The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Across the room,’ she says. ‘It's not my room. It's a room I don't know. Across the room there's a wardrobe. Hanging on the wardrobe door is my favourite dress. It's a dress I had when I was small. I mean, I did really have this dress. When I was about nine, I think. Blue with white roses.’

  She shudders infinitesimally, faintest ripple on the surface of still water. As she remembers, the hunching of her shoulders is barely perceptible, a small and heart-touching gesture of self-protection.

  ‘All round about me. On the bed. There's these huge, fat rats. I'm afraid to move. My head's over to one side. There's a wound on my neck. Blood's running out on to the bed. One of the rats is feeding on the blood. Its nose is next to my neck but it's not touching it. Another rat is resting against my leg. At the top of my calf. I can sense other ones round about me.’

  Sitting on the bed, she looks terribly bereft. Her beautiful legs, revealed by the rucked skirt as far as her suspenders, seem contradicted by her mood. They are a come-on she can't help but does not mean.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know that if I move. The smallest movement, and somehow the rats will attack me. I know that if I can stay absolutely still, until the blood stops flowing, I'll be all right. The way my head is lying. It's turned away from the window and towards the wardrobe. I'm watching the dress. It's the original size it was when it fitted me as a small girl. And I know it'll never fit me again. I'm crying. Very quietly, so that it doesn't make my head move. The tears are running across my nose and face and on to the bed. I want to really sob. To let my body shake with it. But I can't. Because, if I do, the rats will get me.’

  She looks at him sitting on the bed beside her. She has remembered he is here. His left hand is resting on her thigh. She lays her own right hand on top. He takes his hand out from under and covers her hand with his. Downstairs, the other party goers are rocking around the clock. Put your glad rags on and join me, hon.

  ‘It's a strange dream, isn't it?’ she says.

  He softly strokes the back of her hand with his thumb, as if it were an answer.

  ‘It ends there?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes. That's when I woke up. What do you think it means?’

  He doesn't know. But he knows that, if he's anywhere in there, he's one of the rats. It's not a happy feeling.

  ‘Maybe,’ he says, unable to resist bringing the weight of his considerable experience to bear upon the question, ‘It could be that you're frightened by your own sexualness. It could be saying that. The frock. You want to go back. That was safer. What ye are now. People might abuse it.’

  He feels as if he's bearing witness against himself. He had been busy only with her body. He had had her skirt far enough up to show the white triangular shimmer of her pants as she lay back. He had her blouse unbuttoned and her brassiere loosened. He had been frustrated and annoyed when she suddenly sat up and seemed upset and wanted to tell him about her dream. Jesus, had he resented that bloody dream. Nobody invited dreams to the party. He had known what would happen. And it had. Listening to that dream was a good way to lose an erection.

  But that resentment has somehow evaporated in the listening. He looks at the taut, protuberant breasts with the brassiere rumpled above them. He sees the helplessly attractive legs. But now he is also seeing past the parts. He sees her. She is as insecure and vulnerable as he is. Just because she looks so perfectly complete, it doesn't mean she is. This isn't someone just to make fantasies from. This is someone to care for.

  He puts his arms around her and they hold each other. She is clasping tight.

  ‘You okay?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes. Thanks.’

  He's not sure what the thanks are for. For understanding? For not making love? Then he realises that this is making love. It comes as a mind-opening revelation to him. This is making love. You don't have to be dismantling a girl to nakedness to be making love to her.

  He thinks about the endless talk about girls between his friends and him over the last few years. Which of those less-than-trustworthy reporters back from the front line of experience ever bragged about how good it had been to hold each other? Which of the eager inquisitors ever asked, mouth open in anticipation, ‘What was the cuddling like?’ They had been programmed to assess their sexual experience by a method as mechanical as that of a school examination: breasts covered but touched (elementary) -25 per cent; breast naked (secondary) - 50 per cent; pudendum naked (advanced) - 75 per cent; intercourse total (graduation) -100 per cent. (Pleasure experienced by the woman will not be taken into account in any of these sections.)

  This is good. It is good just to hold her close and feel the soft warmth of her body and know the gentle rise and falling of her breathing. An amazing awareness arrives. He feels like a man. More than at any of the not very numerous times he's managed to stand up to a would-be hard-case at the dancing, more than at any of the times he's managed to coerce a girl to let her breasts out of her brassiere in the shadows of the Burns Monument in the Kay Park, he feels like a man. He may not know what a man is but he knows it has something to do with moments like this. It's a good feeling.

  This is one way of making love. He's certainly not giving up the attempt to do it in at least one other way he can think of but he will postpone it for just now. Don Juan is off duty for the night. He just wants to nurse her through the memory of her dream. He just wants to be a shell for her hurt.

  They hold and kiss each other softly.

  ‘It'll be all right,’ he says.

  How he can tell, he wouldn't know. But the certainty arrives from somewhere and he voices it.

  ‘You feeling all right?’ he asks

  ‘I'm all right,’ and she kisses him.

  He eases her brassiere down over her breasts. He reaches his arms round her and hooks her brassiere at the back. He buttons her blouse for her. Reverse seduction. Is that ‘The Last Post’ he hears being played for the death of his machismo? They smile at each other.

  ‘You want to go down?’

  She nods.

  ‘We've been a while,’ she says. ‘I hope they don't know what we've been up to.’

  ‘Discussin’ dreams? Ah won't tell them if you don't.'

  PUT YOUR GLAD RAGS ON and join me, hon.

  We'll have some fun when the clock strikes one.

  THE MUSIC IS THE PULSE OF THE EVENING. The record has been playing continuously. No other song is allowed. If someone tries to put something else on the record-player, the murmuring threats of riot are heard in the room. Bill Haley and the Comets rule.

  Something has happened here, something new. Tam can feel it. This is the night rock ‘n’ roll came to town. A group of motley teenagers who came here as vague and uncertain individuals have become a sect. Faces shine with Pentecostal fervour. The dancing has turned wildly experimental. People gyrate and gesture with laughing awkwardness, sometimes falling delightedly in their attempts to meet the music. New postures are constructed out of sound, form like blueprints in the air, and the young bodies contort desperately in their efforts to fit themselves into the shapes they hear coming at them from the music. It's open day at the zoo of the imagination. Let all those caged-up creatures out to play.

  Coming downstairs with Margaret, Tam feels as if they have gone upstairs for half an hour and missed a revolution. They pass instantly from the self-conscious personal worries of their intimacy into a communal frenzy of unthinking abandon, without a decompression chamber. Tam starts to dance jerkily, as if he has the bends. Margaret joins him. The room goes into orbit. They are travelling to a new place. As they part and dance with others and as the evening spins further and further away from the assumptions they all brought to it, Tam talks and dances and goes into amazed reveries and stands in the kitchen and walks in the garden and sits on the stairs and keeps meeting people he knows who look and talk like strangers, suddenly interestingly unknown.

  He finds Jack Laidlaw drinking with the cat. He is sitting on the steps outside the back door. He is dri
nking a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. He has found a saucer into which he is pouring beer for the cat.

  ‘Come on,’ Jack is saying. ‘Drink up. Cuddles.’

  The cat seems to be more interested in the elaborate stroking Jack is giving it than in the beer, although it does go back to the saucer from time to time.

  ‘That's the stuff. Cuddles. You wire in. Ye're gettin’ the hang of it.'

  Tam brings out a kitchen chair and puts it in the pathway beside the door and sits facing Jack. It seems like the most natural thing in the world to do. He thinks, with some surprise, that Jack doesn't look sixteen. He doesn't look like any age particularly. His handsome face appears both wise and naive. Maybe the beer does that. The amount he has had surfaces in his eyes when he looks up at his new visitor, smudging their blueness.

  ‘Tom. Hullo. Tom, this is Cuddles. Cuddles, Tom. What a name for a cat, eh? Cuddles. Cuddles, the tom cat. Like puttin’ a frock on a tiger . . . That's why Ah'm givin' it the beer,' he adds mysteriously.

  They talk. They agree that this has the edge on Avondale Brickwork. A girl Tam doesn't know appears in the doorway behind Jack and puts her hands over his eyes.

  ‘Guess who,’ she says.

  Jack sits without saying anything long enough for them to think he has fallen asleep.

  ‘Come on,’ the girl says.

  ‘Rhonda Fleming,’ Jack says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, sorry. Ah'm waitin’ for Rhonda.'

  ‘Ah'll tell Jennifer you said that,’ the girl says, and goes away.

  ‘Rhonda Fleming?’ he says.

  ‘What?’ Jack says.

  ‘Rhonda Fleming? You fancy big Rhonda as well?’

  He means as well as he does. But, given his heightened state of mind in which he is catching the ambiguities of his remarks even as he makes them, he realises that, in his own case, it could mean as well as every other woman in the world.

  ‘Dream woman,’ Jack says simply.

  Immediately they are improvising a duet in praise of Rhonda Fleming. Her tits are perfect, imagine looking at that face across the table in the morning, and do you remember that time in Build My Gallows High when . . .

  ‘That's amazin,’ Jack says.

  They stare at each other as if they have only just discovered they have the same parentage. Jack's beer is finished and they share Tam's bottle.

  ‘Ah've got to practise,’ Jack says. This is the first time Ah've been guttered. But Ah think Ah'll get better at it.'

  They go on to discuss Tam's going to university in a couple of weeks. Jack sits his highers next year. He's not sure about university. He'll see how he does in the highers. They talk about what they might eventually do. Jack wants to travel. Tam admits that he wants to write. It seems all right to say it here, where they sit out of range of the sniping pragmatism of common sense. The possibilities seem endless. From the house. Bill Haley and the Comets are still evoking wild vistas.

  ‘Tom,’ Jack says seriously. ‘Ah like you. Come and we'll be friends for life?’

  He agrees. No problem, deal done. They shake hands solemnly. The handshake is appropriate not just as a gesture of a compact made. It is like meeting each other for the first time. Tam has known Jack slightly at school and then at the brickwork but he had never imagined how much they had in common. He leaves the rest of the beer with Jack and goes for a walk in the garden.

  ‘Come back an’ see me any time,' Jack says. ‘Now that ye know where Ah live. But bring somethin’ for ma cat. Ah always like visitors to bring somethin' for Cuddles.'

  Vegetation is wonderful, isn't it? Thirty yards from the house the music whispers and the smell of grass and leaves makes him feel different and alone and distant. He inhales a dark and other sense of himself. Finding a new awareness, he draws the scent up through his nostrils, nature's cocaine. Some day he may try the chemical stuff, when he's living in America maybe. But for now just breathing is a big enough turn-on.

  He looks back towards the house. This is a long garden. The house looks impressive from here. He wonders what Caroline's parents will think when they get back. Maybe they should all help her to clear up at the end of the night. In the kitchen of the house next door the figure of a man is walking up and down past the window, the sentry of the suburbs.

  He thinks of the party, all those people looking as if they are finding a new expression of themselves. He compares it with other parties he has been to. He thinks of the ones he used to go to when he was in the last year of primary school. There were a lot of them then, a rush of them, perhaps because the class would be splitting up to go to different schools. The parents would go out for several hours in the evening and kissing games were played. Postman's Knock and Torchy and Forfeits.

  He remembers one in particular. May Clarke invited him to it. Late in the evening, a game of Forfeits began. It came the turn of a girl he had been watching compulsively since he came in. Her face had simply filled the room for him, striking and dark-eyed. Those eyes made him want to jump into them. Her mouth was the first time he had really noticed mouths. He had kept his distance, intimidated by her age. He was twelve and he had learned that she was fourteen. But her breasts, he thinks now, appeared to have been sent on ahead of her. They must have been seventeen at least.

  The boy who was giving the forfeits was sitting, blindfold, on a chair. The boy who was standing beside him, stating the sex of the person who was to make the forfeit, was his friend. They were both about fifteen. As the girl stepped up to be told what she had to do, Tam noticed that the standing boy squeezed his friend's shoulder. He realised that they were working a ploy between them. One of them expected to be chosen by her to carry out the forfeit. Tam couldn't tell which, because both of them had been round her all evening like muzzled dogs round their dinner. His joy was unlimited (early stirrings of the latent machismo) when she picked him. The forfeit was to choose her favourite boy in the room and kiss him according to the number of stars in the sky.

  The joy was short-lived. When they stepped outside into the darkness, the sky was starless. Tam shrugged helplessly and they waited a little while, cuddling coldly, and went back inside, where he discovered that May Clarke wouldn't speak to him again.

  Standing in the garden, he can't believe how stupid he was then, what an unimaginative little bore. He never saw the girl again after that night. No wonder the girl cuddled him coldly. That mouth he might have kissed haunts him still, like the girl on the bus he allowed to wave him goodbye before he had met her.

  He makes a decision there among the leaves. If he misses life, it won't be for the want of trying. May the guilt that comes to plague him when he is dying have its source all in sins of commission, never in sins of omission. He would rather die of overload than inertia.

  He should have invented the stars. The thought arrests him. But not invent - discover. See them where no one else can. You must discover your own stars. He decides that he will.

  You must discover your own stars. That cryptic statement, created by himself, makes him feel philosophical. He ponders the end of this summer. It is officially over now. He has been prolonging his personal version of it falsely, to give him more time, reluctant to abandon his adolescence because he has found no ceremonial moments to mark its closure. For which of the markers he set himself on leaving school has he managed to reach? None.

  He is still terrified of going to university. The plan he had developed was to try and read more or less everything before he went, no matter how skimpily. That way, he reasoned, it would be a lot harder for them to find him out. But it had failed on two counts: he couldn't read enough and what he did read so quickly was like skating on a frozen loch. What was going on in the depths below the surface?

  The Journals of Kierkegaard was the book of this summer that represented his failure to him most dramatically. His persistence with the journals had not been entirely for dubious reasons. There may have been an element of the flash in it, like someone contriving to hav
e his passport stamped with an exotic location to which he has never been. But a deeper truth was that he did find the journals fascinating. The references could be bewildering, so assumptive, as if this man had a private map of the world which he thought everybody must share. The ferocity of the thinking sometimes knotted like a migraine in his head. The details of the enterprise might sometimes baffle him but what had sustained him was the almost mythic grandeur of the whole. The book had slowly taught him something he had never realised before: that it is possible to live ideas through to the death. He wasn't sure whether this was noble or merely mad or both. But he was sure that he might have to spend the rest of his life reading Kierkegaard in order to come honestly to terms with him. This meant his summer plan was a fiasco. He would still arrive at university as an ignoramus.

  He is still a virgin. The nearest he has come to having sex is the Great Senga Debacle, when he came into the air, touching no one, and he wonders if he is condemned to live in his own hallucination, able to make love only to the idea of making love.

  He still dreads Cran, stripped and sweating in the infernal glow of his kiln, where things harden into what they really are or break down in the heat. He still doesn't know if he would harden or break down.

  He still sometimes feels sadly distant from his family, a foster child who doesn't quite fit in. He still hasn't written anything that could be put to better use than kindling for a fire. ‘Actions in Generic Tense’ has been abandoned. This summer has been a fair old disaster.

  But something - maybe it's the insistent promise in the music coming from the lighted house like a hoarse voice that reaches him in the darkness where he stands - is forbidding him to lose heart. There's still two weeks. It occurs to him that whatever happens in the next two weeks cannot constitute a bigger failure than he has achieved so far. There's a kind of perverse hope in that.

  This philosophical stuff's all right. You must discover your own stars. Where the hell were they, though? Still, he feels at the moment a kind of defiance of his own past. Maybe that was a philosophy in its own right. He suddenly thinks of a motto earned from the shambles of this summer. He likes mottos. He remembers two classical ones he picked up from The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, which he won as a prize in third year for ‘Distinction in Classics’. One was from Epictetus, a stoic philosopher - ‘ανεχου και απεχου,’ he said. Endure and abstain. The other was in Latin, source unknown to him - ‘nosce teipsum’. Know thyself. Was that the Delphic oracle? Thomas Mathieson Docherty, philosopher (1937- ), has just added his own epigram to the store of Western thought. It's not original to him, he has to admit. As he mutters it into the night, he knows that all he is really doing is rearticulating the contribution of the Scottish working classes to the history of philosophy: ‘Fuck it.’ Perhaps he's not that far alienated from his background after all. Fuck it. Let the battle recommence.