The Kiln (33 page)

There is no escaping from this. You have done it. It is there, final, irrevocable. It is you who have done it, nobody else.

(‘Tam Docherty? 14 Dawson Street? Right. We've got a real one here. No mercy. What justification could he possibly have for this? I'll tell you. None. For the Lord thy God is an angry God.')

‘What's wrong with you, boay?’ his mother says. ‘You liked macaroni and cheese last week.’

‘Maybe he's went vegetarian,’ his Auntie Bella observes.

She is arranging her headsquare in front of the oval mirror that hangs on a chain from the living-room wall. She has refused her tea, saying, ‘Ah've the five thousand tae feed up there.’ (The biblical reference gives a new and sharp pang of guilt.) But she has still been sampling a few chips from his plate. She ruffles his hair as she does so.

‘What part of an animal does macaroni come fae?’ his father asks.

He is looking up, puzzled from his newspaper where Tam has noticed the headline ‘Man with Bunion Dies in Hospital’. He probably thought he had problems. If that's what happens to you for having a bunion, what could be in store for him?

‘The cheese!’ his Auntie Bella says, as if she finds it wearisome having to explain everything to humbler intelligences. ‘The cheese. That's from a cow, intit? Milk. To butter. To cheese.’

She pats the knot on her headsquare with the complacency of the well informed. His father is staring at her. His mouth shapes itself a couple of times towards speech. But whatever he is thinking appears to be inexpressible. He goes back behind his newspaper. From there his final comment is issued.

‘Bella,’ he says. ‘See when you die? See if ye donate yer brain to medical science? Gonny leave directions? So they can find it?’

His Auntie Bella laughs, happily impervious to his father's lack of appreciation. Her nature, as his father has said before, ‘come intae the world dressed in elephant hide.’

‘Tom,’ his mother is saying. ‘How can ye work in a brickwork if ye don't eat?’

‘He's left the brickwork,’ his father says.

‘Oh, so that means he should stop eating?’ his Auntie Bella says.

(‘Silence, ye little people!’ saith the Lord.)

Their voices bicker distantly. He is alone with His wrath at his wrongdoing. He has committed adultery. Adultery. The word has attached itself to him like an incurable disease. But nobody else knows he has it yet. He carries it around with him secretly, a sickness that estranges him from normalcy and breeds debilitating questions in him like diseased corpuscles. How can he claim to be a Socialist if he can betray Eddie Fitzpatrick in this callous way? What is the point of trying to write when the pen droops in your hand like a lost erection? What would his family think? Is the day before yesterday the land of lost content? He sees it shining plain.

The three boys in the Queen's Cafe seem to be living where he used to live. He's in exile now. And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden. (James Dean would have understood. He wishes, maybe for the hundredth time, he hadn't piled up in his Porsche a few days ago. He misses him like a friend he was only just getting to know.)

The three of them are laughing a lot. The table they sit at is in the same room as he is but he feels as if it could be a scene from another world. He is sipping a cup of aloes. They seem to have been drinking euphoria, though the empty cups would suggest tea. The one in the middle is conducting their mood. The other two are just following his lead. He holds up his hands. They give him the silence he wants.

‘Expeliment on pledictability of human nature,’ he says

He takes the silver paper from a Player's packet which is lying empty on the table and very carefully pares the lining of rice-paper from it. Taking the rice-paper, he kneads, tears and twists it into an elongated, vaguely human shape, like a figure by Giacometti. He does it all with that exact, fanatic concentration with which Hollywood scientists bend over hissing beakers. The paper man is laid ceremoniously on his side in a saucer from which the cup has been removed. Then the cup, containing dregs of cold tea, is poised precisely above the figure, angled on the axes of the thumb and
forefinger. He pauses, looking around with manic mischief in his eyes.

The moment freezes for Tam as he looks. He sees the boy who is holding the cup smiling in his arrogant handsomeness. He sees the other two watching the boy intently. They are bathed in dull sunlight, like figures in an old painting where the pigment has dimmed. They seem so brief and so poignantly unconscious of their brevity. They are turned in on one another, simultaneously declaring the importance of themselves and concentrating on nonsense. As if he has become an instant geriatric. Tam contemplates the joyous wastefulness of youth.

‘Observe,’ the boy says. ‘Confucius, he say: what happen when man pee the bed?’

He delicately tilts the cup until some drops of cold tea fall on the paper figure. With just the right degree of languor, the figure turns gently in its saucer until it is facing the other way.

‘All clear?’ he says. ‘No more confusement? Man loll away from plish. Plish velly wet.’

They all laugh until it seems that medical attention may have to be summoned.

Oh, very good. Is that all they have to do with their time? Do they know nothing of the griefs to be endured? Can they imagine having committed adultery? Have they ever wandered through a world blighted by their own evil, a self-made and permanent winter, and found not the solace of one friend? For John Benchley wasn't in.

The housekeeper has come to the door wearing that perpetual hat she presumably goes to bed in. It is fused for ever to her head as if it has been surgically attached. Maybe it has a religious significance, like that skull-cap Jewish men wear. The cap of devout respectability. No bad thoughts may enter here. It may be raining evil but, behold, it touches me not. Her face looks like one of the prunes they served so often at school dinners. You took them like penance and later, in the lavatory, they purged you of impurities.

‘Yes?’ Mrs Malone says, staring at him.

This is not a red carpet. He feels as welcome as a drunk man at a Rechabite meeting. She has never liked him, perhaps because once, when she was in the room clearing away the tea things,
he said, ‘God is dead.’ He was quoting from his skim-reading of Nietzsche at the time.

But he doesn't think such niceties would matter to Mrs Malone, even if you explained them to her. Quoting would still be blasphemy. (The teacups had rattled like forewarning of an earthquake. John Benchley had smiled at him. Mrs Malone hadn't.) Or perhaps she dislikes him because she knows that John and he secretly drink sherry. Or perhaps her hat is an evil-detector and she had always instinctively known about him then what has now been proven to be true, that he was destined for bad things.

‘Ah'm sorry tae bother you, Mrs Malone,’ he says. ‘But is John in?’

Her face wrinkles even more, from prune to raisin. Maybe those who have become wicked betray themselves in every subsequent act. She has found him out.

‘The minister,’ she says, and pauses. He understands the meaning of the pause: thou shalt not take thy minister's name in vain, which means familiarly. He has disrespected the sanctum. He has entered the mosque with his shoes on. Thou shalt honour the man with his collar back to front. ‘The minister is at a funeral.’

(Why do you want to interrupt the solemn duties of the great ones with your trivia?)

‘Any idea when he'll be back?’

‘He's a busy man. Mrs MacPherson's not very well. There's an elders’ meeting. He has things to do.'

The door shuts in his face. He imagines more bolts being shot home than the door of the Bastille had. He stares at the door for some time, absorbing its symbolic significance. He is despised and rejected of men. He turns away, disappointed and relieved.

For what could he have said to John anyway?

(‘Hullo, John. Good to see you. What it is. I've just been riding the wife of a friend and I thought we might have a chat about it. Any chance of a sherry?’)

It is hopeless. There is nobody he can tell about this. There is nothing to do but pace out the dimensions of his loneliness. He decides he will commit suicide.

The woods of Bringan take his mood into theirs. He has stopped on the Swinging Bridge and watched the waters writhe below, brown as beer and frothing white across the rocks. Recent rains have deepened the river but not enough. These aren't the waters of a grand oblivion and an abiding mystery thereafter, the insoluble grief of family and friends for the drowned. These are the waters of an embarrassing unconsciousness, maybe a fractured skull and three weeks in the hospital and the puzzled disgruntlement of his family (‘Whit the hell were ye tryin’ to do?' his father asks) and the need to pretend that you fell while trying to walk the parapet of the bridge.

Now he has passed on into the trees. This place is mythic for him. Bringan is where his boyhood came to commune with its dreams of a secret greatness only he knew about. This was his Chiron, a wild and living entity that taught him impossible possibilities and the strange, dark power of imaginings, that contradicted, every time he came, the banality of his daily life, that cured him, with leaves, of petty wounds the town had given him. Here his short trousers had become hose and kilt and buckskin chaps. Here his woollen jersey had been medalled jacket with braided epaulets and toga and doublet. Here his hair had grown piratically long in an hour. Here, still hiding out among the trees, like outlaws waiting for their time to come when he would finally identify with them, were Robin Hood and Wat Tyler and Robert the Bruce and William Wallace. Their ghostly presences shame him now.

For what has he become? A seedy adulterer, a betrayer of himself and everyone else. He senses his heroes, who were him in hiding, dead all around him in the dark places of Bringan, starved from the lack of the provisions he should have brought them. This place is haunted for him today, and not just by famous names or the possible versions of himself he had imagined. He is suddenly awed by stumbling upon memories much more immediate and
real, as tangible as ancestral bones which embarrass his smallness by the size of them. These are his father's woods, his grandfather's woods.

He cups his hands and drinks from Moses' Well, a hidden spring his father showed to him, and the bad taste of him in his mouth has turned pure water sour. The thread of luminous liquid still runs as clear but when he breaks it with his flesh it is defiled. He spits it out.

The Soldier's Hole, the deep pool where Michael taught him to swim, is polluted by his presence. He feels that, if he stripped and dived into it now, his body would turn it to sludge.

He has made his decision. He will go home and collect the book Maddie Fitzpatrick gave him at the party. He will return it to her. He will say a final goodbye, no matter what desperate appeals she may make. Nothing will make him so much as pause in his purpose.

‘
DON'T EVEN IMAGINE IT
,’ his mother says.

The voice, coming from another room, sounds eerily preoccupied. It does not know that he is here, standing in the hallway outside the closed door of the living-room. He has in his hand the book he intends to return to Maddie Fitzpatrick. He has slipped into the house silently, using the key that hangs from a string inside the letter-box, wishing to talk to no one in his mood of grand despair. He has gone upstairs and found the book and tiptoed back down when the voice arrests him with his hand on the Yale lock.

‘Ah'm tellin’ you. Don't even imagine it.'

He takes his hand off the lock and stands very still in the lobby.

‘Oh, Ah think Ah can imagine it, Betsy,’ his father says.

‘Can ye? Well, Ah can't.’

He is transfixed. He knows himself to be eavesdropping and he doesn't like to be doing that. But he is compelled. This is news of something he doesn't know, he senses. News of what? He waits. A child's voice shouting in the street outside comes and
goes without meaning, hieroglyphic as a bird blown past on the wind. The sunshine refracted through the frosted glass at the top of the front door steeps the hallway in soft light. The hanging coats and jackets seem instinct with an unknown future, waiting to be worn.

‘Why not?’ his father says.

‘Because it isn't what's goin’ to happen.'

‘You know that, do ye?’

‘Yes. Ah do.’

‘But it was good enough for Michael an’ Allison.'

‘Who says it was? It's what happened to them. That's all. Does that mean it was good enough?’

‘They seem to be doin’ alright.'

‘Aye. Ah think so. It wid seem so. Maybe they have what they were wantin’. But it's not what Tom wants.'

The realisation that they are talking about him gives him a strange sensation. He feels himself existing outside himself, as if he were somehow an event, happening in ways he doesn't know and can't control. He is aware of the solidity of his life in a way he hadn't imagined.

‘Ye know that, do ye?’

‘Don't you?’ his mother asks.

‘Ye're sure it's no’ what
you
want? Tryin' to make him somethin' he's not. For yer own sake.'

‘Ye know me better than that. Conn. If ye don't, who have Ah been sleepin’ wi' all these years?'

‘He seems happy enough in the brickwork. An’ it's money comin' in.'

‘Happy? Were you happy in the pits? Are you happy now? An’ Ah'm not tryin' to make him what Ah want. Just tae give him the chance tae decide what
he
wants. If he's a happy dustbin man, Ah'll be happy. But he'll be a dustbin man wi' vision. An' nothing'll curtail that, if Ah can help it.'

‘An’ the rest of us can plod on.'

‘What he does'll no’ detract from the rest of us. Just be an extension of it.'

He realises that his father has been suggesting they forget about his going to university and his mother is insisting that he will go. He feels strangely neutral about the question. He has thought
about staying on at the brickwork. He has thought about taking up the place he has been offered at university. Both seem equally acceptable or unacceptable.