Our Fathers Page 3

  The voice was my father’s. It dangled a cigarette in the black of the corner. ‘Yes you’re the daddy now.’

  And the rumbling of the pipes seemed to fall away – just his voice in the heat. ‘I bought you a rabbit, Jamie, you remember that? Your rabbit in the garage. I don’t think you’ve been taking care of it now, have you? Your mother put it in the garage; you know it was a pest in the garden. It’s in there by itself. And the ferrets, you know, have been sniffing around the edge. Tonight they might have found a way in. Your rabbit, Jamie. I don’t think you’ve been looking after it the same. The ferrets are there. You ought to be a better daddy, Jamie. The wee bairns. Pitch black. And you with your books. Your shells around the lamp. Your maps. Your granda’s tales of dead bricks. But the living things, Jamie. The wee bairns. Pitch black. And them depending on you, Jamie. I think the ferrets are in among them. Too dark in there. And you with your torch in this hot place. It’s a shame, son. It’s just no bloody good.’

  Down fell the cigarette on to the oily floor. And nothing happened. He was gone. The sound of the pipes came back from beyond, and no one was there in the room. Just me and the heat and the naked bulb. And soon enough I was back in my bed. The owl shrieked in the tree. There was no rabbit of mine in the garage outside. The rabbit had died months before. One of us was lying. And yet my father was surely not out of his bed that night. He slept right through my bad dreams, and was silent there in the other room, his bed next to my mother’s, as he followed nightmare shapes of his own. I had been alone in the boiler room. I only imagined he was near me. Or maybe he came to me later in a dream. I’m not sure: he seemed at the time to creep so easily into my head. His atmosphere lurked there. His cigarette burning in the dark; his mouth a malignant shadow.

  *

  My mother had a dog’s life then. These were the years of our best alliance. She could never be true to me – I knew that already – but still we could stand together in the higher winds, side by side, making laughs out of nothing.

  Every morning, from four until eight, she worked on the line in a baking factory, the Superloaf, and we’d meet halfway down the hill, and stand at an iron gate, rain or shine, to have our breakfast. This was our most open and peaceful time: a family moment for both of us. She would always have two hot rolls in her bag. A biscuit or two. A carton of milk. ‘Never you mind,’ she said more than once, ‘you’re just passing through here, Jamie.’

  She would always say such things. And sometimes we would just laugh against that gate, the absurd business of our lives suddenly filling us up with hopeless mirth, and all our talk was of the daft things that happen. But she looked tired in her headscarf and cheap furry boots. ‘You’re a sketch,’ she would say.

  ‘You shouldn’t have had me,’ I said one time. ‘You and him would’ve been fine then.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ she said. ‘Some day you’ll see what he was like with his own father. Problem with Rab is he can’t understand people who aren’t like him. You’re your own boy already, Jamie. Never bother with him. But mind, he has a lot of time for you in his own way.’

  Maybe I thought I could make my mother happier. I’ve never considered it much since those days. I allowed myself to think she had made her choice in life. Maybe she never really did. But the truth is my mother was something different from my father. She had all the simple courage that good people have. She went to her work; she brought me rolls; she stood by her useless husband. She was bright enough to see the point of other people’s lives. She wanted them to do well. She believed that things would be all right for me, that time would be good. Only sometimes would she stop, and look at me, and see that I’d said a childish thing. And she’d know I was next to nothing underneath, and hug me for a minute, and then all my helpful intimations of adulthood would come to the rescue of both of us.

  We laughed beside the gate. The mad things that happened in our country, in our house. I always had questions about the last war. She didn’t remember much. She told me no one would settle for that life now. ‘The wars made us buck up our ideas,’ she said, ‘not that everything worked out.’

  Every family was the same, she said. You had to make the best of it. ‘Your dad’s people were always very heavily into that. Politics and that. They used to give out leaflets in the street.’

  The cows seemed to watch us with their big brown eyes.

  ‘Tatty-bye,’ she said. ‘Sure and see you get good marks in the class. We don’t want any dunces about the place.’

  With a smile my mother would pad over the red-ash playing fields towards the school. I walked away. Now and then I would stop in the road. I picked leaves off the trees, held them up to the light. Sometimes I bit into them. Now and then I put a few in my schoolbag. The bag was full of leaves and things. The cows rolled their eyes. A drunkard was no big thing. Kids just had them at home. And sometimes teachers would offer a word of concern. But mostly they said nothing. Usually they’d come and ask if you’d had breakfast that day.

  ‘Si, al fresco.’

  ‘And is there a light in your house all right?’

  ‘Well there’s usually a fire on the living-room carpet. That tends to keep the bats out.’

  That was the sort of thing I would say to them. Just to keep them off. Teachers would leave you alone after that. And also, because my father worked at an approved school, they somehow imagined that he himself might bask in a pool of approval. At any rate I would never say a word about him. Some kids would burst into tears in the class. Some would get themselves suspended, then toddle home for a beating. At my school there were two kinds of kid with a wasted parent. The first kind, the much more common kind, would sniff glue, chew mushrooms from the grass banking, break windows, sell their free school dinner tickets for cigarettes, never do a stroke of work, would end up in remedial, and dog-off as many days as possible. With glee and worry they would set fire to half-built houses, and attack girls in the playground, and eventually strike a teacher, and would one day find themselves expelled.

  That was one sort at St Bridget’s. The other bunch would stay in the library during the interval. They would ask for extra homework. They would run errands for the teacher. The smallest extra-curricular task would be theirs. They hid themselves in chores. They would see the teachers outside of school, and read them poems in the public parks. They would take out their vengeance and fury on exam papers. They would learn about computers and home economics, planning the life they could live one day, the day they got up, and got out, and away from all this. Any old thing that offered the chance of not being their parents. They would grasp their lives to themselves. Their voices stayed small in the class. They missed every party. They never had girlfriends or boyfriends or dope, they never crossed teachers, and feared any cause for a note to their parents. Those kids knew it was only a matter of years. Each one bided his time for the grand escape. They had heard of deliverance, and they tried to bring it on with an eager pencil.

  I made a name for myself in Biology. The teacher was chestnut-headed, lipsticked, and wise. Her name was Miss McCardle. The boys insisted her name was Bunsen. I quite lost myself in her classes: in photosynthesis, in geotropism, in reproduction, in the intricate process of respiration. She was something, Bunsen. She let me see that the world was mine. Not mine alone, but mine too. She would choose me for experiments. She once pricked my finger – a gentle, hilarious spearing – and took some blood for a lesson on cells. We crowded around the microscope. ‘You have good blood, Jamie,’ she said.

  ‘Aye, right,’ I said.

  She smiled. Bunsen could know a thing without asking.

  I loved the things she could tell me. We spent whole hours with our heads in plants, breathing the smells of creeping ivy, tracking the veins of a Busy Lizzie. It turned me about, to know how things had ways of their own. How plants could grow. And how they could live and breathe and make more of themselves. Bunsen allowed me to visit the classroom after four. We sat at the back with dishes of agar j
elly. We watched life happen, replicating cells. And over the months we made our own wine. We added yeast and laughed out loud. At Christmas we sat in her office with plastic cups.

  ‘How civilised we are,’ said the excellent flame.

  ‘How wise and true,’ said I.

  My childhood was dotted with lucky islands. Mrs Drake, and the cockles of Berwick. Miss McCardle, the siren of Saltcoats. And even now and then my father’s father. My granny Margaret. They gave me much more than other children got. More of the seas and the way soil worked; more of their own dear health. But Miss McCardle was something new: her hair, and the sweet-looking smile about her. I wanted to kiss her right on the lips. She told me just to behave myself. And that was that. I turned to my maps of how the world was: H2OS and CO2S. Waters. Carbons.

  After hours, the classroom lights burned on in the early dark. And cleaners came in from the housing estates, silent with mops, lifting chairs, thinking of dinners, emptying bins. But Bunsen and I went on. She led me awhile in the mysteries of Chemistry. I got the periodic table off by heart. We discussed this metal, that mineral, and gas. She showed me what rocks were made of. We talked of how strong things were. What uses they had. And after months she helped me to Physics.

  ‘The study of pressure and time,’ she said.

  I don’t know why. I still don’t know why. But all those lessons I had in that class were like heady prescriptions against future pain. They soothed me with reason. Her carefulness soothed me. Bunsen was a tireless exponent of her primary subject, Biology. ‘It makes sense to know how the world is alive,’ she said.

  ‘Physics is brilliant,’ I said for trouble.

  ‘Indeed,’ she said, ‘the study of pressure and time. But don’t forget life, Jamie Bawn. Don’t forget life. Ecosystems. For living is all that matters in the end.’

  The English teacher disliked me. He knew I was born in England. He was all for the Scots and the language of his forefathers, ‘them that fought to unsheathe the iron tongue’. Or ‘thim that focht tae unshith the iron tongue’. That is the way he spoke. Our Scottish voices were canons and cutlasses to him. Our every word was an argument-in-the-making.

  He refused to wear a tie. He proclaimed loudly of Dunbar, of Fergusson and MacDiarmid.

  ‘The poets of the heart and the head,’ he said.

  Or, the poyets ae the hert an’ the heed.

  ‘… who put themselves against the placid mutterings of our neighbours.’

  Or, who pit theirsels agin the placid muttrins ae oor nee- bors.

  He was funny to watch, our seaside warrior, our nay-saying bore, Mr Buie. He wore pitted shoes the colour of mud. His woollen trews hung as mail bags on string. He’d a baby’s cheeks, ruddy and soft, and waves of hair, a coastal shelf, in steady retreat from his awesome brow. His greying eyes were always on us. They spoke of long ago. They spoke of lost ground, lonely evenings, and sins.

  Buie believed in a grand commonness: he spoke of real people; he spoke of oppression. We had never known anyone like that before. He wanted us to know that the way we spoke was a political matter.

  ‘They’ll try hard to take your language away,’ he said.

  That was Buie. There was always ‘they’. He could never understand our lack of taste for abstract resentments. We knew who ‘they’ were all right. And most of them – the ‘they’ that we cared about, and who haunted us daily – were never so far as the other side of the Border. They snored in the room right next to ours, or dwelled long and nasty in a parallel street, and some took classes at the local school.

  I got into a bit of a mess with Buie. He banned MacDiarmid’s ‘English poems’ from the class. He wouldn’t hear of Robert Louis Stevenson, except for those stories in braid Scots. He thought Walter Scott was a fascist. Buchan was a swine. Muriel Spark was a ‘turn-coat London harpie’. I had two girl pals in the class. Buie had christened them Cleopatra and Beast. He thought they were skiving hussies and pests.

  ‘You’re like the moon, Bawn,’ he said one day. ‘And these two are your satellites, spinning through the air quite canny like, transmitting mayhem and chaos and disastrous noises!’

  We fell about laughing. Buie was mental. But the words that he spoke were more than just words: he believed in them. One day, he stepped out of the class after a signature rant on the Treaty of Union, and he failed to come back that day.

  A wandering supply teacher came to our rescue. She spoke of American things. She spoke of Norwegian plays. And next day too she came in with her strangeness. She had gathered something of our class’s infatuation with the native voice. ‘Speech is not all there is,’ she said. She went to the board and held up a book. ‘This nation was not always so obsessed with the way it sounded on paper. For many years it paid great attention to other things as well. To the way it thought. The Scottish Enlightenment shows us that there is more than one way to make English Scottish. More than one way to write Scottish English. A strong Scots accent of the mind,’ she wrote. ‘Discuss.’

  Buie came in before the end of the lesson. He listened a moment. His face was grey. He dismissed the girl with the bangled wrists. He asked me to wipe the board of words.

  ‘That is my blackboard,’ he said. ‘It belongs to me.’

  And he told me to leave not a trace of her chalk. ‘A very good example,’ he said, ‘of the English propaganda.’

  He gave us a lecture on the meaning of Utopia. He said it was a word that meant everything in Scotland. ‘We all want to live there,’ he said. He told us this place was built of hard work, and ‘a strength of spirit’, and bravery too, and your own unweakened voice. It was a place with a government. A place without wars. A land where we all lived equal. Bring on the future, he said. Bring us ourselves, only better.

  ‘It’s a place to be built,’ said Buie. ‘You begin by building it with your own hands, in your own minds, in your own hearts. Our fathers wore themselves away to make this true. That is the history of this century, and of others before us, going back to the Industrial Revolution, and further. And it must remain with us.’

  He looked at me. ‘That is right, is it not, James Bawn? The work of our fathers might give us hope.’

  I put down my eyes to the desk. Maybe he was right and wrong. A strong Scots accent of the mind indeed.

  And yet much of Buie has stayed with me. I have loved the poems that he loved. I grew to perceive the beauty in them. They have been on my lips ever since. They will always mind me of my grandmother’s yearnings; of all our yearnings. They bleed somehow, in their Scottish way, into my love of Miss McCardle, and now, with time, they colour the life she once pushed me to know.

  They were poems of Biology and Physics. Poems of Geography. Poems of Breathing.

  Mr Buie held fast to his ground. He never saw any other ground like it. He heard no words but his own rising up. Mr Buie was much like us. He dreamed of knowing the future, and he woke up knowing the dead.

  *

  My grandparents Hugh and Margaret had flitted that year. They moved to the light of the eighteenth floor in a high-rise up the coast. Hugh was a famous Housing man. His whole life rang with the question of better housing. He was known as the man who had pushed the tower blocks. He believed they answered to people’s needs. He believed in those blocks to the end of his life.

  And he always said he could live in one himself. And as sure as his word he came one day. He joined the disgruntled people in the air. I was thirteen years old, and it was our third year at Ferguson, when Margaret and Hugh made the journey west. The journey for them was a long one somehow. But for me the journey was shorter: Hugh is the basis of everything I know. But that soft day of the annual fair, when the ancient burgh was gowping in colours, and New Town lairds were ringing the changes, and each in their cups went across the moor, good Hugh Bawn came into his tall house, a pot of tea beside the stainless sink, a shore of clean air, a view from the window, a place that seemed like a palace to them. There were no red ribbons on the taps that day. My gra
ndparents came as the band passed on. But the dauntless Hugh came up those stairs, quietly keeping his vision intact. These were the houses they had lived to build. And here his life was to come full circle.

  His years as the Housing supremo were waning. His years as my godsend took over instead. We became separate halves of one another. He told me over and over again how I was his younger self. But still he believed in the man he used to be. No love was lost between his Glaswegian glory and him. That’s what he said, and that’s what we thought at the time. But Hugh had seemed to have the gumption to make himself new. Down he came to the Ayrshire coast with his bells and his books and his flow charts intact; he had old stories in his possession, and elderly hopes to burn. But he wouldn’t retire. He would never retire. He came to the New Town with a mind to assist in the planning of all the new housing. He came like a king to a half-rural seat. I was nervous, but glad he had come.

  I began then to visit in secret. I was learning Hugh’s trade, and helping my granny with her flower stall at the harbour. During those years at the Ferguson school my visits to Glasgow had been too few. I was in their house there a dozen times. But seeing them had soothed me greatly in those wastes of time. Strange as it was, and given their age, and all Hugh’s intolerance in the matter of ideals, it was these old folk who gave me my life, and who best represented the future for me. Their new flat was a mausoleum to future prosperity. Their feeling for the past gave me hope for the future, and awakened my sense of the livable times ahead. Hugh was to teach me what all of this meant. My father’s illness had belittled us. He loathed all time. He saw only lies. My granda Hugh had his own desperate heart. His westward flight was not all it seemed. But that was for later. In the sorry glare of my first teenage years the appearance of my grandparents was all of a rescue.

  It was the last year of my time at the Ferguson home, the very last months with my mother and father. Things were finally coming apart. My father’s mind was not right. It was never right. Only the years would make me see this. But the job at Ferguson had seemed so hopeful, so right for him as he was. And even there, in the worsening light, we thought he might gain, and shake off the self that had raged near to death down in England. But the darkest time had arrived. It would pass, and then I would go, and all those Ferguson days would seem hopeless and grave. They would ever after seem cold. The unspeakable hours. Only now, with this distance of time, and my life in Liverpool, can I let those shadows cross to the page. My grandfather said I should tell our story. A summons to heaven or hell he said. And now I can see our days spread out. The way we were in that place of ours. The last days at Ferguson were the worst of our lives. And it was Berry too. Berry brought those hours to a head.