The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  No, not exactly in alphabetical order. They jumped intae yer heid like bellydancers, writhed aboot there for a wee while an' shot the crow. Then another wan skited in. Hullo, it's ma turn. Another drink, methinks. You've had enough. Aye, but sometimes what's enough? Sometimes you need a friend. Au secours, la bouteille.

  One of them said something like: either there is a God or there isn't. Let's place the bet. The obvious thing is to bet on God -because if He is there, you win. If He isn't there, what do you lose? Nothing. He would drink to that.

  Yes. Right enough, Blaise or Rene, whichever of you said it. But wait a minute. There's a humanist version of this bet. Let's bet that there is nothing there. This is the most human bet that you can make. Firstly, because to be human is to admit that there is no way you can know that anything is there. Secondly, because, if there is nothing there, it makes your moral behaviour all the more real, all the more an expression of you. It has no basis but yourself. You replace religious cynicism with human idealism. You exist dramatically as you in an empty universe. The God, who is or is not there, becomes powerless. You render Him irrelevant. The question of His existence no longer matters. You will create your own goodness, regardless of Him. Thus, agnosticism becomes the only true faith.

  He took another sip of communion whisky. Ya beauty. Sometimes the bevvy worked. If He isn't there, you won't feel cheated. You chose to be moral in his absence, for your own humanist reasons. And if He is there, you must be in with a shout of getting into heaven, even if it's just by the tradesman's entrance, for you've at least tried to live a moral life. In fact, maybe it should be by the main door. Your attempt at goodness will have none of the impurities in it of fear or that's-what-they-told-me-to-do or Ah'll-swap-ye-a-good-life-for-a-seat-in-heaven. It exists sheer. The only basis for morality becomes love of your kind.

  Imagine a prison, he would think. The huge communal cell is crowded with people of every race. None of them is sure what crime has been committed, unless it is that of being human. They don't know what system of law has sentenced them nor the basis of authority for the power which has passed the sentence. But they know they are condemned without appeal. One by one, at a time not to be appointed, they are taken out. Why they are taken out at that time, why they are taken out at all, what happens after they are taken out, nobody knows. They only know that the cell is replenished with prisoners and depleted of prisoners continuously.

  What should the prisoners do? Should they fight one another to establish a hierarchy of authority within the cell? They could do that but to what purpose? Such power is patently illusory, since it is a pretence of power within powerlessness. Isn't it dishonest to the reality of their experience for one to claim dominion over another? If you can't finally control the terms of your own life, how can you honestly pretend to control the terms of someone else's? Isn't that claiming not to be the same as someone who is the same as you?

  What should the prisoners do? Should one of them claim to know what happens beyond the cell and seek to control the behaviour of the other prisoners with that knowledge? But nobody knows, for they are all trapped in the same cell and share the limitations of that entrapment. Nothing anybody does, says or thinks will alter the unity of helplessness they have in common. The possession neither of knowledge nor of things will change finally the terms on which they all have to live.

  Imagine, for example, that the master jailer appears, not to remove someone this time, but to throw a watch into the middle of the cell. The prisoners could fight for possession of the watch. The individual or group gaining possession of the watch might feel they have an advantage over the others. But they have no such advantage in any real sense. They may have disadvantaged further the other prisoners, who will have less ability than they have to make coherence of the passing time, but they will have gained no greater control over the ultimate meaning of that time, the meaning of which is controlled by the power that imprisons. Thus, if they share the watch with everyone, they lose nothing, since the time within which they live is not under their control anyway. But they might gain, for among the others there may be some whose imagination and inventiveness, given the chance to use the watch, can devise more fruitful ways in which to deploy the time.

  He decided that this was the tradition he came from - a long line of logically instinctive Socialists who lived by principle above materialism because it was the only existentially sane thing to do. His father was right. So was his Uncle Josey. Before he passed out in the chair, he drank to his relatives, all his relatives.

  ‘UNCLE CHARLIE. HOW'S IT GOIN'?'

  ‘How's it goin’, Tam? Ah used tae unbutton two buttons and it popped out at me, ready for action. Now Ah unzip all the way down an' send in a search party. That's about exactly how it's goin', son.'

  As they talked, Tom was still trying to realise that this was the funeral of Michael, his brother. But he couldn't retain the idea for very long at a time. He found himself more than once almost expecting to see Michael. It wasn't all that long ago that Joe, Michael and Marion's first son, had been married here. Many of the relatives and friends who had been at the wedding had returned today. Tom watched his nephews and nieces stunned at being brought back so soon to the Ossington Hotel, as if life was telling them it had made a mistake. Sorry: don't celebrate. Mourn. That's what I meant to say. What were Joe and Fiona thinking, now that their wedding dinner had turned so quickly in their mouths into the funeral spread, like biting fish and tasting sausage-roll.

  ‘Ah suppose he was about as good as it gets, eh, Tam?’ his Uncle Charlie said.

  If only the minister at the cremation had been able to say something as authoritatively simple as that, Tom was thinking. But, through no fault of his own, the man could say nothing that mattered. All he had were the abstract articles of his faith with which to memorialise the day. As far as the man being cremated was concerned, the minister was a non-believer. If only he had known enough to believe in the way Uncle Charlie did, he might have brought to the event more than a shroud of words in which there was no corpse.

  His Uncle Charlie surely believed. Sitting beside him, Tom was grateful for Uncle Charlie's effortless appreciation of other people's qualities. There came to him suddenly an incident at school which he now realised was probably prompted by his Uncle Charlie.

  When Sinatra was being regarded as a has-been, in the early fifties. Tam had taken four of his 78s to school. In the playground the day before, he had been trying unsuccessfully to convince Harry Walker that Sinatra was a genius. He had brought the records in to lend to Harry so that he could learn how stupid his lack of appreciation was. The records were lying on his desk in the maths class when Dozey Davidson, the teacher, lifted them up and examined each as if it were a long-dead fish. He replaced them sadly.

  ‘I'm sorry for you,’ he said.

  ‘If you don't like him,’ Tam said before he could stop himself, ‘I'm sorry for you.’

  It was maybe the first time he had been so cheeky to a teacher and he was glad. What gives people the right to make fun of your family? Would Dozey like trying to tell his Uncle Charlie that he's sorry for him? As Tam's mother once said, ‘Charlie's ma brother. An’ Ah love him. But Ah have to admit he could pick a fight if he was on his own in Madame Tussaud's.'

  Uncle Charlie had told Tam on several occasions of the time he went to hear Frank Sinatra at the Pavilion in Ayr. About forty people turned up, scattered throughout the hall. Who wants to listen to a clapped-out singer? Uncle Charlie always smiles at this point, the smile of a man who was in the right place at the right time, when nearly everybody else has taken a wrong turning.

  ‘Well,’ Uncle Charlie says. ‘Ye know what happened. Tam?’

  This is the moment Tam loves. Uncle Charlie's eyes are looking towards magical realms, like the old man in The Boyhood of Raleigh. Uncle Charlie talks slowly, carefully. Summoning up an historic moment is a delicate business.

  ‘This wee thin man walks out. Right? He's tired-lookin’. H
e looks kinna beat up. He looks round the audience an' he gives a wee laugh to himself. An' he goes...'

  Uncle Charlie always pauses here. Tam knows he is rehearsing in his head how to talk American. Uncle Charlie likes to talk American. So does Tam. Tam knows that Uncle Charlie's version of what Sinatra says will vary from what Sinatra said the last time. Sometimes Sinatra begins by saying, ‘Hi, folks,’ and sometimes by saying, ‘Hello, you guys.’ Sometimes it's just ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.’ Tam doesn't mind. The words may vary but the experience they are capturing is the same. Listening to Uncle Charlie's repeated anecdote has become an impromptu lesson in story-telling. What matters is not so much what Sinatra said as the feeling it generated in Uncle Charlie. In trying yet again to renew that feeling, it's almost as if he has to renew the words as well. That way the experience comes back fresh, re-energised by the search for words to match it.

  ‘Hi, ladies and gentlemen,’ Sinatra says this time. ‘Hey. Let's not be strangers. Forget the ticket price. Why don't we get together? We're not enough to make a crowd. Let's just be company for each other.’

  He brings everybody down to the front rows. He sits on the edge of the stage. And he sings. How he sings.

  ‘That wisny for money,’ Uncle Charlie says. ‘That was a gift tae the people who came out on a dark, wet night tae say they loved him. He made us just a bunch o’ friends. That was a night. Tam. That was a night.'

  Tom thought, sitting at the funeral with his Uncle Charlie, that maybe his anger at Dozey had been a tribute not just to what Sinatra had achieved but to the sincere joy of Uncle Charlie and to the remembered pleasure of a teenage boy. It occurred to him that many of our carefully articulated and supposedly rational opinions are perhaps just attempts to justify the way we can't help feeling, a helpless innocence trying to assume a sophistication that doesn't really fit, the way that children like to dress up in adult clothes. Maybe he hadn't been defending Sinatra so much as defending that time in the living-room when the reflected wonder of his Uncle Charlie's experience had taught him that this is what talent can do, be a secular Jesus with the loaves and fishes, take a handful of banal ingredients (a dark night in Ayrshire, a few appreciative people, a dingy hall) and make a miracle of shared pleasure.

  When he thought of it, that was what these people he came from had had - a talent for living that could feed on scraps, make an event out of a pot of tea and a couple of relatives who dropped in uninvited, memorialise small moments in anecdote, construct a family legend out of somebody falling off a bike, develop a poetry reading from a remembered book someone had accidentally come across, find a sense of community in some shabby council houses and a few bleak streets. Would Gill and he ever be able to give their own children that talent, even if they stayed together?

  ‘That's ma two best pals away now,’ Uncle Charlie was saying. ‘No offence, Tam. But after ye went to the Uni, we were never quite as close again. You were always a bit of a maverick, son.’

  ‘That's for sure.’

  ‘When yer father died, Michael took his place for me. Know what he did, Tam? When Ah took ma heart attack that time. Must be what? Twelve year ago now. He was still workin’ then for Smith Brothers. In the van. When Ah was confined to bed. He came in early every mornin' an' shaved me before goin' to his work. Left me fresh as a daisy to begin ma day. Every day. Until Ah could do for maself. Fairly helped me that, son. When Ah wis down. Gave me a daily sense of maself Ah could try tae get back to. An' nobody ever asked him. He just decided. An' Ah bet he never told anybody. Did you know that?'

  ‘Naw. Ah didn't.’

  But he was glad to know now. He was reminded of lines he had memorised for himself at school. He had done that a lot in Boris's class, leafing surreptitiously through poetry books while Boris talked one of his strange, meandering monologues, leaving the class to eavesdrop. That was how he learned ‘Jenny kissed me’. These lines were from Wordsworth, he thought:

  That best portion of a good man's life.

  His little, nameless, unremembered acts

  Of kindness and of love.

  ‘Aye,’ his Uncle Charlie said. ‘That was Michael. But then ye'll no’ need me tae tell ye that. Ye'll have yer own sense of him.'

  HE IS STANDING IN THE DOORWAY of John Dalton's house. He is wearing short velvet trousers which have shoulder straps. He is three. John, who is seven, stands beside him. They have just finished a spell of digging for Australia in the back door. They have not been successful, although John exclaimed at one point, ‘Ah can see the sky.’ Now they are smoking Capstan Full Strength cigarettes, which John has stolen from his father's cigarette drawer. He is looking up at John admiringly, as he always does. It is then that he glimpses his mother's face at the window of his own house opposite. It is the most frighteningly distorted face he has ever seen.

  He throws away the cigarette and runs towards the door of his house, reaching it just as it is opened by his mother.

  ‘Ah'll never do it again. Mammy,’ he shouts hopefully.

  ‘No, by God, ye'll no’. Get in here.'

  She unstraps his trousers and beats his bare bum all the way up the stairs. He is put immediately to bed, to wait for his father coming home. As he lies alone in the room, wondering what horrors may result, Michael puts his head round the door.

  ‘Looks bad, Thomas,’ he says. ‘They're sendin’ for the polis.'

  MICHAEL'S HANDS ARE NO LONGER THERE. A moment of panic comes over him like a blackout which clears magically and instantly into blue sky and leaves. A cow is mooing somewhere. He hears Michael laughing. His mother and his father and his sister are part of him and they are not. They are waving. He can go back to them if he chooses and not if he chooses. The freedom he feels gives him the day as if it were his personal property. The grass is greener than he had noticed. The leaves are audible. The water of the Soldier's Hole, which has frightened him for weeks, is now his friend, supportive. He likes its rusty taste. He can swim, he can swim.

  ‘HERE, TAM.’

  He looks up from where he sits beside the cooker in the kitchen. The room has become his study. He sits there in the evenings with the cooker lit for warmth and does his homework. But this is a Saturday afternoon. The cooker isn't lit and sunlight is coming strongly through the window. His big brother, Michael, is standing over him.

  ‘Here,’ Michael says. ‘Ye're not the ugliest bastard Ah've ever seen. Ah think ye're gonny need this.’

  He hands Tam a slim book with hard covers. The covers are bright red. Tam opens the book and looks at the title page. He looks up at Michael. Michael is smiling at him with kindness.

  ‘Ah don't think Betsy and Conn'll have told ye too much about it, eh?’

  Tam smiles embarrassedly.

  ‘Keep it in yer drawer,’ Michael says. ‘Beside yer Hank Jansen books.’

  Michael goes out. The sun from the kitchen window shines like the light in a holy picture upon the book and Tam feels like a medieval knight who has been given a magic key but has no idea how to find the door the key might open. His mother walks into the kitchen. He slips the red book inside the cover of the book he has been reading, which is a book about an English public school called Carry On, Rippleton, one Allison gave him for his Christmas. The title of the book inside the book is his secret - The Technique of Sex.

  I KNOW NOT WHITHER I SHALL HIE

  When I at last am dead.

  I only know as now I lie

  On this, my own death-bed.

  That I have sinned ‘gainst God and man.

  That I have slain my friend.

  That I must die by my own hand

  And thus must meet my end.

  I have the knife, I have the will.

  My tale is left untold.

  I have the right myself to kill—

  Our friendship's bond I sold.

  I face my falsehood with the true.

  My soul is calm within me.

  I drive the blade my body through

  An
d all is calm within me.

  He holds the paper in his hand like a piece of some extraterrestrial substance. Can such things be? (Afterwards, he would wonder, ‘Should such things be?’) He looks across the living-room at his mother reading and thinks what a weird thing is a newspaper. His lips silently mouth the words on the sheet.

  He has written a poem. He can't believe it. He needs some kind of confirmation of what has happened. He finds Michael in the back green, sawing a piece of wood laid across a kitchen chair.

  ‘Michael,’ he says. ‘Look at this.’

  He hands his brother the poem as if it is something he has found and can't identify. Michael blows wood-chips from his left hand and takes the paper from him. He reads it sternly, looks up carefully at Tam. He seems to be checking Tam's face for something. He reads the poem again. His face relaxes and he tilts his head appreciatively.

  ‘You didn't write this, kid? Did ye?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘What age are ye? Fourteen? That's great, Tam. That's absolutely great.’

  He gives Tam back the paper and returns to his sawing.

  IN THAT CASUAL MOMENT, with the rasp of saw on wood and a light wind blowing, one kindness has helped to congeal a passing fancy into a compulsion and the smell of wood-shavings will always be for him like new hope coming to him on the wind and he will sometimes think that the epigraph to anything he writes should be: Michael's To Blame.

  MICHAEL SITS UP IN HIS BED. He is drawing on a sketching-pad. The cold he has makes the skin around his nose bright red. Tam sits on the bed and puts down the two books he has been carrying. He lifts the top one and shows Michael the flyleaf of the back cover. Michael looks up from his drawing at the book. He shrugs.

  ‘Think ye can draw him?’ Tam says.