Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  Angus jumped back, both hands held up, palms towards Conn. From behind his sign of truce, Angus stared, his mouth coming open.

  ‘Whit’s it fur, Conn?’

  ‘Fur whit ye did tae ma feyther.’

  Angus’s hands came down slowly. They stared at each other from three yards apart.

  ‘Jesus Christ! You’re drunk, son, aren’t ye?’

  ‘No’ that drunk.’

  Angus looked round to see if anybody was watching them. The street was quiet.

  ‘Ye mean the funeral, daen’t ye? Well, come oan hame an’ we’ll talk aboot it.’

  ‘There’s nothin’ tae talk aboot.’

  Conn took a step towards him.

  Angus’s right hand came up again, still palm towards him.

  ‘Richt,’ he snarled. ‘Fuckin’ richt. But we’re no hivin’ it here. Ah widny let them see ma brither gettin’ murdert.’ He pointed at Conn. ‘Ah still think you’re drunk, son. Ye’re aboot fower pints awa’ fae yer brains. The morra mornin’. You still feel like this, you come doon tae the house fur me first thing. We’ll go up the road. The nicht, you jist go hame. An’ get ma mither tae pit a poultice oan yer heid.’

  Conn stood staring at him. Angus shook his head and went past him widely as if there was a fence round him. Conn was still standing there when Angus looked back.

  14

  Annie shook Angus awake, saying, ‘Angus. There’s somebody et the door.’

  ‘When? Who?’

  He raised himself on one elbow. His eyes were open but blank as a statue’s in the dimness.

  ‘Lusten.’

  There was a double knock at the door. In the stillness it sounded threatening, its purpose unimaginably secret. Angus lay with Annie’s hand still on his shoulder, sighing himself awake. He swung out of bed, pulled on his trousers and, buttoning them, padded across to the sideboard. He lifted the clock and held it close to his face, waiting for his eyes to absorb the time.

  ‘Hauf past six?’

  ‘Who could it be?’ Annie asked.

  Angus stood gouging his eyes with the heels of his hands. He yawned and crossed and opened the door. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to ask who was there. By the time he realised it was Conn, he understood what was happening. They looked at each other for some time as if to verify it.

  ‘Come in,’ Angus said.

  ‘Ah’ll wait here fur ye.’

  ‘Christ. Come in. Ah canny come oot yet. Ye widny hit a man when he’s sleepin’.’

  Conn came in reluctantly. He had spent all night honing himself down to what he had to do. The edge of his anger depended on keeping Angus clear-cut in his mind, as an abstract of his faults. It didn’t help his purpose to have to meet the monster’s relatives and see him yawning and scratching his head and stubbing his big toe on the table.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Conn,’ Annie said. ‘Is something wrong?’

  Conn didn’t know what to say and Angus saved him.

  ‘Conn seems tae think there is. Stoap actin’ it, Annie. Ah telt ye aboot it last night.’

  Annie lay with the covers pulled up to her chin, trapped in bed. Conn stood undecided, embarrassed to be embarrassing her. While they neutralised each other, only Angus seemed himself. He brought himself out of his stupor without haste. He struck the coal in the fire, releasing flame. He crossed to the window and held back the curtain for a moment.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘It’s mair or less daylight. Ye must’ve chapped the sun up this moarnin’, Conn.’

  He walked slowly back and forth, scratching his bare torso and shaking his head.

  ‘No’ bad, richt enough. Ye’re only here.’

  ‘Ah think it’s the daftest thing Ah ever heard o’,’ Annie said.

  ‘Don’ blame me, missus,’ Angus said. ‘Ah’ve tae get banjoed whether Ah like it or no’.’ He pursed his lips and his eyes suddenly filled with something like admiration. ‘Christ. A gunfighter in the faimly.’

  ‘Haun me ower that frock, Angus, please.’

  ‘Aye. Make us somethin’ tae eat, hen. Ah don’t want tae dee oan an empty stomach.’

  Angus gave over the dress and pulled the curtain of the set-in bed for her. He started to splash his face with cold water from the pail beside the hearth. Annie got out of bed and crossed to the cradle.

  ‘Ah hope Ah didny waken the wean,’ Conn said.

  ‘No’ him,’ Annie said. ‘He takes efter his feyther’s side.’ And then, as if she had just remembered why Conn was here, ‘but Ah’m hopin’ he’ll hiv mair sense than his feyther’s side.’

  Towelling himself, Angus said, ‘Sit doon, Conn. Sit doon. Rest yer footwork.’

  For the next twenty minutes or so, Conn kept losing the reality of what was happening. He found himself thinking at one point that they were preparing to go poaching. Past times with Angus interrupted his thoughts, like mutual friends who didn’t know that things had changed. Drinking a cup of tea while Angus ate, he couldn’t believe that they were really going to fight. He looked round the house and admitted to himself his admiration for what Angus had done. The place impressed him. Angus had decorated it himself, some of the furniture was new.

  But the most impressive thing about the place was the atmosphere: Angus and Annie communicating in half-phrases, the warmth, the ease, the breathing of the baby gentle in the middle of it. It seemed an impregnable fortress with Angus as its central pillar. The feeling weakened Conn. He stood up, still finishing his tea.

  ‘Thanks, Annie.’

  Angus looked past him at the wall and nodded, tied up his laces, rose, pulled on a jacket over his collarless shirt.

  ‘The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast,’ he said.

  ‘Wull the pair o’ ye no’ sit doon,’ Annie said.

  ‘Now, now.’ Angus was smiling. ‘We’ll no’ hiv a foreigner fae Irvine tae tell us hoo tae soart things oot.’

  They walked up High Street towards the country. It was a fresh morning. Once Angus snittered and said, ‘Ah thocht it wis the rent man.’ Then, ‘Maybe it is, eh?’ But talk was something that was left behind, like the town. They passed places plaqued with private memories. From a tree a piece of frayed rope hung, reminding them of their own games. Past the swinging bridge, a man with a glass eye, out walking his dog, said, passing, ‘A sherp moarnin’, boays.’ They both said, ‘Aye’. About a hundred yards later, Angus said: ‘Ma Uncle Wull. When he wis drunk wance. He put his gless e’e oan the mantelpiece an’ says, “Ah’m fur a sleep. You keep yer e’e oan them.”’ Conn said nothing – inadmissible evidence.

  It was hard enough to get where they had to go without taking any unnecessary luggage with them. By the time they had reached the bridge above Moses’ Well, their road was beginning to turn back on itself. To go on would be to retreat from the edge they had created in themselves. Conn stepped through the gateway in the stone beside the bridge, ducked through a gap in the hedge and into the field above. Angus followed.

  They stood in the uneven field, not looking at each other. Beyond the hedge, the trees were stirring slightly in the wind. Down the shelving slope where the occasional tree was rooted half in air, the river ran among its stones. If one of them had laughed, it would have been all right. Instead, Conn dropped his jacket on the grass and pulled off shirt and vest. Angus did the same.

  Stripped, Angus looked bigger than he had done in his clothes, as if the jacket had been serving to disguise a quarry as a man. Conn looked lean beside him. Both their bodies shone pale in the growing sunshine, immersed as they had been in the pallor of the pits.

  They squared up, circling, arms revolving, for an unconscionable time. Conn threw a punch like a signal and they found themselves released into making a series of embarrassed passes at each other until, Angus stumbling on a tuft of grass, Conn’s left hand connected with his cheekbone. Meeting the pain, Angus suddenly came alive. He bull-rushed Conn and for seconds they threshed in a tangle of arms out of which Conn miraculously escaped, like a man passing thr
ough a mincing machine intact. They came slowly together again.

  The fight had become real. The next couple of collisions tapped the anger in the two of them. Angus burst Conn’s lip and left a red weal like a birth-mark under his heart. Long buried feelings re-emerged, grievances queued up for a go. Each found himself called to answer for the anguished frustrations and complex resentments that had massed up in the other.

  The punches were fired from what both had at first believed were unassailable positions. Conn had begun believing that he was so right that he couldn’t lose. He had felt the insuperable justice of his position. Angus had been convinced that his strength was annihilating.

  Each proved the other wrong. Conn learned quickly that his assumption was as stupid as trying to stop a stampede by calling it names. Angus saw that Conn simply wouldn’t annihilate. There was something extra there now. He would just have to be beaten.

  They wove a crazy pattern in the sunlight. Anyone watching from the farm a mile above them on the hill would have seen them blunder like butterflies about the field, while the grass went black in the shadow of a cloud, greened again in the sun. What they wouldn’t have seen was that the field was crowded. Its bigness, in which they seemed lost, was cluttered with the furniture of their past. They bumped into their father’s failure, backed against countless incomprehensible memories, struck against their mother’s pain. And in their rage they made a wreckage of it all and tried to heap it on each other’s head.

  Their breathing became their total context, contained them like a cloud that threatened suffocation – the grunts and gulps and barking exhalations all that was left of their father’s talk, their mother’s silence. They wrestled, their hands skidding on their bodies greased with sweat, and broke apart. Honking for air, they plunged back in. Conn, whimpering with anger, swung a right at Angus and buckled his fist on his shoulder. They closed again, Angus bear-hugging Conn until his spine bent like a bow, Conn writhing and butting and finally kicking himself away.

  They moaned at each other, watching. Conn started to let Angus come to him, trying to withhold his punches till Angus was almost on him, his nerves taut with the fear of it. Angus tried to bury Conn under sheer weight of pressure, his assaults failing time after time, like powder refusing to fire, until he hit Conn with a punch that landed like a boulder on his ribs, lifted him and jarred him on to his back. Angus jumped in with one foot raised to kick. By witholding it, he made a counter-pressure in the fight, an eye of self-awareness that inhibited them. At once he was angry with himself. As Conn rose, Angus took a savage swing at him. Conn threw himself clear and Angus spun on his own momentum and sat down.

  Instantly, both felt how tired they were. Angus sat heaving. Conn bent over, retching for air. They had to finish it soon. Looking up, Angus was enraged at the injustice of Conn standing. He got up and charged.

  Conn came into his best phase of the fight. Faced with Angus’s self-neutralising anger, he was given an extension of life. He backed and dodged, leading Angus on to his punches. But his temporary success was a guarantee of his ultimate failure. Time and again, he set up perfectly the mechanics of the kill and couldn’t effect it. He was like a matador who had everything that was needed except a sword. And then, without preliminary, Angus hit him once above the temple and the inside of his head distended like a balloon. His feet went into a strange vaudeville routine and he travelled an astonishing distance, a drunk man going for a walk. But he wouldn’t go down because if he did he could never get back up. He stood, shaking his head and peering patiently among the splinters of his vision, looking for Angus. When he finally saw him, Angus was waiting at the end of several badly lit corridors.

  They started towards each other. It was a long journey. Both seemed caught in separate currents, so that they circled out of distance and started all over again. Conn was aware of a badge of blood fastening painfully to his upper lip. Angus’s arms weighed on him like a couple of corpses. He felt as if he might need help to lift them. Finally, they were level but still some way apart. Heads drooping, they looked across at each other, like men on opposite sides of a street.

  The sweat frosted on their bodies. Conn was prepared to go on but knew at the same time that it would only be a matter of going on. Angus sensed that he could stay with it forever but he would only be the servant to Conn’s own exhaustion, and his victory would be like the action of a bystander. The fight was reducing them to ciphers, like swimmers caught in a storm. Whatever positions they were finally beached in would prove nothing about them. Nobody had won. But the fight had lost.

  Their breathing gradually subsided, admitting the other sounds around them. A cow mooed. The river was still there. They turned together to pick up their clothes and in doing that they acknowledged more than the futility of one fight. Like the retiring champions of a way of life, they felt the pointlessness not just of their own actions but of their father’s and their friends’. All they had achieved was to pay homage to a dead ethic. What they had done had courage and dignity and even a kind of grandeur but no relevance. In a last defiant gesture, Angus stopped and held Conn by the shoulder.

  ‘Holy Christ!’ he said. ‘Ah’ll say wan thing. Let them come a hundred-fuckin’-handed, an’ we’ll eat them. Bring ony ten men intae this park, an’ you an’ me wid punch them intae the grund. A’ richt, then?’

  They stood swaying slightly, drunk with exhaustion, as if waiting for an answer. Only the wind ruffling the grass around their feet. They went back to searching for shirts and jackets. As they stumbled around the field, astonished at how far from their clothes their crazy pilgrimage had taken them, the total oppressive failure of it gelled. Their white shivering bodies, mapped with a scuffle but enlisted in a war, hunted for covering. Holding their clothes at last, they looked vaguely round the field where they had buried some family ghosts.

  They went down the banking and drank at Moses’ Well. But the water only added to the pain of Conn’s mouth. Angus scudded on down from the well to the river’s edge and Conn went after.

  ‘Ah’m fur a soom,’ Angus said.

  He stripped buff and hit the water like an avalanche. Watching him, Conn wanted the water round himself. As he took off the rest of his clothes, his body became a crowd of pains. He drowned them in the searing cold of the black water, where it ran deepest under a ledge of rock. They splashed and lolloped and lay, while the leaves made patterns on them.

  They dried themselves with their vests, which they afterwards put in their pockets. Walking back down the road, they were very quiet, almost drugged with the day. Like Siamese twins who had wrenched themselves apart, they were each in pain, but at least the wounds of each were unmistakably his own.

  In the town Angus wanted to buy cigarettes. Standing beside him in the shop, Conn watched him buy two copies of the Sunday People. He gave one to Conn.

  They walked to the corner where they would separate. Conn watched the people passing in the street. The bells were ringing, inviting some of them to church. Conn looked at Angus.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Ah’ll be seein’ ye.’

  Angus held up his palm in a salute. As they walked away, a few yards broke between them like an ocean. Each held the paper tucked under his arm, a flimsy rudder.

  15

  Conn was alone with Mick in the house. Jenny and Kathleen had gone with the weans and Old Conn to the park. The book lay across Mick’s knees as usual, his forefinger sifting through it. Empty of the others, the place seemed oppressively still to Conn, even the sun motes suspended. He felt that if he spoke, his voice would reverberate. He thought of going out but couldn’t think of anywhere to go.

  Instead, he crossed to the partly open window and looked down at the corner. A haphazard group of men stood and crouched there. The sun shone full on them and their postures – back-tilted head, splayed hand, minutely tapping foot, chin crutched on palm – were shadowless, like a mural. They seemed stunned by the sunlight.

  Conn walked back and forth i
n the room. Everything oppressed him, looked ugly. He sat down beside the empty hearth, gnawing the back of his hand.

  ‘Hoo did ye make oot against Angus?’

  Mick’s head was still lowered to his book. Conn wondered if Mick meant what he had thought he meant.

  ‘Whit?’

  ‘Aw, come oan,’ Mick said. ‘Ye can maybe kid ma mither oan aboot a gamey catchin’ up wi’ ye. But Ah ken ye had a go wi’ Angus. Hoo did ye get oan?’

  ‘Ach, it just kinna petered oot. A guid thing fur me.’

  ‘Whit’s the oadds, onywey?’ Mick said. ‘It wis a no-contest.’

  ‘Hoo d’ye mean? Dae ye think he’s that guid?’

  ‘Conn, be yer age. That’s no’ whit Ah’m talkin’ aboot. Ah mean who cares which wan o’ you two can punch the ither yin’s heid in. Whit did ye want tae fight wi’ Angus fur onywey?’

  ‘Whit fur? Because o’ whit he did tae ma feyther.’

  ‘Och, Conn. Dae ye no’ unnerstaun’ yit? Don’t waste yer time worryin’ aboot whit Angus does. He’s gave up the joab a while ago. He disny ken whit it’s a’ aboot. He’s like a man shapin’ up tae his mirror.’

  ‘Hoo can ye be so cauld?’

  ‘We leeve in a cauld place. Maybe Ah’ve jist adaptit.’

  ‘He’s oor brither,’ Conn said. ‘Ken? The fella that used tae stey here.’

  ‘Aye, he’s ma brither,’ Mick said. ‘Ah like ‘im fine. But don’t ask me tae take ‘im seriously.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Conn stood up. ‘Whit’s happenin’ here?’

  He started to walk. Mick stayed still. Only his mouth had moved. Conn stopped again at the window, looking out. Mick was staring at the floor.

  ‘Whit’s happenin’?’

  ‘Whit’s happenin’ is that folk don’t ken whit’s happenin’. They jist want wages an’ they canny accept that they’ll hiv tae tak’ mair. Tae get whit ye want, ye’ve goat tae settle fur mair, that’s a’.’

  ‘But ma feyther,’ Conn said. ‘Is that him by, jist like that?’