*
We wanted Hugh to be with his mother. The dark cars followed his hearse to the Royston Cemetery in Glasgow; 30 miles of tree-spattered Ayrshire, the villages here and there, inhaling the white afternoon. We crossed the fields, each field tight with frost. Outside Lugton a farmer stood, transfixed in the meagre grass, his cold cows lolling around him. He took off his cap as the cortège passed. Margaret turned in a daze from the window.
‘It was a good turnout,’ she said.
Glasgow now: a gaseous plaid of one-way roads.
We passed the old municipal Post Office. It was closed down. A saltire banner flapped up there, over George Square, the castle of Fletton brick. Margaret swallowed hard. Her speech was slow. ‘The flag that fans our people cold.’
She turned to me. ‘I want you to know that your granda made mistakes,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t always lovable to people, though I always loved him. And he made mistakes. Let it be clear in your mind, Jamie. He got above himself as a housing man, and he spread the money a bit thin, and the houses suffered, but he never took a penny out for himself. You must realise that. I think you said you knew that was true.’
‘Yes I do,’ I said.
‘The idea that he had money,’ she said. ‘He barely had a pension at the end. He never bothered about money.’ Her eye glinted beneath the net of her veil. ‘And don’t think I don’t know you’re paying for most of this.’
‘Shhh, Granny,’ I said, and took her hand. ‘We’re going to be all right.’
‘They will never believe that he was only trying …’ she said.
‘Shh,’ I said. ‘They will believe. They will.’
Someone had taken care of the grave. The gravestones on either side were covered in moss, but not Famie’s. You could see the words clearly:
Euphemia Bawn
Born 2nd March 1893. Died 19th May 1941.
Councillor and Reformer
Beloved wife of Thomas Mangan Bawn
who died at Ypres on 6th January 1918
whilst serving his country.
‘In my end is my beginning.’
I had never known so much silence. A small wind, the strands of grass vibrating like strings. And our few dozen breaths showing thick on the air thereabouts. The men mostly stood with their hands clasped in front. The women’s were stuffed into pockets, or trapped in handkerchiefs. Father Timothy started his words. Much of what he said I couldn’t hear; his voice went over the houses; my eye was absorbed in high windows. One thing came over:
‘… the inevitable courses of Nature in reclaiming what she has lent to us.’
Margaret had entered on other proceedings. She wasn’t with us. Her lips moved slowly. She ignored the priest. I placed my arm over her. She made no movement. She was out somewhere in her salt-seas of comfort; she spoke with her national ghosts.
‘He should be buried in swansdown,’ she said, her voice just a murmur under the priest. ‘He’s only asleep.’
The people put their eyes to the coffin lying over the grave.
‘He’ll step out of that chest on the high day,’ said Margaret.
I looked for a time at the sorry ground. Some of the people whispered words in response to the priest’s holy things. One or two of the women put a hand on Margaret, but she was lost to us then. She seemed like an aged tribeswoman, a rune-reading witch, strange and erotic with her fingers. She began to whimper. ‘Our Lady wept for Darnley in a white cloot,’ she said.
‘Granny, I’m here still Hold my hand.’
She held it tight.
‘My very own,’ she said with tears coming down. She was now ignoring the presence of everyone else. She had come to look frightened. ‘Jamie my own,’ she said, ‘I’ll be the last in that grave. I’ll be the watchman, sure I will?’
Out of dust we came, and unto dust we shall return …
‘I’ll take in water for they’re a’ thirsty,’ said Margaret.
‘Shh,’ I said. ‘I’m here. I’m here, Granny.’
There was nothing more to say. Margaret shook cold in my arms. I could see a silver helium airship over the city centre. It glinted there in the distance. It flew high on a string from the City Chambers. I don’t know what it was doing up there. It was the sort of thing they did now. The sort of thing many of us did. I suppose it was meant to make people feel they were living in a good place. Or maybe it was just for the new year tomorrow. A Hogmanay balloon. It turned slowly in the air over George Square. It turned very slowly.
‘Put in the mirror and put in the bell,’ said Margaret. ‘He’ll come out of there with a rage forenoon.’
Her voice was loud and plain now.
‘Shh,’ I said.
I held her straining arm. I thought she might throw herself into the pit, so glazed was her eye with fear and sorrow; to hurt herself to prove Hugh’s honour, an act of suttee in the heather-touched lanes of the Royston Cemetery, under the cloud-shade of Glasgow. She seemed to melt into common tears as the coffin went into the ground. She came to quietness then. Father Timothy lifted a handful of soil. I stepped up to him. I took his hand in both of mine. I took the soil. I held my hand over the grave; the cold clay took seconds to slide away, falling at last to the coffin below.
‘Goodbye,’ I said.
I went back to Margaret. The people had left the grave. She leaned over with a small twist of violets. She kissed them and dropped them in. She spoke seven words in the great stillness.
‘I won’t be long at your back,’ she said.
I held her hand as we walked to the car. Lines of graves going down the hill, and just at the foot there, a spread of houses. The light was beginning to go from the sky.
SEVEN
Jamie, Come Try Me
The Bruce Hotel,
12 Market Square,
Dumfries.
3 January 1996
Dear Karen,
This is the place where the man who wrote Peter Pan spent his boyhood. You would like it here. There are lots of old communists, and frock shops.
I’ve come down here to find my father. I just want to see him that’s all. Dumfries feels like what it is – a country’s end. The Galloway hills and trees are amazing. The hedges are all Protestant. It’s all very tidy. You would like it. Maybe we can come and see it some day.
What a time this has been. I used to think that only old houses could be haunted, and old people. But that is all over now. I’m coming home.
Love Jamie.
I sent that letter from the hotel desk on my second day in Dumfries. The letter carried all my love of Karen. But also, as I wrote it out, a feeling came over me, a red-eyed conviction, a sense of things that would never leave me, and of things now slipping away. I felt in a moment my strength, my weakness. I knew that the world was less certain now, and I’m sure I saw it for the first time, how changes come about, and that some were for good, and some for bad, and that in one day’s closing lies the opening of the next. As the pen went across the paper I knew I had changed. I could only love where I could. I could only hope to be happy, and find comfort in the hope, as people do, wherever they are.
I see that letter in front of me now. If it contains something of the gathered obsessions of my life so far, then let that be so, for it also contains a promise of them one day being dissolved, and of the future coming into its own, and blowing medicinal wind into the rooms of all those hours gone by. The days to come might be days like these; Karen and me, and the life we could make between us. I had always thought I would turn to salt if I ever looked back: but I was all right now. I would soon go home.
The hotel wallpaper was tea-time flock. The curtains were Terleys-white. I sat on the bed – back on the headboard, sachet of coffee in soft-boiled water – and there I saw blocks of Dumfries light meandering through the bay window’s glass. It had something to do with cars and clouds, the way the light-blocks went round and round; like fireworks on snow they burst into shadows at the door. The light came into the room, shifting
along the walls, as if time were no object, as if time itself were impervious to all that happens under its passing. All you could do was watch it going, the shadows a pretty companion, the broken marks of a thousand sun-dials, running away from time, and me.
I posted the letter. Then I sat on the bed and watched the light for an hour. I think it was an hour. I closed my eyes and dreamed of young men singing songs from open windows. They sang in their pyjamas. I came down to hear them. They stood at the windows with big smiles at night time. And then we all went out to the sea. The boat was dry. Red fish swam on either side of the boat. We all sailed ahead thinking nothing could be wrong. And nothing was wrong.
The boat we sailed on was big and dry.
When I woke, dark fingers of shadow swayed on the wall. Trees outside. The light had moved to the trees now. The new shadows played on the wall. They danced in a ring. A movie of children on the far wall.
As a boy I ran out on my parents. I never came back.
Dumfries became a place in my head. I thought of it now and then. Hugh told me it was red-stone. They never wanted any blocks like his. It was a blush-spot on the map below Ayrshire. We thought not to like it was good. When I left my parents to their final disasters – pain and mind-loss, the eventual split – the last places in Scotland were my father’s ports of call. My grandfather always had the word on him. He’d be pickled in Ecclefechan, sozzled to hell in Gretna Green, or lost to himself in Langholm or Canonbie. The last places in Scotland: the beginning of England.
My father was nothing but mad on the drink. I was afraid of him. The look in his blood-dimmed eyes that day, the day he said he would end me for good, those years ago in the Ferguson home, the damp walls encircling us. That was the picture of him I carried in my head. His gaunt face. His collapsed cheeks.
My life-blood, my enemy.
*
In my last year at school this picture was replaced once more. I went down to Dumfries to see him. It was summer. Hugh and I had inspected the roses at Culzean Castle on the way down. I know the sea there sparkled in a fair tumbling of blue. Only the rocks seemed asleep that day; down on the beaches they lay about, in ghostly spray of sea-salt and softness, those glacial ruins, their hard memories, and all around them the full-blooms and bickerings of summer.
The rocks stood still. Auld Wives rocks, in threes: hurled from a mythical Ireland out there, launched in the days before Christian boats, by infamous women in their heathen cloth, who had nothing of beauty, but hurled these rocks to show they had strength in its place. That was the story of the rocks at Culzean. Hugh told it again. He loved to tell it. The Auld Wives stood on the beach below the castle wall. Some phosphorous bombs were washed up; they fizzled and split at the tide’s edge, those mini-worlds of lava. Yesterday’s sewage was held in a gluttony of blue.
Dead crabs. American voices.
The sand was slick with an inkling of coming oil.
They had found my father’s car on the edge of the Solway Firth. It was up on the grass with the doors wide open. He’d abandoned it there. The back seat was piled with drained bottles. Lanliq, Eldorado.
A string of keys dangled beneath the wheel. The floor was all Woodbines. The roof was bashed. It seems he had found his way back to a local pub. He leaned on the bar and began to scream. He just screamed. No words. He took a water jug off the bar. He continued the screaming. He broke the jug and tore at his wrist. He ripped again and again at the flesh of his arm.
Gouts of blood, on the bar towels, the ice bucket.
All the time he screamed. He hurt himself. The police came.
The peat-moss water of the River Nith; its glimmer down to the Blackshaw Bank. A mineral souse over hills and dales; the waters of thirst and oblivion. The Burgh of Dumfries. A civic neatness; a well-fitting collar round the tie of the Nith. A place of ease and worship. Long queues at the post office; satellite dishes on every street. But quiet Dumfries. A place of cakes.
They put my father in a nut-house. Eskdale Brattles. It was a posh place with high fencing; some kind of old baronial hall. It had once been a place for nervous gents. They taught them to spoon their soup in peace. It was so much of an orderly world about there. They had Wellington boots stacked by the door with people’s initials marked on them. The consultants wore watch-chains. There were birds of all kinds making noise in the gardens. I will never forget those lawns. Every colour under the sun. And the day I came there were bees outside, bees that buzzed, or were crooked in thistles. The bushes were heavy with sweet-smelling bells. My grandfather sat on a bench in the garden. I went into the ward by myself.
‘You’re very thin,’ I said to my father.
‘Porridge they feed you,’ my father said, ‘and kippers.’
His hair seemed redder than it ever had. The light in the ward was grey. He raised his hand. ‘You don’t look a fucking bit like me, so you don’t.’
‘Suppose not,’ I said.
‘No way. My family were all good at the football. You could never kick a fucking ball. A bastard’s no strength in his ankle.’
‘Not much. But you can play can’t you?’
‘I’ll put my boot to your arse,’ he said. ‘The fucking right way. No problem. No fucking problemo.’
A stack of cardboard sick-trays was beside his bed. And something odd: a small, painted, alabaster statue of St Joseph.
‘It’s all a load of shite. Stories of things that never happened. Cunts waving their arms about the place. Big noises. Bampots the fucking lot. Everybody wants to give you their big fucking story. God this and God that. God the fucking lot of them. Bampots. A load of piss.’
‘And what …’
‘What’s your name?’ he said.
‘My name?’
‘Your name. Your fucking name. What’s it to be?’
‘Jamie,’ I said.
‘Oh Jamie is it? Jamie. Wee Jamie. O Jamie fuck off.’
‘Dad.’
‘Don’t dad me. Don’t fucking dad me. I’m no your fucking dad. You must be fucking joking. Away you go and fuck. Wee Jamie. Big fucking head and wee fucking shoulders. Can he kick a ball? Can he fucking kick a ball? Go and take a fuck to yourself, son. What a fucking laugh eh? We are all daft in here. Don’t tell me they away and said nothing about it. Go and fuck yourself!’
‘Are you needing anything?’
‘Peace perfect fucking peace. No messing.’
He wiped his mouth and stared at the blankets.
‘I want you to go away.’
‘I don’t think I deserve this,’ I said.
‘Don’t give me what you deserve. What wee Jamie deserves. What does wee Jamie deserve? A kick in the arse. A good doing. A good kick in the bastarding arse. And he can go and blame some other cunt. Go on, my friend. Saint this and saint fucking that. Build them big, build them strong! On you go, wee man. Make us all sick. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred … gone yourself!’
I stood up. I felt a dangerous quickening about me.
‘You’re the fucking bampot,’ I said. ‘Your only son comes to see you …’
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you. Fuck you! Fuck up! Fuck up! Dickslapper!’
‘You make me sick,’ I said.
‘Nurse, nurse, get this sick bastard out of here! Nurse! He’s evil. He’s a bad wee bastard. He just offered me a drink! Nurse.’
The nurses came running.
‘Mr Bawn, come on now. This is no way to behave.’
‘Honest, nurse,’ he shouted. ‘He’s a bad person. He keeps tempting me with whisky. He said he would bring me in a dram. A big fucking tumbler of Grouse. He said it just there.’
I nodded to the nurses.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m on my way. The best of luck to you. He’s disgusting.’
‘Fuck him!’ shouted my father. ‘He thinks he is something. Can’t even kick a ball. Never could. Hopeless fucking wanker. Charge! Charge! Comes in here and offers me a drink! Bastard doesn’t know what a drink looks
like. Pure wanker. Fucking hopeless cunt of a boy. See he doesn’t steal your flowers by the way. The pansy likes flowers so he does. Comes in here with his fucking lies. Liar!’
I was outside before his voice drifted away. My grandfather was sleeping on the bench. He woke up and looked into my face. His eyes turned to the garden. He patted me about the head.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘there’s a Franciscan monastery up the road. Do you know it? The place where Robert the Bruce stabbed the Red Comyn. The beginning of the wars. Scotland’s independence. Happened just up there. It’s a lovely day.’
And we passed out of those high gates in silence. But soon we spoke of the local stone, and things that happened a long time ago. He didn’t ask me about his son. But he linked my arm as we walked up the road. We fell quiet as we turned the corner at the road’s end. The old monastery was now a supermarket.
‘Well well,’ Hugh said. ‘Life must go on. It comes for us all in the end.’
*
My father had gone quietly from the funeral mass. He didn’t come to the grave. The look of him standing at the back – lips unmoved to prayer – had stayed with me over the days. He had seemed so altered, a man of the parish, nicely filled out in his leather jacket. He was just like a person I had never known. He seemed all of a sudden a smaller thing: a spent force, a man of quite ordinary bias. There was nothing very tragic about him. He was like a lot of men who’d never known themselves: he’d made a life out of small and distinct realisations. And here he was. He was living with himself. Maybe he’d grown tired of his confusions, and now he was just their final sum, a character formed out of resignation, and the settled notion that this was all the life he could ever know.
I sensed he had come to this. There he was, depleted in his fawn-coloured scarf. I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t sad. The look of him stayed, that’s all, and it passed along my veins, as ice-water to the heart.
They told me he now drove a taxi in Dumfries. I walked down the steps of the white hotel and was quickly lost in the crowd of English Street. The January sales had started. Every window was loud with a string of red words: BARGAINS. MUST END SOON.
Our Fathers Page 23