Remedy is None

by William McIlvanney

  And as the cell existed for him out of place, so too it existed for him out of time. That private chronometer of precise habit, the intricate machinery of recurrent people, places and actions that regulates the passing of our days, had stopped. For him the personal concerns that preside on our lives like private zodiacs, moods that sway the tides of our blood like moons, commitments that come like punctual suns, had broken from their orbit. Present was confounded with past, old actions resurrected, faces usurped the empty air, dead words started out of their cerement of silence, and in the struggle future was eclipsed.

  The time that moved outside the cell did not include him in its motion. His mind turned outside of time, functioning on its own futility, like a rat in a revolving cage. The sun that delivered morning to his window had no relevance to him. Sunday workmen who clumped past on the street outside, hoasting the first phlegm on to the pavements, moved in a different dimension from him, somnambulists in a dream from which he had awakened. The opening of the cell door evoked no response from him, a scratching on the shell.

  A policeman entered, carrying a tray so that it indented a brass-buttoned belly.

  ‘Here’s a bite o’ breakfast for ye,’ he said.

  His voice insinuated itself gently into the silence of the room, as undulating as the Highlands it came from. The haggard eyes looked back at him dully, erasing his presence. The head shook absently and a hand flicked across the eyes as if removing a speck. The policeman stood for a time, watching as if he had bought a ticket.

  ‘Anyway, I’ll leave it,’ he said.

  Nothing showed on the pinched face. The eyes still stared inwards, focused on whatever was happening behind them.

  ‘Well, ye will fecht,’ the policeman said in that gentle accent. ‘It’s a hard lesson sure enough. But ye maun learn it. All you kinna folk that can’t keep their hands off others maun be learned.’

  Something flickered like summer lightning on the face and then was gone, so that it was difficult to tell if it had really been. Charlie’s eyes turned on the policeman, but whatever had drawn their attention to him expended itself in the effort of doing so. Charlie looked uncomprehendingly at him. The tobacco burning in his pipe-bowl, glowing red and fading ashen in obedience to the bellows of his breath, and the tobacco-and-soap smell that he exuded stirred Charlie’s senses dimly like a childhood memory. His alien presence was a strange incursion from a life that had no connection with Charlie.

  ‘Aye, we maun learn your kinna folk,’ the policeman said. Then he went out complacently, having spoken on behalf of all good men and true.

  He disappeared from Charlie’s vision like a mote. Charlie’s mind was given over to its own turmoil, was caught in a civil war that no external event could influence. His concern was not directly with the fact of his imprisonment. He rethought his predicament endlessly, but without aiming at any positive effect. Already it was an automatic gesture, like the padding of a lion in its cage. It was within the limits of that fact that his agony took place. No attempt was made to see through or round his situation. The situation could only have meaning in relation to himself and at the moment there was nothing in himself that it could relate to. His identity was atomized, his thoughts were countless spinning particles that reshaped themselves into ever-changing patterns. Not until some sort of pattern was fixed could a response be established to the things around him, which at the moment were dulled by that anaesthesia to everything but itself that any intense pain throws out. The baited bear doesn’t feel the gadfly. So Charlie writhed inwards on himself in a pain that was like a terrible compound of the pangs of birth and death. Many things in him screamed against their own dying, fought against the denial of themselves. Memories of happy moments invaded his mind, claiming their right to be repeated, telling him that his future should have known many more. Ambitions that had been silenced by the possessive presence of his father’s death regained a hearing in his mind, now that that obsession had been exorcized in action. They assailed his mind, made all the more intense by their impossibility. They weren’t the finite, logical ambitions of maturity which, being founded on reason, can therefore be rationally disposed of when their impossibility has been acknowledged. They were the infinite ambitions of youth, those dim vistas of the future which the young see shining before them with ineffable hope and which cannot be called mirage until they have been travelled, those inarticulate arterial promises that have to be lived into discredit. Now that the dark alien identity that had lived in him since his father’s death had released itself, he had become again to some extent just a young man. There was a resurgence in him of the sharp sense of unlimited potential that surrounds the young like a miasma. So many things seemed to have waited for him to fulfil himself in them. There were so many places to go, names that were like mysterious private symbols to him, Rome, Madrid, La Place de la Concorde, that had always been like secret passwords to some vague Nirvana that shimmered in the future. There were simple things he was to have done, like walking down a street with a girl, being in a room where people were laughing, talking with friends. He was to have read books that illumined many things. He was to have watched so much grow and deepen around him, to learn living, to see Andy and Jim become themselves, to abide the gradual fulfilment of himself. The future was to have been the slow amassing of himself from many places, the formation in him of some great unknown identity from mysterious fragments. Ironically, this intense awareness of what was to have been realized in him came at the very moment of its ultimate contradiction, gained a vitality that made its imminent death the more unbearable. In everyone it dies, this sense of their vast and mysterious significance. But then it is a gradual process. Time administers to us gradually increasing doses of the commonplace, purging us of our fancies, until at last we are immune to all but our more practical ambitions and desires. Our lives become practical and self-contained only by starts. Reality contains us intermittently, for slowly increasing spells, so that by the time we are finally interred in it, we have become conditioned to its narrowness and hardly notice the transition. Vague grandiose intentions co-exist for a time with more mundane necessities, and then are ousted by them. The wild improbable hopes that are entertained in youth are replaced by more immediate ambitions, the absence of one only being achieved by the presence of the other, so that change presupposes adjustment to it.

  But for Charlie, the process was accelerated. What may be had to become what might have been, not slowly through the assimilation of a substitute, but at once, and in a vacuum. All that he might have been was denied in one cataclysmic action, shattered, not removed by the gentle erosion of the years. Like all deaths that come in the prime, it was painful, and the pain of it was intensified by another that grew from it like a Siamese twin, the labour of bringing into being the truth that was to take its place in him, whatever it was that he had made himself.

  What had he made of himself? He did not know. He did not know what had happened. He knew that a man had died and that he had killed him and that he was in a jail charged with murder, but these fragmented facts told him no more of what had happened than the wreckage tells of the shipwreck. The floating debris tells us merely that a ship is sunk, but what ship it was, or what cargo it carried, or where it was bound, or how it sank, or how many lives were lost in it, or who will wait for them, it doesn’t tell. The facts of misfortune mean nothing in themselves. The vastest cataclysm means only as much as its relation to each individual involved. Disaster is a divinity we can only comprehend under private names. A city in ruins moves us less than one widow weeping. So Charlie, faced with the brute facts of what had happened, strove to wrestle them into meaning.

  It was not so much that he sought to understand why he had done it as that he sought to understand what it was that had acted through him. For he sensed dimly that his own part in it was over already, finished with his action, and that personal motives could not adequately explain what had happened. It is the nature of violence to be like fire and con
sume the elements which feed it, so that the reasons for it are extinguished in itself. Such reasons as we form in retrospect are like the letters on the headstone. They only tell us what is not, what no longer exists. Charlie’s action did not concern him most deeply in this way. His action isolated him, it is true, but it was not the fact of his isolation that mattered most. That action had been the judgment passed on him by a force far greater than himself. And it was only the understanding of that force that could make his action comprehensible. It had used him, inhabited him, goaded him, driven him, and finally manifested itself through him in a terrible action, leaving him to face a murder charge. But neither the death of Mr Whitmore nor the murder charge, nor Charlie’s own predicament was the meaning of that dark force. These were no more than mere manifestations of it, themselves meaningless until it was understood. That mysterious lodestone had drawn him mercilessly to it, away from normalcy and friendship and love, through grief and despair and murder* and still, with his life in pieces about him, it was what he sought to come at. The rest mattered less than it. The cell, the impassive policeman, the intricate machinery of justice that was grinding into motion around him, the grief of his family, these things meant little to him until he had found whatever it was that dark power had to impart to him. Until it should infuse them with its meaning, these occurrences were aimless fragments, debris drawn in and thrown off by the vortex of which he was the centre.

  But aimless and irrelevant as they were, they still encroached on the dark whirling void that was himself, sought to impinge on him. A little later in the morning, the cell door opened again and another policeman looked in. He lifted the tray with the breakfast untouched and shook his head.

  ‘Pull yerself thegither now, son,’ he said. ‘Yer brother’s here to see ye.’

  The situation created for Charlie projected like a jetty into his flowing thoughts, but seemed still far away from him. As if from a distance, he saw appearing on it John and Elizabeth. The presence of Elizabeth did not provoke surprise at the inaccuracy of the policeman’s statement. Where nothing cohered, the incompatibility of statement and fact was as natural as an axiom. He simply saw the two of them standing there, spruce and somehow forlorn, like people waiting to meet someone who hadn’t turned up. He felt a vague, displaced sympathy for them. But it did not occur to him to give it any expression. It seemed somehow pointless, as if they were out of shouting distance.

  The policeman closed the door on John and Elizabeth. They stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. The dialogue that followed was as cryptic and formal as the ritual exchanges of sentries. John asked Charlie if he was all right. Charlie’s mouth said that he was all right, like a cave redounding an echo. Charlie then asked John and Elizabeth in turn and both gave the correct response. John said he was seeing about a lawyer and Charlie said they were not to worry and Elizabeth said that she had made something for Charlie to eat, extending the message-bag she was holding. It went on and on like that, like some ludicrous family game of pass-the-platitude, played out desperately against the background of the bleak walls and the policeman waiting outside and their imminent separation until Elizabeth broke the sequence. It happened unexpectedly. Elizabeth mentioned again the meal she had made for Charlie, and then realized that she had said that already, and in the moment of confusion she lost control of herself. She stopped, working furiously against herself, furrowing her brows to dam her tears. But the emotion filled up in her as palpably as liquid filling a glass until it overflowed. Her face fought to stay impassive and her body clenched on a racking sob. Somehow she managed to fix her features into something like composure, but the tears oozed on to her cheeks, like blood through bandages. She began to weep agonizingly and John had to put his arm round her and lead her out. At the door he paused and gently detached the message-bag from her hand. He said goodbye to Charlie and put the bag on the floor. The door clanged shut behind them.

  Charlie sat staring into their absence. He seemed as external to their grief as the dead man is to the funeral rites. Their sorrow could be shared with each other, but not with him. He was beyond the point where these things could relate to him significantly. The message-bag epitomized their helpless love, just as the pitcher and food left with the corpse are all that his mourners can give him as token of their love. It was like the words that had been spoken in this cell, the only currency they had, but one which had no meaning here, obols in the mouths of dead men.

  Every gesture made towards Charlie was nullified by his stillness, his inability to respond. He.was isolated in himself, struggling for the private resurrection of understanding that would transform what had happened into meaning. The confusion of things occurring around him deepened, entangled, became utterly inextricable.

  As time passed, he could not remember whether events had happened within minutes or within hours. He existed outside of any present, in a strange limbo that rested upon a subtly shifting past. Events never reached him as happening,but only as having happened. There had been the dark bumping journey with two policemen sitting with him. He had washed himself somewhere and dried himself on a rough towel. He remembered its texture on his skin. He had disembarked into a rough courtyard surrounded by high walls, another prison. Men had been watching him. A policeman had tried to get him to eat the meal Elizabeth had brought him. He had stood in a courtroom. He had been given a bath and had been dressed in anonymous corduroy clothes.

  Through it all he had paced endlessly, trekking, it seemed, through a terrible emptiness where people and places were shed from him like useless lumber. Night found him still walking in that second cell, exhausted but driven on by some desperate impulse that seemed to promise him destination.

  Suddenly, the tiredness of two days pressed a plunger on his pent fatigue. Sleep came like a detonation as he lay down. Thoughts thrown off drifted in isolation across his mind, a line of poetry, the image of his father’s face, the date of Mary’s birthday, parts of himself surrendered to oblivion. And then they too were waterlogged with sleep.

  He lay on the bunk, huddled in a foetal crouch.

  Chapter 21

  YOU WAKE INSIDE FOUR BRICK WALLS, A CELL. AND that is all you need. You go on from there. The cell splits like an amoeba, to a bunk, a floor, a window, the shifting clouds beyond the bars. Days take shape. Morning means tea and bread, a basin of water, a tablet of dun soap, a square of gauze towel. You progress from your first sight of the gauze towel through the drying of your hands on it many times until you have become the user of the towel. Two more meals means evening. There is a twice-daily half-hour exercise, when the prisoners walk round and round the enclosed yard, a walk of refugees from reality, a trek to nowhere. There are men you come to know in this exercise period, men who walk with you regularly while the guards lounge and watch. They begin as strange presences, their faces weird in the unnatural light of their circumstance, until familiarity learns to see the wart or the broken tooth and invests them with humanity. Charges are formally exchanged like visiting-cards and friendships grow like grass in pebbled streets. There is an issue of books to read, dished out peremptorily, the iron rations of sanity. Like a chameleon you take colours from all this.

  This was Charlie. This was the meaning his crime bestowed on him, the legacy of action. The dark ritual of violence in which he had sacrificed Mr Whitmore and himself had evoked nothing more than this divine indifference. The chimera of truth that he had felt haunting his father’s death, whose plaintive cry he had heard demanding admittance to their lives, was by some terrible irony farther from him than ever. He had pursued its elusive presence as far as Mr Whitmore’s body and he had surrendered his own identity to bring it into being. And still it had not materialized. Instead, there was only the vast waste his search for it had created. That cry came fainter now, dying in distance, and seemed a dwindling mockery.

  Its departure left Charlie in terrifying loneliness. It had stripped him of himself, of friends and future, luring him towards it with promise of so
me deeper meaning. And now it left him with nothing but the banal functions of his body, food and sleep and the company of strangers. At first he still tried to believe that the meaning of what had happened would be understood, that the machinery that had taken possession of him would be the means of interpreting the message that was written in the death of Mr Whitmore, in the grief of his family, and in the deprivation of himself. But he learned gradually that here he had no right to be understood. Here life was reduced to the barest sustenance of itself, meant no more than its own prolongation. It gave no rights beyond itself, only concessions. It granted food for body and mind in order to keep them functioning. But it offered them no purpose for which they should function. It measured out fresh air, but only in such quantities as would suffice to counteract the lack of it.

  Here one thing negated another, and each activity only existed to counteract its opposite. It was a miracle of equilibrium, the very perfection of futility. Those huge walls were a temple dedicated to meaninglessness. Each day from the endless rooms of cells men were brought forth to walk like shadows in the sunlight, but only long enough to be able to appreciate what they were not, so that their illusory freedom from futility should only serve to intensify their real bondage to it. Then they filed patiently back into their cells like macabre monks to continue their devotions to their pointlessness. And the bolts clanged home along the corridors.

  Joining every day that circular pilgrimage of men on parole from meaning, Charlie came to understand their calm despair. A dull acceptance was all that was possible here. Only real people can have real emotions. And these people were not real. They were automata, mechanisms stripped to a few basic functions of existence. Each one was anonymous. Each wore the same faded corduroy clothes, which had not been made for anyone in particular. Each drank from mugs worn by other people’s mouths. They were provisional people. Each one here had done the thing which didn’t belong to him, small or large, had aggressed beyond himself by taking or doing. Each one here had been taken away from himself, and must wait to see what he was given back.