The Kiln (34 page)

What intrigues him now, what holds him there - listening in the lobby with open-mouthed concentration - is the significance of the choice, not just for him. He realises, awesomely, that he is part of the quarrel that is the shared experience of his parents.

‘Yer own father would have wanted him to go,’ his mother says. ‘He wanted you to go on at school.’

The silence is a man swallowing the bitter taste of his own past. Tam suddenly feels great compassion for his father. He remembers with sudden poignancy a moment he once shared with him. He thinks about himself there.

‘
THE COLLEGE
,’ his father says. ‘You could go there.’

It is bright sunlight. His father is sitting on the step at the back door. He is dressed in old trousers, collarless shirt. Tam is standing maybe six feet away from him, between two of the clothes-poles on the back green. The clothes-poles are goalposts, for Tam is practising to be a goalkeeper. He has decided that he has discovered what he is going to be when he grows up. He will keep goal for Scotland's football team. He is nine.

He has just solemnly informed his father of his final decision about his future and the training that will lead to the fulfilment of the ambition has already begun. His father has unearthed the size-five leather stuffed with paper, which has recently replaced the paper balls bound with string Tam has been using for years to play football with him in the house. His father has been throwing the ball to Tam, varying the angles cunningly to test his reflexes. Tam has been diving in all directions with outrageous abandon, no matter how close the thrown ball comes to him.

He is sweating heavily since, in spite of the heat, he is wearing his yellow polo-necked sweater knitted by his Auntie Bella, for that is what goalkeepers wear. His short trousers are standing in for football pants. His black sandshoes give him a supernatural agility. His actions are compulsive as a dance to music no one
else can hear. Indians did rain dances. His is a dance to the future, a series of twists and turns and mysterious acrobatic leaps in his improvised costume which will oblige to happen what he wants to happen. Self-absorbed as a dervish, he spins in the sunshine, whirling beyond Dawson Street. The back green becomes Hampden Park. The random noises of the day become the roar of the crowd. Somewhere in a certain future a radio commentator's voice is talking with urgent reverence.

‘And Docherty makes another amazing save . . . I can't believe this . . . The crowd is going wild . . . Just listen to them . . . And again . . . And again . . . Now he is diving to the left . . . This is the most amazing goalkeeper I have ever seen . . .’

‘Ye don't fancy being a centre forward?’ his father is saying. ‘They score the goals.’

Tam rejects the idea with an impatient shake of the head. It isn't just that he is too fiercely concentrated on the task of saving Scotland to deviate into speech. It is that one wrong ingredient may spoil the charm. What you wish for you must wish for utterly. They score the goals? ‘Not against this amazing young goalkeeper, Docherty, they don't,’ the commentator says.

‘The college,’ his father talks on while he patiently throws the ball to Tam and receives it back from him in a rhythm that becomes hypnotic, freezing a casual episode inexplicably into a shining moment that will stay with him.

NOW STANDING IN THE LOBBY ILLUMINED BY ANOTHER DAY
, he feels the moment still turn dazzlingly in his mind, faceted and polished by memory, a diamond hewn from sunlight, an unbreakable image in which both of them are held, the man and the boy inextricably together.

‘Ah made a choice,’ his father says in the living-room, ‘an’ because of it Ah'm who Ah am. Ah'm sorry if Ah've disappointed ye. Maybe ye should've married an office worker. Or an insurance man. Would ye like me to go to night school?'

Tam hears the cofdness of the distance that is between his parents. The living-room might as well be the Antarctic Ocean
and them floating past on separate ice-floes. In this small house where they have all been living in such close proximity there has been such loneliness. How can such a small space encompass such isolation?

He would like to interrupt his parents and tell them that their positions have a false finality. For that day, playing with the ball, his father had spoken of university as if it were the promised land. He had made Tam see a wonderful place of great learning and fascinating conversations and sports. Out of his own ignorance of such places, he had created a blueprint for an ideal college. Where had that vision come from? Perhaps, it now seems to Tam, his father was not so much talking to him as dreaming an alternative life for himself. And in that dream his son had seen the possibility of his own life. It was his father who had first made Tam think, so long ago, of going to university.

Why had he done that? Why does he speak against it now? Was he then, in a moment of generous self-abnegation, inviting his son to conspire against him? I won't always be able to encourage such hope in you. Take this brief gift of openness and use it against me when you must. For I will close and it will be up to you to subvert my hopelessness with the hope I am giving you now.

Hearing his father try to close his future. Tam feels not the meanness of the present but the generosity of the past when his father sat that day dreaming, clumsily, like Plato on a step. In his personal hopelessness was multiplied the kindness of his giving of hope to Tam, a hope he could never share in. Tam sees the essence of his relationship with his father in that day.

‘Conn,’ his mother says in the living-room. ‘Ye're as good a man as Ah know. Ah'm not askin’ ye tae be different. But ye're less than ye can be. An' Ah am, too. Maybe that's what happens tae everybody. But we don't need deliberately tae arrange for it to happen to our weans.'

Tam remembers coming home from the dancing once to find his mother, the housework done, sitting by the fire reading the Rubaiyat. It wasn't the likeliest phenomenon where they came from. He is suddenly flooded with an awareness of the horizons his mother can still see, no matter how enclosed her circumstances. It seems to him a remarkable achievement. At the same time he understands his father's determined inhabiting
of where he is. He feels love for both of them. The feeling makes him all the more certain that he must no longer be involved with Maddie.

HE STOOD IN FRONT OF MADDIE'S HOUSE
. It wasn't her house now.

They had painted the woodwork of the windows yellow. A green Rover stood in the driveway. A young woman came out of the house in a blue sweater and black ski-pants. She was retrieving what looked like a small, leather weekend bag from the boot. She was attractive but not as attractive as her self-regarding manner suggested and not as attractive as Maddie. Maybe if she had been Garbo, she might just have got away with it. The haughtiness of her head suggested she was balancing something there. Maybe it was her bank account. With her hand on the raised boot, about to close it, she stared at the strange man standing across the street. She stared for maybe twenty seconds. She wanted him to know that she was staring. She closed the boot with vehemence and went back inside.

Don't phone the police, he thought. He was just a ghost passing through her life as she was a ghost passing through his. She wasn't to know that she was living in an important part of his past and him a compulsive revenant.

He hadn't intended to come here. When Michael's funeral was over he had gone back to his mother's with Marion and Allison and some people and they had talked for a while and he had left them there and come out for a walk. The walk had led him here without his being aware of it until the house ambushed him.

But he couldn't cross the street and go in as he had on that day of mental turmoil. What was it he really thought he was doing then? What had been his true intention? He would never know. He was returning the book, of course. But how necessary was that? She had invited him back anyway. And he also had in his inside pocket the poem he had written for her the day before. It wasn't exactly a demand that they part. He hated what he had done and he wanted not to do it again. He loved what he had done
and he had an overwhelming desire to do it again. His memory, like a zoom lens, followed his past self across the road and up the driveway towards the door which, it had seemed to him, would open on to a bewildering confusion of possibilities.

‘
HHHHMMMMMMM
,’ she says. She has told him he must lie absolutely still, do nothing, say nothing. He must leave everything to her.

‘Nice cock.’

You can
say
words like that? And the building doesn't fall about your ears? You don't have to lock them away in some dark drawer and bring them out only when you're alone at night?

She is saying them to
him.
The ectoplasmic woman whose features have always been blurred and shifting, for whom he has been writing and rewriting the script for years, trying to get it excitingly right, is here, solid with flesh. The hair that has graduated from blonde to brown to red to blonde has become vividly black, veined subtly with silver, experiential treasure. The wild and tumbling mass of darkness is more exciting than anything his imagination has ever conjured up.

The eyes that have been blue and brown and green are staring at him and they are olive now with weird shards of light in them that seem to find passing reflections of many other colours. Tunnelled with lust, they draw him into their disorientating dark.

The flesh is so sheer in close-up. The brown hollows of her slightly hunched shoulders seem as distant as valleys. The mole on her hanging right breast is monumental. The raised curve of her arse is part of a continent of body he feels he could spend the rest of his life exploring. He feels as if maybe he's seeing for the first time in his life. His eyes have found a true perspective. She defines his horizons.

And the mouth - curling with delicious wickedness, sometimes smiling abstractedly as if sharing a secret with another darker self, sometimes open and poised as if waiting for instructions only some distant part of her can hear, its lips writhing sensuously - ferociously soft, those muscular petals. And what it says.

‘Nice cock.’

Her stiffened protruding tongue traces the length of it from where it is rooted in the shrub of hair to the pink, cleft tip of it.

‘Sweet cock,’ she says

She swings her breasts against it, letting their weight push it sideways until she raises herself and it springs erect again. She takes it gently in her hand.

‘Look,’ she says. ‘You've finally come out to meet me.’

She looks up at him with savage gentleness.

‘So this is who you are, shy boy. Pleased to meet you.’

As she bends again, her hair falls, obscuring everything but itself.

‘Thomas,’ she murmurs.

Then she flicks her hair into a new chaos through which her watching eyes look strangely disembodied, dryad in a dark wood.

‘John Thomas.’

Her amusement is eerie, like laughter in a far room.

‘John Thomas! You've read Lawrence?’

The name jars him the way an alarm clock would. There's another world besides the one he is in? Lawrence? Who the hell is that? Lawrence Sterne? He's heard of him. Is she so familiar with his stuff, she calls him by his first name? Lawrence of Arabia? A small and boring brain cell somewhere continues to concentrate on the problem, like some workaholic still at his desk while the office party is going full swing downstairs. D.H. Lawrence. By the time the answer arrives, there is no one there to receive it. He's glad he doesn't have to say no, he hasn't read him, except for
The Man Who Died.

She is licking him again without taking her eyes off his face. Is she checking his expression? The way he feels, he can't imagine that he has one. His features appear to be floating on his face. He must look like anybody, or nobody.

‘You look like Billy Budd,’ she says.

What is this? The Graithnock Literary Appreciation Society's sexual outing? This at least is a reference he knows, the only book of Melville's he has read. It's lucky she didn't compare him to
Moby Dick.
The only thing he knows about that book is
that the title sounds like a social disease. Billy Budd. Angelic. Beatific. (That's a good word.) That must be what she means. Well, given the right conditions, who can't look beatific?

THAT TIME WITH MADDIE
, he would think, was probably when his adolescence ended. That afternoon was a crash course in growing up. Summertime was officially over. He learned that intensity of feeling doesn't automatically generate itself in the other and that making love doesn't necessarily mean making soul-mates. This surprised and saddened him.

His initial purpose of renouncing his feeling for Maddie had evaporated within seconds of entering the house. She kissed him at the door and led him to the bedroom. After two hours of making love in ways that had been unimaginable even to someone as imaginatively preoccupied with the subject as he was, he knew that they must spend the rest of their lives together. He explained this to her as they were drinking wine again at the yew table.

Smiling, she explained that she was married.

He understood that but they would tell Eddie together.

That was hardly necessary.

There couldn't be any way to keep it from him.

They wouldn't have to.

He didn't understand.

Eddie knew already.

He didn't understand.

She had spoken to him on the phone.

The muffled nature of that conversation had always haunted him, like attempts to communicate from different planets. And when the line finally cleared, the realisation was suddenly deafening. He sat with his love poem in his pocket and understood that this was something Maddie had done often enough before and would do often enough again. It was something Eddie agreed to. Strange rules they played by in the adult world.

His departure was not too fast, at least not as fast as he would
have wanted it to be. At the door she had kissed him lightly on the cheek and her lips felt searing, as if they might burn that place and leave it for ever numb. She told him to keep the book as a memento of her but he couldn't imagine that he would.