Docherty (15 page)

While Miss Carmichael gave him sympathetic exemption from her questions, he took a stub of pencil in his fingers. Slowly across a scuffed piece of paper a word moved clumsily. Opposite it another word was manoeuvred and settled, the way he had seen in a dictionary Miss Carmichael showed him. His hand shook as he did it. It was a painful and tremulous matter, like an ant trying to manipulate stones. He sat buried inside himself while the words spread themselves across the paper. Minutes later, he was stunned into stillness, looking at the big awkward shapes they made before him.

One side of the paper was filled. He didn’t start on the other side because he now wanted to write things that he couldn’t find any English for. When something sad had happened and his mother was meaning that there wasn’t anything you could do about it, she would say ‘ye maun dree yer weird’. When she was busy, she had said she was ‘saund-papered tae a whuppet.’ Tit a raker oan the fire.’ ‘Hand-cuffed to Mackindoe’s ghost.’ ‘A face tae follow a flittin’.’ If his father had to give him a row but wasn’t really angry, he said ‘Ah’ll skelp yer bum wi’ a tea-leaf tae yer nose bluids.’

Conn despaired of English. Suddenly, with the desperation of a man trying to amputate his own infected arm, he savagely scored out all the English equivalents.

On his way out of school, he folded his grubby piece of paper very carefully and put it in his pocket. It was religiously preserved for weeks. By the time he lost it, he didn’t need it.

16

Mairtin stood translating everything into himself. The glass in his hand took wilful reflections from everything around him. The bulge of his belly was satisfaction. One foot danced in stasis, his family moving threaded on his thoughts. In the moustache years were held in arrested avalanche.

Each dance was a relationship. The steps created a convention within which they could celebrate themselves, uncles, cousins, aunts, neighbours, friends, advancing, receding, intersecting, pivoting on one another, all conforming to patterns whose law was whimsy. The music quickened the whole thing into compulsion.

In the flare of sudden movement, round the corner of a comment, faces bobbed, piked on exertion, a group sat in an alcove of private conversation. Privacies became public.

A fat man’s galluses burst. He had taken off his jacket and waistcoat to be comfortable. One strand of the braces twanged over his shoulder like a fractured harp-string. One side of his trousers drooped, revealing the tops of home-made drawers of scarlet wool. Tadger Daly stood bowed in the middle of the floor, lockjawed with laughter.

Jenny’s Uncle James revealed the secret of how to put water and whisky in the same glass and keep them separate. While the younger children played at sliding along the edge of the dance-floor, Angus, hiding at the end of a corridor, showed Conn how to smoke, and drank an inch of stale beer from a tumbler which had been left below a chair. The Co-operative Hall was a masque of faces lurid with enjoyment, luminous with sweat. Even Jenny’s mother, in the presence of so much drink, kept a festive smile clenched like a fading rose between her teeth.

The dress, an heirloom starched and laundered specially for Kathleen, shed radiance wherever she went. At half past seven in the morning, she had stood in the living-room, imprisoned in its stiff whiteness, waiting for the cab to take her to chapel. Her strange presence muted the rest of the room, made it seem drab, a cocoon that had belied its contents. Her father and brothers were almost shy, embarrassed by what they hadn’t seen before. Her mother fussed gently, possessing for the last time. Kathleen asked plaintive irrelevant questions about her appearance, innocent of her own transformation. It wasn’t beauty, or anything that could be objectively named. It was simply Kathleen, the blackness of her hair blued subtly by the whiteness of the veil, her eyes deepened into an awareness of what she thought the day meant to her, her body’s ripeness, her oval face achieving the brief perfection of itself.

Conn’s Uncle Sammy dropped a glass. Having been accused of being drunk, he offered to stand on his hands to prove sobriety. To have his hands free for demonstration, he put his glass down on a chair that had been taken away minutes ago. It was the beer he didn’t take that finally couped him. Seeing the exploded shards of glass, he dismissed any suggestion of a brush and shovel.

‘Nae man that wisny sober could pick up a’ these bits withoot an injury. Right?’

His wife escorted him home five minutes later, handcuffed with a bloodstained dish-towel.

Old Conn enjoyed himself with his pipe and a little beer. All evening people arrived at his chair to talk, laugh, and go away. He smiled much. Reflected in his gentle eyes, the dancers whirled and flung across a desert.

Jack said, ‘Ah never expected tae enjoy ma ain waddin’ as much. An’ the best o’ it’s tae come.’

He tried to make sure he spoke to as many people as possible. He moved among a minefield of suspicions and survived. Older women watched, waited for him, listened, nodded.

‘He seems a nice boay.’

‘A guid wey wi’ him.’

‘Aye. At least they’re beginnin’ weel enough.’

The children gave way first, so that the evening died slowly and piecemeal among them. One lay asleep on a window-ledge, cushioned on a jacket. Another slept across two chairs, another on his mother’s knee. Two small brothers niggled each other half-heartedly, wrangling with their tiredness. The songs grew sadder. ‘The Nameless Lassie’ was strangled at leisure. Only a few couples still soft-shoed around the floor, as if caught up in a habit they couldn’t break. A woman sat staring across the bleakness of tomorrow. The empty glasses covered two trestle-tables. Three men, caged in their own agreement, picked fleas from one another’s egos. The band were taking longer between tunes. The dark silence of the town outside was seeping into the place like gas, deadening them.

It was a bright moon, the cadaver of daylight. The unusualness of being abroad together in the early hours of the morning heightened their awareness of one another. They were more a family for being alone in the lunar emptiness of the town. Angus walked slightly ahead of Jenny, whose hand was on Conn’s shoulder. Mick and Tam came behind them, talking Tam, proud of the social ease and straightforward likeableness he had seen in Mick this evening, was pleased to let him do most of the talking, while Tam himself silently memorised his happiness so that he could keep it with him after tonight. Kathleen, he thought, was well married. Jack should make a good man. Everything had been fine – the meal, the drink, the dancing. They couldn’t really afford it, except that you had to be able to afford what your children deserved. There wasn’t any other way to live.

He had enjoyed seeing so many people together, in contact with one another. He felt like a man who had successfully expressed what he wanted to say. He felt somehow reconfirmed in his love of people. As he passed a decaying tenement building, he took the flower from his button-hole and stuck it in a crevice of the brick.

The sunlight Conn wakened into was disappointing. The day ahead defined itself negatively: it wasn’t the day of Kathleen’s wedding. Mick and Angus were already up. Conn could hear the sounds of the others through in the living-room. There were just the same small things as always waiting to be done. But as he rose and pulled on his trousers, he found that fragments of the previous day were still with him, usurping the dullness of the room like sunspots. The horses had been marvellous. He loved the way the skin moved like water over the hardness of their muscles. The priest. Frightening in his bright clothes. Moving his hands as mysteriously as a magician. The high coolness of the church. The variety of faces. And the noise. Angus with the beer, saying he bet he was nearly as strong as his father. The richness of the whole day gave Conn a terrible impatience to take part in things.

With his nightshirt off, he crossed to the mirror on the dresser. He crooked his arms and squeezed. The biceps came up like small bubbles below the skin. Shutting out the sound of his mother laying out the dishes on the table, he carefully achieved the expression he wanted, glared a challenge at himself.

17

Miss Gilfillan was dead. It was in this form High Street first became aware that anything was different with her. Decorous as ever, she hadn’t appeared to public knowledge as one of the undignified dying, but merely passed invisibly from a gentle life to the perfect gentility of death. With faultless etiquette, she had become a corpse quietly and in private.

Disbelief followed the news to every face that heard it. She had never allowed them to become a part of her life, but – perhaps largely because of this – she had become a very special part of theirs – intractable, perennial, an enduring posture from the past, like a local version of the Albert Memorial. For her to die seemed a needless refinement. An era had been erased.

Meeting this incredulity, the facts found themselves affected by it, formed into minor legend. None of the ritual signs of her existence had changed while she was dying. She hadn’t been seen on the street for some time beforehand. But that wasn’t unusual. Old Mrs Molloy vouched for the fact that the setting of the table had continued regularly, except perhaps for the day before, when she herself hadn’t been out of the house because she was ‘chesty’. Nobody had seen her eating during this time, right enough. But nobody ever saw her eating.

Mrs Simpson, who lived upstairs, had been the first to sense something wrong. She realised that for days she hadn’t heard a sound from Miss Gilfillan’s house. It wasn’t that she had expected to hear much. Miss Gilfillan was the quietest neighbour anybody ever had. But now and again you could hear her moving about, and sometimes talking quietly to her own loneliness. Mrs Simpson put a piece of dumpling on a plate, took it with her, and knocked at the door. The dumpling was an excuse. She knew Miss Gilfillan wouldn’t take it. She wouldn’t take anything from anybody. There was no answer.

When Mrs Simpson told her husband in the evening, he said she had likely been out. But Mrs Simpson had tried three times since that and, anyway, where was there for Miss Gilfillan to go? Next morning, before her husband went to work, he tried as well. Getting no answer, he went outside and looked in the window. He could see a vague shape lying in the set-in bed, fully clothed, it seemed. He broke in the door.

It was a thought, as they said, that Miss Gilfillan, who would have polished the doorknob after somebody’s hand had been on it, should have her door burst in and not move a muscle. It was enough to make her come alive again. She was found lying dead on top of the bed. She was wearing what must once have been an expensive dress, and was perfectly composed, except one leg had slipped so that her foot rested at an angle on the floor in a most unladylike position. Around her the room was perfectly neat and tidy, marred only by dust that had settled since she stopped moving. The table was laid for dinner.

From all of this her last days were reconstructed. She was said to have died of starvation. She hadn’t once asked anybody for help and she had been found in a room cluttered with objects which would have brought a good return from the pawnshop just across the street. She had to be imagined daily dusting these very things with the last of her strength, unfailingly setting a table on which food never arrived, sacrificing herself for a roomful of objects.

For the men at the corner the room took on the charisma of a shrine. But it didn’t last. Not long afterwards, relatives who had never been to see her when she lived arrived to despoil, haggle over relics, and peel the place to the bare walls. A bricklayer and his family moved in. He soon acquired a reputation for knocking the wife about.

For a month or so her absence had a reaction on the life of the place, precipitated that intensified sense of oneself that an unexpected death frequently brings. It expressed itself obliquely. At the corner the small preoccupations of the men became defensively more strident, like dogs barking at strange noises in the dark. Using their gathered presences like a verbal gymnasium, they shed the sluggishness of winter, rehoned old commitments, vaunted a bit, and with plans and forecasts took out each a personal lease on the coming spring.

Gibby Molloy greeted the burgeoning year with a conviction strong enough to suggest that he had had an equinoctial vision. He was, he had decided, a formidable fighting-man. All things considered, this was an interestingly original interpretation of his experience so far. It was true that he had always been subject to unforeseeable fits of violence, but these had almost invariably involved him in conflict with inanimate objects. More than one man had seen this as proof that his shrewdness as promoter exceeded his shrewdness as participant. As Tadger Daly had used to say, ‘Gibby wid fight wi’ his shadda. An’ he wid stert second favourite.’

But though the source of Gibby’s conviction was secret, at least one of its effects was obvious. It brought to an end those uncontrollable outbursts of aimless destruction that had dogged his life. He was like someone who, having been mugged by the same footpad for years, finally hires him as a bodyguard. By formalising his tendency to violence into open challenge, he managed to contain it.