Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  He twisted the map round to himself. And he looked at it quietly, his finger running up and down the lines, over the hills and their forests of birch, up and down the sands of the coast. ‘And this is all sea?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘All the way to the islands.’

  After a while he folded it up and went back to the mind of his calculator.

  ‘I like maps,’ I said.

  The boy looked up like I’d just said nothing. He made a frowning smile with his lips and his chin. Far away, unfazed, his eyes said that he liked them too; there is nothing the matter with maps.

  I found an Avis car in Paisley. A swipe of a card made it mine for two weeks. I hadn’t wanted a car until that day. I wanted to walk everywhere, or sit on buses, mope on trains, face the future in the backs of taxis, but now it seemed easier to have a car. The one I hired was made for the serious smoker. It had two lighters. A place to stand up a packet of fags. The car was a Turkish bath in minutes.

  A guy on the radio – sour-voiced, bone idle – was talking tripe to a legion of teenage phone-ins. He spoke like a drunk impersonating a drunk. ‘It’s time now to burn the St Andrew’s flag‚’ he was saying. ‘Scotland the brave, it is Scotland the bollocks and no mistaking the fact. Okay. Here we have wee Regina from the Garngad. Gina, is that you?’

  ‘Hello, Lou. I love the show. I’m glad you got rid of they bampots were on a minute ago. Lou, tell me this. Tell me. If Scotland’s that brave, how come we’ve never won the World Cup? All they idiots on your show going on about the football. Good talk. Tell you, Lou. It’s all just balls – tell them that out there. Show us your World Cup if you’re that smart.’

  ‘Go’n yourself, Regina. That was wee Regina from up the road. Great stuff. You tell them, hen. The problem with this country is there’s too few people with brains. That is the problem. Now, heavenly bodies. Phone in and give us the benefit of your view. This morning’s topic is The Scottish Nation: Why Have We Made Such an Arse of It? Stay beside your phones. Okay. Jim from Foxbar, give us your view.’

  ‘Aye, Lou. That lassie was on there. What she’s needing is a right good …’

  ‘Well done, son. That’s the brainy stuff we like. It’s dunder-heads like you that’s got the country in the grubber. Next – line two, Angela from East Kilbride. Angela?’

  ‘Morning, Lou.’

  ‘Turn down your radio, hen. That’s a helluva racket.’

  ‘Okay, Lou. Is that it? Right. The reason, Lou, the reason this country’s in a mess, right, is the way men talk to women. Like that idiot just there. There’s, there’s no respect for the female. If my father had spoken to my mother the way these boys speak to us …’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to bring in a broken pay packet to the likes of you‚’ said Lou.

  ‘Right you are‚’ said Angela, laughing away. ‘And another thing. These condoms. They’re too available now. It’s encouraging them all to bloody well abuse the system so it is. Women don’t need condoms, it’s work they need. And men can learn to talk right.’

  ‘Okey-dokey … Line three …’

  I turned it off.

  The old Labour men just loved to talk housing. I can hear it still. It was waiting lists, it was good, clean air, preserving community, the back-to-backs condemned. It was land being scarcer than money. It was packed with amenities. It was creating a taste for the ambience of the suburbs. It was clearing the slums. It was improving quality. Aesthetically pleasing.

  ‘The saving of Glasgow.’

  One of my granda’s oldest chums was an architect, a pipe-smoking man full in love with those phrases. And he believed every one of them. He spoke of the blocks as social saviours, artistic wonders, a triumph of this over that. He once described some of the creations he fashioned on the slopes of Sheffield as looking like Tuscan hill villages in the half-light. To the Housing Committee he passed out postcards of St Mark’s Square in Venice. ‘This is our example of a mixed style‚’ he said.

  They wanted so much. And their wanting so much made us want so much less. The ones still alive send me hate mail in Liverpool. McCluskey gets it too. Letters still written in the old Corporation style. Commas in the date. Reference being made. Typewritten. And to every one it’s a personal matter. I always want to say sorry. I want to say thank you and sorry. We just don’t agree any more.

  Sorry. Thank you.

  And yes, I know. They say there was nothing of aerosols then. Nothing of satellite telly and dining rooms. People wanted to be like other people. And now they want to be themselves. They want garages and trips abroad and a different-coloured door.

  I want to say yes. I know. Sorry.

  Those letters made me sad because of Hugh. But not only because of Hugh. Every time we blow a block I feel it for those who built it. The old men are always in our minds. We want to say sorry. Thank you. And we live like you with our plans and our words in the dark. Their names on those plaques at the front of the blocks. Those newspaper clippings. A day out for the Committee. Women in hats. Men in dark coats. Eyes raised up.

  I parked the car at the Argos Superstore. I walked past a wedding boutique: ‘Kilts and veils on special offer.’ And then the woo of the public bars, the everyday magic of Stockwell Street, the stumpy haunts of lovers and fiddlers and scribes. A blackboard was there with its chalk half-gone: ‘Mary MacDonald of The Songs.’

  Last night’s laughs. The smell of old drink in the street. People milling around. And up at the bridge they were gathered in thousands. Down by the river. All the eyes looking past the weather-scarred wall. All the eyes. Over the River Clyde they looked. And tall over there, shading the Gorbals, the clouds up above them, the Florence Square towers, and grey they were, and grey the windows, and overhead a school of starlings moved as one.

  I thought of long-ago crowds by those banks. Women in bonnets with placards aloft. The Green all mud. The rumble of feet. The leaves in some past autumn spinning in circles in the public parks. Up on the streets they marched to a drum. A bad day for images of Gladstone and St George. The rumble of feet growing louder and louder. Down among the citadels of St Enoch’s the procession passed, the clamour rose, brushing the fronts of those ornate buildings with their clocks insensible. We are Fighting Landlord Huns.

  A tarpaulin sign lay over the roof of the condemned block, tied on the head, a knotted hankie:

  DALE CONSTRUCTION – DEMOLITION.

  The women beside me at the railing were tearing sandwiches for kids. ‘Keep your eyes open or you’ll miss it,’ said one of the women. There was buzz and Saturday chatter all the way down. ‘It’s ten past ten,’ said the woman again. ‘If they don’t hurry up we’ll miss Donna at the majorettes. She’ll be standing at the door.’

  ‘Aw she’ll wait for us,’ said her friend, chewing a cake, then bringing the top of an orangeade bottle up to her lips. She held it there like a trumpet. All the way along the north bank of the Clyde, the noises of children, the clapping and crying, and mothers in leggings, wiping and catering, boyfriends and fathers staring ahead.

  Bottles like trumpets; the Saturday hoopla.

  My eyes were steeped in the brown river water. There was hardly a movement there. Just water; calm and slick and oblivious. In the middle of the stream you could see reflected the swooning towers of the Gorbals. The tall buildings. A glint of the windows coining out the water; a dazzle of glass. And calm the water. Calm and slick and oblivious.

  Just then a foghorn sounded right clear. For half a minute it went. When it stopped there was silence. No one spoke; the children looked up. And still the water was calm to my eyes. A bang went up like a noise from the core of the earth. It was a good blast: you could feel the tremor up through your shoes. People gasped.

  I looked up from the Clyde: the block just dropped right down. Out of the sky and into the river, the tower disappeared, and dust and smoke rose up in its place. In a minute the water was calm again; the rumbling had gone.

  Everything was quiet.

  The
sadness you feel when a house comes down. You feel for the people who lived there. All those sitting rooms and painted walls, gone in an instant, as if the hours that passed inside meant nothing much, as if they never happened. The shape of those rooms will always remain in the minds of those who lived there. People will grow up with a memory of their high view over Glasgow. They’ll remember the sound of the elevators, the lights down below; the cupboards, the bathroom, the smell of the carpets. They’ll know that they once lived high in the Gorbals. The thought of the rooms will bring back conversations, the theme-tunes of television shows; they’ll remind them of parties and arguments and pain. And above all that they will bring back innocence: a memory of the day-to-day; a time when the rooms felt modern and good, when no one imagined their obliteration. The people went into those towers with hope: life will always be like this, they thought. But what they thought came down with the rubble too. They lived in those rooms, but will never see them again. They are gone.

  Over the Gorbals the smoke climbing up from the wreckage was met with the everyday spew of the Polmadie furnace, the ascending fumes twisting there, a double helix, and drifting out to the nothing above.

  The laughter and chatter came back again. Children shouting. The mother beside me wiped her eyes.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s that.’ And she led her children away from the wall.

  Down below, in the river water, the Gorbals reflected was thinner than before.

  *

  Alice my mother was married again. It was ten years ago. And for most of that time we had not felt badly: we’d agreed to get on with our lives. I saw her one time at an hotel in Blackpool. It was the Labour Party Conference. I came in with a colleague; we were carrying boxes. My mother was sat in the bar with her pal. They had come down to Blackpool on holiday.

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ I said.

  And that was the way it was with us. We liked each other in a simple way, but we saw no reason for cards and cuddles, for monthly rehearsals of what went wrong. This was something my mother had done for me. She didn’t demand that we grow up together to better times; she let me move away, and she sensed, in a harsh but dependable way, that better times would mean losing the past. She had trained me well at our fresh-air breakfasts, standing years ago in the cow fields at Saltcoats.

  The cows seemed to watch us with their big brown eyes.

  ‘Tatty-bye,’ she said. ‘Sure and see you get good marks in the class. We don’t want any dunces about the place.’

  Two hot rolls; a carton of milk.

  ‘Never you mind … you’re just passing through here, Jamie.’

  And in a way that I’d got used to – to other folk, quite mad – she had meant I was passing through her life too. People have thought it abnormal of her, and abnormal of me to accept it. But we have known better. There was nothing to do but wish each other well. She said years ago I was different ‘You’re different,’ she said, ‘and that will bring its own troubles. Let your gran Margaret have time with you now.’

  She didn’t argue with me the day at the hospital. The day I said I wasn’t coming back. She cried on her way down the corridor. But she knew it was right. She had set me to do this leaving. Alice knew then that my father would haunt her for years to come. She was good at knowing these things. She wanted peace for me; she wanted her marriage to sink if it must, but not to take me down with it. That was the thing about Alice: she saw my life before I did. And no one saw hers. None of us thought of the power she possessed.

  The cold, blue morning she fell in the road, she knew it then: our family was dead. At the snowy window she knew it: the time had come to separate our lives. And meeting her in Blackpool I saw there were signs it had worked for her too. She had never looked so healthy to me. Never so blonde. And so we eyed each other proudly among strangers. We knew the sore facts we had both escaped. I slipped two twenties under her glass.

  ‘You look lovely, Mum,’ I said.

  And after some jokes, and a pint of beer, we stood up as we remembered. We said goodbye. A solid goodbye, and phone if you need me.

  But the day of the demolition I felt that something had changed. The river was calm and slick and oblivious. Losing the past had run its course. I wanted to see my mother. I wanted to speak to Alice, see how she felt. I wanted to know about her life now and her husband’s job. I wanted to say something …

  Stop running. I wanted to say, ‘Stop running.’

  Let’s stand on the same ground and notice the weather. To show her pictures of Karen. To say stop running we are all right now. She would make a good mother. Like you are. Here in your garden. Please stop running. We’re okay now. My granda is dying there and what’s the use? I saw his favourite block come down today. Who are all these new folk in your life, my mother? Is he good to you? And all these towns have changed so much. Nothing can last for ever. Even the tide goes somewhere in the end.

  Stand still. Listen here to your only son. It’s all calm now: calm and slick and oblivious. Let us drink the cool water. I imagined saying that to her. ‘Let us go down to the water now, and paddle and laugh, like a family.’

  I was sleeping at the wheel in Auchentiber. Lulled by the roll of the uniform hedgerows. Two seconds at most. But that was enough to make me stop. I pulled the car over at a farmhouse pub. A wagonwheel filled with winter plants. My breath was chill as I pulled the hand-brake. I looked in the mirror. My hair was damp. My face was white. My lips were red as blood on snow. I’d not felt right all day.

  And that change was more than a change of mood. I felt different. Something I’d known I no longer knew; something was altered; a lasting shift had come about.

  But every such shift that occurred in my life had tended in one direction: changes as stiffenings of the basic will; terse new advances, never reversals. The changes I had known about were changes of degree; usually they were changes in the ways I felt apart from family matters, untouched by all that old chaos. They were times of fresh resolve, novel encroachments of the selfish gene. They were hardly changes: they were surprise confirmations. And over the years those increments of certitude had made me the perfect foreigner. I had no original home. No old belongings. Nothing but the certainty of where I was now. I’d no doubts, no switherings, no turnings-back. And no sense of what it is to be one thing and another. No half-heart. No struggle. No evolving self-pity. There was only me, and now, and other people themselves. The rest was just history.

  Yet none of that seemed true any more. All my defences were down. What happened that morning made me different from myself, and strange in my skin. It wasn’t about mood, or depression, or emotions running high. It wasn’t nostalgia or Yuletide regrets. I don’t think it was any of that. It was a fresh upwelling, a notion of death, a sense of expiry in the broad afternoon. And I wasn’t disheartened. I wasn’t scared. I just wanted to speak to my mother, that’s all. I wanted to tell her I’d a girl called Karen. To take her aside and to say this and that; to look at her, and say here we are, and what have we got, and hold me a minute I’m not always right. I wanted to say a few words about Karen. That I thought I loved her. That we nearly had a baby. That I thought I might die in my car one day.

  For years I’d been walking out the door. Walking away. And being always certain I knew the way forward. But now I wanted to Walk in. To sit right down at the kitchen table. To say make me a cup of tea will you not? And tell me about years ago. And listen: this is how I felt as my grandad’s block came crashing into the ground. This is what I felt. And maybe our plans are only our plans. Maybe my work’s not the only truth. Maybe it’s not the truth at all.

  I phoned 192 from the pub telephone. Her name was the same. Her house was still her house.

  ‘I gather she and what’s-his-name were living there in sin. It was a good thing they jumped the broom last year. Living it up at their age.’

  This was the gospel according to Gran Margaret. The woman on the l
ine fed me the number. It felt like a pattern I knew somehow. I rang it. What’s-his-name answered. ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘we’ve never actually met before. I’m Jamie, Alice’s son.’

  ‘O hello there, son,’ he said, with a nice person’s effort. ‘I’ve never had the chance to meet you yet.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I hope so before long.’

  ‘Aye, that would be grand. Alice is not here at the minute. She went up to the Railway Club. Do you want the number there?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘there’s no emergency. I’m not far from Saltcoats. I thought I would just come in and see her.’

  ‘She’d be delighted with that, son. You’ll get her at the club. And maybe I’ll catch sight of you later myself. I’m not sure if I’m going up there yet. I’m supposed to be on the night shift the night.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘see you one way or another. Bye for now.’

  ‘Nice talking to you, son,’ he said.

  And down went the phone. It came as no surprise to me that my mother had found someone who spoke carefully. The first half of her life was nothing but bastard language. I would bet it was a priority: find a man who will speak gently amongst women and strangers. If nothing else, it would make her feel that her circumstances had changed; her new life was made of better sounds. And that in itself would be something to her.

  The seafront at Saltcoats was dead for the winter. The coast lay strangled in a beige silk gown. No children threaded through the metal of the play park. Beer cans were afloat in the paddling pools. A mound of mussel-shells useless by the road. And every tea-room a sanctuary for one. Sometimes two. A double-wafer out of season. The jinkle of a spoon in a cup.

  Music and lights – a fruit-machine’s nervous breakdown.

  A candy-floss booth was Windolened on every side. The fun was abandoned; only strays went up and down the front. A man, a dog, a packet of chips. Nothing going on but the weather. The art deco cinema was closed; a round pile of elegance put off for good. The seagulls bored on the castle wall. It’s blowy out there. The pensioners came down to the small hotels; they were keen for the cheap high tea.