Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Ye mean tae say ye hivny noticed? Whaur the hell dae you leeve, Dougie?’

  Some of the dust of that brief, explosive moment settled on Conn for good.

  2

  High Street was the capital of Conn’s childhood and boyhood. The rest of Graithnock was just the provinces. High Street, both as a terrain and as a population, was special. Everyone whom circumstances had herded into its hundred-or-so yards had failed in the same way. It was a penal colony for those who had committed poverty, a vice which was usually hereditary.

  High Street and its continuations of Soulis Street and Fore Street made a straight line to the Cross at the centre of town. Together, they had at one time been the main street of the town, a residential district for the rich. But when this predominance was taken over by the roughly parallel line of Portland Street and King Street, the older area, like a tract of land gone marshy, had been abandoned to the poor. Among the less impressive flora and fauna that were now to be found in it, there remained the occasional ghostly reminder of a more grandiose past, like a monument among weeds. One of these was the name people gave to one of the buildings in the Foregate, as Fore Street was more commonly called. The building was known as Millerton Close and was said to have been the town house of Lord Millerton, who had a large estate near Graithnock. During Conn’s early years Millerton Close contained at various times in its musty recesses an alcoholic, a family with rickets, and a consumptive mother of six.

  In that harsh climate people developed certain characteristics common to them all. Where so little was owned, sharing became a precautionary reflex. The only security they could have was one another. Most things were borrowable, from a copper for the gas to a black suit for funerals.

  Wives looked in on one another without ceremony. The men gathered compulsively each night at the street corner, became variously a pitch-and-toss school, a subdued male-voice choir, a parliament without powers. Especially in summer, they would stand long, till the sky had raged and gloomed to ash above their heads. The children, when not at school, were seldom in the house during the day, but could be found indiscriminately deployed among backcourts and doorways and corners of the nearby park, as if they were communal property. The authority of the nearest adult was understood to apply to them all. Conn learned early that when any adult asked him to go an errand, his parents’ authority was backing the request, even in the case of old Mrs Molloy (secretly called ‘chibby heid’ by the boys because of the strange lumps that covered her scalp), who invariably encouraged his compliance with the words: ‘Heh, you wi’ the big heid an’ nothin’ in it.’

  Underpinning the apparent anarchy of their social lives and establishing an order was a code of conduct complex enough to baffle the most perceptive outsider yet tacitly understood by even the youngest citizens of High Street from the time that they started to think. One of its first principles was tolerance. Being in a context where circumstances blew up the ordinary trials of life into terrible hazards and seemed to have them arranged with the unexpectedness and ingenuity of a commando assault course for living, people learned to accept the crack-ups it led to. Behind every other trivial occurrence lay a stress-point upon which poverty or despair or a crushing sense of inferiority had played for years. Consequently, frustrations tended to explode in most of them from time to time.

  Sometimes men would disintegrate spectacularly, beating a wife unconscious one pellucid summer evening or going on the batter with cheap whisky for a fortnight. Such bouts of failure were not approved of, but they also never earned a permanent contempt. They were too real for that.

  High Street was very strong on rights. Though these might not be easily discernible to an outsider, they were very real in the life of the place, formed an invisible network of barriers and rights-of-way. It was morality by reflex to some extent, motivated often by not making the terms of an already difficult life impossible. Yet there was as well behind it a deep if muffled sense of what it meant to be a man, a realisation that there were areas which were only your own, and that if these were violated formidable forces might be invoked.

  Adultery, for example, was a rare phenomenon. This was partly because the public nature of private lives and the sheer drudgery of coping with large families legislated against the contrivance of such situations. Overwork is a great provoker of chastity. But it was mainly because such a step took you on to a dark and slippery ledge, and out of earshot of the predictable. Whereas in more polite society such an action might mean the dissection of a private pain in a public place, in High Street, where a divorce court seemed as distant as the court of the Emperor must have seemed from a fortress on the Great Wall, the direction was reversed. The situation became more private, was injected to ferment in one man’s skull. People averted their eyes, awaiting an outcome. The commonest one was what they called with chilling simplicity ‘a kicking’. And they would have found it hard to blame a man who forgot to stop. It was simply that they understood men as bundles of conflicting and frequently immeasurable impulses, usually imperfectly contained by a fraying sense of purpose. Whoever slipped the knot would have to abide the hurricane.

  For the rest, where the offence was venial, the violence was formal. Two men would go up a Sunday morning road to a handy field. Shirts off, they would punch the affair to a settlement. But such manual litigation was seldom. Relationships were so well charted through countless small daily contacts and endless conversations that there had evolved an instinctive hierarchy ranging from those with whom most remarks or attitudes were permissible to those it would be unwise to provoke. Near the top of it was Tam Docherty.

  Tam was very much liked and they would have liked him more if they had known what more in him there was to like. But he was largely in shadow. Forbidding and indistinct attitudes relating to the Church and working-class life and conditions of labour obscured the clear contours of his nature, like clouds of vaguely thunderous potential. At the corner, talk of the priesthood seemed to aggravate the phlegm in his throat, so that the parabolas of spittle became more frequent, but he would say little. His name wasn’t a pleasant sound to more than one pit manager in the district. He lived very much in a personal climate of squalls of sudden temper, spells of infectious pleasure that couldn’t be forecast, brief winters of brooding isolation that were apparently unrelated to events around him.

  Conn himself sensed this even in his early years. He learned to live comfortably among the mad swoops of affection which left him spinning in his father’s hands above a ring of laughing faces, the still silences, the instant angers which his mother was expert at earthing. The anger was the more frightening for being usually incomprehensible.

  But for Conn, High Street was a second mother who had secret ways of dispelling every worry. He learned the repeated moods of the place like a favourite story, savouring, dumb with delight, the parts he loved the best: the Saturday morning muster of groups of children, when the big ones were there, romantic as convicts in their freedom from school, fabulous with unimaginable experience, making involved plans that put him in an ecstasy of fear, while the week-end stretched before them like a continent; the time just before tea when the men the grown-ups called ‘the heavy squad’ came down from the Townholme forge and their boots made sparks on the cobblestones; when the men stood at the corner and they might box him, or his father, hunkered against the wall, would make of his legs a place where Conn could crouch and nothing could touch him; the street giving itself up to darkness, a mother leaning out of her tenement window, lassoing her son by his name in the thickening dusk.

  At the top of High Street you could walk down Menford Lane, a street that died, like progress, in a factory. To its crevices clung the smell of wool and dye and human sweat, a fungus imparting dark dreams of manhood. Machines gnashed behind black windows, chewing shouts and laughter. A woman’s song drowned. After its shadows, the street bruised your eyes with its brightness. The place they called The Gates was good. You went between houses, under an arch, alo
ng a causeway, through a gate. It was all grass behind the buildings where the washing was, green hummocks dropping towards the river. Soldiers bivouacked under dripping blankets. Pirates parleyed in the wash-house. Mothers came, following their own shouts.

  Crouching, as if you were looking for something on the cobbles, you could see into Mitchell’s pub. The door was always open. In the dimness men moved, miles away. They dipped their mouths in tumblers. Voices curled like smoke out into the street. The words lingered strangely before they disappeared, exciting and unremembered. Sometimes a man coming out would stop and laugh and look into his pockets for a penny. The window of Mrs Daly’s shop was low enough to let you look in, your tongue wandering in imagination through boxes that made neat segments of colour like toy orchards. Inside she moved about in a gentle fuss of rustling clothes and sibiliant words, chapping nuggets of vinegar toffee on to a scrap of paper, counting out Jap Desserts or aniseed balls, or handing over a lucky tattie into which you bit expectantly.

  Opposite the Meal Market, a huge tenement at the corner of Union Street, was the opening to the park. It was down a dip, so that you had to run and, crossing the bridge in a group, you became a herd of horses. Below you, running along the backyards of High Street, the river was visible for a hundred yards of Amazonian variety. At the top beyond the mill it churned down over the Black Rocks, then planed into a pool where men and boys swam in summer. The water was black – over twenty feet deep, they said. Dripping water on the bank, they told stories of dogs down there. Flowing on, the river took blue bilge from the mill and whorled it into fantastic, vanishing shapes, broke into a thousand freshets on the rocks, before, just as it passed under the bridge, stretching tight as a skin and sheeting over a three-foot drop to a sapple of bubbles, from which in season a trout would sometimes volley into the air. Then it slung itself under the railway arch and away. The bridge led into the Kay Park, a bowl of grass with a bandstand as its centre.

  In one of the yards in Soulis Street they made wheels. When you stood in it, you breathed wood-pollen, like being inside a tree-trunk. On the days when you felt brave, you could take a friend and creep into the stables under the railway arch that marked the beginning of the Foregate. Behind each door dusk was stored in huge warm slabs, veined delicately with sun-streaks. Straw fissled, inventing shapes in the darkness. A snuffle was a horse, invisibly inhabiting its breathing. A hoof threshed, and you ran. And always around were the people coming and going, a forest of faces.

  Home was safety. The Dochertys were lucky in having two rooms, unlike most people in the street. There was the living-room with its two set-in beds, in one of which Conn slept, while his mother and father had the other. The kitchen which led from it was minute. The small room at the back was where Mick and Angus slept. Kathleen used the bed that folded into the press behind the outside door. The fire was a permanence and the area around it was centre-stage, where all the best things happened, where his father told him stories, where the others sat at night talking while he pretended to be asleep, where he could watch his father’s body bulge from the zinc bath as the water turned black. The sheer regularity with which the same things happened every day in this house was his greatest comfort.

  It was as well that he had the underlying stability of such a routine, for his relationships with his family were mainly confusing. Only his mother and Mick were always themselves. His mother’s lap was the best place he knew, and usually available, and even when she was angry it simply meant that a bonus of affection was coming up. Mick was patience on legs. He would let Conn wrestle him, punch him, threaten him, and his only retaliation was laughter.

  But his father was several men, not all of them nice. Kathleen frequently treated Conn’s presence like a bit of accidental lumber and often tried to sweep him out of doors. Angus was the worst. Playing with him was for Conn like trying to work a machine he didn’t understand. Every so often his fist would come out like a piston, and Conn couldn’t tell which lever he had pulled this time. Whenever he was around Angus, Conn kept in trim for flight.

  Yet even these uncertainties became a kind of fixture. And the first few years of Conn’s life taught him that things were unchangeable. All there could be was his father coming in from the pit, his mother roughing his hair as she put him to bed. Time was High Street, Angus bullying, Mick laughing, Kathleen bustling.

  Then he had to go to school. It astonished him that the simple expression of his unwillingness to go didn’t banish the necessity. Out of the rubble of his old security he picked some weird new perceptions: that Kathleen’s chest was getting bumpy, that Mick could touch the top of the door if he jumped, that Angus could lift a full pail of water off the ground. His having to go to school was just part of the general strangeness.

  So he went. Very soon he accepted it. It didn’t occur to him that Angus was the only other one of the family who attended the same school at the end of the street. It didn’t occur to him that Mick and Kathleen were going somewhere else.

  3

  Not long after he started attending High Street School, Conn came in from playing one evening, resignedly expecting to be sent to bed. But two things about the room threw routine out of joint: his father, who had come home late from the pit and wasn’t long washed, stood still stripped to the waist and heating a clean shirt against the fire which faceted his body into planes of brightness; Grandpa Docherty sat beside the fire, smoking a blackened clay pipe. Conn liked his Grandpa. He was brown and thin, with enormous hands and a gentle voice that didn’t belong here. When Conn’s family visited his house, he would talk almost exclusively to Conn and, if his father wasn’t there, would let Conn play with the strange, worn beads he carried in his jacket pocket.

  Now he winked an invitation to Conn and stood him between his legs. He just sat there staring at Conn with a kind of mournful affection the boy couldn’t understand. The hugeness of his hands obscured the pipe-bowl completely, so that he seemed to be grasping fire. Conn writhed uncomfortably, sensing the unfamiliarity of the room. It was as if it was no longer one place but sectored into different areas. His father was taking too long to heat his shirt. His mother was completely absorbed in folding the washing in her basket. His grandfather watched him hypnotically. Kathleen sat on the stool, staring interestedly at her grandfather.

  Conn was glad when his mother said, ‘Oan ye go oot, son. An’ play a wee while longer. Kathleen, you watch the wean.’ Kathleen tutted but took him out, his grandfather releasing him reluctantly.

  With the children outside, Jenny Docherty put aside her basket of washing, pushed a loosened bang of hair behind her ear, and said brightly, ‘Well. Ah want a word wi’ Aggie. Ah’ll see ye before ye go.’

  ‘Right, Jenny,’ Old Conn said.

  ‘Right, nothin!’ Tam’s voice stopped her. ‘Ye’ll wait, Jen. This is your hoose. Y’ve a richt tae hear whit’s said in it.’

  ‘It’s aw richt, Tam.’

  ‘Of coorse it is. So jist content yerself.’

  Conn’s feet clattered in the entry below them. Then the room filled slowly with silence. Jenny went back to her washing, teasing and folding the clothes repetitively and needlessly. It soothed her, faced as she was with the futility of what was about to happen. This at least was something which offered an immediate return, the comfort and warmth of her family.

  It was still light enough outside but the small windows acted as a filter, adjusting the day marginally at both ends, so that dawn was delayed and darkness, as now, was anticipated. The room was already drowning in dusk.

  ‘The nichts is fairly drawin’ in,’ Old Conn said.

  ‘Aye. Winter’s no’ faur awa.’

  Jenny felt sorry for him, but it was a pity caged in the resentment she felt against the atmosphere he had created. She watched Tam tuck his shirt into his trousers and hoped that he wasn’t going to be upset by the conversation that was ahead. Ladling out his enormous plate of soup and setting it on the table by the window, she felt a helpless love for him
. He had been drinking. She knew that was why he had been late. It hadn’t been much, but he did it so seldom that even a glass of beer showed. Each eye glowed with an almost imperceptible fuse of temper.

  She had learned to recognise these times and understood them. At first she had tried to oppose them but not now. They were infrequent and, since he disliked them as much as she did, all you could do was minister to them like a nurse until the pain passed. For pain was what lay at the centre of them. Tam despised the way drink was used in High Street as a means of escaping from yourself. There were occasions when he enjoyed having a drink, and that was all right. But there were others, which both of them recognised, when the drink was a toast to his own despair. Of these he was always ashamed.

  Tacitly both understood that there was in him a kind of malignancy, a small hard growth of bitterness which lay dormant most of the time but would spasmodically be activated by an accumulation of imperceptible irritations. When that irreducible nub of frustration discharged its pus, it created in him an allergy to his own life. The result was anger against whatever was nearest to him at the moment. It wouldn’t last for very long but, while it did, it was like being locked in with a thunderstorm. His rage might flash out on anything, one of the children, herself, an inanimate object. They still had in the house a clock which his fist had petrified at ten past nine. It lay in a drawer as a bit of family history, an antique of anger. It had become a secret joke between them. Sometimes when his anger was swelling, she would say quietly, ‘Aye, it’ll soon be ten past nine, Tam.’ And he would give himself up to self-conscious laughter.

  Another salve she used was to say, canting her head to have him in profile, ‘My! Ye’re gettin’ to look awfu’ like Gibby Molloy.’ Old Mrs Molloy’s only son, who lived alone with her, two entries along from them, was the local exemplar of pointless fury. Every once in a while on a Saturday night he drank himself into a state of revolutionary ardour. Coming home, he would methodically set to work – to a stream of background noises which included an obscene roster of his personal enemies, repetitive denunciations of ‘them’ and ‘youse’, and spontaneous slogans of vaguely proletarian bias – battering down the door of the outside toilet. Every Sunday morning after such a night, he was out early, quietly and efficiently replacing the curtain on that small tabernacle of public decency.