Eight scapular blows.
She whimpered and crouched, but she still defied him, and her mother came home earlier than expected and caught her red-eyed in the act. Gerald was glad to have a witness of his sister’s disobedience and complained it wasn’t the first time.
Mrs Provan stared at Senga, frightening her.
‘You’d start a fight in an empty house you would,’ she said. ‘You bad little besom.’
She advanced speaking.
‘You know damn well it’s your place to make a meal for Gerald when I’m not in. I’m fed up telling you.’
Senga retreated silently.
Poised to jouk, right hand over right ear, left hand over left ear, her head sinistral, she borded the kitchensink in a defence of temporary kyphosis.
Mrs Provan halted.
Senga straightened.
‘It was me set the table and made the tea,’ she replied with spirit, confounding her mother and her brother in one strabismic glare. ‘If he wants any more he can make it himself.’
‘It’s not a boy’s place to go using a fryingpan,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘That’s a girl’s job. Your job.’
‘It’s him starts fights,’ said Senga. ‘Not me, It’s him. Always giving orders.’
Her guard was dropped.
Her mother swooped and slapped her twice across the face, left to right and then right to left.
Gerald grinned.
Senga wept.
‘I wish my daddy was here.’
Gerald chanted.
‘Ha-ha-ha! Look at her, see! She wants to sit on her daddy’s knee!’
‘She’ll wait a long time for that,’ said Mrs Provan.
She put her arm round Gerald, ratifying their secret treaty, and Gerald rubbed his hip against her thighs.
CHAPTER TWO
Mr Alfred sagged at the bar, sipped his whisky and quaffed his beer, smiled familiarly to the jokes exchanged across the counter, and lit his fifth cigarette in an hour. His hand wavered to put the flame to the fag and his lips wobbled to put the fag to the flame. The man at his elbow chatted to the barmaid. The barmaid chatted to the man at his elbow. Propinquity and alcohol made him anxious to be sociable. He waited for an opening to slip in a bright word. After all, he knew the man at his elbow and the man at his elbow knew him. They had seen each other often enough. But neither admitted knowing the other’s name, though he must have heard it countless times from Stella, who knew them all.
It grieved Mr Alfred. Sometimes he thought he was making a mistake frequenting a common pub with common customers and a common barmaid when he had nothing in common with them. In every pub he went to he recognised anonymous faces. For besides being a bachelor and a schoolmaster, a Master of Arts and the author of a volume of unpublished poems, the only child of poor but Presbyterian parents and now a middleaged orphan, he was a veteran pubcrawler. But it was his weakness to stand always on the fringe of company, smiling into the middle distance, happy only with a glass in his hand. He had been a wallflower since puberty. He wanted to love his fellow men. When he was young he even hoped to love women. Now every door seemed locked, and without a key he was afraid to knock.
Stella drew a pint. The beer was brisk. She brought the glass down slowly from the horizontal to the vertical. She was pleased with the creamy head on it, not too much, not too little. With pride she served her customer.
‘There! How’s that for a good top? See what I do for you!’
The man at Mr Alfred’s elbow put a big hand round the pint-measure. He grinned.
‘Nothing to what I could do for you.’
‘Ho-ho,’ said Stella. ‘I’m sure.’
Her frolic smile said enough for a book on sex without fear. Mr Alfred caught a reprint tossed to him free. He jerked and fumbled for something to say. Distracted to find nothing, he missed what they said next. When they stopped laughing Stella turned to him as if he had heard.
‘This man brings out the worst in me.’
Mr Alfred smiling tried again to find a mite to contribute. By the time he was ready to catch the speaker’s eye she was slanted from him, sharing another joke with the man at his elbow. She ended it laughing.
‘Aye, I know. The doctor says it’s good for you.’
Mr Alfred meditated. Alcohol always made him meditate. His cigarette smouldered at an angle of fortyfive. There was a glow in his middle and a halo round his head. He was getting what he came out to buy. An anaesthetic between the week’s drudgery behind and the week’s drudgery ahead. Stella was his world for the moment. Stella and what she said and the way she said it. His daily thoughts assured him he was the victim of a coarse and even foul mind. He accepted it, as a redhaired man accepts his red hair. He was willing to believe Stella was never guilty of an equivocation and to blame himself for thinking her conversation was loaded with a wrapped freight of allusions to sexual intercourse. He wondered how he would get on if he tried to make love to her. But he had a good idea what would happen. Even if she ever gave him the chance he would muck it up somehow. He would be sitting an examination in a practical subject when all he had was a little book-learning. He drooped.
When he came out of his soulsearching the man at his elbow was turning to go.
‘Good night, sir,’ Stella called out, moving up from the other end of the bar to give him a wave.
‘You never call me sir,’ he said as she came level.
He thought his joking pretence of jealousy would amuse her.
Stella strolled down the bar again and threw him a vague smile over her shoulder. It said she heard him say something but didn’t quite know what and didn’t think it mattered.
He staggered out on the bell to wintry streets and shivered. Between tall tenements and down dark lanes, his cigarette out, he talked to himself. He criticised the chaste loneliness of his habits. He muttered Milton’s question. He had a habit of thinking in quotations when he had a drink on him.
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles in Neaera’s hair?
When he recited the pleasant alternative suggested by the great puritan poet he remembered an old surmise that with should be withe, meaning bind or pleat. It seemed an idea worth lingering over. But at that point in his erotic meditation he was interrupted by a woman who had no resemblance to Amaryllis or any other nymph. She linked her arm in his.
‘Coming home, darling?’
He recognised her as the reason for his wandering, and he knew the trembling of his lean body when he left the cosy pub was due less to the chill of a sleety wind than to the hope of finding her. But the moment she opened her mouth and touched him he was as empty as all the glasses he had drained. Still, with his usual politeness he answered insincerely, or with his usual insincerity he answered politely.
‘Yes, of course.’
There was a public convenience, doublestaired, a dozen steps ahead. He disengaged his arm from hers with a gentlemanly apology.
‘You wait here. I’ll be right back.’
He descended, leaving her loitering at the top of the stairs. When he had emptied his bladder he returned to the street by the other staircase and weaved home to his single bed.
CHAPTER THREE
Two of Gerry’s classmates collided at playtime. There were about four hundred colts running wild in a small area. Collisions and spills were common. Most often they led to nothing more than a vindictive shove and a corresponding push. But this time Gerry intervened. When the boys began their ritual snarling he jostled them. They tangled. He persuaded one of them to challenge the other. A square-go was fixed for four o’clock in the Weavers Lane. The news of the engagement circulated with a speed only slightly less than the speed of light, which is of course the maximum velocity at which any signal can be communicated in our universe, and Gerry was sure of a big attendance. He sprawled in Mr Alfred’s class after playtime, dreamy with pride at being a fight-promoter. He put a pencil between
his lips, took it out and exhaled.
‘Is that a good cigar?’ Mr Alfred asked, very sour.
He was lately finding the afternoons tiring. They sent a jangle of pain round his skull. He felt he was a foreigner trying to get across to people who didn’t speak his language. The days when he enjoyed teaching seemed so far away he believed they belonged to somebody else.
Gerry rolled the cylinder between his fingers, tried to squeeze it, sniffed it, looked at it suspiciously.
‘Aw sir, it’s only a pencil,’ he decided.
‘Put it away,’ said Mr Alfred.
Gerry tapped the end of the pencil on the desk as if he was stubbing a cigarette and set it down with hyperbolic care.
Mr Alfred gave him a hard look. But he had been teaching too long to go looking for trouble. He meant his glare to be enough to show he knew cheek when he saw it and wouldn’t take any more.
He glanced at the textbook to check the place and resumed the lesson tabulated there for teacher and pupils. It was, in his opinion, a rather childish exercise in oral composition. But the boys seemed to find it difficult. They hadn’t an answer to any question. They sickened him.
‘They just sit there pandiculating,’ he said to himself. ‘Shower.’
From the day Collinsburn became a comprehensive school he had always been given the dullest classes. He resented it. The men who took the bright boys and girls to leaving-certificate level were all honours graduates. But he was sure he was as good as any of them, in spite of the fact he had only an ordinary degree. He was convinced he was better equipped to be Head of the English Department than the man in the job. He had read more widely. He had written prose and verse for the university magazine when he was a student. For a session he had been the magazine’s most distinguished poet. He had his collection of unpublished poems behind him, and he kept up with modern poetry. Given the chance he knew he could inspire some good boys in fifth and sixth year with his own abiding love for literature. But the Principal Teacher of English, a portly man prematurely bald and Deputy Head Master, was just a dunce who had never written a poem in his life. He was only a teaching-machine during school hours, and outside them he was a non-smoker and teetotaller who read nothing.
Gerry had no loose change when it came his turn to make a donation to the begging composition. He shrugged, shook his head, and put his pencil-cigar back in his mouth.
Mr Alfred let it pass. He was thinking of the year he had to give up his honours course and settle for an ordinary degree. It was all because his father died suddenly and his mother mourned so much she became a bit unbalanced. He qualified quickly to get a job and bring some money into the house. Then his mother went and died too. If they had only lived another couple of years it would have made all the difference to his status. To his prospects of promotion. To his salary. To the classes he was given.
These cogitations on his misfortune occupied the back of his mind while the front went on soliciting sentences for the oral composition. A yelp from the pubescent anthropoid beside Gerry pulled the emergency cord that stopped both trains. He stared at the startled animal.
‘Hey sir, Provan stuck a pin into me.’
‘Aw sir, I never,’ Gerry declared.
Innocence and indignation sparkled in the young blue eyes.
Mr Alfred walked slowly across the room, stood over them both, glowered down, textbook canted.
‘Show me,’ he ordered Gerry.
‘It’s only a safety-pin,’ said Gerald.
He opened his fist and showed it.
‘It doesn’t seem to have been very safe,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘What were you doing with it?’
‘Taking it out my pocket,’ said Gerry.
‘Why?’ said Mr Alfred.
‘My braces is broke,’ said Gerry. ‘I was going to try and sort them.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Mr Alfred.
‘And McLetchie went and shoved his arm into me,’ said Gerry. ‘You see, I had the pin opened, sir.’
He lolled back, smiling up.
‘Wipe that smile off your silly face,’ said Mr Alfred.
Gerry raised an open hand to his face and drew it down over his nose and mouth. Took the hand away to reveal a straight face. The bland insolence of the obedience provoked Mr Alfred. He smacked Gerry across the nape. He knew at once he shouldn’t have done it. But he damned the consequences. It would soon be time for the peace of a pub-crawl. He sketched an itinerary and wondered if he should go and see Stella again or leave her alone for a bit.
Gerry rubbed the offended neck and drew back from any further attack though none was threatened. Cowering he shouted.
‘You’re not supposed to use you hands. I’ll bring my maw up.’
‘Bring your granny too,’ said Mr Alfred.
‘Ya big messan,’ said Gerry.
‘You cheeky little rat,’ said Mr Alfred, and smacked him again where he had smacked him before.
‘I’ll tell my maw you called me a rat,’ said Gerry.
He crouched over his desk, sullenly puffing the forbidden pencil again.
‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Take that thing out of your mouth. Anybody would think you were a sucking infant.’
‘Oh!’ Gerry cried in delight. ‘What you said! Wait till I tell my maw.’
CHAPTER FOUR
The Weavers Lane was a good venue for a fight. Not far from the entrance it changed direction sharply, and twenty yards on it veered again before turning to the exit. Whatever went on between the zig and the zag couldn’t be seen from either end. To make it still more suitable the centre stretch had a recess of stony soil where some dockens and dandelions maintained a squalid existence.
On one side of the lane: the back walls of Kennedy’s soap factory, McLaren’s garage, and Donaldson’s paint- works. On the other: the palisade of the railway embankment.
But the fight was a flop. Gerry saw at once where he had gone wrong. He had matched a warmonger with a pacifist. In a minute it was no contest. McKay hit Duthie once, an uppercut wildly off target. Duthie reeled against the spectators. They shoved him back into the ring. He stumbled forward a couple of steps and stopped with his head down and his hands across his face, patiently waiting the next blow. Disgusted at the lack of style in his opponent McKay pushed rather than punched him and Duthie fell down. He lay there. He seemed to think he had done his bit and that was the show over. Gerry was annoyed.
‘Get up and fight!’ he shouted. ‘You’re yellow!’
To encourage Duthie to rise he kicked him three or four times in the ribs. He made it clear he had a great contempt for Duthie. But Duthie gave no sign of caring about anybody’s opinion. He sprawled raniform in defeat and croaked upon an ugly docken. The happy boys and girls, four deep all the way round, jeered at his abjection.
Gerry sighed.
Duthie lay still, waiting and willing for death or the end of the world to come and release him from his agony. Neither event occurred at that particular moment, but his salvation came along in the shape of Granny Lyons, famous locally for the health and vigour of her old age. She used the Weavers Lane every day as a shortcut between her house and the shops, and she was never one to emulate the Levite if she saw a creature in distress. She broke the ring of fight-fans with a swing of her shopper, hoisted Duthie to his feet, and shook him alive again.
‘You stupid wee fool! You should keep out of fights.’
Duthie wept.
‘A skelf like you,’ Granny Lyons comforted him. ‘You’re no match for McKay. Oh, I know him all right. And I know that Provan there too. Some bloody widow, that one’s mother.’
The dispersed mob reformed at a goodly distance.
‘Hey missis!’ Gerry called out pleasantly. ‘Yer knickers is hingin doon.’
He was hiding behind Jamieson and Crawford, and between the phrases he ducked from a shoulder of the one to an elbow of the other.
Granny Lyons measured them all with blazing eyes.
They retreated
under her fire.
‘Scum,’ said Granny Lyons.
She paused, swinging her shopper, thinking.
‘Human rubbish,’ she shouted, and went on her way.
Duthie tagged behind her, though it meant he would have to take a detour home.
Gerry’s disappointment with the fight stayed with him over teatime until his mother came in. Senga did nothing to make up for it. She obeyed all his orders without a word of complaint. He was a Roman slaveowner defeated by the humility of an early Christian. He tried to make her rebel so that he could batter her. She wouldn’t break. She made his tea, kept the fire going, washed the dishes, cleaned his shoes, washed his socks, and switched the TV on and off and on again whenever he told her from the command- post of his armchair. He waited for his mother.
‘Big Alfy hit me this afternoon,’ he said before she was right in.
‘Him again?’ said Mrs Provan. ‘He’s always picking on you, that man.’
‘Right across the face,’ said Gerald. ‘Hard. His big rough hand.’
Mrs Provan threw her handbag on a chair and hurried to him. She took his chin between thumb and forefinger and turned his face left and right, looking for a bruise.
‘For nothing?’ she asked like one who knows the answer.
‘I bet you were giving up cheek,’ said Senga unheeded.
‘Yes,’ said Gerald.
His mother stopped looking. She could see nothing. She was angry.
‘I’ll see about this. Teachers aren’t allowed to use their hand. There’s no hamfisted brute going to get away with striking my boy.’
‘He called me a rat,’ said Gerald. ‘And he used a bad word. He said I was a so-and-so-king infant.’
‘Oh, he did, did he?’ said Mrs Provan. ‘Well, I’ll call him worse when I see him. And see him I will. First thing tomorrow. Some teacher him, using that language. You leave it to me, Gerald. You’re not an orphan. You’ve got your mother to protect you.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Mr Alfred, MA Page 2