Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  *

  I went a lot to the beach in my last week at Saltcoats. My father was worse every day. It was odd to see the sand under snow, as if the sea-foam had stepped from the waves, and it lay here and there, a white crackling on the rind of the coast.

  Mrs Drake had been right those years ago in Berwick. I wondered was she still alive. Was she sighing and breathing yet? Or did she one day fall with her spade, the North Sea ripping the air about, a squall of kittiwakes marking the shore, and the old woman dead, like nothing was nothing, and breath just slipped away? The thought of her lying there. Her hand across the shore she loved. Her skin cells flaking in the sand.

  Her ink was still clear in the note at the back of The Sea Shore. I kept it to hand. Her favourite line from Thomas Hardy: ‘Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour.’

  I walked up the town from the shore that night with a sense of coming change. Aldo’s chip shop aglow in the early dark. Young men gathered at the window-cage. The sound of their heels as they bashed against it.

  You followed the towpath that came from the shore, where our Ferguson burn ran into the sea. You stuck to the path at the housing estate, and found the old bridge, the castle still, and up through the trees you passed towards the school. The path was all ice as I walked along. There was sometimes a silence on the housing schemes at night. Every house glowed orange. You’d hear a dog’s bark. A baby crying. Somebody whistling to a bedroom window. But mostly it was quiet on a night like this. The washing lines, the whirligigs, were hung with icicles, and the roads were slurried with grit. One or two chimneys blew smoke at the edge of the scheme. But hardly any. The hum in the air was from pylons; a cold and nervous electrical hum.

  After all this time I took in the street names. I stopped and looked at them. I had passed through the housing scheme blind until then. A grid of twelve streets. I wandered that night from one to the other; wandering slowly, the pavement all ice, a deep-lying chill in the tarmacadam bones.

  Keir Hardie Drive.

  John MacLean Drive.

  Sandy Sloan Drive.

  James Maxton Drive.

  Arthur Woodburn Drive.

  Helen Crawfurd Drive.

  Tom Johnston Drive.

  Jean Mann Drive.

  Hugh Murnin Drive.

  William Gallagher Drive.

  John Wheatley Drive.

  Campbell Stephen Drive.

  I had thought I would never know those names, and soon I would never forget them. My coming years with Hugh made me know them, and the years since then have made them strange.

  But that frosted night I wanted to know them. The cold in our house made it clear all at once. I looked from the window at that sudden paradise of sodium yellow. The housing scheme. My grandfather’s plans. There was my new life out there. Our modern housing. There it was, yellow through the trees. Street after modern street, named for the receding glory of dead socialists.

  Our new windows. They deflected none of my father’s old pain. He was coughing up blood and refusing the doctor. He was so much younger than he liked us to know. But there he was, in that swamp of a house, spitting up blood in an ashtray, calling out names with his chin on his chest. My mother was white. The staff at the school just passed without blinking.

  One night a policeman brought him back to the house in a van. They had found him down in the centre of town, lying in the snow, his red hair frozen to the pavement. The police had taken him to Casualty, and one of them brought him back. The officer said they had to cut his hair. They cut his hair to get him off the street. He was frozen to the ground. He was lucky to be alive, he said. Nearly lost him, he said. Must get help for him, before it’s too late.

  My mother sat him down on a stool in the living room. She brought in all the fires she could find. He was shaking like nothing. She sat him there. She gave him a can of lager.

  ‘No more whisky,’ she said.

  And then, with all care, with all the patience there is in the world, she evened up the hair all around his head. His red curls dropped under the blunt scissors. Red leaves down to the carpet. I thought of his hair still frozen to the pavement. Down there, in the town, those frosted hairs where he nearly died.

  Fear is what remains of Ferguson for me. Cold fear. And the thought that we all might die in the night. And time was so slow in going out. My last day passed so slowly. Ashen-faced, unkindly, a morning after my own heart.

  I was standing in striped pyjamas at the crack of dawn. Thirteen years old. Standing at the window in my parents’ bedroom. No one was there but me. My mother was working at the Superloaf; my father was out there tearing up space. The day cracked open like an oyster. There was salt spread on the road, and the grass was white with unmarked snow, like a field of pan bread. Nothing but likeness that grey-filled morning. Nothing but like.

  Our trees like the movement of three witches’ fingers.

  The clouds like the man in Mulligan’s Pool.

  And me like my father in his father’s boots, watching for nothing along the road, keeping an eye out, chittering cold in that upcoming Baltic sun. My head was different that day. And then I saw my mother limping up the path. A black knot she was – the white sky behind, the snow beneath – and she moved up the path with her scarf round her head. I could see there was something wrong with her.

  I sat on the edge of his unmade bed. The smell of him about it. I could see the stairs from where I sat, and could hear her footfalls, one at a time, and the way she whimpered in her sore throat. She was crying on the stairs. A horrible dread came over me at I sat there. The sound of her trouble. I could hear it as she moved up the stairs, and could see it as she stepped on to the landing. Both hands on the bannister, the scarf around her head. It wasn’t a sound I knew. Not anger or unhappiness, not disappointment or woe, not embarrassment, not resentment, not regret. The sound in the hall was the sound of pain. She was hurt. She was crying like a child. The slow, thick whimper of the suddenly injured. I rose from the edge of the bed as she came to the bedroom door. The look of her will bother me all my life.

  She couldn’t keep up with her breath. She drew off her scarf in the pale doorway. My own breath went out to soothe her. Her forehead was swollen and dark. Her cheek was grazed from the eye to the chin. Blood ran from a wound on her lip. My eyes were lost in the shocked space between us. Like a child she wept. Our eyes joined across the metres of festering carpet. A look unknowable. And some wordless seconds we passed there in hell together. ‘He ran after me,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t his fault. I argued with him in the road. He pushed me away. I ran and ran. It was dark. I fell at the rocks. My face is sore, Jamie. Get me a cloth. It wasn’t his fault.’

  I held her fast and weeping at the door. ‘I’m going to kill him,’ I said.

  The rest of the day she spent in bed. I fixed up a lamp beside her. There was something numb about Alice as she lay on those pillows. She didn’t say much, and didn’t flinch as I cleaned her face, dabbing the sores with TCP.

  ‘Why did you marry him, Mum?’

  ‘I loved him, son,’ she said.

  In the afternoon he came back to her side. I walked up the stairs with a cup of tea. He sat on her bed with his head on her knees. A waste of tears. Her hand just stroked at his scissor-marked hair. I put down the cup by the bed, and he turned. ‘It was an accident, Jamie. She fell on the road.’

  ‘And you left her there,’ I said. ‘Don’t look at me. We’re finished.’

  *

  My escape came sooner than most. I woke in my bed one day with sore legs, just a kid with sore legs, and I told the parents I couldn’t walk. An ambulance came to the school. They lifted me out of bed. My mother stepped into the ambulance too. We were never meant to return. There was nothing wrong with the legs. I just woke up, that’s all, and the sun was coming through the net curtains. A fearsome promise in the sun that morning, scorching out the damp on the wa
lls, the countries and glaciers and lost forests, burning through my framed certificates of First Communion and Confirmation, and in the vast white heat of the moment I knew it was time to go. I couldn’t live our life any more. So I faked the legs. And in the Kilmarnock Infirmary I spoke to my mother in a new way. ‘I’m off,’ I said.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘To fuck,’ I whispered, ‘and don’t say stay or anything else cause I’m gone.’

  The doctor waited by the trolley He looked like one who had spent his life just combing his hair. I spoke to the mercy of his white coat.

  ‘I like history and flowers, me,’ I said.

  ‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘Can you not see that you’re upsetting your mother with this talk?’

  ‘And buildings with windows going all the way up.’

  I felt sometimes like I wanted to die. My mother’s grazes. We wept beside the choking lifts. I could think of nothing but the lunatic smell of the wards. ‘I will go and stay with Granny and Granda,’ I said in the end.

  And my mother, she walked away. She always wore a nylon apron. Even when not doing the house, or tidying herself away from the world, she wore a checked apron. I don’t think she had many clothes to wear. And as she walked away in tears that day, making off down the corridor, a wounded animal, I felt I might just freeze there for good. She couldn’t help me; I couldn’t save her. No longer could we even calm each other down. I stood on my shaking legs, my head on the public phone. I wanted to smash those walls, or dial God, or fling myself down the lift shaft, shouting last things in a loud voice. But there was nothing to do. My granda’s voice came on to the line.

  ‘Jamesie, my boy,’ the old voice said, ‘that’s right. You’re somebody who likes our new buildings, and you liked Nana’s flowers. Remember? Come here to your room.’

  He said I would do my exams some day.

  ‘You’ll be clever about it. Come to your room. You know your nana and me, we love to show you all the things. We have your chemistry set here. And new books.’

  That was more or less the end of my mother and father and me. I wouldn’t see them for many years. And it has taken these years to begin to know them.

  It was that simple, and that hard. Mother going down the corridor, her apron covered in hospital light, my father sick at home, killing us all with his sadness. The sight of her walking away that day. She was a young woman, and all the fine strings of her being drew her back to the man we had once agreed to hate. And now she might lie beside him until the clocks had stopped. Of course I knew nothing. She couldn’t just leave him alone with his bottles. And so there I was: my first grand act of selfishness complete.

  I stopped all the crying. The polished tiles under my feet suddenly shone upwards, and I could see my face glowering back at me. My teen jeans and Lions’ T-shirt. All the distant hospital noises came at last. My mother would be on the bus now back to my father. A steady breathing came back to me. Something was settled. There was no way I could ever miss that house of ours.

  That was how I came to live in the flats at Annick Water. My grandfather’s home was bright. The radiators burned in the evening, and wood-chip paper covered the walls, clean from ceiling to living-room floor, and white, a high room over the New Town, books and pictures and an early start. There were no pretty poisons or fungal walls, none of that old creeping darkness. There was only the past of Hugh and Margaret, the past of their people, the country, and buildings. I thought I knew what the country was made of. They said no, no: come along with us. ‘There are ruined buildings in the world,’ said Hugh, ‘but no ruined stones.’

  Hugh then called me his project. He gave me his books, his tools, and his names for everything. He spoke of the busy years that had made our day. All the secrets of Scottish housing came to me first hand. Not all of them – not Hugh’s stone privacies – but the tricks of the trade, and the tale of our family’s bid for Utopia. I heard of trades unions. I heard of saints. But mostly Hugh told me of building bricks, of clays, and slates, and cements, and steel. He told me the cupola of the Church of San Gioacchino was covered with aluminium sheeting in 1897. He told me how asbestos tiles clad the Empire Stadium at Wembley in 1923. He drew me a map of the bitumen source, the great Pitch Lake in Trinidad. He spoke of plastics, and resins, and ‘rainwater goods’; he spoke of plasterboard. Hugh showed me love, and he showed me the scope of his love, of Margaret, and me, and reinforced concrete.

  Three miles or so from the Ferguson school I found a place in another world. A place of disciplines and hopes. A valley of information. A well-lighted room. And Hugh and Margaret were people of no small understanding. We went to the rivers, and over the hills of Kyle and Carrick, the ferns and trees all listening like me on the headland, and Hugh with his words, full flood on the moor. Gran Margaret corrected his names for the families of flowers. And down below us the coast of Ayrshire was mute. The sea and the coast were quiet below, there in the lights of old January.

  TWO

  The Night Stairs

  So the moon is up there. I see it fine. And know that an eye is looking down. It must see the earth that we can’t see, and also see me, a stranger slumped on a racketing train, a yellow train on the marshes this night, gathering speed, and Ayrshire out there, a moon-drunk whore in the dark. This light from the sky, it travels right down the years to find us.

  And years had passed since the train out of Berwick. Here I was on a different train. There was little of the boy I used to be in the face that stared from the darkened window. I sat alone in a charcoal suit. A thirty-five-year-old man on a train. I was coming back to Ayrshire to see my grandfather. The smell out there, the shadows. They were all that I knew and remembered. The fields were black. The trees were crooked past a gauze of rain.

  The word in my head was carbon.

  The vegetable origins of coal. The decomposition of old trees and shrubs. You imagine you smell it in the Ayrshire fields. The breath of everything; the black seams underground. The layer upon layer of carboniferous fruit. And as I grew up there were men still mining the land of its antique load. But now they live on the surface again. Except for our fathers now planted. The ones now dead, and carboniferous fruit themselves. The ides of geology – a memory of loss.

  Carbon. It led out my thoughts as the train came down.

  The racketing, racketing train.

  I thought of the carbon exhaled in the breath of those living. The stuff absorbed by those meadows outside. The atoms deep down, in the coal out there – pressure and time, pressure and time – which had gone from the tiny expanse of our lives. I thought of the carbon in crude iron ore – burning away, burning away – but keeping enough for to make it good steel. The train and the fields and the houses and me. Of course we were one on that journey back. The slow train’s rhythm sending me out. Pressure and time, pressure and time.

  The sight of a Gorbals towerblock had put me back with the carbon again. The metal beams; my grandfather’s hopes.

  I breathed out hard in the empty carriage. You could see the breath like cotton in the air. I was going home.

  Carbon combines with sulphur and hydrogen. With iron it forms steel; and it unites with copper into a carburet, as observed by Dr Priestley.

  My mind fell back with the heave of the train.

  Our fathers were made for grief. I could see it now. And all our lives we waited for sadness to happen. Their sunny days were trapped in a golden shag box. Those Scottish fathers. Not for nothing their wives cried, not for nothing their kids. Cities of night above those five o’clock shadows. Men gone way too sick for the talking. And how they lived in the dark for us now. Or lived in our faces, long denied. And where were our fathers? We had run from them. We had run and run. My life had been miles and miles away. Until this October.

  The train screamed into a black tunnel.

  Scotland again. We all sprouted up in these valleys of mirth. Possible fools with bigots for fathers, losers for husbands, and mean, mortal hours. And
only the prospect of living in their wake, and one day becoming just like them. And how we were taught to wear our endowment lightly. A purple thistle sewn to the pocket of a school blazer. But hard drink had ever been the only promise. The only promise, and nowhere named in our history books.

  I was coming back home with a hope to escape again soon. I thought it could make no difference to me. This other country. This place of the past. It couldn’t detain me long. Outside the train I could see the lights, the spangled bands of once-modern houses.

  Carbonaceous.

  A heap of bones, a wrecked carbuncle. Flooded with streetlamps: the Hutchinson Charity School at Paisley. In a second we passed by its ruins. My granda Hugh Bawn once named him the only poet, a man who had taught in that school, John Davidson. And Margaret would have none of him. Davidson, the devil of Barrhead. The antichrist. The blether of science. ‘God through the wrong end of a telescope.’ The self-killing man.

  But to us John Davidson had the modern soul. ‘What does that man tell us?’ Hugh would ask, out of my grandmother’s hearing. ‘What is it he’s saying?’

  ‘That man is made from the same ingredients as the universe,’ I said.

  Hugh would smile. ‘Is that what it is?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I would say. ‘He says it here. He turns his back on Victoria …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He makes a great deal of the common clerk. He says that science will make our joy.’

  ‘He’s the modern boy,’ said Hugh.

  And there I would read the secret verses. The man who could take his father by the beard. ‘What did you in begetting me?’

  Hugh loved John Davidson. ‘I’ve no time for poetry, but for him all day.’