The Kiln (13 page)

They have strange customs here, strange people. Tam has been mystified by everything. Time, for example, is divided into one-hour units. For an hour you sit at the machine and pick up the unbaked black bricks that spew out at you relentlessly and stack them on a hutch. While your head screams with boredom, the machine keeps throwing the bricks at you until you think its action is a deliberate and personal insult to the mind. For an hour, while someone else becomes an extension of the machine, you push the loaded hutches out of the lighted shed into the darkness and along the rails that lead to the kiln. One of the two men in the kiln accepts the full hutch and you bring the empty one back to the shed to be reloaded. For an hour you sweep the shed and try to remember that you're not a robot. Then you return to unloading the bricks.

Tam hates it already. It is raining tonight and he has turned up wearing casual shoes. Fred Astaire visits the brickwork. His feet are soaking and he is up to his kneecaps in mud. Twice he has pushed the heavy bogey off the rails and has almost wept with the strain of having to lift it back on. Only the shame
of asking for help has given him the strength to realign the hutch single-handed. But he doesn't know how much longer he can go on.

Yet now, as he sits at the tea-break, he finds an unexpected compensation. The sandwiches his mother made him taste wonderful. He remembers his father telling him something his grandfather once said about being a miner: ‘Pit-breid is the only guid reason for goin’ doon a mine.' The sense of being part of a family tradition sustains him a little. He has found a direct connection, however tenuous, with the legendary grandfather he has never known personally. That dead man of reputedly awesome hardness gives him some sort of credentials here, tells him. ‘This isn't so strange.’ No matter how strange it may seem.

‘So this army wallah is comin’ tae teach the Home Guard about hand grenades,' the man with the lived-in face is saying.

‘Ye didny use hand grenades in the Home Guard?’

‘Only as ornaments. But ye had tae be prepared. An’ we're all lined up in front of him. An' he's holdin' up a hand grenade. An' he shows us how ye pull the pin. Without actually pullin' it, mind ye. An' he says, “Once you've done that, you count.” An' he counts. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.” An' he kids on he's throwin' the grenade. An' a long time after, when he's goin' away. Sandy Lamont. Ye know Sandy? Helluva stammer. Well, Sandy's got a question. “H-h-h-h-how m-m-m-many d'ye c-c-count up tae again?” An' the man stares at him for a while. “Just you fuckin' throw it,” he says. “Never mind the counting.'”

The gaffer, who is an Englishman, comes in.

‘Right, you lot,’ he says. ‘Holidays over.’

As Tam rises, he feels the pains in his arms and legs and he thinks he won't make it through his first night. But he does and the first night becomes the second and the second becomes the third and the third becomes habit. He is wearing Michael's old boots now and an old boilersuit of his father's with the hems on the legs let down. He has become better at keeping the bogey on the rails. The trick is to apply the weight only forwards as you push, never downwards.

The gargoyle faces of the first night have resolved themselves
into recognisably human forms. They have developed names and identifying attitudes. The man with the marsh-mist voice is Hilly Brown. (Hilly? He doesn't look like a Hilton. Hilliard? Hillman?)

Hilly is the talker of the company. His beat-up face releases wry words and arresting thoughts into the stillness of the tea-break when the silence of the machines sounds like freedom to be yourself. His use of language interests Tam.

‘Farquhar, ya bastard!’ Hilly says at the beginning of a break.

‘What's up. Hilly?’ James Morrison asks.

‘What's up? Ah've just had the first bite o’ ma piece here an' this balloon hawks a thing on to the ground like a jaur o' tadpoles.'

A jar of tadpoles. That's a terrific description of a certain kind of spittle. Hilly uses some amazing images. He is telling them of going through a wood one night and coming upon a couple making love on the ground. ‘His arse,’ he says, ‘was openin’ and shuttin' like a sea-anemone.'

He is the one who gives Tam his apprentice's initiation. He has discovered that Tam did classics at school.

‘So ye're a classical scholar?’ he says. ‘Tam, is it? Okay, Tam. What's Latin for aeroplane?’

Tam has been searching his mind for about fifteen seconds before he twigs.

‘Aw naw,’ he says. ‘Thanks a lot.’

He realises he has been subjected to a variant of being sent for a left-handed brush or a tin of tartan paint. The feeling of stupidity is minimised by the fact that the others have been waiting quite seriously for the answer. As the laughter subsides, Dunky Semple, who has joined in, speaks.

‘Can ye no’ think of it, Tam?' he says.

Dunky's brains, as Hilly says, ‘are still in the box. He's waitin’ for instructions comin' through the post about what to do wi' them.' Dunky gazes vaguely past their conversations, constantly nicking and relighting a Capstan Full Strength cigarette and passing weirdly tangential comments that seem to come, as Hilly has suggested, from ‘Radio Mars’. They are discussing women, as they often are, and Dunky chooses a thoughtful pause in the conversation to interject.

‘At the pictures one time,’ Dunky says. ‘A lassie took ma hand. She just sat and held it, so she did. For ages it was. Her hand was warm. An’ it was that soft. The softest thing Ah ever felt. She went out before the lights went up.'

Nobody laughs, not even Billy Farquhar. They sit staring ahead.

‘Ye shoulda got her address, Dunky,’ Hilly says.

—
AFTERWARDS
, he would be talking to an old woman who lived alone in sheltered housing. She suddenly began to talk about a Wallace Arnold's bus holiday she took to Brighton many years ago. The thing she remembered most vividly was an afternoon tea-dance. The same man had asked her to dance twice. She could describe the man very clearly. Listening to her recall that luminous moment, he would think of Dunky and wonder about the varieties of quiet lonelinesses there were, a one-handed love-affair, a two-dance life.—

BILLY FARQUHAR IS THE TEDDY-BOY'S NAME
. He is nineteen, huge and with his thick red hair done in a quiff and a D.A. at the back. (Duck's arse is translated by the papers into duck's anatomy.) It's surprising that he didn't laugh at Dunky's confession of lost love for he seems as sensitive as one of the bricks that come red from the kiln. He doesn't take much part in the conversations, preferring to stare round about while Hilly and James Morrison talk, using a large knife to cut up the turnips he steals from a neighbouring farmer's field for his piece. If something they touch on catches his attention as being noteworthy or surprising, he tends to say ‘Fuck!’ as his contribution to the discussion, or, if he's feeling expansive, ‘Holy fuck!’ He only really animates if he is invited to report on his latest experiences of getting a ride or having a fight. He is reputed, by Hilly Brown at least, to have ‘a dong like an anaconda’.

James Morrison doesn't welcome such information. Both Tam and Jack Laidlaw have been separately informed by him on the first night that he doesn't really belong here. He has been a builder with his own firm until ‘the drink got the better of me’. He still has his bungalow and he is off the drink and he is only working here to keep the house going ‘till the trade picks up’.

All the strange talk that swirls around Tam at the piece-break seems wild and uncontrolled and yet it is hobbled by something. That something is, he comes to realise. The Chair. Even when it sits empty during the break, which is most of the time, it still manages to dominate.

‘
DON'T SIT THERE
.’ No. Nobody ever does. Except the one.

THE CHAIR
. It would often come back to him. He would smile to himself at how it had always expressed itself to him with capital letters at the time. But it hadn't seemed funny then.

It came again into his mind as he stood at the bar in the Stag's Head. It was the pub nearest to the flat in Warriston. But it wasn't just the nearness that appealed to him. Ever since Michael had taken him for his first official drink at seventeen to the Akimbo Arms in Graithnock, he had had a weakness for rough talking-shops. That first time, the abrasive noise had unnerved him a little and he had been glad of Michael's knowledge of what to do. Not knowing what to drink, he had accepted Michael's advice and he took a Double Century. The taste was a faint echo of those sips of stout he had sometimes stolen from his grandmother's glass when she was out of the room.

Just as the tartness of the drink passed from being something that made him wonder how anybody could voluntarily drink this stuff into being an experience he enjoyed, so the crass earthiness of the pub became an intermittent release from introspection, the nearest thing to animated Brueghel he would find. The pub was
the social convention he had missed most any time he was living in France. French people tended to drink in psychological alcoves. Among them, he had sometimes longed for the communal atmosphere of a Scottish bar, the shouted long-range conversations, the jocularly insulting comments that were thrown around the place like spears, the impromptu seminars on football or politics or the nature of relationships between men and women, the man or woman who suddenly decided a song was necessary.

He had once written a short poem he called The Young Man's Song'. He didn't like it but it had caught for him something of what he had felt about pubs when he was younger, how they could form a kind of interesting crossroads for an evening (which road will we go from here?), could ambush routine, could catalyse dull habits into an event.

That wasn't exactly how he felt these days, he had to admit. But a diluted form of that feeling had always stayed with him. It had survived long enough to follow him to Edinburgh, no longer a song perhaps but at least a hoarse whisper that could be heard from time to time in the stillness of the flat at Warriston. Living alone there, the nearest thing he had to a social life was wandering occasionally into a down-market pub of an evening. You took your chance of stumbling across Walter Mitty on an off night, assuring you he was an eccentric millionaire or an unpublished genius, or of getting into an argument with a man who seemed only marginally sane or of meeting someone who was deeply interesting and whom you would otherwise never have met.
And if you were becoming just boredly stoned, you could always shift your pitch.

And there are threat and noise and song. The threat had always provoked in him both fascination and fear, like a child wanting to climb a height from which there is a possibility of falling. He remembered the way some of them always used to walk across the parapet of the railway bridge at Bonnyton on the way home from the pitch-and-putt. The parapet sloped downwards towards a thirty-foot drop to the railway line. Presumably, it had been designed that way deliberately to discourage tightrope walkers and it was exactly that which made them want to walk it.

There was something of that repellent fascination in his sense of Cran. It had started with The Chair. In the two nights before he saw it filled, it had managed to acquire a mysterious authority. Cran Craig only visited the tea-break intermittently, appearing without warning among them, steaming from the heat of the kiln like Vulcan from his forge. But on the first two nights, as the small man called Frank, who worked with Cran, took each bogey that was delivered, Tam had caught a few striking images of a big figure, stripped to the waist inside the kiln and glowing red. He had stared out steadily at Tam a couple of times, like a beast wondering what careless creature had dared to approach its lair.

Those shocking glimpses were developed into dread by the way the others talked about Cran. They didn't talk loudly, as if prepared for his arrival at any moment. They said he had been a merchant seaman. They said he had been in fights all over the world. Hilly, the philosopher of the group, wondered if he had ever lost a fight. He thought he must have but he didn't think anybody should suggest that to him.

Billy Farquhar warned Jack and Tam that Cran didn't like anyone looking at him unless he was talking to them and sometimes not even then. Sitting on their wooden benches, they tended to glance at The Chair when they mentioned him.

It was an ordinary wooden chair, high-backed and scuffed, a floral cushion fixed to the outer rings of its back with two tie-cords. But plain as it was, Tam dreamt about it after his second night's work. The Chair seemed to palpitate in the dark and he somehow knew that he was moving towards it, although
he couldn't see himself in the dream, and he couldn't reach it. The sensation was reminiscent of those other times in dreams when he was trying to punch someone and his fists felt liquid, could achieve no impact. The Chair in the dream haunted him like a throne he aspired to ascend but was afraid to.

When on the third night Cran came, Tam thought his subconscious wasn't a bad judge.

It wasn't just his bulk or the face like a stone mask. It was the aura of dangerous stillness he gave off. His nature was fat on a low heat. It could look bland and still as long as it was left to itself. But introduce any alien substance to it, an unacceptable opinion or attitude, and it flared and seethed and you risked scalding.

The one who risked scalding most became Tam. Cran had discovered he was a Docherty. He had heard of his grandfather's reputation as a street fighter and had obviously decided that the Docherty blood-line was running a bit thin. His contempt for Tam was not expressed directly. It manifested mainly in talking across him until he was silenced. Cran's philosophy, such as it was, was stark and harsh.