The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  His mother used to talk more than once of a recurring moment she had learnt to dread. It was when she would go upstairs to get ready for bed and his father was already there, lying with his head cupped in his hands.

  ‘Betsy,’ he would say, his eyes gazing at the ceiling as if it were the promised land. ‘Ye know what Ah've a helluva notion o’ tryin'.'

  And she would scream silently. Another money-making project was threatening their lives.

  No wonder the uncertainty of what his father was had troubled him. It must have been like living with X the unknown. After leaving the pits he seemed determined to try everything. When Uncle Josey challenged him for being a working-class entrepreneur, he said, ‘Negative capitalism, Josey. Ah'm tryin’ to get the wealth intae the hands of the workers. Then we can share it out more fairly.'

  The most intense expression of his confusion with his father always came at primary school. Every so often they were given forms to fill in. He hated forms, always would. But he could always handle these questions easily enough, except for one. He always checked the form over first before writing anything down, to see if that one dreaded question was there, and it seemed it always was. The question simply said ‘Father's occupation’ and then a colon and a space to put your answer in. That was an insoluble space for him. He hated that space.

  He used to steal glances at his neighbours' forms. It seemed to be for them the easiest question in the paper. Storeman, they'd write. Joiner. Plumber. Fitter at Mason's factory. What the bloody hell is ma feyther? He took venomous delight in swearing in his head towards him. Why did everybody else know what their father was and he hadn't a clue? The bastard. What was he trying to do to him? He made him feel like a dunce.

  He would go out to the teacher's desk and begin an elaborate, apologetic mumble. At four o'clock he'd be out of the school like a sprinter - there were no devious routes home taken on those days. He was confronting his mother at five past four, his teeth bared in an imitation of his father. ‘What,’ he once said, feeling as he said it how clever the expression was, ‘is he this week?’ He could be bitter about his father.

  Sometimes his mother could answer the question and sometimes she couldn't. Sometimes his father didn't seem too sure himself. He would ponder, picking his way round unimaginable obstacles, and he would say something like. ‘Tell ye what, son. Jist say Ah'm on for maself.’

  ‘The boay canny say that,’ his mother would say. ‘He needs to say something specific’

  ‘Unemployed,' his father would say.

  Eventually, he found his own way round the problem. He knew his father had been a miner. But that was very specific. Panic can make you understand context in an exact way. (He picked up a lot of words from his mother. She once told him words were power and he took the thought into himself like a secret weapon.) You're either a miner or you aren't. His father was obviously not a miner any longer. He didn't have a lamp for his bunnet and he didn't come home black. Anybody could see him and find that lie out easily.

  But he had also been a van driver and a labourer and tried to be a scrap dealer and had been a street bookie. He knew that being a street bookie was illegal because his mother had told him not to mention it to anyone or the police might get to hear of it. That was out. He decided to make his father a general labourer.

  It was a genuine inspiration, he felt. No teacher ever questioned it and he came to feel that he had made a contribution to the security of his family, shut out the prying eyes of strangers, given his mother one less worry and protected his father's strangeness.

  But it certainly didn't change anything except the ease with which he could fill in forms at the school, he had to admit as he washed the residual soap off his face and dried it. His father had continued to dream incorrigibly about the big breakthrough into wealth.

  It seemed his father and his Uncle Charlie had once made a handsome standard lamp at a time when standard lamps were coming into vogue. They made it out of a brush shaft from the brush factory in Graithnock and some pieces of wood they found. Everybody who saw it admired it and, within the praise, his father and his Uncle Charlie fancied they saw the glint of gold. They went round the houses with the varnished standard lamp and a small notebook, taking orders. They came back with a lot of names and addresses. They calculated how much money they would make and were amazed. Then they discovered that they couldn't make another standard lamp. After a week, the back green was littered with misshapen and broken brush shafts. They went back round the houses and cancelled all the orders. The reason they gave was that they ‘couldn't get the right parts’.

  The summer of the kiln was also the summer of the Collaro. Collaro was the name of one of the latest kind of record-players. His father bought one. The family realised that it was more than a form of domestic entertainment when his father invited Uncle Charlie round to listen to a batch of new records neither of them liked. While they grimaced at the sounds they heard. Uncle Charlie made a list of the titles and seemed to be working out some kind of running order.

  That week they hired a hall in Stewarton, a nearby small town. They were organising dances there two nights a week. For a fortnight, things went well. A lot of teenagers turned up to dance to the music. But the venture collapsed when a bunch of nosey teenagers pulled back the curtain that had been rigged up at one end of the hall. The vision of Uncle Charlie in shirt sleeves and bunnet, changing records and telling the boys to fuck off before they got their arses kicked, seemed to destroy the mystique of the evenings. There was a mass walk-out. They tried once more but word had got around and the last evening was a boycott.

  Looking for what Kristofferson called his ‘cleanest dirty shirt’, he stopped with the black denim shirt in his hand. He saw his father's fortnight in Stewarton in a new light. Like Edison or Logie Baird, he was simply a man ahead of his time. He had arrived at something which would, when the time was right, make vast fortunes for many people. Putting on the shirt and clicking shut its buttons, he understood with sudden and open-mouthed awe the amazing truth. His father was the man who invented the disco.

  But maybe his father's most dangerous enterprise had been his attempt to be a fruit-and-vegetable man. Who would have thought that potatoes and apples could turn so nasty? For him, that adventure had reached its dark conclusion the night his father said, ‘Oh ho.’ Those two syllables would sound always in his mind like the double turn of a key to unlock a special chamber in his memory vaults.

  ‘OH HO,' his father has said.

  His blue eyes widen. Sitting in his armchair, he slowly takes from his mouth the cigarette he has just lit. He purses his lips as if interpreting the meaning of the sound they have all just heard. It was a triple knocking at the door and very loud.

  They have been listening to the wireless. Almost half an hour beforehand, there had been the familiar tolling bell, the plangent chord of menacing music, and Valentine Dyall, in a voice as dark as a subterranean passageway, had intoned, ‘Appointment with Fear. This is your story-teller, the Man in Black . . .’

  Tam loves that voice. He has often practised being Valentine Dyall in the bath until the water went cold - with fear, it seemed to him - around his body. Sometimes the family has put out the light and listened by fireglow, Michael making terrifying faces at Tam any time he dares to look over. (‘Stop that, you,’ Tam's mother says. ‘Ye'll give the boay nightmares. A face like yours. Worse than any horror story.’)

  They haven't done that this evening. Only his mother and father and Tam are in the house. But this story is frightening enough in the light. It is about a very self-confident man who claims to have no superstitions. To prove his contempt for such nonsense as the existence of ghosts, he makes a bet with another man that he will spend the night locked in a funeral parlour surrounded by dead bodies. He is given a tape-recorder to record his reactions throughout the night, so that he cannot come out in the morning and deny what he really felt. He tapes a few bland and relaxed comments at first. All is going well, it
seems, until in the course of recording another message, he says how boring all this is and that he wouldn't even be afraid if that corpse in the glass-topped coffin were to tap three times on the glass.

  Just at that moment there is the sound of a fingernail tapping three times on glass. There is almost simultaneously the sound of a hand knocking three times on a door. Tam is nearly out of his chair before he realises why he is so frightened. The door that someone is beating on isn't inside the radio. It is in his house. It is as if the story has come out of the wireless to get him personally. In embarrassment at his own obvious fear, he starts to laugh. He is taking relief from the fact that the knocking is real. But the relief doesn't last long.

  His father's widening eyes are looking at Tam's mother. His mother's eyes look back nervously. Dawson Street isn't exactly the wild frontier but it can be rough. When you open that door. nobody is going to shoot you. But this can be an angry place, friendly but angry. You learn to know the different knocks on the door. This knock is too brisk. It is at least impertinent. It isn't the way you knock at people's doors. It means trouble.

  ‘Ah'll get it. Conn,’ Tam's mother says.

  Tam's father nods slowly.

  ‘All right, Betsy,’ he says.

  While she goes to the door, his father's eyes stay on the fire as Tam watches him. Neither of them can hear what is being said but Tam understands that his father is not listening for words. He is listening for sounds, a signal of what is happening out there. His body has become tense in the chair. His eyes are seeing nothing, as if he has erased sight instinctively in order to achieve what Tam has heard is true of the blind - intensified hearing through the absence of vision.

  With the heightened intuition of fear, Tam suddenly realises why his mother has gone to the door. It is to defuse a dangerous situation with a woman's presence. If she can speak to whoever is there first, things may be calmed down. When she comes back in, she doesn't look too calm. Her face is flushed.

  ‘Conn,’ she says nervously. ‘It's the Burleys. The van's broken down. There's three o’ them. They're awfu angry.'

  This is bad. Tam's father is unlikely to die. But he is likely to be very severely dealt with. There is a reason for this, as there usually is, if you can find it.

  Tam's awareness knows the reason. His father had tried recently to run a fruit-and-vegetable business. It was the latest of his dreams of instant wealth, negative capitalism in practice. He bought a van. He converted its interior into shelves that could accommodate various fruits and vegetables. Michael was involved. He had come out of National Service with a driver's licence. He would drive for his father. The Dochertys have suddenly achieved the status, it would seem, of having a family business. It is not a status they are destined to enjoy for long.

  Michael has told Allison and Tam, out of earshot of their father, about the first sale achieved by the family business. Michael drives the van into Shortlees housing scheme. Their father gets out, dressed in a leather apron and with a leather satchel slung over his shoulders. (‘Like a wee-boy that got a tattie-man's outfit for his Christmas?’ Allison says.)

  ‘Tattees! Vegetables!' their father begins to shout. Michael is instantly helpless with laughter. He is stretched full length along the double seat in the cabin of the van, moaning for mercy. The image of his father, transformed in seconds from sardonic fireside philosopher into town crier, is too much for him. (‘It was so corny,’ Michael says. ‘Like he'd been to RADA and not passed the course.’)

  ‘Behave yerself, ya daft bastard!’ their father is hissing at Michael between public announcements. ‘They'll think we're amateurs at the game. Tattees! Vegetables!’

  The first customer is a small woman ‘with a face like a vinegar sponge’. (Michael describes her through the tears of his renewed laughter.)

  ‘Yes, ma bonny lass,’ their father says. ‘What can Ah do for you this fine day?’

  ‘Ah'll take half a stone of potatoes.’

  ‘Yes, you will. That is what you will have.’

  Michael hears him working with the metal weights which he bought in a second-hand shop and of which he is so proud. He has spent an hour or so practising with them in the living-room.

  ‘There we are, ma dear. And many, many thanks.’

  Michael climbs down from the cabin and comes round to the back of the van. Their father is smiling.

  ‘First sale for the old firm,’ their father says. ‘Off and running at Ascot.’

  Michael looks at the scales, where the small metal block that has been used to measure the weight of the potatoes is still in place.

  ‘What did that woman ask for, Feyther?’ he says.

  ‘Tatties. Half a stone. Not much but a beginnin’.'

  ‘Even less than ye think. The scales say a quarter of a stane.’

  ‘Eh?’

  Their father looks at the scales.

  ‘Ah naw,’ he says. ‘Those fuckin’ daft weights. Ah can never get them right.'

  Michael describes the long moment of indecision on their father's face. Allison and Tam can see it as if it were a close-up in a film. He isn't sure which house the woman has gone into. He looks at the scales. He would like to give the woman the extra potatoes. But he is too embarrassed to start making enquiries.

  ‘Fuck it,' he says. ‘Let's get our arses outa here.’

  And they rattle off like the James gang on wheels.

  The first sale was an omen. In five weeks the business had folded and someone had reported Tam's father to the Inland Revenue, who were claiming tax on mysterious sums of money he had never seen. The business has run at a loss.

  The threat of financial ruin and roup hung over the family until Tam's mother went down to the tax office and spoke to a man there. She explained that, far from being a tax-dodger, her husband had rendered the family a hardship case. She told the man how little she had received for housekeeping during the five weeks of what the family would afterwards call ‘the great potato famine’.

  She cited some of the other ventures her husband had engaged in. She mentioned the ton or more of gasmasks he had bought. John Grant, who had a lock-up near Tam's father's had tipped him off that each gas mask contained a small disc of copper. She told how he and Uncle Charlie, for a fortnight, turned up at 8 am every weekday at the lock-up where the gas masks were stored. They treated it as a full-time job. They brought a piece with them and took only a half-hour lunch-break. They worked until 5.30 p.m. each day, chatting as they worked about the riches they were accumulating. At the end of two weeks they went, with hands scarred and chapped from stripping each gas mask down to that small particle of precious metal, and delivered their hoarded wealth to Piebald Lundy, a local scrap dealer. He gave them two pounds ten shillings to split between them.

  She told him about the standard lamp fiasco. She was going to tell him about—

  ‘Mrs Docherty,’ the man said. ‘Let's stop there. Tell me any more and I'll feel obliged to lend you a pound from my own pocket.’

  He took a letter he had on his desk and tore it up and put it in a waste basket. When she came home and told them what had happened, there was general relief and laughter. Only their father was quiet, brooding by the fire.

  ‘One thing, Betsy,’ he said darkly. ‘He didny give ye the name o’ the bastard that shopped me?'

  Next day he sold the van to the Burleys for thirty pounds. That was maybe ten days before.

  Now he stands up and nicks his cigarette into the fire. He puts the stub on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Be careful. Conn,’ Tam's mother says.

  His father shrugs to her. John Garfield couldn't have done it better. Tam is impressed by that shrug, for the Burleys are a known family in the town, violent and fierce and sudden, offering the rule of force. Anyone who tries to take them to a law beyond their own is liable to appear in court with a bandaged head and an imperfect set of teeth with which to state his case. Tam's father goes to the front door. Tam and his mother wait tensely in the living-ro
om. He watches her. Her eyes are scouting the room nervously. Perhaps she is looking for a suitable object, should things turn physical.

  The living-room has been redefined for Tam. He sits in a cave of warmth and brightness. Beyond its entrance bad things can happen, dark creatures roam. His father guards that entrance. The sounds that come from there rumble and threaten. The voices of all three Burleys are deep and indistinct. They all seem to be making noises at the same time. His father's voice is light by comparison. His mother and Tam are statues. The exchange that is taking place out there is only sometimes meaningful.

  ‘No’ good enough' growls towards them.

  ‘Sold in good faith.’

  ‘Some kinna refund.’

  ‘Ye'd have tae take that out the brig.’

  It's an expression Tam has heard his father use before. The brig, Tam realises with panic, is the bridge of the nose.

  ‘Ah don't have a copper tae spare.’

  ‘It's no’ gonny do.'

  The grumbling continues, ebbing and flowing.

  ‘Look, boays. Decide what ye want tae dae. It's cauld oot here.’

  The voices growl on but slowly, Tam realises with relief, the growling is receding. He hears the door being closed.

  On the wireless, Valentine has completed his story about the man in the funeral parlour, unaware that he has been broadcasting to Madame Tussaud's for the last few minutes. It seems the other man, who put the bet on with him, persuaded a friend to lie in one of the coffins. He had tapped on the glass three times when he heard the recording being made.

  When the funeral parlour is opened in the morning, only one man survives from the two who were alive the night before. At first, they can't tell which it is, for he is transformed, lined with age and grey-haired and raving. Eventually, they understand that he is the man who bet he could stay in the place overnight. He had thought the man in the coffin was a ghost and had strangled him and had lived the rest of the night in dread that another ghost would come. Unusually, Tam hasn't been able to give in to the horror the man is supposed to have felt. He thought ghosts were frightening? Had he met the Burleys?