Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

‘Beautiful,’ I said, turning the fossil. ‘It’s really great.’

  We sat with our tea. The wind dashed the rain on the roof of the caravan. The noise was there all right, but the place seemed so peaceful. We just sat there. You couldn’t believe this van was a real place, in a real country, in a real time, with the world all real. With that noise on the roof, and the sweet, dislikable tea, the afternoon felt more like a thought, more like a melding of things in the mind, and less and less like a scene in the world of people and fossils and rainfall and fields.

  ‘Do you think I will ever meet the lassie?’ said Robert.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There might be a day. There might be.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said.

  We had both settled into not saying much. I told him I liked his place. He looked at me as he bit into his lip. He sniffed.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘… I think this might be all I ever wanted.’

  You could tell that he found this hard to say.

  ‘Well then,’ I said, ‘it’s a good thing that you have it now. It’s the best thing. You can’t live all your life as somebody you’re not.’

  ‘This was all I wanted,’ he said, as if to himself.

  ‘Well you have it now.’

  We spoke about how those fields were once full of men and coal. ‘Everything in this country is cheap now,’ he said. ‘It’s all the same way. Cheap.’

  I smiled at him.

  ‘It used to be build, build, build,’ he said. ‘Not that I wanted anything the fuck to do with that. I could hardly stand up myself.’

  We laughed at the same time.

  ‘Now it’s demolish …’ he said.

  ‘It has to be done,’ I said.

  We put our hands around our cups. The rain now battered down. The dog that barked was running away from the field to the trees. I could feel the heat come up through my hands.

  ‘It has to be done,’ I said. ‘You can’t stop change from happening.’

  Robert’s eyes were green. They were wide in that small, airless home of his. His eyes were green and his voice was steady.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s right enough.’

  *

  Robert Burns died in Dumfries. In his last weeks he took to the water off the Solway Strand. The Brow-well was rich in iron; a bottomless, salted mud. The wind of Annandale cut to the very bone. The poet waded out: he shivered in the green cordial, knowing death, his eyes on England. The last of his letters are here in my memory.

  To Jean Armour: ‘I delayed writing until I could tell you what effect sea-bathing was likely to produce. It would be injustice to deny that it has eased my pains, and, I think, has strengthened me, but my appetite is still extremely bad.’

  To James, her father: ‘I returned from sea-bathing quarters today, and my medical friends would almost persuade me that I am better, but I think and feel my strength is so gone that the disorder will prove fatal to me.’

  And to George Thomson: ‘After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds.’

  Getting wet is a local perdition, and yet it begins the Christian life. In Annandale the people are baptised every other hour. The rain seldom halts. I was soaked on my way down Mill Vennel, along the street where Burns’ last breath still hangs at the eaves of an old house, a stout place bricked and re-bricked, surpassing the buildings on either side. The street filled my head. The rain was heavy. I went into the town in my waterlogged jacket.

  In the bar of the Atholl Arms I took a five-pound note from my pocket. I spread the wet note on the counter.

  Culzean Castle in a soggy blue.

  I asked for a whisky. There was vapour of peat in the glass, an invisible cloud of old fermentation, amber-bright, a broth of burning grass. The whisky went down in one. It burned at my tongue and my throat.

  His slogans had passed me by at the time. But now I could see them. On the walls of my father’s caravan, hung here and there, above the fridge, propped by his bed, a series of slogans painted on wood:

  ‘One Day at a Time.’

  ‘Easy Does It, But Do It.’

  ‘There But for the Grace of God Go I.’

  ‘You are No Longer Alone.’

  And printed on a dish-cloth, under a drawing of some praying hands:

  God Grant me the Serenity

  To Accept the Things I Cannot Change

  The Courage to Change the Things I Can

  And the Wisdom to Know the Difference.

  I think he had painted the slogans himself. Cut the wood, planed it off, stained it, and painted out the letters with a steady hand. I could imagine him doing it. And as he did so he might have said those words over to himself. The words became him, and he became the words. He was making a life. He had rounded the slogans with sandpaper.

  I sat in the Atholl two days after seeing Robert. The sky was as grey as any in my time. Rainwater bubbled at the choking drains. The bar was golden. I was due that day to see him again. He was speaking at a convention of Alcoholics Anonymous in the Loreburn Hall. He asked me to meet him in Oughton’s Restaurant, a chip shop in Barony Row.

  He was there already as I came to the shop. I stood for a minute under sheets of rain. I watched him from the pavement. His head and hands were crouched over the table. With concentration, with higher hopes, he drove a bookie’s pen across a betting slip. He was neat in a shirt and tie.

  ‘Christ! You’re dreeping wet,’ he said.

  ‘It’s pissing out there.’

  ‘Hang your jacket next to the fire,’ he said.

  He screwed his newspaper halfway round.

  ‘There’s a good Ayrshire nag running at Lingfield,’ he said. ‘Three forty-five. Two-to-one favourite. Corncrake.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you ever have a bet?’ he asked.

  ‘A bet.’

  ‘Aye. A bet, you know. Do you ever back the horses.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  The waitress was very young. A pair of dark glasses was propped on her hair.

  She licked her top lip; she pointed at the board.

  My father clearly had a way with strangers. He was able to talk to them, as if he were glad to be just himself, as if he liked to be starting from scratch. He seemed happiest to proceed where there was no expectation of him, no overshadowings, no underminings. He wished for a world without background noise. He would hate to be told who he was by anyone. That was the opposite of the freedom he craved. He wanted now to take charge of his story; he wished to present himself as he himself thought good, without complication, without the ravenous interventions of those who will always know better. Robert was his own man now. He may always have seemed that way to others, but now he seemed that way to himself.

  He smiled at the girl and made her laugh. He pointed at me.

  ‘Now don’t take any messing from him,’ he said.

  The girl laughed; she laughed the way young girls do when older men embarrass them in front of younger ones. I bit my cheek and smiled as well.

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ I said.

  Robert ordered hot Vimto and a King Rib Supper.

  ‘You’re just after saying they had the best fish in Dumfries,’ I said.

  ‘But I’m not wanting fish,’ he said. ‘You have fish.’

  ‘Fish,’ I said to the girl.

  ‘Two Vimtos,’ said Robert.

  ‘Not for me. I can’t drink it.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ he said. ‘Everybody likes Vimto.’

  I always had a habit of denying myself things I secretly wanted. People would ask me if I wanted another drink; I’d say no, and then stop at a bar on the way home. They’d say eat some more; I’d wave it away, and then watch with envy the second-helpers. A lot of things were like that with me. I was always suppressing appetites, wishes, dreams. Enjoyments were a sort of danger to me. Pleasures contained an element of risk. They could make me feel subject to some unmindly force, swayed by some
thing larger than me. I was afraid of too much comfort. I don’t know why. And in some dark vale I was scared of addiction. Watching Robert eat his dinner made me scared for him. He ate like someone helpless.

  Drink, anger, sugar, potatoes, curses.

  Robert was an addict; he felt at home in the storm’s eye, a swirling glut of everything. I once thought he was just like a baby with his bottle. All his life spent proving the truth of need over want. He had always needed one thing or another. He was always stuffing himself. He couldn’t help it. The new excesses were bad for his body and good for his mind. He liked chips. He liked sugar. And once I advanced past my fear for him, and saw that he wasn’t drowning, I began to admire the force with which Robert devoured things for comfort, the way he wanted it all, even as he knew that all his indulgence would one day come to devour him. He went to his plate as a nihilist. He dared his body to tumble and die. He wasn’t going to let himself be in want of anything. He would have what he wanted now. So long as he managed to stay off the drink. He would have what he wanted, and now.

  His life had been one long search for things he could say he needed. Once upon a time he needed a ball and a Celtic strip; he needed a wife and an only child; he needed miles between him and his father. And then, the consolation of an English strand; all the drink in the world; his home again; a hospital bed; a long silence; a room of recovering boozers. And now he needed a rain-soaked afternoon. He needed his son to come and go. He needed to feel there was something salvaged. He needed the girls there in Oughton’s to like him. He needed chips with every meal.

  I sipped at the hot Vimto. It coated my tongue in iron.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘what your grandfather’s favourite word was?’

  ‘Progress,’ I said right away.

  ‘Nearly,’ he said. ‘Have another wee try.’

  ‘Deliverance,’ I said.

  ‘No. That’s not the one I’m thinking of. He used all those Moses words. But the word he used most often in his life was the word “fuck”.’

  ‘That’s not funny,’ I said.

  ‘But true all the same. I was just thinking about it the other day. He used to say that the word known to all men is “love”. He’d read that in one of my granny’s Irish books. “What is the word known to all men?” he’d say; my mother she smiled up at him, and said “love”. And I would think, what is the word known to all of us. “Fuck”.’

  ‘I would have said that about you,’ I said.

  ‘True and all,’ he said. ‘But I was thinking, the word I will always remember him by is a word I heard all the way through my life. He said it nearly as much as he said fuck. In the fifties, in the sixties, he said the word at least two dozen times in any day. “Municipal” was the word. “Municipal.” It’s one of those words that’s hard to say if you’re a wee boy. I used to say “Manisipeople”. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t want to know what it meant, either.’

  ‘It was the kind of word he liked,’ I said. ‘It described the way they wanted things to be. Municipal.’

  ‘You don’t hear it now. Why is that?’

  As he asked me the question I felt a mighty swell in the pause. The air was damp with the sap of thoughts. I was filled with the sense of the long story.

  ‘Why is that?’

  It was the biggest question my father had ever asked me.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s an old word. It’s not what people know any more. It’s an old word.’

  ‘Manisipeople,’ said my father.

  ‘Municipal,’ I breathed, into the dark of my glass.

  *

  The Loreburn Hall, a chamber of well-shaped granite. The door was a local wood. And chiselled above was a coat-of-arms: a ship, a hammer, a tulip, a blood-red hand. The hall was filled with blue-breathing people. Everyone smoked. Thousands of people with time on their faces; women with lipstick on smiles; old men with canes and veteran fedoras; keen mums in headscarves, all in their rows of interminable plastic. Along the sides there were young men in tracksuit bottoms. They seemed to say nothing. They seemed on their own. They snapped out smoke-rings from the midst of their tentative whiskers. They looked shell-shocked. Their eyes were bright and Scottish.

  Up on the stage there were tartan banners: THE 42ND ANNUAL BLUE BONNETS GATHERING. YOU ARE NO LONGER ALONE. My father was smart in his tie. I went for a walk outside as he spoke. I could hear them laughing; ‘My name’s Robert …’

  When I came back he was down in the seats. There were people around him, shaking his hand, clapping his shoulder. They gripped at his arm; they came with a kiss and a cuddle those women, fine and laughing as they gathered round. An elderly man stood on the platform. He held a microphone. He was large-eyed standing there, a pipe in his hand, a shoal of fish passing silver in his hair. He looked down smiling at the thousand eyes.

  He spoke of the first of these conventions, the first to come to Dumfries. ‘How careful one should be about starting anything new in AA,’ he said. ‘You never know where it will end!’

  The audience was keen to clap and laugh.

  ‘In addition to our alcoholism,’ he went on, ‘Billy and I had a lot in common. Billy was the co-founder of the Dumfries gathering. He is dead now. Almost the same age to a day, we had both served in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers during the First World War, and had marched many a mile to the regiment’s most famous pipe tune, “Blue Bonnets Over the Border”.’

  My father’s cronies sent smiles to the platform; the speaker was very old. At the back of the hall, under a jammering strip-light, a bagpiper kissed at his chanter, busy rehearsing an old tune to come.

  ‘A good few years after the war …’ said the old man on the platform (he spoke so clearly for someone of that age), ‘… I wrote to Jim to tell him that members of the fellowship in Liverpool and Carlisle were coming to Dumfries. I asked him to write to all the Scottish AA groups and ask them to meet us there. I wrote: “Tell them the English are invading Scotland once more. Raise the old Border war cry, Blue Bonnets Over the Border!” This started a chain of Gatherings held once a year. Everyone who has ever attended one of those Gatherings has come away with a new store of memories and a host of new friends.’

  A cheer went up from the body of the room. Whilst the Chairman spoke on, my father sat enraptured, the feet of his chair near-bending in complicity, the smile on his face going tensionless and free.

  I walked to the back of the hall. The tea-urns stood like security guards; they stood at the back in their silver armour. Lemonade was stacked in packs of two dozen. Everyone you saw was carrying a soft drink. The hall was hot. But it wasn’t all heat: they carried their bottles of Curry’s Red Cola as passports to the Gathering, as softly-carbonated trophies, the thirst they all conquered now marked by a craving for the innocence of raspberry and vanilla, the bubblings of Tizer and Irn-Bru.

  Hundreds of old men with their bottles of pop: the more they can drink, the more sober they are.

  A table up against the back wall had literature for sale: The Big Book. The Twelve-Step Life. The Jack Alexander Story.

  I wondered at the passage of these words, these bits of wisdom from faraway places, a column of words from the Saturday Evening Post, a flutter of sense from forties New York, now made for this table, with the tartan cloth, and the line of communicants free with their Scottish banknotes.

  I had noticed down there the way they had named each other. Danny D., or Fergus Mac, or Sheila C. My father’s group marked themselves another way. They took to their occupations. There was Bricklayer Bill. Taxman Murray. Carpenter Tommy. Grocer Annie. Carpet-layer Ted. Teen the Machine. Coach-driver Duncan. Plasterer Jimmy. They all had things to do in the world. Or they once had. Or they hoped to have again.

  But on that day they seemed bound by a sense of the second life. A language of self-help slogans. Recovery was the story of the moment, and they all told those stories, and listened to the stories of one another, and they brought the old stuff of wars and ideals,
of history and dreaming, of enlightenment and love and deliverance and progress, and they made it serve the swelling narrative of their own improvement. They believed in a unity of needs; they had made a nationhood of self-rescue. Our fathers were dead and gone: here were the living, and every wind of tradition came about them, every breath of the past came in whispers to make them new, and here they were, a gloaming of faces in a tartan seance, a calling-down of ghosts from the greenwood side.

  ‘Help us to help ourselves,’ they said. ‘Help us to help one another.’

  Oh help us to live where you could not. Oh show us a place that you – father, son – have only ever dreamed of knowing.

  One day at a time. My father’s eyes.

  They knew the ideals we had tried to know. He had found Utopia in a community of reformed boozers. He looked up at me. Those green eyes were his father’s. They glistened there in that darkness of joy. The people touched his arms. They patted his back.

  He made his life by making lives. They all did. And all the rest was another story.

  These people were off the drink. They had found themselves in Scotland and the world, and had made it new, for themselves, for each other. A pipe band began to play. The AAs stood up in their rows. My father too. They took out white handkerchiefs and waved them in the air.

  The Legionnaire’s Song.

  A sea of white sails leaving for America.

  ‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ they sang.

  I watched my father with his spotless cloth. He waved it high in the air.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said to my father’s eyes.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said to mine.

  And all my life I will see my father’s face, and remember it there in that festival of hope. When I got to the door I looked back again. He was there. He was alive. The light was pale, the rain was falling on the old roof, and we found each other’s eyes again, the same green eyes, and we smiled over the crowd of legionnaires, his army of new friends, and we waved a hand. The smile and the hand that brought light to our rooms, and passed over time, the years behind us.

  *

  Margaret’s hibiscus. The leaves they were green. And the orange petals curled from the plant, a wave of Chinese, paper-thin.