There was a brief silence, as if we were all trying to picture people – parents, grandparents, lovers, friends – whose faces were fading or already gone from our memories. And into this silence John’s voice came again.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I think we don’t lead real lives any more. Do you ever think that?’ He didn’t seem to be addressing anyone in particular.
‘No,’ Gregor said. ‘Never. My life is intensely real. Trying to teach thirty wee shits stuff they don’t want to know about five days a week is very real. And you’re just down the corridor from me teaching a different set of wee shits, so I can’t imagine it’s less real for you. What do you mean?’
‘Well, us, here, round this table,’ John said. ‘Forget the wee shits for a minute. Our daily lives are so much less physical than they would have been a generation or two ago. Not just us – most people in this country, at this juncture in history. Hardly any of us do real jobs any more – I mean hard physical labour. We don’t get a grip on the world – a hard, sweaty, actual grip on it. We don’t feel it. I’m not trying to demean the work any of us does but it’s not how it was fifty or even thirty years ago.’
‘Not true,’ Gregor said. ‘There were teachers then, and doctors and ministers and librarians. They didn’t do the physical labour. Other poor bastards did it, but as soon as technology and more disposable income and upward mobility and all that made it possible, they stopped doing it too. Now it’s poor bastards on the other side of the world that do the hard labour.’
‘All right,’ John said, ‘maybe the lack of physical work is only a symptom. I just feel that we’re not connecting with reality any more. I mean, when we went to war last year, when they were bombing Baghdad, it didn’t feel like you were watching a real war, it looked like a film, a computer game. Nobody feels, nobody cares any more. There are no causes left. Even Scotland doesn’t feel like a cause anybody’s going to get angry about. How else could a man like John Major have won the election, for fuck’s sake? Did he bore us into not caring? I mean, we don’t even believe in God any more, most of us. Well, do we, Gideon?’
‘Maybe not in this room,’ I said, ‘but all the opinion polls tell us the majority of people still believe in him. And in the rest of the world, well, there are plenty of folk out there creating misery and mayhem in God’s name. He’s a lot less popular than he used to be, though, which is probably no bad thing.’
Nancy looked shocked. ‘There are plenty of people doing good work in God’s name too,’ she said. ‘You should know that, Gideon. You’re one of them.’
‘Good and bad don’t come into it,’ John said, before I could answer her. ‘It’s historical change, you can’t stop it. But we still have to make sense of our lives. If we don’t do it through politics or religion we have to do it some other way.’
‘Oh, and how’s that?’ Gregor asked.
‘Film,’ John said. ‘I think we think of our lives as films. Movies. Moving pictures. Sometimes you catch yourself thinking – or you hear someone saying – “Oh, mind when that happened, it was just like that scene in such-and-such.” If your life is like a film it gives it a kind of framework. I think we imagine our lives as movies because that’s the only way left to understand them.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Gregor laughed. ‘You’re talking mince, John.’
‘Actually I don’t think he is,’ Nancy said. ‘You’re saying films, John, but it could be fiction, it’s the same thing. When I think of all the novels I’ve read, I do wonder if it’s been a sensible use of my time. Why would I fill my head with all those made-up stories if it wasn’t to try and understand my own story? Every month my book group discusses a novel and its characters as if they were real people making real choices. Life is a story. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a book or a film, it’s still a story.’
‘Maybe that’s why everybody thinks they have a novel in them,’ Amelia said. ‘Every bloody game-show host or model or has-been politician or weather forecaster for God’s sake seems to be writing a novel these days.’
‘It’s a refuge from confusion,’ Nancy said. ‘If they can just tell a story where all the loose ends tie up, the whole world will make a lot more sense.’
‘Aye, but with a film it’s visual,’ John said, the only person at the table, as far as I was aware, who was writing a novel. ‘Your head is filled with images without you having to be literate or without you having to make the effort of reading. You just sit in the cinema and it washes over you. Imagine what it must have been like the first time you went to the pictures, back in the silent era, when you had no experience at all of film. You’re in the stalls watching a huge train hurtling towards you. There’s a woman tied to the tracks. There’s a chortling villain, but you can’t hear his laugh, you can only imagine the sound it makes. You know the train must be making a hell of a noise, but you can’t hear it. And the woman’s screaming but you can’t hear her either, you just see her mouth opening and shutting and you know she’s screaming. There’s a pianist bashing out dramatic music to go with the pictures. You’d start screaming yourself. How could you not be caught up in that? How could you not imagine your life differently once you’d had that experience?’
‘You’re talking shite,’ Gregor said. ‘I don’t know about novels, but cinema, film, TV make things more real, not less. It’s true now and it was true in the silent era too, as you’ve just eloquently proved.’
‘Aye, right, Gregor,’ John said.
‘You can’t deny it,’ Gregor said. ‘The camera brings you face to face with stuff that you might otherwise never experience or know about. Think of that footage of the concentration camps being opened up in 1945. Horrible, horrible, horrible images, but utterly real. One of the reasons people know all that happened is because we have the pictures, we have the evidence on film.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ John said, but Gregor had more to say.
‘I’ll tell you what’s real,’ he said. ‘When I was a kid, my two brothers and I used to have this thing about who’d use the loo first in the morning after our dad had been in there. It was hellish – basically, his shit stank.’
‘Gregor!’ Amelia said.
‘Oh, come on, we’ve finished eating. It was unbelievable, at least it was to us wee boys whose bowels were still unadulterated by bevvy and middle-age. Going in after him was a kind of endurance test. We’d have a right laugh about it, holding our breath and everything. Then I guess we grew up and forgot about it. And one day recently I was in the bathroom having a crap and I went back in five minutes later, and the smell hit me. My dad’s smell. The exact same. You know how your sense of smell can take you back decades in just a split second? I was eight again, holding my nose. And I thought, Christ, if even your shit smells the same as your father’s, what chance have you got? Against your genes, I mean, your inheritance. No chance. Now that’s real.’
All six of us present that night were well into our thirties, and at the time it didn’t look like any of us were going to pass our genes on to anybody. I thought of my father and realised that I had no recollection at all of what the toilet had smelt like after he’d been in it. The same for my mother. I tried to think of my father’s ordinary, everyday smell, and came up with nothing. I imagined it as dry, bookish, but I was remembering the study, not him. If film was evidence of existence, so was smell. I had neither photographic nor olfactory evidence that my father ever lived. The best proof I had of him was myself.
At the end of the evening, when I stood up to go, Nancy said that she too must be off. Her house was on the way back to the manse. It would have been churlish, indeed impossible, not to offer to walk her home.
It was about one o’clock, and although there were few clouds and many stars in the sky it was a warm night. Amelia and Gregor lived just round the corner from Catherine Craigie, and Nancy a couple of streets beyond. My visits to Catherine were well established by this time. Her house was all in darkness as we passed. Nancy said, ‘Do
you know what they’re saying about you going to see Miss Craigie so often?’
‘They?’ I said.
‘Peter Macmurray and his friends. They say it’s the ungodly communing with the godless.’
I laughed. ‘Which is which, I wonder. I really don’t care what they say.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s all nonsense, of course.’
A little further on she said, ‘I hope you didn’t mind me mentioning Jenny.’
‘Not at all. I meant it when I thanked you.’
‘And did you mean what you said about belief in God?’
I knew at once what she was referring to, but pretended otherwise.
‘What did I say?’
‘That it wasn’t a bad thing that God wasn’t so popular these days.’
‘It’s a fact of life,’ I said. ‘A lot of people just can’t accept the idea of God any more. It’s not because they don’t want to, it’s because intellectually they can’t. I don’t think it makes them worse or lesser beings. It’s like what Amelia said about Jenny. It’s normal. People are forgetting what God looks like. Sometimes he’s still there, but often he’s not. It’s a natural process.’
‘That makes it sound as though it doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, it matters all right. It causes all kinds of anxieties. But to individuals, to human beings. I don’t think it matters to God.’
‘Oh, Gideon, that’s a terrible thing to say, that God doesn’t care. How can you say that? “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.”’
‘Don’t quote Scripture at me, Nancy, it’s far too late for that. Anyway, I didn’t say he didn’t care, I said it didn’t matter to him. There’s a difference.’
She didn’t reply. We reached her garden gate and came to a stop.
‘Do you want to come in for a coffee?’ she asked.
‘No, thanks. I’ll just head for home, I think.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you at church on Sunday then.’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Yes, tomorrow.’
We both hesitated. If I changed my mind, she would let me come in. I was tempted, but only for a moment. It wasn’t Nancy that I wanted.
‘Good night, then.’
‘Good night.’ She opened the gate and went through it. I looked up into the night. Countless stars winked down at us and didn’t give a damn what we believed.
‘Gideon,’ she said, as I turned to go.
‘What?’
‘God cares,’ she said. ‘I know he does.’
XXXI
Catherine Craigie’s rheumatoid arthritis had developed aggressively in her late forties, and since then she’d had only brief periods of remission. She’d tried everything, from physiotherapy and homoeopathy to a vast range of drugs, ingested and injected. Some of these treatments gave her temporary pain relief, but none helped much in the long term. Her knees and ankles were bolted up as if enclosed in some medieval instrument of restraint, her fingers were thick, deformed and stiff, her shoulders were twisted and she could hardly turn her neck. It had even got into her jaw, which made chewing her food difficult. A home help came every morning to clean the house and make her lunch and dinner, but Catherine ate very little. ‘Too much bloody hassle,’ she said. Her swollen joints were red and angry, bulging out because she had lost so much weight. Everything was an effort, from making a cup of tea to holding a book. Every movement had to be conducted at a snail’s pace, but she didn’t complain much. Complaining didn’t get you very far, in Catherine’s book.
I poured the whiskies and asked her how she was, a question which invariably drew a facetious response.
‘I’m dying,’ she said. ‘By degrees, some days faster than others, but definitely dying. So are you, of course. So are we all. Actually, that’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. My funeral arrangements.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Don’t look so surprised. I’m very poorly, Gideon, and I’d rather get everything settled while I’m still compos mentis.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody of sounder mind.’
‘No, of course you haven’t. But one of the nastier aspects of this blasted disease is that it lurks in the shadows waiting to mug you. It’s likely to finish me off when I least expect it, because it’s turned my immune system against me. I’m so wasted away, you see, that my body can’t support its own vital organs, even if they hadn’t been seriously compromised by the amount of steroids I’ve had pumped into me over the years. I shouldn’t be drinking this stuff but frankly if I’m going to incapacitate my liver I’d rather do it with a decent malt than a cocktail of drugs that don’t appear to do any good. Well, anyway, I won’t bore you with the details, but sooner or later my liver, my heart or my kidneys are going to give out, possibly all of them at once, and that will be that. I hope so anyway, I don’t want to hang about on some ghastly life-support system, thank you very much. Cheers.’
‘That’s better,’ she said after she’d raised the glass to her mouth with two hands, swallowed a mouthful and got the glass down on the table beside her again. It was hugely tempting to try to assist, but she hated that. ‘If I want help, I’ll ask for it,’ she would snap.
‘Sometimes I can feel my heart creaking away like an old boat on its moorings,’ she said. ‘And sometimes I’m sure it’s a clockwork spring just about to burst. That’s why I want to make sure everything is properly in place if I should suddenly drop dead.’
‘What can I do?’ I asked.
‘Well, I want you to run the show, of course.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you.’
‘Where?’
‘In your church, for heaven’s sake, where else? And afterwards in the church graveyard. Why else would I ask you to get involved?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Out of badness?’
She grinned at me like an elf.
‘You’re not supposed to turn me down, you know,’ she said. ‘I’m one of your parishioners.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of turning you down,’ I said. ‘But I’m surprised, given your lifelong aversion to churches. Why not book into a crematorium and have done with it?’
‘Well, there’s the family plot for a start. My father and mother, paternal grandparents and great-grandparents are already in it, and a few aunts and uncles too, but I think there’s room for one more. Why go to the extravagance of lighting a fire when there’s a perfectly good hole in the ground waiting for me? Not that I have to have your blessing to go in there.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s the local council’s concern, not mine. And you know there’s no legal requirement for any kind of service or ceremony at all, religious or otherwise. But this isn’t about religion, is it?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘If you look on the desk beside the computer, you’ll see a sheet of A4 printed out with your name at the top. Instructions. That’s what it’s about.’
I went over to the desk. Her old Amstrad was long gone, and she now had a sophisticated-looking laptop. Before I could even glance at the paper, she was speaking again.
‘No, no, wait, don’t read it yet. Remind me what happened to Jenny. She’s not buried here, is she?’
‘No, she was cremated. She thought humans were taking up enough space as it was. We’d talked about it once or twice so I was pretty sure that’s what she wanted. The funeral was in Edinburgh. Her parents wanted that, and it took the pressure off me.’
‘And what did you do with her afterwards?’
‘I brought her back here, and one day John and Elsie Moffat and I went for a walk on the beach, and we scattered her there.’
‘For any particular reason?’
‘No, not really. I think we thought she’d blow away easily on the beach. I remember feeling a bit awkward at the time, guilty almost. As if we were dropping litter or something.’
‘But she wasn’t from here,’ Catherine said. ‘I am. I feel rooted, four generations deep. Th
at’s why I want to do it through your church. I haven’t gone to church for forty years, Gideon. I don’t believe any of the claptrap you no doubt come out with every week, I don’t believe it any more than you do, but…’ She looked at me steadily, and for the first time in our acquaintance I thought she was about to shed a tear.
‘But,’ I repeated.
‘One doesn’t abandon it all on a whim. The kirk, the kirkyard, my family, me, you – there’s something much bigger than religion going on in all that. Much bigger. The religion was just a phase, and it’s coming to an end. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Like the Picts putting Christian signs on their ancient stones, but the stones surviving the Picts and their new religion.’
‘Something like that. When you’ve spent all your life steeped in history, learning it, teaching it, absorbing it, it becomes a very solid thing. It’s like this disease – it gets into your bones. It isn’t ephemeral or theoretical, it becomes part of you, and you part of it. And I feel a very strong obligation to that idea. If I believe in anything, that’s what I believe in, do you see?’
‘And you want me to ensure you remain part of it, after you’re gone?’ I asked.
‘Exactly.’
‘I’ll do everything I can to see that you do.’
‘Thank you. I knew I could rely on you, Gideon.’
‘That’s not what you were saying a few weeks ago. You couldn’t bring yourself to trust me, you said.’
‘That’s different. It’s your thinking I don’t trust. As a functionary you are totally reliable. Now I typed that out laboriously, using two semi-functional fingers, because it’s important that you know exactly what is to happen. My lawyer will get a signed copy, too, but first I need to know if you have any objections. I hope not. If you officiate, I imagine that will prevent any busybody official from the council coming along and putting a ban on proceedings.’
‘That’s hardly likely, is it? Unless you’re planning a riot or to be lowered in by helicopter or something.’
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 25