The Kiln (22 page)

(‘Fuck it, boys. It's a chance, isn't it? We're almost in range of an actual human pussy. Let's go for it.’)

They do, fatally. All they achieve is to litter the inside of Senga's new, tight, black skirt with their corpses, like an assault force that didn't get beyond the foreshore. They lie bleaching there.

‘Ya silly bastard. Tam,’ Senga says. ‘What'll Ah tell ma feyther?’

She discusses these things with her father?

(‘Hopeless again the night. Dad. Another premature ejaculation.’

‘Never mind, love. There's more pricks in the sea than ever came out of it. Ye'll meet a good screw one of these days. Never fear.’)

As he pushes another bogey into the dawn, the sun comes up on him like his personal searchlight. His shame at the moment is just hidden memories, sores in the mind - Senga taking her knickers (appropriately white as far as he is concerned) from her handbag and covering her unmolested crotch - her niceness to him at the station where he takes her to catch her train - the forgotten bottle of Irn Bru which must still be lying there, marking the spot like a plaque for which he knows the inscription: Tam Docherty was here and might as well not have been - traces of mohair on his jacket in the morning. But his shame will soon be as visible to everyone as facial scabs.

His plan to get out at the end of the night before the day-shift gathers doesn't succeed. Most of them are there before he reaches the rest area to collect his jacket and satchel. The man who shouted at them in the street has obviously been telling the others what he saw.

‘Ah-ha!’ somebody shouts as he comes in.

‘It's Errol Flynn.’

‘Saturday night with Senga.’

‘There's a reporter fae the
News o’ the World
here.'

‘Gonny give us the blow-by-blow. Tam?’

Senga is among them, unruffled as ever. What has
she
been telling them? Discretion has never been her conspicuous talent. She waits for the noise to settle.

‘Ah'll tell ye somethin’,' she says, and his stomach develops a chill. The others are statues of prurience. ‘He's mair of a man than any of you lot'll ever be. And that's the truth.’

‘Whoo!’

‘Show us yer credentials, big yin.’

‘Senga should know.’

She does but she isn't telling. She winks theatrically at him for everyone to see and a legend without substance is fully formed. He can't pretend it's him but at least it gives him camouflage till he tries to work out who he is.

He smiles at her and the smile is misconstrued by the others. But he knows what it means. Senga may have a tongue as rough as a scrubbing-brush. She may treat sex like fast food. But, as far as he is concerned, she's class.

IF HE HAD BEEN CAPTAIN COOK
, he would have named a small island after her - preferably one with a turbulent stretch of water to the north, to be called McMurtrie Sound.

COLETTE WAS DRIVING
with her usual expertise. She effortlessly overtook a man in a Peugeot and Tom caught a glimpse of his distraught face, incredulous that a woman had passed him. He would probably have to see his analyst.

‘You will be returning to Grenoble by the way of Paris?’ she said.

‘No other way, is there?’

‘It is the only reason?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You speak as if it is not done by choice. I thought you loved Paris.’

‘I do. I could eat it with a teaspoon.’

‘Maybe we can see you then. Shortly.’

‘That would be good. Then you and I could do more joint work in murdering each other's language.’

‘You're not thus bad.’

‘So
bad. I'm worse. I'm like the English shop where they had the sign in the window saying
“Ici on parle français”
and when the French tourist went in and asked,
“Qui c'est qui parle français?”
the man behind the counter said,
“Je”.’

‘Yes. That sound like you.’

‘And that definitely sound like you.’

‘Anyways. When you and Gill come to Paris next time.
Nous pouvons aller encore au cinoche avec Michel. Quelle joie pour toil Tu aimerais bien ça, n ‘est-ce pas?’

She looked across at him and winked and began to enjoy the driving. He laughed. They never let him forget that one. Michel had arranged a special treat for the four of them at a cinema near Deux Magots. He kept refusing to tell them what they would see, just that they had to be there at half past midnight. When he and Gill caught up with them, Michel spirited them into the cinema, still secretive. Tom couldn't believe it when the credits rolled. It was a Sonja Henie film made in 1942. It was crap on ice. The only alleviation of the misery was Tyrone Power. He was young and starting out and trying things. His energy crackled. But even he wasn't enough to dull the pain. When the lights went up, Tom made to go. Michel leaned across Colette to restrain him.

‘There is more,’ he said.

‘More what?’

‘More of this.’

‘Sonja Henie pictures?’

‘Two.’

‘Three Sonja Henie films at a sitting? What is this, Michel? Suicide by Sonja Henie? Come on.’

‘You will enjoy,’ Michel said. ‘Observe the motifs. One film is as good as another when you do that. Just observe.’

‘It's shite.’

‘Tom,’ Gill was saying. ‘Behave and watch the film.’

‘He is right,’ Colette was saying. ‘I tell Michel all the time. Films like this are just
merde.’

Sensing support, Tom pressed on.

‘Listen, Michel. Don't gimme all this structuralist stuff. It comes down to a simple fact. If the pictures were combat, Sonja Henie would be a war criminal.’

He liked that but nobody else did.

‘Sh!’

‘Pssst!’

He looked round at the people who were mouthing at him.

‘What's your problem? You want tae shoot the doctor? Ah'm tryin’ tae save you lot from brain death.'

‘Monsieur! S'il vous plaît. Nous voulons voir lefilm. Si vous ne voulez pas le voir, vous n'avez qu'à partir. Nous voulons voir le film.’

‘What fuckin’ film?' Tom was muttering on his way out.

Twenty minutes later. Gill joined him in the bistro. She ordered a coffee and shook her head at him. He apologised.

‘Not to me,’ Gill said.

‘To Michel?’

‘He paid for the tickets.’

‘Bought the tickets? But that's like apologising to the Marquis de Sade for leaving in the middle of a whipping.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Is he still watching them?’ ‘Yes. Colette isn't too happy to watch.’

‘She's a good judge. Look. Let's go back to Haussmann. You're only here for a week, you know. I'll apologise in the morning. Honest.’

She seemed to be pondering.

‘Well. There are certain things that will have to be done at
Haussmann. I'll decide what they are. How is it said in French?
Pour expier?’

He smiled.

‘Some of that penance can be great,’ he said.

But when he phoned Michel later that day to apologise, he realised that he had been set up. Besides wanting to see the films, Michel had wanted the entertainment of Tom's reactions to them. He regarded the experience as some kind of triumph of Gallic culture over Scottish lack of subtlety. You mean effeteness, Tom suggested.

It became a continuing wrangle between them. Michel said Tom didn't know how to look at films. Tom said Michel didn't know how
not
to look at them and, if they put Warhol's eight hours of the Empire State Building in front of him, he would watch it as avidly as
Le jour se leve.
Michel said Tom didn't understand filmic form. Tom said Michel appeared never to have heard of content. Tom hated the way films were edited these days in defiance of any feasible credibility. Michel said that was structuralism. Tom said it was self-indulgent lack of talent.

Michel eventually developed a theory, as he would, to explain what he called Tom's ‘neurotic response to the performing arts’. He developed the theory from ‘two cultural traumas in your experience’. Unfortunately, Tom had told him about one of them.

He had explained that the first opera he ever attended was in English. He had heard snippets of other operas before that and enjoyed the music. But when he discovered the banality of what they were singing, he couldn't believe it. There was a moment in the opera where a man and woman were singing about closing a door. ‘Close the door.’ ‘No, I will not close the door.’ ‘Will you please close the door?’ ‘No. The door stays open.’ That sort of thing. Tom said he had wanted to shout, ‘Shut the fuckin’ door an' let's get on with it,' as if he were at a football match. To hear what those supposedly impressive people were actually singing to each other, he said, was like eavesdropping on the conversation of yuppies: all that opulent style fuelled by an articulacy out of a shopping catalogue - off-the-peg emotions, interchangeable cliches of response, style without individual content.

Michel pounced. Tom didn't believe in art for art's sake. No,
Tom said, he believed in art for fuck's sake, because it was so necessary it shouldn't be squandered as mere fodder for critics. Yes, but that made him miss the point of art, which could only function effectively within its own parameters. Tom kept demanding that it relate to ‘real’ life. Every time art invited him to come out of his working-class prejudices and enjoy it on its own self-referential terms, Tom panicked and retreated back into those prejudices, found an excuse for denying the self-containment of the art, invaded it with disbelief. Anyway, Tom said, he would stick to listening to Mozart on tape rather than buy tickets for
Cosi fan tutte.

(Dear W.A. Mozart
,

What does it feel like to take down God's dictation?)

The second experience Michel used against him was something Tom had told Colette and Colette had passed on to Michel. Colette and he had been talking about great moments in cinema and he had said, only half jokingly, that one of his most memorable cinematic moments had happened in the Forum Picture House when he was a boy. He couldn't even remember the title of the film or the name of anybody who was in it. But it was a film about people travelling in the jungle and lost in an amazing density of foliage, the sort of film where someone says, ‘It's
too
quiet,’ or a native bearer mutters, ‘Drums say no go on, Bwana.’ The camera was tracking slowly through the foliage. The silence was utter, when there was the most sudden and chilling scream Tom had ever heard. It lifted him clean out of his seat, along with many others. The cinema was in panic, nobody more so than Tom. Then he realised why. The scream was real. It came from a local man who was well known for taking fits at the pictures. That moment of an imaginary scene peopled by a real living scream had haunted his sense of what art was ever since.

‘Of course,’ Michel had said. ‘Art is not enough for you. You must be always disrupting it with the real.’

‘No,’ Tom said, ‘It's just that, if you're alive, it always
is
being disrupted by the real.’

Tom had pretended outrage at Colette for giving away his secrets to the enemy. Looking at her now as she drove, he smiled
and decided he was glad he hadn't told her about some of his early experiences of the theatre. That would really have given Michel evidence for the prosecution. Those occasions had sometimes felt like a play within a play, or maybe part-play, part-unrehearsed happening, distorting the original into a hybrid.

‘What do you think about?’ Colette said.

The Merchant of Menace

THE SCENE IS THE HALL OF A JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL IN GRAITHNOCK
. It is a wet Tuesday afternoon. On the stage a play is in progress. The audience is a motley throng of junior pupils from various schools in Graithnock. The actors are contending with an atmosphere which might be described as seething. Not all the dialogue is restricted to the stage.

She's not the only one. Tam Docherty sits in a crossfire of
contradictory awarenesses that are exhausting his concentration. He isn't sure but he thinks he may be the big skinny bastard due for beheading. It is not a reassuring thought. But at least he can safely assume he isn't the one whose tits are going to be grabbed. They would need tweezers for that. He is trying desperately to focus on the play but the guttural whispers are going off all around him like sniper fire and Shakespeare's words stagger across his devastated attention, tattered and bleeding, grandeur in retreat from the assaults of his own guerrilla culture.

He has read the play in school this year, his second year at Graithnock Academy, and the bits he understood have fascinated him. When he was told they were being marched to one of the local junior secondary schools to see their first performance of a Shakespeare play, he had been excited. But the reality of the experience has no resemblance to his expectations of it. He has not imagined that watching his first play would be a dangerous experience or that so much of his time would be taken up by planning his escape at the end of it. For they will simply be dismissed into the playground when this is over. The two mad whisperers sound like part of a gang. If it's him they're after, he'd better find handers or make a quick exit.