‘Naw. That’s richt. Then we could all’ve starved in a state o’ grace.’
‘Where d’ye get yer thochts? Yer blasphemous thochts.’
They grow in pits. Ye can howk them oot wi’ the coal.’
‘Nae wonder ye’ve had trouble gettin’ jobs. The way ye talk. Ye’ve never known yer place.’
‘Ah’ve still tae find it. In the meantime, ma place is wherever Ah happen tae be.’
‘Look roon ye! Ye’ve a hoose an’ a family an’ a guid enough joab. Ye don’t know hoo lucky ye are. When Ah came over here
‘Ah ken, Ah ken. Ye chapped the door o’ Kerr the builder. An’ he let ye sleep in a shed fur a fortnicht. An’ ye worked two weeks fur jist the price o’ yer meals. Did he chain ye up at nichts, feyther?’
‘Tam!’ Jenny’s voice as she turned from her washing surprised them both, the shock it expressed providing an objective measurement of the distance between them.
Tam stood up and when he spoke it was an indirect plea to his father for a truce.
‘Luk, feyther. We’ve had a’ this afore. Ah ken ye had it rough. An’ Ah’m sorry. So there it is. But that’s nae excuse fur kiddin’ oan this is comfort. It’s mebbe better, but it’s no’ guid.’
‘Ye’re too taken up wi’ the body. Instead o’ the soul.’
‘So are a few folk, feyther. Ah don’t see mony priests wi’ malnutrition.’
‘Whit aboot the wee fella? He’s got a soul too, ye know.’
‘Then let Goad fin’ it.’
Old Conn retracted from him, as if not sure how closely God could localise his thunderbolts. He shook his head in disbelief. Tam put his white silk scarf round his neck, collected his jacket and cap, wanting to avoid further abrasion.
‘Ah’m awa doon tae the corner, Jen. Ah’ll no’ be long. Dae ye want tae hing oan, feyther? Or wull Ah walk ye doon?’
His father said nothing. He stared at the fire, Jetting Tam and Jenny look at each other across a silence. His eyes looked watery in the firelight. Having sounded the depth of his bafflement, he looked at Jenny, but spoke at Tam.
‘Ye never learned talk like that fae oor family,’ he said softly, deliberately.
Tam’s voice hardly ruffled the stillness: ‘Whit does that mean?’
‘It’s a’ richt, Tam,’ Jenny said quietly. ‘Forget it.’
‘Whit does that mean?’ Tam shouted.
The old man looked back at the fire.
‘Ah mean whit Ah mean,’ he said.
‘Naw!’ Tam was bending over him. That’s the last thing you mean. You mean whit Father Rankin tells ye tae mean. See that.’ He pointed at Conn’s head. There’s nothin’ in there that belongs tae you. They confiscated yer bloody brains at birth. An’ stuffed their stinkin’ catechism in their place. Auld man. Whit gi’es you the richt tae think bad o’ ma wife? Because she’s Protestant. Damn yer stupidity! Look!’ Old Conn’s right hand was in his jacket pocket, and Tam yanked roughly at his arm until the hand emerged, the rosary beads he held in it spilling out roughly, like entrails. Tam took them from him. ‘Bloody toays! Ye’re still playin’ wi’ yer bloody toays!’
Tam and his father stared helplessly at each other across the rosary as if it was a frontier. On the one side was Old Conn’s unassailable acceptance of his life. On the other lay Tam’s personal experience, a wilderness of raw ideas and stunted dreams, a desperate landscape which this instant set before him like a map. He read in it his own despair, understood it, not rationally, but more deeply than that, because he had learned it in his blood. He saw the bleak terrain of his own life stretching before him without stint. The one oasis was his family. The rest was work that never blossomed into fulfilment, thought that was never irrigated with meaning. The absence of certitude made a moor of the future, and inarticulacy lay over everything like a blight. He felt a grotesqueness in his efforts to impose himself on the forces he was up against, the pettiness of his fights with pit managers, the ludicrousness of a family that had two religions. He had perceptions that enabled him to feel the pain, but not the words to make it work for him. He could only endure.
In this moment the rosary seemed to divide him from a mysterious contentment, perhaps brought over by his father from the rural Ireland he had never seen, born as he had been among the factories and workshops of Graithnock. Beyond that line was a safe place inhabited by his father. But it wasn’t his, and he couldn’t live there honestly. He realised with sudden hurt that the volume of his voice hadn’t meant anger or conviction, but simply uncertainty. Gently he gave back the rosary, and it was as if he was returning to his father every gift which Old Conn had ever given him.
‘Ach, feyther,’ he said. His hand touched his father’s shoulder awkwardly. ‘It’s a’ wan. It disny maitter.’
He cleared his throat and made an attempt to smile at Jenny. Fumbling for a formula, he said to his father, ‘Hoo’s ma mither keepin’ onywey?’ And then as their alienation from each other swallowed up the question – ‘My Christ!’
He turned at once and was going out when Kathleen brought Conn back in, informing her mother, ‘Mick an’ Angus are jist comin’, mammy.’
Their father bumped against them awkwardly. And for a second they were all floundering strangely in the gloom. Then Tam touched Conn’s head in his favourite gesture of affection, and went out, leaving on Conn’s scalp a message he couldn’t understand and which his father couldn’t express.
4
Tam didn’t go immediately to the corner that night. Keeping to the opposite side of the street, he cut off down the Twelve Steps, a dark alley, the steepness of which was periodically eased by short clusters of steps that occurred like locks in a canal. It led down to the riverside. He sat on the dyke and watched the water.
He was waiting for what had happened in the house to catch up with him. What he had said to his father had been not so much a deliberate expression of his thoughts as a stumbling discovery of them, as much a revelation to himself as it was to anybody else. The confrontation had brought from him secrets he hadn’t openly acknowledged in his own mind, attitudes he hadn’t consciously formulated, but which had become a part of him because of the climate of his life, contracted like a virus from the slow talk of his friends, embedded like the pellets of black powder from the pit-blasts in his face. Now he had declared these attitudes in words and he had to measure himself against them.
The step of doing so wasn’t an easy one to take. His mother and father had done their work well. Woven into the whole texture of his boyhood were formative memories of the crucifix on the wall, family pilgrimages to nine o’clock Mass, the catechism, priests whose casual opinions became proverbial wisdom for his parents. His three sisters had made good marriages. The four brothers he would have had if they had lived had all been baptised Catholic. He had always been told to pray for them. Now it seemed like a profanation of their infant corpses to abandon the faith which had buried them.
When he had married Jenny, it was simply because he had wanted to marry her, and the feeling was hot enough to make fuel of anything that got in its way. He had felt no conscious antagonism towards the Church. And since their marriage Jenny had never tried to influence him. When Kathleen and Mick went to the Catholic school, she accepted it. When Angus and Conn attended High Street school, it was his own decision, one made brusquely, as if he didn’t want to consider its implications. ‘It’s nearer’ was all he said.
Now at least one implication of that decision was forming slowly in his mind: perhaps he wasn’t a Catholic. He felt cold without the word. It had happed his thoughts as long as he could remember. Whatever misery, anger, bitterness, despair had come to him, it had still been vaguely containable in the folds of that loose word, to be thawed