Remedy is None

by William McIlvanney

  Where to? Charlie thought. Down the rabbit’s burrow? To the land of make-believe, where we can play at being people? So much for truth. He could bid it goodbye here. This was as far as his action took him, this bleak dead-end. The rest was a backing-away from it, the covering of his tracks with dead leaves and twigs of reason. Why did it have to be like this? Was the truth he had wanted them to face too terrible to face? So that they had to cover it up, to obscure it with irrelevances, to make it into something different before they could bear it? Somehow what he had done had destroyed its own meaning. His action had been an attempt to halt glibness, to tear off superficiality, to make the truth be faced. Instead, it had merely created its own glibness, a greater need for superficial reasons to conceal its true nature. His truth had spawned its own falsehood. He had forced them to deny the true meaning of his action. For some things are too terrible to be acknowledged if life is to have any meaning, is to continue on a practical footing. As a wound craves bandages, the truth he had revealed to them craved concealment. And they were doing an expert job of concealment, performing immaculate plastic surgery on themselves. And what could he do about it?

  ‘Mr Grant. Have you been following me?’

  It seemed senseless to talk about it. What was talk going to achieve now? But the question was there, like a performer’s hat. It was only polite to put a penny in.

  ‘Following you? Ah widny exactly put it that way. I wouldn’t exactly put it that way. You don’t seem to be going anywhere. Except round in circles.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

  The lawyer’s voice had gone quiet, but its quietness was ominous with the tension of anger on a leash. Charlie felt that it was hardly worth offending him just to go on with this. Enough had been done already. Too many people had been hurt. And it all added up to nothing. What use was there in adding even one more insult to it or prolonging it in another moment’s anger? But the lawyer was there. And he owed him at least an answer.

  ‘All I mean is, I don’t see any point in the part you’re asking me to play. I can’t identify, as it were. All this elaborate pretence. It’s so trivial. I mean, what is the point of it?’

  ‘I thought I had made myself clear, Mr Grant. I’m not pretending that it isn’t trivial. In fact, I specifically said that it was. All right. I’m not even saying that it’s going to make much difference. It might not make any difference. Indeed, to be quite honest with you, in a case as clear-cut as this one, I don’t see that it will make any difference. But while there exists the slightest possibility that it might, then it is my business to consider it. And I’m trying to make it yours. While there is any factor, however slight, which might weigh in your case, however fractionally, then it is my duty to try to see that you get the benefit of it. A human being is at stake. No feather of fact can be ignored. Nothing, no matter how trivial, can be discounted if it might possibly off-set your case. And I won’t let it be discounted. Not even by you. A mote is enough to blind us to the truth.’

  Charlie felt smothered with protection. But what could stop this man? He was passionate in his desire to have justice for Charlie. And he couldn’t see that his passion was a denial of Charlie, a gross injustice to him, presupposing that the truth of what he had done meant no more than what a few people thought of it, was subject to a few psychological gimmicks.

  ‘I think I know what you feel, Mr Grant. You say you don’t see the relevance of this to what you did. I understand. There are many other factors more important. Of course, there are. But it is in order that these other factors may be seen clearly and in true perspective that we must try to obviate marginal confusions and biases. The case as such is in our hands. Don’t worry. We’ll make it as strong as it can be made. Let us take care of that. But I see every case as a composite presentation to the jury. Not just words. Or ideas. But a thing of many facets. And yourself, your physical self, is one of them. Your presence. And I find your attitude to your own case alarming in the extreme. I want you to fit in with the practical requirements of this situation. That’s all. Just to accept this thing as it is. And help us to make the most of what we have. I don’t know what sort of vague half-formed ideal ofjustice you harbour, Mr Grant. From Mr Edwards, I gather that you have small patience or sympathy with the rather imperfect and makeshift version of it that we dispense. Be that as it may. It happens to be all we have available. I’m afraid you have no choice. All I ask is that you make the most of it. I want you simply to accept the negative need not to jeopardize anything we may have to our advantage by what you say or how you act in that courtroom. Just help us to see justice done. Will you, Mr Grant?’

  Charlie was on the point of accepting the lawyer’s terms because there seemed nothing else that he could do. But suddenly revulsion at the whole process of persistent falsification to which he had been subjected halted him in the act of affirmation. Anger rose in him against what they were making out of his action. Perhaps he couldn’t stop them. But he was damned if he would agree with them, simply surrender.

  ‘No!’ he said, and his voice was almost a shout, denying not only the lawyer but everything they were doing to him. He rose suddenly in his agitation and started to pace up and down in the cell. ‘No. Maybe you can make nonsense out of what Ah’ve done. But Ah’m damned if Ah’ll help ye. Justice? Ah don’t see any justice. What’s justice about this? Look. Did Ah ask you to try to save ma skin? The only justice Ah want is to have what Ah’ve done understood. Ah want it known whit that man’s death means. The man Ah killed. The same way as Ah want it known whit ma feyther’s death means. You can do whit the hell ye like with me. Ah didn’t ask anybody tae try to make out that Ah’m innocent or a victim of circumstances. God, Ah’m not innocent. Ah killed a man. Never mind me. All Ah want is for you to understand what’s behind his death.’

  ‘Exactly. And what makes you think that’s not what we want? Of course it is. We want to know why this man was killed. What made you do it. We’re trying to decide. We’re trying to explain.’

  ‘Explain! You’re not trying to explain it. You’re trying to explain it away. You’re trying to find a lotta glib reasons for it. That makes it look not as black for me. You’re trying tae dae everything ye can tae make it look not so bad.’

  ‘But there are reasons for it. There must be. There must have been things that helped to make you do it. Your father’s death. The way you resented your stepfather. Taking his place. The drink. You had been drinking.’

  ‘Reasons. God, Ah’m sick of listenin’ to the reasons you give me. You an’ that other lawyer. Drink. Or misguided love for ma feyther. Or an Oedipus complex. Or God knows what. That makes it nice an’ convenient, doesn’t it? Because if that’s all there is to it, fair enough. These things happen. It’s too bad. But that won’t do. Whit are ye tryin’ tae make out? That Ah’m just an agent for some psychological quirk? Acting on behalf of Tennent’s beer? Dae ye think that was all there was to what Ah did? Naw. It can’t be explained away like that. What Ah did is burnin’ me alive. An’ you offer me Elastoplast. Look. Ah did something terrible. Terrible. Ah killed a man. You want to know what Ah did? Ah’ll tell you. Ah went into a room an’ Ah systematically beat a man to death. There is no reason why Ah should’ve done that. There’s no excuse. There is no justification. Right. Do what ye want with me. Break ma neck or bury me or shut me up. Ah mean, if Ah’m just a dog that’s had too much sun an’ run amok, then put me down. But don’t pretend that what Ah did wasn’t a terrible thing. And see just one thing. One thing. See that what Ah did had tae be a terrible thing. It had to be. Because it had to show what had happened to ma feyther. An’ my God, that was a terrible thing. So why pay attention to what Ah did? The only meaning it’s got is to show what happened to ma feyther. There’s no mystery in what Ah did. It’s not worth all this consideration. Ah killed a man. You can deal with that in any way you like. But you can’t deal with it and not deal with that other crime. Ah mean, Ah’m responsible for this one. So let me pay f
or it. But who’s responsible for the other one? An’ who’s goin’ to pay for it? That’s what matters. A lot of people are responsible for that other crime. Everybody is, who was ever glib about what a person is. Everybody who doesn’t care is to blame. It’s got to stop. It’s got to be faced. You can’t pretend that people don’t matter. People need more than food and drink and a bed. They need more than material success. Everybody has to have a chance just to be a person. Everybody. Everybody matters completely. Or nobody matters. Not God. Not anybody. What’s wrong here, when a man can be discounted, can be written off? An’ nobody cares. What are ye goin’ to do about that? That’s what matters. That’s what you should be concerned with. That’s what everybody should be concerned with. Not with me. You should be concerned with your part in that other crime. Not with ma part in this one. Don’t make excuses for me. Don’t try to extenuate what Ah did. Nothing. Nothing can extenuate me. Not you. Not anybody. Nobody can help me now. Ah’ve made ma own hell. An’ it’s private.’

  His words had forced the lawyer into a withdrawn silence, like someone taking shelter from a cataract. He was able to assimilate only fragments of what he had said, and even these seemed rough and unhewn hunks of meaning, wild, haphazard, and not a little lunatic in places. He had observed the desperate eyes, a wick of fever burning in each pupil, the broken stride that was no more than a nervous concomitant of speech and kept time to the words, the restless hands that would become suddenly crucified in appeal. The total figure was somehow reminiscent of a biblical prophet, clad in the rough skins of his own pain, wandering in a self-created wilderness, whose emptiness echoed nothing but his voice. He was reminded vaguely of a poem he had learnt at school:

  Only the echoes, which he made relent,

  Rung from their flinty caves, Repent! Repent!

  ‘Mr Grant,’ the lawyer said quietly, ‘for the kind of judgment you have in mind, it’s not a lawyer you want. Justice isn’t a divinity. We have no absolutes. We have to wait until error manifests itself and judge it comparatively. That’s all we can do. It’s only as far as this that our criteria are meaningful. Beyond this, no. We can pass judgment on Mr Whitmore’s death. Not on your father’s.’

  Charlie sat down. His anger had cooled, but it had tempered his conviction to certainty.

  ‘Then your criteria aren’t meaningful at all,’ he said evenly. ‘You can take action on Mr Whitmore’s death. But not on my father’s. What good is that? It’s like curing a leper of the common cold. I’ll tell you something. You have no right to judge me. You have no right to punish me. If your rules can’t be applied to my father’s death and still have meaning, then they can’t be applied to this man’s death. If the laws that make this man’s death a crime don’t make my father’s death a crime, then they aren’t laws at all. If the truth they derive from isn’t the same truth that governs my father’s death, then it isn’t truth at all.’

  ‘Mr Grant. You seem to be blindfolding yourself quite deliberately to certain obvious differences. Something utterly intangible on the one hand. And something all too tangible on the other. An act of explicit violence. At a specific point in time. A killing.’

  ‘You’re wearing the blindfold, not me. There are different ways of violence. And different ways of killing. But does that make the thing itself different? Six years or six minutes. It only gives you more time to savour the pain. And it was tangible enough. I know it was. I was there. No. Your way of judging it means nothing.’

  ‘On the contrary. Our way of judging it is all the meaning there is.’

  They stopped talking. Words ran out, leaving them isolated in their mute convictions. They sat surrounded by the stone silence of the cell, like incarnations of twin truths that depended upon but denied each other.

  Chapter 23

  RON EVANS TOOK A LAST DRAG ON HIS CIGARETTE, dropped it, and gutted it with his foot, so that the tobacco shreds merged with the marl of the corridor. He looked out of the window. In the street beyond the courtyard, there weren’t very many people about. Mainly women. Hurrying home to light the sacred oven. It was a boring time of day, he felt, when they all trekked home to do their devotions to their bellies. To appease the great god Guts. Two girls passed by, resplendent in print frocks. Summer was icumen in, right enough. Bringing them out like butterflies. A nice image. They emerged from the cocoon of winter overcoats to flutter in bright dresses. Very good. He was wasting his time as a hack. He watched a young woman push a pram along the street. She was coatless too, bouncing buxomly in her first post-natal bloom. ‘I wouldn’t mind giving your pram a refill for you,’ he thought, but there was no one handy to whom to voice his wit. Only a couple of motley groups. Waiting like him.

  He glanced at his watch. It wouldn’t be very long until opening time. He wished to hell they would get it over with. It was a foregone conclusion anyway. They didn’t have to call in Solomon for this one. Even Lieutenant Tragg would have got a conviction this time. He thought of him sitting there in the dock. Charles Grant. Charlie to his friends, and ‘Charlie’ was right. He was a proper one. Poor bastard. Poor, stupid bastard. Your own mother couldn’t have helped convicting you in a case like this. Come to think of it, Charles Grant’s mother certainly would have. She was an interesting one. She looked a fair bit of goods and yet tatty. You couldn’t make up your mind just from looking at her whether she was a case of prematurely blighted early middle-age or someone who had spent her life outrunning the wrinkles, only to be caught on the home stretch. She contrived to look both well preserved and decayed, as if she had just stepped out of Shangri-la. Maybe she had. Certainly she must have had a very tidy set-up before little Charles turned boy prodigy and wanted to play at Nemesis.

  Children. Who needs them? he thought. They always grew up into two-legged recriminations. They complicated every decision you made, became little consciences growing on to your life like parasites, sucking every ounce of resolution out of you, until all you wanted to do was play it safe and give them security, so that they could have all the chances their existence had robbed you of. They filled your life like overgrown piggy-banks into which you stuffed your own present so that it could become their future. And then at the end of it they turned round and told you all the places where you had gone wrong. They were impatient of the thrift you had cultivated for their sake, or they were ashamed of you in front of their friends, or they were downright intolerant of your old-fashioned interference.

  They were prigs, all of them. They all wanted to believe that their parents were made of stainless steel. They didn’t like to think that their parents might still know what sex was. That they might not only know it was, but might also fancy a little of it now and again from unorthodox sources was not to be considered. It was all right if you were them, but if you were their parents you were supposed to become some sort of domestic vegetable that was fulfilled in feeding their faces and looking at television. He wondered sardonically what his own eldest son would think if he knew a few of the away-from-home truths about father-figure Evans. He smiled in connivance with himself. He must take Drew aside some time and fill him in with a few of the facts of life. On second thoughts, better not. Let him hang on to his illusions as long as he could. He would find out soon enough when his own turn came.

  They all had to learn. Only some were pig-headed about it. Like Charles Grant, Esquire. That was the worst kind. The do-gooders. Holier-than-thou. Sent down specially by the divinity to sort out lesser mortals. Empowered to administer death. The upstart bastard. Who did he think he was? Evans could have told him who he was. He was a stupid little boy, suffering from a bad case of prudishness. Someone who took a tantrum because the world wasn’t all peaches-and-cream and little Lord Fauntleroy. It was just too bad that someone had to die of his tantrum. Too bad for the late Mr Whitmore. Poor old Whitmore. He seemed like a smart enough bloke. He had been doing very nicely, thank you. A very good job. And just as efficient with women. So he knocked off with the one he fancied. It wasn’t his fault th
at she was married. And why not? If he could get away with it. And he nearly did, too. Except for Charles His Holiness Grant, God’s representative in Kilmarnock. Too bad, Mr Whitmore. You can’t take it with you. And all because of a tantrum.

  That was all it was, an overgrown child’s tantrum. It was no good trying to justify it as anything more. All the clever talk was so much crap. Did the lawyer really believe all the guff he had been speaking in there, about ‘social conscience’ and ‘hypersensitivity’ and ‘burden of guilt’? What the hell was he on about? You didn’t have to look far for the reasons here. Charles Grant was the Case of the Classic Prig. (That was a good title. He must remember to put it on a postcard and send it to Erie Stanley Gardner.) That was all he was, anyway. Someone who couldn’t face up to the fact that his mother had enjoyed a bit of extra-marital nookie. He just couldn’t face it – not even when she married her benefactor and made it all legal. And he couldn’t face the fact that his father was just a down-at-heel bum, who didn’t know his financial arse from his economic elbow, and probably wasn’t much good in bed either. What was so hard to face up to in that? Plenty of people had a bum for a father and they didn’t go around killing because of it. The world was full of bums, moaners and social pimps, who never had the breaks, queuing every week at labour exchanges to live off other people’s earnings. If you happened to get one of them for a father, that was too bad. You shrugged and took it.