‘Some house,’ he gibed, surveying her as if he was estimating her height and weight. How could he, so tall and handsome, come from such a shrivelled thing as this crabbit woman with grey hair, mournful eyes, a flat chest and skinny legs with black cotton stockings? It was another injustice. He should have had a beautiful elegant mother with shapely legs and a bosom like the advert for a shaving soap, not too much and not too little, a mother who would inspire him to write the poetry he knew he could write if only he could get peace and quiet. ‘A janitor’s house in the school playground! That’s a fine house! Living right in the middle of the slum where he worked.’
‘It was a bigger and better house than this,’ she shouted. ‘Who could I bring here, a room and kitchen up a dirty close with a stairhead lavatory, and a single-end on each landing? You never think what a come-down it is for me to have to go out to work and be a cleaner in the very school where your father was the janitor for fifteen year, aye, and his job was jist as important as the headmaster’s I can tell ye. He saw them come and he saw them go, and they’d all have been lost without him. He kept them right. And now I’ve got to be a cleaner there and live in a room and kitchen that looks right on to the four-apartment house I had rent- free in the playground. It just shows you how life treats you.’
‘You’re just after saying we’re lucky to be here,’ he stabbed quickly back, gloating over her cracked temper. ‘Lucky that big fat drip Nancy went to Canada. Ha-Ha! That was a bit of luck all right. If ever a dame got on my nerves it was her with her very coarse veins. A real intellectual topic of conversation she had!’
‘You’ll please me if you speak of your Aunt Nancy with proper respect for your elders,’ she said stiffly, on her dignity as a lady again. ‘If your Aunt Nancy hadn’t got the factor to agree to us getting her house I don’t know where we could have went I’m sure. And just having to flit across the street from the school was a big saving. If we’d had to pay for all our furniture getting took somewhere across the river it would have cost us a lot of money I can tell you. But you never think of that. You’ve a mind above money, like.’
‘You aye come back to money, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You’d think that was all there was in this life, money, the way you talk, you’ve no idea of art and philosophy and – and—’
He was stuck for a moment for another subject, to let her see what a superior mind he had.
‘And poetry and the drama,’ he added quickly, remembering the card above the shelves in the far corner of the library. ‘You’ve never lived. I’ve lived, so I have. I’ve read the great poets, it’s more than you ever done. You, you’ve no idea of culture.’
‘Have you?’ she asked him very coolly, cutting him deep. ‘You couldn’t even pass your qually and you try and kid me about culture. You never read the half of the books you bring in here.’
‘Ach!’ he snarled at her.
‘Another thing,’ she pursued him cruelly, turning from the cracked, mottled sink where the window looked across Bethel Street to the ancient school where her husband had worked. ‘It’s high time you stopped hanging about the backcourt and going across there to the playground every night. If you could just see yourself! Be your age. It looks daft, a big fellow like you playing with wee boys at school.’
‘I’m not playing with them,’ he answered proudly. ‘I’m helping them. They come to me for advice. Cause I’m older and cause I know more than they do. I’m trying to learn them. If I’d had somebody to guide me the way I guide them when I was their age I wouldn’t be where I am today, so I wouldn’t.’
‘A crowd of scabby gangsters,’ his mother muttered. ‘There’s no’ a shop in the street safe from them.’
‘Okay they’ve got a gang,’ he admitted generously. ‘And what’s wrong with having a gang? A gang is only the expression of the primitive need for a community. You read any book on child-psychology, that’ll tell you. People feel they must belong. I mean ordinary people. And these lads aren’t even ordinary. They’re a lot of poor dirty neglected children with nobody to shower love on them.’
‘Shower,’ his mother sniffed, having trouble with her nose again. ‘They’re a shower all right. Shower o’ bastards.’
‘Their parents have no interest in them,’ he went on, making a speech at her, ‘and they’ve no interest in their parents. They were born in the jungle and their whole existence is one fierce struggle to survive. The only law they know is the law of the jungle and they’re beginning to learn its disadvantages. So they come to me and I try to learn them to live according to the law of law and order. They see you’ve got to have someone to appeal to so they come to me. I’m their referee. They rely on me for to see justice done. I’m the lawman. I’m the judge. Cause I stand above it so I can see it. Boys are like Jews, they’re different from the people round about them. And where would the Jews have been if they hadn’t had Moses to give them the Law?’
‘Ach!’ his mother derided him. ‘Playing wi’ a lot o’ weans and ye call yourself Moses!’
‘They’re not weans,’ he shouted. ‘They’re innocent children. And Christ has said unless ye become as little children ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’
‘Oh, it’s Christ now, is it?’ cried his baffled mother. ‘You’d gar anybody grue so you would the way you talk. Moses! Christ!’
She returned to the dishes in the basin in the sink.
At that point in their friendly discussion he banged out of the house, scampered down the three storeys to the close, went into the littered smelly street and walked across the city to the University. He liked passing through the Main Entrance in University Avenue. He felt he was entering the land he should have inherited. He often walked through the University to comfort himself. When he crossed the Arts Quadrangle and approached the Bute Hall he felt happier and lighter. All his grudges dropped from him. He was where he ought to be. If the girl in the library could see him now she would think he was a student all right. A university student, that was the life.
Bach’s music didn’t get over to him, but he was pleased to be sitting there while the choir and orchestra went through it. His attention drifted peacefully. Music always made his mind wander. That was why he liked to go to orchestral concerts. He felt liberated. So while the sopranos got lost in ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’ he plunged contentedly through the jungle of his grievances.
All he wanted was peace, peace and quiet, and he couldn’t get it. He wanted to be free from the need to earn his living so that he could be a poet like Shelley or make documentary films like Peter Scott or be a novelist like Tolstoy or even a television personality. He knew he had other talents too. He had helped to prepare and move the scenery when the Drew Rowan Youth Club put on a pantomime, and he enjoyed being back-stage. He knew he had a good sense of the theatre. He could produce plays, or he could travel round the world with a cinecamera and do a series about strange places and peculiar peoples. There was nothing hard in what David Atten- borough did. Anybody could do it. All you needed was money. Anything was possible if you had the money to give you the leisure to do it. He could be an authority on modern art. Nobody else in Packing and Dispatch had read the amount of stuff he had read on Picasso and Henry Moore. Shelley and Wordsworth had enough money to write poetry without having to work as well. If they had been a janitor’s son like him they wouldn’t have had the chance. If he had the money he could buy a house on some lonely part of the coast in Devon or Cornwall, and it would be peaceful enough there to be a poet. To be a poet you had to see things as children saw them, all fresh and unspoilt, like the smell of apples or the colour of the sky when the sun was setting behind the Campsies in summer or the touch of a cat’s fur or the taste of a glass of milk and a buttered roll. And because he liked to be with kids and listen to them blether so that he could keep roots in the world of his childhood people laughed at him. They said he was soft.
They had said he was soft since the first day he went to school. He blamed it on his name. He hated it for years. Percy was a sloppy name. It was too uncommon in the tenements, too Kelvinside,