The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Not a fucking man among them.’

  You fucking bastard.

  ‘Your family are shite.’

  You fucking bastard.

  ‘Useless cunts, the Dochertys.’

  ‘You fucking bastard.’

  You have said it. The two of you are standing in the doorway of the kiln. The sound of your voice in the air pulls the rest of your rage out through your mouth.

  ‘Put your mouth on my family one more time and I'll kill you, you bastard.’

  He is amazed at your foolhardiness. So are you. He swings a punch. You dodge. But he hits you on the shoulder. You fall beside the jagged pile of broken, discarded bricks. He is coming towards you again. You lift a broken brick. You stagger up. He throws another punch. The punch misses. You swing past him and turn. You hit him on the side of the forehead with the half-brick. He stumbles back and his heels hit the bottom of the pile of broken bricks. His arms flail for balance and he sits down with thunderous heaviness. You can hear the sound of the ragged brick ripping into his trousers. The effect is amazing. He is screaming. You move towards him to do more. Something in you is baying for blood. Cran is helpless.

  ‘Tam!’ someone shouts.

  THE OTHERS ARE HERE. It is Hilly Brown who has shouted. Tam feels suddenly very cold in the early morning air. He looks down at the brick in his hand, wondering where it came from. It is as if someone has planted it on him.

  ‘Keep that daft bastard away from me,’ Cran is shouting.

  And something answers from somewhere in Tam.

  ‘That's a good idea,’ it shouts. ‘Or Ah'll kill the bastard. This is a catchweights fucking contest. Ah mean it more than he does.’

  Hilly Brown is there. Billy Farquhar is there. James Morrison is there. Jack Laidlaw is there. They don't know what to do.

  ‘Mention ma family one more time,’ Tam says, still holding the brick, ‘an’ you're dead.'

  ‘Keep back, ya daft bastard,’ Cran says.

  He is obviously in pain and not offering to move.

  ‘What is it, Cran?’ Hilly says.

  Two of them go to help Cran up.

  ‘Naw, naw,’ Cran says. ‘Get back.’

  He takes about a minute to extricate himself from the pile of bricks. He cannot seem to straighten up. The seat of his trousers is saturated with blood. He is almost weeping with pain.

  ‘What is it?' Hilly Brown says.

  ‘He's burst every pile in ma arse,’ Cran says.

  THE TAXI WAS PASSING THE PLACE WHERE AVONDALE BRICKWORK USED TO BE. Tom smiled to himself. An idol with an arse of clay. Cran had gone home and was off work the next night and, when he came back, he let it be known, through Frank, that he wouldn't be in for the tea-break till that loony bastard left. Tam had felt a particular pride when he heard Cran quoted as having said, ‘The Dochertys were always mad bastards.’ He had kept the family honour intact.

  It was only in thinking about it afterwards that he had realised the ironic significance of the chair. What had become for all of them a symbol of power had been in reality a sign of frailty. Cran had needed his special, separate place because he couldn't sit on a bench like the rest of them. It was a lesson that had stayed with him: never take authority at its own estimate.

  His own status for the last few nights he was in the brickwork was a fair example. He wasn't asked to go back into the kiln, presumably in case the heat reactivated the demons in him. The others obviously regarded him as someone to be reckoned with, both with women and with men. Yet all it had taken to create this sense of him was an accidental brick up the arse and a girl who was kind enough to lie for him.

  At the tea-break on the last night. Hilly Brown moved the chair towards him.

  ‘Ye no’ gonny sit on yer seat, Tam?' he said.

  He almost did. Then he had a better idea. He gestured Dunky Semple towards the chair. Dunky sat in it throughout the break, eating his piece and rubbing the wooden arms and looking down at the cushion every so often. He had as much right to it as any of them and he certainly enjoyed it more than anybody else would have done.

  ‘Not long now,’ the driver said.

  ‘No.’

  The driver couldn't know the irony of what he was saying. Time might be so short that Tom was too late. Arriving in Graithnock, he discovered that Michael had been moved from Graithnock Infirmary to a hospital outside of town. The cerebral haemorrhage he had taken this morning was massive. He had failed so far to recover consciousness and they had moved him to a specialist unit.

  The headlights of the taxi suddenly showed the entrance of the driveway to the hospital. All his attempts to avoid the likely outcome of what had happened through refusing to contemplate it had come to this, just as the primitive magic of trying to ignore Cran hadn't prevented confrontation. Here came another kiln or rather, he feared, the icy variant of one, where they took you to extremities of cold.

  THE ROOM was not somewhere people could stay long, was a place for passing through, like a province of Antarctica. Its clinical sterility didn't accommodate the living comfortably. His mother and Allison and Marion and her three sons, Joe and Don and young Michael, looked awkward there, like misplaced furniture. Only Michael fitted. He lay very still on the bed, his face fixed in an expression that seemed concentrated on a problem none of the others could understand. Tom sensed immediately that he was walking into one of death's anterooms. At least he had arrived in time.

  They all embraced clumsily. His mother and Marion were crying. His arrival stirred the stillness into murmured conversation. They asked about his journey. He asked about Michael. The doctors had pronounced no hope. The only time Michael had shown any response was one of the times Marion had tried to take his hand. He had brushed it away gently and they thought he had muttered, ‘Don't, darlin’.' That seemed like a long time ago, in Graithnock.

  Hearing that, Tom had a memory of watching his father die. Something astonishing had struck him then, at eighteen. A slow death isn't just something you do. It is something you find out how to do. The spirit seems trapped in something it can't get out of. It comes up against death like the final conundrum. Tom thought he understood the concentration on Michael's face. He was looking for the way out. He was already far out of reach of their helpless grief. The best they could do was to be there and wish him success, for anything else would have been a selfish prolonging of his pain.

  That pain intensified quite suddenly. He became restless and uncomfortable and breathing seemed something he had forgotten how to do. His lower face took on blue like a shadow of cloud. His distress transmitted itself to the others.

  Tom left the room and in the corridor met the sister who had spoken to him when he arrived.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘My brother's breathing is getting very laboured. He's in a lot of distress. Is there something you can do to help him?’

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  She came to the door of the room and looked in at Michael.

  ‘Im afraid you'll have to leave,’ she said.

  Marion started to cry and was refusing to go. Nobody wanted to leave.

  ‘We want to stay,’ Tom said. ‘We want to be with him.’

  ‘I'm sorry, sir. We cannot possibly set up the equipment unless the room is cleared. You can wait in another room. It's the only way we can do it. It won't take long. And I'll let you back in as soon as we've set things up.’

  ‘We want to be with him at the end.’

  ‘You will be, sir. Of course. It's just a few minutes. The longer you delay, the longer it's taking to help your brother.’

  With Tom's help, she led them into an empty room along the corridor. The waiting seemed endless. They wandered around dementedly. Tom went outside and waited in the corridor. As he saw the sister approaching, he opened the door of the room.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We can go in now.’

  As the others came out into the corridor, the sister reached them. Her eyes found Marion among them.


  ‘I'm sorry, my dear,’ she said. ‘Your husband's dead.’

  The sound that broke from Marion and his mother and Allison both grieved and enraged Tom. As the others crowded back into the room where Michael lay, he stared at the sister.

  ‘Was that done for your convenience or supposedly for ours?’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You may beg it but you're not getting it.’

  He went past her into the room. He saw Michael dead. No touch, no sight, no sound, no words allowed. The family stood beside his bed. They were huddled together as if trying to merge, become again amoeba. They looked like castaways on a shore of the ocean of silence Michael was lost in.

  He stared at Michael. He was embittered beyond bearing that he had not been able to speak to him. Without any warning there occurred to him something he had once rather grandiosely said, that he would have made a pact with the devil for thirty minutes' conversation in a Parisian bistro with Albert Camus. Or now for ten minutes anywhere with Michael. But there was no devil to make any pacts with. Death, you bastard. You're so sterile you don't even accommodate the possibility of evil. Abandon sin all ye who enter here. Hell is simply the worst of the truth. Hell is no human choices. Hell is nothing. What more could heaven have been?

  He went over to them and stretched his arms as far around the group as they would reach and wept with them.

  AT LEAST WITH HIS FATHER THERE HAD BEEN SOME WARNING.

  HE WOULD REALISE INTERMITTENTLY, and with renewable surprise, that he was now older than his father had been when he died. That was a strange feeling, a kind of role reversal. He was now talking in his head to someone who was younger than he was. He would pause in Edinburgh, holding in his hand the plate he was drying or with the kettle poised above the cup where the teabag was being saturated with milk, and he would wonder about that.

  Did the extra years and the difference of his experience mean that his relationship to his father was much changed? Would what he had learned have had any power to salve the baffled outrage his father had contrived to distil into astringent comment?

  His mother liked to say how proud his father would have been of all his grandchildren, in teaching and in the business world and in social service and in academia, all comparatively successful in their various ways, but most of all as people. ‘No’ bad for an auld ex-miner,' she would say, and smile. And once, when she was talking about Megan and Gus both doing postgraduate degrees at Oxford, she even roped in Tam Docherty, the grandfather he had been named for and never known except through family story and local legend. He had died down the pit, saving another man's life, and in her sense of him it was as if that brave, compassionate and angry man had been travelling towards a light he never reached but in which his grandchildren would live. ‘Ah wish yer feyther had just lived tae see it, though,’ she would say.

  He appreciated that. But what engaged him more about the idea of his father still being alive was whether they would have understood each other better, if they could have cracked that cryptic masculine code in which they had tended to communicate, as they had failed to that Sunday morning when he had wanted to tell his father about Cran. Would they have been able to move further into that place of openly exchanged love they had at last found just before his father died?

  As he stood at the window of the living-room, remembering his father's death, he looked across the road in the early light to Warriston Cemetery. It was no longer in use and was dilapidated and vandalised in many places. It was as though even the dead had deserted it, or at least the lasting sense of them their relatives had tried to establish. For cemeteries were for the living, weren't they? And when the griefs of the mourners went, nothing was left but ruined monuments of feeling. Old cemeteries were ghost towns, haunted not by the ghosts of the buried dead but by the ghosts of all the sadnesses, once felt to be immortal, that had failed to survive. The sorrow they expressed was not that we die but that even the grief for our dying dies.

  That summer his father went, he was eighteen and had completed his first year at university and was working as a railway porter during the holidays. He liked the cap they gave him.

  He was no longer afraid of university. He had discovered that he was unintimidated by any of the intelligences he had so far come across. He had discovered that he wasn't unattractive to some women. He felt physically stronger than he had ever felt in his life before. It was a good time.

  Then, one sunny afternoon when he was lounging on a mail-barrow on Platform 2 and clowning with Matt Bailey, another student, he saw his father walking across the station towards him. It was perhaps the unusualness of the context that first of all made him see his father fresh. But it was also more than that. He looked so small and vulnerable, as if he had lost his way in the town where he had always lived. He came up to the wooden barrier, which his face just managed to reach over.

  ‘Aye, son,’ he said. ‘How's it goin’?'

  ‘Fine, Feyther. What ye doin’ up here?'

  ‘Up at the Infirmary there. Gettin’ the X-ray. Told me tae come back in an hour or so. Get the result. Just passin' the time. Thought Ah'd come up an' see ye.'

  Just that. (How casual death can be.) A few words like a sealed telegram from a distant place, one he was instantly wary about opening up to see what it was saying. Thinking back on that day, he was convinced he had known already that the news was bad. He knew because he knew his father knew, or at any rate had started to believe. It was as if, even as they stood and talked and included Matt in the conversation (how polite death can be), something in his father had begun to walk away alone. And a patch of sunlight was highlighting an area of oil-stained wood on the mail-barrow, fixing it in Tam's memory.

  The guilt about having forgotten for a few hours that today was the day for having the X-ray was sharpened when he looked in his father's eyes. He could see in them a small wincing of the spirit which he had never seen before.

  The result of the X-ray was lung cancer. His father was dead in three months. In that time he went from physically formidable man to apprentice cadaver. He was fifty-one.

  In those last months, with his father mainly in bed, they had more one-to-one conversations than they had ever had before. At first his father had been able to move around the house and once -in that brief Indian summer the dying are sometimes allowed - he went for a last walk round Bringan, wheeling his first grandchild in the pram. The pram was a prop as well as a pleasure. The walk was slow and he took a lot of rests but it was important to him to see for a last time the places of his boyhood and maybe to be introducing a new generation to them in his mind. (I leave you this legacy, having nothing else to leave you.)

  Confined to bed, he lingered on through October, his mind staying clear in spite of the drugs, but his body eroding. Once, in the middle of a conversation with Tam and his mother when they were talking about the doings of some people they knew locally, he glanced down at the skeletal forearms which had once been huge and he said, ‘Look at these. Ah'll never get that back, Betsy.’ And he smiled absently and went on talking about the things they had been talking about.

  It was like that, a man absently acknowledging but being polite and gentle about his dying. What else to do? He had other people to think about.

  ‘So the university, son? How's that goin’?'

  ‘No’ bad.'

  ‘Must be a kinda unusual experience for ye. Very strange still?’

  ‘No’ so strange now.'

  ‘That's good.’

  It wasn't that what they said to each other was of any particular significance in itself. It was that the context in which they said it made everything reverberate with significance, as if they sat in an echo chamber where even talk of the weather would resonate.

  Their talk was small ordinarinesses that seemed as monumental as standing stones because of the empty horizon against which they stood. The most casual reference could throw long shadows. A mention of Joseph, no matter how lightly made, inevitably
brought with it the realisation that all his father would ever really know about his grandson was that he was there.

  Once when he had opened the door to check if it was raining, his father called out his name urgently from upstairs. He had thought he was leaving without having their morning conversation. He never did. And by the time his father died, he felt he had had the chance to understand a little more the simple humanity of his father, its instinctive sources, lying beyond any comprehensive philosophy of life.

  WAS IT THE PASCALIAN WAGER OR THE CARTESIAN? He always mixed the two of them up. He knew that Pascal had been born in Clermont-Ferrand and that Descartes had been to Amsterdam. But what help was that to him? Who the fuck was it who made the choice between atheism and Christianity? He had no idea.

  He took another sip of his whisky and water and toasted Warriston Cemetery outside the window. He was pissed. He knew that. Was that why he couldn't remeitiber? But sometimes the bevvy was an aid to memory. Sometimes it created weird synapses between memory cells that seemed to have lost touch with each other for years and there, as if in sheet lightning, there was something long forgotten. Not this time, though. What it was, maybe, was that whisky memory was primitive memory, pre-rational. Eh? When you were pissed, you couldn't look up your memory as if it were a reference book. The thoughts didn't exactly come in alphabetical order, did they?

  He glanced across at the pile of unopened letters on the table. They were mostly bills which left him baffled as to how the senders had managed to track him down. Soon he would open the two or three which appeared to be personal, but not tonight. He could respond to them when he felt a little closer to answering to the name on the envelope. Meanwhile, more important matters were afoot. Let mental safari continue.