The first ten years of my life in Ochtermill passed in this dreary atmosphere. I had had no conception of how dreary it was until I went to school and saw how other children interacted with teachers and with their parents. School was an explosion of colour, from the posters and pictures on the walls to the different chalks used on the blackboard and even to the clothes the teachers wore. I began to see us, the Macks, in a different light, and it was not a comfortable view. My father should have been one of the most influential figures in a place the size of Ochtermill, but, with each passing year, his influence was dwindling. In the early 1960s he could walk down the main street and bickering groups of boys in shorts would look guilty and fall silent while he passed; some men touched their bonnets; others crossed the street to avoid him; women in headscarves would smile nervously and then whisper behind his back. But by the middle of the decade there was change in the village: even at seven or eight I was conscious of it. The gangs of boys, now wearing jeans, ignored him or stared insolently; young men grew their hair till it covered their ears and collars; young women abandoned headscarves and wore skirts that barely covered their thighs. Meanwhile the grocer’s turned itself into a new kind of shop where customers picked up wire baskets and helped themselves to things off the shelves; pop music, a complete mystery to me, played on a jukebox in the Italian café, and crashed tinnily from dozens of transistor radios carried by girls with long, pale legs and false eyelashes; rumours of students smoking hashish and women ‘going on the pill’ were confirmed as facts. Some people claim that the sixties never happened in Scotland, but they did; and in places like Ochtermill, where they ran headlong into the remnants of the 1930s, it was impossible to pretend otherwise. In 1960 the church’s pews were all full; by 1970 they were more than half-empty. My father, the Reverend James Mack, stood like a breakwater in the ebb of the decade, while those for whom organised religion meant nothing any more went out with the tide and did not return.
But it was not just a clash of eras or generations, it was a clash of cultures too. The sixties was an American decade: the Americans might have gone home after the war but they were back in these years, influencing the form of music, books, art, fashion, social attitudes. British pop groups sang with American accents, teenagers dressed in denim, Marvel comics filled the racks in station newsagents, and American shows and the American war in Vietnam filled the staid black-and-white screens in homes which had television. My father hated all this: the triumph of stupidity. He saw it too as an invasion of privacy, which it was. The sixties demolished privacy, encouraging people to explore their inner selves and lay them out for all to see. To my father, this was like passing a law permitting indecent exposure in public places.
Looking back, I see that the decline of his influence was rapid, but at the time it seemed gradual, partly because he remained such a conspicuous figure. He stood over six feet tall, with a long, straight back and arms that reached almost to his knees. He had big, meaty hands that he would clasp behind him as he walked, so that his arms formed an inverted Gothic arch. He walked very stiffly, as if that arch outlined the end of an invisible ironing-board stuck down his back. He never had good colour, and his ashen complexion made him seem even more forbidding. His grey hair had receded far up his head when I was still a toddler: his brow was like an expanse of polished rock and his jaw like a jutting piece of granite. His bright blue eyes, set in deep sockets, shone like crystals in this bleak terrain.
He was not a talkative man, but when he spoke it was impossible to ignore him. Although he had banished Scotticisms almost entirely from his vocabulary, he had a strong west coast voice that accentuated every guttural and fricative, and made him use English as if it were a chisel or gouge that had to be gripped hard and applied with precision. This made him sound extraordinarily emphatic and combative even when saying something simple like ‘Good morning’ or ‘Thank you’ or ‘Let us pray’. When he read from the Bible, the effect was very powerful, and when he prayed aloud in the kirk it sounded more as though he were challenging God than beseeching him. My mother and I sat in the front pew, beneath the pulpit, so I don’t know if anybody was in the habit of nodding off during his sermons, but if they were I can’t imagine that they slept easily. Sometimes, if he was particularly enthused, I would have to wipe his spittle from my hymn book.
He could be fierce, but it took extreme provocation to bring his awesome ferocity to the surface. I have mentioned the reddening of the cheeks which was the sign of an imminent explosion; I used to watch in cowering anticipation as people who didn’t know him so well blundered on unaware of this warning signal and then received the full blast of his wrath. The things that set him off were all appropriate targets for a minister’s anger – blasphemy, deceit, extravagance, waste, selfishness, greed – but he did not always keep a sense of proportion when he saw these sins manifested. He could with equal vehemence decry slum landlords, deplore the nuclear arms race (which he also saw as blasphemy, the ultimate setting-up of false gods) and castigate me for not eating my greens. In the pulpit his rage was mesmerising and inspiring; in the manse or street, it was sometimes irrational and, yes, even stupid.
I began to be conscious of this from about the age of seven or eight. His moods affected the entire house, making it feel like a place where all spontaneity was left, like outdoor shoes, in the lobby, where all pleasure was suspect, where all that was entertaining was measured and tested for impurities. In describing the manse, I seem to have paid most attention to the room my mother and I spent least time in: the minister’s study. It was the nerve-centre of our existence. The gloom seeped out from there and filled our lives.
I also became conscious of something about myself. Like my father, I was boiling away within, but I kept a lid on my passions. Somewhere in his Journal Walter Scott says something about this, I forget the exact words: ‘Our passions are wild beasts: God grant us the strength to muzzle them.’ Unconsciously at first, and then deliberately, I learned how to do this. It was what enabled me to survive, but it is what prevented me, for so long, from really living.
It is midnight, but I am not sleepy. The fire bakes and breathes and I breathe with it. Another dram. Soon the night will be at its heaviest and darkest. I will sit for a while in its midst, then begin again.
VI
The importance of evidence, the necessity of facts. Like Mr Grad-grind in Hard Times I believed in facts. I believed in them that day I found the Stone, which was why it disturbed me so much. I remembered Thomas called Didymus, who would not accept that Jesus had risen from the dead unless he saw and felt for himself the print of the nails in his hands. I’d have been with Thomas on that. I’d read David Hume on miracles, his argument that although a miracle was possible you’d need so much evidence to persuade you it had happened that it wouldn’t be a miracle any more – and my sympathies were with him. I used to discuss all this with John Moffat when we were students together at Edinburgh, and long after that too. Now John teaches history at Monimaskit Academy. He believed in facts then, and still does. We argued vociferously but in those days we were on the same side. Yet we also recognised that evidence could be misleading or wrong, could even be lies; that truth is a variable and slippery thing. One of the exercises John used to do with his pupils was read out extracts from the old burgh annals of Monimaskit – items presumably recorded in all sincerity and not by some sixteenth-century joker intent on pulling the leg of posterity – in order to demonstrate this point:
1567. In this yere in the moneth of Aprile, ane kow broucht furth eight dog whelps of monstrous size insteid of calfs. Nane could controul thame even in thair first houris, and thay killed and devoured thair mothir. The nixt day fiftene strang men cast thame in ane fischerman’s net and thay war draggit yowland and teirand the net with thair teeth and war dround in the sea.
1570. In Julii, ane of the servand lassies at Keldo beand seik, a doctour of physick wes summond, that did give her an emetick; and she did vomit furth twa puddocks and
a spider, and efterwards ane littil houss all compleat with lum, door and winnocks; but althogh ane watch wes keepit, the pepill that bade in that houss war nevir discoverit.
So where did that leave me, as far as the Stone was concerned? What would posterity make of me? I jogged in through the outskirts of town that January afternoon and imagined the item some future teacher might read out:
2003. In January of this year, the parish minister did claim that there appeared at a certain place in Keldo Woods a mysterious stone that was never seen on that spot before. And the townsfolk laughed at him, and when he persisted in his delusion they were enraged, and he was dismissed as a fabricator of tales not worthy to be a pastor to the people, and died in shame and poverty in Dundee.
I really did construct that text in my head as I ran, and though I may not die in shame, poverty or Dundee, how true the rest of it has turned out to be.
I stopped running at the manse gate and walked up the gravel driveway, limbering down. I went round to the back door, lifted the key from where I usually hid it under a broken slate, and unlocked the door. I took off my trainers, knocked the loose mud off them against the sandstone wall and put them on newspaper in the utility room. I thought of my father’s gleaming black brogues, how he used to polish them till the sweat stood on his brow. In the kitchen, the time on the cooker changed soundlessly. I thought of Jenny. In the hallway, the grandfather clock from Ochtermill ticked peevishly. On the stairs, silence. In the bedroom, silence. I thought of Jenny again. Whenever I came in from a run, she was there in the house. And then she wasn’t.
In the shower the water poured over me and I imagined rain running down the many faces of the Stone. Something strange, unnerving and wonderful was happening. I was frightened, I was excited. I wondered who I would dare to tell about it.
I would, almost certainly, have told Jenny if she’d been there. She’d have been in the kitchen: baking, perhaps, or ironing, or at the table reading a book or doing the Scotsman crossword. The kitchen and bedroom were Jenny’s rooms, they seemed permanently filled with her warmth, her smell, whether or not she was there. Even after all those absent years – eleven of them, blown away day by day like calendar leaves in an old movie – she lingered. The big pine kitchen table had six matching chairs, but Jenny had banished one of these to a corner of the room and put in its place an oak Windsor chair with a faded blue cushion tied to two of the spindle-shaped uprights. It never looked that comfortable – it never was for me, I’m too long and bony – but small, soft Jenny loved it, could sit in it for hours, one leg tucked under the other, read whole books, fall asleep and wake unstiff and without a crick in her neck. After the accident – not immediately but a few months after – I moved the Windsor into the corner, and the exiled pine chair came back to its rightful place. I never sat in Jenny’s chair, but I couldn’t sell it or give it away. Sometimes a wisp of her was there, curled up in its arms. More often than not it was empty.
‘Hiya. How was it?’
‘Fine. Cold, but good for running.’
‘See anybody?’
‘Not a soul. What are you up to?’ Silly bloody question if she had a book in her hand.
‘Page 467. Bleak House.’
‘I thought you’d read that before.’
‘I have. Twice. It gets better each time. Mr Krook is about to spontaneously combust.’
‘Oh. Well, I’d better not hold him up. I’m going for a shower.’
‘Good.’ I can see her smile. ‘You’re far too sweaty for a minister.’
I smile back. ‘Jenny?’
‘What?’
‘Something happened today. On the run. I don’t really know what, though. It’s hard to put into words.’
‘Try. Words are what you do.’
‘I was in the woods, and there was this stone. This standing stone. It’s just appeared. It shouldn’t be there at all. It wasn’t there on Thursday.’
She tucks a strand of hair behind her right ear, raising her eyebrows at me. ‘What are you talking about, Gideon?’
‘I don’t know. I saw this stone. It’s just appeared, like Dr Who’s Tardis.’
‘Ri-ght. Um, hallucination, perhaps?’
‘No, I touched it. It’s real. But it can’t have just materialised out of thin air. Can it?’
‘Your department, not mine.’ Her voice was always soft, but she could be firm too. ‘Go and have your shower and tell me about it later. I want to find out what happens to Krook.’
‘You know what happens to Krook. What about what’s happened to me?’
Hopeless. She wasn’t there. Anyway, she wouldn’t have believed me. Maybe I wouldn’t have mentioned it after all. The same way I’d never mentioned the arm. In the hope that it would come to – nothing.
Not long after we first arrived in Monimaskit I’d become aware of twitches and spasms down my left arm. The first few times, I didn’t think anything of it. Then I began to notice a pattern: I’d feel the arm getting ready to shudder, and a fuzzy, numb sensation would come over my head and face. There would be a dim roaring in my ear, like waves breaking on a gravel beach, then the arm would start to shake from the biceps all the way down to the hand. It only lasted a few seconds – ten or fifteen at most – as if whatever was going on had been cleared out of my system, out through my fingertips maybe. I felt that it wasn’t happening to my arm but to somebody else’s. I observed it with a detached curiosity.
For a long time I explained this away as God telling me not to get above myself, God saying, ‘Gideon, my man, you may be on my team but don’t think I don’t know your heart, don’t think I can’t see right through to the oily slick of your soul. I’m tolerating you, because the Kirk needs to keep all the ministers it has, and on the surface you put in a pretty good performance, but don’t get above yourself, my friend, because if you do I can deliver a blow so stunning, so devastating, that you’ll wish you’d been on the bench for Satan from the opening whistle. Remember what happened to your father? You think that was just chance? Think again, Gideon.’ This was when I was in my early thirties, a newly called minister who, unknown to everybody except my wife, did not believe in God. I didn’t believe in him and yet he was still there, a hovering doubt in the background of every move I made: somebody out there may be watching you. I thought I’d got it all out of my system as a boy, but I hadn’t. You don’t, not if it’s in you in the first place. Anyway, the point was, he was there or he was not there, whether you believed in him or not. I happened not to believe in him, but he was still there. And that was the twist: even if he didn’t exist, he would still get you, sooner or later. My left arm was a manifestation of that.
One autumn day, I came in from a meeting and went upstairs to change into my running gear. I’d taken off my shirt and was just reaching for the cupboard when I felt the arm sending out its preparatory signals. I’d found that the event passed more quickly and easily if I stood still and didn’t try to control it. This time, though, it was different. The fuzziness that was usually outside my head seemed to have got inside; clouds closed in around me, reducing my vision; the noise in my ears wasn’t the distant roar of the sea but the booming sound of being completely under water. I felt myself lift and tilt. The arm began to behave like a disembodied conductor’s arm at the finale of some great orchestral concert, jumping and jerking in wild circular movements. I watched it, unable to interfere. I went down on my knees, then on to my right side, then on to my back. A stricken ship. I felt I might sink right through the carpet, the floorboards. Slowly I came to rest. The arm came down on top of me, heavy and triumphant, as if it had defeated me in a wrestling bout.
For a few minutes I didn’t move. To begin with I wasn’t that worried; I felt I’d witnessed something happening to someone else, to someone else’s arm. I heard water running in a pipe behind the wall. Downstairs Jenny was banging pots in the kitchen. I didn’t call out – it seemed pointless. You are your father, I thought, it’s happened to you too. You’ve had a st
roke. You’re paralysed. You’ll never walk again, let alone run. Wait here for a while and see what happens. Then I didn’t call out because I was frightened. Would I even be able to speak? I wondered if I’d become incontinent.
That was what snapped me out of it. Don’t be fucking ridiculous, a voice said, you’re not wet down there. I reached out a hand – the left hand – and felt around my groin. Not even a damp sweat. The hand moved the way it was supposed to; so did the whole arm. A few seconds later I was on my feet. I felt normal, but I did not trust this feeling. I decided to skip the run that night.
When I appeared in the kitchen, Jenny glanced round from scrubbing carrots in the sink. I’d put on jeans and a jumper. ‘I thought you were going out,’ she said.
‘Changed my mind,’ I said. ‘I’m a wee bit tired. Think I’ll just do some reading instead. Unless there’s anything you want me to do?’
‘No,’ she said. She carried on with the carrots. Evidently she didn’t see any difference in me. ‘Away and sit down. You must be tired if you’re not going running.’
‘I think I must be,’ I said. I went into the study, sat behind the desk and pretended to be busy. You are your father, a voice said. Not my voice, someone else’s. I went through what had happened. The arm had acted quite independently: either that or some other force, possibly God, had taken control of it. Certainly it had been nothing to do with me.
I didn’t say anything to Jenny. I was afraid. If I didn’t talk about it maybe it wouldn’t happen again.
And it didn’t, not as dramatically or intensely as that anyway, although the tremors seemed to come more often. Sometimes the arm would take me by surprise, jerking things from my hand or making me spill my coffee. Once every few days I got the fuzziness in my head, but it cleared if I didn’t fight it. It was as if I had a smouldering Vesuvius buried inside me. It gave wee belches and boaks once in a while, but I felt it was only teasing me. Or God was – testing and teasing, building up for the big one. And there wasn’t anything I could do about it. If I had another attack like that big one, I told myself, I would go and see Amelia, but I wasn’t convinced she could help.
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 6