Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Ah wis in the Barchan Pit at the time.’

  ‘It wis jist efter ma Auntie Chrissie dee’d. Ah mind she said fae her bed she wid dance at ma weddin’. The sowl!’

  ‘Ah wid jist be twinty-three. Or twinty-fower.’

  ‘Ye mind the rain?’

  ‘Christ, ye were braw.’

  ‘You looked younger than Ah’d ever seen ye. Like yer ain wee brither.’

  ‘Aye, it wis twinty-three year ago.’

  ‘Naw. Twinty-fower. Oor Kathleen’s twinty-three past.’

  Tam pokered the fire against the hard frost and the grey thoughts. Jenny didn’t resume her sewing. The fogged window still showed very faintly where Tam’s hand had minutes ago rubbed a spyhole on the pane, but their breaths were sealing it again. With Angus and Conn asleep and themselves drawn tight to the heat as if only the fire could see them past approaching midnight, the silence appeared to stretch away from them like something vast. The house, becoming the architecture of their thoughts, seemed not two rooms but a big emptiness.

  ‘A’ that time,’ Jenny said.

  ‘An’ ye never failed them fur a meenit o’ it. Nane o’ the fower o’ them.’

  ‘A’ that time. It seems funny tae think aboot it noo.’

  ‘Aye.’ Tam had the fire settled for the night. ‘But we better no’ laugh too lood. We’d waken the boays.’

  Standing in front of the fire, he stripped for bed. As he bent, the firelight picked out the blue of the coal-scars round the shoulders. His left biceps had acquired an ineradicable dusting of black powder, shadow of an explosion. Saying, ‘Ach aye,’ Jenny rolled up her sewing in agreement. The rest was simply unsayable.

  But they thought it, touching beyond talk in their awareness of each other the learned weaknesses and hurt parts. Jenny knew why Tam didn’t want to see too much of the work she was doing, although he loved and admired the thoroughness with which she did it. She understood without words the growing resignation in his eyes, just as she would have understood the expression of a devout believer who has come back for the umpteenth time from Lourdes to find the same deformities, and can’t imagine where he can find the strength ever to go back.

  Tam sensed Jenny’s feelings, the pride that was tinged with melancholy, so that her natural busyness gave way every so often to brooding stares, like someone who had just realised that she has been eagerly sewing her own shroud. For a part of her life was ending and with it came the awareness that she would never be as necessary again. From now on the extent of her involvement could only diminish. Halting from time to time in her work, she went over the realisation again and again, committing a hard lesson to memory.

  Conn, though not oblivious to the fact that this time affected his mother and father in some ways sadly, was too absorbed in the richness of his own reactions to take those of his parents very seriously. As the day he had been living towards came near, his thoughts grew more callously self-centred. When the night arrived for being given the results of his mother’s work, he was so far out of himself in an almost mystical transport that everybody else was just irrelevant, except perhaps as mirrors of his mood.

  It was Christmas Eve. Several objects were carefully arranged on the table: a pit-bonnet with the leather patch sewn on to the skip to hold the lamp; a pit-lamp bought by Tam; an oil-flask acquired second-hand and burnished for days by Angus; a working-shirt bought by Kathleen; working trousers and moleskins Jenny had made a fit for Conn and a pair of pit-boots that had cost her more than she could afford. Over a chair-back was a jacket she had modified as much as she could towards Conn’s build. Their presence on that evening was due to a double insistence of Conn’s: that he wanted nothing for his Christmas except what would help him in starting his work; and that, since he wasn’t a wee boy any longer, he would take them on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas morning. Also on the table in an attempt, which was lost on Conn, to soften the implications of these things, to make them seem more a gift, were a pen-knife and a second-hand book, both given by Tam.

  Returning from the unnecessary errand he had been sent on, Conn had given his mother the matches before he noticed the stuff on the table. His expression was a prerogative of the young, unfakeable as a sunrise. He said, ‘Great!’

  The family watched, enjoying the importance with which he imbued everything he touched. Angus had stayed in and Kathleen had come up ostensibly to ask her mother’s advice about Alec but more importantly to witness the ceremony. Having still not achieved a sense of family in her marriage, she found in the occasion a temporary renewal of conviction in the possibilities the future held.

  ‘These are great,’ Conn said.

  The lamp hooks in here,’ Angus explained.

  ‘Ah ken. Ah’ve seen ma feyther’s an yours often enough.’

  ‘An’ ye fill it oot o’ this.’

  ‘That’s a beauty. An’ moleskins tae. Can Ah try them oan?’

  Kathleen helped him to carry them through to the room and then left him. Putting the things on was for Conn a confused, fevered experience, haunted by half-remembered stories of magical garments and astonishing transformations wrought in seconds and secret truths stunning those to whom they were suddenly revealed. The nearest thing to clarity in him was a sense of the defeat of the stifling narrowness of school, the negation of its lies. But the feeling didn’t occupy him long, for school was instantly and utterly irrelevant. When the frog becomes a prince, he bears no malice towards rodents. The bonnet gave him a new identity. The shoulders of the jacket drooped like inconspicuous wings. The boots were seven-league. He emerged to awe the others.

  Angus’s suppressed laughter became a tight smile on Kathleen’s face, as if it had to find an outlet somewhere. Jenny held her feelings in balance with difficulty. The clothes were an intrusion on his youth, gave the impression that adulthood was abducting him. She could have cried except that, if he had to go to work, there was consolation in his being so well prepared. A lot of families had to beg or borrow the means for starting a son in the pits. At least they had provided by themselves for Conn and he owed nothing to anybody. With long-acquired skill, she fended off vague, disturbing emotions by concentrating on practicalities. The boots were a good buy, the moleskins fine. The jacket wasn’t too bad. The bonnet was the only problem, the fact that it was too big emphasised by the weight of the lamp. She would have to cut a panel out the back.

  ‘That’s quite a bunnet ye’ve goat there, Conn,’ Angus was saying. ‘When ye’re no’ wearin’ it, ye can aye rent it oot as a single-end.’

  ‘A’ ye’ve goat tae dae, son,’ Kathleen countered, ‘is learn hoo tae be as big-heided as yer brither an’ it’ll fit ye fine.’

  Looking on, Tam accepted Angus’s mockery as if it were aimed at him. He regretted the two pressures that had made him agree to this: Conn’s insistence and their poverty. He couldn’t have felt worse if he had given Conn a suicide-kit for Christmas. But more hurtful than the immediate irony was seeing in front of him the incarnation of the inevitable. That he had refused to face the fact that it was inevitable until now made him more ashamed. He could never have afforded to keep Conn on at school. It had been a silly dream for a grown man to allow himself. Now Conn had made him admit the obvious. He had fathered four children and all he had ever been able to give them was their personal set of shackles. He went over suddenly and put his arm round Conn, slapping his shoulder. He winked at Conn and started to laugh.

  ‘Aye, ye’ll dae, son. You can stert onytime. Hoo aboot this man, eh?’

  His laughter established a mood. They closed on Conn, getting him to show them things, making him important. His mother said, ‘Ah wish oor Mick could see ye noo.’ He felt his father relaxing towards him, as if he accepted who Conn was in a way he never had before. The feeling was to grow, establishing between Conn and his father a deepening relationship, and Conn was at that time unaware of what lay behind the removal of the tension that had existed before with his father, was too young to appreciate the pr
agmatism experience teaches us, so that, once the desperate hope that had seemed a vital organ is removed, we can learn to live without it.

  Later that night the objects were again set out on the table where Conn had insisted on leaving them when he went to bed. Only the boots were on the floor, because Jenny had said it was unlucky to have them on the table. She wasn’t normally superstitious but this was not a time for taking chances. She was for propitiating even the gods of strangers.

  In different rooms Tam and Conn remained awake, the one too tired, the other too eager to sleep. In the darkened house, the invisible pit-lamp glowed in the minds of both. For one, the mocking past, absurd precipitate of twenty-four years of struggle. For the other, the promising future.

  13

  An advanced field dressing station in a trench called Harley Street. And other names: Glasgow Road, Strathcona Walk, Finchley Road. Edwardian Britain stripped of its stucco morning-suits. Dug-outs became villas, christened Mary, Violet or Nancy. Kensington Palace stank of unjustifiable suffering. In The Picture House the deaths were genuine. Burlington Arcade and the Leicester Lounge had human limbs for mortar. Kelvingrove Mansions frequently caved in.

  Set down in an ironic metaphor of Britain, Mick accepted it, learned its topography thoroughly. His horizon became the back of the man in front of him. From dug-out to sandbags and back again was a shift. Lice were natural. A sliced petrol-can was a fire. Army biscuits were a form of fuel. He questioned nothing. Yet there occurred in him dim implications, a vague need for reprisals. His postponed anger was a kind of politics.

  For the moment it didn’t reach the length of coherent thought. There wasn’t time. He lived from sleep to sleep, an ache of small necessities, to hunt for lice, to scavenge heat, to avoid being killed. He pared himself to the starkness of the place. Beyond his reflexes he was void. He lived in the taste of biscuit, through a fag, as a listening for the sound of the look-out’s whistle.

  ‘Bomb to right!’

  He forced himself to look, to wait till he could see and judge and run and throw himself flat. The detonation juddered under him, seemed to lift him on a wave of earth and throw him into space. His eyes still closed, he span. His hearing was a plangent agony. He drifted in a waste of terror from which he didn’t believe he could ever come back, until he heard a voice saying, ‘Fuck this fur a coamic song.’ He opened his eyes and the world was made again. In the beginning was the word.

  And the word was with man. The men were the only identity he had left. He survived only as one of them. The others were the only sanity each of them had. They had evolved their shared esperanto for the truth: na-pooh, sanfairy-an, nae bloody bon. They transformed the machinery of hell into contemptible jokes: coal-boxes, whizz-bangs, pip-squeaks, milk-cans, old boots. They purified enormity into obscenity. They enriched the mud with swearing.

  In the old barn they’d had a sing-song. Mick had watched their faces, feeling what he imagined some religious people must have felt at a revivalist meeting. For the moment he was saved. It wasn’t the heroism of men singing before a battle. It was the opposite of that. The singing was mostly lousy. It was their recalcitrant ordinariness, their refusal to be heroic. The horror that they had come from and the terror they were going to were both earthed in their faces into something bearable. Mick saw men who would have to count themselves lucky if they lived another two months and they were unselfconsciously casual. One of them winked in acknowledgement of a cigarette. Another wiped his nose across his sleeve. Another sang obliviously in the wrong key. Confronted by the ravaged face of history, they nodded wryly and worked out how to make the fags last and concentrated on keeping their heads down. Their secret was their inability to pretend to be more than themselves, the distinct reality that belonged to each of them separately, like moles or warts. They became what Mick had in place of a religion.

  Big Tosher had crystallised it for him. Waking one night to someone talking, Mick tried dimly to focus on the sound. They were back from twelve days in the trenches and sleeping in some kind of outbuilding on a farm. Nobody knew exactly what kind of building it was because it had been dark when they came to it. Mick located Tosher lying on the ground along from him. Apart from the troubled breathing of the men, Tosher’s voice was the only sound. He was speaking quietly, saying, ‘Naw. Ye’ll have tae go, freen’. Tae hell wi’ this. Must be removed.’

  Mick’s first reaction was a chill of apprehension. He thought Big Tosher had snapped. He had known it happen often enough before. You couldn’t always foresee it. Sometimes a man sat down quite casually, throwing out a remark, and he wouldn’t get back up as himself. That remark would prove to be the last coherent news, like a message sent out from a transmitter that mysteriously breaks down. Some delicate balance had shifted in him and he would sit gleying ahead of himself. You would have had to sink a mine to get to him. Others went out in a sudden fragmentation of hysteria. Mick listened in awe, wondering if he was hearing the first bulletin from Tosher’s madness.

  ‘Must be removed! Bloody interlowper.’

  Tosher was moving quietly into the darkness. His self-absorption was total.

  ‘Leevin’ aff the back o’ the worker, eh? Nut at a’. Oop, ya bastart!’

  It seemed to Mick that Tosher was taking off his clothes.

  ‘Ye micht as weel gi’e yersel’ up. Ye’ve nae chance. Must be removed.’

  Just when Mick was considering intervention, the truth of it came to him, Tosher was on a louse-hunt.

  ‘Whit dae ye think this is? The bloody Pairish. Ah’m no charity.’

  Listening with understanding, Mick found himself laughing noiselessly into the darkness. Hearing Tosher’s moment of triumph, ‘Goat ye, ya Hun!,’ the noises of satisfaction, the gradual subsidence, Mick experienced a small revelation. Like Tosher’s campaign against the louse, Mick’s war was a private one.

  He understood what had so often jarred his sense of honesty in the way the papers talked about the war. They said things like ‘honour’ and ‘self-sacrifice’ and ‘indifference to personal danger’. They didn’t understand. What the war taught was selfishness, a flame of pure necessity through which each man had to pass. And something strange happened to most of them who went through it. It connected them to others. They became so expert in caring about themselves that they comprehended that same care as it existed in others, could judge it with an emotionless neutrality. The result was that they discovered true generosity.

  If a man gave up a share of rations to another or took over early from him, it was simply his expertise in the pressures they lived among telling him that he could afford to do that at that time and the other couldn’t. That was all. The gift carried no obligation. It was just an acknowledgement of both their natures. They existed beyond the power of stimuli like principles or ethics. Virtue and necessity were the same.

  As the war progressed, living among these specialists in being human, Mick had learned. More and more he shed any unnecessary luggage of thought or speculation. He honed himself down to just being there. His sense of himself was in the third person.

  So he tried to avoid what he knew he couldn’t handle. All the time he was experiencing things which he couldn’t allow to take place in him just then but which would have to happen later. His mind recorded them like undeveloped negatives. ‘Stretcher-bearer to the left!’, and later the man with half a face was carried past him. The feet of the rats across his body coded future nightmares into his mind. The trench in moonlight printed a plate of leprous beauty on his memory.

  Survival could only be partial. What was happening didn’t happen to individuals. Catastrophe had nothing to do with being you. It was the result of fortuitous positioning, accidental decisions, momentary orders. It was what happened to people.

  He moved beyond all sense of time, among what only his body could comprehend. Mindlessness was his routine. He was someone. Disaster was what would probably happen. When it happened, it would happen to someone. When it came, it came. The
shell exploded. Something was moving through the air. The ground was battering someone. Someone’s pain was splitting the sky.

  14

  When they left the road, the ground seemed harder, conveying the strange sensation that asphalt was a cushion on the earth. They climbed a banking ferrous with frost and began to cross a field. It was still dark and shapes were different densities of black. Grass skinkled, the frozen filaments snapping as they stepped. Denied a visual perspective, they felt themselves defined by a sensory braille. A foot that had to adjust to an angle of the ground affirmed the bulk of the body. The weight of the things they carried, bumping, measured the motion of their walking like a metronome. Cold etched at their faces. Breath froze.

  Not much was being said. Sliddering down another banking, they could see against the sky other shapes converging. They hit a dirt road where the struck stones didn’t budge. The crunching of their boots was absorbed in moments among the multiplying versions of itself. The sense of space was lost, first through sound.

  The feet just a yard ahead of him took Conn by surprise. He looked behind and then to the front again. He was part of a crowd. Again his determination to take in every part of this day stage by stage had been defeated. His expectations had been ambushed so often by unpredictable realities that his powers of assimilation were scattered. So much had happened already.

  There was the eeriness of Tadger’s whistle, calling his father and Angus, and himself for the first time, out into the darkness. The drugged movements of the men in the small roomful of ashen light, as if compelled to obey what they couldn’t control. The scalding porridge, his mother whispering, That’ll stick tae yer ribs.’ The harshness of new lace-thongs on his fingers, gouging him awake. Angus with boots and trousers on but still in his vest, slumped forward asleep in a fireside chair, his elbows on his knees, his forehead resting on the backs of his clasped hands, the shoulders bulging like a deformity, while his mother brought him food and shook him gently alive. His father pulling on his trousers, his lips crinkling to keep the cigarette in his mouth as he started to cough, the cigarette taken out as the cough became a seizure, and his father leaning on the smoke-board, his body working like a bellows, until he spat a knot of phlegm into the fire and his breathing subsided to a noisy wheezing. His mother saying, ‘Ah wish tae Goad ye widny smoke oan an empty stomach.’ Familiar things that seemed strange: the bottled tea, dark red; work-jackets over chairs, stiff-armed like suits of armour. The enjoyment of them walking with Tadger and his three sons through darkened empty streets, sentries guarding other people’s sleep. His mother’s last remark, ‘Goad bliss ye an’ the devil miss ye,’ and her smile that was almost shy, as if she was sorry to be saying something so silly.