Docherty (16 page)

Unfortunately, Gibby’s first action in his new role was not an auspicious one. He challenged Tadger Daly. This went beyond courage so far as to encroach on fantasy, being roughly equivalent to a boy who has been given a pair of boxing-gloves for his Christmas matching himself with the heavyweight champion of the world. Tadger had long ago earned High Street’s accolade – the designation ‘hard man’. Not quarrelsome by nature, he was content to let his past speak for him. Occasionally, he offered a mild reminder. With his hands in his pockets and wearing his pit boots, he would turn a complete somersault on the causeys. He was reputed to be able to put the head on a man from six feet away in one acrobatic leap. His truncated body was fitted with the preposterously long arms of a much bigger man, as if borrowed from the Brownie of Blednoch. Sometimes, hyperbolic with drink, he would claim to be the only man who could tie his laces without bending down.

Against this, Gibby ranged the full force of his impertinence, like a sparrow trying to intimidate a buzz-saw. Perhaps it was the very outlandishness of the challenge that inspired Gibby to make it. There certainly seemed to be no more mundane explanation.

It happened at the corner. They were talking about football players when Tadger remarked that Paterson, a local outside right who had gone senior, had no idea. ‘If ye put icin’ on the baw,’ Tadger said, ‘he wid eat it.’ It suddenly occurred to Gibby that Andy Paterson had once walked out with his sister and there had been talk of their getting married. Therefore, Andy Paterson was, in a sense, nearly Gibby’s brother-in-law.

‘Ye’d better take that last remark back, Tadger,’ Gibby said with quiet menace.

‘Ah’ve goat naewhere tae keep it, Gibby,’ Tadger replied, and went on to talk about something else.

‘Tadger! Ah’m talkin’ tae you.’

There was a puzzled silence. Gibby grew on it.

‘Ye better take that back.’

‘Whit back?’

‘Aboot Andy Paterson.’

Tadger reflected.

‘A’ richt, Gibby. If ye put icin’ on the baw, he widny eat it. He wid maist likely divide it oot among the weans. Fair enough?’

Gibby shrugged with the air of a man who has done his utmost to avoid the inevitable and seen his efforts scorned.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Come oan. Ower the park.’

Scenting a jocular conspiracy, Tadger looked round the other men at the corner. But the incredulity on their faces was unmistakably genuine. It came very slowly to Tadger that Gibby meant business. It wasn’t possible but it was happening.

‘Och, away tae hell, Gibby,’ Tadger said. ‘Whit dae ye want? Buried under the band-stand? Wi’ full military honours.’

Everybody appreciated the humour of it except Gibby.

‘Ye’ll come. Or ye’ll get it here. Are ye comin’?’

‘Ah’m fine here, Gibby. Thanks a’ the same.’

‘Are ye comin’?’

‘Gibby!’

Tadger spread his arms in appeal. Gibby attacked. Tadger’s left arm shot out and took a handful of Gibby’s lapels. Keeping his arm absolutely rigid, Tadger stood side-on to Gibby’s assault. It was a heroic moment – Tadger standing holding a frustrated tornado by the scruff of the neck, while he reasoned with its fury.

‘Gibby, Gibby. This is ney wey tae be gaun oan. Folk’ll think we’ve fell oot. Could we no’ discuss it?’

Gibby’s answer was to increase his efforts, his ferocious fists savaging Tadger’s armpit. After some more pleas for peace, Tadger turned to the others, bringing Gibby with him like a gaffed fish.

‘Well, boys. Ye see hoo Ah’m placed. If Ah let him go, he’ll kill me.’

There were sympathetic murmurs. Without warning, Tadger’s arm compressed like a spring and he applied his bowed head to Gibby’s inrushing brow with the precision of someone administering an anaesthetic. There was a crack like a rifle-shot. Tadger held on to Gibby as he sagged and solicitously propped him up against the wall. Three-quarters of an hour later, Gibby came to.

But those who had assumed that the matter was closed had failed to understand the new Gibby who had emerged from his winter sleep. Two days later, he challenged Tadger again. This time he made the stipulation that Tadger’s head constituted an unfair advantage and only fists should be used. Tadger agreed. Three days after this defeat, Gibby issued his third challenge. His tactics were now becoming clear. He admitted that his intention was to wear Tadger down and he expressed the belief that he would finally be victorious. He was, in a way, proved right. When he demanded a fourth contest, Tadger shook hands with him and apologised for any remarks he had made about Andy Paterson.

Gibby was content. Thereafter he kept his antagonism for those outside High Street. He had achieved his identity among the men at the corner, hewn out his own small niche in the annals of High Street. Like the inventor of gunpowder, he had devised a devastating new mode of combat – the ability so to sate the enemy with victories that he surrenders. As Tadger admitted, nursing bruised hands, made wise by experience, ‘Ye canny beat Gibby. He’s too cute fur us. He’s goat a system, ye see. He keeps pittin’ the heid oan your hauns till yer knuckles brek.’

Tadger himself was too involved with other thoughts that spring to be much concerned with Gibby. He had carried out his three demolition jobs with a casualness that was almost absent-minded. He had his own worries. With his family nearly large enough to be declared a separate state, he and his wife had decided there would be no more. When he let this be known, it became a temporary pastime to make jokes about it. There were hints of panic in the Vatican, commemorative medals being struck, suggestions that he had lost his faith, counter-suggestions that that wasn’t what he had lost. None of this bothered Tadger. What bothered him was the fact itself – they would have no more children. Though there were some families whose large numbers weren’t entirely unrelated to the promptings of local priests, this wasn’t the case with Tadger’s. Both he and his wife were besotted with children. They had produced fourteen not so much in definance of their circumstances as indifference to them. Eleven were still alive. Things had been made slightly less impossible by the fact that four of them were now working, while Tadger’s mother, with her small shop, was able to help. Two of the children lived with her. But a sense of economy had finally overtaken the manic creative urge of Tadger and his wife.

The effect on Tadger was a gentle melancholy that lasted for a few weeks, rather like a one-man wake for the unborn. The familiar thought of children to come had become so central to his life that he missed it badly. For a time he made up for it by telling stories about the children he had. Every day brought a new chapter in the saga of his family. His tendency to be boring about them was accepted by the others as a natural phase.

Not all forms of boredom were so benign. Josey Mackay, long absent from the corner, reappeared regularly to issue up-to-the-minute bulletins on the Boer War. Much older than most of the others, Josey was conscious of his irrelevance to what was going on around him. His answer was to make everything irrelevant to him. Catching a lull in the conversation, he would suddenly say, ‘Aye. D’ye ken whit they used tae dae?’ An account of the unbelievable machinations of the Boers would follow. Between such urgent messages, Josey filled up the void of other people’s conversations with whistling. Fortunately for the others, Andra Crawford, though a good deal younger than Josey, had fought in the same war. It was one of his functions to confound Josey’s impressive powers of boredom by contradiction of facts, disruption of sequence, and by generally defusing the point of what Josey was saying, although this wasn’t always easy to locate.

While Josey marched eternally on Mafeking and Andra outmanoeuvred him with ambush, the spring, almost unnoticed by them, prolifereated into new forms around their barren and disputed tract of past. One of Wullie Manson’s ferrets, obeying some primal urge, chewed its way out of its cage and escaped. It was duly arrested at the Cross by the prodigiously fat policeman they called Fifty Waistcoats. The chairge is vagrancy,’ he told Wullie when he reclaimed it.

Dougie McMillan talked of one day owning a fleet of motorcars that could descend on well-stocked rivers such as the Stinchar and cull salmon ‘like getherin’ buttercups’. He wouldn’t travel himself, just sit in a wall-mapped office, directing an army of poachers. Alec Simpson talked of emigrating. Sconey developed the habit of buying a bag of grapes at the Barras so that, standing at the corner, he could throw the rotten ones up at Auld Jimmy Sticket’s window. What he enjoyed was disputing with Auld Jimmy when he had shoved his bald head out of the window: ‘We’ve seen nothin’, Jimmy. Ah’m afraid yer evidence is very flimsy. Widny stand up in a court of law. In fact, yer argument widny haud wee tatties.’

Johnnie Allison believed he was going to have a good year at the horses. Danny Mitchell cured his wife completely of her tendency to neglect her household chores. Home from the factory one day, he threw up the window and screamed, Tire! Fire! Fire!’ When a crowd was gathering below, he added at a bellow, ‘In everybody’s bloody hoose but mine.’

Andy Dunlop’s greyhound bitch had three pups from a good strain, and Andy saw a fortune up ahead. Tam Docherty felt inexplicably that things were going to be all right, as if hope came to him in the air, like pollen. Four of the men formed themselves into a barber-shop quartet, giving corner recitals. Night after night as they stood there, songs, ambitions, small, private hopes, careful plans, were revealed, and released like pigeons into the evening air.

It was March 1914.

18

‘Trees talk’ his Grandpa had once said. And around Conn lay a countryside brimming with dangers, peopled by all races, mountained wildly, amok with monsters.

Other people called it The Bringan’. Conn knew the name but had frequently managed to forget it. It was applied to the stretch of countryside lying north east of the town, between the Dean Estate on the one hand and the Grassyards Road on the other. Built above the Barren Red Coal Measures, Graithnock was an industrial town under siege from farmland, so that Bringan was only one of many areas of rich greenery, but to Conn it was what ‘the country’ meant.

Introduced to him by his Grandpa Docherty, it became more than a place and assumed the importance of a relationship, establishing in him a growing and shifting complex of responses which partly measured and partly influenced his development. Seeing it first through the druidical eyes of his Grandpa, he was frightened, deliriously stirred. Trees were brooding presences, soughing incantations. Every bush hid an invisible force, frequently malevolent. Just to walk was to invade all sorts of jealously held terrains and you had to avoid taboos and observe placative rites.

But it wasn’t long before deliberate misdemeanours without retribution undid the old man’s enchantments, and Conn was able to imbue the place with his own more enlightened and manageable mythology. There was the Crawfurdland Estate, wooded with a luxuriance unlike any other part of Bringan, in summer dark and dense with undergrowth. Anyone with any knowledge of these things could see that it was Africa.

The familiar part of the river where the land shelved down dramatically towards it for fifty feet or so, balancing trees, was Indian country. You had to move warily there, for – Indians will be Indians – they had that habit of whooping suddenly over the crest of the hill to sweep down on you among the trees. The trick was to keep your nerve until they were on you, crouch swiftly, and, straightening unexpectedly, catapult them on down the slope where they drowned in a huddle of broken bones.

Just beyond the main bridge on the other of the two rivers, which ran through the Bringan before converging in the Dean, the forest became fir. There, among the pine-cones, trappers moved, swaddled warmly in fur-lined jerseys, their bare feet defying the snow as they fought off the ravening wolves. Perhaps best known of all was the hill he had discovered by himself, coming on it suddenly round a bend in the river. It was uniquely ribbed, a huge semi-circle of grass like an eroded stairway. For whoever dared to climb, the rewards were great. Standing victorious on its summit, you could see the world spread out like a map twenty feet below.

Little by little, though, the forces of practicality reclaim their own. The man absorbed in trapping the passing seasons in his field is a persistent presence. It’s all right if you can remain invisible to him so that he becomes unknowingly a part of whatever landscape you put him in. But seeing you some days, he tames the tumult, atomises all reivers with a look. The war-paint fades, the whoops of pursuit wane into sunlight, and you’re left standing small beside a hedge, looking at a man ploughing, legginged in mud, who waves and laughs with a jauntiness that is no way to treat a warrior. At least the horse is beautiful.

It was a slow and patient process, by those who worked the land, lived on it, used it, this reclamation for ordinary purposes of country usurped by fantastic intruders. For Conn, some salutary moments, which measured his acceptance of reality rather than provoked it: being chased from the Crawfurdland Estate by the gamey, who, while Conn dodged among the trees, remained an invisible pursuer, enraged Zulu, but, seen from the safety of the road beyond the gate, emerged from the trees middle-aged and jacketed, and disappointingly out of breath. Falling into the river while defending a fort, so that he had to sit naked on the grass while his clothes ‘dried’ and Angus and some other boys engaged in wild battles. When he arrived home shivering in damp jersey and trousers, he was given a mustard bath by his mother, who kept muttering ‘pneumonia’. Meeting poachers, whose preoccupied movements and bulbous jackets hinted at real adventures taking place around him which made his own imaginary ones seem silly.

Gradually, then, the Bringan became itself for him, no longer strange. Over several years, visiting it frequently, first with his Grandpa, then with others or alone, he made of it the opposite pole to his life from High Street. The Bringan was where he could escape from the arbitrary and frequently harsh identity which High Street impressed on him. It was more gentle, flexible, yielding easily to mood, and, in its timeless folds of field and aged conclaves of trees, it held places that could absorb any grief, soothe any hurt.