Our Fathers Read online

  Many a night we curled on the sofa like cats. Watching videos about people in France. Drinking red wine from giant tumblers. Arguing about why the women must always be punished or die. We would read the same paperback: I’d tear it down the middle and let her take the back half (she always reads quicker than I do). She would stand behind me as I was shaving. She would count my ribs and put her lips to my shoulders. Her hands spreading over my bare chest. Her hand running down and stroking my cock. Her lemon mouth going down my arm and biting my wrist. And I’d kiss her sniggers away; shaving foam on her face, in her hair.

  We would go to bed. All the debris of our current lives on the living-room floor. The video unrewound. Things not said. The sheets in Karen’s bed were as cool as a field of long grass. So cool I wanted to sleep there for ever. The cool sheets and all that calm for ever. The long grass. The Mersey nights at the patio windows. Karen’s silencing world of clean cotton. She was always saying I whispered in my sleep. Quietly. No moans or groans but quiet words. Her hand in my hair.

  Sleeping.

  The smell of pines. The old smell of pine.

  Every long minute of the night we would breathe our own in that flat of hers. We dreamed our dreams of oceans, and unborn babies, the windows like rigging, the wind against them, and both of us talking our strange words to nobody. There were words we couldn’t say to each other; they were lost in the muddle of our separate pillows. Karen had wanted our baby. I shook my head a hundred times.

  ‘Let’s have no more of families.’

  And still the night bore down on us. The night bore down, a blue returning of the city’s breaths, the millions of souls asleep, our carbon dioxide, our flowers breathing, quiet there, alive in their pots. The North of England is radioactive. We slumber in gases: a red glow at the heart of every bed. The power stations run all night. Out on the motorways cars go into the fog. Acid rain at the rattling glass. We can hear the winds in our tangle of sheets.

  Sleeping.

  The all-night garages cold and wet in a gaggle of light. There are service stations to the North Pole, but inside our rooms there is no noise of baby. We slept all night; no gurgle to interrupt our privacies. No noise of baby. And that was the dead centre of our troubles. Karen and I had started a baby. By the sparkle in her eyes I knew she had wanted it.

  Our baby.

  ‘Please, Karen …’

  Her sparkling eyes. I knew she wanted it.

  ‘… let us have no more of families.’

  She terminated it. We never spoke of babies again.

  Our pregnancy. We caused it to come to nothing. I caused it. And in our clean lives, our dark sleeps, we are thinking about it. It is all my fault. We are thinking about that too. Mothers. Fathers.

  The dead centre of our trouble. It lay heavy on us. Karen said I was stopping the future. My head was clouded with remorse.

  The rain that drummed on the phone-box roof.

  She answered the phone on the second ring. ‘Karen, it’s me.’

  ‘James.’

  ‘Are you okay, baby?’ She waited a second.

  ‘Not a hundred per cent, no. Are you drunk?’

  ‘Baby, I miss you. I took him out today. My granda. We’re in a pub. It’s raining.’

  ‘Is he well enough to be out like that? I thought he was dying.’

  ‘He’s up and down. I miss you. This is … this is terrible, Karen.’

  I suddenly thought I might cry into the phone. I knew she could hear it.

  ‘James. Do you want me to come up there?’

  ‘No, don’t come. Everything will be all right.’

  She tried to lift me. ‘You sound so Scottish, sweetheart. If you don’t come home soon I might not be able to understand you.’

  ‘It’ll be a while yet, Karen. It’s just so weird … all this.’

  ‘Phone me more, James. Are they giving you a hard time?’

  ‘No, no. It’s not that. It’s hard for everybody, you know?’

  ‘I went round and checked your messages. Most of them boring. Phil from your office is looking for a number …’

  ‘Tell him there isn’t a number. I don’t want anybody ringing …’

  ‘You’ll have to extend your leave. Do you want me to ring …’

  ‘Tell them not to do that. There’s no phone here, it’s …’

  ‘Okay, darling. It’s fine.’

  ‘Will you ring Phil? Tell him I have to stay on here. It’s hard to know really.’

  ‘All right. And a guy left a message, a guy … em, McCluskey. From Glasgow. He said you talked about a consultancy in Glasgow. They’re doing some block. Do you want to ring him?’

  ‘Can you give me the number?’

  ‘Wait a second.’

  I could hear her padding across the kitchen. The television music somewhere. In the bedroom. She came back with the number. I wrote it on the back of a betting slip.

  ‘And that’s it,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you miss me?’

  ‘I do, Karen. I feel like a … I don’t know what I feel. If I ever get away from here … If this is over … We’ll go on holiday or something, you and me. I’ll buy you a coat.’

  She was laughing now. ‘James, you’re drunk. Don’t say any more …’

  ‘Better, Karen. I can make it better.’

  She went very quiet. The hiss of the phone, the remote TV. I could hear her breathing.

  ‘Better,’ I said. ‘You know we are good. You and me.’

  The sound of our breathing.

  ‘You take care up there,’ she said. ‘And if he improves just come back, and then go back when … you know … things get worse. I don’t know why they need you there all this time. But anyway. I want you back here in one piece. All right? I love you, James.’

  ‘Love you, Kaz.’

  And then she put the phone down. But still in my head I could hear her padding across the carpet in Liverpool. ‘Love you, Karen.

  I.

  I love you.’

  The rainwater ran from my hair, down my face, into my mouth. There was a loch in the road. Water everywhere. I stopped at the edge of the path and was sick. I thought it would never stop. I held on to a low-hanging branch; the water ran down my arm. A revolt of the nerves, a violent breach. I stood for a while in the rain.

  ‘Why did you leave me with all them fools?’ Hugh said. His head was low.

  ‘I thought you were having a good time,’ I said.

  ‘But I wanted you here,’ he said. ‘This is us having a good time.’

  One of the crowd broke in.

  ‘Your da here is some man,’ he said. ‘A great man.’

  I just nodded.

  Hugh studied me. It was an even look, a resigned stare. The other men got on with the business of each other.

  ‘You think I’m corrupt, son, don’t you?’ Hugh said.

  ‘What?’ I looked at him funny.

  He’d fallen under his own spell. He was speaking more to himself than me. The whisky was all the way through him. He was saying things he kept to himself.

  ‘So we were for better railway stations and wage packets and clean houses and school milk,’ he said.

  Something long gone came into his eyes. ‘Simple things. We wanted to better ourselves. The inside toilets. We knew the enemy in them days. We wanted milk for the weans and better teeth for them. And aye people made something out of it. I know that. They tell me people made something for themselves. Well, well. That’s the way it is. There’s always somebody making something out of progress. But I never did. As long as things got done. That was all I cared about.’

  I said nothing. He turned with his heat.

  ‘Don’t stand over me, Jamesie, with your fucking regulations. I know who I am. And your crowd will rush over the Border with the big solution I take it?’

  I thought to say nothing; my stomach fluttered. I looked at his eyes.

  ‘Even progress changes, Hugh,’ I said. ‘Different notions. A new time that’s all. It
doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Different times?’

  ‘A new time.’

  ‘And you and your cronies are going to make something new out of this mess are you? This rubble you’re creating? No, Jamesie. Tell you something for free, son. You will need much more than a couple of slogans and a big banner. You will need more than a demolition ball and dynamite sticks.’

  I was too drunk to ignore him. I thought I knew better.

  ‘It’s a good place to start,’ I said.

  My resolve of the day, to protect him, was wavering now, as it wavered before, and would do again, before it was over. I should have just nodded, even in drink.

  ‘When we blew things down it was a start,’ he said. ‘With your lot it’s not the start of anything. It’s the end.’

  ‘We can change things,’ I said.

  ‘Good luck to you,’ he said. ‘Here’s more for free. You’re following the bad examples nowadays. Our example was good.’

  ‘There are walls coming down all over the place,’ I said.

  He looked up, his eyes red-rimmed, and sick. He tapped his chest and pointed to the air. ‘Our materials are stronger,’ he said.

  I came back to my senses then. I would say nothing.

  He leaned back.

  A taxi came for a girl at the next table. I asked her to get the driver to radio for another one. Hugh was ready to go home. His head was down, and he was no longer leading the board in their jokes and their songs, their high tales of world domination. He was content there; he wore a wearied smile. He had made his audience love him. He seemed to recede into a world of his own. His cigarette burned. And he smiled at me. My soaking hair.

  Outside a pink firework burst over the distant houses. It was late in the month for fireworks; late in the day for the rites of treason.

  Our car made its way through the circus of Ayr. Yards of water round the crooked trees; house lights dim behind a gauze of rain. And on the outskirts of town, with the roar of the sea, we passed by the Glengall House. To the everyday eye just another white building with its own sad business going on inside. A nursing home. The mute walls; the yellow rooms. But still the old madhouse where Hugh had been born. The ghost of his mother lying on a bed.

  Knees and belly and head like the peaks of Arran.

  We passed the building in a second. Both of us in the back seat. Those wraiths made of sea-salt in the asylum just past. A puddle of music. Hugh rolled his head from the window and stared at me with his sore mouth.

  ‘Guy Fawkes,’ he said.

  I thought of fire blazing in the wards of Glengall. And women dancing: hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels. ‘Weel done, Cutty-sark!’

  It was pitch black. Hugh looked at me long. He was all of his years. Glengall behind us. And in minutes the old man was sound asleep. The driver was off on his own. My head went to the window on my own side. The front doors of houses just falling away. Those living rooms. All the houses just spinning back; a stream of fast-going brickwork. And a herd of ghosts coming after the car. I looked out the back window. There was nothing left but a whorl of mist.

  We pulled away to the blackness of Ayrshire. My eyes wide open.

  The child you have been will never desert you.

  FIVE

  On Earth

  Margaret said there was a Christinas tree in the hall cupboard. It was stuffed in a box, the wire branches bent out of shape, trapped in green tinsel. There were dozens of shiny baubles there too, and Santas and angels chipped with age. I put my hand right down to the bottom: a silver star, a home-made star, a thing I had made for them years ago.

  The cupboard was heaped with old things like that. Boxes of books from Collins. The plastic bases of flower arrangements. A carton of iron bells. Knitting patterns. And while I was in there I noticed more of Hugh’s old plans and time-sheets. I put them into a carrier bag, slipped them under the Christmas box, and lifted them together. The electricity meter caught my eye as I came up. The wheel wasn’t moving. A length of twisted coat-hanger was threaded through the box, holding the wheel at a stop. I put out the light and closed the door.

  Hugh seemed too weary to cough. He couldn’t stand up. At times he seemed unsure if he was awake or asleep, and we’d hear him grumble at the coming and going.

  ‘Fuck, fuck.’ ‘See us a fag.’

  Some afternoons I just sat by the bed reading from Burns or Sven Hassel, or rolling the cigarettes. Now and then he’d throw his hand over to close the book. Or he’d pass a roll-up back to me. ‘Too tight,’ he’d say. ‘I’ll need a poultice … on the back of my … neck … to get a draw on that.’

  And he seemed to know us well enough as the coughing returned. The two things came together. The sore cough and us. At times he could flame up with a moment’s reason. ‘D’ye hear my wife singing?’ he said one of those times. ‘D’ye hear her? She’ll never forget, that woman.’

  None of us was good at forgetting. That was a family ailment. But he was right about Margaret – she would never forget – and her memory could seem like something larger than all of us. Margaret lived out of her memory; the stories, and the keeping of stories, was what she felt the world was for. She held our lives to account. She wanted us all to remember what had happened here. When she lost her temper, with the women at the coffee mornings, the kids on the landing, the men on TV, the rogue members of the family, it was usually because they were ‘ignorant’. That was the worst thing she could say about anybody alive. They were ignorant. They made an easy job of forgetting the rights and wrongs, and they were beyond care, and just ignorant.

  Margaret used to be a great one for rote learning. My proper education began in her house. She would sit me down with her books of popular history, giving me the great names, and the final word on the holy terrors. I can still recall whole chunks of those books she made me learn by heart. A sense of betrayal lay deep in both Hugh and Margaret; it was an important part of who they were. Way behind both of them, or behind the words they spoke, lay thousands of acres of emptied land – bogs, glens – places filled with the sound of sheep and lost voices, where once their ancestors had thrived and raged. Margaret had taught me the names of her people, those men of the old Highlands, whose houses were burnt, whose land was cleared. They were men hanged on apple trees grown by their own fathers; they were women beaten with ash truncheons; they were starving children, sent under white sails to Canada, torn from the land they loved, their dark tartans turned into shrouds.

  Over the months I had noticed how Margaret was without living friends. She saw the women at the coffee mornings, but she wasn’t close to any of them. She lived her life in an element of ghosts. Death had long ago taken the people she felt close to, those friends and kinsmen she had never met, and just as far back it had silenced her foes, those lords and ladies who’d made the country a place of mourning. Margaret possessed a whole eternity of forgiveness, but only for the living; they may be ignorant, they may be wrong, and selfish on top of all that, but for living people she only felt sorry. She might, now and then, lose her temper, but really she only felt sorry. She had no inclination to blame people for their faults. She saved her fury for the ignoble dead. Them she hated. The people who betrayed her people. Them she hated with every shard of her being.

  I dressed the Christmas tree in my granny’s room. She sat in her favourite chair. An Ayr Advertiser was folded on her lap. A cup and saucer. Minute by minute she picked the fluff from the wrists of her jumper. It was a man’s jumper. She often wore men’s jumpers.

  ‘I can still remember your history lessons,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure that you can, Jamie son. And it will no be long until you’re telling them to your own bairns.’

  I didn’t look up at this. I just stared at my face in a green Christmas bauble. I had my father’s eyes. A minute passed. I looked up then. ‘I would like to have kids one day,’ I said.

  The words surprised me as they came out. They were true, and I just hadn’t said them like th
at before. Something about the room, and the way I was stretched out on the carpet, and the Christmas tree, and my granny’s white face; something about the radiator and the heat coming over, and the look of the light as it fell about her old photographs. I don’t know why I said it to her then. Something made me want to say it. I suppose I wanted her to know something private about me, to see me just a moment in the glimmer of my own adulthood.

  ‘We nearly had a baby once,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think I’d be a very good father.’

  ‘Ye mustn’t think so,’ she said. ‘The days move on, Jamie. Nothing that’s happened should make you afraid. You’re a good man.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  The words came out very quiet. She paused with them.

  ‘Is Karen your girlfriend?’ she asked.

  ‘But who told you that?’

  ‘You did,’ she said. ‘In the first days you were here, you were saying her name, just in your sleep. Is she nice?’

  ‘Not bad for a Protestant,’ I said.

  We both smirked. My granny rolled her eyes.

  ‘Well I’m saying nothing,’ she said. ‘You’re the modern ones. Just don’t waste yer life on worries, son. I want ye to be happy.’

  She licked two fingers and smoothed away a drip on her skirt.

  ‘I’m glad ye’ve held on to the wee bit history,’ she said. And then she looked at me in a manner of trust. My granny had a look for everything. The last one had two meanings: I trust you have listened; I trust you will always be listening.

  ‘George Granville Leveson-Gower,’ I said.

  Poor Margaret grew black-eyed.

  She put both hands round her teacup, as if her body had sudden need of the warmth, and she hissed all her breath out at once. ‘Evil,’ she said. ‘Pure evil.’

  I rose on my knees and faced her. Those little acres of carpet between us. The Christmas ornaments were still in my hands as I started reciting. I smiled as the words came back. Margaret closed her eyes.

  ‘George Granville Leveson-Gower. He was the Great Improver. Where there had been nothing in his opinion but wilderness and savagery, he built, or had built for him by the Government, thirty-four bridges and four hundred and fifty miles of road. The glens emptied by his commissioners, law-agents and ground-officers (with the prompt assistance of soldiers and police when necessary) were let or leased to Lowlanders who grazed 200,000 True Mountain Sheep upon them and sheared 415,000 pounds of wool every year.’