Our Fathers Read online

  Forms of ether, primal hydrogen,

  Azote and oxygen, unstable shapes,

  With carbon, most perdurable of all

  The elements …

  The old school was back there. Davidson’s dwam. And there on the train I felt a gust of his carbon-curdled vapours.

  The house of my childhood was there in the dark. A light behind the trees. All winnowing tide, and early frost; winnowing tide, and eyes as big as the moon. Our house was out there somewhere. I wondered if it had a memory of my father.

  The nicotine smell of his troubles once hung in the air. How it licked over the new ceiling. And all the days he would sit by his twisting fire, the television loud, saying nothing on nothing, and him with a tumbler of drink, the Ayrshire rain crashing at the window, and all his sad blood running its course, half mad with the sound of it moving inside.

  The train stopped a while by the hill of Misty Law. Cold leaves on the line. My eyes were down in the rows of houses.

  I had left my parents to their own ruin. I was too young then to see what it meant. How that image of my mother walking away would settle down in the mind.

  What she did, what I did, what he did.

  It would all grow silently with the noise of time. But what a great virtue I had made of avoiding their names these last few years. I had long been gone from the site of these memories. I had put much of it away. But time had brought it all forward. My granda was dying in his bed.

  My mingled thoughts went out to the stars. The train into Ayrshire. Ten years since I last came down that track. And nearer twenty since the day in Kilmarnock, the day of the sore legs, when I moved in at last with the senior Bawns. And what had become of us all? I can only say I had once been happy there. Hugh was not disappointed at first. I followed his example. Then I grew up. Hugh was obsessive, as his son had been, as each of us was, in his way. Hugh then was keen to shut out the world. Margaret and me he wanted alone. A world of nature, and things gone by, and Margaret and me, his only tribe, the last of his good society.

  Then my legs started aching again. I left the flat for university. Since those days he has called me a wrecker.

  The train rolled forward on its beams of steel.

  *

  I remember that journey to Ayrshire now. I remember my thoughts that night. The sense of loss at the flashing glass. The sense of death and carbon.

  When I set out for Ayrshire, that October day, I risked all my ease, my fine English solvency. I knew how my shored-up peace was at risk. Ayrshire for me was a far gone world, a puzzle of ragged affections. But my grandfather was dying. And the time had come. I held my breath. I packed a bag. I kissed my girlfriend at the bedroom door. I left my car. I took credit cards, and keys, and a brace of shirts. I stood in the kitchen waiting for a taxi. The morning was Scouse.

  A notion of old things rained at the station. How well I had held back the years. I stood on the platform, stroking my chest, smoothing my jaw, the bristles there an orderly garden, a place where time could not stand still, or rage. I had come to manhood carefully. My body was pleased to outgrow that boy. At times you forget him, the person who lived in this skin. You find a nick on your thumb. An overlaying of white tissue, like anaglypta. You remember the story of a boy who once cut his finger on a rock. You hear something of his voice. You think of his books and his pencils. You remember the way he looked out through his eyes. And then you see they are your eyes too. Your vision clears. You were that boy. Every room of his house is here. You can never demolish him. He will never leave. Unless you find yourself leaving yourself. The boy is not back there in Ayrshire; he’s here. He is always here.

  I stood on the platform. The thought of home made me shrink in my shirt.

  But calm. I had wanted to make this journey. The time had come. My head was light with other places. And Lime Street fell away, a small memory.

  *

  The train was enfolded in darkness. The burning train, the field out there; the tadpoles alight in their pools.

  Paisley then Johnstone. The farms of Wester Gavin and Newton of Belltrees. The train was a strip of yellow light. It shook up the moss and Herb Robert, and running at speed on the wires above, it rackled the moor, and lifted the wind to the rowan trees. A furrow of broom and bracken fern lay snug at the waist of Lochwinnoch.

  Up and down the empty aisle, a bottle of Irn Bru.

  To arms, old Ayr, to arms again. The drums of vengeance hear.

  We passed Beith then Glengarnock. Over the silt of the Powgree Burn. I saw what I could. A loch of bashed prams and old batteries. The town of Dalry, with the chemical works, a cluster of lights, and night hours. My eyes were lost in the sparks and the solder. The men at their work. And fumes spreading over the Garnock Hills. A cap of smoke: sulphur, azote, ether.

  Ayrshire moor.

  The bottle rolled at twice my speed. A song lay low in my head.

  A brighter meed, a broader frame,

  Await our gallant toil;

  We hold the hearts our fathers held,

  And will preserve their soil.

  To arms old Ayr, to arms again,

  Her eager warriors cheer.

  And Carrick, Coil, and Cunningham,

  Together charge the spear.

  Ayrshire out there.

  A county shaped like an amphitheatre. Bent like the crescent moon. The only Scottish shire with a face towards Ireland. My mind ran out to the tops of the hills as the train moved on. Up go the eyes of rabbits and owls. They peer from the uplands of Kyle and Cunningham, and so do the eyes of people in their high farms, who are mad for the sea, and who applaud the roar from their rocky seats, their island view from the upper tier. I felt them near to me. I felt their breaths at the window.

  And the rivers too come down from the hills.

  The Garnock, the Irvine, the Ayr, the Doon Water. The Nith and the Stinchar. The Girvan, the Lugar.

  How they bend and they turn, with the help of the land, the lift of the wind, and by and by they open their banks, and spill at last, a short collapse in the Firth of Clyde. And still it moves on, south and west, to the bittern graves of the Irish Sea.

  At the back of those Ayrshire hills were broken castles. And under them, the putrefied hearts of great men. The open moors now bore the names and the marks of their Covenant spirit. Many a song stood still in the long grass. Over the top of those idle crannogs you might hear words on the south-east wind. The burr of reform still rolled in the Garnock Valley. Out there, in the dark places, men and women had died for Melville and Knox, and the ground was sewn with beliefs. And now it seemed but whispering grass. The old stories gone, of ministers and miners, of Union men, of troops, and now the land had been cleared. Japanese factories would be coming soon.

  Those fields of blood and carbon. They became the sites for the newer wars, our battles for houses and redevelopment, fought by the likes of Hugh and his mother. The names of those dead warriors, Wallace and Eglinton, Maxton and Hardie, were now known as streets on the council estates, the former glories of Ardrossan and Saltcoats. But some of those houses, built on ruins, were now no more than ruins themselves. In fields they lay as rubble again.

  I knew they were out there still. Beyond that bracken our dilapidations lay about in the grass. We had built houses after all. And we had torn them down with our own hands.

  The train had slowed.

  Kilwinning and Irvine. The lights down there. Once upon a time people crowded into those sandstone houses at the market cross. I could see the remains of those buildings from the moving train. And a plume of smoke here and there. The people with fires were burning the last of the local coal, to stave off the first bit of winter.

  Over the orderly parks lay the housing schemes. The televisions beat out their sickly light, from house to house, from block to block, like some kind of dizzy semaphore. Bonfires were got up at the gable ends. Kids ran down from their dirty-white houses with burning sticks as the train rode past on the embankment. I sat with my h
ead against the window. Light and life now blocked out the stars. The train buzzed slowly to its station stop. The bottle awoke. It rolled down the aisle. I lifted my bag and stepped to the opening door.

  Outside you tasted salt in the air. Salt and sulphur and gutted fish. A nervous wind skirled above the station. I could see right down to the harbour lights. The village of Affleck; the church of St Joseph’s. The sound of the sea over rocks.

  My hands were freezing as I lit a cigarette and smoked it there on the platform. I quickly kissed it down to a stub. I wanted to feel thick with smoke inside; upped with that buzz of deep inhalation. Cigarettes, they make you feel like a super-breather on a cold night. You feel alive smoking them. You feel deeply alive. In the grand smoke you wonder at the depth of your organs. You feel a quickening in the undertow. The grand smoke. It makes you feel healthy on a cold night. Lungs and heart, liver and kidneys.

  You feel all right. The lips’ tender vent: a jetstream of smoke and icy air.

  I dropped the fag on a wet copy of the Ayr Advertiser.

  The station was the tidiest in Scotland. It said so on a brass plaque tacked to the wall of the ticket office. The station clock was no secret-keeper either. It whacked out the seconds overhead. The station brae was full of taxis with nothing to do. I was the only one off the Glasgow train. The town behind the carpark was quiet that night. Nothing too mad about the steeples or disco bars. A slow night at the bingo no doubt. Autumn sleet over the tower blocks. All the people who weren’t in their beds, or asleep watching telly, or hunkered down in the backs of pubs, would have stayed by the door for the last of the children to come. The night I arrived it was Hallowe’en.

  So there was my town for sure. I was happy to see it again. My time on the train had somehow brought me closer. The town had emerged like a place in a dream. Now it stood clear: the reek of fish, and sandstone cut with a Presbyterian trowel.

  The unplaceable sadness of belonging was suddenly mine on that station platform. I saw that I wasn’t here for much. To do the right thing was all. To put a cool hand in the world that had daunted my adult sleep. I wasn’t looking for change or glory or madness or remorse. I don’t think I was. I just came home to see my granda. But maybe I was blind. Maybe there is no such thing as an ordinary trip home, to a home as undappled as mine. But I know I had thought that it might be ordinary. It might just have been that I wanted it so.

  I stood a minute more. Then I took Hugh Bawn’s letter out my pocket. The paper might have been thirty years old. His writing was a mess. The letter was in green ink.

  Dear young Jamesie,

  You should hear I’m not well so there you are. I’m not wasting the time writing out all the stuff. Enough for you to know the score about me being sick up here and not very happy in myself at the present time. (But not dead and that’s some mercy I suppose.) I am writing this now through a great sickness of body and everything and tired. I am not well enough to ring a telephone number. Anyway we don’t have one for you. And there’s no phone here to bother us.

  You’ll not keep away all the time, sure you’ll not? I want to speak to you Jamesie. Not here in a letter (I don’t like letters) but when I see you I’ll see you. My throat is sore and my breath is not up to much.

  Most sincerely

  Your Granda,

  Hugh Bawn

  p.s. We don’t know were your dad is and he’s lost altogether I suppose but never mind him.

  This Hugh was like Hugh at the end of his life. The letter even smelt like him. He had drawn more strength out of self-pity than is strictly typical in a man of action, but then again, he also had more skill in dealing with the facts of the world than do most people. At least that was how I remembered him. And that letter failed to unsay the hero of my childhood. It simply promised more of him. He had been ill a long time, but somehow I saw here an end to his illnesses.

  A gust of rain had just blown about me.

  Over the hill and the playing fields I went towards the housing scheme. The rain threw down its fine, soft web. I trudged across the sodden grass. It was after eleven. I stopped in the field’s dead centre. I looked up at the towers and the whitened barracks of Monboddo Park. All the life going on in that citadel of worries and dreams.

  The primary school was muffled in a barbed-wire fence.

  But clear, late, further off, the song of an ice-cream van.

  A giant Orion of satellite dishes. A constellation of box rooms up ahead. Most of the windows showed burning orange. But not all of them. I thought of the people in those high rooms. Teenage girls in ultra-violet, trying for a tan. Old men bored in the nylon pyjamas. A teenage boy with a plastic guitar singing to a girl who wasn’t there. A woman cupping a cigarette at the kitchen window. Her eyes going out.

  Could she see me in the dark pavilion? Did she look down to where I was, there in the field, in the black of the field?

  Nothing like October. A billion leaves in the mud. My favourite month was always that month of earlier darkness and the smell of rain. In Ayrshire at least, with the going of the light, the lawn-mowing evenings of summer, it feels like a proper return to the dark, to the older ways. October reminds me of pagans and poets, of days when the sky falls down among the people.

  Gathering brows like gathering storm.

  A boy once sat at the window in summer. A hay fever kept him inside. And he dreamed of wet leaves. His wanted his breath to make droplets on the glass. His hot eyes looked for waterfalls. He sat at that window with borrowed books, dreaming the smell of Octobers to come, when all shall be well …

  … and all manner of thing shall be well.

  The world that he yearned for was toffee and treacle. A banshee to yell at the back of the hills. A world of turning leaves. A Hallowe’en. And still we remembered the dead in our Ayrshire October. That was the month of the dead returning, the ghaists and bogles we tempted with fruit, and song.

  Passing the goalposts at the far end of the playing field I could hear the dim bedlam of kids and dogs doing the late rounds. I could see them from the edge of the grass, messing about, and blethering among themselves.

  Just doing the late rounds. Skateboarding.

  A crowd stood at the mouth of Blair Avenue. Fire roared out of a metal drum at the roadside. A dozen steps and I was among them.

  ‘Penny for the Guy.’ All of them.

  Most of the boys were dressed as old wives. The girls were made up as witches and punks. The boys were smeared with lipstick, old scarves tied in knots beneath their spotted chins. Some of them wore dresses with bulky trainers showing at the bottom. They all had the same glass eyes. Twinkling awhile with tonic wine and the light of the fire.

  My hands made a fuss in my pockets. ‘A bit early for the Guy,’ I said.

  ‘Never too early for the Guy, mate,’ said the small one.

  ‘And our Hallowe’en?’ said another. He held a plastic carrier bag open by the handles. Apples and monkey nuts and a corner of coppers.

  ‘You’ve done well,’ I said. And I dropped a fist of silver in the bag. ‘So mind and share that among the lot of you.’

  ‘They’re getting feg all,’ said the small one, pulling up the sleeves of his dress. ‘They mugs don’t have a brain between them. Listen, mister, do you need an old lady to carry your bag?’

  The troops giggled, and a taller boy slugged from a bottle of cider or something. He took a big slug. He spouted some into the flaming drum.

  ‘Very good,’ I said.

  ‘This Hallowe’en is a pure mess by the way,’ said one of the girls. ‘There’s no a party in the whole fucking … anywhere.’

  ‘You should be in your bed,’ I said.

  ‘That an offer?’

  They all started laughing again. The small guy was called Caesar. And Caesar began to frug about in front of the fire. He spluttered a load of hip-hop banter as he danced around the drum. He sang what he sang in American.

  ‘She’s a slut.’

  The flames licked out in some n
ear-syncopation. His mother’s scarf was beginning to slip.

  ‘Fuck up, Caesar,’ said the girl. ‘At least the big man looks like he’s got a ride in him.’

  Some of the other girls cooed in mock horror. They twisted and laughed in their bin-bags.

  ‘If Elvis was blond he’d’ve looked like you. No sweat,’ said one of them dancing over.

  ‘You’re all mad,’ I says.

  ‘Well. Can you sing, blond Elvis?’

  The Caesar one was nearly in tears. ‘No stop it. No way. Just stop it or I’ll piss myself,’ he said, dancing in a circle, flapping his skirt.

  ‘What were you doing over the grass?’ said one of the girls in bin-bags.

  ‘I’ve just come from the station.’

  ‘We don’t ken you. You don’t live around here. What is the tie for?’

  ‘I’ve just come from England.’

  ‘The English,’ whispered one of the tall boys looking up.

  ‘The English,’ I said.

  ‘Fucking bastards,’ said another.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You don’t sound English. But you don’t sound much Scottish either.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Aye they are.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fucking bastards.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Shite at football. Except Man U.’

  ‘And Everton.’

  ‘Away you go Everton. Pure shite.’

  I started to laugh at that. The tall one seemed more interested.

  ‘Is it good in England?’ he asked.

  ‘Some things are,’ I said. ‘Not everything.’

  ‘See the Queen,’ says the Caesar one.

  ‘It’s not that much different from here,’ I said. He didn’t believe me.

  ‘No no. See the Queen.’ Caesar again.

  ‘In London you might see the Queen.’

  ‘No, I mean. See the Queen, she’s a pure fucking dog. Right? A pure boot.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘if you say so.’

  ‘Okay if-you-say-so big man,’ he said. And danced around the drum again.