‘You were lucky son. Your mother would not have been good for you. She was a child of changing times and I couldn’t keep up. There’s nothing particularly new about feeling you’ve been somehow misplaced, dumped in the wrong era.’ He glances up, suddenly forlorn. Are those tears in his eyes? My father never cries. ‘I was never as adaptable as other folk. This was a blessing, I think, when your mother left. It meant I wouldn’t do something daft like go chasing after her, it meant I’d stay put and do my duty to you. I loved her, yes, and I grieved as I should. But a deeper part of me was relieved, God forgive me.’
I can’t think of any time when my father has spoken so openly. It’s a moment I should rise to, a bonding opportunity that might never come around again. But much as I know I should hug him I won’t. As much as I feel the swell of a thousand questions I won’t ask them. I’ve long been his alter-ego, too self-aware. Too weak. ‘The wedding’s coming up.’
His gaze softens, the eyes betraying familiar disappointment at my expected failure. I’m sick of his forgiveness, his superiority. ‘Yes. The wedding,’ he finally says. ‘She’s a good girl, Amber. I haven’t seen her for a long time. I hope she’s chosen well. Is he a good man, Jim?’
‘Peter? He’s got potential.’
‘Potential.’ He’s suddenly anxious. I notice Nurse Ratched straighten up. ‘But can he provide?’
He isn’t talking about money. Peter will have no problems on that count. It’s the deeper provisions, the invisible intangibles in their all-weather manifestations. Like he always provided and I’ve never been able to live up to with my family. But I can’t give him that assurance about Peter. Why not? I’ve lied to him my whole life. He’s always been a secret worrier and this mind-fracturing disease might be making it so much more fevered. What’s fuckin wrong with me, why can’t I lie to reassure this decent, ailing man? ‘I’ll have a word with the matron. She’ll get you ready on the morning of the wedding and I’ll come and get you.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he whispers, left hand on mine as he taps with the other. Anxiety flickers again in those blue eyes, a cloud coming in. The unnerving, child-like smile returns. Still he taps my hand. My time is almost up. But today is not the day I tell him he has to come home with me.
* * *
Havana, Cuba, 11/4/99
I had no idea your father worked at the brewery. But there was Edward one grizzly morning, rolling a barrel past when I was dropping off a note to the warehouse foreman. I asked if he needed a hand and he stopped in his tracks. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said and gave a snooty little sniff. He looked good out of the priestly garments I had first seen him in, very well-muscled (those upper arms . . . ) with a cross round his neck. I decided there and then I wanted him to screw me, I wanted to watch that crucifix bounce as he screwed me.
I hope that doesn’t shock you. But it always starts with lust, does it not? And my, oh my I certainly had a lot of lust. I started waiting for him at the distillery gates.
You have to understand that this was still the 1950s, such behaviour was very much taboo. Young ladies were supposed to be coy, they were the ones to be a-wooed, not a-wooing go. That didn’t stop them getting shagged behind a grotty pub on a Friday night. No, it was ok to be a slut so long as you pretended not to be. Anyway, for a few weeks your father ignored me, all my winks, jokes and little flirtations. Then one morning he stopped, looked to the sky and said, ‘ok, you win, I’ll buy you a bloody drink if you promise to leave me alone.’
It is as simple as that really, all our stories ultimately are.
Time and again I have witnessed it, a series of basic causes and effects that repeat with minor variations. Edward would see the Absolute in this and perhaps I do too. Catholicism’s a dark, hefty religion, though I guess if you are going to catch religion you might as well suffer the original. I just could not get to grips with those Buddhist and Sufi wannabes I was to meet in London in the sixties. It just seemed too playful in comparison, too undemanding. The Creator has never struck me as being all that relaxed about his Works. I have often wondered if it is your father’s lingering influence that makes me feel so comfortable in Central and South America.
I went to chapel with him, once or twice. These were the days of the Latin Mass, heavy on the incense. I had been brought up Presbyterian and this was very different, exotic even. There was something intoxicating about it, hints of deeper truths. Edward never knew that I once went to Confession. It was a strange thrill, almost erotic, sitting in that musty box, the shadow of the priest behind the mesh.
Sex? Edward was not comfortable with sex! Sure, he was a randy goat but it conflicted him terribly. I agreed we should get married sooner rather than later and so we did. August 1958. Morven thought I had gone completely insane but it seemed like such a great big adventure. Naturally, my parents did not come. Getting married was a good thing, but to a Catholic? No, this was not done, which made it even more exciting. I thought I loved your father too, that lust was evolving into something deeper. And the thought of a stable home, where I could have the space to write was so very appealing.
149 Broughton Road. A tiny one-bedroom tenement flat, first floor. We moved in a week after the marriage. That winter was freezing. I set a little desk beside the window and sat there for hours, trying to write. I moved on to prose, poems a bit limiting for all that I now wanted to say. I was so young, convinced I had found the keys to the universe. You need so many more words to explain all that . . .
I read passages to your father. He’d sit there in front of the three-bar fire, frowning. I do not think he ever really understood what I was saying but I had to get it out. Sometimes I would wake suddenly in the night, like someone had spoken to me in my sleep. I’d be up and through to the desk, desperate to get the words down. I think there are certain times and places when the occluded, the unconscious, runs closer to the surface. In Broughton Road it poured right out of me, like it pours out of me now, for the first time in years, now as I look up into Havana night and again feel the universe vibrate.
But no-one is listening, now as then. And if you do not listen then how can you ever truly hear what another has to say? I was part of the fringe set, beyond the Rose Street Hierarchy, a ‘lesser writer’. I tried out my best work but no one got it, too many literary prejudices and petty preconceptions. Then I met an American sailor, another poet, at Milne’s Bar, March 1959. He talked about this American movement, ‘Beat’ he called it, a revolution in words and society at the same time, tearing down received structures and letting it flow, flow, floooow. ‘You’ve never heard of them?’ he said. The next night he brought me a book, ‘On the Road’, handing it over like a sacred text. ‘It’ll change your life Helen, I swear to God.’
He was right. After that there was no going back. I realised how ponderous my writing had been and was determined to just let it all go, let the words roam. I plucked up the courage to do another couple of readings but they still wanted poetry, no room for prose, let alone spontaneous prose. ‘Cosmopolitan scum’ MacDiarmid called Alexander Trocchi in 1962. Such a telling comment, a neat summation of the eventual attitudes of most ‘movements’, Beat included; the insularity, the complacent content to replace one received structure with another.
I had more time for the Gaels. Sorley MacLean, he was more tuned to the universal than most of the Rose Street Boys. They’d shout me down, the bastards, your father one of the few applauding. ‘Just listen to her you pack of jackals, listen and maybe you’ll learn something.’
I gave up on the readings and started inviting people back to Broughton Street. Bribe them with a few whiskies, out with the notebooks and hey presto, captive audience! Saturday nights were a no-no to begin with, Edward wanted to be fresh for chapel on Sunday. But he soon gave in and if we had people round he would skulk off to bed before midnight. There he was next morning in his Sunday best, stepping over the bodies on the floor. That was when he first saw John Tannehill, passed out on the couch with a bottle clutched to his ch
est.
I see my father’s quiet, Arctic fury. He picks a way across the snoring floor, careful with his new-polished brogues, impatient to re-centre himself in the morning Mass. But I can’t believe it. I close the email. It’s so quiet tonight. I try to fill the void with images of my father as a young man.
‘You watching porn again?’
I turn with a start and see my wife leaning on the door-frame. I hadn’t heard her coming up the stairs. She’s all smiles and carries a leather-bound book. I make some kind of muttered response and realise I’ve been staring at the bamboo forest screensaver on the computer.
‘Look what I’ve got.’ I see now that it’s a photo album. She jumps onto the bed and opens it, lying up on her elbows. I’m tired of being tested like this. I know the correct reaction is to sit down and let her lead me through the photos, letting her flush out the nostalgia. Thing is, I’m not expected to do that because she knows I’m completely uninterested. And because she doesn’t expect me to sit down beside her I can’t. To sit would appear suspicious. Then she’d be convinced that I’ve been sitting up here wanking. ‘Remember this?’
Our wedding photos. What did my mother imagine when she thought of me on my wedding day? A strapping young man, jaw set as he faced the future with his beautiful young bride? Would she have been proud, that’s my boy, I knew he’d grow into a fine, handsome young man? No chance. She dripped cynicism. She’d have predicted the shitty, grey white suit, flecked with bits of black cotton, like a badly harled house. It pinched at the armpits, the sleeves a couple of vital centimetres too short. I can’t help staring at the photo, the cow-lick in my hair, sticking up like an antenna. ‘I look like one of the Jetsons. What a state.’
My wife cackles and turns a page. There’s my father, straight-backed in black at the top table, glass of water in front of him. No booze for father. Poor bugger could do with a few drams these days. I try and picture my mother sitting beside him. Would he smile at her as they prepared to let their son go, squeeze her hand, proudly satisfied at how they’d brought him up?
She turns another page and there’s the famous shot, it surprises me more and more as the years pass. My wife and I are staring at each other in the midst of the wedding crowd, caught in a secret, gentle moment. The image is crisp and natural, the lighting delicate.
These were pre-digital photography days. You got what you got. To have a photo like this is a near-miracle. Today you can take a hundred and select the best, have it enhanced to make sure that memory’s sentiment is maximised. I prefer yesterday’s thumb on the lens, the over-exposure and blurring. My life, after all, has been a steady sequence of imperfections sprinkled with occasional transcendence. I can’t remember the last time we looked at each other like that. My wife also seems to sense it, reaching out and placing a hand on mine.
Solace, my father said. We all need solace. Had he truly found it in God or was the Big Man a crutch, a means of vicarious content, like my wife and I searching an old photo for something lost?
‘We need to pay for Amber’s catering Jim. They want it in advance.’
I draw my hand away, thinking of the manager at the home, the final unpaid bill for my father’s care.
‘I checked the balance,’ she says. ‘Is there any overtime coming up?’
Now I’m suddenly wondering if this whole ‘let’s have a look at our wedding photos’ is some kind of ploy to butter me up. Look how happy we were, look at when we took the world on together and no problem was too hard to overcome. Back then you wouldn’t have thought twice about putting in some extra shifts, eh Jim, eh? ‘Sure, nothing I’d like better. Two nights on and two back-shifts and then down to the warehouses on Friday afternoon. Fantastic.’
‘Well I can’t do extra, no extra shifts for me to do or I’d do them.’ She slams the album shut and sits up on the bed.
‘I can do a couple. Not going to bring in much though.’ A capitulation, yes, but we do need the cash.
‘Every little helps!’
She’s all jaunty again, a little victory won. I should shut up but I won’t. ‘A few more months to save wouldn’t have hurt. They’ve known each other for years and all of a sudden it has to be now?’
‘Oh stop it.’
‘Tell me again why’s she’s getting married in February?’
‘For Christ’s sake Jim. They’re in love, they just want to get married.’
‘The whole world doesn’t stop for them though, there’s other responsibilities.’ I glance round, watching her eyes narrow.
‘What’re you talking about?’
I cross to the window. Heavy snow returned this morning. I watched it come from outside warehouse 16, a purple-black band rushing in from the north. Then the scour of the wind, the first flakes. I closed my eyes, I like to feel the blizzard on my closed eyelids, the numbing cold of a world obliterated. Beyond the window the white world’s slipping into night, the snow stopped, for now. Malky’s ploughed it round into a big half-circle, like a crooked smile.
‘Dad’s going to have to move in.’
* * *
He sits at the bar, casual-like. There’s a double Highland Park in front of him, mark of a man with taste. The red-head in the black mini-dress has already noticed this, and the way he turns the glass in his hand, the golden liquid catching the light. What’s he so pensive about? She’s intrigued and who wouldn’t be. After a moment he catches her eye. A quick smile. The four-piece is playing a pulsing low beat, David Lynch-like, a haunting sax, black suits in front of red velvet drapes. He moves along the bar. ‘A night for ghosts,’ she says, ‘and I’m going to haunt you.’
‘I’d say a penny for them but you look like you’d want a pound.’
JC plonks himself down on the seat I’ve been keeping. I push across a whisky. He’s grinning, beard its usual straggle of mousy-ginger. He’s wearing a beanie hat and tatty old Aran sweater. ‘See you made an effort.’
‘S’what the punters expect.’
‘You’ve been wearing that sweater since you were fifteen!’
‘That’s the whole point!’
I shake my head. But he’s right, integrity comes of familiarity. His fans would forgive, probably not even notice, any sartorial debacle. It’s the dreaded ‘new direction’ that would doom JC. Even the pseudo-Europop of his last single (the critics called it ‘ironic’) had led to some sharp intakes of breath on the internet notice-boards. ‘Where’s the fit groupies though? I thought with the Mercury you’d be fighting them off. It’s the same old hackit lot in here.’
JC looks mock-serious. ‘A nomination shouldn’t change a man.’
‘Course not.’ He hadn’t won last year’s music prize but the kudos had boosted his sales. Late-career recognition, Warner Brothers came a-knocking, the gigs starting to sell out. JC soaked it up but kept it in perspective. The punters were starting to thin out again but there were still a few more than before, a solid mix of original die-hards and genuinely smitten newbies. Tonight’s gig was sold out months ago. An easy win, a home-town showcase for the Gate label, three short sets from the roster then JC and his band to headline.
‘Hard night at the ranch?’
‘The usual.’ I’d fled from my wife at the top of the argument’s second hour. Long-standing wars like Kashmir or Gaza must be similar, ongoing skirmishes combined with the occasional brutal rocket and mortar assault ending in the tattered stalemate of the forlorn status quo. The taxi driver took some persuading to drive out in the snow to pick me up from the distillery and take me back into town for the gig. I wasn’t too fussed if I couldn’t get back.
‘The wedding?’
‘The father.’
‘Eh?’
The red-head at the end of the bar suddenly cackles, her leather-clad friend snorting away beside her. The spell’s broken. She swallows the rest of her pint and necks a purple-coloured shot. A little bit of liquid trickles out of the side of her mouth and she catches my eye, winking as she wipes it away, coquettish as your
granny with the travelling salesman. Her crow-like laughter intersperses my conversation with JC. He’s understanding but gently judgmental, as is JC’s way. Wouldn’t have hurt to have told her. She’s going to be worrying now, Jim.
JC’s a man who’s never understood the need for secrets. He reckons that explains why we’re so repressed as a nation. I’ve asked him many times why he uses a pseudonym if he’s got so little to hide. Simple as fuck eh, sing your way to enlightenment, a clean conscience, an uncompromised life! Imagine my wife’s face as I stop an argument in its tracks with a little improvised tune. How we’d laugh as we realised the mind-sapping inanity of our fights . . .
I swallow the whisky and gesture to the barman for another. It’s too easy to be a cynical prick. JC’s one of the few people I admire and the last person I’d want to alienate. I’ve been jealous of him at times, I can’t come close to the integrity the fans dig. He’d told Warners to piss off. I think I’ve always been a tad unnerved by the mirror he holds up to my shortcomings.
‘I wrote a song for Amber’s wedding. Thought I’d try it out tonight.’
JC’s grinning again and I’m genuinely touched. ‘Nice one,’ I say.
‘Fuckin sound!’
We burst out laughing, a couple of daft lads again. Few people have the ability to strip the years back to a more straightforward time. The reminder of hope, that’s JC’s gift. It brings the crowds, even Crowgirl along the bar feels it. Alone in her bed, three in the morning, that fragile time between drunkenness and hangover. She puts the headphones on, reading herself into the lines of a JC tune, starting to smile. I’m getting sentimental, whisky always does it. One of these days I might be the one taking the wedding album to my astonished wife. She’ll probably wonder if I’ve just been diagnosed with a terminal disease.
The gig’s tremendous and it’s a pity my wife’s not here. Honest. She’d enjoy it if she let herself. I’m not totally cynical, I haven’t yet given up the possibility of shared interests, even if it gives me the shivers. But she’s always been odd around JC, something in our relationship she doesn’t quite get and therefore mistrusts. And she refuses to admit she enjoys his music. That’s good, she’ll say, before discovering a sudden dislike when I tell her its JC’s latest.
The Stillman Page 11