Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘… stopping at Paisley Gilmour Street, Johnstone, Glengarnock, Dalry, Kilwinning, Irvine, Barassie, Troon, Prestwick, and Newton-on-Ayr. Arriving at Ayr …’

  The sound of the man from somewhere above.

  They’d swing me along the platform on my skinny arms. My head going back: the miles of glass on the station canopy; the starlings on the other side, a cloud of black smoke, this way and that, a cloud of smoke.

  Hugh loved to show me the pictures of his new flats. In some of those pictures they looked like toys. Buildings all shining; up in the sky.

  They made out their spare room like it was just for me. Birds of Prey. The Life of Plants. Build, Build, Build. The Battle of Culloden. A stack of books on an Ottoman basket. Margaret would sometimes read them beside me. ‘William Augustus,’ she would say, ‘the Duke of Cumberland. He slaughtered our men in forty minutes. There’s a flower named after him. Let’s see if we can find it – Sour Billy.’

  Hugh lit one cigarette off another. Embassy No. 6.

  He had photographs all over his cupboard. 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.

  My granda was on the phone. He shouted down it like a man possessed. ‘Get it done! Just get a fucking move on! There are people on waiting lists.’

  Hugh was always a champion curser. Margaret always said he had a mouth on him, and he never hid it from animal or child. You would see Hugh in the most fantastic rages. Usually with his housing colleagues, or with pressure groups, people who had reasons to oppose the erection of this or that tower block.

  ‘Tell me one good reason why this fucking city needs a bastarding golf course,’ he would say.

  ‘Leisure, Councillor Bawn. Leisure. I mean, you don’t expect the people to just sit in your tall buildings all day, do you?’

  ‘No, Mr McCafferty. They’ll be at their fucking work. Or they should be. And when they’re no at their work, they can sit on their arses and look out the fucking window. Look at the nice views we gave them to fucking look at. I mean: the view will be quite restful on the eye. There’ll be no stupid fucking golf links for instance.’

  I learned of these things only slowly. I was quite dazzled by who my granda was, and how he held to tradition with all his stories. To a child – and to many people whose childhoods were far gone – his vision seemed immaculate. He seemed so powerful at the time. He made an impression on everyone he met.

  One morning outside the City Chambers – one of my holidays from Saltcoats – he took me by the hand. We were on our way to look at possible gap sites for new blocks. He liked to take me along to those sites. I think that my fascination fascinated him.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about fucking costs,’ he said to a neat young man in a blazer. ‘People are still living in slums here. We promised new houses. Let’s get them up. No delays. We must fucking move ahead with this.’

  I remember the man said something under his breath. Something about ‘standards’. My granda grabbed him by the throat and pushed him up against a stone lion.

  ‘Listen here, snooty wee cunt. That boy there knows more about standards than you do. We are building good fucking flats. Great flats. For cheap if we can. I just want you to tell me how much we’ve spent once it’s spent. Get it? They tell me you’re a dab hand at the adding up.’

  We walked to Hugh’s car in silence.

  Hugh knew nothing of my life at home. He never did know. And I had no interest in telling him anything. It felt like separate lives. I just wanted him to show me the new buildings. That day we got flowers from my granny’s shop. Margaret counted out the stems. She giggled, and shrugged Hugh off, as he tried to plant a kiss, and nip her arms. I stood there laughing by a bin of lilies. Bus brakes were squealing out on the street. Hugh made us laugh. And as Maggie wrapped our flowers in brown paper my granda began to speak a poem. He did all that, looking at Maggie, a mocking smile about him, and her face flushing with pleasure and old surprise.

  Goodwill is in the blood, in you and me,

  And most in men of wealth and pedigree;

  So rich and poor, men, women, age and youth

  Imagined some ingredient of truth

  In Socialistic faith that there could be

  A common basis of equality.

  ‘Oh don’t, Hugh,’ she said. ‘It’s terrible.’

  ‘Terrible and true,’ he said. ‘The Bard of Barrhead.’

  He took me to see the place where his mother had lived in Govan. We put the flowers on a broken wall. A row of young houses with white verandas stood there in front of us. He told me about the ships that used to pass this way. Only once did he ask about our life down south.

  ‘Do you follow the local history there?’ he said.

  ‘We live in Ayrshire now,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  He left all that to Maggie. ‘Your father’s a waster,’ he said.

  Some of those Glasgow blocks went up in months. Hugh basked in glory; he felt the flats were the great triumph of his life. He would cut the ribbon on many of the new towers. And down in the forecourt he would often speak of Wheatley and MacLean. He spoke of the rent strikes, and his mother, Effie Bawn. He would speak of the great Labour victory over Scotland’s housing problems. And as he cut the ribbon there would sometimes be tears in his eyes. The flats were so personal to him. They grew right out of his private moments.

  He took me to one of these openings in the Gorbals.

  Bright sky, songs. The lobby was full of red balloons.

  Hugh pressed a button sending the first electricity to the lifts. I stood in Florence Square.

  The Maxton Block. Twenty floors. It seemed to me the most beautiful thing in the world. People took pictures. The great bank of windows. Yes his world was high and lovely. He lifted me up that day for one of the newspapers.

  Councillor Hugh Bawn, ‘Mr Housing’, 62, with one of the local children.

  We said goodbye that day for another year. And then one morning an envelope came to our house with my name on it. My granda’s handwriting.

  ‘Come to Glasgow, Jamesie. I don’t know your number.’

  The day I arrived he took me to see a new kind of earth-mover. I brought out some of my drawings.

  ‘A young draughtsman and no mistake,’ he said.

  The new machine was something. I spent the day in a series of builder’s huts. He drove me around his building sites. I was happy to sit in his car with a book. He did his thing with the workmen. He would often come back in a black rage.

  At the end of the day we drove in his car to a field above Roystonhill. It was after dark; the last thing at night.

  The lamps on the motorway glowed like flaming puff-balls. Dozens of high flats with all their different curtains and radiator heat going through the rooms. There was a cold wind outside the car. We sat with the engine on. The radio whisper. The shipping news: moderate or good; warnings at Cromarty, Finisterre.

  The complete dark beyond the yellow lights. Sea salt cracked the frost from the windows.

  ‘We are coming to live in Ayrshire,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have a hand in some of the new housing at Irvine, the New Town. We’ll be very close to you then.’

  My breathing was heavy and quick. I was frightened. I should have been pleased. I would be pleased. But there I was … worried. ‘I know it’s not easy the way things are at home,’ he said.

  I tugged at my jersey. I looked at him; my lip was going. ‘Don’t say anything,’ I said. ‘I don’t want … I don’t want to talk about that place.’

  A whisper of sea on the car radio. Water rolling on a shore somewhere.

  ‘My job is done here, son. I’m getting older myself. Maggie and I would like to be nearer the countryside. Sometimes
I wish …’ And he never finished that sentence. He just stared up at the sultry flats.

  From under the seat he lifted a bag of Caramac bars. Maybe a dozen in the bag. And we sat that night on Roystonhill and ate them all between us. We undid the wrappers, staring out to the flats and the lights and the darkness beyond. ‘We have remade it, Jamesie,’ he said. ‘The world out there. And the future, the future will be fucking easy.’

  He went on speaking in the car. Not to me, and not to anybody. Not even out loud. He just moved his lips as he stared out there. I could see the yellow lights reflected in his eyes. He just moved his lips. To no one, to nowhere.

  The last of the chocolate went soft in his hands.

  FOUR

  Old January

  On the eighteenth floor I dreamed of the sea. Every night the sea. Mainly in the first two weeks. The walls of the room grew liquid in my half-sleep: small coughs passing on one side; shards of songs on the other. My grandparents were often awake in the dead of night.

  The dream of water kept coming back. And every time the sea got colder, it came more slowly, the falling waves, the break on the shore. In the mornings I would wake early. The same gulls at the bedroom window. Since coming back to my gran and granda I’d hardly been out of the house. Just talking to Hugh when he felt like talking; helping my gran with her charity boxes.

  Many a day I just sat in the box room. The bed covered in papers: old letters, plans, newspaper cuttings, legal reports, jotters. One day a letter came from my girlfriend Karen. It came in one of her blue envelopes; Liverpool postmark. Her handwriting was tiny. It was very legalistic. She wrote things down as if they could later be used in evidence. And that was Karen’s thing: she was a lawyer. The handwriting reminded me of why we were going out. We fell in love with each other’s precision, or what we mistook for that. She had always seemed to me so ripe with the facts; Karen wanted the world to be rational, and to express itself in rules; she spoke of rights and responsibilities; she was very organised. And yet there was something romantic in her too. The way she laughed like the world was over. The fact that she danced and sang so easily. The way she kissed you. And the way she felt that the world could be better. But for all her training, for all her reason, she was lost in the drama of big changes happening; she wanted red flags waving, and shouts in the street, and good-minded people marching to a drum. She thought the new Labour Party was an embarrassment. Sometimes I thought it was my past she loved.

  Karen was crazy about office stationery. She would drag me out of restaurants in the afternoon to go with her and find ring-binders. She would lose herself in Ryman’s, wandering the aisles like a mental patient: staples, a hole-punch, some sticky notes, a brace of pads, a jumbo pack of elastic bands. And the letter she sent me was adorned with coloured paper clips and sticky notes. The date was clearly marked off. She liked to draw lines under things.

  Dear James:

  I miss you. I hope you haven’t gone mad yet up there in Scotland. There’s been a big postal strike here, so I hope this letter reaches you before the end of the millennium.

  I don’t know your grandparents, but I hope you will send them my best wishes. I’m sure it’s just terrible, all this. I have spent these last few weeks thinking about things. I am sure going to Scotland for however long it takes is the best way to deal with it all.

  Apart from missing you, I think it’s where you should be right now.

  It’s not easy to write it down, because in a way I just want to run after you, and if I thought it would help you that’s what I’d do. But on reflection I don’t think I should come to Scotland, or that you should see much of me, until all this is over. You need to be away from everything, James – me, here, the office. I think this has been true for a while, and your grandfather’s illness is only part of it. You need to sort things out. You know I’m here. But my honest opinion is you should take this time to yourself, and maybe think about everything, and what you want. I’m here all the time if you need me. Just know that everything’s cool, and take your time.

  Karen had judged the situation well. I missed her too. She knew me better than I knew myself. I had to go off on my own. Beginnings and endings were not to be confused: our love had to find its own level.

  Margaret often wanted me to watch television with her. Every morning she stewed the tea and rolled the lid off a tin of meat. Four McKechnie’s rolls, a half-inch of butter in the fluffy sheik. The family meat. Pink as a week in Miami. Chopped ham and pork; a gelatine moustache. In every mouthful a toxic shock. That was all fine. We ate them with cheer in the grace of confinement. And even the tea began to feel good; its hazelnut languor suited the days.

  My gran is the only person in Scotland who watches programmes for Gaelic viewers. She would insist that she is part of a community of telly-Gaels. She would often speak up (in English) for their virtual nationhood. But I suspected my gran was in fact the only viewer, besides me, a holiday-maker, an armchair tourist, in Angus and Mhairi’s ghostly world of Celtic crosses. Every other morning we sat in front of the TV in Maggie’s bedroom, faces glowing from the phosphorescent breakfast, watching a scree of Arran-knitted hillwalkers tumbling through the mountain air.

  My gran and I began to use this half-hour as a time to practise our laughs. Maggie would occasionally maintain the basic seriousness of the sessions, talking back to Angus, and she’d sometimes ruefully ignore my attempts to burnish the programme’s absurdities. One of the days Mhairi was going on about fashion tips picked up from last summer’s swim-suited holidaymakers on the Western Isles. I found myself unable to stay quiet.

  ‘Swimming costumes?’ I said, ‘in Uist ?’

  ‘Oh aye, Jamie son. You wouldn’t credit the things they have nowadays.’

  ‘But swimming costumes, It’s absolutely freezing up there. All the time.’

  ‘Well they say it’s getting warmer and warmer, Jamie. There’s a hole in the O-zone layer. Have you no heard about it? And anyway, you know what the young ones are like nowadays. They cut about with nothing on.’

  ‘You know something, Gran. I think it’s the English that make this programme. I think Angus is actually called Timothy somebody.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Jamie. You’re spoiling my programme. This is the best thing on.’

  ‘No seriously. They make it in London with actors. I bet you. And they take those giant crosses all over the place. They’re inflatable. I bet you any money.’

  ‘Don’t you believe that, Jamie son. That’s your history there. It’s all you’ve got at the end of the day. Come ben and help me fold these pillowcases …’

  We’d leave the television with its rolling credits, its tuneless Gaelic moan.

  Hugh was not good at sleeping. But he was not always mad or outside himself. Odd noises would struggle free and rise from his discomfort, mostly at night; and old words, old phrases, would steer themselves from his burning throat. But for most of each day he just lay quietly in the bed. He was perfectly conscious, even chatty some days, and only now and then would he fall, in the daytime, into some far delirium.

  Sometimes he would ask me to come through to his room, come through and hear tell of some glory or other. What he really wanted was a listener. A silent listener. One of the long gone boys. The glory days. That is why he called me back home. He never asked me a question. Never sought an opinion. He ignored my life as best he could. And who would blame him? It was all too late for that. Much too late for other people. He carefully let you know it. And yes it might have been so. For Hugh the world was almost chock-full of traitors and liars and fools. His grandson was all three. And some days he would just rage in his room. At hopeless builders, at phoney friends. At people more English than they should ever be. The smallness of the world. No-marks, he would call them. My presence in the flat at Annick Water gave him a final direction for all this fuss. A damp towel on the brow. It wasn’t much fuss really. He was dying there, and he needed something. Somebody. Even if only to blame them for th
ings going wrong.

  Despite knowing all this, and caring about it, I would sometimes lose the rag with him. I came by his bedroom one morning looking for a box of tissues.

  ‘Get the fuck out of there, soft lad,’ he said.

  I was carrying a toothbrush.

  ‘They are my napkins,’ he said. ‘Go and buy some yourself, you tight bastard.’

  And as I went to go he railed again. ‘You know, Jamesie, I’ll tell you something. You are a vain wanker.’

  ‘And why is that, Grandad? Because I own a toothbrush?’

  ‘Is that you getting smart?’

  ‘Well. Tell the truth. You never owned a toothbrush in your life. Your cleanliness never stretched that far, did it?’

  He went as if to get out of the bed. It was a horrible thing to say.

  ‘No, stupid-appearance. All my teeth fell out worrying about you and your daft fucking family. Away you go. There’s a mirror in there waiting for a date.’

  ‘Okay, Grandad. That’s me going into the bathroom now. I might even brush my teeth, just to break the family tradition you know.’ I started walking away.

  ‘Aye fuck off,’ he shouted at my back. ‘You learned all your selfish habits in there.’

  And then half an hour later he would be shouting me through for a chin-wag. ‘Come and listen to this story of how we managed to get the Springburn walk-ups balanced on two pillars.’

  That sort of thing. And he did seem to have more colour in his face after an argument. The truth is that my granda, just like my father, really enjoyed a certain amount of aggro. It gave them a lift.

  But then something happened. As the days wound on he seemed better. His body was full of shadows. We knew that. His head was unsettled. He was loaded with drugs. But in the last week of November he straightened up. He asked for coffee with milk. He wanted porridge. I remember how he specified Scots Porridge Oats: