Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  The remembered fragments were confused with others. Coughing that broke out among the walking men, moving from one to another like a password in the black morning air. The lights at the pithead thawed the darkness into bleak random patches and gave what had been mysterious figures grey, ordinary faces. His father talked to a man whose eyes measured Conn disinterestedly.

  The cage took four. In the blackness with only his stomach as a guide, Conn thought they were going up. A darkness enveloped them.

  Tadger’s voice said, ‘Thank Christ we’ll hit some watter-leaf the day.’

  His father’s voice wasn’t his father’s voice. It said, ‘Splint we’re oan. The hale bluidy country’s made o’ splint.’

  ‘Except fur the stane.’

  ‘Hiv ye some Alfred Noble?’

  ‘Aye. Ye can hiv some.’

  Angus suddenly shouted, ‘Get ready, fower-an’-a-hauf! They’re comin’ up!’

  ‘Keep yer wind fur breathin’,’ Tam said.

  ‘Aye, if ye’ve ony spare,’ Tadger said, ‘jist pass it along.’ He put his hand lightly on the top of Conn’s back and thumbed the hair on the back of his neck in a gesture he would never have allowed himself in the daylight.

  Somebody opened the door of the cage at the bottom and said, ‘Aye, boays.’

  One big light burned near the cage, blue, gently palpitating, a poisonous flower. Like petals fallen from it, the lighted pit-lamps swayed away, settling into darkness.

  ‘Haud oan, ye’ll be pasted before ye stert yer shift.’

  Angus held his arm to stop him. His father went on. Tadger was gone. Angus and he just stood.

  ‘Noo ye’re sure ye’ve goat everythin’?’ Angus asked. ‘Ye haveny left yer muscles in the hoose?’

  ‘Where’s ma feyther?’

  ‘Don’t greet, son. He’ll be back. That’s when it’ll be time tae greet.’

  Angus leaned against a prop. Their father’s lamp appeared again and they followed it.

  Coal was strange, more various than could have been imagined, black only sometimes, inclined to mimic rock, a place, an architecture, a record, an opposition, a measurement of time. His father muttered to it occasionally, ‘That’s aboot us.’ ‘Come oan, ya bastard.’ The swear-words were as soft as endearments. Dust was so much that you forgot it. The hutches were deceptive, not looking big but feeling like wells when you tried to fill them. Angus, cutting coal, loading a hutch, pushing it, was alone with his exertion. Bread tasted marvellous. ‘Pitbreid’, his father said, ‘is the only guid reason fur goin’ doon a mine.’ Behind the chink of axes, the infrequent dull explosions, the rumble of the hutches, the pit was secretive. Props sighed. Water whispered in inaccessible places. Rats leapt away from lights.

  Learning to work there, Conn became part of a time-scale different from any he had known. The pit was something separate, an entity on its own. Anything that happened on the surface was just punctuation. Here the continuity was unbroken of hewing and propping and hutching and drawing. Day merged with day and events followed a sequence not dependent on time so much as an internal logic of their own, the cutting of new workings, the driving of props, the counting of hutches, the laying of rails, the lifting of rails, something as abstruse and self-extending as a mathematical equation. It was a self-justifying involvement, an expertise the purpose of which was itself. Day after day he mastered the skill of the others, the art of constructing tunnels that led to blank walls, like entombed men studying the aesthetics of escape. Behind them they left a Lascaux of dripping passageways, roughly sculpted chambers, perilous with water, foul with gas, upheld by rotting timbers, a folk-monument that undermined the earth. There, like a primitive religion most people had forgotten, they had practised painful genuflections, hard prostrations, lain in water, wrestled with rock, while the pit left its message in them like stigmata. Later, Conn thought there must have been a time when it was all new to him, but he couldn’t remember it.

  The boy’s wonder petrified into facts, and they were all the man was left with of what he had been, like stones on which fern-leaf shadows can dimly be made out. The Blue Dan was the light that burned at the bottom. Water-leaf was the best household coal. You could see your face in it. It brought most money and was easiest to get out. Alfred Noble was explosive used for blasting. ‘Fower-an’-a-hauf was the weighman for the pit. He never allowed more than four-and-a-half hundred-weight per hutch, though a lot of the men claimed they held nearer five. There was a check-weighman to act on behalf of the men, called ‘Leg-an’-a-hauf because he had lost a foot in the pit, but he was known to be the other weighman’s echo. Each day the bottomer opened the cage for Conn.

  Like a dogma accepted beneath the level of questions or comprehension, his experience there became a central influence on his life. Because of it, much else followed naturally. Like the others, he developed a love of the open air, green country. Washed, his first instinct was to get out. Whippets interested him, the chase became inexplicably a part of his heraldry – greyhound on a field verte. The old stories he had heard so often of the closeness of the men who worked down the pits took on new meaning. Even the superstitions that he had listened to his father dismiss seemed to him not stupid at all but like a code only the miners themselves understood.

  Two or three weeks after starting in the pits, he saw Tadger stop in the chill morning air.

  ‘Hell,’ Tadger said. ‘Ah’ve forgotten ma piece.’

  The seven of them stood in a dark, empty street. Tadger was thinking. There was still time to go back. It was a moment or two before Conn realised the problem, that it was unlucky to turn back for anything, that if a man had to return to the house, he should stay there. ‘You three’ll no’ be leevin’ as fat at piece-time the day.’ The others laughed, not without relief, and they all walked on.

  In step with them, Conn thought of the pit they were headed towards, soughing, black, dangerous. He understood the place where Tadger had been standing. With gladness he realised that his wish had been granted. He was one of them. The implications of that wish were something he still had to learn, but for the moment his new experience was complete and absorbing in itself, so absorbing that when the official word came about Mick, Conn felt a small shock of surprise that real things were happening outside the sphere of his own life.

  15

  The best way to make the room was to start with the gable-end. That gave you a mainly blank surface, regular in shape. The two windows, it was true, were a difficulty. But by being careful not to focus on them directly, you could reduce them merely to shapes made of light, acting not as clarification but as a baffle to whatever was beyond them. This meant you had a rectangle inset with two smaller rectangles, and the effect was one of strengthening the sense of rigid form.

  On such solidity you could build. Progress would now give the impression of being not lateral but vertical, for this was your foundation. Speed was variable. Sometimes you could move with quite surprising quickness from one familiarity to another, from the remembered dark brown stain on a brass bedstead to the indentation on the polished floor beside it. On such occasions you had the feeling that the entire structure was already there and only waiting for you to make use of it. But at other times the problems seemed insurmountable. It was so hard to maintain what you had made until it acquired the strength to stand by itself. An unanticipated noise could make rubble of half-an-hour’s work. The hump of bedclothes, carelessly allowed to intrude before the rest of the room was ready for it, could become a complex of ridges, where you were lost. This was frightening because there was no way of telling what you might meet there. To lose total control of the present was to stumble again on to that wilderness where events from the past survived like crazy anchorites, nurtured on their own monstrosity and hungry to impose their lunacy on whoever was foolish enough to come across them. The only refuge was the room, or rather not the room but the work of making it. There was even a way in which the mildly disgruntled consciousness of futility, that aw
areness of dealing with intractable materials, was not a bad thing. The need to go on with it was always there.

  It was generally the case that progress was slow, for the room was a very long one. It could take Mick, say, a couple of hours of painfully sustained patience to complete the place, an achievement which was, indeed, remarkably rare. Mostly he was content simply to go on with the attempt as long as he could. Success was most validly measured in time passed. This attitude became so familiar, not to say comfortable to him that he frequently forgot altogether about the very possibility of completion. This probably didn’t matter, or if it did was most likely helpful, since the best thing that could happen wasn’t that he finished but that the burden of what he was trying to do was realised afresh as being intolerable and his mind, achieving an intense moment of recoil, shuffled the entire problem instantly, and won void – not that terrifying wilderness that pressed so often against the very walls of the room, but silence bland as unguented bandage, a glacial emptiness in which he was at peace. After that, the work could begin again.

  Every day it was the same. The need to start anew was not unpleasant, had something almost of excitement in it. There was a recurring moment that he loved especially. It happened most often in the morning but could occasionally be found at other times of the day, as if a time-lock had occurred and a new day was beginning in the middle of the old one. It was when he was at just the right distance from the room to see the sunlight and nothing else. Along the room large windows faced each other, and the sunlight took place at regular intervals, lying from window to window in vast, unbroken blocks. The room then derived a purpose, was purified simply into contours for containing these – like a hangar for stored sunlight. That was the time. The sunlight lay waiting like great luminous slabs of Carrara marble, from which he could with patience tease the shapes and presences already implicit in it. It felt almost like hope.

  There were even days when hope seemed justified. The room was completed. The whole preposterous structure was painstakingly built up fragment by meaningless fragment, teetering with absurdity. Achievement had gone beyond that. In moments of particularly intense concentration, he had managed, still keeping everything in place, to know the room in its horizontal solidarity, a firm projection of stone. The grass beyond it was also permissible. In the last of those moments the word ‘hospital’ firmed in his mind through a series of almost insensible jolts, like a recently erected building settling.

  These times became more common. Then it was that he fully rejoined his body, became properly a part of the words he said every day to whoever happened to be sitting beside his bed. The room ceased to be a collapsing collection of things and resolved itself into a continuing and actual place with beds and people and occurrences that were sequential. But the attainment of this condition, as he discovered, did not necessarily mean its permanence. Days still came when his mouth was left to carry on a charade of conversation, his body to profess a firm certainty in which he himself couldn’t share. And even though the actuality of the room became more easily realisable, though it became more natural to see it solid, even to identify the people in the various beds, to say their names, to talk to them – the most hazardous part of all remained. This was not to locate the existence of the room, but to locate the existence of himself within the room.

  It was long and lonely for him trying to catch up with his body on the bed. How many times he returned to terrible events, still sheeted in the flames of their happening, how many times sheered off in remembered terror, only to lug himself back again and again, in an attempt to find lost pieces of himself. Between the fear of his past and the fear of his present he shuttled, desperate to salvage what was left of him from his experience.

  His own body was his only certitude. It was the best way to come at what had happened, meant the past. Frequently he would inventory his wounds, without pity or, indeed, feeling of any kind, but with the mechanical repetitiveness of a prayer recited under stress. The sight of one eye was restored. The other was permanently useless. This in itself was to be counted as a gain, since he had been for a time totally blind. Besides, as had been pointed out to him, the ruined eye was not significantly disfigured. A slight scar showed near the temple. All it meant, he had been told, was the need to take special care of the eye that functioned. The leg, he was assured, would heal. ‘Complete mobility,’ the doctor said. That left only the arm, the right one. The surgery on it was finished now. They had begun by taking off the hand, then part of the forearm, and had finally stopped above the elbow – an almost shy progression, as if the truth were diffident. And thus, the map of his recent past was made complete.

  With its help, his experience almost became possible. It wasn’t so much that his wounds measured what had happened to him but rather that they indicated what hadn’t happened. He hadn’t hung on wire, discharging a refuse of guts and moaning till one of his own men shot him from a trench. He hadn’t stepped back from the parapet, saying mildly ‘fuck it’ to nobody in particular, and sat down gently dead, a sardonic medal of blood on his tunic. He hadn’t run screaming in an attempt to put himself in the path of the mortar that cartwheeled clumsily through the air. He hadn’t ended as a talking torso, like some remnant of statuary unfortunately damaged in transit. He was simply going to be blind in one eye and minus an arm.

  That wasn’t bad. The biggest immediate disappointment was probably that he was less relieved than he had expected to be, that he felt less of everything than he would have imagined in his desire to get out of the trenches. Incapable of formulating an explanation for himself, he nevertheless remembered an incident when he had arrived at understanding, not as a rational process but as an observed fact, physically enacted. It had been when he was wakening after one of the operations. At the foot of his bed a doctor was talking to someone else about him. The doctor’s voice was pleasantly matter-of-fact. Mick felt for his hand and it wasn’t there. Another time, if he had been more himself, he might have responded with anger or outrage, adopting the common enough stance of resenting being treated as a number. But, too weak to have an automatic reaction, he was obliged to have a real one. He saw that he felt not the slightest offence at the way the doctor was talking. He saw that he wasn’t being treated as a number – he was a number. And the doctor was merely another one. Outside the walls, the machinery was clanking on, and whether it needed your hand or your eyes or your legs or yourself to run on made no difference to anything. That was simply what it needed. That was all that mattered. You didn’t. Personal responses were irrelevant.

  The building he was in was only one of countless throughout Europe, temples to the modern mysticism. To them came those who, regardless of race, had managed to attain the new Nirvana. They had gone through the novitiate’s visionary instant in the falling flare, understood the words exchanged in darkness, been purified with mud, and reached the final sanctum. Their prophet’s promises hadn’t been in vain. The gods that controlled their lives had admitted them to their presence. Who would be petty enough to quibble about what must be lost in order to gain so much? They returned blind or legless or having left their minds behind. Transformed, indeed enlarged by decimation, they were led or were wheeled or limped among their endless private visions, unutterable to others – therefore, how great. The new elect, they had been placed above the confines of a private life, the folly of ambition, the silliness of ordinary love. Their future was the past.

  Absolved of himself, he lay in bed, feeling nothing, waiting for nothing. When he saw the two of them come through the door at the end of the room, recognition didn’t occur to him at first. The orderly pointed. As the other man advanced, Mick’s own tears told him it was his father. The tears meant nothing to him. They just happened, like a wound that was supposed to be healed reopening. They touched his cheeks strangely, as if belonging to someone else. He couldn’t remember when he had felt them last. He wondered if in some way he was crying for his father, for the terrible naïveté of his presence, comi
ng forward now, one hand crumpling his bonnet, staring towards him, looking too physical for the place, and somehow contaminating that clinical atmosphere, awkward as a human being in heaven. He didn’t know. He didn’t realise that he was weeping through his father’s eyes, that, empty as an angel, he could only come alive through the suffering of another.

  16

  Tam returned from the military hospital on a Saturday evening. He was tired from the journey, and that helped. It softened the directness of his meeting with the family. He was a man back from a distance and familiar roles could be adopted until such time as they all felt able to face the uniqueness of the situation. Kathleen helped her mother by putting plate, spoon and bread out on the table, while Jenny pretended the soup wasn’t quite ready. Conn stoked the fire and Angus brought more coal. Wee Alec, asleep in the plaidie, lay on one of the set-in beds. Tam himself took off his collar, untied his boots, and talked about travelling on trains, as if the whole purpose of his journey had been inspection of the railway system.