Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  In his mind a word rose for no reason like a fish and fell: ‘mysterious’. He lost it but the ripples it left went on, touching everything around him. The placings of the others, casual yet related, fascinated him inexplicably. His father had hung his jacket on a fence-stake. Shirt-sleeved, dappled with leaf-shadows, he was a stranger, holding a child Conn seemed to be seeing for the first time. Through the glass Kathleen smiled and stroked her forehead with two fingers. What she and his mother might be saying was unimaginable to him. His grandfather was a riddle – an ancient man sitting in sunlight on a broken bench with two cloth-wrapped dumplings beside him. Conn looked at the bag he had carried, lying against the fence, and wondered where it had come from, who had made it. Because Angus’s hair was ruffled by a faint breeze, Conn couldn’t understand why he had so often resented his brother.

  He stood dumb with love, ravaged with joy. He felt caught up, carried along, like being involved in an incredibly complicated dance the steps of which he didn’t know. He only knew that he wished to share in it more fully, desired to have the casually preoccupied poise of the rest, to be like them. He was almost unbearably filled with what seemed an unstoppable energy and he had nowhere to put it, no means to release it. He wanted to express it and all he could find to do was to lift a lopped branch of a tree and, spinning, whirr the air into scars of sound that healed instantly. He whirled and stopped, lashed and rested, and the more vigour he expended the more he had, while his people and his place became more marvellous, and the day, in huge fragments that seemed burning, that were both mystery and revelation, fell all around him.

  And kept on falling. That train was no train. It could never have appeared on any timetable. Yesterday or tomorrow or any other day you could wait at the same time and only a train would come. But today they stepped into a fable – a jostle of giants with blackened faces being conveyed through the unsuspecting countryside from one secrecy to another. Conn smelled the dank earth-smells caught among their clothes betraying them as no ordinary men. They didn’t fool him with the disguise of their casual talk or their attempts to wear unexceptional smiles. Not listening to their words, he heard their voices, harsh, electric, swelling and muttering, like storms conversing. He noticed the unnatural whiteness of the teeth against the darkened skin, so that every smile was an unexpected brightness quickly cached. They might deceive others but he knew all right that nobody knew who they really were.

  When some of them got seats for his mother and Kathleen and his grandfather, and recognised his father, Conn felt suddenly taller to think that he had connections with them. Their conversation fell on him like a magic formula releasing him into himself.

  ‘It couldny be Tam Docherty.’

  ‘Hell, it couldny be onybody else. Tam Docherty.’

  The name rippled among a few of them, causing looks Conn couldn’t understand at the time, that lens-adjustment by which the blurred hearsay of the past is crystallised into present fact.

  ‘Hoo’s it then, Tam? Hoo’s yer knuckles fur bruises?’

  ‘Ah hear ye’re leevin’ quiet, then.’

  ‘Retired undefeated. Bob Fitzsimmons the Second, eh?’

  Somebody made a corner of a seat for Conn, saying, ‘Here y’ are, son.’

  ‘Aye,’ somebody else said. ‘The auld dug fur the hard road, the pup fur the pavement.’

  ‘Ye’ll hiv tae learn tae staun’ awa’ fae yer feyther, onywey, son. He’s a wee man but he makes a big shadda.’

  Sitting, Conn felt even more a part of them. As if he were a prince to whom they couldn’t bring enough gifts, the man who had spoken turned from him to his mother.

  ‘Whit’s yer secret, Jenny? Ye’re aulder but ye’re no’ less braw. Mind when ye used tae come up tae the village? Nae maitter whit time o’ year it wis, ye were bloomin’. Ye were a wee summer all oan yer ain. Ah wid’ve mairrit ye maself.’

  One of the younger men shouted, ‘Ye see hoo lucky ye were, missus,’ and there was laughter. Jenny was laughing too, embarrassed but not sorry to be so.

  ‘Away, ya skelf,’ the man went on. ‘You young yins think ye inventit men an’ women. But Ah’ve seen the real breed, son. Hauf o’ youse widny make a pit-piece fur a man. Ah could get a better man in a lucky-bag. But Ah’ve seen men.’

  ‘We’ve heard it a’ afore,’ the young man shouted.

  ‘Aye, ye hear it but ye don’t listen. An’ Ah’ve seen weemen, like Jenny here, that didny hiv tae buy their faces ower the coonter. A complexion straight fae Goad, son.’

  ‘In the name o’ Goad, man,’ Jenny said involuntarily.

  ‘Ah’m sayin’ that, Jenny. But ye were wise. Ye mairrit the richt man. Wan o’ the best wee men in Ayrshire here.’ He announced it like a town-crier. ‘If ye’ve never seen this yin in action, ye’ve never seen an angry man.’

  ‘Here, sur,’ Tam said. ‘Ye’re talkin’ like a book withoot batters.’

  Their laughter finally quelled him and he joined in it. The young man didn’t pursue the comparison of generations, out of deference to Jenny, but the implied challenge had made a buoyancy among them that kept afloat the sense of expansiveness they felt in work being over. Conn had his own reasons for catching the contagion, having just discovered who his mother and father were.

  ‘Ye’re up fur the jing-a-ling then?’ somebody asked.

  ‘Aye, it’s pairtly that,’ Tam said.

  ‘It should be a guid yin.’

  ‘Some richt guid teams.’

  Conn experienced awe of what was ahead. His father had tried to convince him that a jing-a-ling was just a night when a few mining communities got together in one village for a five-a-side football competition and maybe a few games of quoits and whatever else could be organised. But he knew now that whatever it was, a jing-a-ling wasn’t as simple as that.

  ‘An this’ll be Mick.’

  ‘Naw. Mick’s in the sojers.’

  ‘Oh, aye. He wisny in the pits. He’s no’ exempt, like.’

  ‘He didny want tae be. Naw. This is Angus.’

  ‘Gus. Of coorse. Gus. Ah can hardly credit it. Whit dae ye feed him oan then, Jenny? A hoarse between two mattresses? Whit age are ye, son?’

  ‘Ah’m sixteen past.’

  ‘An’ Kathleen there. Hoo are ye, hen? That’s guid. A mither as well. Ye’re a gran’feyther, Tam, like me. Ah canny get used tae it. It’s no’ me that’s gettin’ auld. It’s jist that mair folk are gettin’ young nooadays. An’ that’s yer youngest.’

  ‘That’s Conn,’ his father said.

  ‘Ye hadny lost yer touch, Tam. He looks a likely boay.’

  The man turned away to make faces at Alec, having just bestowed a kingdom upon Conn. He had always believed in himself as someone special and now he knew it. The train moved through country that he owned, bringing him nearer to the capital of himself. He had been to the village before but always just as nobody in particular. Now he seemed to see it.

  The walk from the station lay through wonders. Conn just had time to take in the bleakness of the country that he found to his liking, the small school and the playground where he wished he had played, and at the end of the miner’s row the low house with its rain-barrel under the eaves, before, in getting there, he found his sense of place transformed into a sequence of events.

  People exploded on them from all sides and the week-end became for Conn a daze of impressions. He was poked and talked at, his hair ruffled, his biceps felt. Gusts of indecipherable laughter kept taking place. He met bizarre clusters of unknown features and was taught to call them Uncle and Auntie, only to find behind their formidable fronts unexpected recesses of kindness where shillings were kept for weans and sly jokes hoarded.

  His new-found Auntie Chrissie kept him in front of her for a while, shaking her head and saying, ‘My oh my, Jenny. Ah canny get ower it yit. Sarah! Wha is that like? Wha is that boay the image o’ staun’in’ there? See the boattom hauf o’ his face there. It’s Tam as a boay. Here, Tam. You’ll never be deid while he’s
leevin’. That’s a fact.’ Then she gave Conn a shilling, for the bottom half of his face as far as he was aware.

  His Uncle Airchie showed him a trick with a penny and a handkerchief. His cousin Chairlie (‘Ah’m really jist yer hauf cousin but it doesny maitter. Ah’ll jist tell the boays ye’re ma cousin.’) took him out to the woods to show him places where men poached. Chairlie was a year older but not snobbish with it. In bed at night, while the talk of the grown-ups rose and fell in the big room, the two of them lay in the dark, exchanging their ideas about things. For two days they were friends for life.

  For Conn there was so much that was new and yet expected, as if he had at last found an expression of himself that matched his imagination. It wasn’t just in the sense of belonging which the affection of so many adults gave him, nor in seeing for the first time his cousin James’s fabled collection of rocks and being able to say that he knew about them already. It went wider than that. He took to everything that was happening with a naturalness and an enthusiasm that suggested he was discovering his element.

  The jing-a-ling typified it. He loved it all. Seeing it, he developed a different ambition every half-hour or so. He would be a football-player. The roughness of the game played in tackety boots, that crazy stramash of strength and energy, charged him like a dynamo. He knew that was what he would be like. He knew he was the same as these people.

  Then he was going to be a quoiter. He was allowed to lift one of the heavy iron-rings and then marvel at the distance the men threw them, wrapping them round a metal stake embedded almost completely in the mud. Then he wanted to be a marker, one of the men who crouched over the mud-patch, holding a piece of paper where the quoit should land. Some of them would stay like that, unmoving, until the quoit brushed the paper from their fingers. The bravado of it thrilled Conn. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted more to be the man who could casually show that depth of trust or the man who inspired it.

  He was bewildered with potentialities. In the course of the weekend his imagination contracted a kind of fever, so that by the time they were coming back on the train he was no longer sharing the same reality as the rest of his family. They talked banally about things, and outside Graithnock station, his father told a friend who had stopped to talk that they had been up at Cronberry for the weekend. To them that was all that had seemed to take place.

  Conn took his own truth home with him. It sustained him through the evening. After Kathleen had gone home and Angus was out for the night and Old Conn was away for his walk, Conn lay alone in his room, glad to have the place to himself. There his fragments of ambition formed themselves into one. He was going to be a man like his father and those uncles because to be that would include all the other ambitions. The feeling suffused him like a passion and so impatient was he, so determined, that the time he would have to wait seemed like forever. Without warning, he started to cry. He cried quietly because between him and where he had to get to it seemed such an endless and ridiculous waste.

  Hearing his mother coming in, he covered his face quickly with his arm as if he had fallen asleep in that position.

  ‘Conn? A’right, son?’

  He breathed evenly and didn’t answer. He listened to her going out again and heard her say to his father, ‘Ah thocht Ah heard the wee yin greetin’ there. Ah goat sich a shock. Ah kent there couldny be ony reason fur it.’

  ‘Whit’s wrang like?’ Tam asked.

  ‘Naw, it’s nothin’. He’s sleepin’ fine. It musta been ma imagination.’

  Conn stopped crying and took his arm away. He lay still for a long time, being a miner. Then with his hand he wiped the damp patch on the pillow where the last of his boyhood had drained out of him.

  11

  It was lined paper. There was a grease-stain in the top right-hand corner. The stain was not unlike a face in profile. The candle was resting on a flat piece of tin. The run grease made small, white, frozen waves. The pencil was small and snub-nosed, its tip disappearing under the prongs of the pared wood, like a small stone in a setting too big for it. The delicately flapping candle-flame made an area of dimness in the dark, a light that almost seemed breathing fitfully, inhaling to take in the humped bodies of two of the men, exhaling to leave them in darkness again. The centre of it was the paper. To Mick’s troubled sight the page looked hardly solid, a shaft sunk, a wall of whiteness.

  It was like being back at school. A pencil, a paper and the obligation to write. It was a test. Could you move the words across the paper and say what you were expected to say, without breaking the rules, without being wrong? Without wandering into what wasn’t the point?

  He no longer found refuge in letters. At first it had been good to write them, but, like a course in which the exams get progressively harder, he found the problem more and more difficult. It seemed impossible to manoeuvre the words on to the paper from the great waste that surrounded it. There was nothing he could say.

  ‘Dear mother and father,

  I’m fine as usual. No worries.’

  He saw his hand. It was abraded along the back where it had scuffed a sandbag. The candlelight floated it at him separately, a huge complex of knuckles and bloated pores. Like a planet watched through a telescope. He seemed a long, long way from what was happening there.

  ‘But there’s something I have to tell you.’

  He rested. And Jake made a baffled noise in his sleep. Mick wanted to tell his mother and father what the faces of some of the men looked like in candlelight as they lay in tiredness which sleep could barely touch. But that would have been pointless.

  ‘Danny Hawkins was killed yesterday. He died very brave.’

  He had barely time to get the words down before they were buried in images of Danny dying. The ‘milk-can’ coming through the air. The scrambled panic. And Danny running towards it instead of away. It must have been deliberate, Mick thought. The scream that was Danny disembowelling. The few animal whines that admitted him to his death.

  ‘Tell Mrs Hawkins she can be proud of him. He was a good soldier.’

  Filthy. Troubled with lice. Living in a permanent state of hypnotised fear. Suspected syphilis. Private Hawkins, deceased.

  As one of them had said, ‘Ah wonder if he really had the pox. Or jist the gun.’

  The mocking horror of it swarmed up at Mick through the words he had placed on the paper, memories of men dead, of sad laughter, flies buzzing in an eye-socket, assaulted him. The lines of the paper became the bars of a cage through which terrible images reached for him. He took the page and held it to the candle, cauterising his mind. The fire flared against his hand but he hardly felt it. He hardly felt anything. He blew the candle out and sat in the dark.

  He had failed.

  12

  Jenny temporarily developed the habit of saying, ‘Ah canny believe it. Time seems tae pass that quick,’ to which Tam said nothing. Kathleen frequently shook her head and said, ‘He seems too wee.’ Angus offered his pit-hanky as a means of transport. At nights Jenny seemed always to be sewing at the same things, taking them out and folding them away again with mesmerised preoccupation, so that one of Angus’s working shirts was short of a button for more than a fortnight, which had never happened before, and a hole in Tam’s moleskins was allowed to get bigger. Once Tam looked at what she was doing and said ambiguously, ‘Aye.’ Once she asked him, ‘Whit aboot the gaffer?’ but Tam just kept looking into the fire and she didn’t ask again. Small economies occurred and nobody mentioned where the extra butter and the second egg had gone. The signs of change were absorbed discreetly into the rhythm of their lives without very much open reference to what lay behind them.

  The object of them was Conn. When he was out of the house or in bed, the sewing and the talk and the silences went on around him like a conspiracy. He animated them by his exclusion. But the suppressed nature of the activities that related to him wasn’t solely due to a desire to keep them secret from him. Jenny also didn’t want what was going on to intrude too strong
ly on Tam. In his lengthening silences something was being interred.

  Both of them spoke little about it, merely lived with it in an oblique almost shamefaced way, rather like parents obliged to arrange a Black Christmas for their child and ashamed to be giving him nothing but a stockingful of ashes. Yet Conn knew what was going on and was secretly happy. As a child will who knows what is being planned for him but doesn’t want to spoil it for his parents, he too remained discreet. For a month or so, they lived in an irony of gentle, mutual deceptions. Behind the deceptions, their real feelings were their own.

  One night when they were both together by the fire, Jenny said suddenly, ‘Hoo long is it that we’re mairrit, Tam?’

  Her sewing fluttered on to her lap and she was staring into her own question as intensely as if she were trying to count her way back through every chore from the one in her hands till then.

  Twinty year?’ Tam asked.

  ‘Oh. Did we hiv Kathleen before we were mairrit?’

  Tam came out of his preoccupations and together they gathered clues with a concentration that suggested the answer was more than itself.