A few weeks after our near-conversation, I was in the Hazel Tree again, with the usual crowd. My father was on good form, but there was an edge to the evening, a certain electricity in the air. It’s a cliché, I know, but that is how it feels, like electricity, like the charge before a lightning storm. I had no idea what was going on, but I was there, and after a few drinks, I felt included. We were doing the usual stuff, playing dominoes, drinking, talking crap, and I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, other than that odd charge in the air, until my father got up and headed for the toilets. That was when I saw Alastair. He looked different from the last time I’d seen him, heavier, darker, but I could tell that he’d been watching us, and now he was following my father out into the corridor. I glanced around the table, to see if anybody else had noticed: if they had, nobody was saying anything. Quickly, I got to my feet.
‘Where are you off to?’ somebody said. I think it was Junior, or maybe Mull, my father’s best friend among the little group he ran with.
I paused. ‘Just to the toilet – ’
‘Oh, aye?’
I nodded and looked at him. His face was blank, very still, but there was something in his eyes. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ I said.
‘Sit down, son,’ he said. ‘You’re no use to him at the moment.’
‘What?’
‘Your old man can look after himself,’ one of the others put in. ‘Sit down and get that wee whisky down your neck.’
I sat down. A few minutes later my father came back, looking very calm. When he sat down, Junior looked at him. ‘What took you so long?’ he asked.
‘Needed to wash my hands,’ my father replied. ‘Couldn’t find the soap.’
I looked round. A couple of boys who had been standing at the bar went out quickly and there was a noise in the corridor outside. My father paid no attention, but reached into his pocket and pulled out a banknote. ‘Get the boys a drink, son,’ he said to me. This time he didn’t slip the note under the table, as he usually did. ‘A pint and a wee one,’ he added, and he smiled dangerously, as if he knew something I didn’t know, something secret and, until that moment, beyond confirmation, a little piece of information that had only just come to light, not about the world, but about me.
CHAPTER 6
The dredger is in today. Every winter it comes, its silver and cherry lights too bright for our little harbour, its great scoop churning up the silt and garbage that has settled over the last twelvemonth. My son likes to go down and stand on the waterfront to watch; there is something that satisfies him about the steady work this boat does, in the still part of the year. To be honest, I like it just as much as he does: some nights, I find an excuse to go out, just so I can walk by the harbour and watch the men at work. They seem more real when they are here, wedded to something intimate and physical and, at the same time, perfectly abstract. They seem more true, more defined than they appear in the pubs, absent from themselves, possessed of skills that are written deep in the muscle and the nerves. Arbeit macht frei. Why not? On some winter afternoons, after the gloaming sets in, the harbour becomes a theatre of lights and noise, all of it bent to a purpose, to the beautiful, steady work of maintenance, the creation of order.
Elsewhere, that order fails. Up in the town, they’re already screaming through the wynds in souped-up cars, wet-pimpled boys racing around the half-lit streets in a fog of carbon and gangsta-rap, their shiny white faces and polecat eyes improbable behind the windscreens, all self-regard and simmering inferiority complex. As the early darkness of winter sets in, they hang around outside the schools they so recently attended, fatherless children waiting for someone to notice them. The pretty girl who was never impressed by their swagger; the teacher who tried for a while to get through, then gave up to concentrate on more hopeful cases; boys in the year they’ve just left, who still haven’t been given their first car; boys like themselves, willing to stop a while and admire the souped-up tin-cans revving and gurgling in the car park opposite the school. I see them all the time, hurtling along the shore road with their stereos blaring, too stupid to know how stupid they look. I feel sorry for them, at one level, but all I can do is all anybody else does: I ignore them. We all ignore them.
When I was a child, people were always asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. It wasn’t just teachers and vaguely familiar uncles at weddings or funerals, everybody wanted to know, from the fishmonger to our neighbour, Mr Black, whose own children were married and gone. Everybody wanted to know; though, of course, they didn’t really want to know at all. It was just a thing people say to a boy who is still at school, one of those questions that always begin with And.
‘And what do you want to be when you grow up?’
I would be waiting for it, ready to feign the awkwardness of a child being taken seriously for a moment by a grown-up stranger, and I would take a moment to think before I answered, as if such a thing was within my power to decide. Most of the time, I said what people expected to hear: engineer, teacher, jet pilot, train driver. Occasionally, because I had mastered the word early, and knew what it meant, I said pharmacist – and, once, when a particularly smug old church lady stopped me and my mother on the steps outside St Bride’s after Mass, I gave voice to the one true ambition I nurtured, the one answer, out of all the possible answers I could have come up with, that I really trusted. The unco-guid old lady – I knew my mother didn’t like her, though she would never have said as much – posed her question and waited, with a condescending, self-satisfied smile hovering about her lips: ‘And what do you want to be, when you’re all grown up?’
Without a moment’s hesitation, I said ‘An Italian.’
I was only half joking. I knew exactly four adult Italians, the father, two uncles and grandfather of a classmate, and they all struck me as the very model of what I wanted manhood to be. Italian men could cook (in this case, they could even make ice cream), they were obvious and natural in their affection for children, they got excited about the things they liked. The fact that they even liked anything in the first place was something of a revelation. Most of the other men I encountered seemed to like nothing at all. Of course, I knew the Italians were not alone: I had met a couple of Poles, a Slav, a Hungarian, even a Frenchman. The Frenchman had shown me how to pick a flower right at the base of the stem, and suck out the nectar inside. I knew he was French because he was wearing a dark blue beret and had that kind of accent. As he stood there, explaining to me that what I was tasting was what bees tasted as they drifted from flower to flower, I kept stealing glances at his beret. When I was older, I decided, I would have one just like it: not quite royal, but not quite navy blue either, it was somewhere in between, subtle, yet bright, like the colours women wore.
That was a time when men of a certain temperament wore berets. Priests, of course, when they went cycling around their parishes in those flat black berets with little ribbons on them. Young priests in fawn raincoats and charcoal-grey berets, walking around in churchyards, their boots crunching on the frosted gravel. Old priests working in their gardens, too close to God now to hear confession. The beret men weren’t just priests, though. They were men from every walk of life: the gentler kind, the intelligent ones, the thoughtful, the artistic, the kind-but-not-soft-hearted. Schoolteachers, janitors, the man who kept the paper shop on Stenhouse Street. It didn’t matter what they did. What they had in common was a sure sense of themselves that other men lacked. They were often religious, of course, but in a looser, more everyday way than the devout people I had been instructed to admire. It was as if they had all wanted to be priests, once upon a time, but hadn’t passed muster, like my thirty-year-old neighbour who still lived with his mother and went to Mass every day before work. Many are called, but few are chosen, Father Connolly would say, and you couldn’t help noticing the look on his face, a hurt, slightly awkward look that combined pride and loneliness in equal measure.
I could never work out if that loneliness was a disguise, a way
of letting the other men know that having a vocation wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, that the big, echoey house by the church and the car were luxuries that he paid for dearly, in the small hours, after Mrs O’Driscoll had washed up and gone back to her own house. Yet it seemed to me that these other men, the beret men, had a vocation of their own. It was informal and unacknowledged, but it was there for anyone to see: the calm, patient, skilful pursuit of ordinary life, a vocation of the commonplace. Those men transformed the most banal event into a ritual by the power of the imagination. Most of all, they were unlike my father in every way, and they weren’t ashamed of the fact – and they weren’t afraid. They were separate, gentle, self-contained. They looked at my father and saw him for what he was – and I saw it too. They were sorry for him. It wasn’t contempt; it was compassion. That look the fortunate reserve for those who have been unlucky, in their lives, in their characters, in their talents. I wanted that look – or, rather, I wanted the calm I saw in their faces, a calm that my father not only did not possess, but would have denied – so I thought then – with his dying breath.
Sometimes, during periods of uneasy truce, I was going to the Hazel Tree with my father; sometimes we did everything we could to avoid one another. Occasionally, violence flared. After the Alastair incident, I was out of favour for reasons I didn’t understand, but by now I was moving away, making friends with boys my father didn’t like, boys like me. There were complaints from school about truancy, suspected drug use, insolence towards teachers, violations of the uniform code. My father didn’t need any of that. It was a distraction; he felt called upon to act in some way; he thought my mother blamed him for how things had gone wrong. One evening, after I’d been sent home for wearing a makeshift safari outfit to school, instead of the Pope’s colours, he told me that, if I got into trouble again, he’d get me a full-time job at the works. ‘They’re looking for new blood in the coke ovens,’ he said. ‘How do you fancy that?’
‘Fine,’ I answered.
He gave a contemptuous snort. ‘You wouldn’t last two days,’ he said.
The crisis point came in our kitchen, during a school lunch break. My father had come in and, seeing I was going to be late getting back and was making no effort to hurry, he grabbed me by the throat and pushed me back against the draining board. Without thinking – if I’d thought for a millisecond, I wouldn’t have done it – I picked up a long-bladed knife from the sink unit and all of a sudden we were standing face to face: a man and his son, locked in moral stalemate. When I look back, I’m sure he wasn’t afraid of that knife; he almost certainly could have taken it from me before I did any serious harm. After all, he was – hadn’t Alastair proved it? – one of Corby’s undisputed hard men. What he must have seen, however, was the look of pure hatred on my face; a look which, all of a sudden, had finally revealed to us both that, whatever the cost, I would have been quite happy to kill him. Looking back, I think I would. It surprised me, at the time, but it was also something close to a liberation. He must have felt a momentary dismay then, as he became aware of the level to which we had both sunk: after a long minute, he retreated, with a sneer and a glib remark about not picking up a knife unless you meant to use it, and I was gone, out the back door and over the garden wall. I didn’t stop running till I reached the woods.
After that, things were quieter between us; but the resentment still simmered. The times when I wanted to do serious damage – the days when I wanted to kill him – began to merge, gradually at first, then with frightening acceleration, into a single, burning need to do something. Began to merge, that is, into a plan. I knew I couldn’t have stabbed him when we stood face to face, in my mother’s kitchen, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t do something outside, in the cool of the night, stepping out from the shadows, the way men sometimes did, with a knife, or a hatchet. Looking back, I’m shocked at how seriously I took this plan, but at the time, it seemed possible. It wasn’t such a hard idea to entertain – as long as it was safely tucked away, reserved for some future date.
By the time I was seventeen, I was hanging around with a completely new crowd. After I’d lost my job at the works – one night, I’d dropped acid and gone in on a twelve-hour shift, the next night I’d not gone in at all – I started at Scandura, a factory that made gaskets. To begin with, I was a solitary, working at my jigsaw in the corner of the shop floor, cutting out the small-batch, trickier gaskets that couldn’t be made on the presses. I liked that work, it was almost skilled, and I enjoyed working with the jigsaw. There weren’t that many small-batch jobs, though, and when I had nothing to do I had to operate one of the presses – a boring task usually reserved for women. I couldn’t turn the work out quick enough. I’d get bored, start dreaming and, after a while, I moved to the warehouse, where my physical strength was considered useful.
From that moment on, the people I met after work, the boys I played table football or cards with in the canteen or out on the loading bay, the men I considered my friends, were a bunch of escapees from Glasgow: Tam, Big John, Wee John (who was, of course, bigger than Big John), Mickey. At Scandura, they were the boys who worked in stores, unloading raw materials from the lorries, keeping things in order, walking about in brown warehousemen’s coats, limber, slow-moving, placid, and – the merest glance confirmed it – implacable. Nobody got to work in the stores unless Tam and his boys were OK with it, so when I was reassigned there, I was both apprehensive and honoured. It was the beginning of my shift when the floor supervisor, a supercilious ex-RAF type with the cliché handlebar moustaches, came over.
‘We need this machine for somebody,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a new woman starting. I imagine she’ll make better use of it than you do.’ He looked me up and down as if faintly amused by something. ‘You get yourself over to the warehouse,’ he said. ‘They need help over there. See Tam when you get there.’
At first, I thought he’d made a mistake. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Once, he’d got me to cut out a whole batch of complicated gaskets, using expensive material, only to discover that he’d sent me the wrong blueprint. Naturally, he blamed me. ‘Are you sure?’ I said, before I could stop myself.
Handlebars bristled. ‘You’re not here to ask questions,’ he said. ‘You’re here to do what I tell you – ’
I smiled. ‘I’m here for the pay packet,’ I said, ‘like everybody else. Whatever else happens is incidental.’
He studied me a moment, then shook his head. ‘Fucking students,’ he said. ‘You won’t last a week in stores.’
I’m not ashamed to have fond memories of the Scandura boys. They weren’t patronising me when they let me into their circle: they wanted me to see how they lived, but they wanted to be sure I wouldn’t get hurt, morally, as much as physically. They weren’t like the so-called hard men I’d met before: playground bullies strutting around in Crombies and Doc Martens; skinhead gangs prowling the side streets around the town centre or the Lincoln Estate, waiting to pick off the weak and the stragglers; the Hazel Tree bampots that hung around my father’s crowd, waiting to step into their shoes. These boys were warriors. They didn’t fight five on to one, the way so many did. They fought real battles, usually against the odds. Their opponents were people they chose to dislike: servicemen; skinheads; anybody who ran in a gang, or conformed to some ugly system they could see at work in the world. When they weren’t out on one of their missions, they were funny, likeable, cunning, ironic. They were far from stupid but they knew that, unlike Mr ex-RAF, they weren’t going anywhere. When they were out, in their long black coats and baggy, Bay City Rollers-style jeans with a tartan trim, their long hair flowing over their shoulders, Wee John’s baby face set, utterly detached, Big John laughing, Tam raising his wild, keening yawp, they were terrifying, like the berserkers of old who ‘went without coats of mail, and acted like mad dogs and wolves’. The berserkers belonged to Odin, whose name derives from the old Norse, odur, meaning rage or fury; according to the sagas, Odin could assume the
form of an animal, or a bird when he chose, and it was said of the berserkers that they, in turn, could assume the forms of wolves or bears. It may sound fanciful, but I came to believe that these boys really were berserkers, mutant sons of Odin, immune to attack from ordinary weapons, possessed by a divine odur.
Eventually, I started going to the pub with them. Their nickname for me was Big Yin, which was, of course, ironic. Most nights it was just a drink after work, then I would wander off to the Open Hearth or the Nag’s Head, while they continued on to whatever they had planned. I knew this was pretty crazy stuff: some weekends, they would go off to the villages around American Air Force bases and get into fights with ‘the Yanks’, or they would do battle with skinheads, squaddies, whoever they didn’t like. They had no intention of getting me involved in any of that – they were, in fact, quite protective – but one night, outside the shops on Gainsborough Road, I was there when the action came to them. We had been to a couple of pubs, then we’d bought some fish and chips and were standing around, eating, talking. I wasn’t usually with them this late, and I can’t remember, now, why I wasn’t off doing my sensitive-type routine in some dim bedroom somewhere, listening to Tim Hardin or All Things Must Pass with some dark-eyed, platonic girl. I imagine they thought it would be a slow night, just another weekday, no big deal; then, from nowhere, a gang of about fifteen or twenty smoothie types appeared, charging into the little square in front of the shops brandishing sticks and chains, knives, hatchets, who knows what. It was too late to do anything but take what was coming: I was sure it was going to be bad and for a moment I felt nothing but icy terror, but then, just as something hit me, I felt a ridiculous surge of righteous anger, a sense of injustice that these creatures, less intelligent than the average mollusc, were about to beat me to a pulp. I’d been turning round just as I was hit, so whatever it was had struck the side of my head, but it still almost brought me down. It didn’t though, not quite, or not right away, and I lunged forward, grabbing my assailant and dragging him to the floor as I lost my balance. I think I wanted to hurt just one person before I got what was coming. I have a physical memory of punching him, battering at his head and face as we went down, but I’m not sure, looking back, if I did any real damage. Then, as I lay flailing about haplessly, something happened and the other boy was gone. I don’t know how. One moment, I’d been holding on, the next he’d slipped from my grasp – but it hadn’t seemed as if he had broken free so much as someone had dragged him off. Finally, with an effort, I sat up. My glasses had come off and I swatted the ground around me, trying to find them. Then Tam appeared, peering at me with a queer grin on his face.
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