Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  Scampi-in-a-basket. Scones. More tea. A mad sherry.

  ‘Nothing to stop you at your age, Helen. Drink it while you can …’

  Not so long to the summer now. Warmer soon. Better days for the Arran boat.

  ‘Tell the wee lassie it’s McEwens Export.’

  The town had grown much since my days at the Ferguson school. All the fields now were filled with streets. Barratt houses, oval-shaped windows. Triangular gardens, the different doors. All the running burns were culverted and walk-safe. For hundreds of acres now you didn’t see chimneys. No cooling towers, no real coal fires. Even the parts that had seemed to me so modern in my youth – the black-and-white factories, the council dwellings, the streets named for heroes – much of it now seemed grey and diminished, or fading somehow. The white houses had worn badly. I found it hard that day to imagine the boy who was spurred by the sight of those buildings, the thought of their builders. None of it seemed so modern any more.

  The school was demolished. It was taken down. Most of the staff and inmates had been taken to a secure young offenders’ home near Ayr. Mulligan’s Pool was now under the road, the drowned man a bother no more. I drove through the town with no trouble in my chest. I was glad to see it. The place you grow up in is not an option. Not like your adult places, argued over, decided on, paid for, one day left behind. Your childhood homes existed in dreams; they had seemed to exist for nobody but you; a bundle of shapes, some shadows on a wall, beyond our reckoning, above our powers to say yes or no. A mythic address, not chosen by you. A church spire rising at the centre of town. A bank of trees on the brow of the hill. The trees’ fingers. The way to the sea.

  The Railway Club is a blue-glossed cabin that stands well up on a rock. Its windows look out to the islands. There are serpentine steps leading up from the road. I left the car at the bottom, and climbed, the wind all around, the steps pure green, and oily. There used to be a coal-mine above the town. Ardrossan Mains. Halfway up the steps there’s a standing wall, the remains of an engine room.

  Tufts of grass at every nook. Ashlar stone.

  Once upon a time the gas exploded underground. Twenty men died. Four of one family. There was nothing of mercy on the wind that day. The wind came again. Salt and spray at the top of the rock.

  The Firth of Clyde – an iriscope.

  The sea is black glass. The wind breathes over. As the wind breathes over it seems to find colours: yellows and browns and greens out there. The wind moves on. The colours disappear. The sea again is a pane of black glass. Dark water: a half-second’s peace. The sea is black glass, and the wind comes again. Yellows and browns and greens out there.

  A fishing trawler floated in the sea’s dark middle, outriding the waves and the EEC, the rocks, the Ministry of Defence. The spray ran white on the beach below me. Up at the door, with the sign above it, and pale ale logos here and there, I stopped to remember my lines. But nothing was there. Just the wind and me, the curve of the rock. The dram-drinking noises, the song inside.

  An elderly man with smiling jowls asked me to sign the book. His tie flopped out of a V-neck jumper.

  ‘Wee Alice is in the corner,’ he said, ‘with all the girls.’

  He laughed to himself, enjoying his role.

  ‘Now you watch yourself with that lot,’ he said. ‘A parcel of rogues the lot of them.’

  He continued to laugh as he turned the book, and dropped my two coins in the cash tin. A card school was busy just past the doors. Headless pints and a smattering of loose tobacco. Folding tables and plastic chairs. The men at the bar were talking about football. Hair pomaded, beer-bellied, loud and restless in their three-button shirts, each seemed ready for anger and joy, high on a boast, or a promise of fun. Every one had a hardened look; their features said something familiar.

  I thought I knew them. Each one looked like someone I knew.

  My eye stayed there for a second too long. I just nodded. I didn’t know them. My shirt and tie made a small fellow nervous.

  ‘It’s not me, it’s him,’ he said, pointing to one of the card- players. ‘He’s the poll-tax dodger.’

  The circle laughed. And I did too. One of those smiles that’s a frown of the lips and the chin.

  The women were cheery, each one festooned with gold chains. They all wore a variation of the same blouse. My mother looked up from the table as I came across the dance floor. The girls all hushed.

  ‘Is somebody dead?’ my mother asked right away.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re still alive. I’m here to buy you a drink.’

  She smiled and bit her lip. The girls looked nowhere, or inspected their nails, waiting for Alice to open. They knew something large was happening. This stranger, this dark suit. And Alice stood up, a spark in her eye.

  ‘Lassies,’ she said, ‘this is my boy Jamie. He lives in England.’

  And each fell in with smiles about them, hands to my mother’s wrists.

  ‘What a lovely big fella,’ said the one I liked. ‘Bonny like you, Alice. Oh my. The big blond.’ Cackles came down, a jackpot of coins.

  ‘You can sit beside me any time you like, son,’ said a ruby-faced one.

  Easy laughter.

  ‘Hey, moaners,’ she shouted to the men at the bar, ‘you can all go home now. That’s the talent in.’

  ‘I hope his suspension’s in good nick,’ said a man who sounded like her husband, ‘if he’s to take you anywhere, that is.’

  ‘Cheeky bastard,’ said the woman, and all the girls laughed, and lifted a glass.

  I went round the table and sat with Alice.

  ‘A nice big boy,’ said her friend at my side, and then, with all the others, she fell away to allow us a notion of privacy.

  It was as if this group was used to trouble. I don’t know if Alice had ever mentioned her son in England. But there was no embarrassment, no shy looks. Everyone played it just right for Alice. No wrong questions, no mock surprise. It was something to talk about for later, I’m sure. But just then, with my mother still flushed, and worry in her eye, they all turned their backs, new jokes rising, cigarettes burning, Alice and me just a moment to ourselves.

  ‘You look a bit thin,’ she said. ‘Your hair’s down over your ears.’

  ‘It’s your Scottish water,’ I said. ‘Never did a poor soul any good.’

  ‘Hey, watch what you’re saying. We sell it now in fancy bottles. Your smart people down the road can’t get enough of it.’

  We laughed into the table. When the girl came past I lifted the list from the kitty tumbler and handed it over, with money. ‘Bring us a round, would you please,’ I said, ‘and add on a pint of Export.’

  ‘You don’t need to be buying rounds,’ said Alice.

  ‘Never mind us, son,’ said the woman nearest, with a cough.

  ‘Not at all. No problem. It’s fine.’

  My mother and the women exchanged looks and smiles. Alice was great; she seemed so alive and well tuned. She looked like she knew her way around herself. And here was the person she wanted to be. Her hair all layered and tinted in a shop. Her make-up light and carefully done. I took in everything about her then. Her perfume upgraded from the Avon vapours of yore.

  She once had the scent of weekly instalments. The new smell was hers: softly it spoke of her affluent days.

  I had never seen her with painted nails. Light brown and smooth, even-cuticled.

  I never thought my mother could have such nails. And everything about her seemed just like that. Mature and stylish and kept in check. Her look spoke of time to herself, and few money worries, and no constant back shift. She looked like a woman with charge cards. A person with views, opinions, and shocking things to say. A woman of silences and thoughts. And most of all, I could see it there, and see it there as I never had. My mother looked like a woman who was having sex. She was not the object I’d long made her into: the desireless wonder, the queen of endurance. This was not the woman I saw. The woman I saw was having sex. And it struck me. I
t struck me as something new and important.

  The oddness of thinking these things of my mother, of seeing so much in the wave of her hair, the hand on her glass; of finding so much in the tone of her voice, the depth of her laugh, the way her scarf was knotted and tucked; the oddness of this, of grasping these things, was wiped clean away, just by the force of who she was now. I didn’t recognise her. She was different from the woman her first life allowed her to be. So different. And not the person in my imagination. She was suddenly herself, and so very real, and living out nobody’s version but her own. I thought in those seconds that perhaps none of us had ever known her at all. We had no idea but our own idea of her. And that idea was dead. She had her own life now. And it was new. Sitting beside her in the Railway Club I suddenly saw her for the first time. She wasn’t just a child’s lost mother, or a victim trapped in time. She was something else. She had not just lived her life as an absence. She was here, and was much, much more than the bare, abandoned thing that lived alone in my head.

  I saw her that one time in Blackpool. But I didn’t see that she was so much herself.

  ‘You’re so like your father in some ways, Jamie,’ she said, ‘wanting us all to live in the kitchenette.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I was just wondering. I mean. When did you start coming to the social clubs? The pubs. I mean how did you meet the ones who come?’

  ‘Let me tell you something, Jamie. You’ll remember it yourself. All the singing and dancing was knocked out of me years ago. When you were a baby, you know? But I had a life before then – a good life. My mother was a singing-and-dancing person, and I used to go with all the girls then to the Scarborough. I had a life before your father, and I’ve had a life since … since that all ended. I wasn’t going to just lie down and die. These are my friends here. They’ve been good to me. And so has Bob. But, you know, that’s fair enough. I’ve been good to him.’

  ‘When I saw you that time in Blackpool,’ I said. ‘I was happy for you. You seemed like you had … you seemed like you’d survived all that rubbish years ago.’

  ‘We’ve never spoken of anything, Jamie.’

  ‘I know.’

  And just as she spoke it occurred to me that I wouldn’t say those things I had thought about all day. The tower block, the demolition, and Hugh bad now and dying in his bed. The fact that I sometimes had panics in my car. None of that. The long-term plan. The getting back together. My Karen and the baby that wasn’t born. None of it. I was happy to just be there with Alice, talking a little, one thing or another, and just watching her there in the middle of her own life. Everything could wait for another day, or could wait for all time for that matter. What I’d come to find was here quite differently. The sight of Alice was an answer in itself.

  One time my mother allowed me to go free, to learn about houses and history and flowers, and to lose my cares in an act of becoming, and now it was her turn, and she wanted to be free to lose her cares, and not be silenced by the forces of before. The fact was clear in her every aspect. I mustn’t confuse her with my own confusions. And nor did I want to. I was all the man I would ever be.

  Steady enough, and made up for her. Contemplating Alice.

  She was happy and free on the rock over Saltcoats. And when my mother said that – ‘We’ve never spoken of anything, Jamie’ – I knew she just wanted us to stay friends, and not the people who make big claims, and who make or break each other. She wasn’t cut out for family routines. She said it herself in so many words: ‘Let’s be as we’ve been, my Jamie boy. Only more so, and with more sense of what is good in us; more days like these.’

  ‘… And your mammy came in,’ said Ella, the one with the ruby face. ‘And she gave each one of us a miniature of vodka. (You know the wee vodkas.) We’re sitting there in our rollers right, drunk – four in the one room in a bed-and-breakfast – and the wee baldy guy’s ready to pap us out if we don’t shut up. Yer mammy and the vodka. Next minute, the bold one. Muggins here. I’m out on the landing there looking for the toilet. I sees a door. No problem – in I goes. Feels around the wall. A basin. That’ll do nicely says me. (Puggled as a monkey.) Messing about with the night dress. The light comes on. Big Malcolm! I’d walked right into his room. Well. The look on him. Mental he went. Your mammy here had to go in there in the morning and speak nice to him. Right out of order. What a laugh.’

  The women at the table were screaming with laughter. All the tales from a weekend in Rothesay. My mother was chuckling away to herself.

  ‘Characters,’ she’d say, just under her breath, at the end of every story.

  ‘A bit of order over there,’ shouted one of the husbands at the bar. ‘The pensioners here are having to turn down their hearing-aids. Shut it.’

  But the women just went on as before. Alice was right about them. They knew how to enjoy themselves. They knew they wouldn’t have to wait around for tragedy. In years still to come there’d be cancers and cures, failures of the heart, trouble with nerves. Husbands would wander; a car would appear out of nowhere. The women in this group would one day have police at their doors. Drugs and failed marriages; loneliness, depressions. And grandchildren too; the troubles ahead.

  All would know tragedy, and each their own. My mother’s friends and my mother too. But this day they were laughing for all the world. Cruising along on a second wind. They laughed at each other and poured out drinks. No time to think of a world not here. Alice was right about these women. They could enjoy themselves.

  ‘You’re good company,’ my mother said to me. She had noticed my giggling and jokings-back, my silly-arsed flirting with Ella and Joan. ‘And you take a drink,’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘did you think I was boring and plain, my mother?’

  ‘Well no,’ she said, ‘you were a funny kid. Always a bit of a shadow-mouth. You were always thinking. Always making plans. And you had the harsh eye. I hadn’t cut you out as a raver.’

  ‘Oh I’m mad, me,’ I said, with a blush and a grin. We laughed at the beer-mats again.

  ‘Bob,’ she said.

  And there at the table was silver-haired Bob, easy-going, false-toothed, and tall.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Jamie,’ he said.

  He shook my hand like to shake it off. But his eagerness was just like mine. It seemed so civilised to be liking Bob. My mother’s husband. And it wasn’t hard. In his grey flannels and blue blazer – his full sovereign ring – Bob was the opposite of my father. He looked at you when he spoke. He’d a feminine manner of patience about him. He drank half-pints. He carried his things in a wallet. He seemed to like listening to Alice. And he touched her more in ten minutes – a pat, a nip, a squeeze, a kiss – than my father had done in ten years in my presence.

  There was an air of instant generosity about Bob. He was a stretch of clear water.

  ‘Come up to the bar,’ he said. ‘You must be just about exhausted with these women.’

  The men at the bar were all plastered. They laughed at nothing and spilled their drinks. ‘You better watch your time,’ said one, ‘if that suit’s to be back today.’

  ‘You’re a daft cunt, Jimmy,’ said the easy-going Bob.

  And that was no surprise either. It was said in a certain manner, in a way that was harmless and private. All the men in that part of the world have a voice they preserve for these moments. It always comes out with men along bars, so long as the women are distant: a knowing, all-men-together, Masonistic thing, a deft orchestration of ‘pricks’ and ‘dicks’ and filthy jokes. Even the gentlest of husbands are prone. They like the inclusion, and recognise the code; they join in the banter, to show themselves worldly, to show themselves open to the commonness of things. And young boys grin over their first pint of cider. The church of men. The sense of connection.

  A greasy-faced Sammy pressed in between us. ‘What do you call a woman with three jugs?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Bob, unpeeling a ten-pound note.

  ‘A godsend
,’ said Sammy. He spluttered into a brown pint. I grinned like an idiot, with one side of my face. Bob chuckled.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Now piss off.’

  The guy went away and pressed himself in further up.

  Once or twice we tried to speak at the same time. Eventually Bob broke through.

  ‘She’s a smashing lassie, your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s been the making of me.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, a bit weaker than I meant, ‘she’s never looked better.’

  ‘Happier,’ Bob said. And then he corrected that. ‘I mean. It’s always a struggle to be happy with yourself.’

  Always a struggle. I didn’t ask him what he meant by that.

  ‘You know, my mother and me, we haven’t seen a lot of each other. Not in recent years.’

  ‘Aye I know,’ said Bob. ‘I mean, this being the first time we’ve met, and all that.’

  Bob was speaking nervously. Everything he said was vague, as if it would be out of order for him to be too definite now, too certain, and to seem to be making judgements, on this our first meeting. But he did make judgements. He was too organised a person not to say the thing he thought would be most helpful.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I don’t know much about Alice’s earlier life. I don’t think it’s my place … but, anyway, I know that Alice has strong feelings about you, and want you to know you’re welcome in my house. Any time.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  But I suddenly wanted to walk away. Or just leave. I was overcome with a sudden feeling that I just wasn’t part of this world. Maybe I never had been. I was glad to see Alice; her husband was a nice man. But what had this to do with me now?

  What had this … why was I here?

  I tried to swallow my inconsistency with a gulp of beer.