‘Maybe not,’ Prentice said. He looked back at Kenneth. ‘But you might be wrong about the things you’re so busy telling us the truth about.’
‘I did say I wasn’t certain.’
‘Yeah? What about Darren?’
Kenneth looked puzzled. He shook his head. ‘No, you’ve lost me; what do you -’
‘I can’t believe he’s just ... gone, like that, Ken. I can’t believe there isn’t something left, some sort of continuity. What was the point of it all, otherwise?’
Kenneth put the rod down, clasped his hands. ‘You think Darren’s ... personality is still around, somewhere?’
‘Why not? How can he be such a great guy, and clever and just ... just a good friend, and some fuckwit forgetting to look both ways cancels out all that ... probably not even a fuckwit; probably some ordinary guy thinking about something else ... How ...’ Prentice shoved his hands under his oxters, rocked forward, head down. ‘God, I hate getting inarticulate.’
‘Prentice, I’m sorry. Maybe it sounds brutal, but that’s just the way it is. Consciousness ... goodness, whatever; they haven’t got any momentum. They can stop in an instant, just snuffed out. It happens all the time; it’s happening right now, all over the world; and Darren was hardly an extreme example of life’s injustice, death’s injustice.’
‘I know!’ Prentice put his hands up to the jacket hood, over his ears. ‘I know all that! I know it’s happening all the time; I know the death squads are torturing children and the Israelis are behaving like Nazis and Pol Pot’s preparing his come-back tour; you keep telling us; you always told us! And people just scream and die; get tortured to death because they’re poor or they help the poor or they wrote a pamphlet or they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time; and nobody comes to rescue them, and the torturers never get punished; they retire, they even survive revolutions sometimes because they have such fucking useful skills, and no super-hero comes to save the people being tortured, no Rambo bursts in; no retribution; no justice; nothing ... and
that’s just it!
There
has
to be something more than that!’
‘Why?’ Kenneth said, trying not to sound angry. ‘Just because we feel that way? One wee daft species, on one wee daft planet circling one wee daft star in one wee daft galaxy; us? Barely capable of crawling into space yet; capable of feeding everybody but ... nyaa, can’t be bothered? Just because we think there must be something more and a few crazy desert cults infect the world with their cruel ideas;
that’s
what makes the soul a certainty and heaven a must?’ Kenneth sat back, shaking his head. ‘Prentice, I’m sorry, but I expected better of you. I thought you were smart. Shit; Darren dies and you miss Rory, so you think, “Bugger me; must be a geezer with the long flowing white beard after all.”’
‘I didn’t say -’
‘What about your Aunt Kay?’ Kenneth said. ‘Your mum’s friend; she did believe; must be a God; prayed every night, went to church, practically claimed she had a vision once, and then she gets married, her husband dies of cancer within a year and the baby just stops breathing in its cot one night. So she stops believing. Told me that herself; said she couldn’t believe in a God that would do that! What sort of faith is
that?
What sort of blinkered outlook on the world is it? Didn’t she
believe
anybody ever died “tragically” before? Didn’t she ever read her precious fucking Bible with its catalogue of atrocities? Didn’t she believe the Holocaust had happened, the death camps ever existed? Or did none of that matter because it had all happened to somebody else?’
‘That’s all you can do, isn’t it?’ Prentice shouted back. ‘Shout people down; skim a few useful anecdotes and bite-sized facts and always find something different to what they’ve said!’
‘Oh I’m sorry! I thought it was called argument.’
‘No, it’s called being over-bearing!’
‘Okay!’ Kenneth spread his arms out wide. ‘Okay.’ He sat still for a time, while Prentice remained hunched and tense-looking in the bows. When Prentice didn’t say anything, Kenneth sighed. ‘Prentice; you have to make up your own mind about these things. I ... both your mother and I have always tried to bring you up to think for yourself. I admit it pains me to think you ... you might be contemplating letting other people, or some ... some doctrine start thinking for you, even for comfort’s sake, because -’
‘Dad,’ Prentice said loudly, looking up at the grey clouds.‘! just don’t want to talk about it, okay?’
‘I’m just trying -’
‘Well, stop!’ Prentice whirled round, and Kenneth could have wept to see the expression on the face of his son: pained and desperate and close to tears if he wasn’t crying already; the rain made it hard to tell. ‘Just leave me alone!’
Kenneth looked down, massaged the sides of his nose with his fingers, then took a deep breath. Prentice turned away from him again.
Kenneth stowed the fishing rod, looked round the flat, rain-battered waters of the small loch, and remembered that hot, calm day, thirty years earlier, on another fishing trip that had ended quite differently.
He took up the oars. ‘Let’s head back in, all right?’
Prentice didn’t say anything.
‘Fergus, darling! You’re soaked! Oh; you’ve brought some little friends with you, have you?’
‘Yes, mother.’
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Urvill.’
‘Oh, it’s young Kenneth McHoan. Didn’t see you under that hood. Well, jolly good; come in. Take off your coats. Fergus, darling; close that door.’
Fergus closed the door. ‘This is Lachlan Watt. His dad works in our factory.’
‘Oh, really? Yes. Well ... You’ve all been out playing, have you?’
Mrs Urvill took their coats, handling Lachy’s tattered and greasy-looking jacket with some distaste. She hung the dripping garments up on hooks. The rear porch of the Urvill’s rambling house, at the foot of Barsloisnoch hill, beyond the north-west limits of Gallanach, smelled somehow cosy and damp at the same time.
‘Now, I dare say you young men could do with some tea, am I right?’
Mrs Urvill was a tall, aristocratic-looking lady Kenneth always remembered as wearing a head-scarf. She wasn’t that day; she wore a tweed skirt, sweater, and a pearl necklace which she kept fingering.
She made them tea, accompanied by some slices of bread and bramble jelly. This was served at a small table in Fergus’s room, on the first floor.
Fergus had one slice of bread, and Kenneth managed two before Lachy wolfed all the rest. The war was only over a few months, and rationing was still in force. Lachy sat back, belched. ‘That was rerr,’ he said. He wiped his mouth on the frayed sleeve of his jumper. ‘See the breed in our hoose; it’s green, so it is.’
‘What?’ said Kenneth.
‘What rot,’ Fergus said, sipping his tea.
‘Aye it is,’ Lachy said, pointing one grubby finger at Fergus.
‘Green bread?’ Kenneth said, grinning.
‘Aye, an’ ah’ll tell ye why, tae, but ye’ve goat tae promise no tae tell anybudy.’
‘Okay,’ Kenneth said, sitting forwards, head in hands.
‘Hmm, I suppose so,’ Fergus agreed unenthusiastically.
Lachy glanced from side to side. ‘It’s the petrol,’ he said, voice low.
‘The petrol?’ Kenneth didn’t understand.
‘Load of absolute rot, if you ask me,’ Fergus sneered.
‘Na; it’s true,’ Lachlan said. ‘See the Navy boys, oot oan the flyin boat base?’
‘Aye,’ said Kenneth, frowning.
‘They pit this green dye in thur petrol, an if yer foun wi that in the tank uv yer motor car, ye get the jile. But if ye pit the petrol through breed, the dye comes oot, an ye can use the petrol an naebudy kens a thing. It’s true.’ He sat back. ‘An that’s why we huv green breed in oor hoose, sometimes.’
‘Woof,’ Kenneth said, fascinated. ‘Bet it tastes horrible!’
‘That’s illegal,’ Fergus said. ‘My mother knows the C.O. at the base; if I told her she’d tell him and you’d probably all be arrested and you
would
get the jail.’
‘Aye,’ Lachy said. ‘But you promised no tae tell, didn’t ye?’ He smiled thinly over at Fergus, sitting on the other side of the small table. ‘Your maw always call ye “Darlin”, aye?’ .
‘No,’ Fergus said, sitting straight and drawing a hand across his forehead, moving some hair away from his eyes. ‘Only sometimes.’
Kenneth got up and went to stare at a big model ship in a glass case on the far side of the room. It was an ordinary steamer, not a warship, unfortunately, but it looked magnificent, like one of the ones he’d seen in the big museum in Glasgow when his dad had taken him there. The ship was wonderfully detailed; every stanchion and rail was there; every tiny port-hole, even the oars in the tiny shore-boats behind the tall funnel, their seats and internal ribs thinner than match-sticks.
‘You her darlin, ur ye?’ Lachy said, wiping some crumbs from the plate. ‘You her wee darlin, that right, Fergus?’
‘Well, what if I am?’ Fergus said sniffily.
‘Weyl, whort if a eym?’ Lachy mimicked. Kenneth looked round from the gleaming, perfect model.
Fergus’s face looked pinched. ‘At least my mum and dad don’t hit me,
Master
Watt.’
Lachy sneered, stirred in his seat. ‘Aye, great fur some,’ he said, standing up. He walked round the room, looking at some wooden aircraft models on a desk, tapping them. ‘Very fancy carpet, Fergus darling,’ he said, going up and down on his heels on the thick pile of the intricately-patterned rug. Fergus said nothing. Lachy picked up some lead soldiers from a couple of trays ranked full of them, then stood inspecting some maps on the wall, of Scotland, the British Isles, Europe and The World. ‘They red bits aw ours, are they?’
‘No, they’re the King’s actually,’ Fergus said. ‘That’s the Empire. They’re not red because they’re
commie
or anything.’
‘Ach,’ Lachy said, ‘Ah ken that; but ah mean they’re British; they’re ours.’
‘Well, I don’t know about “ours”, but they belong to Britain.’
‘Well,’ Lachy said indignantly. ‘Ah’m British, am ah no?’
‘Hmm. I suppose so,’ Fergus conceded. ‘But I don’t see how you can call it yours; you don’t even own your own house.’
‘So whit?’ Lachy said angrily.
‘Yes, but, Fergus,’ Kenneth said. ‘It is the British Empire and we’re all British, and when we’re older we can vote for MPs to go to parliament, and they’re in power, not the King; that’s what the Magna Carta says; and we elect them, don’t we? So it is our Empire, really, isn’t it? I mean you when think about it.’
Kenneth walked into the middle of the room, smiling at the other two boys. Fergus looked unconvinced. Lachlan rolled his eyes, looked at the small single bed, then at a couch in one corner. ‘You got this room all tae yerself?’ Lachy said, voice high.
‘Yes, so?’ Fergus replied.
‘Bi Christ, it’s all right for some, eh, Ken?’ Lachy said, winking at Kenneth and walking over to the model ship in the glass case. ‘Aye,’ he said, tapping the glass, then twisting a little key in a lock at one end of the case; the side panel of the case opened. ‘Ah bet ye can get up tae all sorts aw things in here by yourself at nights.’ He started trying to haul the model out of the case.
‘Stop that!’ Fergus shouted, standing up.
Lachy shifted the whole glass on its stand, reached in and lifted the model out of its two wood and brass cradles. Kenneth saw the rear mast bend against the top of the case. The black threads of the radio wires sagged.
‘How can ye play with it in here?’ Lachlan protested, straining to pull the model out.
‘Lachy -’ Kenneth said, starting over to him.
‘It’s not a toy!’ Fergus said, running over. He swatted Lachy’s arm. ‘Stop it! You’ll break it!’
‘Ach, all right,’ Lachy said. He slid the model ship back in. Kenneth noticed with some relief that the mast flexed back into shape, hauling the radio antennae taut again. ‘Keep yer hair on,
darling.’
Fergus locked the door of the case and pocketed the key. ‘And don’t call me that!’
‘Sorry,
darling.’
‘I said stop it!’ Fergus shrieked.
‘Ach, dinnae wet yer knickers, ya big lassie.’
‘You disgusting little -’
‘Oh, come on, you two; act grown-up,’ Kenneth said. ‘Fergus,’ he pointed over to the window, and a slope-topped display case standing under it. ‘What’s all this stuff?’
‘That’s my museum,’ Fergus said, glaring at Lachy and walking to the window.
‘Oo, a museum,’ Lachy said in a pretend posh voice, but came over too.
‘Things I’ve found, locally,’ Fergus explained. He stood over the case, pointing. ‘That’s a Roman coin, I think. And that’s an arrowhead.’
‘Whit’s that green thing?’ Lachy said, pointing to one corner.
‘That,’ Fergus told him, ‘is a fossilized pear.’
Lachy guffawed. ‘It’s a bit aw bone, ya daft bugger. Where’d ye get yon? Back a the butcher’s shop? Find it in the dug’s bowl, aye?’
‘No I did not,’ Fergus said indignantly. ‘It’s a fossilized pear; I found it on the beach.’ He turned to Kenneth. ‘You’ve got some education, Kenneth; you tell him. It’s a fossilized pear, isn’t it?’
Kenneth looked closer. ‘Hmm. Umm, I don’t know, actually.’
‘Fuckin bit a bone,’ Lachy muttered.
‘You filthy-mouthed little wretch!’ Fergus shouted. ‘Get out of my house!’
Lachy ignored this, bent down, face over the cabinet.
‘Go on; get out!’ Fergus screamed, pointing to the door.
Lachy looked sourly at the pitted, vaguely green exhibit labelled ‘Fossilized Pear, Duntrunne Beach, 14th of May 1945.’
‘I’m not kidding! Out!’
‘Fergus -’ began Kenneth. He put a hand on the other boy’s arm. Fergus hit it away, face white with fury.
Lachy wrinkled his nose, which was almost touching the glass of the cabinet. ‘Still, whit dae ye expect frae a laddy that hides in a lavvy?’
‘You
pig!’
Fergus screamed, and brought both fists thudding down on the back of Lachy’s head. Lachy’s face crashed through the glass, into the display case.