Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  At this my granny opened her eyes: she raised her brow and sipped her tea. She thought I’d forgotten the next part. She put down the cup. ‘He pulled …’

  I raised a finger, smiled, continued.

  ‘He pulled the shire of Sutherland out of the past for the trifling cost of two-thirds of one year’s income. And because he was an Englishman, and spoke no Gaelic, he did not hear the bitter protests from the poets among his people.’

  ‘And a fucking bastard he was as well,’ said my granny.

  ‘Maggie!’ I said, laughing at the base of the tree, throwing a bauble up at her chair. ‘That’s no talk for a Christian woman.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, now deeply blushing, ‘no wonder.’

  A great light was up in her eyes. ‘I’m so glad ye keep these things in yer head,’ she said. And with that she switched on her television. When I finished the work and stood at the door she looked again.

  ‘That’s nice and Christmassy,’ she said.

  Her eyes went back to the screen, and she bit her nails. It seemed like she wasn’t really watching the figures on telly though. Her gaze stopped a bit short of the screen. She was just staring at space. From her little twitches, her quicksome grins, I guessed she saw there some shapes of her own.

  It was a younger Margaret who taught me those lines. She gave me a custard cream for every paragraph memorised. And afterwards she gave me indignant lectures about what it all meant. She would sometimes cry and sing in our kitchen seminars. It all meant so much to her.

  Stitched between the lines of those lessons was a notion of how the horrors of the past might relate to Hugh’s great enterprise. She would fix my grandfather – that other great improver – as the opposite of those long-named ravagers of old. She told me that Hugh understood the horrors of forced removal, and that he too came from people who fought against it. His mother, she said, had been a famous woman who beat back the landlords of another time. And Hugh’s great experiments had grown out of those domestic trials. She was sure of that.

  Hugh was a great man. He was the hero of her youth, and even in decline he embodied, for her, the higher things. He had made a difference; he had given the people betterment. She said she loved him for that and also for himself. That is the way she put it. And maybe no one ever got close enough to my granny to ask her just what she meant by that. Loving him for what he’d done, and what he was. Enfolded within all Margaret’s certainties was a hard core of pride, and within all that, a smallholding, a cosmos, a kernel, of pity.

  To say that Margaret was held back and stifled – trapped by a sense of duty to that pity – would be to say something against her wishes. She was not like my mother, who for years defended my father’s actions for fear of the truth. Margaret was quite sure of her husband’s gifts, and certain in the role she had sought and maintained, as his partner, his defender. She would be against any suggestion that Hugh’s troubles had held her back, that the obsessions of Hugh’s life had silenced her own cares. She didn’t seem to feel that had happened to her. Hugh’s cares and her cares lay side by side at the foundations of their marriage. If anyone said that Hugh had been too long distracted with the business of tower blocks, and changing the world, she would only say there were worse things to be distracted with. She didn’t speak up. She didn’t see any need to speak up. She would say that any worries she had were worries she had brought upon herself, and would add that Hugh had always a lot to contend with, that he had taken large tasks upon himself. In a worn moment – first light, last candle – she might confess that she had sometimes been unhappy. And no sooner would she have said such words than she’d take them back.

  ‘It’s my own fault,’ she’d say. ‘I never had any women friends, and I never went over the door.’

  Privately I felt that Margaret was more than once a casualty of the great improvers. The first one burnt her houses and sent her people in ships to another world, the second kept her in exile from the truth of things, and made her a prop in the fantasy of his own spotlessness. By the end of his life Hugh had caused her to be more than a prop – she was a well-spring of propaganda, an everyday font of saving lies. I never intended to say a thing about it. Those months in Scotland, the days watching my grandfather die, were lived in opposition to any such saying. I too had become a prop and a well-spring. I too wanted him easy at the end. My granny kept her secrets to herself. She had always shown patience and self-denial when it came to the matter of other people’s inventions. As Christmas came on, I grew more determined to follow that example, shadowing her measures to protect Hugh in his final distress, whilst all the time inventing new measures to protect her in hers. But I often failed to be as good as she was. I came late to these responsibilities. I sometimes got it very wrong.

  One day we were washing Hugh in his bed. The morning had spread out badly. There was bedlam in the flats underneath. The sound of smashing glass. Kids were rattling the letter box every few minutes for hours. I went out to the landing. ‘There’s somebody sick in here,’ I shouted. ‘Keep away from the door.’

  ‘Fuck up,’ said a tiny boy, scarpering to the stairs.

  Both lifts were broken again. I wanted to go out and phone the Corporation.

  ‘Don’t phone them,’ Margaret said, wringing out the cloths. ‘The school holidays have started. They’ll get the lifts going soon.’

  Hugh’s green eyes would open now and then. He looked at the wall.

  Even with all this, the hollow cheeks, the scalp withered, you could still see how handsome Hugh had been. His face was like something out of marble. You couldn’t tell if he was asleep; it had all gone quiet. It was very strange in that back bedroom: the holes punched out on the walls, our medicinal soap, the noise down below, that McCormack album sleeve pinned to the wall with a flightless dart.

  I was washing Hugh’s feet; Margaret worked at his head and chest. ‘John McCormack sang,’ Margaret said, ‘and the things that came into his voice. You wouldn’t believe it was possible. The Irish can sing. And yer granda here, his people freed themselves good and able. The people of Scotland and Ireland, they drink in the same water. And Ireland’s its own country …’

  The agitations of the morning got the better of me.

  ‘Ireland’s its own country no thanks to Scotland,’ I said, catching my own breath. ‘And Ireland never did you any favours either.’

  Margaret looked like she’d just been slapped.

  Hugh opened his eyes.

  In a slow way, in a way very deliberate, and quite blank, I went on to say things grossly out of turn. I don’t know why. Each word was a stab of something. Sickness, anger, frustration with lies. I just opened my stupid mouth.

  ‘The brave Sutherland people we sing about, the great fencibles, helped the English defeat the Irish rebellion of 1798. Scotsmen had a hand in the spilling of blood on Vinegar Hill.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Hugh, not moving.

  ‘And then,’ I said, my hands beginning to shake a little, ‘later on, those Irishmen, those victims of famine and wars, they joined in the scramble over your fathers’ glens.’

  ‘Shut your face,’ said Hugh, half-rising from the bed.

  I stood up.

  There was a flame in Margaret’s eye.

  ‘Those Irishmen we betrayed came on to betray us,’ I said. ‘Your books, Granny, are not the only ones I know. The evil English! It was some of your people that put swords into the heads of Hugh’s men, and his men that burned your Highland cottages. They cleared the land you go on about. See? I’ve read other books. I know other things by heart, Granny.’

  Hugh was coughing hard.

  ‘Get fucking out!’ he spluttered. ‘He’s a fucking liar. An English bastard. He’s just his bastarding father all over. Get him out!’

  And when I looked at Maggie she was pressing him down on the pillows. Her eyes were wet. I could have died. Hugh was whimpering oaths to himself. She looked up at me once he was settled.

  ‘Would you leave us b
e, Jamie. I want to wash down the middle of your granda.’

  She dipped her cloth then into the basin.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t fash, son,’ she said.

  And just as I turned she spoke again. It was as if she were quoting from something long gone. A tablet of truths. I stood there ashamed.

  ‘It wasn’t just right what you said. Our people broke apart when they heard the drums of the Irish. There was no blood. We have it written down.’

  No more was said about mistakes.

  Our universe was full of unsaid things. And that was most helpful. That was best.

  *

  Fergus McCluskey was in charge of the blow-downs in Glasgow. He wanted me to come and supervise the demolition of a block in the Gorbals, at Florence Square. It was one of the show-towers designed by Marcus Booth. Hugh had commissioned them. I was with him the day it was opened.

  McCluskey’s number had been in my pocket since the day I went into Ayr with Hugh. More than once I had gone down to the phone outside the chip shop at Annick Water. I had stood there with the phone in my hand, the number on the betting slip, and a feeling I should go ahead, carry on with the job old Hugh had taught me to do. But I knew it wasn’t the same job. Hugh had taught me to plan those houses. For five years now I’d been blowing them down. That was the new plan. And in Liverpool it all made sense. But there, at the foot of Annick Water, with the light all yellow on the eighteenth floor, I found it too hard to ring the number. Hugh’s green eyes were somewhere above. My hand would return the phone to its cradle.

  I phoned McCluskey too late to help him.

  ‘Fergus,’ I said, ‘it’s James Bawn here.’

  ‘Where in Christ’s name have you been?’ he said. ‘We’ve been needing a hand here.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Fergie. Karen gave me the number. I couldn’t get round to ringing until now. I just couldn’t face it. I’ve been away from work this last while.’

  ‘So your office said. But they wouldn’t give us a number. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just that block. Florence Square. D’ye know, Fergie, that was one of Hugh’s.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘but I thought you never saw him any more.’

  ‘Well he’s dying in Ayrshire. I’m with him here. I just couldn’t think of it …’ And then I stopped. I thought there was much I wouldn’t say.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Fergus McCluskey. ‘Nobody knew that here.’

  ‘It’s tomorrow morning, right? The blow. Ten in the morning?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘One thing, Fergie. Stick the stuff in the middle. Bang it right under the joists. There’s a lot of steel in there, and it’ll fold straight if you get under it. And keep the punters well back. More than usual. You know – the blunt force. Keep them out of there.’

  ‘It’s dense in those streets. That’s why we needed the help. We can’t have any flying metal. There’s a lot of people in and out of there.’

  ‘Just ring it,’ I said. ‘The whole area. Get the radio people to juice up the dangers.’

  ‘Right ye are. All of it’s in order.’

  ‘See you before long,’ I said.

  ‘Hope so,’ he said. ‘And Jamesie. Send our best to the big man. We always talk about him.’

  ‘No problem,’ I said.

  There were two things I knew outside the phone box. I knew I would set out the next morning to see the last of the Gorbals block. And I knew I would never be able to tell Hugh his apprentices were asking for him.

  The early morning was cold on the bones. The air tasted of snow. Down in the housing scheme there was hardly a noise; the lamps fizzed quietly on the empty street. The lamps fizzed away out there, as if in conversation with each another, as if no one could be watching, no one awake. Places like this are deserted at night. Not a soul on the street. You hear the odd shout, the odd car, but mostly you hear nothing at that hour but the fizz of the lamps …

  The sound of your own blood turning.

  It was Saturday morning. I had stood at that window on Saturdays before. My good teenage years, freed from the Ferguson school and my mother and father, my eagerness then for days to begin; awake at the window in the early light, sandshoes on, and fishing rod, or looking way out for the milk-float, the first of my grand employers, the hush-hush whirr, the rattling glass, smoothing its way round the bend of our street.

  I saw it again that morning: the milk-float, whirring into another day. That street and this block and the person watching, none of us new any more, none of us the first on the planet.

  Hugh lay awake in a tangle of candlewick bedspread. The room was thick-breathed and vague; Hugh in the gloaming, a roomful of doubts.

  ‘Morning,’ I said.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Bring me a bit cheese from the fridge, would you not.’

  I came back in and cut it up on a plate. He pulped the cheese soft with his gums.

  ‘My mouth is that fucking sore,’ he said. The blanket smelt of old man’s sweat.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Take it slow.’

  I pressed some antiseptic cream on my finger and rubbed it round his mouth.

  ‘Away,’ he shrugged.

  The bath was full of wet sheets. I shaved at the sink. The water was warm. I poured out some more, dragging handfuls over my shoulders, under my arms. My body had changed since coming back. No mornings at the gym. Eating funny. My arms seemed thinner. It was as if, in some strange way, my body was going back in time, becoming a child’s body again. All the power had gone out of me: my chest and my arms felt weak; I hadn’t thought of sex in a long while. My body was as secret as a boy’s. I felt alone with it.

  Margaret had ironed me some shirts and draped them over a clothes-horse in the hall. I put on a blue one; knotted a red-striped tie.

  My face was thin in the mirror.

  You can’t be too smart as a Housing man.

  John Wheatley and his walking cane. Down the corridor of the City Chambers. Tipping a wink at the typing pool. Tall and beloved, the great housing man. Smart. A white handkerchief in the breast pocket. The cranes out the window. ‘Aah, the kind Effie Bawn.’

  Mr Wheatley so neat in Hugh’s office. To shake the hand of Mr Housing.

  I needed a haircut. I imagined hands mussing the hair on my forehead. The taste of lemon balm on my lips.

  My head poked into the bedroom.

  ‘I’m off now, Hugh.’

  There was silence then; nothing there but a low, tranquillised breathing.

  *

  There was a story in that morning’s Scotsman. It sat under a wide picture of the Gorbals: ‘Booth’s Tower Comes Down Today’.

  An era will end in Glasgow this morning as high-rise flats in the troubled Gorbals area are blown to the ground. The unpopular Maxton Block at Florence Square, designed by Sir Marcus Booth, and built in 1972 at a cost of one million pounds, will finally be demolished in a controlled explosion at 10 a.m. The ‘Maxie’ block was viewed at the time as a work of architectural genius, held by the controversial former Chairman of the Public Works Committee, Mr Hugh Bawn, to be ‘the saving of Glasgow’. The so-called ‘streets in the sky’, which were believed to be the answer to the City’s notorious housing problems, were built at break-neck speed throughout the sixties and early seventies. But, in recent years, Bawn’s blocks became better known as ‘the blight of Glasgow’ – dampness and vandalism making life a nightmare for the nearly 500 residents in Florence Square.

  Mrs Moira McPhail, 42, who lived in the block for six years before moving to Carntyne last year, is glad to see them go. ‘It’s good riddance to bad rubbish,’ she said. ‘They were a misery, and they should never have been built in the first place. They’re nothing but an eyesore.’ Mrs McPhail said her eldest son Ewen’s asthma got much worse while they were living at the flats.

  But not everyone will be so happy to see Maxie go. Pensioner Jim Ainsley, a Gorbals r
esident all his life, said yesterday how much you got used to them. ‘I’ll miss them,’ he said, ‘they were nice on a summer’s day, and much better than the slums that were there before.’ Ex-Chairman Hugh Bawn, who is among those under investigation in the City Council’s corruption hearings, was not available for comment. He lives in Irvine New Town, and is said to be in bad health.

  A spokesman for the Housing Department would only say that the tower blocks had seemed a good idea at the time. He warned that the area would be out of bounds this morning, and that spectators should stay well behind the perimeter fences.

  End of an Era? Opinion, page 16.

  Two kestrels hovered at the railway siding. I had never seen two. One higher up, pinned to its spot of clear air, wings beating, its eye on something small in the grass. The second one hung much lower. It was just about to dive as the train ran on. I put the newspaper back on the seat.

  Ayrshire out there, and all its purple leaves. On a hill just ahead, the last of a broken Franciscan monastery, its dome of low cloud smeared in grey. There was something of a window remaining. A shower of rain came through the window the second we passed. A schoolboy across from me fussed about with a calculator. He wore a green blazer. ‘Going home?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. We crossed the edge of Glengarnock Loch. The boy pointed.

  ‘Could you show me that on a map?’

  I said it was easy if he had the right one.

  Out of a rucksack he drew a pile of Ordnance Surveys, more than a few, held together with an elastic band.

  ‘Let’s see,’ I said.

  The second one down in the pile was the one for North-West Ayrshire. I unfolded it, laid it out flat beneath the window, there in the space between the boy’s legs and mine. ‘Here we are,’ I said. ‘You can see the line we’re on. Here. Between Kilbirnie and Milliken Park. You can run your finger all the way to Glasgow. And that’s the Loch there. The patch of blue.’