Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘… The fucker on the box with the big arms.’

  He asked me to bring him more milk. He was gruff and coughing and cursing as usual, but his eyes had a light in them. And then the swearing eased off. No mistake. The aggro decreased. And he grew easier with my clasped hands and my keenness to spell everything out, a keeness that left me day upon day.

  ‘Shurrup,’ he said, ‘and find the record player. Bring it in. I want that pile of records.’

  And when I sorted it up he handed me the Nat King Cole. ‘Stick it on,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure, Hughie, you …’ Margaret started from the door.

  ‘Give us peace, Maggie.’

  ‘… Jack Frost nipping at your nose,

  Yule-tide songs, being sung by a choir,

  Kids dressed up like Eskimos,

  Everybody knows …’

  The Nat King Cole Family Christmas Album. Not an everyday occurrence. Not every day. Not in that building. But it was just like Hugh to rally and suffer in equal measures, and so brilliantly to manhandle our low expectations. To a fine point Hugh was unpredictable. Just when we began to think him strange and terrified – careering downwards – we’d discover him in bed with a tattered joke book and a bunch of songs. A toothless grin on him. A nerveless shrug. His power to surprise was the last thing to go.

  *

  Everybody has one day – just one diamond day – against which they are apt to judge many of the days of their lives. There will be other great days, warmer days, richer times, moments of love or of grief, but none of them will match the movement of life as lived on that one day.

  A time when you most felt part of the world. A day where you somehow knew you were there in the company of all known things. Alive. Every bit alive. Angels high and the vermin below. All watching, all glory. And the great Scottish bridges making perfect sense in a shower of rain. The seasons at once reflected in your skin; the sky in your eyes; the noise through the trees like some sound in the groves inside you. Most days are lost in the decorum of trying, lost in the lanes of the almost known. And there you have it on that one day. You are in it. And with the slow-going afternoon the world all at once can make perfect sense. It will never last; you know that too. But you had it that time. You had it once.

  Hugh lay in the bed with tears on his face. An old seventy-eight was turning on the deck. It was John McCormack, the Irish tenor. The voice sounded distant through a wall of crackles. A muffled wave of golden brass. The melody was slow. My granda’s hands were shaking. He gripped the openings in his pyjamas. Squares of light coming past the curtains and dancing about the room. The singer’s voice. My thin granda shook in the corner with all the years about his eyes. The water in his eyes. He looked up at me.

  ‘Jamesie,’ he said, ‘I want you to go to the pub with me. Can you take me to Ayr?’

  ‘Aye, Granda. I’ll get us a car.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I like the bus. Can you no find a chair? We can go on the bus.’

  I went through and told Margaret.

  ‘You won’t upset him will you, son?’

  ‘Why would I do that, Gran?’ I asked, hoking under the phone stool for the Thomson Directory. ‘I’m not here to upset him. Don’t you think I know what needs to be done?’

  ‘Good boy,’ she said. ‘You know his picture’s been in the paper. There’s a court-thing in Glasgow. They’re trying to say he … misappropriated money. It’s a load of rubbish. I don’t want them near him. Help me will you, Jamie?’

  I placed my hands on both her arms. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  A look passed between my gran and me just then, a look that she had obviously been waiting for those past weeks. She almost swooned with relief. ‘Gran,’ I said. ‘He asked me to come up here. I’d like to make things easier for him now. Do you understand that? Do you know what I’m saying?’

  ‘Aye, son,’ she said. ‘I understand you fine. God help us.’

  There was a British Legion club up in the New Town. They told me it would be fine to borrow one of the wheelchairs. Hugh wanted to walk up with me. He was sure he could make it there. Then we could take the bus. I was never going to argue with Hugh that day. He had to have whatever he wanted. Margaret put some light trousers on him. The shirt made his neck look scrawny, he said. She threaded his arms into a pullover.

  ‘I want my good shoes,’ he said. Maggie bent down to press on two wine-coloured brogues. She tied them double. With as light a touch as possible – he so hated this sort of fuss – I tied his tartan scarf around him. A fawn jacket over the top. And Margaret came in with a cap.

  ‘Maggie,’ he said, ‘here a minute.’

  He whispered to her as I put on my own jacket. Zipped up.

  ‘Take it easy, you two,’ my gran said. ‘Mind, Hughie. Take your time.’

  As I stepped to the door I saw her slip a bundle of notes into my granda’s hand.

  We made our way slowly. Down one flight to the seventeenth. Only the ‘Odds’ lift was working. ‘These elevators are grand things when they get going,’ he said.

  His arm was linked to my own. Most of the buttons in the lift were painted over with pink nail-varnish. And the metal plate was scratched with names: ROSKO KOOL KILLA. SANTA AND LOVERBOYZ. INCA TEAM LOVES HASH. JULIE FUCKS NEDS. And up above them the usual drawings of breasts and cocks, GANG-BANGS PHONE THIS NUMBER. Hugh kept his eyes to the roof of the lift.

  ‘Not as smooth going down,’ he said. ‘The pulleys feel worn. I must tell them to get the oilers in here.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Bawn,’ said an elderly lady on the ground floor, tight in her coat. ‘You going out for a wee jaunt? Fine day. And you’re looking that well, Mr Bawn.’

  ‘Aye, Jean,’ he said. ‘I’m all of that.’

  We walked down the hill and on to the towpath by the river. The brown water wrinkled. A calm wind was up, a slow breath, in all grace lifting the leaves, turning them twice, laying them lost on the water’s top. The river poured into a small basin under the shopping arcade. The water settled there for a second, glimmering. Mud and roots circled in the soup; a swelling in the undertow. The basin like an earthenware bowl spun from the banks, containing plenty. We watched the river as it flowed and gathered, and watched as a wide lip opened at the other side, under the bridge, and tilted a gush from the edge of the bowl. The flood escaped, and more surged in, water over grass, grass over water. And all in the end went bending to the sea. All the way down the river a white light hung at the trees. Dandelion clocks. The old moor rolled away in a fuss of hawkweed. The churches were quiet. The stone faces on the churches were quiet. Hugh stared into the water; the Auld Kirk steeple was a shadow there.

  ‘Jamesie,’ he said. ‘Did I ever tell ye it was churches I wanted to build?’

  We crossed the Green Bridge over the water. Hugh decided he wanted some loose tobacco. I thought we might cut over for the wheelchair first.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘let’s have a smoke. A walk.’

  So up we went to the High Street. The newly pedestrianised High Street. Mr Haq was open for newspapers, for cigarette papers, for birthday cards and diet Cokes. A half-ounce of Golden Virginia. The Racing Post. Our walk past the shops was slow and stately. Out with my granda. Proud of him moving his legs that way; doing the job and no fuss. ‘You okay, Hugh?’

  ‘Aye, son. Brand new.’

  His head was down all the way. He coughed under his cap. The kids going past us were high on winter bargains. A packed street. All the shop windows. Crimson lights burning at the core.

  Boots Home Face Masseur. Boxes piled under one of Dr Jekyll’s giant chemical jars. Green jars. Change your face. Make your day. Be a new person.

  A gush of heat by the automatic doors.

  Kestrel Lager. Your Festive Choice at Tesco’s. A shock army in Adidas stripes were marching ahead of us with parcels of drink.

  ‘Afore ye go.’

  A good drink.

  Afore ye go.

  Mothers in leggi
ngs; a long queue at the photo shop.

  The City Bakery’s Own Strawberry Tarts.

  I gave Hugh a roll-up.

  ‘Fucking mental place the day,’ he said, taking a light. He looked up and smirked at them all passing.

  ‘Loony Tunes,’ he said. He smoked his smoke.

  Young girls came along arm-in-arm like us. Gold chains in their mouths. There are no prices on Cantor’s furniture. Just terms. Nine months interest-free. A gust of wind blew up as two spiky-haireds went rollerblading past. More stripes on them. Both chewing gum. As we passed the Clydesdale Bank a young guy came towards us with a pile of Big Issues. A grizzled mongrel at his side. Steering Hugh round him I mouthed the word no.

  ‘What was that?’ he said.

  ‘Oh just a collector.’

  It was too nice a day for December. Real sun in the sky. All those mad festive tunes barging out the door of the cheap stores.

  ‘I saw Mama kissin’ …’ Sound just fleeing out the doors, like shoplifters.

  The guy at the door of the British Legion was eating a scotch pie. Not so much eating it, really, as making up to it. Licking it, and kissing it. His fat fingers danced around the edge of it. They pirouetted on the burnt crust. So he liked the pie. There was an action painting of grease across his chin. The man had an unbelievable drum of a stomach. A body in training for the Twelfth of July.

  Corpulent homage to the dainty Dutch king …

  ‘The sash my father wore.’

  A Highland Fusiliers tie hung about his neck. The man sat with his pie on a Tennant’s beer keg. ‘By the Christ,’ he says, departing his stool, ‘if it’s no Hughie Bawn. An elder statesman among us.’

  ‘Hello, Davie. I see you’re still at your dinner. The fat fucker that ye are. Jamesie …’

  He touched my arm and pointed at the smiling bouncer.

  ‘This one has six weans. Can you credit that? Six times that woman’s put up with him. At least! And it looks as if he’s the one having the weans. Yer a fat bastard right enough, Davie. It’s good to see ye.’

  All the while Davie Grimes just chuckled like a battery toy. He loved the abuse, you could tell. And my granda clearly loved dishing it out. As soon as we reached the door of the Legion his voice changed. He became one of his public selves. He was in among the boys now.

  ‘And how is your suffering wife?’ he said. ‘The Maid Marion. You tell her from me the divorce courts are never far yonder. Tell her it’s a good Catholic boy she’s missing.’

  Hugh winked at me. ‘Come on in, son, before this one tries to tap us for money.’

  As we walked through to the club we could still hear Grimes’s broken chortles. Hugh stopped at the signing-in book – ballpoint on a string.

  ‘Saddam and son’ in the Name column. ‘Free the Falklands. All property is theft’ for the Address.

  Davie Grimes came in with a low wooden stool. ‘There ye go, Pops. Sit yourself down, and mind yer pockets. What can I get you?’

  ‘We’ll have two pints of yer best piss, and a wheelchair,’ said Hugh.

  Grimes went behind the bar to do the honours. He waved away the money. The club was empty. A large Union Jack was stretched across the far ceiling, over a narrow stage.

  ‘You need to get the decorators in here, Davie,’ Hugh said. ‘Somebody’s been drawing obscenities on yer Artex.’ He placed his Post on the bar as he said this.

  ‘Aye,’ said Davie. ‘Ye’re some man. Did nobody tell ye the communists surrendered, Hughie? We’ll all be under the one flag in a minute.’

  ‘Right you are,’ says Hugh, taking his pint.

  He looked to me again. ‘To think that boy had a good comprehensive education. And his da a miner too. All his days. Ye’re a black-hearted Tory pig, Davie Grimes. Yer father will be birling in his grave. Next time we see you you’ll be poncing votes for the New Labourers.’

  Grimes handed me the second pint. ‘Ye’re no related to this auld commie are ye?’

  ‘He’s my granda,’ I said.

  ‘Yer sister still in that nice block in Ardrossan yonder?’ asked Hugh. ‘The one beside the library.’

  Grimes was dragging a cloth over the bar top.

  ‘Aye … well, she’s still in there, Hughie.’

  He lifted my beer mat and threw me a glance. Gently I shook my head. Don’t contradict him, I thought. Let him alone.

  ‘Aye, she’s happy enough is Moira,’ Grimes continued. His eye was still on me.

  Hugh looked down his columns of horses. ‘Beautiful towers they,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘I must have them looked at. See if they need a paint job.’

  Grimes met my eyes again. For a second or two I just stared him out. Say nothing.

  I could tell he was thinking about Hugh in the paper. Say nothing. It’s all a mistake. They don’t understand how he was, how he is.

  ‘I mind,’ he said to Hugh, ‘years ago, when you came to our school to give a talk. Do you mind that? They were just building Broomlands at the time. Years ago. You came to the school and gave a talk. About the schemes. The talk was called “The Great Era of British Housing”. In the school gym hall. I remember that, Hughie.’

  ‘Wasn’t me,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Aye, Hugh. Do ye no remember? You had lots of slides of the high-rises in Glasgow and that. In the gym hall.’

  ‘I never gave a talk called that,’ said Hugh.

  ‘You did so.’

  ‘Never in my life. “The Great” … what did you say? … “The Great Era of British Housing”. No. You’ve been working in this bunker too long, Grimes. The talk was called “A Great Era in Scottish Housing”.’

  ‘Give’s a fucking break, Hughie. It was a million years ago.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Hugh, in his best mockery, ‘an important distinction. When it comes to housing, England only followed the great innovations up here. They came at our heels. First with their praise, then with their awards, and then with their sticks of dynamite.’

  Hugh paused.

  ‘Is that no right, James?’

  I passed him a roll-up.

  A longer pause. We stared at each other.

  ‘A stickler for detail is what you are, Hughie Bawn,’ said Grimes. He lifted the bar hatch and disappeared around the back.

  ‘That’s what did for the Russians as well,’ he was saying. ‘Now where’s that wheelchair? I know it’s here; we used it to get somebody to their taxi on Saturday night.’

  *

  We stood in the plastic bus shelter by ourselves. The chair was still folded. Hugh said to wait with the chair till we left the town. The green bus to Ayr came to the stop in less than five minutes. I paid the driver, stowed the chair, and guided the old man to some seats up the back. Smokers.

  Hugh sat in at the window. I remember him touching the glass. Just putting his hand on it. The whole of him vibrating with the bus as it moved along. His hand on the glass. On the edge of the town we began to climb. A good view of the factories and the housing schemes: The New Town. The many-coloured houses. Not so new any more. His eyes were lost in among them. He stroked his bottom lip with his tongue. He peered at the houses.

  Under the sun. Coloured houses. Hugh with his hand on the glass, the housing estates below and beyond. It was something to watch, something to see, that open moor and the pine, the easy slant from the hills over there …

  Down, and down again. The groups of houses and their washing lines. The white washing. The whiteness billowing out: Hugh was lost in his thoughts. And I was lost in his thoughts as well.

  Where other kids lighted their imaginations with Buck Rogers and Outer Space, Hugh’s was taken up with pictures of his own back yard, a place of well-oiled engines, and green belts, with rows of sharp modern houses, white sheets blowing on the line.

  This was the future. Mr Wheatley had plans for humanity. He knew how people might live.

  Even then, with Hugh in the world, I was thinking Hugh’s thoughts, trying to see the shape of his life, the sh
ape and weave of all our lives. It was something to see. Old Hugh Bawn in the world that day.

  From the Loans Road we could see the hills of Arran. The water looking silver. The Arran hills, the story of rocks their only secret. Over the years on that western coast, under the same sky, people like us must have looked out there, and wondered what those hills could remember, and would they remember anything of us.

  Hugh and I looked at the silver shoals of water to Arran.

  I was sure our good and our badness would stay there, all our desires, our disasters. All would remain on the face of those mountains of Arran, and one day others would see us there.

  I thought I could hear voices in the air, see the marks of dead tribes on the slopes of Arran. And I knew I was only another one looking. On those beaches of Ayrshire they’d always imagined these things. They said it loud from their crannog forts. They spoke it from hay-thatched cottages, from broken castles, from fishing boats, and from miners’ rows. And now I was saying it – Hugh at my side – from the back of the green bus into Ayr that day. But the Isle of Arran may never have known us, out there alone on the silver-looking sea. We imagined hard; we hoped out loud. But maybe the hills knew nothing of us. And they never would. We’d live our short hours, and pass as nothing.

  ‘Did I tell you?’ said Hugh. ‘My own da, he died in a hole.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He died at Flanders didn’t he?’

  Hugh kept his eyes on the glass.

  ‘Or somewhere,’ he said. ‘He should never have gone.’

  Hugh had always looked on Ayrshire and Glasgow as the great world. He had never wanted any other part of the planet. Never a thought of elsewhere. In a way he considered the rest of the world quite small by comparison. And Scotland to him was an entire globe. A full history. A complete geology; A true politics. A paradise of ballads and songs. There was some sort of fullness there for him. And even towards the end of his days, the force of his rejection, his late disappointments, served only to confirm his extravagant rootedness.

  ‘No one has been where we have been,’ he would say.

  And he never meant that as anything but a statement of pride. He would never say it was perfect. He would say it was the one place that had existed in a perpetual age of improvement.