The Illuminations (21 page)

‘It’s a game, Mum. A great game. We only believed in it for as long as it lasted. I love my country for its hills and its inventions, not for its sense of injury, not for its sentimental dream that’s there nobody like us. I’ve been out in the world and I can tell you they’re all bloody like us: desperate and tired and fighting for a way into the modern world. I don’t know what convinced you that building walls would make you better inside.’

‘You’re on the wrong page. It’s changed. This country has a flag!’

‘Dump the flags and the drums and the pipes. They’re for the museum. Like all the junk of all the nations.’

‘Those countries you’ve fought in want to kill us. Those people hate civilisation.’

‘Oh, Mum. Stop reading the
Daily Mail
. The band of people who want to kill us are just psychopaths and criminals. They won’t last. And they’ve never even heard of Scotland. Jesus, those
people couldn’t point to their own country on a map.’

‘But you can.’ She went on to tell him he was rootless and cynical. It was a nice conversation, hopeless, going nowhere, but full of the possibilities they each denied. They came alive arguing with each other and so did the country.

‘I might be rootless,’ he said, ‘but I’m not cynical. I love improvement, but I can tell you it doesn’t often arrive in a tank.’

‘Well, remember where you come from,’ she said, ‘if you care for improvement. That’s what we do up here. That’s what we’ve been doing for years now.’

‘Don’t rest on your laurels.’

‘You come from here, Luke.’

‘Do I? I come from here? A person might come from lots of places at the same time and a young person’s sense of humanity won’t confine itself to Dundee.’

‘Oh, Luke!’

‘Don’t Oh-Luke me. Those people in Afghanistan are poorer than you could ever imagine, and they can’t read the books containing the words that they’re willing to die for. But the biggest armies in the world can’t stop them imagining. That’s the truth. They want their tribes and they want their enemies. And so do we.’

‘Oh my,’ she said. ‘Some nations are decent, Luke, and if they want to spread that to backward places then it’s worth it.’

‘Decency?’ Luke said. ‘Do you know why I’ve been drummed out of the army, Mother? Do you want to know exactly? Because my group went into a village where there was a wedding. A small village. People preparing food and playing games and looking after goats. And we were led into a trap but we massacred the whole fucken lot of them. We sprayed them with bullets. We
weren’t even supposed to be there. It wasn’t part of the mission. But we killed them all. Some of those boys were no more than thirteen or fourteen.’

‘I’m sure you—’

‘Don’t be sure, Mum. Don’t be. I was out of my fucken head.’

‘Don’t swear, son.’

‘It was a slaughter in broad daylight. We were smoking spliffs. We were listening to heavy metal. Scots boys. Irish boys and others. All from proud nations. All from freedom-loving nations with statues to philosophers. And then we went into this village …’

‘Son.’

‘No. It was chaos. You want decadence? You want rootlessness? Come to Bad Kichan. I could’ve fired bullets into every building. Into the lady in the wedding dress and the old men and the animals, too. All of them. Just blood. Just the enemy. I didn’t know if I was firing for decency or just gaming. It wasn’t real to me and it’s not real to anybody. So. That’s what I’ve been doing on my holidays, Alice.’

‘Good Lord.’

‘Don’t talk to me about proud nations. That was me. Spreading decency to the world because we have so much to spare.’

‘Oh my.’

‘I’ll never put a uniform on again.’

‘No.’

‘I shamed it and it shamed me.’

Alice was remembering how Sean was the same. He started off believing in all sorts of things for Ireland and by the end he thought the players were part of the same rabble. Maybe it was just hard for soldiers to keep faith. But if Gordon was here he
would put Luke straight on a few things. Nationalism was the way to live in a small country. England had been in charge for long enough and look at the mess they’d made.

‘One of our own boys got killed,’ Luke said. ‘A boy from Dalgarnock. Aged twenty-one.’

‘I know. We saw it on the news.’

Alice slowly shook her head and eventually the mussels came and she ordered more wine. She dipped a piece of bread in the bowl, tasting garlic and herb butter. Being in the Rogano made Alice feel part of something elegant. Gordon might bring her here for St Andrew’s Night and he knew the chef from the markets and was trying to tie them in to an online shop. Luke went outside and when he came back she saw something weary in his handsome face. For the first time, she saw how he might look when he was old. It was a shock, really, because she had never seen his father old. Sean was twenty-six. ‘You still at the smoking?’ she said.

‘I’ll shake it,’ he said. ‘I always start again during a tour. Just being with the boys. They all smoke.’

Alice didn’t know why she needed courage to pat his hand. ‘They said on the news it was drugs. They said the soldiers were smoking drugs.’

‘It catches on. I mean, the boredom. And the Afghans smoke it all day and all night. The boys are like nineteen.’

‘But the major, he wasn’t nineteen, was he? And the newspapers say he was worse than any of them.’ Luke knew there had been stuff in the papers but a public hearing was unlikely.

‘Mum. Just leave it.’

But leaving it just wasn’t Alice. Luke could hear the vague, distant pleasure in her voice as she said the things he didn’t want
to hear. ‘But you’d think a man that age – I mean, practically my age – would know better than to smoke that stuff and then go into a place …’

‘Mum.’

‘… taking boys who can’t see what they’re doing in that state and it was children at a wedding.’

He couldn’t help it but his teeth were gritted when he said it and he felt the heat in his face. ‘Fucking. Stop. Talking,’ he said and he stared hard at her. There was always something weird about Alice’s make-up, as if she didn’t really believe in make-up and was trying it on.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right.’

‘I just can’t talk about it any more.’

Under the table her hands were shaking. It was just like Sean all over again, Sean talking to her, trying to explain something that men don’t want to explain. And even Luke’s voice was the same as his father’s talking about the army. She had the old feeling of not knowing what to say. She didn’t want to provoke him but what about the practical things? Was he out for good? Would anyone be prosecuted for what happened? Would he just live in Glasgow now and settle down and maybe keep away from all this stuff that preyed on his mind?

‘Can I just say something, Luke?’

‘Knock yourself out.’

‘No, not like that. Nothing big.’ She took a gulp of wine and looked away. ‘I was never able to ask her anything about myself.’

‘You mean Gran?’

‘That’s right. I can’t ask. I can’t say, “What happened in my childhood?” or “What was my father really like?”’

‘Why not?’

‘She made it impossible.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know. And I’ve always asked myself, “Why can’t she speak to me?” Everybody has questions.’

‘Yes.’ He could see far down into Alice just then, the quiet, lonely life of his mother who was never free of them all.

‘I always felt my presence wasn’t called for.’

‘Mum …’

‘It’s fine. You learn how to live with these things.’ She took another drink. ‘It was always clear I got in the way of some story she had built about her and my father and what they did, who they were. If I had any doubts or any questions I had to put them away. That’s my life.’

‘Maybe that will change,’ Luke said. She looked at him and knew she was looking at him with all the love she had.

God bless him, she thought, for thinking life was something you solved. ‘I was so envious,’ she said, ‘when you were a boy and the two of you were reading those Dickens novels. You were like a gang. You and my mother and her favourite authors.’

‘They were just books.’

‘No, they weren’t. They were passports. You and she went to unknown places together and I was left behind.’

‘Anyone can read them.’

‘Don’t pretend to be shallow, Luke. You know what I mean. She taught you how to look for more out of life.’

‘I suppose she did.’ He could see the pain in her face.

‘She never told me who I was,’ she said. ‘Just who I wasn’t.’

‘Don’t get upset, Mum.’

‘Some people make life bigger for other people. And I’ve always been on the wrong side of that bargain.’

He just felt awkward. He wasn’t going to say things just to soothe her because she was too shrewd for that. He didn’t quite see it but his instinct was still to hold out against his mother, to stall her sentiment and deny her all the small benefits of possession. And she changed the subject after sniffing to clear the air. ‘All that stuff you’re saying, about not belonging anywhere, that’s just the war talking,’ she said. ‘It’s just because of what you went through in Afghanistan. It’s all the stress and what have you. But I think you know where you belong.’

He felt his phone buzz in his pocket and reckoned it would be one of the many texts from the boys in the platoon. He wished he could dive into the carpet and swim to a time when allegiances were clear. The thing he loved about Glasgow was that you never felt truly alone there: a sense of community upbraided you at every corner, but as his eye wandered vacantly over the floor he felt pinched by the local style. ‘Well, Mum,’ he said at last. ‘I wanted life to be more than us. Much more than us. Maybe that’s why I went away in the first place.’

Alice was looking at the old wallpaper. ‘The way my mother spoke to you when you were a boy,’ she said. ‘She hardly spoke to me at all when I was a girl, and there were these long absences, when she was away somewhere, Blackpool probably or on holidays with him, and I stayed with the neighbours. My father I only saw a few times and I can’t picture him ever once lifting me up. He was awkward. He once gave me a doll but I felt it had belonged to somebody else.’

‘Mum.’

‘No, it’s all right. It was different with you and my mother. I remember you saying to her “What’s colour, Granny?” and she pinched your cheek.’

‘I remember that.’

‘And she said, “Colour is light on fire.”’

LANGOUSTINES

When Gordon turned up he was pleased to know the menu better than anybody else and he wanted to argue about fisheries and good governance but Luke asked if they could change the subject. Alice blushed and looked at her husband. They knew Luke was wrong. Gordon stroked his moustache with his bottom lip as a way of not speaking up, though to him it was a pity about his stepson, who obviously went away too young and no longer understood the priorities of his country. He knew nothing about policy and taxes or what makes a people, and now, God help him, he was like those kids who think their country is Google.

‘You’re just not going deep enough,’ Luke said. ‘Money has imploded. Religion has gone mad. Privacy is disappearing. The ice-cap is melting and children are starving to death. And you want to sing an old song about national togetherness.’

‘He does a couple of tours in Afghanistan and suddenly he’s Bill Gates,’ Gordon said.

‘I did four tours in Iraq.’

‘Of course.’

‘You’re not
thinking
.’

‘No,’ Gordon said. ‘We’re thinking, in our own country, about how it’s important to ensure that elderly people can still get their medicine.’

‘Luke,’ Alice said. ‘You’ve always had your head in the clouds. Always the idealist.’

‘Out of touch with reality,’ said Gordon.

‘The games are finished. All bets are off,’ Luke said. ‘We’re living in the big world now.’

‘This is a big enough world for me,’ Gordon said.

‘So why make it smaller?’

‘I thought you wanted to change the subject, Luke,’ his mother said and she smiled without comfort.

Gordon was wearing a yellow sweater. He knew how to make money but didn’t really know how to spend it. It showed on his face, Alice thought, wondering if she was just too caught up in the mystery of her own family’s approval. That was it. When his langoustines came and Gordon sniffed them on the plate she realised his lack of style told against him in a way she tried to ignore. She loved him for his kindness and his politics but not really for himself.

‘You’ll come round,’ she said to Luke. ‘The whole country’s slowly coming round and you will, too.’

After a while they talked about the business of Anne’s photography and the letter that came from Canada. Alice said the photographs were just another part of Anne’s secretive life. She had kept it all back for her private self and her times in Blackpool. ‘If the offer had come even ten years ago’, she said, ‘we’d all have jumped on a plane to Toronto and been proud to see her having her moment.’