The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  ENTRY FOR THE LOVE-FILES OF THOMAS MATHIESON DOCHERTY: Attempted seduction No. 2,412. (It feels like that anyway.) Name: McMurtrie, Senga. Occupation: brickworker. Distinguishing features: everything. Location of attempted seduction: entrance to disused stables off Soulis Street. Result of attempted seduction: miserable and abject failure. Observations: not so much a one-night stand as a one-night collapse.

  He still can't believe it. Saturday night may be the trauma from which he will never recover. If Sigmund Freud were still alive, it would be Vienna next stop. How could it happen? That's more than twenty-four hours ago but the images still flare in his mind. They flare like cressets. (Cressets is a good word.) Senga jitterbugging like a maenad under the lights of the Grand Hall, her athletic legs defying the tightness of her skirt, while he tries self-consciously to mime a similar abandon, finding it difficult to lose his self-consciousness because dancing with Senga is like dancing under a spotlight; Senga's delicate laughter going off in the street like a maroon, advertising their intimacy; Senga's bared and lamplit breasts, mocking him with their availability.

  The images and the self-disgust weave in and out of his working. He sweats not just with labour but with the dread that Senga will be appearing with the day-shift. He's glad, for two reasons, that Big Billy Farquhar didn't turn up for work tonight. He won't be a witness to Tam's humiliation in front of Senga. And his absence has meant that there's no spare hour for brushing up and thinking relaxedly about things. What Hilly calls ‘the philosopher's hour’ he can do without tonight. It's just alternate tasks: one hour unloading the black bricks from the machine on to the bogey, one hour pushing the loaded bogeys up to the kiln and bringing them back empty. The less room he has for thought the better.

  But thought is the thing you can't turn off. Every step he takes, pushing the heavy bogey along the rails, Saturday night's failure is added to the weight progressively, until he begins to feel as if he's humping a house. Every time Cran appears at the mouth of the kiln, his face carved in contempt. Tam is more inclined to agree with him. What will Cran think when he hears?

  At least at the piece-break Cran doesn't turn up. But The Chair exudes disdain for Tam. As he listens to the others talking, including him occasionally, he thinks how that disdain will spread to them by the morning. Faced with the prospect of losing such limited acceptance as he has among them, of being an object of laughter with them ever after, he realises with surprise how much he will miss the rough texture of their company. They are part of where he comes from and even if it is a small part and one which he may be leaving behind by going to university, he would prefer to leave it with their respect for him intact. He wouldn't wish to shame his relatives by seeming less of the man than he should be. But that shame is coming, he's afraid.

  He remembers a poem Boris taught them in fifth year - by somebody called Brecht, he seems to remember, who Boris said was a German. It wasn't in a book. They were given separate sheets with the poem typed on it. Where did Boris get that poem? Does he speak German? Or did he have someone in the Modern Languages Department translate it for him? Either way, he appreciates belatedly the creative eccentricity of Boris in wanting to introduce them to influences beyond Tennyson and Wordsworth. ‘Questions of a worker who reads’, the poem was called. It has given Tam a working title for his piece-break: ‘Elegy for the reputation of a worker who reads.’ Everything that happens has a special poignancy for him, a feeling that this may be the last time he will be able to be, however marginally, a part of this.

  When he is rinsing out his cup at the end of the break, having spoken only a few words, and Jack Laidlaw says, ‘You all right, Tam?’, he thinks how embarrassed Jack will be for him a few hours from now.

  ‘Is it Cran?’ Jack asks.

  Tam shakes his head.

  ‘If it is,’ Jack says, ‘Maybe Ah could help ye tae hold him down while we both run away.’

  The smile freezes on Tam's lips. Working again, he wonders how he came to get involved with Senga. He blames last Friday morning.

  That morning, she came in as usual for her day-shift as they came off the night-shift. For her work, she affects dungarees, a variety of checked shirts and neat little hobnailed boots. Those are the busiest dungarees Tam has ever seen. The seat of them records every wiggle and their apron front is a jostle of unseen delights. Her shirt, always three buttons down, shows half an inch of the narrow gap between her breasts, like the start of a road he would love to travel. But it would be a dangerous journey, he has decided. For the voice of Senga, breath of the dragon that guards the maiden, comes out at all-comers like a blow-torch.

  ‘Fuck off, you arsehole. You couldny get a ride in a brothel wi’ fifty quid an' a doctor's line.'

  This remark, which Tam takes to be a rejection, has greeted Big Billy's deliberately clumsy attempt to help her off with her black tailored jacket, an oddly stylish part of her ensemble, presumably a remnant of an outfit she formerly wore for places other than the brickwork. Big Billy laughs uproariously. He seems to have decided, with a subtlety of interpretation which eludes Tam, that this is some kind of verbal foreplay.

  ‘Ye want me to help you off wi’ somethin' else?' he asks, smiling rakishly.

  ‘Ye couldny help yerself tae a wank.’

  ‘Ye want tae bet? You can watch.’

  ‘Ah'd rather watch the Interlude.’

  Senga's reference, to those fill-in moments on television when they show you things like a potter's wheel or a kitten playing with a ball of wool, may have been lost on some of the others, many of whom don't yet have television. But not much else is being lost. The people on the changing shifts are standing around, whooping and cheering. Such merry sexual banter fairly relieves the gloom of the working day.

  Senga, surrounded by so many masculine presences, is completely unintimidated. She tosses her dyed blonde hair and hangs up her jacket. She turns her boldly attractive face towards the company and the blue eyes, which look as if they could stare into the brightest sun and never flinch, scan them. When she gets to Tam, she winks.

  ‘Ah-ha!’

  ‘It's young Tam she fancies.’

  ‘Hard luck, Billy. Go tae the end o’ the queue.'

  Of such casual moments is disaster made. Tam thinks as he pushes the bogey towards the kiln. If only he hadn't seen her last night at the dancing.

  He had seen her in the Grand Hall often enough before, discreet as a carnival, seeming to bounce off the edges of the place, as if the biggest public hall in Graithnock was too small to contain her sexual energy. Unlike some of the other girls, who would dance with each other in a lean hour, Senga was always partnered by a male. She was in great demand. In the stag line, where boys stood around exchanging worldly wisdom that was as foetid as a boxer's pants, the word was that she was a certainty. Tam had heard one plooky man of the world brag that she had given him a gam, which Tam had recently discovered meant that the woman did it to you with her mouth. Standing with a face like a plook factory, the suave one explained that that was him finished with her. The hypocrisy of it had made Tam want to vomit. How could you share something like that with a woman and then accuse her of it? Gratitude was more in order.

  Watching her leave with yet another boy in tow, he had more than once wished it was him. But he was afraid of what being with Senga might involve. Woman at work. Ego-crushing in progress. She seemed so frontal about sex, he wondered if she carried a measuring-tape.

  But this night is different. It is one of those nights of rhythmic melancholy which only the dancing can provide. He watches the gently rotating bodies on the floor, a shifting organism of dreams and longings, and he feels a kind of prospective nostalgia for these times. He won't always be doing this. Going to university seems a complete irrelevance. This is where he belongs, among these people.

  Even Margaret Inglis feels like a mirage he has been pursuing. She comes from a different place from him. And Maddie Fitzpatrick's address might as well be the moon. Who is he trying to kid? U
niversity? Writing? He should keep working in the brickwork and learn just to enjoy the life around him. He sees Senga. Tonight she is wearing a tight black skirt and a white mohair sweater. He remembers the way she winked at him. He asks her to dance.

  The night goes into the fourth dimension. Something magical happens. Moving into the energy field that is Senga transforms the Grand Hall. It becomes an exotic place. The yellow, distempered walls have the sheen of muslin in the bright lights. The ordinariness of going to the dancing breaks up into weird fragments. The overweight female singer, who is reputed to do more for the band than sing (an allegation Tam knows from Michael to be nonsense), looks to him tonight like someone out of a Hollywood film, a bit like a Rita Hayworth who's been overeating. Seen through the vitality Senga imparts to him, the other girls' faces are more exciting than any make-up could make them.

  In a whirl of vivid impressions the rest of the evening happens. Senga's inhabiting of the moment is infectious. The moments pass in a dizzying blur until they find themselves outside in a lamplit street. A man he has seen come into the brickwork in the morning with Senga's shift shouts across the road at them, something Tam can't make out but knows is suggestive.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Senga calls merrily.

  She wants a poke of chips and a bottle of Irn Bru. Senga comes from outside Graithnock and he is pleased to be able to tell her that he knows of a chip shop which will still be open. It makes him seem like a man of the world. He feels like Cary Grant.

  (‘I know a little Italian place.’)

  Eating as they walk, they come to the arches at Soulis Street, where there used to be stables. They toast each other with some Irn Bru drunk from the bottle, which Tam lays on the ground at their feet. And, in the shadows, they begin.

  Senga does not go in for preliminaries. As he kisses her, he feels her open coat slide off her shoulders. The mohair sweater rises softly under his knuckles. Senga's right hand moves away from his neck and her brassiere pops. The dim lamplight from the street makes a holy picture of her tits. As he gasps for breath, touching them, she unbuttons his trousers deftly and takes out his cock, which has been trying to butt its way out for the last ten minutes. It is big and hard. He hopes it's big, anyway. At least Senga didn't have to search for it. ‘Oh,’ she says. She tugs at it with her right hand while her left hand expertly rolls her skirt up her thighs to her waist and he is stunned to realise that she isn't wearing any knickers. Whether it is the exciting shock of the realisation that causes the disaster or the impatient wait his cock has had, chafing in the darkness of his trousers, or the way Senga's hand is kneading it like dough, he can't be sure. But he knows that disaster is imminent. He knows it's on its way. He is going to co-o-o-o-ome.

  He tries to jerk himself away from Senga to save face, if that's what you call it. But Senga's hand follows him wherever he tries to go and a disobedient part of him doesn't want to leave her palm. It likes it there. And, as her hand guides him towards that bush between her legs by some instinctive radar, like a bird towards its nest, it happens. He is coming.

  He can't believe it. But he's coming all right. And how do you persuade spunk to turn back? He comes like a small hosepipe somebody is dancing on. Here a spurt, there a spurt, everywhere a spurt-spurt. He looks on aghast as his cock takes on a life of its own. It is as if his sperm, having spent years of pent-up frustration, come rushing out like lemmings, not caring that their instinct is an expression of futility. Little kamikaze bastards. They've watched so many of their mates entombed in toilet paper, you would've thought they might learn sense. But no.

  (‘Fuck it, boys. It's a chance, isn't it? We're almost in range of an actual human pussy. Let's go for it.’)

  They do, fatally. All they achieve is to litter the inside of Senga's new, tight, black skirt with their corpses, like an assault force that didn't get beyond the foreshore. They lie bleaching there.

  ‘Ya silly bastard. Tam,’ Senga says. ‘What'll Ah tell ma feyther?’

  She discusses these things with her father?

  (‘Hopeless again the night. Dad. Another premature ejaculation.’

  ‘Never mind, love. There's more pricks in the sea than ever came out of it. Ye'll meet a good screw one of these days. Never fear.’)

  As he pushes another bogey into the dawn, the sun comes up on him like his personal searchlight. His shame at the moment is just hidden memories, sores in the mind - Senga taking her knickers (appropriately white as far as he is concerned) from her handbag and covering her unmolested crotch - her niceness to him at the station where he takes her to catch her train - the forgotten bottle of Irn Bru which must still be lying there, marking the spot like a plaque for which he knows the inscription: Tam Docherty was here and might as well not have been - traces of mohair on his jacket in the morning. But his shame will soon be as visible to everyone as facial scabs.

  His plan to get out at the end of the night before the day-shift gathers doesn't succeed. Most of them are there before he reaches the rest area to collect his jacket and satchel. The man who shouted at them in the street has obviously been telling the others what he saw.

  ‘Ah-ha!’ somebody shouts as he comes in.

  ‘It's Errol Flynn.’

  ‘Saturday night with Senga.’

  ‘There's a reporter fae the News o’ the World here.'

  ‘Gonny give us the blow-by-blow. Tam?’

  Senga is among them, unruffled as ever. What has she been telling them? Discretion has never been her conspicuous talent. She waits for the noise to settle.

  ‘Ah'll tell ye somethin’,' she says, and his stomach develops a chill. The others are statues of prurience. ‘He's mair of a man than any of you lot'll ever be. And that's the truth.’

  ‘Whoo!’

  ‘Show us yer credentials, big yin.’

  ‘Senga should know.’

  She does but she isn't telling. She winks theatrically at him for everyone to see and a legend without substance is fully formed. He can't pretend it's him but at least it gives him camouflage till he tries to work out who he is.

  He smiles at her and the smile is misconstrued by the others. But he knows what it means. Senga may have a tongue as rough as a scrubbing-brush. She may treat sex like fast food. But, as far as he is concerned, she's class.

  IF HE HAD BEEN CAPTAIN COOK, he would have named a small island after her - preferably one with a turbulent stretch of water to the north, to be called McMurtrie Sound.

  COLETTE WAS DRIVING with her usual expertise. She effortlessly overtook a man in a Peugeot and Tom caught a glimpse of his distraught face, incredulous that a woman had passed him. He would probably have to see his analyst.

  ‘You will be returning to Grenoble by the way of Paris?’ she said.

  ‘No other way, is there?’

  ‘It is the only reason?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You speak as if it is not done by choice. I thought you loved Paris.’

  ‘I do. I could eat it with a teaspoon.’

  ‘Maybe we can see you then. Shortly.’

  ‘That would be good. Then you and I could do more joint work in murdering each other's language.’

  ‘You're not thus bad.’

  ‘So bad. I'm worse. I'm like the English shop where they had the sign in the window saying “Ici on parle français” and when the French tourist went in and asked, “Qui c'est qui parle français?” the man behind the counter said, “Je”.’

  ‘Yes. That sound like you.’

  ‘And that definitely sound like you.’

  ‘Anyways. When you and Gill come to Paris next time. Nous pouvons aller encore au cinoche avec Michel. Quelle joie pour toil Tu aimerais bien ça, n ‘est-ce pas?’

  She looked across at him and winked and began to enjoy the driving. He laughed. They never let him forget that one. Michel had arranged a special treat for the four of them at a cinema near Deux Magots. He kept refusing to tell them what they would see, just that they had to be there at half past midn
ight. When he and Gill caught up with them, Michel spirited them into the cinema, still secretive. Tom couldn't believe it when the credits rolled. It was a Sonja Henie film made in 1942. It was crap on ice. The only alleviation of the misery was Tyrone Power. He was young and starting out and trying things. His energy crackled. But even he wasn't enough to dull the pain. When the lights went up, Tom made to go. Michel leaned across Colette to restrain him.

  ‘There is more,’ he said.

  ‘More what?’

  ‘More of this.’

  ‘Sonja Henie pictures?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Three Sonja Henie films at a sitting? What is this, Michel? Suicide by Sonja Henie? Come on.’

  ‘You will enjoy,’ Michel said. ‘Observe the motifs. One film is as good as another when you do that. Just observe.’

  ‘It's shite.’

  ‘Tom,’ Gill was saying. ‘Behave and watch the film.’

  ‘He is right,’ Colette was saying. ‘I tell Michel all the time. Films like this are just merde.’

  Sensing support, Tom pressed on.

  ‘Listen, Michel. Don't gimme all this structuralist stuff. It comes down to a simple fact. If the pictures were combat, Sonja Henie would be a war criminal.’

  He liked that but nobody else did.

  ‘Sh!’

  ‘Pssst!’

  He looked round at the people who were mouthing at him.

  ‘What's your problem? You want tae shoot the doctor? Ah'm tryin’ tae save you lot from brain death.'

  ‘Monsieur! S'il vous plaît. Nous voulons voir lefilm. Si vous ne voulez pas le voir, vous n'avez qu'à partir. Nous voulons voir le film.’