Docherty. William McIlvanney
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it in his memory. ‘Ye mind Ah wis sittin’ oan the bankin’ at the side o’ the road. Stringin’ the rabbits. Ah had them roon ma neck.’
‘Barney had been et the dancin’, had ‘e no’?’
‘Aye. Nae moon tae speak o’. Ah gets up an’ says, “Barney. Whit time wid it be?”‘
Tam was starting to smile.
‘He stoapped died. A’ he could see wis the white o’ the scuts. Swingin’ in the daurkness. An’ he’s away.’
‘Oot o’ trap wan. Through hedges an’ fields. They tell me you coulda stertit a ferm wi’ the muck that came aff his troosers.’
‘Wi’ his ain brand o’ manure thrown in, nae doot.’
They had coaxed themselves to laughter, Tam leaning on the wall for support.
‘Your time has come,’ Tam said. That’s whit he said the ghost said tae ‘im.’
Along High Street other families had brought out chairs and were chatting in the mellow sunshine. A well-to-do family – husband, wife and two daughters – were strolling towards where Tam and the others stood. That was a common enough occurrence. Quite a few families from better districts made such a walk a Saturday evening event in summer. It could be very interesting.
On this occasion the man was pointing things out to his wife as they went past. A phrase of his talk drifted towards them – ‘people actually living there’. The girls looked mostly at the ground, blinkered with apprehension. The man’s hand patted Conn’s head lightly as he passed. Looking up, Conn felt his father’s hand fit tightly, like a helmet, over his head.
And his father’s voice cleft the calmness of his play like a lightning-flash.
‘Why don’t ye bring fuckin’ cookies wi’ ye? An’ then ye could throw them tae us!’
Conn’s mother hissed, ‘Tam!’
Immediately Conn had a feeling he would forget but would experience again. It was a completely familiar and secure happening transformed instantly into something foreign and frightening. He saw and heard but couldn’t understand.
The man stopped without looking round.
‘Aye, sur,’ Tam Docherty was saying very quietly. ‘Come oan back, then.’
‘Please, Tam. Please,’ Jenny was whispering.
The woman’s linked arm took her husband on. Jenny’s face was flushed.
‘Is somethin’ wrang, Tam?’ Dougie asked and felt himself contract in the look Tam Docherty gave him.
‘Ye mean tae say ye hivny noticed? Whaur the hell dae you leeve, Dougie?’
Some of the dust of that brief, explosive moment settled on Conn for good.
2
High Street was the capital of Conn’s childhood and boyhood. The rest of Graithnock was just the provinces. High Street, both as a terrain and as a population, was special. Everyone whom circumstances had herded into its hundred-or-so yards had failed in the same way. It was a penal colony for those who had committed poverty, a vice which was usually hereditary.
High Street and its continuations of Soulis Street and Fore Street made a straight line to the Cross at the centre of town. Together, they had at one time been the main street of the town, a residential district for the rich. But when this predominance was taken over by the roughly parallel line of Portland Street and King Street, the older area, like a tract of land gone marshy, had been abandoned to the poor. Among the less impressive flora and fauna that were now to be found in it, there remained the occasional ghostly reminder of a more grandiose past, like a monument among weeds. One of these was the name people gave to one of the buildings in the Foregate, as Fore Street was more commonly called. The building was known as Millerton Close and was said to have been the town house of Lord Millerton, who had a large estate near Graithnock. During Conn’s early years Millerton Close contained at various times in its musty recesses an alcoholic, a family with rickets, and a consumptive mother of six.
In that harsh climate people developed certain characteristics common to them all. Where so little was owned, sharing became a precautionary reflex. The only security they could have was one another. Most things were borrowable, from a copper for the gas to a black suit for funerals.
Wives looked in on one another without ceremony. The men gathered compulsively each night at the street corner, became variously a pitch-and-toss school, a subdued male-voice choir, a parliament without powers. Especially in summer, they would stand long, till the sky had raged and gloomed to ash above their heads. The children, when not at school, were seldom in the house during the day, but could be found indiscriminately deployed among backcourts and doorways and corners of the nearby park, as if they were communal property. The authority of the nearest adult was understood to apply to them all. Conn learned early that when any adult asked him to go an errand, his parents’ authority was backing the request, even in the case of old Mrs Molloy (secretly called ‘chibby heid’ by the boys because of the strange lumps that covered her scalp), who invariably encouraged his compliance with the words: ‘Heh, you wi’ the big heid an’ nothin’ in it.’
Underpinning the apparent anarchy of their social lives and establishing an order was a code of conduct complex enough to baffle the most perceptive outsider yet tacitly understood by even the youngest citizens of High Street from the time that they started to think. One of its first principles was tolerance. Being in a context where circumstances blew up the ordinary trials of life into terrible hazards and seemed to have them arranged with the unexpectedness and ingenuity of a commando assault course for living, people learned to accept the crack-ups it led to. Behind every other trivial occurrence lay a stress-point upon which poverty or despair or a crushing sense of inferiority had played for years. Consequently, frustrations tended to explode in most of them from time to time.
Sometimes men would disintegrate spectacularly, beating a wife unconscious one pellucid summer evening or going on the batter with cheap whisky for a fortnight. Such bouts of failure were not approved of, but they also never earned a permanent contempt. They were too real for that.
High Street was very strong on rights. Though these might not be easily discernible to an outsider, they were very real in the life of the place, formed an invisible network of barriers and rights-of-way. It was morality by reflex to some extent, motivated often by not making the terms of an already difficult life impossible. Yet there was as well behind it a deep if muffled sense of what it meant to be a man, a realisation that there were areas which were only your own, and that if these were violated formidable forces might be invoked.
Adultery, for example, was a rare phenomenon. This was partly because the public nature of private lives and the sheer drudgery of coping with large families legislated against the contrivance of such situations. Overwork is a great provoker of chastity. But it was mainly because such a step took you on to a dark and slippery ledge, and out of earshot of the predictable. Whereas in more polite society such an action might mean the dissection of a private pain in a public place, in High Street, where a divorce court seemed as distant as the court of the Emperor must have seemed from a fortress on the Great Wall, the direction was reversed. The situation became more private, was injected to ferment in one man’s skull. People averted their eyes, awaiting an outcome. The commonest one was what they called with chilling simplicity ‘a kicking’. And they would have found it hard to blame a man who forgot to stop. It was simply that they understood men as bundles of conflicting and frequently immeasurable impulses, usually imperfectly contained by a fraying sense of purpose. Whoever slipped the knot would have to abide the hurricane.
For the rest, where the offence was venial, the violence was formal. Two men would go up a Sunday morning road to a handy field. Shirts off, they would punch the affair to a settlement. But such manual litigation was seldom. Relationships were so well charted through countless small daily contacts and endless conversations that there had evolved an instinctive hierarchy ranging from those with whom most remarks or attitudes were permissible