Then I wondered why God allowed me to go on sinning in this way if he so disapproved of it. I was twelve years old, having a religious crisis over whether or not I should be watching the Vietnam War and I Dream of Jeannie on television. Gradually it came to me that I was being toyed with. Did God set traps for children? I thought less of him for that. I watched the programmes because I found them interesting: I found the world interesting. And it dawned on me that it didn’t actually matter whether God liked it or not: I was going to go on doing it. The television was a tunnel to the outside, and I was halfway along it already.
I was a Boy Scout at this time, and went to weekly meetings in the Legion Hall. My mother had suggested that I join the Scouts, my father had approved it, and every Wednesday evening I was sent out of the manse for a couple of hours to take my oath of duty to God and the Queen, to participate in so-called ‘wide games’ of a militaristic nature and to be tested on my proficiency in map-reading, knot-tying and the lighting of fires. I detested this enforced camaraderie and the fact that I was required to be a member of a patrol and engage in teamwork. I knew the other boys quite well, but at Scouts an unbridgeable void opened between us: they actually seemed to enjoy the activities and were better at them than I was. But something else entirely made me decide, after a year and a half of Scouts, that I’d had enough.
On the wall behind where the Scoutmaster usually stood there hung a painting called The Pathfinder. A Scout, wearing the pre-First World War uniform, including the broad-brimmed hat that had been dispensed with only a few years earlier, was standing beside a table on which a map was spread out. He had one hand on his hip and was half-turned, as if aware of a presence in the room behind him. The presence, resting a hand on his shoulder, was the ghostly figure of Jesus. Although I didn’t know this at the time, copies of this painting hung in Scout halls up and down the country. It was supposed to fill boys with hope and courage. What it filled me with was fear and unease. Was Jesus haunting the old-fashioned-looking boy? At the opening and closing ceremonies of meetings, I found my eyes drawn back and back to the painting. It was nothing less than a visual representation of how I thought of the presence of Christ in my own life. Yet when I considered this, I became angry: I didn’t want that spooky figure hovering behind me and touching me whenever I tried to make a decision. I wanted to be left alone. The following week I prepared myself for what I reckoned would be a difficult tussle with my parents.
‘I don’t want to go back to the Scouts,’ I told my mother. We were in the kitchen, preparing the evening meal. I was trying to win her favour by peeling potatoes while she cooked the mince.
‘Oh, why not?’ she asked.
I couldn’t explain the problem about the picture to her. ‘All we do is play games,’ I said. ‘We don’t learn anything, and anything we do learn is useless. Apart from knots, but I know all of those.’
‘That’s a shame, Gideon. Don’t you like playing games?’
‘I’m tired of them,’ I said.
‘You’d better see what your father thinks.’
I’d expected this. She still deferred to him on anything that was not purely household management. I let the silence hang there for a moment.
‘Could you tell him? He’ll not like it.’
‘Now, Gideon, that’s not fair.’
‘I don’t want to bother him. You know, upset him…’
‘You won’t upset him. Speak to him yourself.’
My father at that moment came into the kitchen, carrying an empty cup and saucer.
‘Speak to me about what?’ he said.
‘Gideon wants to give up the Scouts.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
‘He says all they do is play games.’
‘The boy has a tongue, Agnes. Let him use it.’ My father’s speech, always clipped and deliberate, had slowed still further since the stroke. It was as if he had to inspect the words one by one before he allowed them out of his mouth.
My mother fell silent. I turned from the sink.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘It’s pointless,’ I said. ‘We just have games between the patrols. We don’t achieve anything. I’d rather stay here and read.’
‘The exercise is good for you,’ my father said.
I’d thought of that. ‘I’d rather spend more time cross-country running,’ I said.
‘Oh, you’d rather, would you?’
‘Mr Henderson says I could be good,’ I said. ‘I want to run at least twice a week after school. That’d be more useful than going to Scouts.’
This argument sounded better out loud than I’d anticipated, and it was based, more or less, on truth. My running had attracted some attention from Mr Henderson, the Tulloch High School PE teacher. My father’s blue eyes were still bright, and for a moment his gaze was so intense it was as if he was exploring the inside of my head. And then, without warning, the light flickered and dimmed and he breathed out with a sigh.
‘Well, it’s up to you, Gideon,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have your head in a book all the time, and I’m not sure if running all over the countryside achieves very much, but if you think what you do at Scouts has become trivial…’
I leapt on the word.
‘It has,’ I said. ‘It’s become very trivial.’
Something approaching a smile played on my father’s mouth. ‘Then I’ve no objection. Just make sure you don’t waste the time that’s made available to you.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, amazed at the ease of it all.
‘What are you reading these days anyway?’ my father asked. ‘You must have gone through all of Scott by now.’
‘Dickens,’ I said quickly. There was a copy of Great Expectations on my bedside table, with a bookmark stuck in the middle. Although I hadn’t yet read any Dickens, I was on safe ground because I knew my father, who considered fiction beneath him, hadn’t either. ‘But also,’ I went on, adding what I thought would be the coup de grâce, ‘I’ve started reading the Bible – from the beginning.’
I was on safe ground here too, as I knew the first ten chapters of Genesis intimately, but my father wasn’t impressed.
‘I’ve never done that,’ he said. My mother glanced round from the cooker in surprise. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘I have read all the Bible, but not from start to finish. I always thought, if you did it that way, it would become a kind of chore. You’d feel you had to read a chapter every day, the next chapter, whether it was the right one to read or not. I’m not going to stop you – I’m pleased that you’re not entirely neglecting the Scriptures in favour of Scott and Dickens’ – he made them sound like a pair of beatnik poets – ‘but don’t persist in that scheme if it becomes a chore. Read widely throughout the Bible, but read it with care and reflection, not as if you were trying to complete a running race.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said, and my father’s faint smile vanished. I had overreached myself, and sounded smug and patronising. Could I, at twelve, have patronised my father, nearly five times my age? Yes, I could. I did. It was easy. After all, I’d also just told him an outright lie.
I was learning fast: it was a very short step from knowing that I would go on doing things under the watchful eye of God, whether he liked them or not and awful though the consequences might be, to not caring what God thought. I had taken Great Expectations out of the library as a cover for some much more recent fiction, which I kept discreetly in the bedroom press behind my jumpers. There were some very interesting passages in these modern novels: descriptions that gave me a peculiar spiralling feeling in my stomach, which in turn made me read the words again, which gave me the feeling again. Men kissing women; women removing their clothes; men and women doing astonishing things together; even women doing things together without any men present at all. I read these pages and found that part of the male anatomy which was never mentioned in the manse standing to attention as if it had a mind of its own and wished to see the words too. I wanted to touch it.
By some means of which I have no recollection it had been instilled in me that touching it for any reason other than to direct it while urinating was a wicked act. At school everybody called it your willie. In these books it had other names: cock, prick, dick, phallus. I wanted to touch my cock, prick, dick, phallus, but the ghostly Jesus was looking on, shaking his head. But if he knew what I was reading he must have been reading the same material over my shoulder.
I need hardly say that neither of my parents ever breathed a word to me about sex, the so-called ‘facts of life’. Meanwhile in Biology at school we hadn’t reached animal, let alone human, reproduction. The fiction section of the public library became the basis of my sex education.
Tulloch High School, which served Ochtermill and several other surrounding villages, was new. The town of Tulloch – or Tullie as the locals called it – was big and rough, and I’d already taken some abuse on account of my first name and my background. There were kids of all kinds at Tullie High: their fathers were shopkeepers, factory workers, farmers, salesmen, plumbers, engineers, car mechanics, miners. If there were any other sons of the manse in the school, they were keeping quiet about it. Other ministers sometimes sent their sons to private schools in Edinburgh, but even if my father could have afforded it, no son of his was going to be pampered and protected from the world, not in that way. Anyway, Tullie High was a new school, and the authorities were determined to make it shine and had transferred the best teachers from other schools in the area to be its staff. My father was probably right: I would get as good an education at Tullie, if I could survive outside the classroom, as I’d get anywhere.
I’d already grasped the rudiments of self-preservation at primary school by becoming something of a chameleon between classroom, playground and home. English was the only medium of communication permitted in the manse, but this monoglotism would not do further afield. I’d learned, from five to eleven, when to speak formal English, when to switch into a broader Scots, which was what most of the other children spoke, when to show intelligence and enthusiasm in lessons and when to stay quiet. It all depended on whom I needed to impress: my parents, my teachers or my peers. But Tullie High was a very different proposition to Ochtermill Primary, and I was having to adjust my survival skills.
There were boys at school, not much older than I, who professed, some more convincingly than others, to have already done the things my library books described, or at least to know how to do them. The air at break-time was thick with rumour, assertion, denial and curiosity. Meanwhile I was beginning to have confused dreams at night and would wake with the feeling that I’d done something exciting, like gone over a hump-backed bridge on my bike too fast – but better than that, more dangerous but more fun too. I read the library books again and realised that the feeling I got from them was almost the same. I shut the Jesus figure out of my head and read the books and rubbed my penis on the sheet and found I could make the feeling happen that way, my belly would suddenly flip and I’d get a sensation right deep in where my legs met, not in my penis but behind, under, in – a kind of unbearably pleasant ten-second tickle. I apologised to God. The next night I’d do it again. It was the business with the television all over again. Soon I was used to it. Then I stopped apologising.
One night I woke in the middle of one of the dreams and found I’d wet the bed. I thought, it’s just a dream, I’m imagining it. But in the morning I was horrified to see that the dream had left a stiff stain on my pyjamas and on the bottom sheet. This happened two or three times. I didn’t dare mention it to my mother, but she’d surely notice the sheet. I decided to make some cautious inquiries to see if anybody knew what was wrong with me.
At morning break I mentioned it to Danny Gilfillan. Danny was from Ochtermill too. We hadn’t been that friendly at primary school, but we’d formed a temporary alliance: we would stick together at breaks until we felt more confident. Unfortunately another boy from Ochtermill, Michael Fyfe, overheard what I was saying and, howling with glee, made it public information.
‘Dae ye no ken whit a wank is? Hey, Gideon Mack canna wank.’
‘I can so.’
‘He pees the bed.’
‘I dinna.’
‘Ye jist said ye did.’
‘I said ye get this mess on the sheets.’
Others began to join in.
‘Can ye no toss yersel aff, Gideon?’
‘Use a toss-rag, ya spazmo. A hanky.’
‘Is there nae toilet-roll in your hoose?’
‘Yer big posh hoose.’
‘Naw, they jist tear sheets oot the Bible,’ said Michael Fyfe, attempting wit.
‘Use yer da’s dog-collar,’ someone said, to top him.
‘Use yer ma’s knickers,’ said someone else.
The other kids knew how to swear and talk dirty. I had to catch up. I’d had enough of running away or having to defend the purity of the Christian faith by taking blows from bigger boys who saw me as a soft target. I’d even once, on the advice of Jesus Christ, turned the other cheek after I’d been punched. After I was punched again I’d decided that that was the last time I was doing that. Now I thought hard and fast.
‘Course I can wank. But I don’t need tae. I can dae it jist by thinkin aboot it.’
This stopped them. They had to think about that.
‘Nae hauns?’ This was a boy called Alan Busby. Buzz for short. Buzz was big for his age. He came from a mining village. He said he saw the sixteen-year-old lassie next door taking her clothes off every night. He reckoned she knew he was watching. She paraded around with her tits to the moon and her finger up her fanny. Buzz sat at his bedroom window and pulled his whang till it spat on the glass. Just the way he said it made us fall about laughing. We were jealous, I suppose.
‘Nae hauns?’ said Buzz. ‘That’s no possible.’
‘Aye it is,’ I said. ‘It’s better actually, but ye’ve got tae get yer mind tuned intae it. For example, ye can imagine…’–I was digging deep into the stuff from the library books now – ‘… imagine a woman daein it tae ye. Suckin yer cock. Till ye go aff in her mooth.’
There was a chorus of horror and envy. For twelve-year-old Scottish boys in 1970, fellatio was about as far-fetched and filthy as you could get.
‘Aw man, that’s disgustin.’
‘She might bite it.’
‘Bite it aff!’
‘Ye’re a dirty bastard, Mack.’
‘Dirty Mack!’ Buzz shouted and everybody laughed.
‘Ye’ll go tae hell if yer dad finds oot ye’re thinkin that kind o stuff,’ said Danny Gilfillan, who seemed about to switch allegiances.
‘How’s my dad gonnae find oot? It’s in my heid, in’t it?’
‘Well, God’ll find oot. He probly kens awready. That’s worse.’
‘The thing is,’ I said – and it was only later that I wondered, with awe at my invention, where all these ideas had come from – ‘it’s better fae God’s point of view if ye dinna touch yersel. It disna count.’
‘Disna count how?’ somebody asked.
‘As sin,’ I said. ‘It only counts as sin if ye touch yersel.’
I had them now. They thought I must be an authority on sin.
‘ ’Zat right?’ one of them said. He sounded disappointed.
‘Ye can rub yersel on the bedclothes, though,’ I conceded. ‘Jist so long as ye dinna use yer hauns.’
‘And then when ye’re aboot tae come,’ somebody else asked, ‘whit dae ye dae then?’
‘That’s the tricky bit,’ I said. ‘That’s the bit I’ve no mastered yet. But I’m workin on it.’
I sounded like a technician. Some of them didn’t believe me, but others were looking at me with new respect.
Then Buzz stepped forward. ‘Ye’re a gasbag, Gideon Mack,’ he said. ‘Ye’re full o shite. Ye canna wank withoot yer haun. It’s jist stupit. And onywey, there isna a fuckin God.’
A chorus of ‘oohs’ went round the crowd. That was a challenge I surely couldn’t
ignore, not with my father being a minister. They circled, expecting a fight, expecting Buzz to give me a hammering.
‘How dae ye ken that?’ I asked.
‘Cause my da says so. My da’s a Communist and he says there’s nae God, religion’s jist somethin the rich invented tae keep the poor fae startin the revolution.’
It’s easy to say this more than thirty years later, but I know that I felt it at the time, right as Buzz was speaking: that I was above, outside what was going on, Gideon and Buzz were preparing to fight and I was their witness – but there was no second Buzz floating there with me, no spirit of Buzz anywhere in sight. It was just me outside of Gideon, and I suddenly knew where all this was leading, even if Gideon didn’t. It was leading me to say something so outrageous, so far removed from everything I’d ever thought before, that if I was wrong God surely would strike me dead on the spot.
‘Maybe yer da’s right, Buzz,’ I said. ‘Maybe there isna a God. I dinna ken.’
‘So why’s yer faither a fuckin minister then?’ Buzz said.
‘Cause he is,’ I said. ‘Why’s your faither a fuckin miner?’
‘Whit’s wrang wi being a miner?’ Buzz roared.
‘Whit’s wrang wi being a minister?’ I roared back. And I saw myself in my father’s pulpit, roaring at my father’s congregation: ‘Whit’s wrang wi being a fuckin minister?’ The shock and horror on their faces. I knew I should have been concentrating on Buzz but I couldn’t drag myself back. In that moment I stopped believing in God.
I was probably within a second of getting hammered when the bell rang for the end of break. The crowd dispersed and the argument went no further. And I was still standing. Buzz hadn’t knocked me down because of the bell and God hadn’t knocked me down because he wasn’t there. I went back into school feeling pretty pleased with myself.
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 9