by A. D. Scott
They made their way up to Sauchihall Street. He told her he hadn’t heard from Mr. Gerald Dochery senior. She told him she hadn’t any news either. Neither of them mentioned the previous evening.
McAllister chose the books, Mary added some colored pencils and notebooks and a writing set with pretty kittens on it for Jean.
“Perfect for a nine-year-old girl,” she told him. For Annie she’d selected a journal in red leather with a gold-colored lock and key and matching gold trim. It was expensive. He didn’t mind.
“There’s no dates in this, so she can start her journal anytime,” Mary said.
He was surprised to see that she had chosen for herself a novel by Ian Fleming. The lurid book cover, the author, and content were not at all to his taste. He offered to pay for the book. She refused. Purchases paid for, she turned to him, and as the sun caught her hair he was reminded of a raven’s wing.
“If I hear anything of Jimmy McPhee I’ll leave a message for you at the Herald. And remember, I want to know immediately if Mr. Dochery, father or son, contacts you. You’ve got my home number.”
“I promise.”
She smiled, and then was gone, walking up the steep slope to Garnethill and the Art College without a break in her stride. It reminded him of the difference in their ages.
That evening, after cooking fish in milk with mashed potatoes for his mother, and not knowing what to do with himself on his last night in the city, other than drink, he went to the Cosmo Art Cinema to see an Italian film. The cinema was packed with students, and he found the subtitles hard to read, but he enjoyed it. A stray thought that he would have enjoyed it even more if Mary Ballantyne were with him he dismissed.
Leaving the cinema, the white-light night carried a sense of the Highlands, the air, the water, the mountains shadowing the horizon, but not the scent. And on the walk back past the pubs, the hum of the city, the dirt, the trams and buses and taxis, the shouts and the singing of the well inebriated, the murmurs of lovers as they kissed before parting—home to their parents and overlarge families filling every space in the too small tenement buildings—he could feel the city worming its way under his skin, reclaiming him. You’re Glaswegian, McAllister, and don’t you forget it.
THREE
Yesterday, without any expectations, his mother had suggested he come to early-morning mass. Hearing her moving about the kitchen, McAllister surprised himself by getting up, quickly dressing and joining her over her single cup of tea, as she would be taking communion.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
The small nod was all the approval she’d show, but as they walked down the hill she allowed him to link her arm through his. For the first time in many years, if not a lifetime, he felt a connection with this distant woman who was his mother.
He sat at the back of the church, an observer, a former Christian. Nothing in the service made him consider changing his nonbelief. But he enjoyed the sense of community, enjoyed his mother’s presence there on the wooden pew next to him. Since meeting and loving Joanne Ross he had begun to understand what family meant to most people—not that he regarded himself as most people; his sense of himself as a freethinking Scottish intellectual had set him apart from his family. He was, he hoped, now wiser, able to mock his former, youthful, self-importance.
They walked back, nodding to neighbors and fellow parishioners. Many were curious and not a few astonished to see John McAllister coming out of the church with neither a funeral nor a wedding being celebrated.
“Oh, it’s yerself, John,” one man acknowledged.
“Aye. Fine day,” McAllister replied, racking his brains for the man’s name and not finding it.
“ ’Morning, Mrs. McAllister,” said a short round woman dressed entirely in black, a faded browning black, as though her clothes had been made from blackout curtains left over from the war.
A couple, middle-aged, my age, he thought, the woman with childbearing rounded stomach and hair more grey than birth-blond, smiled, saying, “Great to see you, John. How you doing, Mrs. McAllister?”
“Fine,” he and his mother replied.
“Well, here’s a surprise,” said two women, obviously sisters, as they were as well matched as a pair of bookends. Again he couldn’t place them.
“The McCrossan sisters,” his mother quietly informed him when they were out of earshot.
This he found hard to take in, as he remembered them as stunning, and remembered how he had fancied both of them, flirting with them at church socials, which, when still at school, his father had forced him to attend. To please your mother, his dad had said, the emotional blackmail usually working—that and the chance to be in the presence of the McCrossan girls.
Outside the tenement, McAllister could feel his tummy rumbling. He was holding his mother’s elbow, steering her over the broken flagstones, when a man came towards them out of the gloom of the close entrance. In the bright light of a sunshiny June day, he could not make out who it was. A neighbor, he would have thought—if he had given it a thought; he was busy thinking of breakfast, for he could almost smell the bacon frying in the pan, and he would make the ten-o’clock train back to the Highlands.
“Is that you, Gerry?” His mother was peering up at the large man standing in front of her blocking her way. “What are you doing here?”
“Hello, Mrs. McAllister. I was wanting a word wi’ your John.”
McAllister examined the man who was keeping to the shadow just under the archway as though coming into daylight might damage him, much as light would damage a vampire. Gerry Dochery was the spitting image of his father when he was in his forties, the time McAllister remembered the older man best. But McAllister felt that the resemblance was surface only; his father’s friend had been cheerful, always ready with a joke and a laugh, always including the children in his smiles. This younger version was desolation personified with a side serving of malice.
This Gerry, “Wee Gerry,” at well over six feet tall, and looking like half of that wide, was carved from granite, and his obsidian eyes, which were fixed on his former childhood friend, were as animated as the stone itself. A folded cutthroat razor was keeking from the top pocket of his black suit, worn with a matching black shirt. Used to be black was only for funerals and existentialists, McAllister thought, then suppressed a smile, mocking himself for being so pretentious.
“Something funny, McAllister?” Gerry Dochery had a high voice, not in the least in keeping with his hard-man image.
“Not at all, Gerry . . . just pleased to see an old childhood pal.”
Gerry Dochery said nothing, not willing to pursue the subject in front of Mrs. McAllister.
The razor was an unseemly declaration of his trade. McAllister didn’t immediately see that. His mother did.
“I can’t be standing about for all the neighbors to see,” Mrs. McAllister said. “Come on, John, Gerry, I’ll put the kettle on.” She bustled down the close and had the door unlocked and open before either of them could find excuses to refuse her.
“Thanks all the same, but I have to be going.” Gerry Dochery tried his best to get out of the offer of hospitality, but Mrs. McAllister was firm.
“You’ll do no such thing, Wee Gerry.” She was off down the hallway to the kitchen, not checking they were following her, knowing they would. She took off her coat, kept on her hat, put the kettle on, told her son to fetch the milk and the bacon from the outside meat safe. “A cup of tea with old friends,” she said, looking directly at him so Gerry had to look away. “Surely you’ve time for that.”
And she didn’t like what she saw, and she too looked away. His father’s pronouncement that his son was lost to him now made sense. Remembering the times she had fed the boy, wiped his nose, cleaned him up when he fell off a high wall, carefully picking out the tiny stones stuck in the flesh of his knees and palms before dabbing the wounds in iodine, made her look again to see if there was anything of that lad left.
He caught her eye. Se
eing himself as she saw him—an altogether different Gerry—made him flush. And angry. But he knew he had to swallow it if he was to find out what he needed to know.
It was the strangest of tea ceremonies, the three of them in the sitting room—it was Sunday, after all.
She was using her best china wedding service, which she kept for visitors. “How’s your father?” she asked Gerry as she handed him a cup and saucer.
“He’s fine, thank you for asking, Mrs. McAllister.”
“He says he hasn’t seen much of you these past years,” she said.
“You know how it is,” Gerry replied. “You must miss seeing your John an’ all,” he countered, the reproach clear.
“Aye. But he writes me a right lovely letter. Regularly.” She bent over the table. “More tea, Gerry?”
He handed back the teacup and saucer, terrified; the saucer was as thin as ice, and the handle of the cup too small for his sausage fingers. Funny he should be so clumsy, McAllister was thinking, he’s known as a razor artist, able to carve the deepest and most damaging scar in exactly the right part of the face for maximum effect.
“Remember how, when you were wee, you used to call ma husband Uncle John?” Mrs. McAllister was relentless; a rat in a trap had more chance than Gerry. “Aye,” she continued, “one time—I think it was when we were all going for a day trip doon the water thon Fair Fortnight—you said, Thank you, Mr. McAllister, when he bought youse both an ice cream, and ma husband, he says, ‘Call me Uncle John.’ And I said, ‘Call me Mrs. McAllister.’ ”
They all laughed more heartily than the remark warranted.
Round three to my mother, McAllister thought. He was enjoying the performance, but anxious about his train. It was clear to him his mother knew why Wee Gerry was here, and clear he would have to stay until his mother was ready to release the visitor. To have the razor keeking out his pocket, McAllister was thinking, attempting to intimidate me, or show off, wrong move in front of my mother.
“Well, it was nice o’ you to visit, Gerry,” Mrs. McAllister relented. “I’ll no’ keep you—this being Sunday, you’ll be wanting to visit your father.” Nodding her head in benediction, she finished, “Give him ma best.” And Gerry Dochery was dismissed.
McAllister saw him out. They said little. But at the door McAllister held out his hand, and Gerry did not refuse.
“Good to see you, Ger. Any time you’re up for a drink, call me at the Herald or leave a message there. It’ll get to me.”
McAllister knew he was looking at a man who had visited with the intention of doing damage. But something seemed to have shifted in the carapace of Gerry Dochery; his sense of invincibility now cracked with a hairline fracture. Or perhaps it was sheer embarrassment, the same as when, as young boys, they had been caught standing on the high wall of the Acropolis cemetery having a weeing competition onto a grave below. A woman had appeared, looked up at them before they had time to run, and shaking her head she went to lay flowers at the foot of the tombstone splashed with urine.
“I won’t harm you, John,” Gerry told him, “but I can’t say the same about your friend.”
It was then that McAllister realized he was right—harming him had been his former friend’s intention. “About my friend, where . . .”
But Wee Gerry Dochery was off down the street without acknowledging the question. McAllister knew there was no point in chasing after him, in asking more; Gerry Dochery, childhood friend, had crossed a line long since and would not, could not, come back.
As he walked back towards the kitchen, he could smell bacon frying. The clock in the sitting room struck ten. He had missed the train.
“Sit yerself down,” his mother said. “And you can make yerself useful by buttering the rolls.”
After the full Scottish breakfast of bacon, eggs, black pudding, and fried tattie scones, he thought he and his mother would talk about Gerry’s visit. Not so.
When he tried to broach the subject, all she said was, “Best leave it, Son, no use stirring up trouble.” She stood. “I’ll make a fresh pot.”
“Not for me, I’ve missed my train. I need go to the station and book a sleeper. Then I need to let Joanne know I won’t be back till the morning.”
“Aye. You do that. And give the lass ma best.”
“I will.” He looked at her. She gave her usual tight wee smile. And suddenly, whether it was because of his living away in the Highlands, or because Joanne had prized open his I’m-a-buttoned-up-Scottish-male persona, he saw his mother anew; he saw the woman who had lost her husband, a fireman, in the horror of the wartime Clydeside Blitz; a woman who had buried her second son when, at sixteen, he had drowned himself in the River Clyde; a woman who had kept a family together through years of poverty, always encouraging her sons to break free of the Glasgow slums through education.
She caught his expression. “What are you doing, grinning to yerself?” She smiled back.
“Remembering how you used to make me sit at this kitchen table and never let me up until I’d done my homework. Years after, I discovered you’d asked my teacher to set me extra work.”
“Aye, and look where it got you. You have a great job. And you own your own house.”
“I would never be where I am now without you pushing me.”
She turned away but not before he caught her smile. “Get away with you. Go sort out thon ticket else you miss another train.”
He was glad he had acknowledged her insistence on his studying. And so was his mother. As he left the house, he was thinking, It’s too bad my education has made us strangers to each other.
He was about to walk to Central Station, but a tram came by and he jumped on. As it rattled its way down George Street, he knew he should also call Mary as promised, letting her know he’d met up with Gerry Dochery. Her number was in his notebook under MB. Somehow writing her full name had not seemed wise. Not that I’m hiding anything, he told himself. I enjoy her company much as I enjoy the company of Rob McLean on the Gazette—another person going places, another person twenty years younger than myself.
He changed his train ticket, paid the supplement for the sleeper, then decided to call from the phone box outside the station.
“Hello.” Again it was Annie who answered.
“Not at Sunday school?” he asked, putting what he hoped was a smile into his voice.
“No. And you’re not on the train.”
“I missed it. Too busy chatting to my mother to notice the time.” There was a silence to that. “But don’t worry, I’ll be on the overnight train and see you in the morning.”
“I don’t care. It’s Mum who worries when you’re not here.”
She was being deliberately rude, and there was nothing he could say because she was right. “Can I speak to your mother?”
The sound of the receiver being put down was loud, and he saw he was short of florins for the call. He put in his remaining change and pressed the button, hoping it would be enough. There was a wait of about two minutes before the sound of someone breathing like the sigh of wind in pine trees came down the line.
“Hello? Is that you, McAllister?” Her voice, timid, hesitant, was so unlike the Joanne he’d fallen in love with.
“I am so sorry, I missed the train, I’ll . . .”
“Are you coming back? Will you be here soon?”
“Of course I’m coming back. I’ll be home in the morning. Promise. I’ve already got my ticket. I’m . . . I’ve just got a couple of things to see to. I’m staying with my mother . . .” He knew he was blethering. “How are you? How are you feeling?”
“I love midsummer. It’s never really dark. I like that. Last night a full moon came up just as the sun was going down. It was beautiful.”
“Has the doctor been by? What did he say?” McAllister was feeling he no longer knew how to talk to her. He didn’t know how to reassure her. Not without being with her, holding her.
“Come home soon, McAllister.”
“I will
and I’ll . . .” The pips started. “I’ll be back in the morning and . . .” He was shouting over the beeping counting down the seconds. “I’ll . . .” But they were cut off.
He swore under his breath. He strode towards the newsstand to ask for change, then stopped, turned around, and made for the Herald building. The newsroom was always open, Sundays being no exception. He had calmed down by the time he reached his temporary desk to call Joanne again, and have a proper conversation.
Without quite knowing how, he found himself saying, “Hello Mary? It’s McAllister.”
He had no intention of taking out his notebook. Looking up MB. Calling. He would have sworn he dialed by accident. A typewriter was sitting plumb in the middle of the desk—he could have left her a message. All this ran through his head in less than a second in real time.
“You’re up bright and early for a Sunday.” It was after eleven o’clock, but he remembered what an unearthly hour that was for a news reporter used to midnight deadlines.
“I had a visit from Wee Gerry Dochery.” He was trying to sound professional. He didn’t succeed. He wanted to see her. To chat. To laugh. To forget.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“The Herald.”
“Meet me in Blythswood Square. The north side, in the middle. Give me half an hour.” And she was gone.
He had to wait twenty minutes for the bus, it being Sunday, and was five minutes late. He stood on the pavement outside the black iron railings of the square park, under the full prima verdi canopy of trees. The sky behind the three-story Georgian terraces was an almost painful and very unlikely shade of deep blue. This looks more Madrid than Glasgow, was his immediate thought.
What were once family homes of the wealthy were now mostly offices for solicitors, dentists, or doctors, or converted into flats. Many of the basements, once the kitchens and servant quarters, were now flats, often rented by students who didn’t mind the gloom or the damp. However, a few of the terraced houses remained intact, residences of the rich old-moneyed citizens of the city.