talks on while he patiently throws the ball to Tam and receives it back from him in a rhythm that becomes hypnotic, freezing a casual episode inexplicably into a shining moment that will stay with him.
NOW STANDING IN THE LOBBY ILLUMINED BY ANOTHER DAY, he feels the moment still turn dazzlingly in his mind, faceted and polished by memory, a diamond hewn from sunlight, an unbreakable image in which both of them are held, the man and the boy inextricably together.
‘Ah made a choice,’ his father says in the living-room, ‘an’ because of it Ah'm who Ah am. Ah'm sorry if Ah've disappointed ye. Maybe ye should've married an office worker. Or an insurance man. Would ye like me to go to night school?'
Tam hears the cofdness of the distance that is between his parents. The living-room might as well be the Antarctic Ocean and them floating past on separate ice-floes. In this small house where they have all been living in such close proximity there has been such loneliness. How can such a small space encompass such isolation?
He would like to interrupt his parents and tell them that their positions have a false finality. For that day, playing with the ball, his father had spoken of university as if it were the promised land. He had made Tam see a wonderful place of great learning and fascinating conversations and sports. Out of his own ignorance of such places, he had created a blueprint for an ideal college. Where had that vision come from? Perhaps, it now seems to Tam, his father was not so much talking to him as dreaming an alternative life for himself. And in that dream his son had seen the possibility of his own life. It was his father who had first made Tam think, so long ago, of going to university.
Why had he done that? Why does he speak against it now? Was he then, in a moment of generous self-abnegation, inviting his son to conspire against him? I won't always be able to encourage such hope in you. Take this brief gift of openness and use it against me when you must. For I will close and it will be up to you to subvert my hopelessness with the hope I am giving you now.
Hearing his father try to close his future. Tam feels not the meanness of the present but the generosity of the past when his father sat that day dreaming, clumsily, like Plato on a step. In his personal hopelessness was multiplied the kindness of his giving of hope to Tam, a hope he could never share in. Tam sees the essence of his relationship with his father in that day.
‘Conn,’ his mother says in the living-room. ‘Ye're as good a man as Ah know. Ah'm not askin’ ye tae be different. But ye're less than ye can be. An' Ah am, too. Maybe that's what happens tae everybody. But we don't need deliberately tae arrange for it to happen to our weans.'
Tam remembers coming home from the dancing once to find his mother, the housework done, sitting by the fire reading the Rubaiyat. It wasn't the likeliest phenomenon where they came from. He is suddenly flooded with an awareness of the horizons his mother can still see, no matter how enclosed her circumstances. It seems to him a remarkable achievement. At the same time he understands his father's determined inhabiting of where he is. He feels love for both of them. The feeling makes him all the more certain that he must no longer be involved with Maddie.
HE STOOD IN FRONT OF MADDIE'S HOUSE. It wasn't her house now.
They had painted the woodwork of the windows yellow. A green Rover stood in the driveway. A young woman came out of the house in a blue sweater and black ski-pants. She was retrieving what looked like a small, leather weekend bag from the boot. She was attractive but not as attractive as her self-regarding manner suggested and not as attractive as Maddie. Maybe if she had been Garbo, she might just have got away with it. The haughtiness of her head suggested she was balancing something there. Maybe it was her bank account. With her hand on the raised boot, about to close it, she stared at the strange man standing across the street. She stared for maybe twenty seconds. She wanted him to know that she was staring. She closed the boot with vehemence and went back inside.
Don't phone the police, he thought. He was just a ghost passing through her life as she was a ghost passing through his. She wasn't to know that she was living in an important part of his past and him a compulsive revenant.
He hadn't intended to come here. When Michael's funeral was over he had gone back to his mother's with Marion and Allison and some people and they had talked for a while and he had left them there and come out for a walk. The walk had led him here without his being aware of it until the house ambushed him.
But he couldn't cross the street and go in as he had on that day of mental turmoil. What was it he really thought he was doing then? What had been his true intention? He would never know. He was returning the book, of course. But how necessary was that? She had invited him back anyway. And he also had in his inside pocket the poem he had written for her the day before. It wasn't exactly a demand that they part. He hated what he had done and he wanted not to do it again. He loved what he had done and he had an overwhelming desire to do it again. His memory, like a zoom lens, followed his past self across the road and up the driveway towards the door which, it had seemed to him, would open on to a be
wildering confusion of possibilities.
‘HHHHMMMMMMM,’ she says. She has told him he must lie absolutely still, do nothing, say nothing. He must leave everything to her.
‘Nice cock.’
You can say words like that? And the building doesn't fall about your ears? You don't have to lock them away in some dark drawer and bring them out only when you're alone at night?
She is saying them to him. The ectoplasmic woman whose features have always been blurred and shifting, for whom he has been writing and rewriting the script for years, trying to get it excitingly right, is here, solid with flesh. The hair that has graduated from blonde to brown to red to blonde has become vividly black, veined subtly with silver, experiential treasure. The wild and tumbling mass of darkness is more exciting than anything his imagination has ever conjured up.
The eyes that have been blue and brown and green are staring at him and they are olive now with weird shards of light in them that seem to find passing reflections of many other colours. Tunnelled with lust, they draw him into their disorientating dark.
The flesh is so sheer in close-up. The brown hollows of her slightly hunched shoulders seem as distant as valleys. The mole on her hanging right breast is monumental. The raised curve of her arse is part of a continent of body he feels he could spend the rest of his life exploring. He feels as if maybe he's seeing for the first time in his life. His eyes have found a true perspective. She defines his horizons.
And the mouth - curling with delicious wickedness, sometimes smiling abstractedly as if sharing a secret with another darker self, sometimes open and poised as if waiting for instructions only some distant part of her can hear, its lips writhing sensuously - ferociously soft, those muscular petals. And what it says.
‘Nice cock.’
Her stiffened protruding tongue traces the length of it from where it is rooted in the shrub of hair to the pink, cleft tip of it.
‘Sweet cock,’ she says
She swings her breasts against it, letting their weight push it sideways until she raises herself and it springs erect again. She takes it gently in her hand.
The Kiln Page 27
