Docherty

by William McIlvanney

The stillness of the street made every sound audible. The man had turned to glance down at Tam and then resumed looking in the window. His indifference squared with the fact that he had chosen a window that faced out onto a street that wasn’t empty. He seemed to believe that inches gave immunity.

  ‘Here, sur,’ Tam said. The mode of address was ominous, habitual with him when he was roused. It was the formality of a duelling challenge.

  The big man turned slowly to face him, luxuriating in the action.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Here, sur. Whit d’ye mean tae be et wi’ this?’

  ‘I’m lookin’ in this winda’ here.’ The accent was Irish.

  ‘That’s a maiden lady in there, sur. An auld budy. Ye’ll be frichtenin’ her tae daith wi’ this cairry-oan!’ Tam remained a good yard away, not wishing to provoke the big man. His voice was perfectly pleasant. ‘Noo, wid ye no’ be better tae go oan tae where ye’re goin’.’

  He looked Tam over as if measuring him for a coffin.

  ‘Bogger off, little man. Before I fockin’ fall on yese.’

  Something happened instantly to the situation which was almost audible, like a safety catch unclicking.

  ‘Noo, noo, sur,’ Tam said. ‘These is sweary-words ye’re usin’. That’s no’ nice.’

  The big man turned fully round now. He understood. An agreement had been reached. He looked down at the ground, shook his head, lunged suddenly at Tam. Tam ran backwards. As the impetus of the other man’s rush made him stoop, so that his arms dropped, finding nothing solid, Tam came back in at full throttle, and hit him twice, flush on the cheek-bones, right hand and then left. The big man went back a couple of yards and stopped dead. He made a sound that suggested contempt and flicked one hand across his face, dismissing the blows like cobwebs.

  Watching him, Tam had a revelation about what he was up against. If this man hit him, he would be having an early night. Before the Irishman could set himself, Tam had moved right into him, hooking ceaselessly. His fists bounced the man’s head off each other as if they had it on a string. It took an awful long time, and his arms were tiring, before he felt that infinitesimal relaxation, the thaw of muscles that precedes the mind’s unmooring from consciousness.

  He didn’t stop. The man had subsided against the wall, blood spattering from his nose and cuts on his face, and still Tam punched, following his head as it slithered to the ground, rabid with anger. As the man fell, Tam kicked him once in the stomach and his leg was flailing back a second time when Jenny’s voice screamed, ‘Tam! Fur Goad’s sake, stoap! Stoap!’

  Tam’s body froze. The men were round him, about five of them. They moved him back, one of them saying, That’s enough, Tam. There’s nae need fur that. That’ll dae ye noo.’

  ‘D’you want the same?’ Tam was too high to recognise who it was he spoke to. He snarled at a shape. ‘Ya fat-ersed bastard! Whit were you daein’? Hidin’ in a bloody coarner?’

  ‘Ye were oot before we could make a move,’ somebody else said.

  ‘Jesus. He was at it fur meenits,’ Tam said. ‘Beggin’ fur boather. Whit were yese waitin’ fur? Invitation cairds? There were enough o’ ye tae move the bloke oan withoot a blow bein’ struck. Ya useless bastards!’ He looked down at the man, whose head rested on a pen in the road, while two of the men examined him. ‘Hoo is he?’

  The big man groaned and came to, as if offering an answer.

  ‘He’ll be a’ richt, Tam,’ somebody said.

  ‘Who is he?’ Tam asked.

  ‘He’s leevin’ in the Model.’ The Model Lodging House was situated at the opposite end of Soulis Street from High Street. It catered for a mixed migrant clientele, mainly labourers. ‘He was in Mitchell’s earlier oan. Threatenin’ tae dae terrible things tae onybody that goat in his road. Then he went fur a walk. Must’ve came back.’

  ‘Oan ye go in noo, Tam. We’ll take ‘im doon tae the Model.’

  The big man had been helped to his feet, and they cleeked him off down Soulis Street. Tam came back in. Miss Gilfillan hadn’t emerged and he thought it best to let her recover on her own.

  The house was a strange place. The family was reduced to a stunned solemnity. The scene outside, seeming a triumph for Tam in its occurrence, had, in the retrospect of a few moments, negatived to an x-ray plate in which they saw the sinister shadows formed at the centre of Tam’s self. He was aware of it, avoided their eyes, like a patient who didn’t want to know the worst.

  ‘My Goad, Tam,’ Jenny said. ‘Ah thocht ye hud killed ‘im.’

  Tam sat down suddenly, giving himself up at once to despair, and rested his head in his hands.

  ‘Ah think Ah wantit tae,’ he said. ‘Oh Jesus. Why did Ah hiv tae hit ‘im sa hard? It was a’ bye a while before Ah stoaped. Ah widny let go. Ah widny let go.’

  Jenny and Tam were only conscious of each other in the room.

  ‘Naebudy can jist turn it oan and aff like a spicket,’ she consoled him.

  ‘But kickin’ ‘im. Ah’ve never put the boot in onybody in ma life before. Whit’s happened tae me?’

  He was asking Jenny, looking up at her and then down at the knuckles of his hands, bruised and beginning to swell.

  ‘Ah better see tae yer hauns.’ said Jenny, who had faith in the power of small actions to fend off big fears. The regimen of her household was a daily communion by which the amorphous forces controlling their lives were broken down into bread.

  ‘Wid ye throw a pail o’ waiter ootside? There’s a lot o’ bluid.’ The request was anxious and forlorn, as if the guilt he felt would be erased with the blood.

  ‘Ah’ll dae that as weel,’ Jenny said. Her competence came up between them and what had happened. Tam sat docilely in her shelter. ‘Kathleen. Pit thae twa boays tae bed.’

  Kathleen ushered Angus and Conn through to the room. Angus lay talking about it for a time, paring everything that had happened to those moments of unleashed ferocity when his father had become a demolition machine. The rest appeared to be irrelevant to him. But Conn was quiet. Long after Angus was asleep and the whole house was in darkness, Conn lay awake. The night seemed menacing now. The scents of the park invaded the house like fumes. And for hours, it appeared, he could hear the voices of his mother and father. His mother patient, her indistinguishable words stroking his own thoughts to quietness. His father’s voice mournful and subdued, persistent, pleading with the darkness.

  Next morning, on his way out to school, he crossed to the pen outside Miss Gilfillan’s window. His mother had made a good job of the cleaning. But unnoticed in the darkness, splashes of blood had remained. They showed now, several of them – big and dark, some of them more than a yard apart. As if a giant had been coughing blood.

  10

  Miss Gilfillan felt the need for some gesture of thanks. She had spoken to Mr Docherty, waylaying him as he came home from the pit one day.

  ‘Mr Docherty. I should like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks for your kindness in coming to my aid the other evening. I hope I didn’t cause you too much trouble. And I just want you to know that your efforts on my behalf were greatly appreciated.’

  She didn’t say the words so much as she unveiled them. Her rehearsals had paid off. Tam’s expression hid behind the coaldust. He didn’t find it easy to understand that these decorous words were the epilogue to the mêlée of fists and swear-words that had flared up on the cobblestones. He wondered how much she had heard. Tadger Daly, standing at his elbow, was frankly gaping. The expectant silence was as baffling to Tam as RSVP would have been.

  ‘Aye. Well. Fine. Then. Eh . . . That’s very decent of ye, Miss Gilfillan.’

  ‘Not at all. When that dreadful – man -’ she settled on the word as a convention she wasn’t at all sure was applicable in this case – ‘did that, I thought my hour had come.’

  Tam was ransacking his courtliness for a suitable response.

  ‘I think I can fully appreciate what a lady like yourself must have went through.�
��

  They were both smiling now, communication established.

  ‘Here,’ Tadger suddenly interjected. ‘You two’s guid. D’ye mind if Ah sell tickets?’

  Miss Gilfillan flicked her smile at Tadger like a knife, and fled at a genteel pace, while Tadger took Tam’s reprimand with wicked enjoyment.

  She was pleased with the exchange. It was so seldom that she spoke to anyone. Sometimes she didn’t come out of the house for days, just eating frugally of what she had, preserving a musty stillness where memories grew like toadstools. At first, people had tended to come to the door and check that she was all right. But she had discouraged them. Now they contented themselves with secret reassurances, the open curtains, the single flower renewing itself in the window, and most of all the table set methodically for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with fine china and elaborate arrays of cutlery which she couldn’t possibly be needing. She was never seen eating, but as long as the sequence of settings for meals was maintained, she must be all right.

  Her conversation with Mr Docherty sustained her for a day or two. Sensitised by loneliness, she thought back on her few words as if they constituted an occasion, became almost heady on them, the way an anchorite’s palate might be ravished by wine-dregs. As satisfaction waned, it left the appetite for more. For the first time in years, she wanted to talk with someone other than the voices in her head. She chose Conn.

  She thought about it carefully before she approached him. The more she considered it, the more it appealed. He was young enough for her not to be afraid of him, as she was of most things in High Street. She would be repaying Mr Docherty in a practical way for his kindness, for she could teach Conn things he could never otherwise know about – the graces of life. From the time that she had heard his first cries on the night of his birth, she had felt specially towards him, had found out his name, singled him out from the other children in High Street, watched him play. She was already a secret godmother to him. By the time she decided, Conn had been adopted without his knowing it.

  Her method had a Mary Slessor flavour to it. With the paralysing conviction of someone whose mind had closed a long time ago and in another place, wherever she looked she saw only the shapes of her own atrophied prejudice. High Street was to her just the dregs of humanity, riff-raff, scum. Even living among them, she had remained a tourist, clinging to her past like a passport. Now that she was trying to effect a rapprochement for the first time with one of them, the only role she could condescend to play was that of enlightener. She was going to do some missionary work in darkest High Street. Just as natives are lured with coloured beads, so Conn was to be enticed with sweets.

  ‘Just a moment, please. Conn. Isn’t it? You see, I know your name. Do you know mine?

  ‘Yes, miss. You’re Miss Gilfillan, miss.’

  Emerging quickly from the shadow of the entry, she had seemed out of place in the sunlight. Conn wondered if he was going to get another penny from her.

  ‘I want you to do something for me. Here’s a note with some things I want you to get from Mrs Daly’s shop. I’ve put two shillings inside it. Will you do that for me?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Gilfillan.’

  When he got back to her house, the door was very slightly ajar. He knocked as if he was afraid he might be heard. Her voice was a funny sound, like singing when the person doesn’t know the tune: ‘Is that Conn? Come in. But wipe your feet on the mat first. Very, very thoroughly.’ He made it six wipes for each foot. ‘Now close the door.’ He did it reluctantly. He was inside Miss Gilfillan’s house.

  He felt lost at first. It was dark and there seemed to be furniture and brass and pictures and ornaments everywhere. On the other side of the room, like someone lost in a maze, sat Miss Gilfillan. She smiled.

  ‘Aha. A gentleman to see me.’

  Conn looked over his shoulder.

  ‘I mean you, young man. Wouldn’t you like to be a gentleman?’ Conn nodded placatively. ‘Well, you will be. I can teach you.’

  She signalled him towards her. Among the things she had asked him to buy were sweets.

  ‘These are for you,’ she said. ‘But I shall keep them here. And every time you come, you can have one or two. Would that be nice?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She gave him a couple now, and he didn’t like them. They were chocolate on the outside, jelly-soft inside, mushy to the teeth the way he imagined snails would be. He liked hard sweets. He wondered why she hadn’t let him choose for himself, if they were to be for him.

  The small gift and what it meant to him epitomised their times together.

  He came quite often after that. Always before he left, she would arrange the next time for him to come. Sometimes she would have him go an errand for her. The house became familiar to him in separate pieces: the photographs on the sideboard that made their own little frozen landscape, a man with a big moustache appearing in so many of them that he conveyed to Conn the godlike ability of being in many places at once; the small table where the brass ornaments were always shining and always in exactly the same positions; the huge grandfather clock that stood forever with its hands just after twelve – noon or midnight? But the place remained in total a stranger to him, perhaps because he had to leave so much of himself at the door.

  Mud on one of her frayed and fading carpets sent her into a frenzy which would have been adequate to the first signs of the plague. She conquered human nature by ignoring it, forbidding it to affront her. Coming into her room, Conn always felt lumbered with himself, a nose that would sniff at awkward times, hands like cumbersome deformities. He didn’t even breathe freely in the stuffy atmosphere, as if deep breaths were indecent. Once, awesomely, he farted. It pluffed insidiously into the cushion where he sat, and became a smell – rank as original sin. Miss Gilfillan didn’t seem to notice but Conn sat surrounded by his own unworthiness.

  Miss Gilfillan had noticed. But since such things didn’t really exist, she could have no reaction. Like all Conn’s lapses into himself, it merely seemed to render him temporarily invisible to her. There were times when she left him sitting or standing unnoticed for minutes, like a toy she had forgotten about. Their occasions together were strangely without development. What they achieved wasn’t so much a relationship as the demonstration of the absence of one.

  It was hopeless from the beginning. Conn was at first frightened by the ghost ceremonies Miss Gilfillan practised, whispering and moving eerily around her musty room, creating a charmed circle in which she tried to resurrect the past. She initiated him into the uses of cutlery with a ritual solemnity that suggested they were the only weapons that could reduce life to order and sense. She took tea with him as if it were a sacrament. Eventually the word ‘daft’ kept coming into his head like a bad angel. When she finally neglected to tell him to come back, neither regretted it, since they had never met each other.

  But all those moments stayed engraved on Conn’s memory, weird hieroglyphics which experience would eventually translate into some kind of sense. Looking back on it much later, he had the feeling of having been in a mausoleum.

  With his departure, Miss Gilfillan sealed the door on herself. In a sense, his visits had served their purpose. His indifference to all her kindness was somehow related in her head to the scrawny, frightened boy her father had dismissed from his bakery. Conn’s ingratitude absolved her father.

  11

  This is Jack, mither.’

  The name had for Jenny the impact of a secret formula, contained as much potency as ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ or ‘Rapunzel’. It introduced change into their lives. Normally, a girl would only bring one young man into her parents’ house. If by the end of her courting days it had extended to two, she had been flighty, and to have her married was probably a relief. Three suggested infiltration from Gomorrah.

  ‘Hullo, Jack,’ Jenny said to Kathleen’s future husband. ‘Sit yerself doon, son.’

  ‘Hullo, Mrs Docherty. Thanks.’ Conscious of scrutiny, Jack Farrell felt awk
ward, and slightly belligerent because of his awkwardness. He hung his bonnet on his knee and resented immediately the stare of the boy sitting by the window, nursing a neatly bandaged hand – that would be Conn.

  ‘Yer feyther’ll be in soon, Kathleen,’ Jenny said. ‘He’s et the stables in Soulis Street. Wullie Manson’s horse again. Takin’ canary-fits. Jumpin’ a’ ower the place. Yer feyther’s helpin’ tae calm it doon.’ That was a code message. Since Kathleen knew all this, she realised her mother was suggesting that Jack should still be here when her father got back.

  ‘Jack and me’s supposed tae be gaun fur a walk, mither.’

  ‘He’ll no’ be long. Whit wid ye make o’ this boay, Jack? He wis doon at the stables wi’ his feyther. An’ he wantit tae see if ferrets bite. He kens the answer noo, onywey. Ah doot Wullie Manson doesny feed thae ferrets, Conn. We had tae clean it and bandage it fur fear of infection, didn’t we, eh?’

  ‘The dirt that’s aye oan his hauns, ye should’ve cleaned the ferret. It’s probably goat hydrophobia by noo.’ It was a self-conscious remark, Kathleen being smart for Jack’s benefit.

  ‘Ah’ve heard a lot aboot Conn,’ Jack offered.

  There was a pause during which Kathleen and Jack used Conn as an escape from their embarrassment, looking at him as if he were a picture.

  ‘Well. Ah’ll just get ready, Jack,’ Kathleen said.

  ‘Fine, Kath.’

  The shortened form of the name made a momentary window for Jenny, through which she saw their inaccessible intimacy, a strange area encroaching on their lives, into which Kathleen was withdrawing more and more, and where she would eventually live almost entirely. The experience of it was a wistful instant, happiness shaking hands with sadness. As she ironed a semmet, she had a sense of big things happening almost unnoticed round the corner of each trivial task, powerful laws moving in strange conjunction with small accidents, like a tumbril passing a house in which children play.

  ‘Well, oan ye go then,’ she said to Kathleen, who was still standing indecisively, vaguely wanting to act as interpreter for her mother’s first impressions. ‘Ah think Jack’ll survive five meenits withoot ye.’