‘Bit early for the drams, thought you had ballots to collect?’
‘You’re the last.’
‘Course I am.’
‘You get yours?’
‘Aye. You get yours?’ I glance from my wife to Jack. She shifts slightly, holds back a smirk.
‘I’ll post it for you. Not saying you’ll forget, I just want to make sure we maximise the response.’
‘Makes sense.’
In the hallway I take a biro from the phone table, scribble all over the ballot and seal it in the envelope.
‘Thanks Jim. I was just saying to Katie that we’re going to get a solid ‘‘yes’’ on this, lot of anger today.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Jack says he’s been in these kinds of negotiations before. He says it’s really, really tiring.’
Jack settles a strained look on his face. I think he’s going for fortitude. He takes a slug and settles back, his leg touching my wife’s. ‘The tiring bit’s getting them to the table in the first place. Least then you can get them one to one, try and appeal to the human in them.’
‘I wonder about the human in them,’ my wife says.
‘We’ve got to give them the benefit of the doubt! Oh, while I remember, I’ve got something for you Jim. A film, Matewan.’
‘You shouldn’t encourage him, he watches enough DVDs as it is.’
‘Something in keeping with the mood. About a miner’s strike in Virginia in the 1920s and the attempt to unionise the workers. Cracking film. I know you’re a big movie buff.’
A movie buff? ‘I suppose I am.’ I take the DVD.
‘Make sure you watch it before the 4th, get yourself fired up!’
‘4th’s no good for me, did I not say that? I’m on leave, my father’s annual check-up at the home.’
My wife looks at me carefully, a slight narrowing of the eyes.
Jack looks surprised. ‘That’s a shame. A real shame. Will we see you on the picket line at all?’
‘Depends.’
I don’t tell them I stopped into the office on my way home. Coleen, our sad-eyed HR officer, was playing computer Solitaire. She checked the dates and pencilled in my leave, 4th February.
‘Here’s to victory,’ I say, and raise my glass.
‘Victory,’ agrees Jack.
We chat away. The whisky flows. The room’s crematorium hot but I keep lobbing more logs on the fire. I want to know how red my wife’s face can get and if Jack’s hair gel will trickle down his forehead. When I come out of the toilet I hear them laughing and take a detour upstairs.
My email page is open but I’m sure I left it open at Wikipedia. Shouldn’t the screensaver have kicked in, I’ve been away long enough. The chair too, would I have left it neatly tucked under the lip of the table like that? I stand at the door for a minute or so. Silence from the Boy’s room, a burst of muffled laughter from downstairs. I should get back down there, dam the sexual tension before it overflows. Instead I re-open Helen’s Journal 1. This is the third time I’ve read it. I can see her, sitting in the still, burning heat of blue Havana. Such imaginings have always come too easily. Tonight, my one hope is that I won’t dream about her again. A harsh laugh from downstairs, as if in reply. I feel suddenly exhausted and decide to let whatever is going to happen down there happen. I’ll go to bed instead, the words of the journal jumbling and tumbling, daring the dreams to come and get me.
* * *
Chipper. It’s the kind of word Camp Gary would use. For reasons I don’t care about, today my wife is chipper.
‘It’s a mystery to me,’ she’s saying. ‘A real mystery.’
I have a twitch in my lip.
My wife slurps tea. ‘Why do they keep on employing the same daft lassies as manager?’
I pull the duvet up round my neck and stare at the radiators. They’re crap, no discernible effect on this crypt-like cold. I press a finger against my lip, trying to stop the twitch.
As with her eating there’s a sound-pattern to my wife’s tea-drinking. A slurp, a slight sticky noise as she pulls her lips apart and then a short, satisfied aah. I look at her surreptitiously. They couldn’t organise the proverbial, she says, next time I’ll apply for the bloody job myself. She won’t, and wouldn’t get anywhere near it if she did. That doesn’t stop her periodically nagging me to go for an office job, get out of that bloody Stillhouse so you can work normal hours like a normal person. I nod, the vaguest sign I can muster to prove that I’m listening. It’s 7.23am. I’m fixated on my twitching lip, the terminal disease it might signal.
I put on a dressing gown and open the curtain. Still dark, will be for at least another hour. The snow falls soft, sentimental. I half expect to see Jimmy Stewart cavorting across the bridge.
‘Do you think the road’s closed?’ I say.
‘Chance would be a fine thing. Soon as you’re past the distillery the road’s clear. Council’s finally got its finger out.’
‘It’s not the council anymore, road servicing was privatised.’
‘Ok Jim. Bit too early to split hairs. The thing is the road’s clear.’
‘Just saying.’ I watch Malky on the road outside, swinging the tractor and snow-plough round in a big arc.
‘You’re always saying.’
I need the sun. No-one should live in this preternatural dark. Endurance must be balanced by celebration, no much wonder the pagans went mental with the return of the light. Trust the Church to burn the fun. Now only endurance remains. We wait for the sun, we wait for winter.
‘Do you think we should have sent the kids to Sunday school?’
She pauses as she gets dressed. ‘You feeling all right?’
‘Imagine they were right and we’re the ones who got it wrong. All this snow could be a punishment for not believing in God.’
‘Do you really think God would send snow as a punishment?’
‘Why not?’
‘Cause it doesn’t seem like much of a punishment. Thunderbolts and lightning is more his style, isn’t it? Throw me that skirt.’
‘Only it if doesn’t stop.’
‘What doesn’t stop?’
‘The snow. If the snow never stops then we’ll all eventually suffocate under it.’
‘I’m suffocating right now! I haven’t got time for this.’
‘Just saying.’
‘Can I get the skirt now?’
I hear the crump of tyres on snow and look out the window. A red van has pulled up outside the house. Peter Davidson, white lettering on the side reads, Carpenter and Craft’sman. When I pointed out the apostrophe my wife called me a snob and reminded me I failed O-level English. Now Peter’s marrying my daughter the apostrophe no longer makes me smirk.
The Boy ignores Peter, but then the Boy ignores everyone. My wife fusses around. She’s running late but nothing is too much of a hassle for Peter and Amber. If my wife insisted on being late for her work to make sure I got my breakfast I’d be checking under the car for the ticking bomb.
I’ve been trying to decide for a while. Today I’m convinced. Peter does have a big nose. I stare at it as I drink my coffee. It isn’t immediately noticeable, more a question of the right angle and light. Actually, it seems the dimmer the light the bigger the conk. But only if he’s in half-profile. In full profile the nose seems normal-sized. Strange, I would’ve thought that full-profile and full light would be the optimum conditions for the revelation of a big nose. Apparently not, I stand corrected. Still, I suppose it goes to prove that there’s also something peculiar about Peter’s nose, beyond its size. It’ll be an ongoing source of fascination and the thought’s quite encouraging. If I can file Peter under entertainment then his presence may become tolerable. Doubtful though, can a comedy nose alone sustain a man?
My wife, daughter and Peter are having a grand time. Jolly, it could be called, eggs and square sausage being scoffed. It takes a while for the conversation to seep into my consciousness. I’m not mistaken, they are indeed talking about having
an ice-sculpture at the wedding.
‘Can you imagine how classy it would look?’ my daughter gushes.
Peter flashes me what he must’ve wanted to be a conspiratorial smirk. What are women like, the look tries to say. What about me getting into your daughter’s knickers, the look actually says.
My wife cocks her head and says nothing, as if objectively considering the idea. I know she’s already sold, that this is a charade she feels, as a critically supportive mother, she has to go through.
‘What do you think, Daddy?’ Amber beams in my direction.
I think, Daddy? I’m always unnerved when she drops into the little girl routine. ‘Where do you get the ice?’
Peter forks in the last of his sausage and leans back in his chair. ‘Reckon I could do it maself,’ he announces.
‘Oh get away with you,’ says my wife, smiling.
‘Whaaat,’ says Peter.
I wait for the sneaky little wink in my direction, a raise of the eyebrows. Neither is forthcoming.
‘Big block of ice, no bother. Been freezing for days and I can get the chainsaw and cut it out of Loch Cluanie. Be a footery job with the carving mind but I’ve got the tools. What would you fancy, a swan or something?’
My wife glances at Amber and both look at Peter, who looks at me. I’m having a laugh! Don’t worry, I know fuck all about ice-carving and hahaha did you all really think I was going to do that? That’s what I want the look to say. Have confidence in me ‘father’, the look actually says.
My wife places a hand on Amber’s shoulder. Opposition is now futile. The inevitable end will be a malformed ice-swan, melting on the dance floor. I notice the Boy standing in the doorway, slack-jawed but somehow smirking. He’s wearing headphones but he’s heard everything.
I’m out getting logs when they clamber into the van, all but the Boy that is. Mother and daughter in a workman’s van, Peter said when my wife accepted the lift. Remember that you both ‘came’ of your own free will. Peter Davidson, my daughter exclaimed, mock-offended. I tell myself I just imagined Peter’s sleazy emphasis on the ‘came’. No-one shouts a goodbye but Peter gives me a salute. There’s nothing mocking in this, he isn’t imaginative enough.
Unlike the Boy. Something’s coming. He’s standing in the middle of the road watching the van turn. When it faces him he doesn’t budge an inch and Peter’s forced to stop, right where the road dips into a hollow. The Boy’s judged it perfectly, it’ll be a swine for the tyres to get any traction in the snow. A few hoots of the horn but still the Boy doesn’t move. Then suddenly he’s bending down, scooping snow and hurling snowballs at the van, viciously. I think he’s shouting die muthafucka die but maybe I’m making that up. As the van door is flung open the Boy starts running, suddenly hurling himself in the air, floppy-bodied, like a soldier caught in an explosion. It’s impressive, authentic, he doesn’t even put his hands out to break his fall. Time and again he surprises me, I really should be more supportive.
I listen to the revving van, staring into the snow. I don’t want to leave this place but little would persuade me to stay. I half-close my eyes and the grey gloom becomes a Cuban beach, arc-lit by the sun. The Boy has disappeared into a snowy haze become shimmering heat, a young woman emerging in his place. I’m fixated by the brown body, the slow swing of the hips. She’s smiling, her nipples erect behind the black bikini top. I saw so many beautiful women over there but it’s a long time since I allowed myself to follow those memories. It’s Helen’s Journal of course, taking me back, that bold statement of time and place. Havana, Cuba. Over five years have passed since I was there, over a decade since the journal was written.
Another email came yesterday, another attachment. Now I’ve let her in once the next time will be easier. I didn’t read it straight off. To rush is to lose control, to let her dictate the terms. I’ve waited until now and I’ll wait some more. Another cigarette first. This creeping uncertainty. I don’t think I want it to become familiar but I can’t be sure, I can’t be sure at all.
Havana, Cuba, 26/3/1999
I was always a poet. If you’re always a poet then it’s always a problem because poetry is about truth and the truth can hurt. You have to learn to let go. It is mainly women who realise this, I think because they recognise the maternal nature of creativity, as nurture and release.
My first poem, lost and good riddance. I was fifteen and it was called ‘A Vision’. You may think it egotistical, an early and unsurprising manifestation of a character trait soon to be definitive, that a teenager, whose horizons were so narrow and whose life so innocent, could believe herself capable of anything as formidable as a ‘vision’. But are many mystics not young, naïve, as if wisdom is more easily graspable without the burden of time and the dictatorship of experience? It is telling that I can only remember the first lines of this ‘vision’, the rest of the message, my lesson, edited out by a mind now defined by a cynical disdain for simple answers which blithely and irresponsibly ignore the multiplicity of cause, effect, and perspective, in short, all the dimensions that came to crowd, pester, and define our lives. Yes, the vision is now gone, reduced to echoes- not of a great universal truth but tedious adolescent banality.
Autumn rain
all the umbrellas of the world fight for airspace
but never are we dry.
At the time, naturally, my message was important enough to send to the Grantham Review. They hated it. I still remember their letter as clear as day. My words were ‘lacking in form and formality’, my subject-matter ‘over-exposed’, whatever that meant. But this was the 1950s, a time of conservative consolidation and much closer horizons. Girls were expected to stay put, keep the self well hid. And definitely no literature. We were expected to like poetry, yes, especially the romantics, but not write it. I had a male English teacher, who once asked us to compose a poem. He took great pleasure in ripping mine up in front of the class. I am glad he did, or I might never have allowed myself to indulge the possibility that I was doing something right.
Apart from one or two who went away to train as nurses (and came back to the local hospital soon after) not one of the girls from my year left the town. University? You have to be joking. We trudged into secretarial or shop work. I spent two years counting the hours as a grocery assistant before I escaped. Husbands and babies, it’s all my friends talked about. I was terrified by the thought of having a baby and was convinced there was something wrong with me. Do you know what my ridiculous parents put it down to? ‘Nerves’.
Thank heavens for my cousin Morven. Without her I’d probably be living in that dingy little northern town to this day. She had moved away and I adored her. It seems absurd now, but only men were expected to go wandering, the surname-forenames like Anderson or Farquar, so many dour Presbyterian administrators still desperate to make their civilising way, nostalgic for the dying Empire. A few of those jobs were still available then, placements in Hong Kong or Penang if you had the right linen-suited connections. We forget how brave women like Morven were, to have the strength not just to imagine another life but to actually leave the old one behind. She and I shared that pressing need to get out. Who knows from where it came. I think our soul-soaked malaise was simply random, an intangible disaffection.
By the mid-50s Morven was working in the office at Fountain Brewery, Edinburgh, the legendary McEwan’s. She put in a word for me and off I trotted in February 1957. ‘They’ll call you a bumpkin,’ such was my parents’ farewell warning at the train station. But it was true! Clichés, the world is regulated by them, they have followed me for sixty years. These days at Leonardo’s café I’m the identikit red-nosed gringo woman, sweating her way through another impossibly blue day. I see the laughter in their black eyes. They think I’m the drinker but these Cubans would break your arm for a bottle of rum. The Edinburgh boys, they could take a scoop too. ‘The only difference between us is the colour of our skin.’ Ah, those clichés again . . .
Have you seen old photos of Ed
inburgh? It is the red and white corporation buses that stand out in my memory. That livery was called ‘madder’ and it always intrigued me. What was the original madness, what was it madder than? Morven and I lived up near the Meadows and I often got the Number 16 down Lothian Road. There was an advert on the back of the bus that burned itself onto my memory. Then as now I have no idea what it was advertising, only the tagline interested me; ‘Have a good run for your money’. Present tense, telling me to seize the day, every day. I was 19 then, an existentialist without knowing it. When I read ‘Nausea’ it was like Sartre had climbed inside my head and plagiarised everything I had ever thought. As for Paris so for Edinburgh. So gloomy. Dark clothes and buildings. Dark people. I decided to make that advert my mantra, I had to make sure I had a good run for my money.
Did you know I once worked in a brewery? Lo and behold the drink got you too. Soon as you started at the distillery I found out. I know you’ve been there ever since because I know all about you, see, but I will not tell you how. Perhaps it was no more inescapable that your occupation would mirror mine than it is that one day we all empty the final bottle. Ask yourself how much is coincidence, how much pre-programmed?
As soon as I started at the brewery all I wanted to do was get out. I hadn’t expected Edinburgh to wear off so quickly. I was young, selfish, why should only men be allowed to follow their dreams? I wanted to write my way around the world or die trying.
Melodramatic, yes, but back then it was a serious frustration. Even other women mocked me, told me to take my nose out of the air and stop dreaming like a wee lassie. I was desperate to prove them wrong and that is how I came to teach English. It was ok for a woman to teach, or to be a nurse. And there was no way I’d be wiping bums to the end of my days so teaching was the ticket, literally. It allowed me to travel the world, but I’ll come to that.
I want to stress that my choices to keep moving should in no way be read as a judgement on your decision to remain at the distillery all these years. I only wish to understand why you have never strayed. Has the stoicism of the father transferred to the son? I have no way of knowing. My hope is you are not haunted by having ‘settled’.
The Stillman Page 3