When Margaret came to visit him, he seemed only slightly changed. It seemed there was only a very thin callous of time across the father she had as a child and the one she had now. If she nudged her daddy down beside her on the sofa and they talked, their heads resting back, inclining towards each other, they could have been speaking in any time. If she called through from the kitchen and heard his voice, only his young man’s voice, he could have been speaking to her from one of their after-school discussions. They might have been planning an outing, or what she would like for Christmas, bearing in mind that she wouldn’t get it, because Christmas should be a surprise.
‘Alright, then, what would you like?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You’d like to have nothing?’
‘No.’
‘You’d like to have something?’
‘No. I wouldn’t like one of those things that you blow down and press the keys.’
‘You mean a saxophone.’
‘No. These things are plastic. They sound like a paper and comb would, only better.’
‘Mmm. I thought you might hate to have a telescope. Funny.’
‘Oh, I’d really hate that. Yes.’
‘Good, good. Well, you’ll not get that, then. That’s a relief. And now.’
He folded his hands round her waist, nearly tickling, but not quite. He bristled his stubble against her cheek, blew on her nose.
‘Who do you love? Just out of interest. Anyone?’
‘I love you. I love you.’
‘Only me?’
‘Only you.’
‘You’re a good girl.’
Their wee catechism.
He would always begin it softly, at the tail end of something else, as if he wasn’t sure of what to say. Margaret would always answer twice, to make him sure.
‘I love you.’ Loud and firmly, a quiet shout, and then, ‘I love you.’ Softly, to give him all the feeling and stop him being frightened by the shout. This became the only way she could say these words to anyone, although she didn’t notice this for some time.
When they had finished speaking, he would touch her head or stroke her face and never be as happy as she hoped.
Margaret was happy with the telescope. It combined things for her pleasantly. She loved the fresh autumn nights near her birthday, their hungry smell and that obscure excitement they made her feel. She loved to disappear into watching, to be nothing but eyes. She loved the peace of doing something by herself. It wasn’t like school, or even being home with her father. Two of you couldn’t watch; it was impossible for you to see the exact same things. She could look through the one eye of the telescope, the only person there, or needed there, and she could be peaceful and enjoy the night.
She sat in her room while the rows of rooftops and streetlights spread away into shadows and dots; a blush of orange rubbing up beyond the hills. At night, the hills seemed just humps of black nothing, but she knew what they really were. Her light was off and her window opened right up, the door was shut and muffled with her quilt, and she sat in the full feel of the outside and the dark, inside the house and there with her. She watched the colours of the stars and planets and the nothings in between and felt they were lifting her to them. This was the time when the path was opened, when she could choose to walk out from her window and up and into the moon. Asleep, she would dream of running on air. Thin, unscented air.
Her father thought it was too lonely to sit by yourself and look at bright things so far off. He had hoped to be with her, holding her shoulders and giving the little scatters of light their right names, but she didn’t want to know what she should call them. She just wanted to watch the stars turning and think of the bigness of distance and of time and then look at the patterns of streets round her house and be sure they could never change.
Deep in the long winter term at school, Margaret would only feel real when the sun had gone down and she was alone by her window, looking up.
In retrospect, her schooling seems absurd.
Margaret’s education was in no way remarkable, it merely took the Scottish Method to its logical conclusion, secure in the knowledge that no one would ever complain because, after all, it only affected children.
Margaret, like many others, will take the rest of her life to recover from a process we may summarise thus:
THE SCOTTISH METHOD
(FOR THE PERFECTION OF CHILDREN)
Guilt is good.
The history, language and culture of Scotland do not exist. If they did, they would be of no importance and might as well not.
Masturbation is an abuse of one’s self: sexual intercourse, the abuse of one’s self by others.
The chosen and male shall go forth unto professions while the chosen and female shall be homely, fecund, docile and slightly artistic.
Those not chosen shall be cast out into utter darkness, even unto the ranks of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces and Industry.
Pain and fear will teach us to hurt and petrify ourselves, thus circumventing further public expense.
Joy is fleeting, sinful and the forerunner of despair.
Life is a series of interwoven ceremonies, etiquettes and forms which we will never understand. We may never trust ourselves to others.
God hates us. In word, in thought, in deed we are hateful before God and we may do no greater good than to hate ourselves.
Nothing in a country which is nothing, we are only defined by what we are not. Our elders and betters are also nothing: we must remember this makes them bitter and dangerous.
Funny old things, schools. Margaret can easily imagine her headmistress, even now – a piercing, yellow mouth, craned across the black wood of a desk.
‘Don’t you want to die for your country?’
Margaret couldn’t understand the question.
She only remembers standing in a gravel playground each year, each second Friday in September. Rehearsed to the point of hyperventilation, the Pipe Band would advance in long-haired sporrans and white spats. They played ‘The Flowers Of The Forest’ and ‘Scotland The Brave’ and the Brownies fainted.
The Brownies always fainted. They would be marched out in close order through the dark of the morning, a full two hours before anyone else, and stood to attention, brown and taut in cotton dresses and knitted hats. The honour of their pack was in the balance.
As the bugler blew the reveille from behind the Domestic Science block, forward came the columns of girls and the columns of boys, all searching for their special marker Brownie. Each column would string itself out behind its Brownie, safe and still. Without the marker, they would have to wander, lost and incorrect, perhaps halting in entirely the wrong place, perhaps never halting at all.
Usually, the Brownies would last until the opening prayer. Then emotion, the swing of the kilts, or simple exposure would begin to take their toll. By the time Margaret first made her dot in the Armistice Day Photograph, a special team of Brownie bearers had long been a vital element in the display. As the morning progressed, they would lift up their little fallen comrades and carry them away. They had bright faces and stepped in time.
For older members of the staff, the symbolism of these moments would sometimes prove too great. Lowered heads and coughing often hid a tear.
Margaret can’t quite describe her school; if she tries, things seem to get away from her. She can’t be sure if what she remembers is totally true or not. Her head fills with marching columns and the Twenty-third Psalm and she seems to have always been marching or singing, as if she were in preparation for some kind of war. Over the years, she has invented sequences for effect, but only because the reality makes no sense.
She can shut her eyes and watch a huge, square-headed man gradually take off his jacket to belt a boy. The boy has blond hair and is almost obscenely smaller than the man.
‘Sometimes, when I belt a boy, I only take my arm back to here.
‘Sometimes, when I belt a boy I lift my arm, right up, as far as it w
ill go.
‘Sometimes, when I belt a boy, I take my jacket off.
‘For you, boy, I’m going to take my jacket off, then I’m going to roll up my sleeve and then I’m going to make you very, very sorry.’
The horror of it stayed with the class, all day. No one would go near the blond little boy, in case whatever badness he had around him would spread to them.
Such merry brutality soon became commonplace. Margaret smiles as she thinks of the maths teacher, the one with the greasy hair and the uncertain fly, who would beat a boy or two almost every day. The boys responded by spitting, smoking and starting casual fires in their desks. It seemed a natural part of things. For half their time, Margaret and the others would observe themselves like strangers, just to see how far they’d go. The rest of their day, they gave to the fight. It was a way of life they were so used to, they almost believed they’d invented it.
Margaret only realised that she didn’t like her school on one of those marching, drizzling Armistice Days. A real Armistice Day with real Brownies. It was that terrible Day when Frazer MacTaggart, the chosen Pipe Major, flung his six-foot ornamented staff high through the layers of rain and then didn’t catch it.
Every face in the columns of faces tilted up to watch the staff in flight and suddenly knew that Frazer MacTaggart would miss. The faces turned towards Frazer and made him know. He stuttered only a little in his marching, before the staff point caught him a wheeling blow on the shoulder and he fell.
The rest of the band marched around him, not knowing what else to do, and a group, perhaps of Brownies, ran out to help him away.
Margaret’s was the only face that laughed. It wasn’t spite, at least she didn’t think so, she was simply very happy. Her school would have to be ashamed now. Not her; her school. An act of God had hurt its pride. Clever God.
It was hard for Margaret to tell her father what it was really like out there, away from his home. She didn’t know if he could understand. When she came home crying because the lady who taught them sewing had spanked her, she already knew that he wouldn’t be able to help. She told him that she couldn’t use a thimble because it made her stitches go all wrong and Mrs Parker would shout at you for that, but if you sewed without your thimble, she shouted, too.
Daddy held her on his knees with his nose in her hair and didn’t say anything. His breathing felt very hot and she imagined it would make her head less sore, so it did.
‘Come on, now. No more crying. You’ve made my shirt all wet.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s alright. It’s alright. Here you go.’
She took his huge, fresh handkerchief and wiped her face and he looked at the window, beyond her head.
‘We’ll have to buy you a thimble and you can practise.’
‘I can’t do it.’
‘If you practise. It’s only that you’ve never used one. Your mother would have had one, I think she did. You have to please these people sometimes, even if they’re silly. She’s silly. You know that?’
‘Mm.’
‘Who’s silly?’
‘She is.’
‘Who?’
‘Mrs Parker.’
‘Mrs Parker is silly. Go on. All together.’
‘Mrs Parker is silly.’
To please him, she giggled. Thinking of the chalky fabric smell of Mrs Parker and how she would always win, Margaret giggled. Daddy seemed convinced.
Margaret’s father walked her down to the chip shop after that. They looked at all the other gardens and her daddy’s was still the best. Sometimes she wanted to cry again, but she knew that she couldn’t outside, because people would see and they would think it was her father’s fault. She wondered if he’d known she wouldn’t cry outside and that was why they’d come.
That night, she thought she heard him very late, walking about in the living-room by himself.
Probably, Margaret could say the sound of her daddy, up and pacing out the night, had run through her thinking for something like twenty-three years. Through her presence and her absence in his house, it ticked out her worries which were his and his worries which were hers. The space where she expected his sound to be was still unoccupied in her head.
As she dreams in the train, there may be the hush of slipper footsteps, still walking through her mind. Something like her breath or her heartbeat, or the sound of a slow dance step.
One November, Margaret phoned her father. They were both near the end of those twenty-three years they had together. Twenty-three years. As long as a marriage, maybe two.
‘How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘Are you sleeping?’
‘I’m fine, Margaret. Just fine.’
‘That’s good. You’ll be sleeping at night then. That’s good. I had thought that, if you weren’t sleeping at night, it might be a wee bit boring. I thought you wouldn’t like a video recorder. To pass the time. I thought that would be no use to you.’
‘They’re very expensive.’
‘Good thing you don’t need one.’
‘Too expensive, love.’
‘Well, like I say. Anyway, what are you doing with yourself? How’s my Daddy these days?’
When the video came, he seemed happy; he bought tapes and hired films from the garage across the street. He read the leaflets on how it worked. If he wanted to record a programme, he had to kneel down and lean on his elbows, then squint at the little green numbers, press little keys. He found that all quite difficult to do. His knees were stiff. And it seemed his fingers were very large for the remote control. The keys were certainly small and close together, so close he would often press two of them at once. The thing was not intended for his size of hand. It was a shame, he would have used it, if he could.
NOBODY LIKED HIM. Somehow, nobody liked the man. He brought out the childishness in you; almost enjoyed your spite.
When people discussed Mr Lawrence – nice people that Margaret knew and liked – they always seemed to end by simply staring at the round blank he made of his face whenever he passed. His eyes would shine under their hate.
For three years or so, Mr Lawrence was Margaret’s employer.
And he always called her Margaret, her private name, the one her father used.
And he always met her eyes when they spoke; felt for them and met them and gave a little kind of push. Nothing obvious.
And he always made the time to give her advice.
‘Those young people. Margaret? Listen, those young people. Are they safe?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘There’s no need to be.’ He gave a grin after that. ‘No need at all. I’m asking, are those young people you work with safe. You should be careful. The boys, well, they’re hardly really boys any more, are they? Should you be with them on your own? Do you know if they drink, take drugs? Someone like that – in that position – could do anything. They don’t understand the harm they cause until it’s too late.’
‘I’m sure they’re fine.’
‘If you were worried at any time, you would tell me.’
‘Yes.’
‘I know you’re on your own now. I didn’t know your father, but . . . one hears things. Please do ask for any help you need.’
‘I will. I’m fine.’
He pressed her hand with a snatch of a smile.
‘I have to go now, Mr Lawrence.’
‘Of course, of course.’
As tall, green barley smears across the windows of her train, Mr Lawrence walks across one of Margaret’s dreams. She can feel his breath like dust across her cheek as he whispers to her and moves away, leaving a sour, little space of sadness. Then her mind draws up the smell of hot, small gravel and the feel of it, ground by her feet. There is also the sound of water and children enjoying it. She smells the fall of sunlight across skin and gravel dust. She sees the square, grilled windows and the tired, oblong walls of what everyone once decided to christen the Fun Factory.
This is a memory fro
m the summer. One of the standard, mostly wet summers that came even after the climate began to go wrong. For precisely six days in August the sun would shine and that would call out the paddling pool and the weans, all squeezed on the only available patch of grass, between the chairs dragged round from the café, an Alsatian the size of a horse and the sunbathing percentage of the unemployed. Nothing much seemed to get done, Margaret ate ice-cream and it was nice, maybe even Fun.
Calling their particular work-place Fun was a simple necessity, because calling it the Community Link Centre (Drop-in Café, leisure, arts, soft seats and welfare advice) seemed to make its borstal windows and its tiredness far too obvious and no one liked to be reminded of the numberless, larger failings it could in no way alleviate. No one liked to feel they were constantly failing and hemmed in.
Counting Margaret, there were three of them at the Factory, having Fun: Sam and Lesley and Maggie. She always liked to be Maggie here.
‘Maggie, you know where the chess boards all went?’
‘Maggie, that man’s in the café again and Sammy isn’t here.’
‘Maggie, his mammy’s just told me the Alsatian’s ate wee Sylvester. Is that right?’
It was nice being Maggie. She was a Centre Assistant. This meant, among other things, that she typed and did the filing. No one else knew how to do that, so no one could say it was wrong. She generally got Lesley to do the accounts and sometimes she could just sit and drink a coffee; watch the TV they’d bolted to one wall. Sometimes she allowed herself time for that.
They were all Centre Assistants. Rumours suggested that once there had been a Senior Centre Assistant. The power had gone to his head, it was said, and he hadn’t lasted long. Assistants’ duties were outlined briefly on photocopied sheets along with their RESPONSIBILITIES. Mr Lawrence was especially fond of them.
‘Margaret, I give everybody one of these. I would just like to point out that I personally find the tone of the language quite unpleasant. I want you to know that I don’t deal with people like us on these terms. You’ll learn about this – I’ll teach you – there are different ways of speaking to different people. I’m afraid my priority has to be that I’m understood.’
Looking For the Possible Dance Page 2