The Illuminations

by Andrew O'Hagan

  CENTRAL STATION

  They say oil and water don’t mix. But those people never walked out of Cowcaddens and turned at the corner to face the card shops and their helium balloons, the windows displaying teddies and jokes in all weathers. They never walked down Sauchiehall Street in the pouring rain and felt the oil in the rain that waxes your skin and makes you belong to Glasgow. She turned into Renfield Street and immediately thought of the exhaust fumes from the old buses and the neon signs above Central Station that used to glow in the dark with ads for sugar and whisky.

  It was 1981 again. The days of Sean and her with bags of chips after nights at the Apollo. If you meet a man who can make you laugh then stay with him for ever. And that was her Sean: he could make a dark night and a poke of chips something you’d want to remember. She could see the two of them walking down Renfield Street with the neon above and Glasgow standing cold in the exact present, their fingers all salt and vinegar. She could still feel the warm brown chip-paper inside the Evening Times with the print coming off on her hands. They could ignore the news then because it wasn’t about them and she saw Sean balling up the paper and chucking it into a bin, pulling her in for a kiss.

  She always got nervous walking in the city centre with Sean, the green, white and orange buses and the whole Rangers and Celtic thing and him a soldier beginning his service in Belfast. It was a sectarian time and you could get into trouble, but those nights out with Sean seemed to glow pleasantly in her mind.

  Bell’s Scotch Whisky. ‘Afore ye go.’

  ‘Afore ye go where?’ Sean said. ‘I mean, they’re saying: “Drink whisky, afore ye go.”’

  ‘Before ye go out.’

  ‘But if you drink Bell’s whisky before you go out for the evening you’ll be drunk by the time you get there.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘So what does it mean, “Afore ye go”? Drink Bell’s whisky, before you die?’

  She remembered laughing. Creasing up. The laughter in your youth that comes before everything.

  ‘Before ye go to bed? What does it mean, Alice? Before ye go into a meeting? Before you go on holiday? I’m asking you: what does it mean, the advertisement for Bell’s Scotch whisky? Afore ye go? But what is go? And what is afore?’

  ‘And what is ye?’ she said.

  ‘Exactly!’ Sean said. ‘What is the ye that must have Bell’s Scotch whisky before he – or, okay, she – goes?’

  She remembered it all. She remembered his teeth and his laughter and the scent of Brut. The fact that his eyes seemed glassy when the buses passed. It was the teeth and his smell she liked the best: nobody could touch Sean for teeth, and they stopped again to kiss outside McDavit’s kilt shop. ‘Shall we have one?’ he said, looking up. ‘It’s your nation. It’s your community. All of you having one before ye go.’

  ‘Why don’t we?’ she said. ‘Ye need all the help you can get in this life, afore ye go.’ The grin that comes before everything. And then he took her arm and led her over the road to the Horse Shoe Bar for a whisky and a comic sermon on Irish songs. The pub darkened now in her mind as she made her way but there would always be something about that place, always a light on. It seemed so long ago and Glasgow seemed so changed as she fought through the rain to meet their son.

  ELECTRIC BRAE

  She didn’t see him right away. She passed the bar in the Rogano and walked to the back of the restaurant, and there he was in the last booth over by the kitchen. Back of the bus, back of beyond: that was always Luke when he was wee. And there he was now with one of those tall beers in front of him. White shirt, nice sweater. Her own son deep in the pages of a book. She stood on the carpet and just watched him for a moment. He was typically thin but he looked tired for a young man.

  ‘Mum,’ he said.

  She hadn’t expected to feel his resolve when he hugged her but it was the strength she noticed. She saw his exhaustion but his arms still had certainty and pride in them: it was always that way with soldiers, the bravado, the private fight, the clean shirt, the shoes much brighter than bombs. She closed her eyes and patted him wordlessly in the middle of his back. She didn’t ponder for long his state of mind because she noticed as she patted him the gauze of rain still clinging to his jumper. ‘Good God, son. You’re damp. Did you come out without a coat?’

  ‘I’m only five minutes away.’

  ‘But it’s cashmere,’ she said.

  ‘Mum …’

  ‘Right you are.’

  She wouldn’t be the mother. You can’t, really. After the battles and the helicopters you can’t come storming in with advice about raincoats. There was something different about Luke as he sat across from her. Not determined, but achieved. Some people would have counted it a loss in him because it seemed that the softness had gone. Looking at him, listening to his low murmur as he spoke about the flat and the joy of sleeping in his own bed, she felt she was looking at Sean.

  ‘You look good,’ she said. But she wasn’t sure. His life was telling on him. He didn’t know he was young and he probably never would: any day now he’d be thirty, then thirty-five, then you’re in your forties with that tremendous sense of no turning back and nothing really proved. It would take a nice woman to renew his spirit and get him on the right track. That’s what she thought, conjuring with the next set of problems before the present ones had settled.

  ‘This and that,’ he said, answering her question. ‘I’ve been walking a lot. I went up north. Climbed a bit. And I went down south to see about things.’ She ordered the Pinot Grigio. She thought it overpriced but it was the nicest they had by the glass. She saw he was more anxious now and shorter of breath and she tried to shelve the feeling that he was more available now, as victims are. He wasn’t a victim, he was somebody who needed time, she thought, the thing they couldn’t prescribe at the chemist. The waiter came with two small cups of Cullen Skink.

  ‘Gordon will tell you all about it when he comes,’ she said. ‘He’s making gallons of it now for his company. You know about his company, don’t you – Homeland Fisheries?’

  ‘He’s selling fish soup?’

  ‘Well, you know. Prepared fish products. Ready to cook. Instructions in the pack. Fishcakes. Mussels. He won an award for best home delivery company.’

  ‘Good old Gordon,’ Luke said.

  ‘He’s all right,’ Alice said. She paid her dues to Luke’s mocking tone. ‘He works hard.’

  ‘It’s a busy life,’ said Luke. ‘Smoked haddock.’

  She giggled, took a sip. He noted a certain fierceness about her, the pursed lips, the eyes. He could tell she wanted to get close to him by having an argument. Families do that. But he’d been away a while and wasn’t sure he could face it.

  ‘Aren’t you proud?’ she asked.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Scotland.’

  ‘I know we’re supposed to feel proud. But maybe we ought to earn that feeling.’

  ‘You have earned it.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Everybody feels proud, Luke.’ She drank nervously from her glass and put her elbows on the table.

  ‘Before we get totally leathered on national pride,’ he said, ‘maybe we should first work out how to be proud of being in the human race. I would like that. I would like that first.’

  ‘You were fighting for your country.’

  ‘I was fighting for Flannigan and Dooley. For Lennox and Scullion. Is that a nation?’

  ‘Your friends? It kind of is, Luke.’

  ‘There’s no nation, Mum. There’s only people surfing the Net. People like your husband sending cod in parsley sauce to people in France. And the money pouring into your life via PayPal. And every person imagining the world as he wants to see it, just like the guy in the turban behind the wall with an explosive vest who thinks he’s going to Allah. He thinks he loves his country, too. And he thinks his country is being exploited. And he thinks his pals are a nation.’

  ‘You don’t believe that, Luke. You w
ere brought up in a country with traditions and you loved them.’

  ‘It’s a game, Mum. A great game. We only believed in it for as long as it lasted. I love my country for its hills and its inventions, not for its sense of injury, not for its sentimental dream that’s there nobody like us. I’ve been out in the world and I can tell you they’re all bloody like us: desperate and tired and fighting for a way into the modern world. I don’t know what convinced you that building walls would make you better inside.’

  ‘You’re on the wrong page. It’s changed. This country has a flag!’

  ‘Dump the flags and the drums and the pipes. They’re for the museum. Like all the junk of all the nations.’

  ‘Those countries you’ve fought in want to kill us. Those people hate civilisation.’

  ‘Oh, Mum. Stop reading the Daily Mail. The band of people who want to kill us are just psychopaths and criminals. They won’t last. And they’ve never even heard of Scotland. Jesus, those people couldn’t point to their own country on a map.’

  ‘But you can.’ She went on to tell him he was rootless and cynical. It was a nice conversation, hopeless, going nowhere, but full of the possibilities they each denied. They came alive arguing with each other and so did the country.

  ‘I might be rootless,’ he said, ‘but I’m not cynical. I love improvement, but I can tell you it doesn’t often arrive in a tank.’

  ‘Well, remember where you come from,’ she said, ‘if you care for improvement. That’s what we do up here. That’s what we’ve been doing for years now.’

  ‘Don’t rest on your laurels.’

  ‘You come from here, Luke.’

  ‘Do I? I come from here? A person might come from lots of places at the same time and a young person’s sense of humanity won’t confine itself to Dundee.’

  ‘Oh, Luke!’

  ‘Don’t Oh-Luke me. Those people in Afghanistan are poorer than you could ever imagine, and they can’t read the books containing the words that they’re willing to die for. But the biggest armies in the world can’t stop them imagining. That’s the truth. They want their tribes and they want their enemies. And so do we.’

  ‘Oh my,’ she said. ‘Some nations are decent, Luke, and if they want to spread that to backward places then it’s worth it.’

  ‘Decency?’ Luke said. ‘Do you know why I’ve been drummed out of the army, Mother? Do you want to know exactly? Because my group went into a village where there was a wedding. A small village. People preparing food and playing games and looking after goats. And we were led into a trap but we massacred the whole fucken lot of them. We sprayed them with bullets. We weren’t even supposed to be there. It wasn’t part of the mission. But we killed them all. Some of those boys were no more than thirteen or fourteen.’

  ‘I’m sure you—’

  ‘Don’t be sure, Mum. Don’t be. I was out of my fucken head.’

  ‘Don’t swear, son.’

  ‘It was a slaughter in broad daylight. We were smoking spliffs. We were listening to heavy metal. Scots boys. Irish boys and others. All from proud nations. All from freedom-loving nations with statues to philosophers. And then we went into this village …’

  ‘Son.’

  ‘No. It was chaos. You want decadence? You want rootlessness? Come to Bad Kichan. I could’ve fired bullets into every building. Into the lady in the wedding dress and the old men and the animals, too. All of them. Just blood. Just the enemy. I didn’t know if I was firing for decency or just gaming. It wasn’t real to me and it’s not real to anybody. So. That’s what I’ve been doing on my holidays, Alice.’

  ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about proud nations. That was me. Spreading decency to the world because we have so much to spare.’

  ‘Oh my.’

  ‘I’ll never put a uniform on again.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I shamed it and it shamed me.’

  Alice was remembering how Sean was the same. He started off believing in all sorts of things for Ireland and by the end he thought the players were part of the same rabble. Maybe it was just hard for soldiers to keep faith. But if Gordon was here he would put Luke straight on a few things. Nationalism was the way to live in a small country. England had been in charge for long enough and look at the mess they’d made.

  ‘One of our own boys got killed,’ Luke said. ‘A boy from Dalgarnock. Aged twenty-one.’

  ‘I know. We saw it on the news.’

  Alice slowly shook her head and eventually the mussels came and she ordered more wine. She dipped a piece of bread in the bowl, tasting garlic and herb butter. Being in the Rogano made Alice feel part of something elegant. Gordon might bring her here for St Andrew’s Night and he knew the chef from the markets and was trying to tie them in to an online shop. Luke went outside and when he came back she saw something weary in his handsome face. For the first time, she saw how he might look when he was old. It was a shock, really, because she had never seen his father old. Sean was twenty-six. ‘You still at the smoking?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll shake it,’ he said. ‘I always start again during a tour. Just being with the boys. They all smoke.’

  Alice didn’t know why she needed courage to pat his hand. ‘They said on the news it was drugs. They said the soldiers were smoking drugs.’

  ‘It catches on. I mean, the boredom. And the Afghans smoke it all day and all night. The boys are like nineteen.’

  ‘But the major, he wasn’t nineteen, was he? And the newspapers say he was worse than any of them.’ Luke knew there had been stuff in the papers but a public hearing was unlikely.

  ‘Mum. Just leave it.’

  But leaving it just wasn’t Alice. Luke could hear the vague, distant pleasure in her voice as she said the things he didn’t want to hear. ‘But you’d think a man that age – I mean, practically my age – would know better than to smoke that stuff and then go into a place …’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘… taking boys who can’t see what they’re doing in that state and it was children at a wedding.’

  He couldn’t help it but his teeth were gritted when he said it and he felt the heat in his face. ‘Fucking. Stop. Talking,’ he said and he stared hard at her. There was always something weird about Alice’s make-up, as if she didn’t really believe in make-up and was trying it on.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘I just can’t talk about it any more.’

  Under the table her hands were shaking. It was just like Sean all over again, Sean talking to her, trying to explain something that men don’t want to explain. And even Luke’s voice was the same as his father’s talking about the army. She had the old feeling of not knowing what to say. She didn’t want to provoke him but what about the practical things? Was he out for good? Would anyone be prosecuted for what happened? Would he just live in Glasgow now and settle down and maybe keep away from all this stuff that preyed on his mind?

  ‘Can I just say something, Luke?’

  ‘Knock yourself out.’

  ‘No, not like that. Nothing big.’ She took a gulp of wine and looked away. ‘I was never able to ask her anything about myself.’

  ‘You mean Gran?’

  ‘That’s right. I can’t ask. I can’t say, “What happened in my childhood?” or “What was my father really like?”’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She made it impossible.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I don’t know. And I’ve always asked myself, “Why can’t she speak to me?” Everybody has questions.’

  ‘Yes.’ He could see far down into Alice just then, the quiet, lonely life of his mother who was never free of them all.

  ‘I always felt my presence wasn’t called for.’

  ‘Mum …’

  ‘It’s fine. You learn how to live with these things.’ She took another drink. ‘It was always clear I got in the way of some story she had built about her and my father and what they did, who they were. If
I had any doubts or any questions I had to put them away. That’s my life.’

  ‘Maybe that will change,’ Luke said. She looked at him and knew she was looking at him with all the love she had.

  God bless him, she thought, for thinking life was something you solved. ‘I was so envious,’ she said, ‘when you were a boy and the two of you were reading those Dickens novels. You were like a gang. You and my mother and her favourite authors.’

  ‘They were just books.’

  ‘No, they weren’t. They were passports. You and she went to unknown places together and I was left behind.’

  ‘Anyone can read them.’

  ‘Don’t pretend to be shallow, Luke. You know what I mean. She taught you how to look for more out of life.’

  ‘I suppose she did.’ He could see the pain in her face.

  ‘She never told me who I was,’ she said. ‘Just who I wasn’t.’

  ‘Don’t get upset, Mum.’

  ‘Some people make life bigger for other people. And I’ve always been on the wrong side of that bargain.’

  He just felt awkward. He wasn’t going to say things just to soothe her because she was too shrewd for that. He didn’t quite see it but his instinct was still to hold out against his mother, to stall her sentiment and deny her all the small benefits of possession. And she changed the subject after sniffing to clear the air. ‘All that stuff you’re saying, about not belonging anywhere, that’s just the war talking,’ she said. ‘It’s just because of what you went through in Afghanistan. It’s all the stress and what have you. But I think you know where you belong.’

  He felt his phone buzz in his pocket and reckoned it would be one of the many texts from the boys in the platoon. He wished he could dive into the carpet and swim to a time when allegiances were clear. The thing he loved about Glasgow was that you never felt truly alone there: a sense of community upbraided you at every corner, but as his eye wandered vacantly over the floor he felt pinched by the local style. ‘Well, Mum,’ he said at last. ‘I wanted life to be more than us. Much more than us. Maybe that’s why I went away in the first place.’