But even his father’s strange lack of satisfaction couldn’t curb Conn’s delight. The giant who came to their door had walked away an ordinary man. The street resumed its own identity, became again simply a good place for playing in. Conn carefully lifted the discarded butt of his father’s cigarette. It was damp, and spilling shag. He held it gallously between his thumb and the middle and index fingers, and walked around impressively, exhaling manly clouds of air. He felt both security and excitement. It was a stimulating mixture, a boyish version of a sensation quite a few adults had known. If you were a friend of Tam Docherty, his proximity could be exciting. It was like being friends with Mount Etna. The lava never touched you.
That night Conn had something to tell Mick and Angus. It gave him importance. They listened carefully, asking him a lot of questions, and where he didn’t have an answer, he made one up. It was one of the first things he had hoarded up to share with them which wasn’t diminished by their reactions. He felt as if that one incident had bestowed a status on him.
He never fully lost it again. If not yet the equal of either of his brothers, he was at least an initiated member of the secret lives they led in the darkness of the bedroom, someone with a separate identity. The separateness thrilled him, but it was a pleasure which had to be paid for. There came a phase when he lay awake at nights, drowning in waking dreams, while his brothers slept. He lost himself down strange thoughts, stared for minutes into frightening and bottomless possibilities, got himself trapped within incomprehensible fears where he wrestled for release in a sweating panic.
One night, so long after he had started to sleep in this room that he had forgotten he had once slept somewhere else, he suddenly remembered the box-bed beside his parents’. Mick and Angus were asleep, Mick restless and making strange breathing sounds like a language Conn didn’t understand. Conn had been poised for more than an hour on the edge of terror. The room welled with a darkness that lived. Desperate with loneliness, Conn thought of the box-bed, the safety of having his mother and father. He wanted to be there.
Rising, he felt his way out of the room. The coldness of the floor made marble of his feet. He stepped stiffly around Kathleen’s bed and saw the fire red below the dampened dross, seeing it not as a fire, something with edges and form, but just as a redness, an inflammation on the dark. Its reassurance weakened him. Wanting to cry and luxuriating in his security, he wondered whether he should just climb into his old bed and be found there in the morning, or should waken his mother and have her voice to comfort him. He had started to move into the room when a strange sound halted him. He realised at last where it came from: his mother and father’s bed. But they weren’t in it. It was voices which weren’t voices, noises only, eerie, involved secretly with each other. He looked towards the darkness of the set-in bed, seeing it like a cave. Sounds soughed in it, a strange, underground sea whose murmurings frightened him.
Standing alone there, he was a stranger among strangers. He could hear the breathing of his brothers and his sister, whispers in the darkness, strange sounds like deformed laughter from whoever lay in his parents’ bed. A train clanked and snuffled somewhere, weird as a dragon. What was happening?
Cuddling his own dread to him like a doll, he went back. He lay beside Angus and a thousand miles from anyone, rigidly nursing himself to sleep, and weathered the long night like a fever.
8
Strange demons haunted the edges of their small lives – periodically exorcised in print. News from chaos. For philosopher, astrologer and shaman – the papers.
To Jenny it was all merely baffling and depressing. She sensed portents and dangers to them all moving clumsily behind the words, trying to break out. She wondered what it could possibly mean to her mother and father that they should make the paper the highlight of their day.
Every evening, Angus would come down for half-an-hour or so to his Granny’s single-end in the Pawn Loan just a few doors down from his own house, and read the paper to them. Granny Wilson could read, though her husband wasn’t too good at it (‘Ah only went tae the schil when they caught me,’ he used to say), but her eyesight was failing, and anyway, Jenny suspected, she liked the excuse for seeing at least one of her grandchildren for some part of every day. Before Angus did it, it had been Mick who read to them.
They made a ceremony of it. The reader sat in front of the fire, on the footstool. On one side sat Mairtin, smoking; on the other, hands folded on her pinny, Jean (‘Jean Kathleen’, she would tartly inform those who wondered why her granddaughter hadn’t been called for her). Custom had assigned them distinct roles. All news relating to politics and international affairs must await the seal of Mairtin’s attitude. Taking deep puffs of worldly wisdom, he would send out his dicta to Jean like smoke-signals. ‘That Churchill’s no’ a freen’ o’ the workin’ man.’ ‘Turkish swine!’ The human-interest stories were Jean’s province. She sighed readily for others, appended proverbs to her pity, descanted on the ubiquity of misfortune.
Perhaps that was wisdom – learning to play again like children among the chaos. But Jenny didn’t have that capacity. She was too aware of how their lives were overhung with threats they couldn’t control. It didn’t occur to her directly in terms of what one nation might do to another, of international crises. It came ciphered into small things – prices, the mutterings of the men at the corner, Tam’s growing desperation. She sensed that the small pressures they felt, the twinges that affected every day, related to something bigger, the way that tiredness can mean consumption. She didn’t begin to understand it. She only knew that somehow something was wrong.
To that extent she felt older than her parents. They had a simplicity of response to what was going on around them which she envied. God knew they had endured enough themselves. Their lives had been spent among the kind of hardship that didn’t exactly nurture naïveté. But perhaps they had lived so long with the imminence of dire happenings that for them it was house-trained.
They had learned to leave the bigger things to those who understood them. Unlike Jenny, they weren’t fearful of the incomprehensible equations of chance that tried to resolve themselves around their lives. Jenny remembered how when King Edward died, the photograph of him which her mother kept up on the wall had been reverentially taken down and shortly replaced by the face of King George V. That was how much it all meant to them. An old bearded face melting into a younger bearded face. The numerals behind the names changing according to some ancient, inscrutable law, like a mystic calendar that measures aeons. When one guardian angel left, another took his place, staring down on them while the children read out the confusions of the times, his oracular mouth buried in his beard, his steady eyes absorbing the mystery of it all, giving it meaning. Jenny preferred simply not to hear the news, as if ignorance of the possibilities paralysed their realisation.
But tonight, being Thursday, wasn’t so bad. This was the night of the week Jenny chose to come down herself for an hour or two. It was on Thursdays that her mother sent Angus to Dunsmuir’s shop for The Dundee - a weekly paper of addictive sentimentality. In the world it depicted there were no major issues and no doubts. People were ‘bodies’, anger was ‘Goodness Gracious!’, consternation was ‘Help ma Boab!’, and events were what happened when the cat got lost. Bought compulsively by many families in the West of Scotland every week, its pages were a triumph of placative ignorance. It was the highlight of the week for Mairtin and Jean.
Listening to Angus read from it now, Jenny noted for the umpteenth time that he spoke as if he was repeating a message-line for the Co-operative stores. He was fed up with the whole thing. It had been growing in him for some time. She suspected that the only reason he hadn’t openly rebelled against having to do it before now was the shilling that came at the end of it. She worried about Angus. She worried about all of them, but Angus was already forcing her vague, all-enveloping mother’s concern into a particular shape.
He was too hard, too much himself so soon. There was nothing frightened him, or at least nothing that would make him admit he was frightened. Not that that was bad. But just as fear couldn’t be detected in him, so there wasn’t much he would offer in the way of any uncertain