The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  Just as the tartness of the drink passed from being something that made him wonder how anybody could voluntarily drink this stuff into being an experience he enjoyed, so the crass earthiness of the pub became an intermittent release from introspection, the nearest thing to animated Brueghel he would find. The pub was the social convention he had missed most any time he was living in France. French people tended to drink in psychological alcoves. Among them, he had sometimes longed for the communal atmosphere of a Scottish bar, the shouted long-range conversations, the jocularly insulting comments that were thrown around the place like spears, the impromptu seminars on football or politics or the nature of relationships between men and women, the man or woman who suddenly decided a song was necessary.

  He had once written a short poem he called The Young Man's Song'. He didn't like it but it had caught for him something of what he had felt about pubs when he was younger, how they could form a kind of interesting crossroads for an evening (which road will we go from here?), could ambush routine, could catalyse dull habits into an event.

  I want to go to some strange pub

  Where women's eyes are dark with risk.

  Their bodies unknown continents.

  And talk is sharp and laughter loud

  And there are flaring hands whose quick

  Intensities light up our selves

  And there are threat and noise and song.

  Whatever happens shall be sheer—

  My stillness has been overlong—

  Passion or hurt or kiss or tear.

  Remorseless spinning of the hub.

  I want to go to some strange pub.

  That wasn't exactly how he felt these days, he had to admit. But a diluted form of that feeling had always stayed with him. It had survived long enough to follow him to Edinburgh, no longer a song perhaps but at least a hoarse whisper that could be heard from time to time in the stillness of the flat at Warriston. Living alone there, the nearest thing he had to a social life was wandering occasionally into a down-market pub of an evening. You took your chance of stumbling across Walter Mitty on an off night, assuring you he was an eccentric millionaire or an unpublished genius, or of getting into an argument with a man who seemed only marginally sane or of meeting someone who was deeply interesting and whom you would otherwise never have met. And if you were becoming just boredly stoned, you could always shift your pitch.

  And there are threat and noise and song. The threat had always provoked in him both fascination and fear, like a child wanting to climb a height from which there is a possibility of falling. He remembered the way some of them always used to walk across the parapet of the railway bridge at Bonnyton on the way home from the pitch-and-putt. The parapet sloped downwards towards a thirty-foot drop to the railway line. Presumably, it had been designed that way deliberately to discourage tightrope walkers and it was exactly that which made them want to walk it.

  There was something of that repellent fascination in his sense of Cran. It had started with The Chair. In the two nights before he saw it filled, it had managed to acquire a mysterious authority. Cran Craig only visited the tea-break intermittently, appearing without warning among them, steaming from the heat of the kiln like Vulcan from his forge. But on the first two nights, as the small man called Frank, who worked with Cran, took each bogey that was delivered, Tam had caught a few striking images of a big figure, stripped to the waist inside the kiln and glowing red. He had stared out steadily at Tam a couple of times, like a beast wondering what careless creature had dared to approach its lair.

  Those shocking glimpses were developed into dread by the way the others talked about Cran. They didn't talk loudly, as if prepared for his arrival at any moment. They said he had been a merchant seaman. They said he had been in fights all over the world. Hilly, the philosopher of the group, wondered if he had ever lost a fight. He thought he must have but he didn't think anybody should suggest that to him.

  Billy Farquhar warned Jack and Tam that Cran didn't like anyone looking at him unless he was talking to them and sometimes not even then. Sitting on their wooden benches, they tended to glance at The Chair when they mentioned him.

  It was an ordinary wooden chair, high-backed and scuffed, a floral cushion fixed to the outer rings of its back with two tie-cords. But plain as it was, Tam dreamt about it after his second night's work. The Chair seemed to palpitate in the dark and he somehow knew that he was moving towards it, although he couldn't see himself in the dream, and he couldn't reach it. The sensation was reminiscent of those other times in dreams when he was trying to punch someone and his fists felt liquid, could achieve no impact. The Chair in the dream haunted him like a throne he aspired to ascend but was afraid to.

  When on the third night Cran came, Tam thought his subconscious wasn't a bad judge.

  It wasn't just his bulk or the face like a stone mask. It was the aura of dangerous stillness he gave off. His nature was fat on a low heat. It could look bland and still as long as it was left to itself. But introduce any alien substance to it, an unacceptable opinion or attitude, and it flared and seethed and you risked scalding.

  The one who risked scalding most became Tam. Cran had discovered he was a Docherty. He had heard of his grandfather's reputation as a street fighter and had obviously decided that the Docherty blood-line was running a bit thin. His contempt for Tam was not expressed directly. It manifested mainly in talking across him until he was silenced. Cran's philosophy, such as it was, was stark and harsh.

  ‘The kiln,’ he said more than once, ‘is where cley either hardens in tae brick or breaks down intae rubbish.’

  He had obviously decided which Tam would do. Each time he appeared at the tea-break he was pushing Tam further to the edge of the group, leaving him no place for his pride to stand. No matter what sense of himself Tam might have achieved during the day, Cran would unravel it at night. He seemed to enjoy doing that, a steady forbidding of Tam to be himself.

  ‘I SUPPOSE YOU'RE SOMETHING OF A CURIO to them,’ John Benchley says.

  Not just to them. He's something of a curio to himself, he thinks, as he goes on responding mechanically to John's remarks. Taking the night-shift job in the brickwork for the summer has produced another split in his sense of himself. He feels he is subdividing into such a crowd of multiple personalities he'll never be able to unify them into any kind of order. He can imagine how Cran and the others would react if they knew he tried to write poetry. Ritual stoning with reject bricks. But at the same time as he doesn't really fit in there, he cannot honestly believe that his acceptance for university is real and that he will be starting there at the end of the summer. This is not what anyone in his family has ever done. A part of him is waiting for the inevitable day when an official-looking envelope will land on the doormat addressed to him. He knows roughly what its contents will be.

  (Dear Mr Docherty,

  We regret to inform you that there has, of course, been a mistake in the matter of your being given a place at this university. We trust that this error has not inconvenienced you too much by, for example, giving you absurd fantasies concerning the possibility that learned men will waste their time on a working-class toerag from Graithnock. We do, however, hope that you will find in the future some activity more suited to your abilities, such as shovelling shit. Yours faithfully.

  An Amazingly Clever Man)

  His sense of being outside any social norm hones in on him with fresh intensity now and distances him even further from conversation with John Benchley. He sees his lips moving and he realises that it is not what he is saying that matters but his need to say it, the compelled persistence of his nature. He has often persuaded Tam of the necessary existence of God but, Tam realises now, while he was doing so, he had a mole on his cheek, about an inch from his left nostril. That mole becomes more and more significant as Tam looks. It appears to him now as one reason why, after going through his devoutly Christian phase, he decided to become an agnostic.

  For what i
s the point of the mole on John Benchley's left cheek? If the universe has one coherent divine purpose, that purpose should include everything. In his omniscient wisdom, what could God possibly have meant by putting a mole on John Benchley's left cheek? Come on, God, check your books. What was it you meant by that again?

  He remembers a poem he wrote in his secret notebook, where he often stores little cosmic anomalies he thinks he has found because, if he ever reaches the Golden Gates, never mind the questions St Peter may put to him, he has a few he'd like to ask St Peter. And if Peter can't answer them, he doesn't even want in, because if heaven is as ramshackle a conception as earth is, they can keep it. The harps are probably not even in tune and the milk and honey's guaranteed to be sour. And what about the company? All those bland do-gooders sitting around, unable to remember one really bad thing they did. An eternity of boredom. Not one spicy story among them.

  (‘Let me tell you about another sin I never committed.’)

  Oh boy. It will be enough to make you ask for a transfer.

  (‘Excuse me. I think there's been a mistake here. You think you could go through your records again? Just check it out? I think you must have missed the time I stole two biros and a Dinky toy from Woolworth's. Should be listed somewhere. It was a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. One of the dearest models. I've been a right bad bastard. Where do you get the lift that takes you downstairs?’)

  The company's bound to be better in hell. They must have some stories to tell.

  (‘How did you finish up down here?’

  ‘How did I finish up here? Wait till you hear this one . . .’)

  He wrote the poem after he had heard about Mrs McAfferty's new baby. She lived near them in Dawson Street at the time, though she moved later to one of the prefabs in Altonhill. The child was a boy and soon after the birth Tam overheard his mother tell his father, in the quiet reverential voice she always used when referring to the inexplicable oddities an inscrutable fate visits upon the unsuspecting innocent, that wee John McAfferty had been born with one toe missing from each foot. His father, with typical pragmatism, observed that it would only be noticeable if he went swimming at Barassie shore and then - the Scottish climate being what it is - most people would probably just think it was frostbite. But the small pointless cruelty of it stayed with Tam for days and eventually crystallised in a poem that for no reason he could understand made the child both English and the son of a man travelling on a train.

  (The Englishman opposite coming from Crewe

  Speaks of his son, who is John Edward Frew.

  John Edward, it seems, has hazel-brown eyes

  And a talent for drawing beyond all dispute.

  But, strangest of all, and to mankind's surprise

  John Edward has only four toes on each foot.

  And this is a fact which has troubled my dreams.

  And, taking my bath when the water is hot,

  I look at myself and my toes say, it seems

  That we number ten and John Edward's do not.'

  It's a question which, dying, I leave to the wise

  To settle the wherefors and find out the whys.

  If I get to heaven, I'll straighten my tie

  And ask a policeman the way to God's seat.

  Introducing myself, I'll say, ‘Dear God, why

  Does John Edward Frew have eight toes on his feet?’)

  And he'll have other questions. What part of the divine plan is it which demands that some children be born spina bifida? Or decrees that there should be such a thing as congenital syphilis? Or arranges a world in which there can happen the casual horror that befell a man he heard of recently? The man was in his thirties and having a holiday with his family.

  (Yea, and it came to pass that he did an thing of great evil and that was as an abomination in the sight of the Lord.)

  At least it must have been, if we are to believe that what happens to us has any connection with divine justice. What he did was, he went hill-walking on his own, only in safe and well-frequented places. But he stumbled and scraped his leg on a rock and later he was dead. The abrasion of the stone had burst the skin and there had been rat's urine on the rock and it entered his bloodstream. Hey presto. We have a widow and two fatherless children. And why not?

  (And God writ upon stone other commandments. And one of them did read: thou shalt not scrape thy leg against the rock that hath upon it the pish of the rodent. For thou shalt die thereof and the name of thy dying shall be called among men Weil's disease.)

  Uh-huh. Back to the drawing-board, God.

  ‘How goes the writing?’ John Benchley is saying.

  It is a moment or two before Tam can focus on who John is. It takes all your concentration, giving God a row.

  ‘Well. It goes.’

  ‘Have you finally started the masterpiece yet?’

  Tam takes the question seriously. There it is again. One part of him suspects that he doesn't have the ability to deserve a university place and another part of him has the gall to believe he can become a writer. Why can't he introduce the two parts to each other?

  ‘I think maybe,’ he says to John.

  He is being cagey. He has started to write something which he thinks may be his final statement on the nature of human experience but he knows that writers don't like to talk about these things. It would be like letting air into the womb. (‘You don't want to talk it all away.’ Or something like that. Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.)

  ‘So what form will it take?’

  He hesitates. He is trying to shape a statement that will satisfy John's probing curiosity without damaging the foetus he thinks he is carrying.

  ‘It will,’ he says carefully, ‘be a blank verse play about working-class experience. Ah suppose. But just a play for reading. Not for performance.’

  ‘Sounds like Goethe's Faust,’ John says, smiling into his sherry. ‘In a way.’ He is smiling still. ‘Sort of. Kind of.’

  Who is Goethe again? Tam has heard of him. But why does the name jar some tender place in his mind? Then he remembers he went into Fulton's bookshop when he was fifteen, sweaty and dishevelled from two successive games of pitch-and-putt, and asked Mr Fulton if he had any of the works of Go-eth in stock. Mr Fulton stared at his muddy, grass-stained hands for so long that Tam could feel them enlarging to a grotesque size.

  ‘I suppose you're referring to Goethe,’ he said condescendingly. ‘And please don't touch any one of these books. Why don't you come back when you've had a bath?’

  Go-eth. His mind cringes all over again. Maybe his literary aspirations will never survive his background. He often pronounces big words and foreign names in a strange way because he has only ever read them. Where he comes from, he has never heard anybody say them. He supposes he has been suppressing the name of Goethe ever since and he certainly has never tried to read him, as if some rule has banished him from the privilege. Maybe he will always be -the joke gives him a certain masochistic pleasure - a Visigo-eth.

  ‘You have a title?’ John asks.

  ‘A working title,’ Tam says, very professional.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘“Actions in Generic Tense.”’

  That leaves John thoughtful.

  ‘Hm,’ he says. ‘Probably better not to offer it for performance. Not a title calculated to have them queuing round the block.’

  Tam knows John is trying to understate his sense of how ludicrous Tam is. He is a kind man. He is trying not to laugh. Faced with that not unfamiliar feeling of adult disdain (some of his teachers were expert at that), Tam feels a familiar response. It is a desire not to back off from his pretensions but to come ahead with them. He knows they can be ridiculous but he also knows they're who he may be in embryonic form. He feels the colossal energy they give him - a desire to test himself and discover who he is, more powerful than any intimidation that can come against it. (Maybe that's what Bernard Shaw means by the life-force?)

  He watches John sippin
g his sherry and can see the wisdom of his attitude, as he could see the wisdom of the Latin teacher who, when he had a full page of poetry in this year's school magazine, said to him sneeringly in front of the class, ‘Don't worry, Docherty. It's a phase we all go through. You'll get over it.’ Tam hopes not. He has always found that teacher pathetic. Who would want to be like him? An expert in desiccation who might be able to conjugate amare but don't ask him to feel it. Did you have to kill your dreams to be wise? He remembers a line of Yeats he has rewritten to suit himself in his notebook: ‘Imaginative decrepitude is wisdom.’ He is in no hurry to get there.

  ‘Anyway, it would seem to be an improvement on your last venture. “The Fourteen Stations”. Remember them?’

  Unfortunately, he does. He told John about six months ago that he had found the form for what he wanted to say. His idea was the fourteen stations of the Cross as a symbol of any individual life. He would follow one character's life, dividing it into fourteen phases. John had glanced away, slightly embarrassed.

  ‘It sounds,’ he said so quietly Tam could hardly hear him, ‘like the sort of idea you might get late on a Saturday night when you're stuck for the subject of a sermon.’

  It wasn't long afterwards that Tam had abandoned the project and started on ‘Reflections in a Broken Mirror’.

  ‘Verse?’ John says. ‘Is it set in contemporary times? Just now?’

  ‘Aye. It's about the people around me. Ah suppose. The way they live. I want to try and catch some kind of essence of my life so far. Before it goes.’

  ‘You've probably got time. Do you think blank verse is an ideal medium for expressing working-class life?’

  ‘It's very flexible. It lets you move from the particular to the general. The universal.’

  ‘Hm. But you don't think it's a less than natural medium for writing about working-class life?’