Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  Mick disengaged his arm in order to drop his cigarette butt on the grass and grind it with his foot. He stood up, put on his cap, and helped May to her feet. As they brushed the grass from each other, it was as if they weren’t alone. The war was like an onlooker and, self-conscious of the pleasant ordinariness of what they were doing, they felt they should be doing more. They suddenly embraced fiercely, hurting themselves with the impact, and clung.

  ‘Let’s get mairrit noo, Mick,’ May gasped.

  ‘Before Ah go away?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Where wid ye leeve?’

  ‘Ah don’t know.’

  ‘If only we could.’

  ‘Why can we no’?’

  ‘It isny poassible.’

  Mick had given the right response. If he had said anything else, neither of them would have known how to go on from there. But at the moment of saying these things, they believed in their own sincerity, identified with the spurious intensity events were imparting to them. Infected by that delusive sense of stature history sometimes causes, as if private lives could be enlarged by public events, they seemed more than just themselves. They strove to assume virtues of constancy and self-awareness, which until now their relationship had been too innocent, too pure to need. Unconscious of their own pathos, they half-believed, standing there in a clumsy embrace, that they had somehow become more important. The grass soughed romantically, the trees mourned, and three or four birds foundered around them in the wind like personal omens.

  Then, turning to walk, Mick tripped on a tree-root, was hit on the bridge of the nose by a low branch, fell on his knees, lost his cap among the long grass. He crouched there, looking up at her as his eyes watered. There was a moment of disbelief before they both started to laugh. Mick collapsed on to his back. May finished leaning against the tree, moaning for mercy.

  As they walked along the road, laughter came on them from time to time in small ambushes. They were themselves again. Passing a derelict cottage which they had often seen, Mick had an inspiration. Lifting May, he carried her through the ruined doorway.

  ‘It’s a surprise,’ he said. ‘Ah’ve bocht this fur us.’

  He set her down among the grass of the earthen floor, littered with rubbish, a burst and rusted basin, a weathered boot, the remains of a fire, and in one corner excrement. The windows had no frames. About a third of the roof was gone, admitting sky.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Whit dae ye think o’ it?’

  ‘It’s in a good area.’

  ‘Of coorse, it still needs one or two things done tae it. Ah thocht we’d maybe get a door, fur example. An’ cut the grass. But there’s advantages.’ He lifted the basin. ‘Ye’ve yer kitchen utensils. Plenty o’ fresh air. An inside toilet.’

  She was giggling and he put his arm round her, dropping the basin. They had forgotten what was going to happen, too full of themselves to avoid for long transforming everything into a private pleasure, secreting optimism.

  ‘Whit Ah really like,’ he said, ‘is no’ needin’ tae go oot the hoose tae dig the gairden.’

  4

  Conn became more important to them. Kathleen was married, Mick was going to be a soldier, Angus was becoming more and more separate. The war made everything seem different, temporary. Only Conn remained the same, the ignorance of his youth an exemption, his life obedient to an older rhythm that nothing seemed able to interrupt. They informed him with that adult nostalgia for their own childhood which tends to make the childhood of others mythic. The small pulse of his activities became the centre of the family, like the heart of a hibernating animal. The same questions and answers were litanised into their evening conversations. ‘Whit’s he been up tae noo?’ ‘Ye’ll no’ believe whit he did.’ ‘If Ah could tell ye that, Ah’d take up fortune-tellin’.’ ‘He’s an awfu’ boay.’ ‘Whaur’s the wee yin?’

  Everywhere, it seemed. He still had his duties: dauding the pit-clothes against the wall outside, bringing up water, collecting worms for Angus’s fishing, running errands. But he performed them with such practised speed that he seemed hardly to be engaged in them at all. They created the illusion of attendance behind which he was missing for hours at a time. Where he found to go remained mysterious. He travelled like a puffball. Sometimes he came surprisingly to their attention in a posture so exotic that they felt they had unknowingly been harbouring a changeling. So Jenny stumbled on him one rainy day in the wash-house. He was reclining on an upturned tub, smoking two Woodbines simultaneously (since time was short) and tutoring another boy in swear words. In that half-light slicked with rain and sinuous with smoke, Jenny felt as if she had come upon one of the side-rooms of hell. Conn was cuffed and hounded supperless to bed, although later, with the connivance of his mother, Angus took him through some food, whispering and glancing over his shoulder with an operatic display of secrecy.

  Another time he was discovered hanging about fifteen feet up from a piece of machinery in Lawson’s mill. News of that found his family incapable of assimilating it all at once into the ordinariness of what they were doing themselves. Tam was at his paper, Angus putting more oil in his pit-flask, and Jenny elbowed on the sill when wee Sammy Haggerty was fired out of Menford Lane as if it had been a cannon. He spun dizzily at the top of High Street before turning to face the Foregate and running, his feet treating the cobbles like coals. Jenny said later she felt at once that he was headed towards her. She wasn’t in doubt for long. From about fifty yards away, wee Sammy was shouting, ‘Mrs Docherty! Mrs Docherty!’ He stopped below her. His eyes were like penny-bowls. Trying to speak, he swallowed his news in mouthfuls.

  ‘In the name o’ Goad, calm yersel’, son,’ Jenny said. ‘Whit is it?’

  ‘It’s Conn, Mrs Docherty. It’s Conn. Up in the air.’

  His words carried in through the open window and Tam and Angus crowded there for details of the portent. But Sammy wasn’t about to supply them. When Jenny asked him what he meant, he danced crazily, whining, ‘In the mull. In the mull. Oh come quick, Mr Docherty,’ seeing Tam’s face.

  By the time the three of them were in the street, the few men at the corner had come over to Sammy and were trying to decipher what had happened. The only fact that emerged clearly was that Conn was in Lawson’s mill. The small knot of people started unevenly up High Street, Tam in the lead, running full tilt. One of the men had the foresight to stop in at the house of old McGarrity, the watchman, so that he arrived with the keys to unlock the main gate as Tam was climbing over it. After several desperate arguments of keys with locks, they reached where the flat-machines were kept. As the door was opened, somebody deliberately got in front of Jenny, in case what was there wasn’t for her to see. The others craned through the door behind Tam.

  Sammy’s message took on meaning. Conn was suspended miraculously in mid-air, a rod of metal having caught itself in his jersey, which was gathered above him and pulled up to his armpits. Below him were the teeth of a machine against which the force of his broken fall would have gutted him. Over his head was the jagged hole he had made in the glass roof. Spreadeagled on the glass, like someone on thin ice, Rab Ritchie was edging towards the hole with a piece of slender rope in one hand.

  Conn said, ‘Hullo, feyther.’

  Two ladders, a lot of advice and a visit to the infirmary later, Conn was home. His only injuries were a glass-splinter in his bum and an abrasion on his spine. Facts were slowly assembled to show the logical machinery of the fantastic. The boys had been playing at tig. To make it more exciting they had established as boundary-lines the roof of the mill, with all its outcrops. The rest of them were barefoot but Conn still had on his boots. When some of them moved onto the glass-covered section, Conn’s involvement in the game had caused him to forget one significant circumstance, and he followed. The rope had been Conn’s idea. He had shouted up at the ring of incredulous faces to throw down a rope and he would climb up it. Jenny shuddered at the thought of what would have happened if they hadn’t arrived when
they did. Tam said, ‘That wee boay Ritchie. He wisny absent when they gave oot guts. Ye could pit a room-an-kitchen in his hert.’ Jenny said, ‘His brains seem tae take up less room.’ ‘A bit like yerself, Conn, eh?’ Tam suggested. That bit o’ gless must just’ve missed yer brainbox.’

  But incidents as arresting as that were becoming rare. Conn tended more and more to happen offstage. His favourite place was in the Kay Park, a den in a copse of trees beside the lake. There he met his friends. Having sloughed his private fantasies of Bringan, he moved on to almost daily sessions of vaunting talk among the trees when they all engaged in a kind of group hypnosis, hallucinating manhood. Screened with leaves, they kept vigil for the future with the dedication of medieval knights. Their profanities were relentless. They smoked with dutiful persistence, ignoring the watering of one another’s eyes. Grass was chewed, leaves dismantled vein by vein, twigs skinned to willow wishbones. With the gravity of a committee specially appointed for that purpose, they worked on the definitive concept of a man.

  The final version was bound to be eclectic, being a compound of all their experiences. There were certain obvious basics that none of them could doubt. To be a man it was necessary to swear without noticing, to spit long distances now and again, and to smoke. All had already passed these initial tests. Beyond that, areas of specialisation naturally emerged.

  Cammy, Dougie McMillan’s youngest boy, was the expert on poaching. He always had with him some fragment of the craft like an identity card – a white scut, a wire snare, the marks of a ferret on his hand. He knew how to cover one end of a burrow before releasing the ferret into the other so that it would chew the rabbit’s backside till it broke. He knew that guddling was the technique of tickling a fish out of the water with your bare hands. He had seen a whippet catch a hare. He could recognise which birds’ eggs were worth eating. His father had promised soon to sew a special pocket inside his jacket. For him his clearest image of the future was that pocket, out of which, like a magician, his manhood would draw endlessly game, excitement, amazing skill, numberless days among dark woods, bright rivers, fields whose principal crop was rabbit.

  Rab Ritchie was waiting to be a soldier, probably a general, though he knew this wasn’t a job you could just step into. It might take years. Meanwhile, he prepared himself. His memory was an arsenal of every known gun and explosive. He could recite the names of regiments like an epic poem. He throve on dares. Once when some older boys stole a posh boy’s jacket, symbol of effeteness, and threw it with great difficulty over a hornet’s nest in a tree, Rab had volunteered to retrieve it. He passed through the Kay Park like a motorised cloud, jumping fully clothed into the lake. Hanging over his life in the manner of a tragic destiny was the likelihood that the war would be over before he was of age.

  Conn’s province related mainly to fighting and girls. He had, in fact, fought but a few times, and wished they had been fewer. Nevertheless, he had so far always been successful. It wasn’t so much that he had won as that he had stayed around until the other boy decided he had lost. Also, he was called Docherty, and in High Street that was enough. The authority Tam imparted to the name, so that it had the force of a prohibitive notice, had been enlarged by recent stories of the strength shown by Angus in the pits. Conn’s reputation for knowing about girls was only slightly less justified than that for knowing how to fight. It was founded primarily on the fact that the year before, when the writing of love-notes had become a seasonal preoccupation in his class, like collecting chestnuts, he had received four declarations of profound affection in one day. Since then he had done no more than conduct the usual tentative experiments with girls much in the same spirit as he had examined stationary motor-cars and, once, having been allowed into the mill with Mick’s forgotten piece, the workings of a flat-machine. But it didn’t matter. His name was made. When he let it be known that a girl could only have a baby every nine months, the others saw it had to be true.

  The only non-specialist among them was Sammy Haggerty, whose chief contribution was a talent for awe. Almost everything astounded Sammy. Each dawn seemed to take him by surprise. ‘Away ye go!’ was his habitual response, breathed with the reverence of a prayer upon the myriad forms of an unfathomable universe. It was invoked in acknowledgement of the incredible truths the others were possessed of, that women’s breasts were used for holding milk, rabbits could change the colour of their fur in winter, a gun could kill a man half-a-mile away. It also served as a measure of his astonishment when his own researches were declared erroneous, such as his contention that sleeping with your knees up gave you curly hair. It caused waves, he had thought, in the bloodstream.

  In relation to the others, each rather jealous of his area of expertise, Sammy’s naïveté was invaluable. It guaranteed at least one heartening response to any new discovery and gave to the others’ knowledge a hint of vastness. With Sammy’s help, their meetings remained essentially harmonious. Though each might secretly know that his own sphere was the most important forcing-ground for manhood, there was a loosely held agreement that the only complete man was a soldier who spent his leaves poaching, fighting and giving a girl a baby every nine months.

  Other boys sometimes visited their smoking-room among the trees but the permanent membership remained at four. From there they made their sorties, armed in an identity that only themselves were aware of. They spat over bridges, noted pubs for future reference, appraised oblivious women, stood talking rough at corners, cased the entire town. They were a casual fifth-column. Everybody else thought they were just four boys. Nobody knew who they really were. At times they only had to look at one another to laugh, and the laughter was in code. Pacing out their property, they strolled. It seemed that they could feel their muscles grow.

  Yet the surrender of the streets to them was illusory. They lounged in sights that they had never known were set. The town was a carefully organised trap. The first to fall was Cammy. His father having obtained him exemption from school, he went to work first, in a factory near the bottom of the town. It was a place the four of them had often walked past, tempted towards its cavernous entrance, unaware that it could close. Once the three of them thought they caught his face at a window, but he didn’t wave. Later, meeting one of them, he would grudge hullo, as if they had betrayed him, or he them. His silence left a root in each of the others.

  And Conn, the night after Mick had left with Danny Hawkins to join the HLI and live for the time being with an aunt of Danny’s in Glasgow, came home to his big brother’s absence. As it had been when Kathleen was married, Conn’s sense of loss was physically felt, as actual as an illness. He knew the end of something. Mick’s smile, which had for years been to Conn like a night-light, had gone out. His kidding, his almost invariable patience, his reduction of any fear to something ordinary were gone. The war was real. The reality of things was hard to deal with.

  Mick had carved a boat especially for Conn before he left. Conn kept it beside his bed to look at at nights. To have more influence with God, he gave up smoking.

  5

  ‘Unions!’ Angus said. That’s just a wey o’ gettin’ strong folk tae work fur wake yins.’

  Tam’s answer was a roll-call of abused men and bitter places until Angus was stubbornly at bay before a regiment of the oppressed past.

  ‘If Ah wis Auld Conn,’ Angus said, ‘Ah’d take a quiet walk intae the Black Rocks wi’ the heavy bits oan. Whit’s the use o’ just draggin’ yerself aboot day efter day?’

  Jenny said that was his grandfather he was talking about and she’d thank him to call him that and it was his grandfather’s house as much as it was anybody else’s and blood was thicker than water and death wasn’t great company and he would be old himself some day, though not if his father heard him at that, and if he did it wasn’t Old Conn would finish in the Black Rocks.

  ‘The beardies ye had in that jeelly jaur?’ Angus said. ‘Ah used them fur bait. Don’t be daft! Whit did ye want tae keep them fur? Ye’ve a bool in
yer heid.’

  Conn’s fist could only make contact with Angus’s elbows and forearms and the pain of it was salted by seeing Angus’s face crumpled with laughter, as if he was being tickled.

  ‘Ah want tae make masel’ that strong,’ Angus said, ‘that naebody can stoap me daein’ whit Ah want tae dae’.

  The young men he stood among kept their enmity quiet. Their motive was partly caution, perhaps, but to a greater degree and much more importantly it was also a reflex of consideration, like not referring to the deformity of a friend. For they all saw Angus’s excess of egotism in the wider context of his generosity, his capacity for enjoyment that could be contagious, his even temper. In any case, they were all familiar with those fascist impulses which pass erratically through the emergent young like electric charges, because they were all subject to them. It was just that Angus was more subject than most, not surprisingly, since his strength stirred in him like a continent still to be colonised. Who could tell the extent of it?

  Angus had to explore. His exploration tended to create border disputes with everybody around him. He said things that encroached painfully on the long established attitudes of others, he was cavalier about accepted principles of behaviour in the family, he provoked retaliation, and he seemed thoroughly to enjoy the exercise. Only at one boundary-line did his attitudes pass from being self-sufficient manoeuvres into something more serious, and that was between himself and his father. In the pit, Angus didn’t work so much with his father as in competition with him. While Tam cut the coal Angus loaded and drew the hutches. It was always his endeavour to achieve such speed that Tam would be unable to keep him supplied with coal. At home he had a habit of saying provocative things in Tam’s presence, waiting for a reaction. It was comparatively seldom that Tam resorted to invoking his absolute authority in his own house. Usually, he tried to confront Angus on his terms. He sensed that it was something deeper than could be contained by protocol, bull versus bull. Consequently, while he might oppose Angus, he respected that part of him which was already impatient for manhood. It was Jenny who would say every so often, ‘Are ye no’ goin’ tae dae something aboot that boay? He’ll be gettin’ too big for your bits, never mind his.’ Tam had once replied, The day he can take them aff me, he can wear them.’