Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  The charity shops had moth-eaten toys in their windows. Over-lashed mannequins in yesterday’s dresses. African baskets and chutney from Annan. A team of boys came riding past on their souped-up bikes: a great rush of air; a rail of stripes. They each wore a mask against pollution.

  Lead poison, bumble bees, sea salt, asbestos?

  They slid towards the countryside. As they made their way they looked like one people; their slim ankles, their gossamer hair. One people: a club for surviving, a tribe on the move. There was something optimistic in their bright-eyed passing. Something modern. The street was bored without them.

  A lot of the shops were old dwellings. Victorian blocks with the lower brickwork ripped out for glass. There was silver chrome over many doors, plastic wording everywhere. The winter light seemed absorbed in the chrome and the plastic.

  Outside Woolworths, a man who couldn’t lick his stamp.

  I came to a stop.

  The man leaned on a zimmer frame – leaning forward on his elbows, as if he were somewhere else, propped at the fence on a football terrace, or hung at the bar of a boozy saloon. He was trying to lick the stamp. His tongue was too deep in his mouth. It seemed to exhaust him, lifting his arm to his face, and the gum-paper would barely reach his lips before he’d to take it down again. He tried it over and over. I stopped beside him.

  ‘Can I put that on for you?’ I said.

  He unhunched a bit. There was uncertainty in his face.

  ‘I’ll just put it on for you,’ I said. ‘These things can be buggers to stick down.’

  ‘Grand,’ he said.

  I just licked the stamp and pressed it down. It was a postcard. My eye caught some words: ‘Dearest May.’

  I handed it back to the man.

  ‘Can you post it all right?’

  ‘Aye, son,’ he said, ‘thanking you. The pillar box is just up the road there.’

  And with that he took a grip of his frame and I passed on.

  I drifted away on the thought of him, of who he was, and why he was here, of who his family were, and did he have children? I thought of what his days might be like. I wondered what his teeth had been like in the days when he had them. Did he have black hair? Was he a man in the army or navy? Was he a digger for coal? I thought of the old man’s memory. I wondered was it good to him, or bad. He seemed to know his way in the town. I thought of his wide shoes, his pension, his ‘Dearest May’.

  I stopped. I had found one of the roads I was looking for.

  My grandfather had taught me to notice the builtness of things. He would say that nothing comes from nowhere, that even stones have stories. The smallest thing had a purpose. It was an offence to his affections, to take the life of things for granted. He always saw the work – man’s work, God’s work – behind every last thing he looked at.

  The street was exactly like one of those forties drawings, the ones dreamed up in war-fog, and put to paper the morning after Victory. Lines of white bungalows, paved and simple, with rounded doorways, yards of garden. Those drawings had once had a space-age feel, a heat-resistance; their cleanness a promise of mica. I used to look at them with awe. The lines so very pure. The sense of open air and ever-decreasing gravity.

  Some people had lived for houses such as these. The advertisements in the newspapers. The drawings of pencil-thin women in their glad-rags. Children beaming at the immaculate pavements. Husbands in suits with their dazzling mouths. The whiteness. The even-spaced trees; the kitchenette. And binding the streets together: a drainage system that would flush away the worst of the Scottish weather.

  The Houses of Tomorrow

  A Reality Today!

  Enjoy the cheerful, healthy conditions, which only

  proper planning can ensure.

  The modern home is the focus of the new Scottish family.

  The Maxwell Estate, Dumfries. Waiting for You.

  Walking along I began to feel the street under me. It held little of the blank optimism of old advertisements. A monument to the dreams of dead people, but now it stretched away. It was a living place.

  The houses of tomorrow, a reality today!

  And tomorrow was here. The futuristic glare was now dulled to a matt commonness. It now belonged to others. It was their experience now. Much of the whiteness had gone. Down that road there were no dreamers and builders with their arguments for the world – just little houses, and people living there, and no big dispute at the core of the bricks. There was none of the breath of past ideas. The houses were only houses now. The bricks were only bricks. The street was quite filled with its own ongoing day.

  I came to a grey bungalow. There was a garage built like a big wooden shed. The notice on the door said: Arrow Cars. Someone had put soapy water on the grass. The earthworms were out. And overhead the sun was white. The clouds all charred. No god came down to help us. Not me, not the worms. I stood by the grass for a good five minutes. The windows were mirrors of vertical light. My eyes had nothing to gain from heaven: they looked at those windows, purple and yellow and red for a second, a column of yellow that hailed from God only knows. The light moved, the window cleared. The colour went out to another place. A woman’s face was looking right at me.

  In a matter of seconds she opened the door.

  ‘Are you looking for something?’

  I walked up to her.

  ‘Yes, sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for one of your drivers.’

  ‘They’re all out on hires,’ she said. ‘Which one is it?’

  ‘Robert Bawn,’ I said.

  She looked at me, guessing. Her voice was mellow. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a friend of Robert’s,’ I said. ‘My name is Jamie.’

  There was some kind of movement in her eye. Her coolness seemed to go. Her movements suggested a wish to make things easy. ‘Right you are,’ she said, ‘come in here just now. I’ll try to get Robert on the radio. Would you like a wee cup of tea?’

  ‘Some water would be nice,’ I said.

  ‘Good for you,’ she said, bringing the glass from the kitchen.

  ‘Does Robert live here?’

  ‘No no,’ she said. ‘He drives for my husband’s firm. We run the taxis from the house here. Robert has his own place.’

  She took a long cigarette from a purse. She lit it while she spoke.

  ‘It’s a right cold day the day,’ she said.

  And with that she moved to the back of the room. She spoke into the radio. The phone rang at the same time. I saw someone pass beyond the glass door of the living room; it looked like a boy with a fishing rod.

  I sat on the sofa with my wrists on my knees. The glass was empty. It was one of those rooms that was all sofa; a TV pressed between upholstered arms. On top there were medals for bowling and darts. A silver cup for Scottish Curling. On the walls were pictures in cardboard frames: a boy and a girl in school ties and jumpers. A picture of a cairn terrier had something written underneath.

  ‘Bonny. Rest in Peace.’

  A row of football videos ran the length of the window.

  The woman was muffling her voice.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  Crackling.

  ‘I can go out if you want,’ she said. ‘I have messages to get.’

  Crackling again.

  ‘All right then … that’s okay. See you later. Cheery-bye.’

  She answered the phone again.

  ‘Picking up from?’ … ‘Your number?’ … ‘He’ll be there in about five minutes, darling.’

  She then went back to the radio. She called to the men in their cars.

  Nothing.

  She called again.

  Nothing.

  Then another burst of crackles.

  ‘All right, Jamie,’ she said, standing over me. ‘That was Robert. He said to meet him at the Monument. That’s right at the end of the street and turn left. It’s in the middle of the road. Is that okay for you?’

  ‘Great,’ I said, putting the glass on
the carpet. ‘Thanks for doing that.’

  ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘I hope you … find it all right.’

  The boy with the fishing rod was bent over the grass. He lifted worms into a tin. He was a longer-haired version of the boy in the school photograph. As I walked to the road I could see his mother out the corner of my eye. She was behind the window. The window was coming over blue.

  *

  The Monument stone was softened with rain. The years had made it red powder. The man at the top looked mild with his rifle; his helmet a metal boater, good for Henley and a drop of hail, but no use against German shells, or the corroding shite of Lowland blackbirds, who know no song but their own song, and no time but this. Our soldier stared ahead with a beatific smile. The people he’d fought for went round him in cars. His valediction was engraved on a frozen plaque.

  ‘They shall not grow old …’

  I looked up at the copper man. I tried to imagine a body like mine in his war clothes. Under his helmet, my own hair. My blood-rush blown to a stop. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. There was something yellow in the ring of poppies’ nylon.

  My father was there in minutes. He parked the car over the road. I had never seen him in jeans before. He was wearing jeans. He’d a smile on him. He came over to the Monument and put out his hand.

  ‘Well, son,’ he said, ‘you’ve a head of blond hair on you.’

  His handshake was weak, but the skin was hard; his hand was warm and athritic. He had always had freckles, never young, never sunny, but now they looked raw in their folds of skin. He had watery eyes. The sort of eyes that grow greener with feeling. He looked like his father standing there. He’d the similar look of toil just abandoned. His face was large like his. The same idle sniff of embarrassment. The same smoker’s primrose thumb. He was purposeful-looking, a jack of all trades; a plumber, a painter, a builder’s mate. I remembered the cook in the school for bad boys. I remembered his face in the boiler room. The hate and the pride in his mouth back then. His long night’s derangement in the bush with a knife. But the eyes now before me were plaintive for peace: he was somebody else now. I shook his hand and said hello.

  ‘I saw you at the funeral. You left.’

  ‘I know, aye. I couldn’t have gone to the coffin and that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wasn’t certain you were here. I don’t know what your life is like.’

  ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m lucky to be alive. It’s a wonder I’m not dead, Jamie. There but for the grace of God. And into the fucking bargain I was tired. The drink was killing me.’

  ‘You’re better now.’

  ‘One day at a time.’

  ‘I thought we would never meet like this.’

  ‘I always did my best for you, Jamie.’

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  ‘I tried …’

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  ‘We were …’

  ‘Robert. They were horrible times. We won’t talk about them any more. I don’t want to listen to you saying it was all fine. Just …’

  ‘Fucking hell, Jamie, we were young.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We were young.’

  ‘I know.’

  I thought I might walk away from him then. Just walk away and never turn. I had wanted a moment of grace between us. The world would go on without us, I knew. But this one day I had wanted him to listen. I hoped he might stop for a second and hear me. But he wanted to speak. He had always wanted to speak. And somehow I couldn’t blame him for that. He was pathetic, and so was I. Walls of self-pity had risen up between us. We each of us wanted to mend our ways. We wanted freedom. We wanted futures. We looked at each other; two men stood in a drizzle of silences. He touched the arm of my jacket.

  ‘I don’t even know who you are,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not a child any more.’

  ‘No. You’re not a child. You were never much like a child.’

  ‘But I was one, Robert. I was one.’

  ‘It’s an illness, Jamie. I was sick. I was sick then. And I was sick long after. Call me all the names. Call me a bastard. But all I know is I’m fucking trying now. It’s a terrible thing to be hated …’

  ‘You hated your father long enough.’

  He was upset now. Years of sorrow came into his eyes.

  ‘I didn’t hate him,’ he said. ‘I was never the son my da wanted. He wanted somebody he could mould – he wanted you. Your granda was a dreaming man. He needed people that could believe in his goals. I was no good for that. Maybe not good for much. But I didn’t hate the man. You’d be better to say I hated myself. My God, Jamie: your mother and me made our own judge and jury when we made you.’

  I heard myself say the word sorry.

  ‘No. It’s me that’s sorry,’ he said.

  We closed our mouths. Each of us held back a century of troubles. We just let them sink to the graves we knew. There was nothing much we could say. We had wanted to talk our lives out loud, but neither, in the end, was fit for that. We looked at the copper soldier. We looked at each other and almost smiled. Our battles had been so domestic. They were fought in kitchens. They were fought in bedrooms. The Great War. We fought it in our sleep. To make lives as good as the houses they built for us. To make ourselves modern. To think of ourselves as a family on the move.

  The sea whispered somewhere. Our mothers watered it with their tears. The tears went to nowhere, whilst sons and lovers stood watching the waves.

  I thought of Margaret’s battle. Robert’s battle. The battle of Hugh Bawn. My mother’s long war. Each of them marching to a different drum. I could see it then as I looked at my father. He had not been a part of Hugh’s great campaign, and never a part of mine. But he had fought for himself. He had fought and won. He was off the drink. He was sober now. I was there and then charged with a sense of Robert. The nights had been long and slow for him.

  Drowned and washed up, drowned and washed up.

  A never-ending chaos, a spew of losses, the sad and perpetual ruin of his life. And now he was here, a sober person on a winter day, a man in jeans, and touching the arm of a son he barely knew. A new thought came over the air: nothing had ever been easy for him. In a way I would never forgive him for that. He had no ease; but there in the road I knew something else. He was here now. There was feeling in his eye. Something had removed him from the person he was. He’d survived himself. He’d survived his father. My will to speak had sunk with the recognition of something good in Robert. He was trying to live his life, as we all were.

  ‘I’m fucked if I know what to say,’ he said.

  I liked the silence between us. All words slipped away. I had waited all my life to say nothing to my father. I wanted quiet now, and in time we could just forget the old words, and look up straight, and say one thing: ‘We are fine’.

  ‘I could drive you to my place,’ he said. ‘We could go and have a cup of tea.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That would be good.’

  From my father’s car the hills looked black. The trees up there were forked and bare; nothing moved. The car’s ashtray was empty. A St Christopher medal hung on a chain. The car smelled of sweets.

  Magic Tree. Vanillarama.

  My father stared right forward. He spoke about driving. He spoke about Queen of the South. He gave me his view on the system of parking in Dumfries. His temper flared at the manners of other drivers. He talked of the spring fair; he said there were tourists who came there now. And while he talked, his eyes were deep in the road. They followed the lines; his eyes were glass.

  We stopped by a field on the road to Cummertrees.

  ‘This is where I live,’ he said.

  There in the field was my father’s home: a blue caravan.

  He walked among the gas bottles in the wee bit yard. He proudly showed me this and that – the washing line, a radish bed – and he sho
wed them off like a timorous child, a boy with a castle of sand.

  He made the tea and we sat inside.

  There was a fold-down formica table. It had pickle jars in the middle, salt and pepper and a dish of butter, set out in Margaret’s style, the style of his mother. It was odd that. I had let myself forget how my father might have taken something from his own growing up, something that wasn’t resentment. His parents had made it into his sober life in minute ways.

  That huddle of condiments.

  The line of shoes by the door.

  The chip basket trapped in layers of old lard.

  A photograph of the Queen Mary.

  And the smell of pine, no wind in the trees, but a thick kitchen chemical, a gloop on the lino, the memory of freshness, the killer of all known germs.

  The order there of a formerly married man. More tidy than clean; less proud than preserved. The marks of a man who was keen to fill his time. The home of person of burgeoning discipline, calmer waters, fewer regrets. A life of troubles now being shushed to the gentle swing of a pedalbin.

  ‘Is there anybody in your life?’ he said.

  ‘I have a girl called Karen.’

  ‘Karen, aye. Nice lassie?’

  ‘I like her,’ I said.

  There was a dog barking outside. We could see it romping through the furrows of a frozen turnip field. The rain came again.

  A few rocks lay on a shelf above the sink. One was a lump of coral. Another was covered in deeply engraved lines, patterns of shells. I turned them over in my hands.

  ‘Up the road,’ said Robert, ‘there’s a farmer I’ve come to know. He’s hopeless at his work, but he collects these things.’

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ I said.

  He took the fossil in his hand.

  ‘He gave me this at Christmas time. He said it was a common one. From lower carboniferous rocks. That’s what he said at the time. He’s teaching me about them.’

  ‘The study of pressure and time,’ I said.

  My father was quiet. He looked out the window.