Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

‘And a great many years have passed, Mr Wheatley. You were the father I never had. My mother adored you.’

  He couldn’t have said that.

  ‘Ah, the kind Effie Bawn. Never see her like again. And how proud she would be you are finishing our job, Mr Bawn. We had hopes that you would. Mr MacLean had similar hopes of a career for you in what he called “national affairs”. And I remember saying to the douce fellow, “John, this man will attend to the greatest of our national affairs. The great domestic issue of our poor century. Housing. You see his mother has passed him the torch. Mr Bawn is the sort of man who will have the imagination to follow through on our housing legislation. He is at the roots of our Labour Party.’”

  ‘Well,’ replied Hugh. ‘Your example, Mr Wheatley, and the example of the Party, has always been a guiding light in this difficult business.’

  ‘It is only to your credit that you have a memory for the struggles of before, Mr Bawn. Your new flats will provide the example for the whole of Great Britain.’

  Hugh told me how they stood together, looking through the great window behind Hugh’s desk, and all the tall cranes of Glasgow, as he recalled, were dipping to their task, north and south of the river.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ Mr Wheatley whispered. ‘The people might see the sun at last.’

  My granda ended the story there. And the words had sounded so strange to me.

  The sun at last.

  Hugh told me his story of Mr Wheatley as we moved across the park. The light was beginning to go from the sky; an orange glade stood around us. My voice was behind him as he told his story, and there I was, egging him on, asking for more of that perfect tale, adding my voice to Wheatley’s grand encomiums. We spoke as if to silence the birds. Hugh in charge of the story; my voice that joined each phrase with a cheer.

  God of mercy. Hugh was happy at our revived union. He appeared to float on his chariot seat. Happy to be outside. Happy to be telling. This was our day together. And for Hugh it seemed like a fine restoration. His grandson James was a child again, wheeling the General across the park.

  I was happy that day too. The truth was not everything. Hugh had his story, and his story was good. A bank of winter heliotropes danced a jig at the park’s end. They smelled of vanilla. There was no more talk of Mr Wheatley. The great John Wheatley, who had died when Hugh was just a boy, and never saw the Glasgow tower blocks, closer the moon, closer the warming sun. Hugh had made it all up.

  Cars went past in a fully leaded vapour. Raging colours. Vans and their puffs of diesel. It was just after five on the watch. Hugh wanted to see Auld Alloway Kirk before the light went out. We trundled there in minutes. The stones of the kirkyard looked bent and grey. We bumped up the steps. As usual the church was in ruins. Ferns poured out of a window; scurvy grass lay rotting by the wall. I crouched by one of the wheels as we looked at a stone in front of the yard. The stone was almost white. Chiselled, powdered. White as a page.

  William Burnes. The grave of the poet’s father.

  ‘Look,’ Hugh said. ‘Robert Burns must have changed his name.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘His father was Burnes, with an “e”.’

  ‘Wonder why he did that. It’s a mystery.’

  ‘I know he admired his father,’ I said. ‘He was a hard worker. A man for the Bible. He made sacrifices for the boys. Maybe Burns just thought it was a plainer poet’s name.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hugh. ‘He certainly knew his own mind.’

  Hugh waited a minute, staring at the white stone, his eyes going all the way into the rock. ‘You never really hear that old man’s story. To have a son like that, a genius like. He must’ve been something himself.’

  ‘Who can say?’ I mumbled.

  ‘The most beautiful words in all the language,’ said Hugh. ‘They really are. Famous the world over. That is what the poet does.’

  He looked resolved.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ said Hugh. ‘The poets bring us in closer to ourselves, Jamesie. They make us better people. They help us to live our lives.’

  His mood had changed for a second. He stared at the stone with frozen eyes. Then he tutted, and turned his head to the kirk.

  ‘They make us celebrate this whole business,’ he said.

  ‘Or mourn it,’ I wanted to say.

  A fence stood around the kirk. We went up close and stopped on the grass. We were both thinking of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. Hugh had learned the whole poem by heart as a boy. He began to shout it out with a giggle in his sore voice. The words went into the stone, that powdering stone, long-since beaten soft by Scotland’s reforming hammers, and scoured by the local weather.

  When, glimmering thro’ the groaning trees,

  Kirk-Alloway, seem’d in a bleeze;

  Thro’ ilka bore the beams were glancing;

  And loud resounded mirth and dancing.

  Inspiring, bold John Barleycorn!

  What dangers thou canst make us scorn!

  Wi’ tippeny, we fear nae evil;

  Wi’ usquebae, we’ll face the devil!

  We smiled at each other: just for a second feeling the flames in the Auld Kirk. Lassies dancing in their short skirts. Blue darkness folding in about us.

  There was heat in that yard. We felt the warmth, a burning spirit, a bit of hot song rolling time into nothing, we felt it strong in the listening yard, a wild flame, out of the ground to touch our cold bones that evening. We both smiled – smiled to the heart of a thing not there – and shivered into our own day, one man after the other, in that narrow field of the dead. In Alloway Kirk the cold felt warm.

  ‘Bitter breeze,’ said Hugh.

  There must have been work going on at the church. Two bags of cement were parked behind the fence, and a step-ladder there, leading to the top. Hugh knew a thing or two about bells. He would always tell me about the bells in a church, how old they were, which Dutch or French or Scottish man had made them, and in what way, in what year. When I was very young, and a lone visitor to his Glasgow house, he would point to a row of rusty old bells on the shelf in his work cupboard. He’d take my hand down the body of the bell.

  The shoulder, the moulding wires, the inscription band, the argent, the ball of the clapper, the crown, the lip.

  He sometimes stopped in the street and cupped his ear. Me at his side on the Glasgow pavement. ‘Saint Mary’s,’ he’d say. ‘Saint Aloysius.’ ‘Saint Alphonsus,’ he’d say, or ‘St Paul’s.’

  I couldn’t hear what he could hear. My grandfather’s look would be miles away. That was the thing: Hugh seemed to have an awesome sense of the world happening. No one else I knew could notice such things as bells ringing. But Hugh could. He also knew the tones of the bells, the numbers of them, the makers, the metals.

  ‘It’s easy to notice things when you’re making it up,’ my father once said. ‘Half the churches he goes on about don’t even have bells.’

  Alloway Kirk (or the bold Tam) had made us thirst for a drink. We tarried, though; looking up at the kirk bell. There was a gap in the fence. Two bars removed. And the ladders now aglint in this coven of twilight. ‘Dare ye, Jamesie,’ said Hugh at my side. ‘Up the ladder and check the bell.’

  He was smiling something quite evil.

  ‘On ye go. Up the ladder.’

  Only a second’s silence. I knew I would do it. A braver man would have said no. But the look in his eye, the dash of the moment.

  Some way up the ladder I could see him below, snarling with pleasure, a mass of curved steel, his face as wan as Willie Burnes’ tomb.

  ‘Go on, Jamesie! Go on, son!’ He shook his fist.

  I climbed through the thick evening air. At the top I rested a second. You could see the muffled orange of the street lights for miles; the rows of houses over black fields. Headlamps going somewhere, people’s voices. The stars beginning to show. And something happened at the top of the ladder. A feeling came over me: light-headed, awesome, a feeling of tender mercies. The sky was
all eyes: peering down the millions of years; blessings of light from the cold, interminable distance.

  Down, and down again.

  I looked into the dark blueness above. The light coming down; it touched the pulse in my wrists, my hands gripping on, and it struck again, a second’s glint on the silver bars, the two top rungs of the ladder. I felt like the first man in space: the earth below, the heavens above; and nothing could shame the universe we knew; nothing could take our minutes away, and say that we hadn’t lived, and hadn’t tried to live well on this smidgen of air. I took a deep breath. The light had seemed to know us. It had come from eternity to make that kirkyard blue.

  Hugh was down in the trees.

  ‘Go on, Jamesie boy! What does it say? Read off the bell.’

  I put my shoulder against the gable wall, and reached in. I held it by the flight of the clapper. It was hard to see. A note sounded out … It had struck the inside of the bell as I groped my way in.

  ‘Yes!’ shouted Hugh.

  I couldn’t see the inscription. But there was one. I could feel the raised letters.

  ‘What of it, Jamesie?’

  The voice below. I stroked the letters with my fingers. My feet were quite steady on the ladder. My fingers went lightly around the old bell. Over and over. ‘A pattern border,’ I shouted out.

  ‘Yes!’ came the reply. ‘Good, Jamesie. And the words?’ My fingers going over the cold coppery alloy.

  ‘For. For the. The. For the Kirk. For the Kirk. Of A.l.l.o.u.a.y. For the Kirk of Allouay. 1659.’ I shouted it down as my fingers inched over.

  Hugh went quiet. When I came down the ladder he was standing up on the grass. The wheelchair was empty.

  ‘A real beauty,’ said Hugh. He took a step forward. ‘That bell was hanging there a hundred years before Burns or his father ever saw this place. And the father now lying there for over two centuries. What do ye think of that?’

  There was wonder in his voice as he said all this. And his hand went up to scratch at his ear.

  ‘What do ye think?’

  I couldn’t say what I thought. I just looked across at Hugh’s smiling face. His eyes as bright as the stars above.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  *

  Hugh allowed himself little peace. Towards the end he was ravenous for status. Sometimes that hunger would fade, as it did in the kirkyard, and he would stand exalted, as if he had come to a sense of himself, a sense of grandeur, something more than mere just deserts. But it couldn’t last. His larger sense would always give in to something smaller. Or something else.

  Rolling to the Cottars’ Arms Hugh gloomed over. He began to diminish the moment just past. He said that bells were really no more durable than anything else. It was just a matter of luck. Bells had no place in the digital age. And anyhow bells could break. The bell in the kirk at Irvine had been cracked twice: after the joy that followed the passing of the Reform Bill, and during the mad clamour that attended Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It was just your luck.

  ‘Many of them last,’ I said.

  ‘Not many,’ he said.

  There was a small crowd. We sat at one of the tables. The light from the fire danced in the glasses. The barmaid was operatic: Teutonic hair; lipstick rondo.

  We drank whiskies and half lagers. Warming and cooling.

  We put our hands on the copper-topped table. The fire gave our fingers a golden shadow on that surface. We could see the reflections: golden-fleshed, fire-haloed.

  Four whiskies each, four lagers; a quickening in the blood. The drink knows its way. Down the grooves of the drinkers who made us, those deep-lying pipes, those holding cells, all of them built in the genes. Alcohol rushing to seize the heart. Even those who turn from the glass know that story.

  Strong drink. A happy lament.

  A sentimental fury.

  An impotent passion.

  A proud humiliation.

  A violent tenderness.

  A fondness for malice.

  ‘Wine is a mocker. Strong drink is raging!’

  A song was got up in the corner. The man’s face was red. His eyes were all water. He pointed into the middle distance; his hand was numb on an empty glass.

  ‘When will we seeeeeee … their likes agaiiiiiiin?’

  The men at his table had similar faces. Red and watery-eyed. All the traces of former good looks upon them. Thick hair. Strong chins. And they too babbled in their heathen soup. Yellow-fingered like Hugh. The air was filled with their smoky laughter and the sound of the jukebox. Music, laughter, shadows of words.

  In no time Hugh was in among them. He was the veteran in the wheelchair. They loved him instantly, like they loved themselves, with all the pity they could muster.

  Hugh on the cross. The sponge wet with vinegar.

  The fifth round. Then another. Hugh drunk and insistent with his tenner. He lectured the boys in all the great arguments of their town. Before they were born. All before they were born. His talk was just fuel on the fire. They all argued back with their loud nothings. Hugh nodded. All those men, their generosities fairly exploding over the table, their sadness building for the journey home. Hugh reeled off the jokes and the lessons of time. He had the whole corner in a roar. When he coughed they would pat his back.

  ‘Ye’re fucking right,’ he said. He was dead drunk, and enjoying himself, his audience, and forgetting about me at the next table, the judging seat.

  ‘When I was in Japan,’ he said, ‘in the war like, there were lassies that used to come to the camp. One squaddie after the other. In a line. The lassie’s ears would be fucking stretched out, like an elephant’s.’

  Howls of laughter. A tray of drink. Hugh saying more. The story of how terrible life was before the war: black houses, bare feet, and all that.

  ‘You don’t know ye’re living nowadays.’

  He told them how people had fought for what they have. For their freedom, their nice houses. And then he would tell another vile joke; another lie. The assembly would crack.

  ‘Are you a communist?’ one of them said to Hugh.

  Hugh looked over at me with this bleary eyes.

  ‘Ye’d better ask him,’ he said. ‘Ye’d better ask him if we’re allowed to use words like that nowadays.’

  ‘Him sitting ower there?’ said the guy with a grin. ‘Who’s he – yer da?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Hugh, ‘he’s the daddy now.’

  They ordered food.

  Lasagna; an avalanche of white sauce tearing down the glen.

  Chips piled high as Stirling Castle.

  A loch of baked beans.

  Lumps of steak pie; livid red meat, clammy puff pastry.

  Potatoes boiled down to silt.

  Scampi chunks, breathless on kitchen roll, heaped in a buff-coloured basket, the breadcrumbs orange.

  A puddle of peas. And a gammon steak that looked sore. It looked red and sore, like one of their faces, a half pineapple-ring set in the middle, a yellow-toothed grin. The plate was a mirror: the man was eating his own Scots face.

  Salt.

  The one who was interested in Stalin sprinkled vinegar over his lasagna. I was talking rubbish. I was drunk. I ate four jumbo sausages, a pile of water-logged mash.

  I got the drinks in. The crowd dimmed. I wanted to use the phone. Hugh was busy telling the assembled how best to fiddle your electricity meter. I passed out the door unnoticed. The night was cold on the other side. Freezing. The pub blazed at my back as I walked off. The phones were further down the road. A square of light. I could see it. One of the road signs displayed an arrow: ‘This way The Tam o’ Shanter Experience’.

  Two girls and a boy were crushed into the phone box. The boy wore a baseball cap and love bites. ‘Phone’s broke, mate,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said one of the girls. ‘Let the guy use the phone.’ She stubbed out the cigarette on the window pane. It burst into sparks. ‘C’mon.’

  I was alone in the box. And then the rain came on. Standing in t
he box with the rain’s light drumming on the roof. Before I dialled the number, I began to think of what she would be doing there. In her front room. What was she doing right now? The phone on the kitchen table, waiting to ring. The newspapers piled up. The African bowl full of nectarines and leeks. She always turned round the bottles on the spice rack. She liked the labels to face the front. Was she standing at the cooker with an oven glove? Or eating yogurt from the fridge in her bare feet? Sitting on the carpet in a bathrobe, her back to the sofa, the television and the soaps, and a legal pad at her side, an open briefcase, a mug of tea. Was she thinking about me? Out of the window, over Dale Street, over Exchange Square, was she looking at the moving cars of Liverpool and thinking of me? Or was she looking into the sky; the same sky above that phone box, filled with clouds and stars and distances?

  Karen in the bath. Her bottles and potions on every side. Everything for softness; everything for moisture. Her ‘everlasting freshness’. Her Body Shop. Long brown hair up like a palm. The smile on her lips tasting of cool lemon. And her smooth skin asking nothing. Only breathing in the perfumed water. At the base of her neck a shiny hollow. Wet like the mirrors. A place to kiss and hear her sigh those miles away. All her towels made for wrapping around twice. Made for comfort. Made for ease. And with the carpets clean they love and protect her.

  Karen.

  The clear-painted nails of her feet on the carpet.

  Germolene rubbed in the lobes of her ears.

  Her pristine vapours. Karen and her eyes not worried.

  Frosted shadow, highlighter … lip-liners.

  Her sober skin. All the cream and its promises of youth. With fingertips, with eyes closed, she draws the cotton-wool across her face, her neck; sodden with cleanser, stroking downward, downward.

  Slow.

  Toner. Moisturiser.

  She licks the tip of a cotton bud and begins to comb her eyebrows. Karen’s face. Asking me the names of flowers. Bunching them into her blue glass pots.

  ‘How come you know these names, soft lad? Come here.’

  Writing the words on sticky labels. Pushing the hair off my face. Smoothing her balm on my lips with a single finger. Kissing my eyes closed. I’m licking her finger; licking the palm of her hand. The taste of lemon.