The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  ‘What fuckin’ film?' Tom was muttering on his way out.

  Twenty minutes later. Gill joined him in the bistro. She ordered a coffee and shook her head at him. He apologised.

  ‘Not to me,’ Gill said.

  ‘To Michel?’

  ‘He paid for the tickets.’

  ‘Bought the tickets? But that's like apologising to the Marquis de Sade for leaving in the middle of a whipping.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Is he still watching them?’ ‘Yes. Colette isn't too happy to watch.’

  ‘She's a good judge. Look. Let's go back to Haussmann. You're only here for a week, you know. I'll apologise in the morning. Honest.’

  She seemed to be pondering.

  ‘Well. There are certain things that will have to be done at Haussmann. I'll decide what they are. How is it said in French? Pour expier?’

  He smiled.

  ‘Some of that penance can be great,’ he said.

  But when he phoned Michel later that day to apologise, he realised that he had been set up. Besides wanting to see the films, Michel had wanted the entertainment of Tom's reactions to them. He regarded the experience as some kind of triumph of Gallic culture over Scottish lack of subtlety. You mean effeteness, Tom suggested.

  It became a continuing wrangle between them. Michel said Tom didn't know how to look at films. Tom said Michel didn't know how not to look at them and, if they put Warhol's eight hours of the Empire State Building in front of him, he would watch it as avidly as Le jour se leve. Michel said Tom didn't understand filmic form. Tom said Michel appeared never to have heard of content. Tom hated the way films were edited these days in defiance of any feasible credibility. Michel said that was structuralism. Tom said it was self-indulgent lack of talent.

  Michel eventually developed a theory, as he would, to explain what he called Tom's ‘neurotic response to the performing arts’. He developed the theory from ‘two cultural traumas in your experience’. Unfortunately, Tom had told him about one of them.

  He had explained that the first opera he ever attended was in English. He had heard snippets of other operas before that and enjoyed the music. But when he discovered the banality of what they were singing, he couldn't believe it. There was a moment in the opera where a man and woman were singing about closing a door. ‘Close the door.’ ‘No, I will not close the door.’ ‘Will you please close the door?’ ‘No. The door stays open.’ That sort of thing. Tom said he had wanted to shout, ‘Shut the fuckin’ door an' let's get on with it,' as if he were at a football match. To hear what those supposedly impressive people were actually singing to each other, he said, was like eavesdropping on the conversation of yuppies: all that opulent style fuelled by an articulacy out of a shopping catalogue - off-the-peg emotions, interchangeable cliches of response, style without individual content.

  Michel pounced. Tom didn't believe in art for art's sake. No, Tom said, he believed in art for fuck's sake, because it was so necessary it shouldn't be squandered as mere fodder for critics. Yes, but that made him miss the point of art, which could only function effectively within its own parameters. Tom kept demanding that it relate to ‘real’ life. Every time art invited him to come out of his working-class prejudices and enjoy it on its own self-referential terms, Tom panicked and retreated back into those prejudices, found an excuse for denying the self-containment of the art, invaded it with disbelief. Anyway, Tom said, he would stick to listening to Mozart on tape rather than buy tickets for Cosi fan tutte.

  (Dear W.A. Mozart,

  What does it feel like to take down God's dictation?)

  The second experience Michel used against him was something Tom had told Colette and Colette had passed on to Michel. Colette and he had been talking about great moments in cinema and he had said, only half jokingly, that one of his most memorable cinematic moments had happened in the Forum Picture House when he was a boy. He couldn't even remember the title of the film or the name of anybody who was in it. But it was a film about people travelling in the jungle and lost in an amazing density of foliage, the sort of film where someone says, ‘It's too quiet,’ or a native bearer mutters, ‘Drums say no go on, Bwana.’ The camera was tracking slowly through the foliage. The silence was utter, when there was the most sudden and chilling scream Tom had ever heard. It lifted him clean out of his seat, along with many others. The cinema was in panic, nobody more so than Tom. Then he realised why. The scream was real. It came from a local man who was well known for taking fits at the pictures. That moment of an imaginary scene peopled by a real living scream had haunted his sense of what art was ever since.

  ‘Of course,’ Michel had said. ‘Art is not enough for you. You must be always disrupting it with the real.’

  ‘No,’ Tom said, ‘It's just that, if you're alive, it always is being disrupted by the real.’

  Tom had pretended outrage at Colette for giving away his secrets to the enemy. Looking at her now as she drove, he smiled and decided he was glad he hadn't told her about some of his early experiences of the theatre. That would really have given Michel evidence for the prosecution. Those occasions had sometimes felt like a play within a play, or maybe part-play, part-unrehearsed happening, distorting the original into a hybrid.

  ‘What do you think about?’ Colette said.

  The Merchant of Menace

  THE SCENE IS THE HALL OF A JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL IN GRAITHNOCK. It is a wet Tuesday afternoon. On the stage a play is in progress. The audience is a motley throng of junior pupils from various schools in Graithnock. The actors are contending with an atmosphere which might be described as seething. Not all the dialogue is restricted to the stage.

  BASSANIO: In Belmont is a lady richly left

  FIRST ARSEHOLE IN THE THRONG: Ah'm for a feel at that yin on the road oot.

  BASSANIO: And she is fair and fairer than that word.

  SECOND ARSEHOLE IN THE THRONG: Teller to show us her tits.

  BASSANIO: Of wondrous virtues. Sometimes from her eyes.

  FIRST ARSEHOLE IN THE THRONG: Show us yer tits.

  BASSANIO: I did receive fair speechless messages.

  FIRST ARSEHOLE IN THE THRONG: See when we're filin' oot, Ah'm for a grab at your tits.

  BASSANIO: And many Jasons come in quest of her.

  SECOND ARSEHOLE IN THE THRONG: Hey, you. Skinny bastard. We're gonny cut your heid aff.

  FIRST ARSEHOLE IN THE THRONG: An' play at fitba wi' it.

  FIRST AND SECOND ARSEHOLES IN THE THRONG: Ooh, OOh, OOh. Oooh, ooh, ooh. Big skinny bastard's heid cut aff.

  PORTIA: By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.

  She's not the only one. Tam Docherty sits in a crossfire of contradictory awarenesses that are exhausting his concentration. He isn't sure but he thinks he may be the big skinny bastard due for beheading. It is not a reassuring thought. But at least he can safely assume he isn't the one whose tits are going to be grabbed. They would need tweezers for that. He is trying desperately to focus on the play but the guttural whispers are going off all around him like sniper fire and Shakespeare's words stagger across his devastated attention, tattered and bleeding, grandeur in retreat from the assaults of his own guerrilla culture.

  He has read the play in school this year, his second year at Graithnock Academy, and the bits he understood have fascinated him. When he was told they were being marched to one of the local junior secondary schools to see their first performance of a Shakespeare play, he had been excited. But the reality of the experience has no resemblance to his expectations of it. He has not imagined that watching his first play would be a dangerous experience or that so much of his time would be taken up by planning his escape at the end of it. For they will simply be dismissed into the playground when this is over. The two mad whisperers sound like part of a gang. If it's him they're after, he'd better find handers or make a quick exit.

  Also, the performance of the play has thrown him completely. He cannot understand at first what is wrong. Then he realises that
all the actors are women. The jackets and shirts couldn't fool anybody and the voices are a dead give-away. He cannot imagine why this is the case. As the play progresses, it isn't only the haranguing voices around him that destroy the pleasure. One simple fact keeps intruding on his thoughts, defying his belief in the play. Bassanio has bigger tits than Portia.

  A Streetcar Named Backfire

  THE SCENE IS THE PALACE THEATRE IN GRAITHNOCK. The time is evening on a Friday in 1955. Tam Docherty is one of a very sparse audience. A summer repertory company is in residence at the Palace. He has been coming most Fridays with dutiful aestheticism and mixed feelings. He has seen Night Must Fall, Dangerous Corner, The Admirable Crichton and Music at Night. Tonight is more interesting but the audience remains intimately small. He feels he knows most of them by now. He sits in the same almost empty row as usual and the same middle-aged woman sits along from him. She always brings a bag of boilings with her. During the first few scenes, the sound of crunching sweeties accompanies the action like static on a radio. Then the play begins to come over loud and clear, for the woman is asleep, the poke of sweeties resting on her lap. Tam thinks that this is probably the only place she can find peace and quiet from the weans. He has developed an almost filial affection for her. Asleep, she looks like a vernacular version of an earth-mother, heavy body filling the seat comfortably, slightly tousled head gently askew on her neck. Awake, she has a face like a well-stoked fire. You feel warmed by its presence. Over the past few weeks they have been exchanging facial reactions at the end of each play - raised eyebrows, noddings. Her usual comment is. That wis good, son. Eh?' Presumably her critical criteria relate to the quality of sleep induced. Given some of the performances. Tam can see the validity of her terms. Tonight she has taken longer than usual to get to sleep and he wonders if that means a good review or a bad one. Does that mean that she is enjoying it so much that she is prepared to postpone sleep for a little or that the play is annoying her so much she can't get to sleep? The question is rendered irrelevant by her gentle silence. Tom is relieved, for a part of his mind, against his will, has been concerned about her critical insomnia. He has almost been tempted to tell the actors to keep their voices down. Now he can relax and enjoy the progress of the action. It holds him for scene after scene until—

  BLANCHE: What do you want?

  MUCH: What I been missing all summer.

  BLANCHE: Then marry me, Mitch!

  MITCH: I don't think I want to marry you any more.

  BLANCHE: No?

  MITCH: You're not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother.

  BLANCHE: Go away, then. Get out of here before I start screaming fire! Get out of here quick before I start screaming fire. Fire! Fire! Fire!

  MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN: Holy Christ!

  She lurches to her feet. There is the deafening sound of scattered boilings crashing on the uncarpeted floor under the seats in front of her. They rattle ominously for seconds, like departing thunder. Combined with the electric tension on the stage, it is a genuinely heart-stopping moment. For Tam it has an almost supernatural feel to it, like being caught in a science-fiction film called The Invasion of the Ball-Bearings. His startled eyes catch sight of the woman already out into the passageway and heading for the exit. She freezes suddenly and blinks around, locating reality. The curtain has come down on that scene and is now going up on the next one. Tam observes the woman standing in the half-light and staring at the stage. She is checking things out.

  BLANCHE: How about taking a swim. A moonlight swim at the old rock quarry? If anyone's sober enough to drive a car! Ha-ha!

  The Ha-Ha seems to do it. Not many people say Ha-ha when they're caught in a conflagration. The woman tiptoes back to her place and begins to scrabble under the empty seats in front for her boilings. She manages to salvage a few. She seems calm now. She glances along at Tam, who has found her behaviour more riveting than the play, and hisses, ‘Christ, son. Ah thought the place was on fire there.’

  Before the play ends, she manages another short nap. Tam tries to focus on the stage again. But the play is gone. He likes this play. He will always like this play. But tonight, for the last two scenes, he is seized by a prolonged paroxysm of the giggles. It reminds him of the time his Auntie Bella announced to the family that his Uncle Davie had broken his leg in two places trying to change a light-bulb and Tam thought he would die of laughter. He couldn't stop laughing even while his father skelped his head. He was sent outside until he could learn to behave like a human being. He went out the back and rolled around silently on the doorstep like an evil spirit unfit for human company. Later that evening, he heard his mother and father laughing between themselves and his father was saying, ‘Wee bugger. Ah thought he was gonny set me off. Ah had tae send him out. Bella was that serious.’

  Now he is again experiencing that worrying tendency in him to laugh at serious matters. It's like a neurotic reaction. Solemnity provokes hilarity. While Stanley Kowalski rapes Blanche Dubois and Blanche is led away to the nuthouse, he is crouched down behind the seat in front, heaving in an agony of suppressed laughter. Tears are running from his eyes. He is whimpering and moaning for mercy, praying for the play to end. He doesn't care if they all rape one another. Just so long as they let him out.

  When the curtain finally comes down and rises again and the scattered onlookers are erect to applaud the cast, he cannot stand up. He is rocking in his seat in helpless laughter. A man and a woman a few rows ahead turn round and stare at him disgustedly. This makes him worse. He cannot explain to them that, much as he respects the actors' performances, they remain mere supporting players to his unofficial star of the evening, the woman who had performed so convincingly her own small drama - Behaviour in a Theatre which is on Fire. He notices that she hasn't wakened up yet. He manages to calm himself with deep breathing and moves along the row and touches her respectfully on the shoulder.

  ‘Excuse me, missus. That's it finished.’

  The eyes click open brightly. That lovely warm face looks up at him.

  ‘Oh, thanks, son.’

  He waits for her to get up and move out into the passageway. As he is passing her in the aisle, she speaks again.

  ‘No’ quite as good the night, son. Eh?'

  He makes a muffled noise and keeps his head averted and stumbles out, starting to laugh again and finding it impossible to agree with her.

  Buchanan

  HE WOULD GO TO THE TRAVERSE THEATRE and see the play. Like almost any impulse to act which he felt at the moment, no matter how simple, it became not so much a decision as the blueprint for a decision. The paralysis of the will he had been experiencing for some time meant that he found himself submitting anything he thought he might do to a kind of committee of motivations. His spontaneity had gone into coma. Just to keep alive the justification for doing anything, he seemed to need to have reasons beyond mere instinct, since his instincts were largely in suspension. The making of a cup of tea might be preceded by a complicated inner debate concerning whether he really wanted tea, how long it would take to make it, whether in the process he would lose the spoor of the past he was hunting in his head. The more reasons he could find, like tubes attached to a patient in intensive care, the better the chance he had of keeping himself functioning as more than a mind.

  So, as he got ready to go out, he tried to work out why he was going out. He shaved with the last of his disposable blades and the soft flesh under his chin told him he had better buy a new pack. Grimacing in the mirror, he told himself that going to the play would be an act of homage to the fighting career of Ken Buchanan.

  He had always admired Buchanan. He regarded him as the greatest professional boxer Scotland had ever produced, a man who had what only the great fighters have, the ability to enlarge in crisis, to ignite the reflexes under pressure, not to fold. Then, as he searched for the sweater that looked least in need of washing, he felt returning to feed on his small purpose the self-doubts his love of boxing had always had to
deal with.

  When he was twelve or thirteen, his father had taken him to Firhill in Glasgow to watch Peter Keenan win the European bantamweight title against Luis Romero of Spain. Something which he would often wish to disown had surfaced in him and was never quite to go away, a domesticated darkness, a barking black dog no logic could ever quite muzzle. That day encapsulated a continuing ambivalence in his nature.

  Keenan had been brilliant. Romero was reputed to hit like a kicking horse and Keenan had no great power of punch. Yet for fifteen three-minute rounds he neutralised Romero, displaying a stirring array of skills, like a man ballet-dancing among bombs without once losing his nerve or the grace of his line. There was something he had found too moving in that to be denied.

  But the next fight had horrified him. It was between a blond man from the North of England and a black man from Nigeria. In the first round the black man had threatened to overwhelm the blond one, with the crowd shouting him on. From the second round onwards, until it was stopped in the fourth, the black man had been mercilessly beaten and the crowd bayed like an amphitheatre. Crouched far up in the stand and often staring at his feet, he didn't want to be there. Ever since then, his fascination with boxing had lived queasily between visceral thrill and a desire to distance himself from a part of himself.

  He put on the black leather jacket to go with the black jeans. Clothes might not make the man but maybe they could hold him together. Still unsure about going out, he decided maybe he was testing himself against Michel's accusation of philistinism in relation to the performing arts.

  Once in the theatre, he had to admit that he wasn't answering the accusation too effectively. The play seemed to him fair enough and the acting all right, although three people had walked out noisily, as if their departure were a significant comment. He could never do that. It seemed so hurtful to the actors. His method was simply not to come back in after the interval. (He was glad it was novels he had been ambitious to write and not plays. Authors didn't hear their books being slammed shut all over the country.)