The Testament of Gideon Mack

by James Robertson

  Amelia Wishaw was my GP. Jenny and I were on her list at the Monimaskit Health Centre. In fifteen years I’ve been to the surgery no more than three or four times, usually because of some virus picked up on my parish rounds. I saw Amelia socially more often than I ever did for health reasons. Her husband Gregor is head of John Moffat’s History department at the Academy. I don’t see them at all now.

  Amelia can be quite intimidating, very bright, a little arrogant as doctors often are. Maybe that’s why I never did tell her about the arm: a decade and a half of twitches and shudders and the knockout blow still never came, so why bother her? I did think about doing so, from time to time: after Jenny’s accident, but I’d felt so knackered then that it seemed utterly unimportant, a mere fraction of the total pain; after the first of my marathons, when the arm quivered in bed all night, as if in protest; and that day I came in from the run in Keldo Woods, my mind still on the Stone, the arm giving little twinges as I dried myself after the shower. I imagined telling Amelia not just the physical symptoms, but about the sense I had that the arm didn’t belong to me at all, that somebody else had a set of puppet-strings attached to it. ‘Could it have anything to do with my being left-handed, Amelia? Sinister, you know? Could the arm be bewitched, have a mind of its own?’ Oh yes, I could see myself coming out with that, and leading on neatly to my story about what I’d found in the woods. I could see the look of impatience and irritation on her face. ‘Don’t waste my time, Gideon.’

  VII

  My father, I’ve already said, had one indulgence, and that was an enthusiasm for football. He’d helped to organise competitions among unemployed men in Glasgow in the thirties, and had played a lot himself at that time. Although he did not admit to supporting any particular team, except the national one in its annual clash with England, he still liked to watch a good-going game, and occasionally would stride down to the park where an Ochtermill eleven took on other local teams in a junior league. More often on Saturday afternoons in winter he would break off from work in his study and come into the back parlour to listen to the commentary and results. At such times he would fix the radio with an intense stare, as if he could actually see the action being described, as if he could discern some meaning in the haphazard progress of the ball as it was dribbled and passed. If I spoke to him, he very often did not hear me.

  At tea-time one evening in the spring of 1966, he made an announcement.

  ‘I have ordered a television set,’ he said.

  We stared at him, my mother with incomprehension and I with a tiny, thrilling hope that this might not be a perverse attempt at a joke. Almost all my schoolmates had television, or their neighbours had, but there had never been any question of it being allowed in the manse. It was like alcohol in that respect. My father’s opinion had always been that television was a distillation of all the vices he most detested. Furthermore, John Logie Baird notwithstanding, he associated it with America, in his mind the wellspring of those selfsame vices. And now here he was, telling us he intended to bring this monster into the manse.

  ‘A television set,’ was all my mother said. I, for fear of betraying secret desires, didn’t dare speak.

  ‘We must move with the times,’ my father said implausibly. ‘I would like to see the news rather than just listen to it. There are, I believe, some good educational programmes which you may enjoy, Gideon. It will be useful for other things too, major sporting events and the like.’

  ‘I see,’ said my mother, although she didn’t, having even less interest in football than I had. But this was the end of April. I knew the World Cup finals were to take place in England in July: clearly my father could not resist the thought of watching Pele and the other Brazilians, the Italians, the Russians and, most of all, the Portuguese, with their star player Eusebio. To do this, he required a television. It was despised and unwanted but necessary. A necessary evil, in fact.

  ‘The licence fee and rental cost are not unreasonable,’ he went on. ‘We will take it on trial for three months, and if I see no harm in it, it can remain.’

  Thus my father admitted a television – black and white, still, in 1966 – into the back parlour. It came with an internal aerial that you had to move around the room to get the best picture. Although the idea had been entirely his, my father treated the television from the day of its arrival with a kind of suppressed horror: it wasn’t actually part of the contract with Radio Rentals that if its output proved corrosive to the morals of his wife and son it would be removed at once, but it might as well have been. He glowered at the box in the parlour as if it were a guest of extremely doubtful character and it was only a matter of time before it did something outrageously offensive. And on the second-last day of July it did: it showed England winning the World Cup. Still, it had also allowed him to watch international football at the highest level. Furthermore, he had let the beast in, and it would be an admission of error if he had to put it out again. The television remained, and gradually the rules that governed what was watched, and when, were relaxed.

  Two things, however, were beyond the pale. One was watching ‘American trash’: shows like The Munsters, Mr Ed and Bewitched, none of which my father knew anything about, but all of which I homed in on rapidly, picking up information from school and then watching surreptitiously whenever I could. The other was switching on the set on a Sunday.

  These were still the days – just – of old-fashioned Scottish Sundays. On the Sabbath the swings in the park were chained up, and the newsagent’s was the only shop which opened, for a couple of hours in the morning. Not that we patronised it: The Scotsman was delivered to our door through the week, but I was a university student before I was exposed to the wickedness of Sunday papers. The one place I went on a Sunday was to church. I was not allowed out on my bike, nor even for a walk beyond the manse gates, although if the weather was fine I could sit in the garden with a book. Despite my father’s professed desire to move with the times, we were well behind them even then.

  It was on some of these elongated afternoons in the late 1960s that I raced through Scott’s best novels and ploughed through the less digestible ones like Peveril of the Peak. I was a precocious and voracious reader, but I’m not sure I would have persisted with Scott had I not felt duty-bound, once I had started a book, always to finish it. By extension, having begun the Waverley Novels, I was determined to work my way through the entire set. This was 1967, I think, when I was nine: I can’t imagine anybody under sixty reading Scott nowadays. My schoolmates were listening agog to Sergeant Pepper: I was reading The Antiquary.

  I was also acquiring a small stock of books of my own, mostly ‘children’s classics’ deemed suitable because they were at least half a century old and their authors dead. I read R. M. Ballantyne and Rudyard Kipling, Jules Verne and Rider Haggard, with uncritical pleasure. To me, these writers were as new and exciting as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, whose music I only heard in snatches outside the manse, were to my peers. My favourite was Robert Louis Stevenson. I must have read Treasure Island three times in the space of a year, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Hyde, which I didn’t understand but was gripped by, I managed twice. Best of all was Kidnapped. Something in the friendship between David Balfour and Alan Breck, the strait-laced schoolmaster’s son and the wild Highlander, dug deep into me as it has into thousands of would-be adventurers. For a day and a night I ran on hands and knees across Rannoch Moor with that pair, ‘dragging myself in agony and eating the dust like a worm’, till I reached the ‘dismal mountain of Ben Alder’. There was something both awful and fine about Ben Alder in Stevenson’s book, and I have thought of it with two minds, as it were, ever since. A place of danger, a place of refuge. A destination where a man finds both the strength and the weakness that is in him. And now it looms again in my thoughts.

  But other delights were vying for my attention around this time. A feverish excitement ran through Ochtermill Primary School: the television series of Batman had arrived on B
ritish television, and, uniquely at the time, each weekly adventure was served up in two half-hour parts, the first on Saturday afternoon, and the second on Sunday. Invariably the Saturday episode ended with Batman or Robin, or both, facing imminent death. How naive we were back then; how ridiculous and innocent that our nerves could be made to jangle for twenty-four hours because Batman was about to be made history by some character called the Joker, but that’s how it was. We believed in the Joker, the Riddler and those other ridiculous, camp villains – or at least, I did. No wonder I thought holding back the second part till Sunday a mean trick and a massive provocation. How could I possibly watch the Saturday episode, knowing that the Sunday one was utterly out of bounds to me? Yet how could I not watch the Saturday programme? I did, dreading that my father, coming through for the football results, would find me there before I could switch channels; and knowing that I’d be unable to watch the next day. It was temptation of the worst kind. Every Monday morning the other boys at school dissected the way in which the Dynamic Duo had managed to escape, while I listened intently, ashamed to admit my feeble ignorance. And week by week the perception grew in me that my peers were not suffering for breaking the Sabbath. On the contrary, they appeared to be thriving on it, while I hung in the desperate limbo of a life filled with Batman half-stories.

  One Sunday, after a year of this torture, I could bear it no more. My father seemed settled in his study, and my mother, who was feeling unwell, had gone upstairs for a nap. I sneaked into the back parlour, turned the television’s volume control down and switched it on.

  The set took its usual minute and a half to warm up. Then the dot in the screen expanded into a full picture. Batman and Robin were trapped in a chimney stack that was filling with deadly gas. It was up to their necks. The expressions with which they looked at each other said, this really is it this time, pal. Then, as if to get it over with quickly, they both lowered their heads into the fog of gas. That was where we’d got to on the Saturday. ‘Is this the Joker’s crowning jest?’ the voice-over had said. What was to become of them? I waited, wide-eyed. A few seconds later they emerged, back to back, feet planted against the walls of the stack, and, like a human spider, began to work their way up, out of danger. It was so obvious, so impossibly simple, that it was almost disappointing. But I was not disappointed. They had escaped, and I had seen how they escaped! I would be able to talk about it with total authority the next day at school.

  Another few minutes must have gone by. I forgot where I was and what day it was. The sound was louder than I’d intended. I was only a foot away from the screen, finger hovering near the off switch, and maybe that was why I failed to hear my father’s footsteps in the hall. By the time the door opened and his voice filled the room – ‘Agnes? I thought I heard somebody…’ – there was no point in even bothering to switch the television off. I did, though, and jumped to my feet in a flush of shame and fury.

  He closed the door behind him. I stood between him and the television set as if to protect it, as if to say it was not to blame. I could see the wee flames in his cheeks. I bowed my head, fixing my eye on a crack in the skirting-board. I heard him say, ‘Put it back on.’

  ‘No, no, it doesn’t matter, I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. Entirely the wrong thing. He cut me off, his voice shaking.

  ‘It doesn’t matter?’ he said. ‘Do you dare to disobey me? Put it back on.’

  I turned and reached for the switch. The television, being warm, came on at once. If my father understood that, he made no allowance for it.

  ‘I see you have become very skilled at operating that thing,’ he said quietly, almost admiringly. ‘How often have you done this?’

  ‘Never,’ I said. It was true that I’d not touched the set before on a Sunday. ‘I promise, this is the first time.’

  ‘It will be the last,’ he said. ‘Come here.’

  He pointed beside him and I went and stood there. His huge right hand descended on my neck and the thumb and fingers gripped it so that I cried out. He increased the pressure. I thought my head would snap off. His breathing was like that of some monstrous creature in its den. The blood in his fingers pulsed furiously against my neck.

  Thus we stood in front of the television together, father and son, for the remaining ten minutes of the programme. It felt like an hour. If I squirmed to try to ease the pain, his grip tightened. I hated him then, hated what he was doing to me and hated my own helplessness. ZAP! BLAM! POW! I hated the screen with its cartoon punches and I hated the way the parlour echoed with screeching tyres and wisecracks delivered in American accents. I saw it as if through his eyes – cheap, tawdry, meaningless rubbish – and I longed for it to end.

  He pushed me from him as the credits rolled and the inane theme music played. ‘Turn it off,’ he said. I did as I was told, rubbing my neck and wiping away the tears that he had squeezed out of me.

  ‘What… is… that?’ he said, dropping the words methodically into the silence.

  ‘Batman,’ I said.

  ‘Bat… man,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. And then again, ‘I’m sorry.’ But I don’t think he heard that.

  ‘It is not bat… man,’ he said, and I could not stop myself, I was trying to explain, I said, ‘It is.’

  ‘Do not interrupt me,’ he said. His voice grew louder and harder. ‘Do not contradict me. It is not bat… man, whatever that means. I’ll tell you what it is. It is drivel. It is the most unutterable garbage I have ever witnessed. Garbage from the land of garbage. I can hardly credit that you have opened your mind to such trash, that you have defiled the brain God gave you with it. But then…’– he was gathering himself, I could feel the storm coming – ‘but then, to have played this game of deceit, to have lied to me…’

  ‘I haven’t lied,’ I said, but the storm broke and I was muttering into a mighty wind.

  ‘You have lied, Gideon,’ he roared, ‘and you know it full well. You have betrayed me and you have betrayed God with your creeping and your skulking, your wallowing in that filth. You have taken your sin into a corner to play with, guilt all over your face. You have disgraced this house and you have sullied this day, that is God’s day and his alone. How can you have done this under my roof, Gideon? I can hardly bear to look at you. The very sight of you makes me sick.’

  Even at this distance I remember all those words. He was so angry, so revolted, that he did indeed turn his head from me, keeping his eye fixed all the time on the television set. I wonder now what he was seeing: perhaps his own reflection in the dead screen, a parody of a ranting minister, or a man in a fable seeing his own son corrupted by the magical box he himself has brought home. To be told by your father that the sight of you offends him is a terrible thing. The contempt in his voice sounded as though it would last for ever. Which it has. Here I am, four decades on, and I can still hear it.

  Tears streamed from my eyes, but I wasn’t crying, I was too shocked for that. I stood as still as I could, waiting to be struck. He hardly ever hit me: his hands were so big and hard that I took great care to avoid giving him reason to do so. But if he did it was over in seconds, a few heavy, stinging blows on my backside with the flat of his hand or a stick. I could have taken a beating with a stick, but I feared what he might do if he attacked me again with his hands. I stood there on the edge of something unknown, waiting for him to act.

  The door opened. My mother appeared, wrapped in her fawn dressing-gown. ‘James,’ she said. And then, ‘Gideon.’

  He turned on her furiously. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Your voice woke me,’ she said. ‘What is going on?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘except that this boy, your son, has defiled this house, the Lord’s day and himself. I am dealing with it. Go away!’

  ‘I don’t think…’ she began.

  ‘Get out!’

  I expected her to scurry away, but she didn’t. She had seen something that I had not, something peculiar perhaps in the blotches on his face or
the tremor of his body. Then she did what I had never seen her do before: she reached out a hand to him.

  ‘James,’ she said. ‘Please calm yourself. You will do yourself an injury.’

  ‘I will do you… an injury,’ he said, and his right arm came up as if to hit her. At that point I too realised that something was far wrong, for though he thought my mother stupid he had never raised a hand to her. His threat sounded empty, like a line in a play delivered by an actor who doesn’t understand it. His voice went up at the end, more like a question, and his hand stayed high, quivering where he had raised it.

  ‘Are you all right, James?’ my mother said.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Don’t I look all right?’ And the next thing he crumpled in a heap on the floor, all six feet of him folding like a collapsible wooden ruler.

  I stood there like a statue, or an imbecile, convinced that it was I who had delivered the blow that had felled him.

  ‘Gideon,’ my mother said, suddenly efficient as she knelt down beside him. ‘Phone for an ambulance. Dial 999. Quickly now.’

  My father convulsed and a little pile of yellow vomit appeared on the carpet by his mouth. That was the thing that unshocked me and set me free again. I ran to the telephone.

  VIII

  The day after I found the Stone was a Sunday. As I made my breakfast I ran over in my head the sermon I would deliver at that morning’s service.