Flood (4 page)

That night, when Tom finally went to bed, having made sure that Mary had her back to him before he changed into his pyjamas, the whole house felt as though it had gone through a death. The air was full of a choking intensity.

There might have been a coffin on the table in the front room.

As soon as Mary heard the unmistakable creak of Tom's bed and the rustle of the sheets being pulled up to his chin, she turned and sat up.

'Are you really going, Tom?' His hands were confidently behind his head, supporting him on the pillows. He had the look of a person who needed to do no more thinking, the look of a person who would not allow himself to go to sleep for some considerable time.

'It looks like it. Will you miss me?'

'Oh, Tom,' she said, but could find nothing else to say, nothing that would have made any sense. It was a strange, tongue-tied feeling.

Well, that's good,' he said. 'If I'm missed, it'll make trips home all the nicer, won't it?' He chuckled. Mary hurried from her bed and knelt on the cold linoleum at the side of her brother's bed. She was crying softly, the tears dredged up from some last ineffable source. His hands were in her hair, patting her, comforting her. He was struck dumb in a pleasing way. He had always been her big brother, but had never realised just what the bond entailed.

They sat together in silence for a time. Mary's sobbing eased eventually, and a little later Tom thought that he had found some words for his little sister.

'We've all got to make this decision sooner or later, Mary.

You'll have to make it yourself when you decide to leave home and get married or whatever.'

'I'll never leave here,' she said, her eyes searching his for some weak point. Tom shook his head.

'Come on,' he said. 'You're fifteen. You're not a baby any more. You'll want to leave soon enough when you see what it's like outside of school. Suddenly you're not special any more. Your friends have all gone off to become mature adults in boring jobs. You've not got enough brains to get a really good job, one that would take you away from the area. So what's left? The pits are closed. This town is becoming a dump. I'm not going to stay put in a dump. Not me. Maybe I'm not going to make anything of myself in Canada, but I'm not going to make anything of myself here either, so where's the difference?'

'But you've got us!' Mary whispered in anger and frustrated love. Tom was silent for a moment, his eyes forced finally to turn away from those of his fiery sister.

Tes,' he said, 'but what happens when that's not enough?

When that's not enough and I'm too old and weighed down to do anything about it? You won't always be here . . .'

'But I will, Tom, I will.'

'. . . and Mum and Dad haven't got more than ten or twenty years left, have they? Everybody dies, Mary. It's the only fact of life.'

Tou're sick!' she shouted. He shrugged his shoulders.

'Maybe I am,' he said, closing his eyes.

Mary ran to the window and stood there, her blurred eyes staring out on darkness. The night was still. She used to be able to see the winding-wheel at the colliery from this window, but now it had been dismantled. A good home had been found for it in a mining museum in the Lothians.

An old man was shuffling past uneasily below her. He stopped and leaned against the lamp-post, seemed to gasp for breath, then finally forced himself to move off again, his shoes dragging over the pavement. Tom was speaking behind her. He was approaching the window. She did not want him to look out. She turned and went to hug him, and there they stood, in an embrace of silent childishness, until Tom's feet got cold on the linoleum and he persuaded Mary to get back into bed.

It was a strange time, that autumn. Mary's father was drinking quite heavily, though her mother tried to hide the fact from everyone and succeeded only in hiding the truth from herself. Hugh Miller would sit in his chair until the early hours of the morning. Then he would say that he was going for a walk and would not be seen again until late evening, dead drunk usually and shouting along the length of the street about the treachery of the National Coal Board, the dirty tricks, the cruelty of it all. Mary, horrified and in her nightdress, would watch him from her bedroom window.

She would watch her mother, hair falling to her waist in preparation for bed, having to leave the house and manoeuvre the roaring drunk around the lamp-post, which threw a garish orange glow over the proceedings, lending to them the hazy quality of something happening on a screen.

Mary would watch them weave their way into the house, would hear her father retching into the toilet bowl or the sink. Tom would breathe heavily, pretending sleep, his pillow over his head. Mary was sure that he saw it merely as a ploy to stop him from leaving, and this seemed to make him all the more determined.

'What's the use?' her father cried. 'What's the use, eh?

Where's the reason in it? They've shut the pits and they've shut this and they've shut that. What's a man supposed to do? No bloody use to anyone. That's me.' Mary's mother would whisper with patient vehemence at him, and having got him into bed at last, a basin at his side, would look in on Mary and Tom, both of whom would be lying in shade and in heavy silence, a lack of even breathing, which would confirm their mother's worst fears.

In the morning the pattern would be repeated. Mary grew sullen. A lot of things were to blame apart from her father's new-found dependence. Some of it had to do with a large prevailing mood in the town. Teenagers there had been brought up in the Sixties, had been told of the good life to come. Now, the Seventies approaching, they were being shown something else, and were seeing at last that behind every promise lay the bad news. There seemed nothing left to hope for. Everything was slipping further and further away. They talked about nothing else at school. Yes, they discussed jobs and career prospects, but behind it all was the greater knowledge that somehow the decline of the town was pulling them down with it, as if the town and its offspring were a single, inseparable unit.

And as they came to consciousness, so did Mary come into womanhood. She sat in her silent room after school, sometimes toying with homework but more often just staring at the walls and at the posters pinned there, posters of the pop groups who had come to represent the now untenable dream. She cried for no apparent reason. She began to have nightmares, the gist of which would be forgotten on waking. She saw the day near when Tom would be leaving: 6 January 1969. It was so close.

On Christmas morning Mary brushed out her long silver hair for some considerable time. She sat cross-legged on her bed with her mirror wedged in her lap, and watched the waves of static wafting strands around her as if she were sea-blown. A carol service was on the radio. Mary hummed along. She did not want to go downstairs because her father and mother would be there and last night her father had screamed at her mother and had slapped her. Mary had heard it through the bedroom floor. She could not face having to look at either of them or trying to speak to her father. Tom had been away all night at a friend's. He was home now. He was downstairs, where no one was speaking.

The radio was loud in her room so that she would not hear the shouting, should there be any. This was the last Christmas before Tom left for Canada. She had looked at Canada in an atlas at school. It was huge, colossal really, and the towns and cities had good names. Some people there spoke French, but Tom could not. Why was he going to Canada when he could not speak French? It was far too late to put the point to him, so Mary brushed her hair and hummed carols instead.

Her mother shouted up the stairwell, her voice neutral.

Lunch was ready. Mary felt as if she had just eaten a plateful of toast, yet she had to go down. There was no excuse.

She walked downstairs into silence. Her presents were the only ones left beneath the tree. Her father smoked in his chair. Tom, lying across the settee, was reading a book. Her mother could be heard singing softly in the kitchen. The large dining table had been ornately set. Mary drew out one of the chairs and sat down. There were six presents beneath the tree. There would be two from her mother and father, one from Tom, and three from her two aunts and one uncle.

Her grandparents had died in the war. A whole generation had been erased.

Her mother brought in a steaming tureen of soup. 'Here we are then,' she said, and Mary thought that the smile on her bruised face was the saddest thing she had ever had to bear.

On Boxing Day, Mary's mother went to visit her sister in Leven, taking an overnight bag with her. Mary feigned illness and would not be persuaded to go. Tom had arranged to meet with some friends, as had Mary's father, so her mother left the house alone. The door clicked behind her.

Mary did not expect to see her again. She saw it as her final leaving, and she did not blame her. When her mother returned the very next afternoon, no one but Mary was surprised.

But by then she was too distraught to be glad. Two months later, the family had their first letter from Tom in Canada, and Mary told her mother that she thought she was pregnant.

'Please don't tell Dad,' she said through her tears. Her mother remained silent for a long time.

'I'm not going to ask who it was,' she said eventually. 'Just answer me this: can he marry you?' Mary screwed up her eyes and shook her head. Her mother sat examining her own hands. It was not an easy life. First her husband had taken to drink, then she had to watch her only son leave for a distant country, and now this. Her son and her daughter.

She knew immediately when it had happened. Boxing Day.

The whole house had been changed somehow when she had walked into it on the afternoon following. She should have guessed. People had always said that they were very close, even for brother and sister. Unnaturally close. She should have known. She stroked her daughter's silvery dark hair and contemplated telling her husband the news. Would he guess what she had deduced?

As it turned out, Mary's father said nothing, just drifted further into his own numbed world where nothing, it seemed, could hurt him. Mary's mother was not surprised by this. She had always seen herself as the stronger of the two.

He often called her 'the battler' (in the earlier years of their marriage at least) and she supposed it was true enough.

Resilience, she had found, was needed in plenty. She went to church regularly, and knew that every trial was something more than it seemed - a higher test and a kind of judgement.

She prayed to God at her bedside on the evening after she had told her husband the bitter news, and she made him get down on his knees too.

This needs all our strength, Hugh,' she said, but his words were slurred and he collapsed his head on to the bed after a few moments and wept himself silently to sleep.

Mary's mother raised her own head towards heaven and prayed with even more intensity. Strength was needed, Lord, strength was needed.

'But our reserves are not limitless, Lord. Help us in our need. Help Mary to get over all of this. She is a young girl.

Forgive her if you can. Bless my son and my husband, Lord.

Both are good men at heart. And dear Lord God, please let the baby die at birth. I beseech thee, let the baby die. Amen.'

If the unthinkable had happened, then for Mary's mother the worst had yet to come. For some time her husband had been friendly with George Patterson, a bachelor of forty who owned the town's dusty and outdated sweet shop. They often went further afield in their drinking bouts, travelling to Lochgelly or Kirkcaldy for an evening's entertainment and having to walk the sobering miles home after missing the last bus. In early April, with the town already knowing, as it inevitably would, that Mary was pregnant, and her mother stressing the need for her still to sit her exams, Hugh Miller was walking home with his friehd George Patterson.

It was midnight, and enshrouded in a light mist the two men were unevenly trudging the grass verge towards Carsden. They had spent the evening in Kirkcaldy, and had gone down to the promenade after the pubs had closed in order to sniff the sea air. Hugh had sat on the sea-wall and had told George about the many occasions when he had walked with his children along the sands and bought them ices in the now defunct cafe. Having told his story, and having missed the last bus, they had begun to walk out of town along the main road. They tried hitch-hiking, but were too drunk for anyone to have wished to stop for them, and both knew it. By midnight they were halfway between the two towns. They had become separated to the sight by the mist, but kept up a shouted conversation, the substance of which was lost to the wind and the bitter cold. A car came towards them from Kirkcaldy. Its lights caught George Patterson, and it slowed a little. He jumped from the road on to the verge and waved the car past. It was picking up speed again when George heard Hugh say something out loud and then there was a sickeningly dull and heavy thud. The car stopped. George Patterson could see its red taillights through the mist and ran towards them. At the side of the road lay his friend.

Tor Christ's sake,' the driver was saying as he stood above the body in apparent horror. 'I mean, he just jumped out of nowhere. For Christ's sake.'

'Hugh, Hugh man, are you all right?' Patterson's breath was heavy as he crouched unsteadily beside his friend.

Mary's father was able to raise his head a few inches from the frozen ground.

'I loved her, though, George,' he murmured, and then coughed a little and was dead.

For Mary's mother it was almost the end. The girl herself seemed almost too numbed by what had already occurred to be able to take in this latest tragedy, and her mother knew that Mary needed her strength. Indeed, it was that thought alone - that Mary needed her mother's strength - which kept Mrs Miller from plunging into madness and hysteria.

Instead she offered up increasingly bitter prayers to her Lord God and would receive mourners, many of whom were more interested in the condition of the daughter, with a smile like a bar of iron. Mother and daughter came closer and closer together during the arrangements for the funeral, the aftermath of the burial and the approaching birth. Tom could not be contacted, having apparently gone to the far north with a lumber squad, but Mrs Miller hoped that he would not come home in any case; not, at least, until the baby was born. She had forsaken her needlework altogether, but would still make up one of her famed herbal remedies whenever anyone asked her to. Fewer and fewer people did.