Our Fathers Read online

  But my mother was half in love with chaos. She liked my father’s hatred of his father, and encouraged me in my hatred of mine. With all her yearning for the ordinary life, my mother was born to admire outsiders. You could see she felt enlarged by drama and trouble, by the electric pulse of things going wrong, and her vision of the easy life remained in most ways a recurring dream. Though he killed half her life, and always took his hand to her, and never listened to a word she said, there was a part of my mother that found in my father’s listless turmoil, his seething rancour, the features of a vast attractiveness. My mother and me, our little alliance, lay somewhere among the backroads, a place to run to in the uncoupling hours, those times of sense or savagery.

  My mother was in love with him, and I never was. There was nothing in my heart for my father then. That is what I said. And my mother liked me detesting him. It left more of the lovable him for her, and made me a stranger to their understanding. Sometimes she would come to me at night, sit on the edge of my bed, and look at my models of engines and trains, stacked on the floor beneath us. ‘We could go to Australia, you and me,’ she would say. ‘I want to leave him. He’s a bad bastard.’

  ‘Mum,’ I would say, ‘don’t upset yourself.’

  She would dab her eyes on the bedclothes, laying her head down next to my feet. The red on her lips, her old-seeming face, would shine, the light coming in through the top of the door. ‘Jamie, you’re a boy that likes history and flowers, and that’s unusual. You build these wee engines and take them apart. I bet you’ll end up planning houses like your granda. Your father was never good for anything.’

  My mother would sometimes try to drink, just to be more in my father’s world. But she would never try to read a book, or come along the beach, or take me into a towering building, just to be more in mine. And who could blame her? My mother was willing to let me go. She would rage and scorn, and hold me close for a minute, and promise to leave him to rot away. Yet she knew herself better. She would always go back in the end, and I would be left, quite happy alone, uncovering peace among boyish things, planning a future without my parents, in a world that believed in the things it said. My mother told me she believed what she said when she said she would love him in sickness and in health. She would say that, and would be right to say it, and would one day allow him to unsay the lot, and divorce her by Royal Mail. That is the sort of kindness my mother believes in. She’s a better person than I could be. There are no vows between parents and their children.

  The top of my shorts was made of elastic. It dug in. There was always a ribbon of red-ruckled skin appearing just over my hips. There was a summer’s day, not long after we came to Ayrshire. I played at the door of a pub called The Unco Guid. The smell of the sea and the smell of the pub came on like one thing.

  I remember my arms were out of the arms of my jumper. My hands stuck out the bottom, busy at Five Stones. I was more than good at that game. One stone up in the air – pick up two – catch the fallen – put them aside – nick off each pebble – scoop up the lot – toss them into the air again – good boy – and make them come down on the back of one hand. Good boy. My hand darted about the dirt as I sat against the brown tiles of the pub. The Spillers dog-food factory across the way.

  Dogs were bad.

  Saliva.

  They were made to be just like their owners. Angry, barking, with stuff on their teeth. Men in Scotland make dogs be like them: aggression machines.

  In Berwick you never saw people kick dogs, not like you did in Ayrshire. My father said he loved dogs. He would bring one in from the pub – docile, lost – and thereafter train it to bite people. He liked terriers most. Scots, cairns, wire-haireds, West Highlands. Little dogs with sharp teeth. Every one we ever had would pee itself at the sight of Robert. He beat them so much, and taught them the rule: to be scared of him. Any that peed would have their noses rubbed into the wet carpet, lashed with the leash, called all the names. The yelps and whimpers of those poor dogs. And yet how they’d dive up, and lick and kiss him, as soon as he showed some sign of affection. There was something of soft Judas in each of those terriers. By and by my father would take each of them away. He got sick of them. One day we’d wake up and the basket would be empty, the tins of dog food stacked in the bin. My father would go off with the shivering dog. A drive to the countryside. He would lose it there.

  The dog-meat factory was over the road. Spillers, they called it. Spillers: ‘The Happy Choice for the Happy Dog’. Cars went past in a hurry to somewhere. A little way off, under the clouds, I could see cranes moving. New houses going up. People came along the street with their pushchairs. Some of the women would stop and bend down.

  ‘You all right there, son?’

  And yes I was all right thanks. Every hour or so I’d go on tiptoe and look through the glass, the wire-mesh glass at the top of the door. My mother and father sat in the corner, brown tumblers on the table, a jukebox hung on the wall behind them. That day I saw them kissing in the corner. She rubbed her hands in his hair. She kissed his neck. There was blue smoke swaying around the room. The noise of glass upon glass, and songs tailing off inside. And voices overlapping in the dark place. Big laughs. Coins crashing. Then suddenly someone pushed at the door. A man tripped into the day with his trousers loose, his red face shouting something.

  ‘Away ye go,’ he stumbled and said, his eyes all watery and wrong, the steps unsteady, his fingers yellow. ‘Oot the road.’

  My mother came out now and then. A packet of crisps and a tumbler of orangeade. ‘Me and your dad are just talking, son,’ she said. ‘And we’ll no be long.’

  Salt and vinegar. My mouth was spiky and raw with the taste of them. My eyes watered. The tumbler smelt dark. I sat there for hours, the sky changing over. All the headlamps came on the cars. Blocks of light running past on wheels, the local buses, and the faces of people looking down from the upper decks. Some of the people spoke to each other, some snoozed gently against the window, and others looked down, with their big eyes vacant, passing the pub and the pavement and me. I thought who all of them were, making up names and jobs for them, and thinking of birthdays, and places they went on holidays. Where did they live? I thought of each person going now to a faraway place. I thought of them arriving at a well-lit kitchen, with children there, and the TV giving out the regional news.

  I thought of them remembering me. Just as they lay in bed. The boy they passed on the bus through Barrhead. He sat at the pub door. Only a second. He sat there looking up, and waving a hand in the Esso-blue evening. The smile on the boy, a life not my own, and over the top of him, on the other side of the trees, a graveyard stood on the sloping hill. You could see the stones. You could see the light pass away through the branches of wych-elm, the green-winged samaras spinning down to the roof of the pub. Under it all was a smiling boy.

  In a second gone.

  I walked up and down to the bus stop. The smell of pies came down from the houses. We would go home soon. Some wind collected in the bus shelter. Cans lay about with their pictures of girls. Samantha. Terri. Joyce. The shelter was under the lights on the nearby flats. They were naked yellow. I sniggered at the way you could see the girls’ tits. My eyes got fixed on some distant spot – a crush of lights I could see through the perspex wrap of the shelter.

  A thought came down my kaleidoscope.

  Here: me being in this shelter, at this time, holding on to these crushed sexy cans, the wind coming through, the lights as they are, the smell of pies. No one but me has been in this moment. No one is living my life but me.

  *

  Saltcoats was made up of lumpy steppe. A fading of fields, bleeding away to the Firth of Clyde. The sound of progress was shrill in those days. New main roads were gouged from the dirt tracks. Battalions of houses were drilled on the grass. The new shopping centre was loud by the shore front; young folk clustered at the Amusements, a jangling all year round. And people came down to the broken sea wall for air. They came in buses e
very half an hour.

  The town had always felt sleepy and late: a place of quiet endings, and lost industry. No more salt-pans or fishermen; little of coal or the iron smelt. A place of grass sidings that once were canals, a place of beaches, with ice-cream booths standing idle on the prom. The ghosts of Edwardian holidaymakers chattered in the breeze. Saltcoats had played its part in wars and explorations; it was apt to whisper its own small stories. We were full of its quiet backwaters, its drowsy hymns to the god of indifference.

  Saltcoats was becoming somewhere new; no longer could it stand as it was, back from the world of great events. Old fields were filling, day upon day, with new-style flats, and model schools, and endangered families from other places. Mulligan’s Pool, where children had swum on mild summer days, to the menacing sound of tractors and crows at their backs, was now engorged in a factory and car park, a company flag up a slippery pole, and local workers doing Japanese breathing out in the yard of a morning.

  The name of the pool was a secret among the children. Mulligan the Irishman. He had drowned in the pool one night. Just after saying goodbye to the pigs. He had fallen in drunk. The new assembly workers hadn’t heard of Mulligan. To children he was a known ghost. He lived underwater, in the moving shadows of all that was new, and all day and all night he tumbled down in the evil drink. The Japanese nation built a shed the size of the Pacific Ocean; everyone worked there. They flew in bosses and clocks from Osaka. But none of them knew about Mulligan’s Pool. They dressed it to look like an Eastern pond. But we knew better. Mulligan span in the rootless dark.

  The valley had once been a cup of old life. Not any more. Every day of my boyhood it was littered with something new. A glimmer of loading bays. Private golf links on the outer bounds. And giant superstores, fastened to the bypass, and built in the style of the farmer’s bothy The windows looked out on the road, and the girls inside had overalls and hairnets; girls in checks who were hurt by their boyfriends, and lazy or tired, they swayed all day with their price-guns. Beyond the windows were Barratt houses, and the seaside dead, and the Isle of Arran, some way off, like a silver smock laid over the horizon.

  Yes, life went ahead in the mess of our town. From the head of it, on Ashgrove Hill, you could believe the heart of progress was hereabouts. The place was losing the look of old photographs. Reinforced concrete was gaining the light. But a single spire was still bold at the centre; it stood on its own, the Coade-stone bricks of the grey church spire. From our house on the hill it was eye-level. The other churches were bungalows. How very lonely that grey spire seemed. How very old. How old with its face of grey weather. And all round the town new houses came about. The harbour was closed, the quarry was flooded and spoiled. But there it was. Every day it was something new. And one grey steeple under the sun.

  Breeze-blocks. The approved school at the Ferguson Loch was built with those bricks. And in my memory, in my heart of hearts, the common wind that whistled there is whistling still, and it fades to a moan in the corner of my dreams.

  A few years after coming up from Berwick my father got a job as the cook at Ferguson. We moved into one of the company houses. It was built with the same bricks as the school itself. The rain was pouring that day we moved in. Our bits of carpet, our single beds. To my father that place was all of heaven. The house came along with the job. And the job came along with his romance of chaos. It gave him a home in the land of his fathers.

  The school’s governors loved him. To them he seemed street-wise. The kind of man who had understanding. A man ill-at-ease, who might easily handle the poor thugs there, the scrambling boys who needed his eye. The bosses loved him. They took his instability as a guarantee of experience. And sure enough the boys loved him too. He was just the father they’d sooner have had. Swore like a trooper, drank like a pagan, smoked like a bomber descending to earth. Like them he had a talent for resisting the everyday: all his delinquent nerve was ripe for those boys. He became a hero. My father had at last found his home and his station. It was a place where his vices could make him heroic: the Ferguson List ‘D’ School for Boys.

  I used to waste time watching fish in the Ferguson burn. I’d guddle away the afternoons, in Wellington boots and a scarf new-made by my granny. It was there I would sometimes see the boys. The burn was full of old prams. Down at the bridge the flow was clogged with rotted leaves, and dammed with sticklebacked branches. The burn fell thick with cement; the water was dark under a hood of trees.

  Dods of cement going by.

  The boys were called absconders. Berry was one of them. He ran from the school every chance he got. The first time I saw him he was hiding in the castle, an old building next to the water, a pile of stones in grasses and bin-bags. He told me he was fifteen, and showed me his stings from nettles. He was someone I’d seen in my head before: one of those bundles of shivers in books. He said his father had tried to strangle him thirty or forty times or more. His house was in Glasgow. The old man had put his hands around Berry’s neck until he nearly died. He would faint as his father did it. Now he said he had epileptic fits; sometimes, when I was with Berry, he would just fold up on the grass, and go like a piston. He was tall and lanky and his hair was black. He showed me a tattoo he cut into his knuckle with Indian ink. It looked sore. He was always running away. His father hated him. Berry told me he got sent to the school because he had run from his normal school in Glasgow. And he said he sniffed the glue sometimes. His mouth was all scabby.

  Berry had a supernatural look on his face. He seemed that much older than he was. In another place, with other chances, he might have been a boy playing rounders in the evening, or learning the piano, making model planes, or seeing the point of sums. Berry was the first friend I had who was different from me. But our secret was the same. We shared it between us. We knew that our fathers hated us. Berry and I would meet at the burn. We’d walk to the beach, with me saying stuff about lugworms and weeds and the lobes of shells, all the news from that morning’s ocean. A lot of times we sat in the dunes and looked out. Berry always said the same thing: he said he wished he could go on a boat, and sail it far to another place. Out past the lighthouse, in its unmanned calm. He said he would never look back.

  ‘You could have a magic time in another country.’

  Sometimes, when it was getting dark, we’d plain how to get him as far as Glasgow, where he could go and stay with a girl he knew, and one time I stole him a bottle of milk, and a handful of silver for the train. But they’d always bring him back to the school. Sometimes my dad would go to the police station and pick him up. And I saw how Berry thought my father was kinder than the others. ‘At least he would hit you only for something bad,’ he would say. ‘And he buys us things.’

  From my bedroom I heard noises. I would sometimes hear the boys shouting from their windows. The night would be dark, the water of the burn trickling in pitch blackness, the castle no more than a lump of cold stone, and the lights of the housing scheme over there a blind temptation, a cluster of unnamed hopes. The boys would scream for their mothers quite often. You could hear their cries across the fields. As if no one would hear on this distant night, they cried up high, sad words for their mothers. I couldn’t believe all those boys in the school, so similar in distress, with eyes so like one another’s. Their cries all sounded the same as well.

  One night I came out of my room. I wondered if one of those voices was Berry’s. I put on clothes over my pyjamas. A blue cagoule, and Nature Treks, my shoes that pinched, too small. I remember everything of that night – an owl we called Morgan up in the tree, the moon a red forewarning, the grass on the playing fields crunchy underfoot – and I made my way down to the school with a torch. Berry stood up at the window in only football shorts. I could see his face was melted with crying. The torch shone into the ground. Berry couldn’t tell who I was. ‘You are all bastards,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll burn this place.’ He shouted it over and over. ‘I’ll burn it to fuck.’ It was like he didn’t know what to do
with himself. He banged his head off the window. He screamed like hell. And at the end of it all he just sobbed in his hands. ‘I want to go home,’ he said.

  ‘Bastards,’ he said.

  The school’s boiler room was a den of mine. It was always warm there. And on most Sundays I would go with a book. Just the sound of bubbling hot waters. Thick pipes ran around the walls and over the ceiling, alive with pipes and meters. It was dirty and loud and it smelt of oil. A cooling tower rose like a periscope from the back end. There was always a yellow and fizzing light. A single bulb. This night I turned the wet handle and walked forward with my torch. All the pipes seemed to rumble together – fired with a task I could only guess at – the humid air enclosing me, softening my hair, tingling my skin. An old school desk, half-jaked, lay in the corner. You could fix the bolts and make it good enough to use. I sat there contented a minute that night, quite lost in the maddening rumble. A host of questions danced in the greasy dimness: What if none of us can leave this place? What are we doing here? I thought and thought and wondered at it. Can you ever go back anywhere? Can you ever go back?

  ‘Are you dreaming there?’ said a voice behind the oil drums. ‘Just remember: you’re the daddy now.’