A stretch of water. Calm and slick and oblivious.
Bob continued to talk about the good life he wanted for him and Alice. A caravan near Pitlochry. Plane tickets to the Via Dolorosa. And nice meals on patios in wide hats and shorts. An abundance of sun creams. All cares behind them. He told me he had been married twice before. Three daughters. One son. Never sees the son.
‘We all just have to live with our mistakes,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
The karaoke had started, and Ella was up there. ‘I’ll take the blanket from the bedroo-em,’ she sang, ‘and that means we can’t stick ar-ound. Well go walking in the moonlight, where our true love hmm-hm-hm. I can’t see the fucking words.’
‘They women know how to enjoy themselves,’ said Bob.
I was starting to feel the drink. The barman put another two whiskies down in front of us. I got us two more half-beers as well. I lifted a whisky. We stood with our backs to the bar.
‘Well, Bob,’ I said, ‘you’re a good man. I’m glad you’re nice to my mother.’
And I chinked my glass against his on the counter. Bob lifted his beer. ‘Steady, son,’ he said. And then he let himself smile. ‘She’s a great lassie.’
Alice was looking over. I lifted my glass in greeting. She just looked at us. She looked almost through us. The look on her face said nothing in particular. And yet it did somehow. The men boozing and clinking their glasses. She seemed to see us more clearly than we saw her. That was her look. A soft and a fleeting contempt, across the airless dancefloor.
A guy emerged from the corner’s thicket of bar-stools. He had one of those poor beards, the kind that camouflage a slack jaw. Another Sammy. His handshake was cold and liquid. He exhibited the customary interest of one shirt-and-tie in another. Rheumy-eyed and bored, Sammy was a reporter on the local paper.
‘I’ll need to leave that beer,’ said Bob. ‘I’ve my work to get away to. You watch yourself.’
‘Okay, Bob,’ I said. ‘It was …’
‘Great,’ said Bob. ‘Great to meet you.’
‘That’s right. Great,’ I said. ‘And sooner than later I hope.’
‘I hope so too,’ he said. ‘It’s good to keep in touch with your mother.’
And with a lightsome air of paternal authority, Bob winked, squeezed my arm, and moved with busy intention towards the far corner, and his heart’s desire.
The man from the paper moved closer. His breath smelt of scampi fries.
‘You don’t like me, do you?’ he said.
‘I don’t know you, mate,’ I said.
But he was right. I didn’t like him; I thought I knew his kind. It was pretty straightforward really. He looked like someone who had something unhelpful to say. He staggered up like someone with information. Someone with news. The sort of guy who’s keen to tell you much more than you’d care to know about yourself. And I could see from his face that he meant to let me know. He dived with unpiloted fury; the hapless wrath of the truly disappointed professional.
‘You must be one of the great Hugh Bawn’s long-lost tribe,’ he said.
I lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the floor.
‘I hear he’s in deep shit. Some lectures the old boy used to dole out. Seems the old fingers were in the till.’
‘Get lost,’ I said.
And I wanted him to walk off. I didn’t want a fight. But I wasn’t moving. I wasn’t for running to my mother.
‘No, it’s very interesting,’ he said, a grin smeared over his face. ‘Very interesting. I mean, it would appear that your old man, the big socialist, was never shy of a wee chance here and there.’
‘Shut it,’ I said.
‘No, it’s interesting. Him being such a saviour and everything. People desperate for the new flats. It seems he riddled those flats with cheap asbestos, just to get them up. Just to win an argument. Cheap materials. Never safe. Soaked up water like a sponge. It seems your old man was doing deals on the fly. A wee deal here, a backhander there, a wee …’
‘Shut your fucking face,’ I said, putting my glass on the bar.
He moved in closer.
‘Now, now, big man. Don’t get upset here. I’m just saying, you know, it’s interesting. Mr Bawn, he was never by saying this and that, you know, about progress and the future and all that. They say now he might have been skimming a wee bit profit for himself. Would that be possible at all?’
‘Never,’ I said.
‘It’s interesting what you hear. I mean …’
I could see my mother in the corner. She was looking down at a song-sheet. I made a grab for the guy’s throat.
‘If you put anything in your poxy paper I’ll break your fucking jaw,’ I said.
A few of the men at the bar had turned, sensing an incident.
‘You and whose fucking army?’ said the guy.
His face spun back in a whirlpool of anger. He was scarlet. He was shouting now. ‘Your cunt of a granda took the people for a ride. Progress and progress and progress, my arse! Don’t blame the people in here. We’re the ones that had to live in his fucking hovels. Get your fucking hand off me, the English prick that you are.’
I let go of him. I was much taller than he was. My anger meant more. But his awful words had dazed me somehow. I could see he was ready for anything. I let him go and just stood there glaring.
‘You’re disgusting,’ I said.
‘Eh? Go to fuck, you middle-class prick,’ he said. ‘Coming in here …’
I felt I could have crushed him into the floor. For having that face, for saying those things, for writing the stories I knew he would write. For making a show of us. For seeing Hugh’s misjudgements as something cheap and low.
He would never know how much he was wrong.
‘Leave it, Sammy,’ said one of the men, pulling him over.
Our crusader for truth.
Words marched out of my mouth and dropped dead to the floor.
‘Hugh Bawn was an idealist,’ I said. ‘And who are you? What are you to Hugh Bawn? He gave his life to things. He believed in them. And he made other people believe in them. What are you to him? He is a fucking god compared to you.’
People were really looking now. The reporter spat at my feet. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ I said. ‘Even his greatest mistakes came from a better place than your truths. My grandfather has worked all his life. He never had a penny he didn’t earn. He priced his blocks too cheap. He built more houses with what they saved. His mistakes were better than your truths. You fucking pig.’
Alice was beside me. She tugged at my hand.
‘Come on, Jamie,’ she said. ‘Sit down now. Come on.’
The reporter struggled against the arms that held him back. ‘Aye fuck off, son,’ he said. ‘Away back to where you came from.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘New ways to kill your fathers. Crucify them for their mistakes.’
I was drunk but my voice was quieter now. A man stepped from behind the reporter. ‘There’s a different idea of progress now,’ he said. ‘This corruption. They want it to stop. You know that, pal.’
I looked at him. I looked at my mother.
We have to live with our mistakes.
‘The city fathers are taking a tumble,’ he said. ‘You know the way it is. A different idea of progress. The old way didn’t work.’
I looked at him. My blood seemed to retreat in its veins.
‘So they tell me,’ I said.
The women sat like nothing had happened. We tried to forget it. The club lit up in a flurry of songs.
Karaoke sunset.
I stopped drinking. The women went up one after the other.
I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.
Sometimes a man with a serious eye. Lifting the microphone wire with the notes.
Lochnagar.
The waitresses know the song-numbers by heart. They warble and bop their breaks away.
‘Alice,’ I said, ‘old Hugh is a
t his last. He is going to die.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I heard that. It’s sad, Jamie. And you’re closer to him than any of us were. But he’s an old man, you know? You should try and not let it get to you so much. Hugh’s had a good life.’
I looked at her a second.
‘Yes, you’re right,’ I said.
And I didn’t say any more. She didn’t ask me if I was staying in the flat at Annick Water. She didn’t ask me anything like that. She looked back up at the singers. And what she said she almost whispered.
‘Poor Margaret has had it for years. It’s no been easy. But God knows how she’ll live without him.’
‘She has her memory,’ I said.
My voice had faded inside itself.
‘Aye well,’ said my mother, ‘there’s always that.’
I touched her hand when her turn came to sing. I’d heard it said: she’s a lovely singer. She’d the full attention of all her friends, her making-the-most-of-it pals. I inched away from the table unnoticed. Ella and Joan were mouthing the words to my mother’s song. Eyes all water. Enjoying themselves.
Stardust.
I looked up at Alice. She was a lovely singer. She knew how to put it over too. I raised the fingers of one hand, and slowly I folded them into the palm. Berry’s wave, in the Ferguson darkness, all those years ago.
‘Bye, Mum,’ my mouth said.
And she blew down a kiss. A kiss and a smile from my mother up there, so easy now, and so free.
Beside a garden wall, when stars are bright,
You are in my arms.
The nightingale tells a fairytale
Of paradise where roses bloom.
The door snapped shut at my back. The wind again. The breath on the black glass sea.
When I dream in vain. In my heart it will remain.
I could hear my mother’s good singing voice as I stood at the head of the serpentine steps.
A Stardust melody …
On top of the miners’ ruin four magpies pecked at the broken stone, and over the green steps the sea-salt spray was fresh and welcome. The spray was welcome over the rock. My face was cold and new with that spray. I stopped in the middle of all those steps and felt for a second just salt and sea. Nothing was left inside my clothes, nothing of me, just salt and the sea, and the roar of the sea-lap rising.
SIX
As it is in Heaven
Half-owre, half-owre to Aberdour,
‘Tis fifty fathoms deep,
And there lies good Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet!
Hugh died on St Stephen’s Day. It being low water, he went out with the tide. There was no noise at the end of his life. Everything was quiet. He died by himself, four feet high on a hospital bed, on every side a screen of green nylon. Somehow his breath grew supple in the final hours, and cleaner, as if he were back in one of his cool meadows, and lifting up his chest and his nose as he used to do, and purely breathing, as if to take possession of the whole of nature. When we had gone for the evening he just lay openeyed. His breathing climbed down from its high place of trees. The nurse said he just stopped. His last breath gave out to the emerald curtains; the long day was over in the Martin Luther Ward.
The day before had been slow. Margaret cooked a small Christmas dinner. She laid the table in her own room, dressing it with crepe paper, a doily under a Dundee cake. A battalion of condiments was grouped in the table’s middle. Malt vinegar, a jar of beetroot, a bottle of brown sauce, some ketchup in a plastic tomato, a pot of pickled onions, a salt and pepper. She’d made some soup from a knuckly ham bone. She put out steak pie and peas. We ate it without saying much.
Her electric fire burned its bars. All her pictures stood hot on the wooden surround. And here and there the gifts from Spain: a leather-clad bottle of sangria; a flamenco doll; an ashtray shaped like Ibiza; a lush table lighter, ‘Welcome to Santa Ponsa’. Margaret had never gone to those places. Hugh’s old friends, people in the Housing Department at Glasgow, or related to the construction business, they had gone, and they had brought these things back, along with their stories of sunstroke and wine on the beach, and always they brought them ‘with many thanks’. Margaret thought they were terrible objects, but she liked to remember the people.
When she spoke it was almost a whisper.
‘I see you’ve your granda’s papers by the bed,’ she said. ‘So you know all the carry-on. The hearings in Glasgow?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We spoke of it before. You said he was under investigation. Did they know he was ill?’
‘Aye,’ she said. ‘They called him in to speak. A letter. I sent it right back. I said he couldn’t speak.’
‘They don’t understand, Granny. He may have cut corners. But only for the good. He wanted more flats for the people. And he wanted them quicker. Is that not right?’
‘That’s right, Jamie,’ she said. ‘Only for the good. And I know you don’t think these houses are great. But we thought they were great then. We thought they were everything they wanted. And you’re all tearing them down. But they can’t tear him down. He’s going down anyhow in his own way. He always meant to do the best. It carried him away. He made deals with the builders; he got them to deliver cheaper materials, so he got more stuff for the same money. And he sometimes paid them in cash, to speed things up. He only wanted to build more and more. But the high-rises were never as good as they should have been. They were built too cheap. They were too damp. That was his mistake. He was too keen.’
‘I’ll stick up for him wherever I can,’ I said. ‘They’re lumping him in with those other people, who took money and things. Hugh was just …’ I couldn’t find the word.
‘You’re a good one, Jamie,’ she said.
Her hand pulled at the loose skin about her neck.
‘They used to call your granda a moderniser. That’s what you are now. But you’re not trying to pull him down, sure you’re not? Coming back was good. It has been like years ago – the three of us years ago.’
‘I’ll do everything,’ I said.
‘Let’s say no more,’ she said. ‘The Queen is coming on. Let’s hear what she’s saying this year.’
And that was one of the few times we made reference to Hugh’s troubles. One of the few times we actually said it. And although it was for ever on our minds – I had first heard word of it in Liverpool – there was no point in making a show. It was just something large that was happening in public, a bad and involving noise from Hugh’s great profession, and mine too, the one he had given to me. My granda’s bold decisions, his long obsession with new housing, his wayward manner with figures and budgets, his bending the rules, had come forward to hurt him, and to throw our deepest devotions into relief. He had made mistakes. At first he saw me as part of the mob – those forgetters of past necessities, those rectifiers of big mistakes. He thought that he saw me coming: the man with the killing truth.
But in those last months, as Hugh lay dying, I think he, like me, began to ignore the public noise. We swam that while in private concerns. The tower blocks stood around us – we were wrapped in one too – and they joined us up. But as he raged and moaned and stared at the wall, and as he travelled with me through the lanes of Ayrshire, I think Hugh began to leave behind those public problems, those matters to do with immense futurity. It was all just behind him one day.
Hugh trusted that Margaret and I saw the good in him. We were on his side. That is what I had come to hope for anyhow. We were all lost in the past he cared for. And I’ll always say it: being lost in his time made my own time clearer. I wanted my own day, but not at the expense of every day that preceded my own. Hugh’s gains and losses were mine too. I watched the last of his anger and sadness. I saw his end. And though there was nothing especially brave about Hugh, he had tried to make changes, and live with his lies, and that showed a sort of courage too. I came home to Ayrshire thinking I would take a stand against Hugh’s delusions. But that is not wh
at happened. I stood beside him, and listened to his life, and I held his hand, and I finally grew up.
Margaret and Hugh would tell me my life was just at the beginning. And maybe it was so. But all their stories and their ancient songs, their history, their ambitions, their troubles and decay, had brought me to feel, in that season back home, as if I too was part of some great and personal reckoning with the past. They gave me that feeling. And I gave it to myself. I imagined some world I had known and loved was dying with Hugh and Margaret. There was a fading light I had never quite seen. And seeing it changed me. My mother and father rose up in my mind. And so did the children I had yet to have. I had learned that our fathers were made for grief: I was grieving myself before my time.
On Christmas Night my granda wet the bed. He lay looking up at the low ceiling. We tried to feed him crumbs of pie and cake. He cowered from us. It seemed that he and Margaret had come to some pact: they wanted him to die at home. But his mind went wandering out of the room. Margaret said he had grown like his mother. His eyes like the ends of his fingers were yellow. I took hold of his hand.
‘Don’t speak,’ I said. With my other hand I stroked his head, the side of his face. His eyes were scared. He kept them on me.
‘I love you very much, Granda,’ I said.
And at that my own breath shortened. There were tears on me. My hands seemed too big, like hands against a baby’s face. Too big for such a small person as this. His scared face.
‘You are one of the greats,’ I said. His yellow eyes were all water. He rounded his mouth with the effort to breathe, and to speak.
‘I owe you my life,’ I said.
His voice broke through at last.
‘We were good, Jamie,’ he said.
‘Very good,’ I said. ‘And none better.’ I held both his hands.
‘Good, son,’ he said. His eyes half-dipped with the effort. He lifted them back up.
‘Maggie,’ he said. And my granny stood there covering her face.
‘Aye,’ she said, and ran her hands along his legs. ‘I’m here, Hugh.’
Our Fathers Page 20