Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  Anyone seeing him on these occasions found him at his most benign and pleasant. He never alluded to the previous night but went about his work with pleasant forbearance, as if he was repairing damage from a very localised storm. Nobody tried to analyse what dark neurosis related Gibby periodically to his toilet in alternate conflict and reconciliation. It was a release which bothered nobody, since the toilet was out of commission for a few hours of darkness once in the space of several months. It became an accepted social phenomenon, an occasional talking-point. Someone might say, ‘He’s surely gettin’ mair regular, is he no’? Wis it no’ jist at the end o’ last year the last time?’ One of the communal jokes was that Gibby was working at the fulfilment of a secret ambition to be a maintainer of toilet doors.

  By categorising Tam’s anger with Gibby’s, Jenny could sometimes negate it. But the effectiveness of her kidding was dependent on her knowing the times when it was an impertinence. She was afraid that this might be one. As she watched him sit at the table, his hair still damp from the washing, his hands tearing pieces of bread and dunking them in his soup, she tried to console herself with the thought that if he was entering one of his black phases, he would make up for it later. For afterwards his mood tended to be as expansive as a meadow, and it was like when she had first known him. Placatively, she turned to Old Conn.

  ‘Wid ye like a plate yerself?’

  ‘Nah. Thank ye, Jenny. But Ah’m no’ long bye wi’ mine.’

  She went back to folding her clothes, abstracting herself from their presence. Old Conn communed with his pipe. Tam ate. The only sign that everything was not normal was that the paper, which Tam usually mouthed over painfully during his meal, lay unread on the table.

  ‘Weel, feyther,’ Tam said. ‘Whit is it?’

  ‘Oh, Ah wis jist walkin’, an’ Ah thocht Ah’d look in.’

  ‘Aye. Jist the same wey as ye hivny done fur a year or twa.’

  ‘Ah’m no’ as young as Ah used tae be, Tam. Ah don’t get aboot as much.’

  ‘Naebudy’s complainin’.’

  The terms of their exchange were stated. Tam was refusing to meet him anyhow except frontally. Old Conn was habitually a slow talker. Every sentence tended to be the harvest of long thought. He punctuated the silences with words. His inflections, the ghost of slower days in Connemara, made even argument a wistful air, against which his son’s guttural Lallans was a jarring discord.

  ‘Ye’re a sair hert tae yer mither, son,’ Conn said, still wanting to seduce a response from him rather than demand it. ‘She’s that worried.’

  ‘Ah see ma mither every week. Ah ken hoo she feels.’

  ‘Do ye? Aboot the wee one?’

  ‘Aye. Ah thocht that’s whit it wis. Because he’s no’ et the Catholic schil.’

  ‘Why is he no’, Tam? Angus wis bad enough. Noo that’s two o’ them at Protestant schil. Why d’ye send them there?’

  ‘Because it’s nearer.’

  ‘Oh, Tam!’ The old man gave the words a profound sadness and at the same time a terrible finality, as if they were an excommunication. He seemed surprised that Tam, with such blasphemy scarcely cool on his lips, could still rise from the table, tear a spill from his newspaper, cross to the fire and light a cigarette.

  As far as there had been a conversation, it was finished. Old Conn had come up against a familiar opacity that to him was fathomless and frightening. Whatever thoughts he had once had were long since stultified into attitudes, and these were all he could offer a situation which hurt him brutally. He retreated behind them now with a kind of glazed automatism. These formalised exchanges were an area of earned articulacy between them, being a frequently experienced conclusion to their attempts to meet each other on this issue. While Old Conn read his son the sermon of his wayward self, Tam, tying on his good boots across the fire from him, gave him the ritual responses.

  ‘Whit’s happened to ye? Sometimes Ah think Ah should never hiv left Ireland.’

  ‘Naw. That’s richt. Then we could all’ve starved in a state o’ grace.’

  ‘Where d’ye get yer thochts? Yer blasphemous thochts.’

  They grow in pits. Ye can howk them oot wi’ the coal.’

  ‘Nae wonder ye’ve had trouble gettin’ jobs. The way ye talk. Ye’ve never known yer place.’

  ‘Ah’ve still tae find it. In the meantime, ma place is wherever Ah happen tae be.’

  ‘Look roon ye! Ye’ve a hoose an’ a family an’ a guid enough joab. Ye don’t know hoo lucky ye are. When Ah came over here

  ‘Ah ken, Ah ken. Ye chapped the door o’ Kerr the builder. An’ he let ye sleep in a shed fur a fortnicht. An’ ye worked two weeks fur jist the price o’ yer meals. Did he chain ye up at nichts, feyther?’

  ‘Tam!’ Jenny’s voice as she turned from her washing surprised them both, the shock it expressed providing an objective measurement of the distance between them.

  Tam stood up and when he spoke it was an indirect plea to his father for a truce.

  ‘Luk, feyther. We’ve had a’ this afore. Ah ken ye had it rough. An’ Ah’m sorry. So there it is. But that’s nae excuse fur kiddin’ oan this is comfort. It’s mebbe better, but it’s no’ guid.’

  ‘Ye’re too taken up wi’ the body. Instead o’ the soul.’

  ‘So are a few folk, feyther. Ah don’t see mony priests wi’ malnutrition.’

  ‘Whit aboot the wee fella? He’s got a soul too, ye know.’

  ‘Then let Goad fin’ it.’

  Old Conn retracted from him, as if not sure how closely God could localise his thunderbolts. He shook his head in disbelief. Tam put his white silk scarf round his neck, collected his jacket and cap, wanting to avoid further abrasion.

  ‘Ah’m awa doon tae the corner, Jen. Ah’ll no’ be long. Dae ye want tae hing oan, feyther? Or wull Ah walk ye doon?’

  His father said nothing. He stared at the fire, Jetting Tam and Jenny look at each other across a silence. His eyes looked watery in the firelight. Having sounded the depth of his bafflement, he looked at Jenny, but spoke at Tam.

  ‘Ye never learned talk like that fae oor family,’ he said softly, deliberately.

  Tam’s voice hardly ruffled the stillness: ‘Whit does that mean?’

  ‘It’s a’ richt, Tam,’ Jenny said quietly. ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Whit does that mean?’ Tam shouted.

  The old man looked back at the fire.

  ‘Ah mean whit Ah mean,’ he said.

  ‘Naw!’ Tam was bending over him. That’s the last thing you mean. You mean whit Father Rankin tells ye tae mean. See that.’ He pointed at Conn’s head. There’s nothin’ in there that belongs tae you. They confiscated yer bloody brains at birth. An’ stuffed their stinkin’ catechism in their place. Auld man. Whit gi’es you the richt tae think bad o’ ma wife? Because she’s Protestant. Damn yer stupidity! Look!’ Old Conn’s right hand was in his jacket pocket, and Tam yanked roughly at his arm until the hand emerged, the rosary beads he held in it spilling out roughly, like entrails. Tam took them from him. ‘Bloody toays! Ye’re still playin’ wi’ yer bloody toays!’

  Tam and his father stared helplessly at each other across the rosary as if it was a frontier. On the one side was Old Conn’s unassailable acceptance of his life. On the other lay Tam’s personal experience, a wilderness of raw ideas and stunted dreams, a desperate landscape which this instant set before him like a map. He read in it his own despair, understood it, not rationally, but more deeply than that, because he had learned it in his blood. He saw the bleak terrain of his own life stretching before him without stint. The one oasis was his family. The rest was work that never blossomed into fulfilment, thought that was never irrigated with meaning. The absence of certitude made a moor of the future, and inarticulacy lay over everything like a blight. He felt a grotesqueness in his efforts to impose himself on the forces he was up against, the pettiness of his fights with pit managers, the ludicrousness of a family that had two religions. He had perceptions that enabled
him to feel the pain, but not the words to make it work for him. He could only endure.

  In this moment the rosary seemed to divide him from a mysterious contentment, perhaps brought over by his father from the rural Ireland he had never seen, born as he had been among the factories and workshops of Graithnock. Beyond that line was a safe place inhabited by his father. But it wasn’t his, and he couldn’t live there honestly. He realised with sudden hurt that the volume of his voice hadn’t meant anger or conviction, but simply uncertainty. Gently he gave back the rosary, and it was as if he was returning to his father every gift which Old Conn had ever given him.

  ‘Ach, feyther,’ he said. His hand touched his father’s shoulder awkwardly. ‘It’s a’ wan. It disny maitter.’

  He cleared his throat and made an attempt to smile at Jenny. Fumbling for a formula, he said to his father, ‘Hoo’s ma mither keepin’ onywey?’ And then as their alienation from each other swallowed up the question – ‘My Christ!’

  He turned at once and was going out when Kathleen brought Conn back in, informing her mother, ‘Mick an’ Angus are jist comin’, mammy.’

  Their father bumped against them awkwardly. And for a second they were all floundering strangely in the gloom. Then Tam touched Conn’s head in his favourite gesture of affection, and went out, leaving on Conn’s scalp a message he couldn’t understand and which his father couldn’t express.

  4

  Tam didn’t go immediately to the corner that night. Keeping to the opposite side of the street, he cut off down the Twelve Steps, a dark alley, the steepness of which was periodically eased by short clusters of steps that occurred like locks in a canal. It led down to the riverside. He sat on the dyke and watched the water.

  He was waiting for what had happened in the house to catch up with him. What he had said to his father had been not so much a deliberate expression of his thoughts as a stumbling discovery of them, as much a revelation to himself as it was to anybody else. The confrontation had brought from him secrets he hadn’t openly acknowledged in his own mind, attitudes he hadn’t consciously formulated, but which had become a part of him because of the climate of his life, contracted like a virus from the slow talk of his friends, embedded like the pellets of black powder from the pit-blasts in his face. Now he had declared these attitudes in words and he had to measure himself against them.

  The step of doing so wasn’t an easy one to take. His mother and father had done their work well. Woven into the whole texture of his boyhood were formative memories of the crucifix on the wall, family pilgrimages to nine o’clock Mass, the catechism, priests whose casual opinions became proverbial wisdom for his parents. His three sisters had made good marriages. The four brothers he would have had if they had lived had all been baptised Catholic. He had always been told to pray for them. Now it seemed like a profanation of their infant corpses to abandon the faith which had buried them.

  When he had married Jenny, it was simply because he had wanted to marry her, and the feeling was hot enough to make fuel of anything that got in its way. He had felt no conscious antagonism towards the Church. And since their marriage Jenny had never tried to influence him. When Kathleen and Mick went to the Catholic school, she accepted it. When Angus and Conn attended High Street school, it was his own decision, one made brusquely, as if he didn’t want to consider its implications. ‘It’s nearer’ was all he said.

  Now at least one implication of that decision was forming slowly in his mind: perhaps he wasn’t a Catholic. He felt cold without the word. It had happed his thoughts as long as he could remember. Whatever misery, anger, bitterness, despair had come to him, it had still been vaguely containable in the folds of that loose word, to be thawed to a sort of comfort. Even now he wasn’t sure that the word didn’t belong to him. He merely suspected that it might not, as if the deciding of it wasn’t up to him. He could not make the intellectual choice. He could only sense that he somehow had to be himself, whatever that might be, and it might not be a Catholic. What he felt profoundly was the uncertainty of himself, simply that he had to meet life without protection.

  The thing in him as he sat on the cold stone of the dyke, with the river flecking at his feet, wasn’t a thought but an emotion. He had buried a part of himself. So he sat accepting the void, without having any good words with which to decorate it, without a reassuring thought in which to enshrine the past. It was as if above him his own cold star had come out. Ill-equipped as he was, he would follow it. Rising, he felt suddenly the complexity of the night around come over him like a blackout. He needed company.

  The corner wasn’t so much a place as an institution. It had its own traditions and standing orders. Small groups formed round different topics of conversation by a kind of spontaneous cohesion. In the course of an evening, a casual activity, like sparring or conundrums, would isolate certain people in it as if it was a games-room. But a precise observation or a new anecdote would be relayed from knot to knot like an announcement. The various groups remained complementary to a central unit. Solidarity was what it was all about. A typical expression of it had been the night a stranger with a Glasgow accent came to the corner.

  He had been drinking, not enough to make him unsteady, just enough to activate his malice and crystallise it in his eyes. There would be perhaps two dozen men at the corner, lined unevenly along the wall of the Meal Market.

  The stranger stopped at the first one and said, ‘Good evenin’, bastard.’

  Although his voice was casual, the reaction, even among those who couldn’t have caught what he actually said, was instantaneous, like an electric charge passing along them. Twenty-odd men stiffened.

  Somebody muttered, ‘Naw. Naw, sir,’ almost pleadingly.

  The stranger walked slowly along the line, mixing his insults with the measured deliberation of someone trying to brew a riot. The silence of the others was a debate. He was a big man. From his jacket pocket a bottle protruded. He might be too drunk to know what he was saying.

  ‘Fine,’ a voice said. ‘That’s fine! On ye go hame noo.’

  ‘Ah’ll fight any one of ye first. In a fair fight. Jessies! A bunch o’Jessies!’

  The main problem was a technical one. His malice was indiscriminate and they couldn’t all answer it. The stranger drew lots for them.

  The Pope’s a mairrit man,’ he said.

  He had reached the end of the line.

  ‘A meenit, chappie!’ a voice said.

  It was Tadger Daly, father of ten. A champion had been chosen. The big man turned. Tadger was walking towards him.

  ‘That’s a nasty thing tae say, chappie. Noo . . .’

  The big man’s right hand was easing the bottle out of his pocket. From about four feet away, Tadger took off. In mid-air his head looped so that it hit the big man’s nose, which opened sickeningly (‘Like the Red Sea,’ somebody later suggested). When the big man lay on the ground, there was a moment in which the physical ugliness of what had happened almost became dominant, until someone said matter-of-factly, That’s whit ye call doin’ penance, big man.’

  And another remarked, ‘You were the richt man fur the job, Tadger. As the Pope’s auldest boy, ye were the natural choice.’

  The incident was in perspective. Water and a cloth were brought from a nearby house. Tadger helped in cleaning up the big man. Then a couple of the men conducted him, wet cloth still held against his nose, to the end of the street, off the premises, as it were, and faced him towards the railway station. The whole thing had the quality of a communal action, and had been conducted without rancour.

  That night became part of the history of the corner. Any memorable incidents, remarks or anecdotes would be frequently gone over in the nights immediately following their occurrence, like informal minutes of previous meetings. Later, they would recur less often, having been absorbed into the unofficial history of their lives, the text of which was disseminated in fragments among them. Any man who stood at the corner had invisibly about him a complex of
past events like familiar furniture, the images of previous men like portraits. The corner was club-room, mess-deck, mead-hall. It was where a man went to be himself among his friends.

  5

  But tonight it was quiet. A dozen or so were douring the evening out. Tam joined Buff Thompson and Gibby Molloy, who were standing in silence together.

  ‘Aye, Tam,’ Gibby said.

  Buff nodded and winked.

  ‘A clear nicht,’ Tam said.

  And each stood letting his own thoughts feed on him.

  Their silence was the infinity where three parallel despairs converged. Over the past few years Buff’s whole nature had contracted. The gradual recession of his physical powers had taken with it his defensive reflex of wry humour, and left him stranded on the hard, unrelieved futility of his own life. With only a few years ahead of him, he was clenched round a frail sense of purpose that was diminishing to nothing. Gibby’s natural habitat was moroseness. Living alone with his mother, held in a net of trivia, his life consisted of occasional spasms of wildness contained in a long inertia.

  For Tam the moment was a funeral service for a former self. Tam Docherty, Catholic, seemed finally dead. He couldn’t resist going back to memories of his boyhood, like holding a mirror to the corpse’s mouth. But no strong doubts came to cloud his thought. There was in his head a clarity, a cold emptiness. The talk of the others at the corner seemed less related to him than the sound of the river had.

  He still hadn’t spoken by the time Dougie McMillan came up. Dougie wasted no time.