Docherty (23 page)

When Jenny had brushed the entire floor, she negotiated the dust in one crackling, furry heap on to her shovel. She placed the shovel in the hearth. She turned to the pail of warm water she had brought up with her. She was unwrapping the cloth that held the scrubbing-brush and rough soap when she remembered the beds. She took the brush again and knelt to sweep under them. The brush head chimed on a chamber-pot below her parents’ bed. She brought it out, dusted it with the dry cloth, and replaced it. Under the second bed her brush struck something else. After some difficulty, she managed to hook it out on to the floor. It was a small, wooden box, sealed with dust. Wiping it, she slid the lid off.

The contents, long untouched, had fused with time into one another and their container. The inside of the box yielded them reluctantly, like membranes of itself. She picked their delicate organisms apart, into a ribbon, a folded picture, a piece of paper, a square of cloth, a doll’s eye and a ring. The cloth, heavy as brocade, was still fairly bright, and the centre of the ribbon, where it had been folded on itself, retained the original sharpness of its yellow. The picture was in colour, the painting of a house idyllic in a garden where flowers of different seasons bloomed together. The piece of paper said in clumsy capitals ‘I love Peter’ and then the name ‘Peter’ written many times. The ring was from a lucky-bag. Putting it on her pinky, it stuck across her nail. The doll’s eye had been a jewel. She realised with surprise that they were hers. It was like finding your heart when a child preserved in a box.

She replaced the lid and put the box in the hearth because she wanted to use the water before it went cold. But as she scrubbed, the room in spite of her had come alive. The action of disturbing that small cache of rubbish in the box had activated the pity of the past like a taboo broken. Determinedly, she netted more of the lukewarm water in the bristles of the brush, skinned the soap across them, scraped at the floor. But moving across the empty surface on her knees, she couldn’t contain what she was doing to a trivial practicality. It became in part a conjuration of her past. While she made around her wide circles of white froth and then removed them with the wetted cloth she was tormented with thoughts of who she might have been, as if tugging at her arms was the child who had hoarded those bits of dreams like promises, asking unanswerable questions, hurt with silence. Her vigour became an exorcism.

Finished, she put the shovelful of ouse carefully into the fire to be burned, and then remembered she had no matches. She thought of leaving it because she wanted to get quickly out of the house. But it wasn’t right to leave your dirt behind. Then it occurred to her that her father had for years been in the habit of hiding away odd matches against the emergency of needing a smoke some summer evening, when the fire wasn’t lit and he was out of matches. They had found his cautiousness funny, especially since he could never remember where he had hidden them. Searching, she grew conscious of how the light had changed since it had started to rain, and now lay like a lacquer on the floor.

She finally found one stuck behind the pipe-rack. The phosphorus was neutralised with a covering of grease. Leaning over to light it, she saw on the fireplace the small, runnelled area where her father always struck his matches. In her vision, the place took on the isolation of an object held in her hand, a pathetic fragment. The sight of it halted her, brought home to her freshly what had happened, linked with the events of the past couple of weeks like a connective that makes instant sense of what had been gibberish. She knew her mother and father dead most clearly in that moment. She felt the funeral, the emptying of the house, the cleaning, as somehow conspiratorial erasures of the truth before it should impinge too strongly. The pathos of the two bodies stashed hastily into the dark struck her.

She was bitter. They were dead and it was incidental. Their own family had hardly noticed. The war, she thought, the war. It had changed everything and nothing would ever be the same again. Things used to have their place. For her mother and father there had been a way of dealing with life that didn’t work any longer. She thought of Mick, one of those seconds of concern for her family that came at random every day like heartbeats missed. It was the war. Everything was the war. At another time it would have been different. But there was a sense in which their lives being lost by the way like other people’s small change had a ridiculous appropriateness external to the war. She looked at the photo above her. That was, she suspected, how they all died. The shape of her own life became momentarily grotesquely accidental.

Remembering the box she had found, she wondered how she had become the woman she was. Memories almost came to her, like wind-gagged cries. She felt revulsion from her own body, which seemed to her an amalgam of heavy breasts, distended stomach, legs ruinous with veins, a violated promise from her past, used by husband, mouthed by children, caricatured maliciously by work. Dead hopes lay heaped in her like a mass-grave. She was still standing there, memorial to herself, when Conn came in. He was wearing an old jacket of Tam’s, cuffs upturned, drooping shoulders pulped with rain. His shabby presence angered her.

‘Whit dae you want noo?’

That’s ma feyther an’ Angus in fae the pit, mither.’

‘Well?’

‘Ye said Ah wis tae tell ye.’

She knew what they would be doing now. For half-an-hour or more they would lie down before the fire, as they did every evening after work, filleted with fatigue and groggy with black damp. The image of them there rehearsing death made her want to hurry. She felt her regret for herself as selfish. There were things to do. The water to be brought up for their bath. The pit-clothes to be taken out and dauded against the corner of the building to beat out the coal dust in them. The soup and bread to set out on the table. There would happen what always happened. Tam would let Angus have the first of the water. She would help them to wash. Angus would let his back be wiped except for a ridge of coal dust down the middle because, in spite of Tam’s contempt for the superstition, Angus was afraid of weakening his spine. Tam would say, This waiter’s aye like bluidy treacle when Ah get ma turn.’ Then they would eat.

She had to wear off the oiliness with several strokes before the match flared. Ceremonially, as if it represented her parents’ past, her own self-pity, Jenny applied the match to the ball of sweepings in the fire. In a second its substance was flame and then a shadow of grease across the grid.

Feeling remote from her, Conn said, ‘Ah’ll say ye’re comin’, mither.’

‘Jist a meenit, son. Ah’ll come wi’ ye.’

She looked round the room, noticed the photograph of the king and took it down.

‘You cairry this, Conn.’

Conn took it, held it out to study it.

‘Whit fur?’

‘Fur the hoose, of coorse.’ She needed something but couldn’t have explained. ‘Fur luck.’ The irony of it only occurred to her once she had spoken.

‘Ma feyther’ll no’ thank ye fur it,’ Conn said solemnly.

She started to laugh, her eyes softening as they looked at him. ‘Is that a fact? Come oan.’

She gathered the rubbish beside the fire, putting the box on top of it. Conn took the pail containing scrubbing-brush, soap and cloth, as well as carrying floor-brush and shovel. She had some trouble helping him to negotiate the doorway. She locked up and put the key in her pinny pocket to be handed in to the factor. Downstairs she threw everything she was holding in the dustbin.

At the mouth of the entry the pair of them paused, looking out at the rain. She pulled up the collar of the jacket he was wearing and tried to tighten the lapel across his chest. In the end she had to secure it with a pin taken from her apron. His head nestled on his father’s shoulders. ‘Like a pea oan a drum,’ she laughed, as he wrestled away from her fussing hands. ‘But ye’ll fill it yet, eh, Conn?’ Knowing he would want to go at his own pace and not hers, she took the brush and the photograph back from him, and said, ‘Rin then, son. An’ if ye fa’, don’t boather tae get back up. Jist rin oan.’

He ran. Coming out into the rain behind him, she watched. The pail bumped clumsily against his gangly legs. The jacket was like a cloak on him in width. But it was amazing how well he took up the length. He was getting big. Big enough for the pits, unless a miracle came. For Tam’s sake as well as Conn’s, she hoped it would.

Passing on the other side of the street, Mary Erskine called, ‘Guid wather for folk wi’ gills this, Jenny, eh?’

‘Aye, Mary.’

Her inability to move fast gave her a galleon grace that seemed contemptuous of the rain.

10

Everything had been prepared with the care of an organised evacuation. Old Conn had set out first to walk to the station because he couldn’t move as fast as the rest. He carried the dumplings Jenny had made. Tam and Angus, having finished the early shift, washed and ate in relays. Conn dauded the clothes and saw that the clean shirts were there for them. Jenny did half-a-dozen things at once.

Calmly, measuredly, systematically, they arrived at chaos. The neatly drilled and interweaving movements became a traffic-jam of cross-purposes. The voices that had been saying quietly, ‘Ye can get in noo’ and Thanks’, went off like horns. It started with the realisation that thirteen minutes before the train was due Kathleen still hadn’t arrived with Alec, the baby. Jenny sent Conn down to the close-mouth to watch for her and, as he ran back up every other minute to report her absence, each time as breathlessly as if it was a new phenomenon, he was able to catch scalding glimpses of the confusion among which the others threshed. His father standing before the sideboard with its drawers hanging out at different angles, his arms outstretched so that the dangling shirt-cuffs gave him a vaguely priestly appearance, calling ‘Studs! Studs! Whaur i’ the bloody studs?’ Angus running for a cloth, head averted and hands up to prevent the scattering blood from going on his shirt, while his father, embittered by his own failure and still at the sideboard as if he expected a stud to appear to him any minute, was saying, ‘Ya sully bugger. Ye’re supposed tae wait tae the hair grows onywey, before ye shave. Whit are ye tryin’ tae dae? Frichten it awa’ before it comes?’ His mother fixing her hair while she told his father where he might find a stud while she advised Angus to wet a piece of paper with his tongue and put it over the cut. They joined Conn at the close-mouth just as Kathleen trauchled out of the Kay Park with Alec in her arms. Haste strung them out, Angus in front, running with his mother’s message-bag, Conn consoling himself for second place with the thought that Kathleen’s bag of baby-things must be heavier. Tam took Alec. Jenny and Kathleen came last, burdened with the weight of being women. It wasn’t until they had found the compartment, just in time, with Old Conn already a part of it, the dumplings beside him, puffing his pipe in that way that made a hearth of wherever he happened to be, that they started to laugh.

The remembered moments cohered into a ridiculous composition, The Flight of the Five Docherties. One of the handles of Kathleen’s bag had snapped, throwing a nappy on to the pavement. ‘That auld wumman’s face,’ Tam said. ‘She lukked as if she wis thinkin’ Conn wis the maist backward boay she’d ever came acroass.’ Jenny checked on them all as the train shuffled off houses and streets, a woman shaking a duster out of a window, a group of boys foreshortening in the park, Graithnock and the war, and butted its way into the countryside.

They got off at Barrahill and waited. The station had an abandoned outpost atmosphere, the platform raided by couchgrass, the window of the single waiting-room cataracted with dust. Nobody else was there. Bird-sounds threaded silence and a few cows ate a field.

There, with his father teaching Alec wood and flowers and stone, his mother and Kathleen miming conversation through the dirty glass, Angus doing a miner’s crouch in the middle of nowhere as if he’d located the corner of the wind, his grandfather filling his pipe, Conn suddenly entered the day for the first time. It was as if he had passed through a doorway in the wind. The banal facts that had brought them to this place shelved away and he felt not so much come here as grown. He stood drenched in daylight, almost gasping with happiness, lost among acres of sunshine. He laid his hand on the hot stone of the wall beside him, like someone who needs support, and the porous imprint of it seemed fused on palm and fingers. Without looking at anything in particular, he seemed to see it all, from the iceberg clouds and trees and fields hung out along the horizon to the group they made in the middle of it and the stalk of grass that bobbed in Angus’s mouth and his father’s buckled shadow on the ground. The acrid crackle of his grandfather’s lighting pipe seemed big in the hanging stillness, a hayrick burning.

In his mind a word rose for no reason like a fish and fell: ‘mysterious’. He lost it but the ripples it left went on, touching everything around him. The placings of the others, casual yet related, fascinated him inexplicably. His father had hung his jacket on a fence-stake. Shirt-sleeved, dappled with leaf-shadows, he was a stranger, holding a child Conn seemed to be seeing for the first time. Through the glass Kathleen smiled and stroked her forehead with two fingers. What she and his mother might be saying was unimaginable to him. His grandfather was a riddle – an ancient man sitting in sunlight on a broken bench with two cloth-wrapped dumplings beside him. Conn looked at the bag he had carried, lying against the fence, and wondered where it had come from, who had made it. Because Angus’s hair was ruffled by a faint breeze, Conn couldn’t understand why he had so often resented his brother.

He stood dumb with love, ravaged with joy. He felt caught up, carried along, like being involved in an incredibly complicated dance the steps of which he didn’t know. He only knew that he wished to share in it more fully, desired to have the casually preoccupied poise of the rest, to be like them. He was almost unbearably filled with what seemed an unstoppable energy and he had nowhere to put it, no means to release it. He wanted to express it and all he could find to do was to lift a lopped branch of a tree and, spinning, whirr the air into scars of sound that healed instantly. He whirled and stopped, lashed and rested, and the more vigour he expended the more he had, while his people and his place became more marvellous, and the day, in huge fragments that seemed burning, that were both mystery and revelation, fell all around him.