Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

We sat quiet.

  My granny took to her knitting, and we spoke a little of everyday things. She liked to be quiet and she liked to be watched. The common universe was really too noisy a place for my granny. What she wanted was perfect peace. And sometimes I’d think her idea of order was there in the knitted rows she held in her lap, those staticky, coloured bands. A universe of virtues foretold in those gloss-paper patterns. The finished garments held all that was good to her mind. She stared into those fuzzy rows for most of every day, and there, I’ve come to think, she saw strength and goodness, and usefulness and purity. All through these long years, her ambition had slid down those pit-pitting needles, and day upon day her hopes had unfurled with the wool in the basket.

  Knit one, purl two. Knit one, purl two.

  My granny’s days were invested in baby caps and jackets. The fruit of her private moments now went about in prams, snuggled softly against the skin of babies she never saw. And one day those clothes would sell on again, for pence, to other old women short of wool, with lives to unpick, and new hours to fill with this curious knitting.

  Pit-pit-pit, pit-pit-pit.

  ‘What goes around comes around,’ she said from the depth of her chair. ‘I’ve always looked forward to seeing you back among us, Jamie.’

  I smiled across at her. The high rain was tapping around the window.

  *

  There was no light in the passage to my grandfather’s room. Just a dark hall like some tunnel. But there was a strange blue-coloured glow at the end of it. Closer to his door you could see it was coming from outside: the blue searchlight on top of the block. As I walked down the hall his coughing gave out.

  The door was open. A framed picture of Nat King Cole hung on the wall opposite. On the other side was a drawing of a beehive, a gold and pink hive.

  All was dimmed in that blue fog. Shadows from the net curtains fell over most things, making cobalt patterns on the ceiling, and down on the carpet an electric fire burned away. The room was filled with an old man’s smells: sweat and tobacco. Medicine.

  And the strangest thing had happened to the walls. The plaster was bashed in around the room. Craters, at head height, were deep and cracked, showing the Gyproc underneath. Other holes, both higher and lower on the wall, were more in the way of small hollows or dents. My granda lay in a single bed in the corner. His eyes were bright.

  We looked at each other for minutes. Yes, my granda’s eyes they were bright, and humid, and scarce of a blink, and they scorched the air between us. The fierce blue light hung over him. His head way down in the pillows.

  He stared over. His chest rose to meet the gathering cough. But even as he spluttered forward he kept his eyes up, only gripping the legs of his pyjamas, and he put a hand in the acres between us. He tried to give air to a laugh.

  ‘You’re good-looking all the same, just like me,’ he said.

  His voice was raw: a low, deracinated boom. You could tell he was once a big speaker, for the tone was there, though the vital gust was gone now. He was like a man without rooms in his former castle. The locks had been changed. The plan was altered. The servants no longer answered his call. He knew the place but the place no longer knew him. He had lost the power and the right to live as he once had lived in that place. His steps now echoed in the empty hall. Hugh Bawn’s body made a stranger of his voice.

  ‘Come over here,’ he said. He moved his legs up the bed and pointed twice to the space he had cleared. ‘Sit beside me. I’m sore.’

  His eyes of druid grass.

  He kept on looking me up and down. ‘What’s all that hair hanging about your forehead for?’ he said. ‘Do they no have barbers in England? I suppose that’s the smart look.’

  ‘You’d be glad of a strand or two yourself.’

  ‘Aye, well. You’re the smart one. Fair-haired like your mother. You’ll all be in the Nazi uniforms in a minute.’

  With this he paddled his hand in the bed clothes. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve sense enough to smoke?’ he said.

  I put my hand into my jacket pocket, felt for the pack, and pulled one out. I handed it over, and then reached in again.

  ‘The good dentist,’ he said, ‘always takes them out one at a time.’

  Never misses a trick, I thought.

  And then holding the cigarette in front of his face he snapped the tip like some breaker of bread. He threw it down the side, and he licked a line down the length of the fag, then he burst it open, freeing the straggly bits of tobacco. He pulled half of it on to a Rizla paper. He rolled it up with his yellow fingers.

  The whole operation was done in a spirit of perfect disdain. He put the rest of the tobacco in a green tin by the bed. ‘Has Maggie been telling you all my secrets then?’ he said, spitting some shag on the covers.

  My first weeks back I was given to sneering. I thought it would make Hugh comfortable, and me less sentimental. That was before I knew anything. Before I saw the change in myself. But those first weeks my voice could be snide. I thought we would live for ever as us.

  ‘My granny would only know a secret,’ I said, ‘if it set fire to her knitting basket.’

  I rubbed my eyes. ‘Did I ever tell you she’s too good for you?’

  ‘Don’t start me,’ he said. ‘Any chance of a light before I die here?’

  My granda was more comfortable with silences than any man I’ve ever known. He enjoyed silences. He just sat there, riveted. There was nothing he wanted to say, and nothing he was going to say, unless he was already saying it, in which case nothing else mattered. Other people’s talk was just a distraction. Or a cue for something he could say himself. But I’m sure he loved the gaps best. He loaded them up with expectations: he thought that any good man he spoke to would use these silences wisely, to maturate the wisdom, and mull the genius, of the things that Hugh had just said. So he enjoyed them. He was always very generous with his silences.

  We filled the air with smoke.

  ‘You’ve no idea of the pain,’ he said. ‘It’s no everybody that could stand it. This pain. But it’s okay with me. The nurses at the hospital think I’m a great guy, a brilliant cunt. They say people usually get upset and scream blue murder and all that shite, but no me. I told them it was a whole new fucking ball game with this boy. Other people, they don’t have the balls. That’s the problem nowadays, Jamesie. No fucking balls. I’m sitting here happy as Larry. I know what the score is, believe-you-me. No fucking problem …’

  As he said this he tapped his head with a long finger.

  ‘… And you know me. Far too busy for feeling sorry. Holy fuck. Still too busy.’

  He was eighty-something. But he still went on like this. One thing you could say: he had never outgrown himself. Not Hugh. All he’d been through and still he could speak like the lovable gangster. Always in a hurry, always busy, always smart about himself, easy with the facts, familiar with the territory, no time for the schmucks, forever dismissive of a world less attractive than himself.

  Young Hughie. Jimmy Cagney.

  Like all the men who liked to show how the world could never touch them. As children we loved those men. They could have told us the Clyde was all gold. They seemed so smart about things that scared us. Everyone outside their talk was a loser. They could doctor the world with their fists. And no one could force them – that was the message. They knew how to shine in this bastard mess. And they stuck with this knowledge. Even after the shine had gone. They stuck to their way of talking and seeming. Behind their doors those men could feel sorry. Some had always been sorry. But they marched ahead with their infinite bravado.

  ‘This stupid cunt of a doctor – you know Riccarton? He asked me if I had been depressed. I looked at him. “Depressed?” I says. “Listen, fuck, where I come from people don’t have the time to get depressed. We’re too busy making things better.” Is that no right, Jamesie?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you know what the daft cunt says? He says he thinks I’m in for a roug
h ride and I needs to be honest with myself. “Honest?” I says. “I was fucking teaching people to be honest in this country when you were fucking dribbling about your mammy’s tits. You know what I mean, son?” Christ. Honest he says. Fucking honest. “Look, son,” I says. “Never mind. Just you see to them that’s sick, and I’ll get away and get on with my business.” These people think you’ve got nothing to do. I says, “I’ll be honest with you, right? Things are fine. I’m fine. There’s nothing the matter with me. Just you pay attention to them that needs help.” He hadn’t an answer. That was the end of him.’

  Hugh had always spoken that way. He was ready for life as only he understood it. Everything else – even throat cancer, a stroke – was just rubbish. Nobody outside the family seemed to know anything private about Hugh. A big wheel in local government. People knew his face. Once upon a time he was Mr Housing. People remembered his slogans, his grand speeches, his swim across the open river as an old man.

  The big wheel came round our way. He said he could live and die in these tall houses. ‘Good for you, good enough for me!’

  By the time I saw him he had slipped from the world, but not from himself. I wondered, as I sat on his bed, how long he could keep this going. Everything in that room spoke of his agonies, but he could not. Even this late, with his only grandson back to see him, with the illness far on, and Margaret at that small distance; with no great loss between us, with the heedless rain now heavy at that hour, he couldn’t open up, or say he was frightened, or look at me straight in that blue light. Not for a second could Hugh turn his back on the public man. Later I might have understood. But that first night I was ashamed of him.

  For an hour he spoke of his glorious well-being. Or he lay in silence. When I asked about the letter he said it was written in a hurry. He wasn’t worried. He’d nothing to tell me. He wanted me to feel I had done nothing wrong. This is what he said. He wanted me to feel better about things. He wanted to see what I looked like now I was older. He was keen to hear me speaking.

  But he spoke it all himself. In everything he said and didn’t say.

  ‘There’s no point in self-pity.’

  In that room he said it. And then he enjoyed the silence between us.

  He slept a little. And then he would wake, with sudden, rambling tales of great buildings, major works. I began to recognise among these tales the speeches of the past. A line of Gaitskell and Wilson. A rag of policy; demographics. And slowly he bent his talk to the news of the coming successes. His eyes were swimming. He was lost to himself. At one point I began stroking his arm to slow him down. He was racing. He was stabbing the air with his yellowed fingers. And then he turned. His eyes seemed to snap to attention.

  ‘Are you fucking about with me, son?’ he said.

  I said no.

  ‘Cause if you are I’ll fucking flatten you. Right? Like a ton of bricks. Flatten you, and your schoolboy’s hair.’

  ‘Granda. I’ve come here to see you.’

  ‘See me? Not on your fucking nelly. I know you. What are you after? Have you come up the stairs to laugh at me? And I was here before you all. This is no Liverpool. Laugh all you like down there. This is my house.’

  His voice was parched. But he was angry and crying as he said these things and I didn’t break in. ‘You’re just like spoilers and Tories the same,’ he shouted. ‘Blacklegs.’

  I rose from the bed. Margaret came down the hall.

  ‘Don’t upset him, Jamie,’ she said. ‘What’s all this creating?’

  ‘Did you bring this fucking turncoat here to laugh at me?’ He was coughing and spitting at the bedclothes. ‘Did you ask him his name?’

  Margaret brought him something in a plastic cup.

  ‘Still wrecking are you, stranger?’ he said to me. ‘You better lock him in; Maggie. He’ll blow the house from under our arses before you know what’s what.’

  I wasn’t surprised. I preferred this. There was something due in it, something honest. But the expression on his face knocked me back a little. I had quite forgotten the weights and measures of family venom.

  ‘I came to see you, Granda. Just to see you. There’s no need …’

  ‘You took your bastarding time getting here. Fuck off.’

  I sat quietly in a chair by the bed. My granny left us alone. Hugh rambled words and speeches for a while and then he turned his face to the wall.

  ‘Just sit there,’ he whispered.

  The light was wrongly medicinal. The rain had gone to sleet again. I pulled the netting across the window, hung my jacket over the top. The minutes passed on the face of the digital alarm. And the hours. My granda’s breathing grew low and coarse. He was sleeping. Sometimes he would gasp as he slept. His lips would go, as if to say something, and then he would fall away again, a mewling of sleep, and only his breathing filling the room. At 4.42 he said the word ‘Thomas’.

  Our high block swayed for an inch in the wind. Down among the orange lamps a broken car alarm marked out the time. You could hear its yell above the weather. I’d forgotten where I was. Hugh had taken all my thoughts. Watching him, it had seemed for those hours, for those darkened hours, that no one had lived but him and me. The thought of death made us entire.

  But other lives would be taking place. Beyond these troubled rooms, these tower blocks, and beyond the outskirts of our white-washed town, over the fields, the Ayrshire farmers would rise with the milk. Another sort of day was beginning. Men and women and children with lives of their own would be waking to reap their own dear sorrows. Some would be happy, as some could be.

  It would soon be time for a change of shift at the micro factories down the glen. People going home to one thing or another. And down at the coast the fishers come back with their quota of cod.

  That night was over.

  The dark gave way as my grandfather slept, and some kind of mercy survived its quickening repeal. Hugh Bawn slept on his pillows. His old hands trapped in the cotton of the bedclothes, veins raised high and blue above his joints, the open plain of his chest now sparse of hair and ridged with bone. His dark throat lay inoculated beneath that hollow of wrinkled skin. Like beads of blood, the liver spots wreathed, and specked, the dome of his head.

  That night was over.

  Margaret had made me a bed in the box room. She came down the hall in a red gown as I crept away from Hugh. She handed me an extra blanket. She gave me a loan of her Burns.

  ‘I’m fair glad you’re home, Jamie son.’ Her hair was all kirby-gripped and netted. She turned her back. ‘Get your sleep,’ she said. ‘Things will be better now.’

  The last of these words came along the black hall. I heard her closing the door to her room.

  I went down to my shorts and under the blankets. There were seagulls now. They dived from the roof. I could hear them outside the window. Margaret had placed a tasselled lamp on the bureau beside the bed. Bundles of papers were stacked on the floor. Folders, cuttings. Hardcover books. A smell I had waited all day to smell – old and sweet, the carbon paper.

  Keir Hardie adorned the opposite wall. A picture the colour of tea. That grim smile smuggled beneath his moustache; a temperance flag at his elbow.

  Particles of dust rained down from the ceiling. A falling of dust. The sound of the gulls coming closer. My legs felt warm, and my chest was warm, and my cock, and my neck, and my face. Ghostly eyes peered down from the shelf.

  Iodine-coloured photographs. Boys in muckle boots. Girls in soft bonnets. Crowds of people with banners and boards. Crowds to the distance, and under the banners their faces blurred, and the pavement wet, and all the suggestions of noise on that day. Crowds of unknowns. But a woman there at the core of one picture. A woman in skirts, a boy in her arms. The look on the boy saying something familiar.

  The face on the boy. His eyes peering out. His eyes peering out on a future asleep.

  THREE

  Backlands

  Hugh was born at Ayr in the winter of 1913. His mother, Euphemia Bawn, had l
ain on top of the bed – knees and belly and head like the peaks of Arran – until the day she was due had both come and gone. She wanted to see her baby on the first day of the last week in November. How she pained at the birth no one can tell any more. But a holy word went up at the sight of her first and last child. She had held to the sides of her bed until the break of that day, the feast of Alexander Nevski, her favourite saint. Both mother and son were confined at that time to a ward in the mental hospital of Glengall.

  Euphemia had some voice on her, and she tossed her words over praying hands.

  She memorised bits of obscure liturgy. Alexander Nevski’s replies to the papal legates she had by heart. She took the liberty of rigging them up to her own broad Scots.A registered nurse once recorded her flyte with the sanatorium’s young priest. She harassed his ears with the sayings of saints, words made good for her own use.

  ‘We ken the law o’ God fairly weel aboot here,’ she said, ‘and will need nae lessons frae the likes o’ you.’

  Her medical charts record nothing of the priest’s reply.

  Famie was a fan of the higher winds. You may be sure that no one spoke much of Alexander Nevski among the valleys of Ayrshire in 1913. He hadn’t much been heard of, not since the abbots of Kilwinning had raised his name with their iron bells five hundred years before. The coming wars would make his name famous. But Hugh’s mother had made it her own business. She was one for history. And in coming years she’d find other uses for all those whispered orders. Her political heart would always be softly divine. Even then, in her secret years of infirmity, Euphemia Bawn preferred to make good with the saints.

  The husband, Thomas, was a fine singer and a bad farmer. A hopeless slave like the best of them. He loomed large in the life of the hereafter – people spoke of him after his death – but here on earth he was held in low regard, and often pitied. Thomas it seems was a lovely man, good at life, and making cheer; with never a rag of luck in his life, he was hopelessly bad at making a living.