Docherty (3 page)

The room was discreetly tidy. The debris of birth had all been spirited away. Dr Allan stood with his back to the fire, genteelly jacketed again, insulating himself against the walk back home.

Thanks, dochter,’ Tam said. ‘Aggie, there’s a drap whusky in the press there. Fur the dochter.’

‘No, thank you. I’ll be getting back round. And we’d best all get away and let the lassie sleep. She’s a far distance to come back from.’

‘We’ll no’ be long. But ye’ll hiv some. It’s Hogmanay the nicht, as faur as Ah’m concerned.’ Knowing that Tam Docherty didn’t keep drink in the house, Dr Allan decided not to offend against the special provision he had made. ‘An’ wan fur Buff as weel.’

‘Whit’s he done tae deserve a whusky?’ Aggie had found the whisky and two glasses Tam had laid ready.

‘Ah’ve suffered you fur foarty year,’ Buff said.

‘Well.’ The doctor raised his glass of whisky. ‘Here’s to . . . whoever he is. Have you got a name?’

Tam hoisted the baby round to face them: ‘Cornelius Docherty to the company.’

The name seemed to drown him, like regal robes on a midget. The doctor sipped.

‘That’s a terrible size of a name for such a wee fellow.’

‘He’ll grow tae fit it. Don’t you worry.’

‘Whit aboot yerself, Tam?’ Aggie asked. ‘Ye could likely dae wi’ a drap.’

‘Naw. Thanks, Aggie. But Ah’m drunk enough already, withoot drink.’

‘Ah’d oaffer ye mine, Tam,’ Buff said, looking disconsolately at what wasn’t so much a finger as a fingernail of liquor, ‘if Ah could fin’ it.’

The doctor took another sip, and spoke meditatively, as if whisky were philosophy: ‘What are you going to make this one, then? A Hindu? You’ve got two religions in the house already.’

‘He’s a’ Ah’ wid want tae make ‘im as he is. A perfect wee human bein’. Whit mair could ye want? Except fur him tae get bigger. Be mair o’ the same.’

‘He’ll certainly have to get bigger. Before he’s ready for the pits.’

‘He’ll never be ready fur the pits. No’ this wan. He’ll howk wi’ his heid. Fur ideas.’ He winked at the baby. ‘Eh, Conn? Ah’m pittin his name doon fur Prime Minister. First thing in the moarnin’.’

Their laughter ebbed to a still contentment. Mrs Ritchie sat smiling in self-satisfaction by the fire. Buff took his whisky a meniscus at a time. Aggie had put temptation back into the press. Jenny was adrift in drowsiness, her body flotsam abandoned to her weariness. One white hand was being held in Tam Docherty’s, while in his other arm he still cradled his son. Dr Allan leaned into the cushion of heat behind him. His professionalism being disarmed by tiredness, he saw the scene as a fortress of people built protectively and perhaps hopelessly round a child. He remembered how at the birth he had put the child to the bottom of the bed, a parcel of useless flesh, while he concerned himself with the mother. It was Mrs Ritchie who had skelped him into life. She would talk about that and it would swell in the telling, would become a story of a life stolen from the jaws of death. The child came trailing legends, became in the act of being born more than himself. For Tam Docherty he had existed before himself, had been a name, an idea, just waiting for flesh. He saw a tacit but deeply held sense of triumph in which all these people shared. No matter what their lives did to them, this was what they salvaged, this unsmirched new beginning. Conn lay, hubbed in their middle, raw as a fresh wound, and seemed suddenly to Dr Allan impossibly burdened with the weight of all their lives. As the doctor lifted the glass again to his mouth, it was a private toast. With it there went a solemn wish for the kind of fulfilment to this beginning that they dreamt of. It was wished for all the more intensely because he could not for a second begin to believe in it.

Across the street Miss Gilfillan’s figure glimmered tall and pale as a candle in her window. Around her, High Street, its tenement windows gutted by shadows, closes gaping like abandoned burrows, seemed as dead as Pompeii, a desolation where people were frozen into the sordid postures of their grovelling lives. In her mind there echoed still among them the sound of the child’s cry from the lighted window. It came to her not as a birth but as a wail against dying. The ooze of hopelessness had already claimed it. None of them here had any chance. Watching a cliff of cloud slowly erode in the wind, she felt herself dwindle to a small helplessness, her heart contracting to a pebble. The comfort of the past dispersed like a vapour, leaving her shivering in a void inhabited by what people called ‘progress’. She sensed it only as a malign presence, like a legendary monster, fabulous with the future, devouring the past, a self-begetting sequence of deformities. As this year died, what successor, more hideous than itself, would it be spawning?

BOOK I

1

This’ll be a guid clear nicht fur the poachin’,’ Tam said. ‘Are ye up the road the nicht, Dougie?’

‘Naw. It’s temptin’, mind ye.’

‘Up by Silverwood wid be the thing. Whaur Barney saw the ghost. Ye mind?’

‘That wis a nicht.’

It was a Saturday evening in summer. Tam and Jenny Docherty were out at the entry-door and had been joined by Dougie McMillan and his wife, Mag. The women sat in the two chairs Tam had brought out. Conn, still too young to have the wider tether of Mick and Angus and Kathleen, who were over in the park, was playing quietly at their feet, already wise enough to forestall bedtime by being unobtrusive.

‘We’re aboot due fur the “Store Races” again,’ Jenny was saying.

‘Aye.’ Mag shook her head.

It was a term coined by the corner-wags for the beginning of the Co-operative Stores quarter. Jenny lamented the chance it would give certain people to exploit what she called ‘their fella bein’s’. The method was simple enough, though not without its risks.

Since the dividend was good, usually above two bob in the pound, some members made a habit of allowing non-members to buy goods in their name, with the proviso that the dividend from the purchase came back to them. Since such an order was on tick and didn’t have to be paid till the end of the quarter, the non-members could enjoy a brief Utopian sense of luxury without cost.

‘The day of reckoning,’ Mag pronounced.

‘Aye, an’ the cost isny jist in money,’ Jenny said.

Living next door to the grocery, Jenny had seen the effects often enough: families ‘racing’ to the shop at the start of the quarter, descending like locusts on the counters, to take away provisions in clothes-baskets, hand-carts, bogeys. The crunch came at the end of the quarter. Furtive visits were paid to people like Suzie Temple in New Street. She was fabled to have wealth (though she lived in a house where strips of margarine box were nailed across the frames of old chairs). The eyes of certain women took on a desperate, preoccupied look. ‘Store Fever’ it was called.

They say Suzie Temple’s no’ keepin’ too grand,’ Mag said.

‘Christ, yon wis some nicht.’ Dougie had been re-creating it in his memory. ‘Ye mind Ah wis sittin’ oan the bankin’ at the side o’ the road. Stringin’ the rabbits. Ah had them roon ma neck.’

‘Barney had been et the dancin’, had ‘e no’?’

‘Aye. Nae moon tae speak o’. Ah gets up an’ says, “Barney. Whit time wid it be?”‘

Tam was starting to smile.

‘He stoapped died. A’ he could see wis the white o’ the scuts. Swingin’ in the daurkness. An’ he’s away.’

‘Oot o’ trap wan. Through hedges an’ fields. They tell me you coulda stertit a ferm wi’ the muck that came aff his troosers.’

‘Wi’ his ain brand o’ manure thrown in, nae doot.’

They had coaxed themselves to laughter, Tam leaning on the wall for support.

‘Your time has come,’ Tam said. That’s whit he said the ghost said tae ‘im.’

Along High Street other families had brought out chairs and were chatting in the mellow sunshine. A well-to-do family – husband, wife and two daughters – were strolling towards where Tam and the others stood. That was a common enough occurrence. Quite a few families from better districts made such a walk a Saturday evening event in summer. It could be very interesting.

On this occasion the man was pointing things out to his wife as they went past. A phrase of his talk drifted towards them – ‘people actually living there’. The girls looked mostly at the ground, blinkered with apprehension. The man’s hand patted Conn’s head lightly as he passed. Looking up, Conn felt his father’s hand fit tightly, like a helmet, over his head.

And his father’s voice cleft the calmness of his play like a lightning-flash.

‘Why don’t ye bring fuckin’ cookies wi’ ye? An’ then ye could throw them tae us!’

Conn’s mother hissed, ‘Tam!’

Immediately Conn had a feeling he would forget but would experience again. It was a completely familiar and secure happening transformed instantly into something foreign and frightening. He saw and heard but couldn’t understand.

The man stopped without looking round.

‘Aye, sur,’ Tam Docherty was saying very quietly. ‘Come oan back, then.’

‘Please, Tam. Please,’ Jenny was whispering.

The woman’s linked arm took her husband on. Jenny’s face was flushed.

‘Is somethin’ wrang, Tam?’ Dougie asked and felt himself contract in the look Tam Docherty gave him.

‘Ye mean tae say ye hivny noticed? Whaur the hell dae you leeve, Dougie?’

Some of the dust of that brief, explosive moment settled on Conn for good.

2

High Street was the capital of Conn’s childhood and boyhood. The rest of Graithnock was just the provinces. High Street, both as a terrain and as a population, was special. Everyone whom circumstances had herded into its hundred-or-so yards had failed in the same way. It was a penal colony for those who had committed poverty, a vice which was usually hereditary.

High Street and its continuations of Soulis Street and Fore Street made a straight line to the Cross at the centre of town. Together, they had at one time been the main street of the town, a residential district for the rich. But when this predominance was taken over by the roughly parallel line of Portland Street and King Street, the older area, like a tract of land gone marshy, had been abandoned to the poor. Among the less impressive flora and fauna that were now to be found in it, there remained the occasional ghostly reminder of a more grandiose past, like a monument among weeds. One of these was the name people gave to one of the buildings in the Foregate, as Fore Street was more commonly called. The building was known as Millerton Close and was said to have been the town house of Lord Millerton, who had a large estate near Graithnock. During Conn’s early years Millerton Close contained at various times in its musty recesses an alcoholic, a family with rickets, and a consumptive mother of six.

In that harsh climate people developed certain characteristics common to them all. Where so little was owned, sharing became a precautionary reflex. The only security they could have was one another. Most things were borrowable, from a copper for the gas to a black suit for funerals.

Wives looked in on one another without ceremony. The men gathered compulsively each night at the street corner, became variously a pitch-and-toss school, a subdued male-voice choir, a parliament without powers. Especially in summer, they would stand long, till the sky had raged and gloomed to ash above their heads. The children, when not at school, were seldom in the house during the day, but could be found indiscriminately deployed among backcourts and doorways and corners of the nearby park, as if they were communal property. The authority of the nearest adult was understood to apply to them all. Conn learned early that when any adult asked him to go an errand, his parents’ authority was backing the request, even in the case of old Mrs Molloy (secretly called ‘chibby heid’ by the boys because of the strange lumps that covered her scalp), who invariably encouraged his compliance with the words: ‘Heh, you wi’ the big heid an’ nothin’ in it.’

Underpinning the apparent anarchy of their social lives and establishing an order was a code of conduct complex enough to baffle the most perceptive outsider yet tacitly understood by even the youngest citizens of High Street from the time that they started to think. One of its first principles was tolerance. Being in a context where circumstances blew up the ordinary trials of life into terrible hazards and seemed to have them arranged with the unexpectedness and ingenuity of a commando assault course for living, people learned to accept the crack-ups it led to. Behind every other trivial occurrence lay a stress-point upon which poverty or despair or a crushing sense of inferiority had played for years. Consequently, frustrations tended to explode in most of them from time to time.

Sometimes men would disintegrate spectacularly, beating a wife unconscious one pellucid summer evening or going on the batter with cheap whisky for a fortnight. Such bouts of failure were not approved of, but they also never earned a permanent contempt. They were too real for that.

High Street was very strong on rights. Though these might not be easily discernible to an outsider, they were very real in the life of the place, formed an invisible network of barriers and rights-of-way. It was morality by reflex to some extent, motivated often by not making the terms of an already difficult life impossible. Yet there was as well behind it a deep if muffled sense of what it meant to be a man, a realisation that there were areas which were only your own, and that if these were violated formidable forces might be invoked.

Adultery, for example, was a rare phenomenon. This was partly because the public nature of private lives and the sheer drudgery of coping with large families legislated against the contrivance of such situations. Overwork is a great provoker of chastity. But it was mainly because such a step took you on to a dark and slippery ledge, and out of earshot of the predictable. Whereas in more polite society such an action might mean the dissection of a private pain in a public place, in High Street, where a divorce court seemed as distant as the court of the Emperor must have seemed from a fortress on the Great Wall, the direction was reversed. The situation became more private, was injected to ferment in one man’s skull. People averted their eyes, awaiting an outcome. The commonest one was what they called with chilling simplicity ‘a kicking’. And they would have found it hard to blame a man who forgot to stop. It was simply that they understood men as bundles of conflicting and frequently immeasurable impulses, usually imperfectly contained by a fraying sense of purpose. Whoever slipped the knot would have to abide the hurricane.