by Archie Hind
Mat felt a sound rising in his throat but all he did was breathe very deeply. He wanted to wait in the corridor until Jake and his mother came. The doctor gave him permission to wait there and to smoke and Mat sat down on a bench seat hunched over his cigarette and gazing at the square tiles on the floor.
When Jake arrived with his mother Mat stood up to meet them. They came hurrying forward to him along the corridor not as if they were together but like two strangers who happened to be going the same way. In the hurried anxious way they turned into the corridor and walked quickly towards him, in their faces turned towards him, Mat could see the hope, still alive. As if at their sudden arrival at the place where they’d know, the realisation of Doug’s actual death, the actuality of it was too impossible and they both started to hope. He stepped forward remembering the doctor’s humane brutality, thinking to stop them hoping like this, before their hope got any larger, to tell them the worst before they started to expect the best. He meant to speak out directly, trying to force himself, but at the moment when he opened his mouth he felt a sudden reflex like a burnt finger being withdrawn so that he spoke with diffidence, his voice coming out in a whisper. ‘Dad’s dead.’
They had been standing apart waiting on Mat to speak and now they turned towards one another. Jake simply bared his teeth in a wincing grin and his knee bent up spasmodically. He bowed his head in a ridiculous gauche way and kicked at the floor nervously with the toe of his wellington boot. Jetta raised her hand above her head and kept on repeating, ‘Oh, my God!’ Mat and Jake managed to get her to sit down and Jake sat beside her. For a brief moment Mat felt a luxurious pity for his mother and Jake well up in him; a pity which was calming and logical and meaningful against the sterile horror with which he had felt this contingency, this slip; these two crashing lorries with their brutal numb inertia. Jetta sat down on the bench with her knees spread awkwardly, showing the bright flowered apron which she wore to do her housework. Round the tops of Jake’s boots there were a few wisps of straw still sticking up from when he had been carrying on earlier that morning. Mat thought of the persiflage, the idle warm human banter that had gone on that morning at work. He thought of Helen the night before, of his mother doing the housework, and it suddenly seemed to him that everything in human life – the everyday common tasks, sex, love, contentment, aspiration, ordinary human intercourse, hope, laughter, were like dirty snivelling little secrets being uncovered by this sneering, wicked, expedient, mechanistic force that was the world. Like that feeling we get when someone is hurt during some idle horseplay and laughter; like the children caught in their innocence in the bushes; like laughter being wiped from the face. With the bowing of his head, the quivering of the muscles round his mouth and chin, the aching of his rasping throat, the fierce excluding clench of the muscles round his eyes, Mat felt himself cringe in a complete and final shame and the absolute blush of living flush through his body.
13
DOUG WAS ONLY fifty when he was killed. He had been a youngest son, born when his own mother was thirty-eight and his father, old John Craig, had been in his forties. His mother had died in her eighties only half-a-dozen years before, his father only a year before that at the age of ninety-three. Both of them had been old and frail but alert, with all their faculties and most of their teeth. Their great physical endowments had been passed on to Doug. Mat remembered when he used to strip off to wash at the sink, that his body was so youthful; resilient, beautifully toned and alive. Under the arc of his chest the ribs splayed out with his breathing as flexibly as a baby’s. As he dried himself across the white hairless chest the round fatless biceps and muscles of his arms bubbled fluently under the skin. It was this remembrance of his athletic physical life which hurt Mat most. His lovely erect strutting walk in the street, with the controlled swing of the hip and the loose easy jerk of the knee that made his trousers flap around the ankles; the way he’d move about in a confined space – in the house he’d pad about like a big soft cat. From Doug’s reminiscences Mat realised that he had never been properly fed as a child, certainly not during many years of his adult life. He seemed to have held his physical toughness, his endurance and energy in a state of pure grace. And what he had been given in grace, together with its promises, had now been taken away from him by accident.
So it was not just piousness that made people say that Doug had been good for another forty years, for it was certain that Doug would have remained a fit and healthy man for many years. Mat found that his intimately physical memory of his father made it impossible for him to consign Doug into that invalid and pathetic realm in which the dead are put, nor could he remember him with a softened and assuaged grief. Jetta’s was a volatile grief, fluid and healing. Jake’s was stubborn and painful but yielding to time. Mat observed the formalities but inside himself he coldly refused to mourn his father, except for when with a vivid talent for his hurt he would see his father in the quick and lose him as freshly as he did that day at the hospital. In Mat’s life there took place for a while the obliteration of any other consideration than his obligation to Jetta and Jake.
All during the summer he, with Helen and young John, visited his mother every Sunday afternoon. Jake would always be there and sometimes other members of the family, some of Jetta’s sisters, or one of her useless brothers. None of Doug’s family ever came on these visits. Since the death of old ‘Faither’, Jetta’s father, it had to some extent been Doug and Jetta who had made the running in the family, had been the focus around whom they gathered. And now, during these gatherings, it was the family which was talked about and discussed. Mat found his enthusiasm and attention to this gossip as great as anyone else’s.
At first, immediately after Doug’s death, Jetta had gone down to Rothesay to stay with a sister. She had stayed away for nearly five weeks, then when she came back the Sunday visits started. There was a way in which they were happy months for all of them, as if they were spending their time rounding off the past and Doug’s part in it. Jetta’s reminiscences were tearful at first, but as the months passed the tears lightened. The remembrances welled up from her as easily as water from a spring. Mat suppressed the acute immediacy of his own memories and remembered through Jetta as he listened to her stories. Sometimes when her sisters were present they all seemed to contribute – someone would smile and say ‘Remember when . . . ?’ and with patches of story they would put together a whole life, a background, a history. Occasionally Mat encouraged them, for he would often find himself stirred and moved by this repetitive ‘when’ and he’d feel a child-like thrill of curiosity as one of Jetta’s sisters would raise her blonde freckled face and speak. One time he asked:
‘I often wonder at that lampshade, the big one, of orange coloured silk with the tasselled frill, remember, that hung round the gas light, ben the room, in Faither’s?’
‘Everybody had one of those, ben the room. If you didn’t have a shade like that you were naebody.’
‘Was that right?’
‘Aye. I didn’t think you would be able to remember it though, Mat.’
‘Aye. I remember.’
‘That would be the second one. Do you remember what happened to the first one, Jetta?’
‘Do I not?’
And the story of the burnt lampshade would be told. But it wove and interwove with other stories, sometimes with things which Mat remembered, sometimes with events which happened before he was born.
‘I never liked being in a big family,’ Jetta said. ‘In fact, I felt ashamed. Doug would take me to his house and everything was that orderly.’
It was too, Mat thought, and remembered with bitterness how that order in Doug’s family had clashed with Faither’s family, Jetta, and the rest of his sprawling brood of useless children. That was in the times of the tilted slum when Mat and Jake had gravitated towards that useless family and had learned wildness and dirty habits. Not that this had worried Doug. He had been a renegade from the Craigs, like old John Craig, his father, had be
en before him. But Doug’s mother had raised his sisters to such standards of respectability that had tightened the lines about their mouths and burdened them with insincerity. Doug’s sisters had been shocked at the casual upbringing of Mat and Jake and had often snooped around with their dripping aquiline noses. They had bothered Jetta at times so much that she had remained in her own eyes an outcast from a big family. It was laughable to Mat when he thought that both Doug and Jetta had come from an equally large family. To Jetta her own family, old Faither’s brood, must have just seemed bigger.
‘I told him I was the youngest and he came up to see us every Sunday night for a year. Well, I put the four wee yins ben the room every Sunday night and I told them I’d murder them if they made a noise. So nobody was to tell him and nobody was to send out for chips when he came. At the Craigs’ you got lettuce and cold meat with side plates and bought cakes. In our house there was always a big pot of soup on the range, and I used to be terrified, terrified in case somebody just helped themselves. Everybody was warned and Faither used to laugh at me. My mother was an awful one for puddin’ suppers, but she never sent out for a single puddin’ supper on a Sunday night for a year. Then one night they all started screaming and Doug ran through the lobby. They had set fire to the lampshade and Doug had put out the fire. Doug said to me, “Who the hell are they?” and I had to tell him they were my younger brother and my three young sisters. I felt that ashamed. All Doug said to me was “Jesus Christ, Jetta.”’
Once Jetta said mysteriously to Helen without ever explaining the remark, ‘In a’ my early years o’ marriage I never had a decent bread-knife.’ It had something to do with the taunts of the respectable sisters-in-law about her housekeeping. Mat could remember them well, their insincere drawling voices as they would take Jetta down. It had been one thing for which Jetta had never forgiven Doug, that he just hadn’t prevented them from coming around. ‘In oor young days it was the lassies that went oot tae work for the men couldnae get jobs. And I never knew a thing about housekeeping when I got married.’
As Mat and Jake grew older these sisters stopped coming around. At first they used to blow raspberries at them in the street. Jake got a terrific hammering from Doug for calling one of them ‘an effing old bitch’. Then, as they grew older still, Jake became too much for them altogether. ‘Susan was the worst o’ them wi’ thon questions she’d ask, “That’s a lovely drop soup, Jetta, what’s in it?” when she knew damn well it was nothing but a bit bacon rind.’ In the end Jake was able to match their sly hypocritical speiring. Mat could remember one of the last rounds which Jake and Susan had together.
Susan had come one Sunday to dinner. Jake must have been about sixteen at the time. He had anticipated her every sneering question to Jetta and mocked and mimicked her voice, her style, her very attitude, saying grace at the table, belittling all the dishes so that she hadn’t been able to get a word in. After dinner she had said to Jetta, ‘Jake and Mat were aye such sturdy boys.’ She sighed as if to say, ‘With such an upbringing.’
‘Well, you see,’ Jake said, ‘the devil looks after his own.’
A little later she spoke to Jake again. He had been sitting or lounging about the whole day in his old clothes and with more than a day’s growth of beard. But at that time it was only a faint shadow on the corners of his jaw. ‘I see you’ve started shaving, Jake.’
‘Shaving? Whit fur?’
‘Well, you have got a beard,’ Susan said.
‘Call this a beard. It’s only bum fluff. God, I’ve got mair hair on my belly. Look.’ Jake opened up his shirt, pulled up his singlet and exposed the dark line of fell which ran from his pubes up to his chest. ‘It’s all right. Ma belly’s clean. So’s ma semmit. And ma drawers. Ma washes them every month whether they need it or not.’ For years Susan and the rest of her sisters had defeated Jetta with their sleekit questions which always meant something else. In Jetta they had always been able to provoke anger, but now they were afraid of Jake’s hilarious rebuffs and they stayed away.
Mostly, however, the harshness and bitterness in Jetta had been strained away through the sieve of memory. Although Mat remembered the harshness as it was lived – the long end-half of the week when they would fill up on bread and margarine, the cold nights when Jetta would be out scrubbing and Jake and he would await her home coming and shiver from the cold in the dusk – the others Jetta and her sisters, would spin their tales in a different way. In the end it became clear to Mat that what they were remembering was not so much the events, the circumstances, touching, evocative and funny though they were, but that same sense of promise, of youth, that had been lost. And however vague their expectations had been, Doug’s and Jetta’s, it was certain that life had fulfilled very little of that promise. Mat was sure that they too had felt their lives being worn away all during that time of the tilted tenement floor. There was something else too, something which Jetta’s stories, and all those of her red-haired sisters, had in common, something which Doug must have held to. There had been a middle-aged placidity in Doug’s and Jetta’s life since they had come to live in the council house which suggested in its contentment that they had shelved their expectations, had passed them on elsewhere. The stories pointed more and more to where these expectations had gone.
Every one of the Devlins had tried to spoil Mat. It had come from something he was never aware of until he had nearly left school. There was a schoolteacher, a friendly, warm and decent woman whom Mat had led a life of hell. Yet once when he had done something which had infuriated her she had stopped in the middle of her fury, held his head in her hands and had said wistfully to him, ‘And you are such a bonny child.’ At that time Mat became aware of a useful winning thing in himself, but he did not care for his teacher’s regret that it should be squandered in extravagant childish wilfulness. Somehow, he was always forgiven and Jetta and her sisters related the stories of his childish mischief until they began to take on the size of tokens.
‘Eleven full pounds he was the day he was born.’
‘He had a black down all over his back.’
‘The bluest eyes.’
‘And born on a Sunday.’
A Sunday child. Mat laughed at these stories, yet when they showed him the photographs of the fair curly-haired boy – he had been fair, and like Jetta, the only other dark-haired one, his hair had darkened as he had grown – he had felt a disturbing catch in his breath at the clear line of grace, the lovable, forgivable precocity in the child which was himself and which even the stiff clumsily taken snapshots had failed to hide.
‘For the child that is born on the Sabbath Day,
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.’
Such a child must have been a menace and a burden. He remembered how the Craigs had hated him and how the Devlins had, without stint or grudge, given in to him and forgiven his every tantrum and meanness. Jetta’s sister Mary told once how he had kicked in the panel of the door because she had refused to give him a half-penny. Yet when it came to punishing him she couldn’t and had ended by giving him the money he wanted. She told with pride how he had let down the table leaf under a complete and valuable dinner set, as if it had been an honour to her that he should do such a thing. Another aunt, Lizbeth, let him wipe his nose on the sleeve of her coat until it became a family joke. And now these aunts with families of their own would say with unstinted pride:
‘But your Mat was aye our bonniest wean.’
Not just Jetta’s bonniest wean, nor Doug’s, but ours, the family’s, everyone’s.
‘Doesn’t it make your head swell?’ Helen once asked Mat, laughing. Mat had examined his face in the mirror. It was lean, a bit hard, with the blue of his eyes flashing against the dark, but the teeth were crooked, his skin male and coarse grained, the head a little heavy against the column of the neck. Ordinary enough, he thought with satisfaction.
‘Sometimes,’ he said to Helen, ‘it’s just as hard learning to be awkward.’
Even Jake was not
cynical at these times and would add his admiration to the history. ‘The bugger would always get himself out of any trouble.’
All this Mat coldly rejected. All during the thirties his father had worked as a fire drawer in a railway-yard. Mat remembered once Doug being burned when he fell on a shovelful of hot coals. He had come home with his hands and face all covered in unwashed blisters, with the coal and the ash still sticking to him. Jetta had washed and cleaned the burns herself and Doug had gone on to his next shift, his hands all bandaged, wearing an old pair of woollen gloves and with his face all smeared with vaseline. He could remember him, too, when he had had toothache, having a big molar extracted without anaesthetic, to save money, then coming home with his jaw torn and bleeding to snatch a few hours’ sleep before his next shift. And all this for a comfortless arid life on a tilted tenement floor.
Mat and Jake had inherited some possessions from their father; a gunmetal watch, studs, cuff-links, a silver watch and chain with a nail clipper attached, a pen knife, a wooden flute and his books. Jake asked Mat to take the books but Mat preferred to leave them with Jetta in the council flat. But one book Mat did take for a while. They found it, not in the bookshelves but lying in the drawer, a tiny book bound in a kind of pink suède. It had been well thumbed through and in places there were lines underlined in pencil. It was a copy of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation from Omar Khayyám. It was a book which had been well read by Doug’s generation, yet Mat wondered how it could have spoken at all to Doug. For himself he read the poem coldly, repelled by its aristocratic air, its refined sated hedonism. There was nothing that Mat could see in it that could have meant anything to Doug, or would mean anything in his world of bitter poverties, of limited choice.