The Kiln (21 page)

(Ah, Docherty on Olympus. Ye poor mortals, I condemn ye to being as screwed up as I am.)

And he supposed most of them were or, if they weren't, perhaps that's what their problem was. How could they accept the way we lived?

All this pseudo-sophistication, playing musical chairs with our bodies, never-mind-the-quality-feel-the variety, trying to purchase meaning like real estate. What were we trying to do with our lives - build a cut-price Babylon?

‘Tom! Tom!’

The voice belonged to Gill, but it was an echo of other voices that had been attempting to locate him all his life. Ghostly within it were the lost, plaintive callings of boyhood, his friends looking for him in forever darkened streets. There was in it the remembered exasperation of his mother, sadly baffled by the strangeness of his doings.

‘Tom! Tom!'

Who was it that the name was looking for? Which of his split personalities would answer? Dr Heckle or Mr Jibe? The endless internal argument with his own life, the self-appointed seeker after truth? Or the dark joker, prepared to settle for turning the moment into laughter? Or maybe someone else altogether. For in him the highly developed Scottish propensity for duality of nature divided like an amoeba into a small riot of confused identities. He probably
was
having a nervous breakdown, a part of him reflected calmly, like a doctor observing a patient through a spyhole.

It was certainly Tom Docherty who rose from Megan's bed, the father reborn confusedly from the child, but which one of him? The prophet of gloom. He came down like Jeremiah from his private mountain to behold the vanity of human pleasures.

He was also required to help in dishing out the buffet. There was cold ham, cold turkey, chilli con carne and a large bowl of pate, as well as gateau and fresh fruit salad. He opened the wine and left it on the sideboard beside the glasses. He distributed food for maybe twenty minutes, aware that, behind the veneer of suavity he was wearing, there still lurked the ghost of the passionately confused boy, looking for more substantial flesh than this. He was hoping that for Megan and Gus the finding of themselves would prove easier than it seemed to have been for him, especially in the matter of sexual relationships.

ENTRY FOR THE LOVE-FILES OF THOMAS MATHIESON DOCHERTY
: Attempted seduction No. 2,412. (It feels like that anyway.) Name: McMurtrie, Senga. Occupation: brickworker.
Distinguishing features: everything. Location of attempted seduction: entrance to disused stables off Soulis Street. Result of attempted seduction: miserable and abject failure. Observations: not so much a one-night stand as a one-night collapse.

He still can't believe it. Saturday night may be the trauma from which he will never recover. If Sigmund Freud were still alive, it would be Vienna next stop. How could it happen? That's more than twenty-four hours ago but the images still flare in his mind. They flare like cressets. (Cressets is a good word.) Senga jitterbugging like a maenad under the lights of the Grand Hall, her athletic legs defying the tightness of her skirt, while he tries self-consciously to mime a similar abandon, finding it difficult to lose his self-consciousness because dancing with Senga is like dancing under a spotlight; Senga's delicate laughter going off in the street like a maroon, advertising their intimacy; Senga's bared and lamplit breasts, mocking him with their availability.

The images and the self-disgust weave in and out of his working. He sweats not just with labour but with the dread that Senga will be appearing with the day-shift. He's glad, for two reasons, that Big Billy Farquhar didn't turn up for work tonight. He won't be a witness to Tam's humiliation in front of Senga. And his absence has meant that there's no spare hour for brushing up and thinking relaxedly about things. What Hilly calls ‘the philosopher's hour’ he can do without tonight. It's just alternate tasks: one hour unloading the black bricks from the machine on to the bogey, one hour pushing the loaded bogeys up to the kiln and bringing them back empty. The less room he has for thought the better.

But thought is the thing you can't turn off. Every step he takes, pushing the heavy bogey along the rails, Saturday night's failure is added to the weight progressively, until he begins to feel as if he's humping a house. Every time Cran appears at the mouth of the kiln, his face carved in contempt. Tam is more inclined to agree with him. What will Cran think when he hears?

At least at the piece-break Cran doesn't turn up. But The Chair exudes disdain for Tam. As he listens to the others talking, including him occasionally, he thinks how that disdain will spread to them by the morning. Faced with the prospect of losing such limited acceptance as he has among them, of being an object
of laughter with them ever after, he realises with surprise how much he will miss the rough texture of their company. They are part of where he comes from and even if it is a small part and one which he may be leaving behind by going to university, he would prefer to leave it with their respect for him intact. He wouldn't wish to shame his relatives by seeming less of the man than he should be. But that shame is coming, he's afraid.

He remembers a poem Boris taught them in fifth year - by somebody called Brecht, he seems to remember, who Boris said was a German. It wasn't in a book. They were given separate sheets with the poem typed on it. Where did Boris get that poem? Does he speak German? Or did he have someone in the Modern Languages Department translate it for him? Either way, he appreciates belatedly the creative eccentricity of Boris in wanting to introduce them to influences beyond Tennyson and Wordsworth. ‘Questions of a worker who reads’, the poem was called. It has given Tam a working title for his piece-break: ‘Elegy for the reputation of a worker who reads.’ Everything that happens has a special poignancy for him, a feeling that this may be the last time he will be able to be, however marginally, a part of this.

When he is rinsing out his cup at the end of the break, having spoken only a few words, and Jack Laidlaw says, ‘You all right, Tam?’, he thinks how embarrassed Jack will be for him a few hours from now.

‘Is it Cran?’ Jack asks.

Tam shakes his head.

‘If it is,’ Jack says, ‘Maybe Ah could help ye tae hold him down while we both run away.’

The smile freezes on Tam's lips. Working again, he wonders how he came to get involved with Senga. He blames last Friday morning.

That morning, she came in as usual for her day-shift as they came off the night-shift. For her work, she affects dungarees, a variety of checked shirts and neat little hobnailed boots. Those are the busiest dungarees Tam has ever seen. The seat of them records every wiggle and their apron front is a jostle of unseen delights. Her shirt, always three buttons down, shows half an inch of the narrow gap between her breasts, like the start of
a road he would love to travel. But it would be a dangerous journey, he has decided. For the voice of Senga, breath of the dragon that guards the maiden, comes out at all-comers like a blow-torch.

‘Fuck off, you arsehole. You couldny get a ride in a brothel wi’ fifty quid an' a doctor's line.'

This remark, which Tam takes to be a rejection, has greeted Big Billy's deliberately clumsy attempt to help her off with her black tailored jacket, an oddly stylish part of her ensemble, presumably a remnant of an outfit she formerly wore for places other than the brickwork. Big Billy laughs uproariously. He seems to have decided, with a subtlety of interpretation which eludes Tam, that this is some kind of verbal foreplay.

‘Ye want me to help you off wi’ somethin' else?' he asks, smiling rakishly.

‘Ye couldny help yerself tae a wank.’

‘Ye want tae bet? You can watch.’

‘Ah'd rather watch the Interlude.’

Senga's reference, to those fill-in moments on television when they show you things like a potter's wheel or a kitten playing with a ball of wool, may have been lost on some of the others, many of whom don't yet have television. But not much else is being lost. The people on the changing shifts are standing around, whooping and cheering. Such merry sexual banter fairly relieves the gloom of the working day.

Senga, surrounded by so many masculine presences, is completely unintimidated. She tosses her dyed blonde hair and hangs up her jacket. She turns her boldly attractive face towards the company and the blue eyes, which look as if they could stare into the brightest sun and never flinch, scan them. When she gets to Tam, she winks.

‘Ah-ha!’

‘It's young Tam she fancies.’

‘Hard luck, Billy. Go tae the end o’ the queue.'

Of such casual moments is disaster made. Tam thinks as he pushes the bogey towards the kiln. If only he hadn't seen her last night at the dancing.

He had seen her in the Grand Hall often enough before, discreet as a carnival, seeming to bounce off the edges of the place, as if
the biggest public hall in Graithnock was too small to contain her sexual energy. Unlike some of the other girls, who would dance with each other in a lean hour, Senga was always partnered by a male. She was in great demand. In the stag line, where boys stood around exchanging worldly wisdom that was as foetid as a boxer's pants, the word was that she was a certainty. Tam had heard one plooky man of the world brag that she had given him a gam, which Tam had recently discovered meant that the woman did it to you with her mouth. Standing with a face like a plook factory, the suave one explained that that was him finished with her. The hypocrisy of it had made Tam want to vomit. How could you share something like that with a woman and then accuse her of it? Gratitude was more in order.

Watching her leave with yet another boy in tow, he had more than once wished it was him. But he was afraid of what being with Senga might involve. Woman at work. Ego-crushing in progress. She seemed so frontal about sex, he wondered if she carried a measuring-tape.

But this night is different. It is one of those nights of rhythmic melancholy which only the dancing can provide. He watches the gently rotating bodies on the floor, a shifting organism of dreams and longings, and he feels a kind of prospective nostalgia for these times. He won't always be doing this. Going to university seems a complete irrelevance. This is where he belongs, among these people.

Even Margaret Inglis feels like a mirage he has been pursuing. She comes from a different place from him. And Maddie Fitzpatrick's address might as well be the moon. Who is he trying to kid? University? Writing? He should keep working in the brickwork and learn just to enjoy the life around him. He sees Senga. Tonight she is wearing a tight black skirt and a white mohair sweater. He remembers the way she winked at him. He asks her to dance.

The night goes into the fourth dimension. Something magical happens. Moving into the energy field that is Senga transforms the Grand Hall. It becomes an exotic place. The yellow, distempered walls have the sheen of muslin in the bright lights. The ordinariness of going to the dancing breaks up into weird fragments. The overweight female singer, who is reputed to do
more for the band than sing (an allegation Tam knows from Michael to be nonsense), looks to him tonight like someone out of a Hollywood film, a bit like a Rita Hayworth who's been overeating. Seen through the vitality Senga imparts to him, the other girls' faces are more exciting than any make-up could make them.

In a whirl of vivid impressions the rest of the evening happens. Senga's inhabiting of the moment is infectious. The moments pass in a dizzying blur until they find themselves outside in a lamplit street. A man he has seen come into the brickwork in the morning with Senga's shift shouts across the road at them, something Tam can't make out but knows is suggestive.

‘Fuck off,’ Senga calls merrily.

She wants a poke of chips and a bottle of Irn Bru. Senga comes from outside Graithnock and he is pleased to be able to tell her that he knows of a chip shop which will still be open. It makes him seem like a man of the world. He feels like Cary Grant.

(‘I know a little Italian place.’)

Eating as they walk, they come to the arches at Soulis Street, where there used to be stables. They toast each other with some Irn Bru drunk from the bottle, which Tam lays on the ground at their feet. And, in the shadows, they begin.

Senga does not go in for preliminaries. As he kisses her, he feels her open coat slide off her shoulders. The mohair sweater rises softly under his knuckles. Senga's right hand moves away from his neck and her brassiere pops. The dim lamplight from the street makes a holy picture of her tits. As he gasps for breath, touching them, she unbuttons his trousers deftly and takes out his cock, which has been trying to butt its way out for the last ten minutes. It is big and hard. He hopes it's big, anyway. At least Senga didn't have to search for it. ‘Oh,’ she says. She tugs at it with her right hand while her left hand expertly rolls her skirt up her thighs to her waist and he is stunned to realise that she isn't wearing any knickers. Whether it is the exciting shock of the realisation that causes the disaster or the impatient wait his cock has had, chafing in the darkness of his trousers, or the way Senga's hand is kneading it like dough, he can't be sure. But he knows that disaster is imminent. He knows it's on its way. He is going to co-o-o-o-ome.

He tries to jerk himself away from Senga to save face, if that's what you call it. But Senga's hand follows him wherever he tries to go and a disobedient part of him doesn't want to leave her palm. It likes it there. And, as her hand guides him towards that bush between her legs by some instinctive radar, like a bird towards its nest, it happens. He is coming.

He can't believe it. But he's coming all right. And how do you persuade spunk to turn back? He comes like a small hosepipe somebody is dancing on. Here a spurt, there a spurt, everywhere a spurt-spurt. He looks on aghast as his cock takes on a life of its own. It is as if his sperm, having spent years of pent-up frustration, come rushing out like lemmings, not caring that their instinct is an expression of futility. Little kamikaze bastards. They've watched so many of their mates entombed in toilet paper, you would've thought they might learn sense. But no.