The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Hey, Big Yin.’

  His father is speaking from the living-room. Tam is surprised. He had thought everybody else was still in bed.

  Tam looks round the door. His father is sitting in his armchair in old trousers and a zip-necked sweater. His feet are bare. He is smoking in front of the dead-ash fire. He will kindle it soon. Tam wonders if his father has left the kitchen to Tam and his mother deliberately, as if this morning has needed a special ceremony. His father looks tired and thoughtful. Maybe he hasn't slept much.

  ‘You feart?’ his father says.

  Is his fear so obvious?

  ‘Well. Ah don't feel great.’

  ‘Everybody's feart. At least you're facin’ yours. Yer grandfather wanted me to go on at the school. Ah didny want tae. Ah told maself it wis because Ah had more important things to do. But Ah think Ah wis just feart to learn ma limits. An' Ah've had to learn them anyway.'

  Standing in the doorway, he is embarrassed. His father looks so dismayed with himself. He shouldn't be.

  ‘Son,’ he says. ‘We're all feart o’ the world. We lie in bed at night an' dread the things that might happen. The biggest man in the world, if he's got a brain, will live in fear. He just learns to control it. You'll have to do the same. Sometimes, son, ye just have to shout Geronimo and jump.'

  They smile at each other.

  ‘Cheers, Feyther.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  His mother opens the outside door for him. He lifts his Uncle Josey's briefcase from the floor of the lobby. It has new notebooks in it and some pens and the first textbooks he will need. It feels like a talisman in his hand. (You may be Johnny Appleseed in the stone groves of academe but you've got your own lineage. You once had an uncle that owned a briefcase.)

  ‘Good luck, Tom,’ his mother says.

  ‘Thanks, Mither.’

  He hears her close the door behind him. It is still dark and it is cold. He buttons up his raincoat with one hand, awkwardly.

  ‘Hey, Einstein!’

  It takes a moment to locate the voice. Michael's head is dimly visible projecting from the upstairs bedroom window. The hair is rumpled.

  ‘Go slaughter them.’

  The window closes and he walks on. The briefcase still feels like a prop in his hand. He never used it at school. He had carried a canvas, ex-army satchel with a shoulder-strap. That way, he didn't look pretentious passing through the housing scheme. A lot of workmen used them for carrying their pieces to work. He could still feel he belonged to where he came from. But, though the coat covers the blazer, the briefcase seems to him to be flashing ostentatiously in his hand. It was given to him after his uncle's death because his uncle had more than once said to other members of the family, ‘Tam's going to achieve something. Wait and see.’ It was passed on to him like a posthumous commission. Now the responsibility of it is heavy to him.

  THAT WAS THE SUMMER OF THE KILN. He knew it over then. No other summer would be the same as that.

  THAT WAS WHEN Senga gave him the gift, so precious at the time, of her kind silence. It didn't matter how roughly it was wrapped. That was when he had a summer passion for Margaret Inglis. That was when he had an affair with Maddie Fitzpatrick for three days and decided to commit suicide for two hours. That was when his mother had the strength to shape his life towards more freedom, when his father respected his strangeness, when Michael and Allison and Marion hovered protectively but inconspicuously around his days.

  THAT WAS WHEN he made many fools of himself but in the end didn't want to disown any of them. They had been ways of trying to come nearer to himself - gestures in search of actions -and, therefore, ways of trying to come honestly nearer to others. Afterwards, he might laugh at them but it would be laughter between friends, for the boy he had stupidly been was related to the man he would spend the rest of his life hoping wisely to be. The boy had been earnestly trying to emulate an adult the man would probably never manage to become. The man might constantly change the forms the attempt would take but the content for those forms would always have its source in the energy of the boy.

  THAT WAS WHEN he had his first awareness of experiencing the kiln, an accidental place which became a mythic centre in the mind - action in which you discover you, the self learned in happening beyond the lies of the word and beyond prevarication of the thought, the repeated point where existence hardens into being or breaks down into flux. The kiln had been the shifting nucleus of his summer. The kiln was not only in Avondale Brickwork. It was between Maddie Fitzpatrick's legs. It was in his head. It was where you found who you were. It was where he divested Cran Craig of his fearsomeness through the intensity of his own fear, where, by seeing Maddie Fitzpatrick clear, he saw himself more clearly, where a partial truce with his family earned him a partial truce with himself, where he began to compact into who he was.

  THAT WAS WHEN he began to see the justice of his father's baffled rage, the quiet and gracious stature of his mother, to understand at last his uncle's refusal to the death to surrender his love for others. That was when he learned he came from people and a place that were enough, when the uncommemorated names he lived among seemed to give him all the genealogy he needed.

  THAT WAS WHEN he found for the first time the generous giving of a woman's body and the darkness of its hunger. She had taken what she needed from him but she had given him in return some edges of himself, a compass for his lostness, a map of longing. He had received from her more than he knew how to give but he might learn and he was grateful. Even the first sound of his own voice she had given him in a few lines that might matter to no one else but mattered to him.

  He heard faint within the words he had written to Maddie a strange voice talking and was amazed to think it was his own, the first time of its hearing. It was his own not because it spoke well or wisely but because it said what it was totally compelled to say, an utterance that grew undeniably out of his own experience. It was querulous and lost, like a cat long in the cold, but it was there and he might find it again.

  THAT WAS WHEN he knew what Pushkin meant. ‘Not all of me is dust.’ It seemed to him one of the bravest and most human things that anyone could say. It refused to be more precise than it could honestly be. There is more than this because I have experienced so. But the more there is will in no way denigrate what has been. Unless it includes without reservation all that has been, it cannot be more. QED.

  THAT WAS WHEN a seeming infinity of situations and conversations and people and feelings and ideas and sights and places and sounds and thought fused slowly out of fragmentary chaos into a shifting and volatile and dynamic coherence of experience, an imperfectly grasped significance that still tremored on the edge of transformation with each approaching happening, became a past whose only purpose was to be the future in embryo, a future which only the perpetual present could deliver. Now. And now. And now.

  AND NOW HE WOULD PAUSE THERE. Tom stood up from the table and put down his pen. The book is as good as finished.

  He can remember when he had finished what he was sure would be his last book of poetry. He had known that the poetry was the sum of something in him and he had to admit to himself that it didn't seem to add up to a lot. His poetry had been a thirty-odd-year gamble. He thought, even before the book was published, that he had lost, so that he wasn't surprised when it sank without trace. But at least he had ridden with the bet. That was his last wager on the same old number and he could feel himself walking out before the croupier called.

  This was just another bet. This time he could imagine himself saying to the croupier, ‘Hold the wheel still. Don't call just yet. There's something Ah have to do first.’

  Okay, Tam, he says to himself. Let's do it.

  He goes through to the small kitchen and opens the door of the refrigerator. One heel of cheese is all it shows. But in the door of the fridge is the bottle of champagne he has been saving for this moment. The coldness of its neck almost sticks to his hand as he takes it. He elbows the door of
the fridge shut. As he crosses to the sink, he rips off the foil, drops it on the draining-board, unwinds the wire. His thumbs jockey the cork up the neck of the bottle till it pops and fires itself into the curtain. It is darkening outside.

  He loves the gushing of the juice that wants out and lets some of it splatter into the sink. Where there is spontaneity, there will be waste. This stuff is like good moments. When they come, you have to take them there and then. There is no postponing. You can't put the cork back on champagne.

  He licks the neck of the bottle. He lifts an upturned glass from the draining-board and goes through to the living-room. The sun is setting on this side of the house and it glows in the room. He fills a glass as he walks and goes to the table at the window and puts the bottle down there. The sunlight makes jade of it. Tangled among trees and dripping red, the sun lays its warm light on his papers and seems briefly to bless their irrelevance as it blesses everything indiscriminately.

  He looks across at the old graveyard of Warriston where the cluttered headstones are casting darkness before they become it. He holds up his glass to the dead.

  He drinks off his glass and fills out another.

  One thing he hopes he has got right is how the social life seems to him a farce and how the individual life seems a tragedy. And, since all of us are individuals first, it would seem to follow that life is a tragedy performed by farceurs. Enjoy the play.

  He drinks to that. He has spoken to Phil. He will be leaving here soon. He will go somewhere else, catch another train, stoke up the kiln. Impossible to get in touch with Vanessa now. But he must have Grete's number somewhere. It would be good to talk to her.

  He raises his glass above where the dead are, to the sun that still smoulders dimly among the trees.

  As he drinks, he imagines he can hear the whir and clatter of a spinning wheel. He'll abide the outcome. He fills out another glass and drinks to the self he has met again in the summer of the kiln.

  THAT WAS WHEN he walked in the air of early morning through the town towards the railway station. And the self-conscious and solemn progress of his purpose was waylaid by the remorseless and dynamic irrelevance of the moment.

  ‘Aye, Tam,’ Hilly Brown shouted from across the street, on his way home from the brickwork. ‘What's wi’ the briefcase? Takin' yer case to a higher court?'

  Suddenly, he felt released by Hilly's irreverence. He laughed. He waved with exaggerated panache.

  ‘To the higher court of human understanding,’ he bellowed in a ludicrously portentous voice. (Valentine Dyall would have been proud of him.)

  ‘That'll fuckin’ do me,' Hilly shouted back. ‘Put in a word for me.’

  He burst out laughing. He would try. For all of them.

  GERONIMO, his mind is shouting.