The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  Gentle, stubborn, lost Sammy - one of those to whom life has dealt a yarborough: thirteen cards in his hand and not one above a nine. (Tam had thought up that image for Sammy and was pleased with it. It was the main reason he was grateful to his Uncle Josey for having taught him how to play bridge, however inexpertly.) He knew Sammy from primary school where he had early on shown promise of being a loser with a streak of defiance in him, as if he knew his role in life and refused all assistance. A definitive moment in Tam's sense of him had occurred while they were still in infant class.

  A group of them are filing into school at the end of playtime - little, regimented, clockwork creatures. The infant mistress is walking beside them, clapping her hands in time to their marching feet. Tam is near the end of the line and, as those at the front turn a corner of the corridor, the infant mistress stops clapping. Confused noises are heard off. Whatever is happening up there feeds itself back through the line unevenly as a refusal to go on. The children bringing up the rear are bumping into those in front. Unexplained sounds are occurring, gasps of shock and muffled cries of amazement and the hysterical voice of Mrs MacPherson, the other infants' teacher. Always eager for experience, Tam breaks ranks and, under cover of the confusion, turns the corner of the corridor to see what's going on.

  Sammy is standing in the corridor. (Presumably he had slipped into school before the end of the interval, a heinous offence in itself but not half as heinous as what he has done once he got in.) Mrs MacPherson is doing what looks like the rain dance she told them about the previous month. The infant mistress. Miss Stevely, is screaming. She is terrifying when she screams. She is terrifying when she doesn't scream. She has rimless glasses and a chest as bumpy as an ironing-board. On Tam's first day at school, when she peremptorily asked who would be wanting milk, he didn't put his hand up for fear of her rage when she found out he couldn't pay for it.

  ‘Go home, Samuel Clegg!’ she is screaming. ‘Go home this instant.’

  ‘Naw,’ Sammy is saying.

  This basic exchange is repeated several times without either of the teachers daring to lay hands on Sammy. The reason for this reluctance is simple. Sammy has been caught short in the corridor and a leg, a stocking and one of his boots are liberally encrusted.

  Eventually, perhaps because the flaunting of authority is an unhealthy spectacle for the young or perhaps because of the risk of death by smell, they are marshalled again into obedience and marched past Sammy in a wide detour, while he stands there like a Hun surrounded by Rome.

  Sammy has improved since then, it has to be said. He has also outgrown his unbrushed teeth phase, when his smile had been like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. By the time they are talking in the street he is, like Tam, seventeen and very conscious of his appearance. He is scrupulously clean and his hair is carefully groomed into a pendulous quiff at the front and what is called a ‘D.A.’ at the back. He is wearing a Teddy-boy suit, blue in colour, long of jacket, short and drainpipe of leg, with brothel-creeper shoes, the soles of which are thick crepe.

  Yet in spite of his sartorial elegance, the appearance of being a sophisticate, Sammy is still a loser and internally a mess. He must be one of the few people who know less about practical sex than Tam does. He is the Encyclopaedia Britannica of sexual ignorance. Tam suspects that's the main reason he doesn't want the conversation to stop this day.

  Since they have left primary school - Sammy to go to Junior Secondary and Tam to go to Graithnock Academy, the Senior Secondary - they have met each other occasionally and casually. Their intermittent exchanges have acquired the guardedness of sentries talking across the borders of separate countries. Education can do that to you, Tam thinks. Your head emigrates and you're a full citizen neither of where you were nor of where you are.

  Even this accidental meeting with Sammy Clegg in a Graithnock street holds something of the strangeness of this summer - a small tableau of one of the many confusions of Tam's life. He is partly a stranger in his own town. Sammy is where he has come from. Sammy's potential life is a chart Tam feels himself abandoning and he envies Sammy his sense of direction. For what does Tam have to put in its place?

  Sammy is an apprentice joiner. Tam is supposed to be going to university at the end of the summer. He has been accepted for an arts course but, being the first of his family ever to have seriously contemplated university, he doesn't honestly believe it will happen. It isn't what his family does. Sammy wears his Teddy-boy gear like a uniform. Tam is more eclectically dressed, with a jacket that doesn't match the trousers, one of his brother Michael's old shirts and slip-on shoes. Sammy reads the sports pages. Tam is wrestling with the Journals of Kierkegaard and has written a long poem about the nature of life. Sammy will marry soon and have children and fight occasionally and get drunk and do his work. What the hell will Tam do? The familiar shape of Sammy's life seems to Tam like a lost Eden and him living east of it, wondering if it is already too late to get back in. Maybe he should just keep working in the night-shift job he has taken at Avondale Brickwork for the summer holidays and forget about university. That way, his life could be as uncomplicated as Sammy's.

  But how uncomplicated is that? It certainly doesn't look too uncomplicated. Even in his self-absorption, Tam at least manages to see the mirror image of his own searching for self in Sammy. Sammy hasn't a clue who he is either. Tam is wondering if anybody has. They stand there and have one of those slightly desperate conversations by which the lonely and the lost refurbish their image of themselves in each other's eyes. Sammy tells him about his apprenticeship, spitting a lot and swearing more and more as he talks himself towards the tradesman he will be. Tam makes a lot of jokes about Graithnock Academy, beginning to be amazed at how funny his school life has been.

  ‘Tam,’ Sammy suddenly says.

  Tam knows the pretence of shared identities they have been maintaining is about to collapse. Sammy's tone has a shy suspiciousness. Tam waits.

  ‘Tam,’ Sammy says again. He looks down Bank Street and then furtively back at Tam. Talk French.'

  ‘Come on, Sammy.’

  ‘No. On ye go. Talk French.’

  ‘What would Ah say?’

  ‘Anythin’.'

  ‘Come on, Sammy.’

  ‘They learned ye it at the school, didn't they?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Well. On ye go. Ah just want to hear what it sounds like. To hear you sayin’ it.'

  Tam's not sure why he is so embarrassed. He thinks it is perhaps because it feels like being invited to pick someone's pocket. Sammy's wonder is there before any reason for it. Whatever Tam says is going to impress him. But what is the point of words that aren't your own, unearned experience? Language without dynamic content is meaningless, just an oral conjuring trick. It is said he lay with her.

  ‘Le livre est sur la table,’ he says quietly.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Le livre est sur la table.’

  Sammy might be looking at someone from the Amazon basin. He stares at him for some time. He shakes his head.

  ‘Whoo,’ he says, awestruck. ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So what does it mean?’

  ‘The book is on the table.’

  ‘The book is on the table,’ he repeats slowly.

  ‘That's what it's sayin’? The book is on the table.'

  His reverence could not be more if the book had been War and Peace and Tam had written it. He is still shaking his head and it is as if, unknown to himself, he is refusing Tam re-entry to the past they have shared. Tam has become something different. Like someone remembering an old password, Tam comments on a passing girl.

  ‘Ah know what Ah would like to do to her.’

  This is less than entirely accurate. The liking is there but the knowledge is sadly absent. Still, it has the desired effect on Sammy. The wonders of language are forgotten.

  ‘What a body,’ Sammy says. ‘Have ye done it yet?’

  He manages to flannel his way
out of a direct answer but, thinking of going to the brickwork tonight, he reflects that there are some situations you can't fake yourself out of.

  ‘DON'T SIT THERE.’

  The voice comes out like marsh mist, so obscure with hoarseness that words appear as blurs in it. Your ears have to peer to catch the meaning. The face from which the voice emerges is battered and stamped with varied experience, an old suitcase with a lot of labels on it. The labels are no longer legible.

  ‘Ho no,’ a sing-song echoes.

  This time the speaker's face seems to float on his lumpy, awkward body, as if his head is loosely anchored to his being. The face has the indeterminate age of the simpleton, lives in a limbo of features where, if maturity can't properly take hold, neither can aging. When he looks at you, his eyes gley over your shoulders, seeming to communicate with someone you can't see and usually suggestive of mysterious mirth. It is as if the rest of the world is a joke only he has rumbled.

  ‘Ho no.’

  ‘That's the King of Avondale's seat,’ a small man says.

  He doesn't seem to belong here, as if he might just be taking shelter while waiting for a bus.

  ‘Might as well sit in the electric chair,’ a big, fresh-faced young man says.

  He is wearing a long, Teddy-boy jacket, drainpipes and working boots.

  Tam is relieved he isn't the one who tried to sit in the chair. It was Jack Laidlaw who did that. Tam makes a sympathetic face as Jack comes over to sit beside him. They are glad that they know each other. Jack is still at Graithnock Academy, a year behind Tam. They have been no more than acquaintances but they feel as close as conspirators here in the strangeness of their first night at the brickwork. They feel like migrants arrived together in a foreign country.

  They have strange customs here, strange people. Tam has been mystified by everything. Time, for example, is divided into one-hour units. For an hour you sit at the machine and pick up the unbaked black bricks that spew out at you relentlessly and stack them on a hutch. While your head screams with boredom, the machine keeps throwing the bricks at you until you think its action is a deliberate and personal insult to the mind. For an hour, while someone else becomes an extension of the machine, you push the loaded hutches out of the lighted shed into the darkness and along the rails that lead to the kiln. One of the two men in the kiln accepts the full hutch and you bring the empty one back to the shed to be reloaded. For an hour you sweep the shed and try to remember that you're not a robot. Then you return to unloading the bricks.

  Tam hates it already. It is raining tonight and he has turned up wearing casual shoes. Fred Astaire visits the brickwork. His feet are soaking and he is up to his kneecaps in mud. Twice he has pushed the heavy bogey off the rails and has almost wept with the strain of having to lift it back on. Only the shame of asking for help has given him the strength to realign the hutch single-handed. But he doesn't know how much longer he can go on.

  Yet now, as he sits at the tea-break, he finds an unexpected compensation. The sandwiches his mother made him taste wonderful. He remembers his father telling him something his grandfather once said about being a miner: ‘Pit-breid is the only guid reason for goin’ doon a mine.' The sense of being part of a family tradition sustains him a little. He has found a direct connection, however tenuous, with the legendary grandfather he has never known personally. That dead man of reputedly awesome hardness gives him some sort of credentials here, tells him. ‘This isn't so strange.’ No matter how strange it may seem.

  ‘So this army wallah is comin’ tae teach the Home Guard about hand grenades,' the man with the lived-in face is saying.

  ‘Ye didny use hand grenades in the Home Guard?’

  ‘Only as ornaments. But ye had tae be prepared. An’ we're all lined up in front of him. An' he's holdin' up a hand grenade. An' he shows us how ye pull the pin. Without actually pullin' it, mind ye. An' he says, “Once you've done that, you count.” An' he counts. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.” An' he kids on he's throwin' the grenade. An' a long time after, when he's goin' away. Sandy Lamont. Ye know Sandy? Helluva stammer. Well, Sandy's got a question. “H-h-h-h-how m-m-m-many d'ye c-c-count up tae again?” An' the man stares at him for a while. “Just you fuckin' throw it,” he says. “Never mind the counting.'”

  The gaffer, who is an Englishman, comes in.

  ‘Right, you lot,’ he says. ‘Holidays over.’

  As Tam rises, he feels the pains in his arms and legs and he thinks he won't make it through his first night. But he does and the first night becomes the second and the second becomes the third and the third becomes habit. He is wearing Michael's old boots now and an old boilersuit of his father's with the hems on the legs let down. He has become better at keeping the bogey on the rails. The trick is to apply the weight only forwards as you push, never downwards.

  The gargoyle faces of the first night have resolved themselves into recognisably human forms. They have developed names and identifying attitudes. The man with the marsh-mist voice is Hilly Brown. (Hilly? He doesn't look like a Hilton. Hilliard? Hillman?)

  Hilly is the talker of the company. His beat-up face releases wry words and arresting thoughts into the stillness of the tea-break when the silence of the machines sounds like freedom to be yourself. His use of language interests Tam.

  ‘Farquhar, ya bastard!’ Hilly says at the beginning of a break.

  ‘What's up. Hilly?’ James Morrison asks.

  ‘What's up? Ah've just had the first bite o’ ma piece here an' this balloon hawks a thing on to the ground like a jaur o' tadpoles.'

  A jar of tadpoles. That's a terrific description of a certain kind of spittle. Hilly uses some amazing images. He is telling them of going through a wood one night and coming upon a couple making love on the ground. ‘His arse,’ he says, ‘was openin’ and shuttin' like a sea-anemone.'

  He is the one who gives Tam his apprentice's initiation. He has discovered that Tam did classics at school.

  ‘So ye're a classical scholar?’ he says. ‘Tam, is it? Okay, Tam. What's Latin for aeroplane?’

  Tam has been searching his mind for about fifteen seconds before he twigs.

  ‘Aw naw,’ he says. ‘Thanks a lot.’

  He realises he has been subjected to a variant of being sent for a left-handed brush or a tin of tartan paint. The feeling of stupidity is minimised by the fact that the others have been waiting quite seriously for the answer. As the laughter subsides, Dunky Semple, who has joined in, speaks.

  ‘Can ye no’ think of it, Tam?' he says.

  Dunky's brains, as Hilly says, ‘are still in the box. He's waitin’ for instructions comin' through the post about what to do wi' them.' Dunky gazes vaguely past their conversations, constantly nicking and relighting a Capstan Full Strength cigarette and passing weirdly tangential comments that seem to come, as Hilly has suggested, from ‘Radio Mars’. They are discussing women, as they often are, and Dunky chooses a thoughtful pause in the conversation to interject.

  ‘At the pictures one time,’ Dunky says. ‘A lassie took ma hand. She just sat and held it, so she did. For ages it was. Her hand was warm. An’ it was that soft. The softest thing Ah ever felt. She went out before the lights went up.'

  Nobody laughs, not even Billy Farquhar. They sit staring ahead.

  ‘Ye shoulda got her address, Dunky,’ Hilly says.

  —AFTERWARDS, he would be talking to an old woman who lived alone in sheltered housing. She suddenly began to talk about a Wallace Arnold's bus holiday she took to Brighton many years ago. The thing she remembered most vividly was an afternoon tea-dance. The same man had asked her to dance twice. She could describe the man very clearly. Listening to her recall that luminous moment, he would think of Dunky and wonder about the varieties of quiet lonelinesses there were, a one-handed love-affair, a two-dance life.—

  BILLY FARQUHAR IS THE TEDDY-BOY'S NAME. He is nineteen, huge and with his thick red hair done in a quiff and a D.A. at the back. (Duck's arse is translated
by the papers into duck's anatomy.) It's surprising that he didn't laugh at Dunky's confession of lost love for he seems as sensitive as one of the bricks that come red from the kiln. He doesn't take much part in the conversations, preferring to stare round about while Hilly and James Morrison talk, using a large knife to cut up the turnips he steals from a neighbouring farmer's field for his piece. If something they touch on catches his attention as being noteworthy or surprising, he tends to say ‘Fuck!’ as his contribution to the discussion, or, if he's feeling expansive, ‘Holy fuck!’ He only really animates if he is invited to report on his latest experiences of getting a ride or having a fight. He is reputed, by Hilly Brown at least, to have ‘a dong like an anaconda’.

  James Morrison doesn't welcome such information. Both Tam and Jack Laidlaw have been separately informed by him on the first night that he doesn't really belong here. He has been a builder with his own firm until ‘the drink got the better of me’. He still has his bungalow and he is off the drink and he is only working here to keep the house going ‘till the trade picks up’.

  All the strange talk that swirls around Tam at the piece-break seems wild and uncontrolled and yet it is hobbled by something. That something is, he comes to realise. The Chair. Even when it sits empty during the break, which is most of the time, it still manages to dominate.

  ‘DON'T SIT THERE.’ No. Nobody ever does. Except the one.

  THE CHAIR. It would often come back to him. He would smile to himself at how it had always expressed itself to him with capital letters at the time. But it hadn't seemed funny then.

  It came again into his mind as he stood at the bar in the Stag's Head. It was the pub nearest to the flat in Warriston. But it wasn't just the nearness that appealed to him. Ever since Michael had taken him for his first official drink at seventeen to the Akimbo Arms in Graithnock, he had had a weakness for rough talking-shops. That first time, the abrasive noise had unnerved him a little and he had been glad of Michael's knowledge of what to do. Not knowing what to drink, he had accepted Michael's advice and he took a Double Century. The taste was a faint echo of those sips of stout he had sometimes stolen from his grandmother's glass when she was out of the room.