The Kiln (38 page)

Outside of that abyss, which none could fully know but those
who had to live in it, the rest of us were as responsible for our parents as they were for us. Most parents needed our forgiveness as we needed theirs. What we made of them was what we would become.

That was why he despised the contemporary fashion for grown-up children to wail against their parents, to exaggerate imperfection into abuse, to blame their individual problems on ‘dysfunctional’ families. All human beings were dysfunctional. Otherwise, they wouldn't die. If there was a God, depend on it: if this was His universe. He was dysfunctional, too. Perception is a choice.

You had to take responsibility for your own experience and not be intimidated by the abstractions others might try to impose on its reality. All his life, he had to admit, he had probably been writing letters in his head to an unknown woman. No doubt psychologists could have had a field day with that impulse in him -emotional inadequacy, inability to sustain a mature relationship, prolonged adolescence. If he thought they were wrong, one reason was because he believed he had had relationships as full as any psychologist had had.

Relationships that endured to the death could be impressive but they might merit more than sanctimonious paeans to the true nature of love. They might merit also questions. Constancy was a portmanteau in which could sometimes be found, among other things, the senile decay of habit, the drug of comfort, the fear of change.

He believed in fidelity. But final fidelity required some kind of final arrival. He was still travelling.

If the journey seemed to repeat itself at times, perhaps that fact wasn't of purely negative significance. There were two ways to see repeated behaviour, it seemed to him. It could mean that you merely repeated initially learned responses in subsequent situations that did not justly evoke them but had them superimposed through habit. Or it could mean that your initial response was a kind of primal discovery of your true instinctual self (before rationalisation) and, therefore, was something which you continued justly to obey. Your continued failures might not be merely personal but an expression of the failure of your experience to match what your nature needed. It
remained possible that your refusal to accept might be the truth of your experience, the most honest expression of yourself. To cure you of yourself was a way of killing yourself. Why should the definitive actions of your nature be regarded as necessarily a limitation of that nature? They were just as likely to be its ultimate expression.

The attempted discovery of a new self appeared to him a good way to lose yourself and pretend to be someone else. The best you could do was to redynamise who you were, not try to reinvent it. Not who were you but what would you do with who you were, how would you use it, with what honesty, what integrity, what justice? Not where do you come from but where are you travelling to? You had to keep travelling. He would.

HE SAT IN THE TRAIN
from Graithnock to Glasgow, on the first stage of his return journey to Grenoble. He was moving from the certainty of Michael's death towards the uncertainty of his future with Gill and Megan and Gus. The familiar names of the stations they stopped at renewed in him an old innocence.

SITTING BLEARY-EYED AT BREAKFAST
, he feels a slight pain in his ribs. This is a strange part of a strange day. He was wakened by his mother at six in the morning, an achievement roughly equivalent to resurrecting a corpse.

‘Ma ribs are murder, Mither,’ he says.

‘They will be, son. Ah had tae punch ye tae get ye wakened. Where is it you go when you sleep? Anither planet?’

He eats the ham and eggs slowly, gradually re-evolving to the stage of being able to masticate. It is still dark. The brightness of the familiar kitchen seems somehow poignant, a banal Eden from
which growing up is expelling him. The gas cooker is lit and its door has been left open, deputising for a heater. He remembers how often he sat at that lit cooker in the evenings when he was at school, doing his homework. He learned a lot of Greek verbs here, French phrases, the history of the Restoration. He read
Far from the Madding Crowd
in this room and here he was stolid, dependable Gabriel Oak and rakish Sergeant Troy and haunted Boldwood and here he fell abstractly in love with Bathsheba Everdene.

Here he discovered, unexpectedly, that his favourite homework was translating Livy. He used to take a sensuous pleasure in opening the book at the next passage for translation and having his jotter and pencil ready and his Latin dictionary and the piece of scrap paper where he would try to decipher the nuances of what Livy was telling him. Everything else would recede to a far place: the endless, only sometimes unpleasant argument that was his family, the hard, frosty streets of Graithnock, the wondering who he would be when he grew up, the dreams of beautiful and compassionate and understanding women, the goals he would score for Scotland.

There would be only him and the words and the ghostly, shifting presence of a man called Livy. He would make sure of literal meanings first. Then he would wait, doodling variants on the scrap paper. What was Livy
really
saying? He would coax the strange words towards a modern idiom. It amazed him how thrilling it could be. He was conversing with a dead man. When it worked and he thought he could hear Livy talking in a modern voice, he felt such awe, as if he were a necromancer. For there, in the kitchen of a council housing scheme in Graithnock, transubstantiated across almost two thousand years, was a Roman. He felt as if he could have touched his toga.

But, washing down the ham and eggs and buttered bread with hot, sugared tea, he thinks he regrets those monastic evenings. This is where they have led, to his first day at the University of Glasgow. He is terrified. He wants to stay in this small brightness, among objects so familiar he could live here by braille. But it is already too late. The strangeness of what is happening to him has transferred itself to everything else.

The oilcloth table-cover is scuffed with numberless lost moments. He would wish them back again if he could. But
the shapes they make are the hieroglyphs of a strange language, seeming more ancient and less decipherable than anything Livy ever wrote. The burning lines of gas jets on each side of the oven seem as ceremonial as processional candles. The room reflected in the dark window is as haunting as the vivid painting of a place where he has never been.

Even his mother, the most continual presence of his life, moving about the kitchen to do the things he has always seen her do, seems mysterious. She washes a cup and puts it on the draining-board and suddenly he imagines the action multiplied a million times, an infinity of small selfless deeds with which she has sustained their lives, in which she has immured herself. And he realises that he has merely assumed he knew this woman. He remembers an old photograph of her he saw recently, taken by a street photographer. She hadn't known it was being taken. She was just walking in the street. She looked so young and attractive and separate from any sense of her her family might have. Walking on out of that photograph, where might she have gone if it hadn't been for them? What longings, what possibilities has she quietly entombed in the daily tasks of living?

She turns and looks at him. She laughs and lifts the towel, coming towards him. She is drying her hands.

‘Ah don't think Ah'm up to this, Mither,’ he says.

She laughs again. She says what she used to say to him every morning before an examination at school.

‘You do the best you can, son. Nobody can ask ye to do more.’

He breathes out noisily.

‘Whit d'ye think, Tom? If ye fail, we'll disown ye? Ye've earned yer right to go. Go as yerself. Whitever you make of it will do us fine.’

She puts her hand on his shoulder and it feels like an accolade: arise. Sir Thomas. He does. He washes his dishes in the warm, soapy water of the basin. He puts them on the draining-board. He reaches for the dish-towel.

‘Here,’ his mother says. ‘Away an’ use yer head.'

It
is
time to go. He has to catch the 7.25 train if he is to make his first-ever lecture at nine o'clock. He brushes his teeth again, keeping his new university tie close to his chest with his left
hand as he leans over the hand-basin. Maybe cleanliness is next to braininess. He puts on the university blazer and the thin university scarf he bought from the money he earned at the brickwork, the bizarre result of sweating over hutches in the rain and a wild, confused night in a kiln and sweary conversations about women and football and the state of the world. He stares at himself in the mirror. He can't believe in the image he sees there. He might as well be going to a fancy-dress party. Still, maybe appearances, by sympathetic magic, can create the reality. He collects his coat from the lobby.

‘Hey, Big Yin.’

His father is speaking from the living-room. Tam is surprised. He had thought everybody else was still in bed.

Tam looks round the door. His father is sitting in his armchair in old trousers and a zip-necked sweater. His feet are bare. He is smoking in front of the dead-ash fire. He will kindle it soon. Tam wonders if his father has left the kitchen to Tam and his mother deliberately, as if this morning has needed a special ceremony. His father looks tired and thoughtful. Maybe he hasn't slept much.

‘You feart?’ his father says.

Is his fear so obvious?

‘Well. Ah don't feel great.’

‘Everybody's feart. At least you're facin’ yours. Yer grandfather wanted me to go on at the school. Ah didny want tae. Ah told maself it wis because Ah had more important things to do. But Ah think Ah wis just feart to learn ma limits. An' Ah've had to learn them anyway.'

Standing in the doorway, he is embarrassed. His father looks so dismayed with himself. He shouldn't be.

‘Son,’ he says. ‘We're all feart o’ the world. We lie in bed at night an' dread the things that might happen. The biggest man in the world, if he's got a brain, will live in fear. He just learns to control it. You'll have to do the same. Sometimes, son, ye just have to shout Geronimo and jump.'

They smile at each other.

‘Cheers, Feyther.’

‘Good luck.’

His mother opens the outside door for him. He lifts his Uncle Josey's briefcase from the floor of the lobby. It has new notebooks
in it and some pens and the first textbooks he will need. It feels like a talisman in his hand. (You may be Johnny Appleseed in the stone groves of academe but you've got your own lineage. You once had an uncle that owned a briefcase.)

‘Good luck, Tom,’ his mother says.

‘Thanks, Mither.’

He hears her close the door behind him. It is still dark and it is cold. He buttons up his raincoat with one hand, awkwardly.

‘Hey, Einstein!’

It takes a moment to locate the voice. Michael's head is dimly visible projecting from the upstairs bedroom window. The hair is rumpled.

‘Go slaughter them.’

The window closes and he walks on. The briefcase still feels like a prop in his hand. He never used it at school. He had carried a canvas, ex-army satchel with a shoulder-strap. That way, he didn't look pretentious passing through the housing scheme. A lot of workmen used them for carrying their pieces to work. He could still feel he belonged to where he came from. But, though the coat covers the blazer, the briefcase seems to him to be flashing ostentatiously in his hand. It was given to him after his uncle's death because his uncle had more than once said to other members of the family, ‘Tam's going to achieve something. Wait and see.’ It was passed on to him like a posthumous commission. Now the responsibility of it is heavy to him.

THAT WAS THE SUMMER OF THE KILN
. He knew it over then. No other summer would be the same as that.

THAT WAS WHEN
Senga gave him the gift, so precious at the time, of her kind silence. It didn't matter how roughly it was wrapped. That was when he had a summer passion for Margaret Inglis. That was when he had an affair with Maddie Fitzpatrick
for three days and decided to commit suicide for two hours. That was when his mother had the strength to shape his life towards more freedom, when his father respected his strangeness, when Michael and Allison and Marion hovered protectively but inconspicuously around his days.

THAT WAS WHEN
he made many fools of himself but in the end didn't want to disown any of them. They had been ways of trying to come nearer to himself - gestures in search of actions -and, therefore, ways of trying to come honestly nearer to others. Afterwards, he might laugh at them but it would be laughter between friends, for the boy he had stupidly been was related to the man he would spend the rest of his life hoping wisely to be. The boy had been earnestly trying to emulate an adult the man would probably never manage to become. The man might constantly change the forms the attempt would take but the content for those forms would always have its source in the energy of the boy.

THAT WAS WHEN
he had his first awareness of experiencing the kiln, an accidental place which became a mythic centre in the mind - action in which you discover you, the self learned in happening beyond the lies of the word and beyond prevarication of the thought, the repeated point where existence hardens into being or breaks down into flux. The kiln had been the shifting nucleus of his summer. The kiln was not only in Avondale Brickwork. It was between Maddie Fitzpatrick's legs. It was in his head. It was where you found who you were. It was where he divested Cran Craig of his fearsomeness through the intensity of his own fear, where, by seeing Maddie Fitzpatrick clear, he saw himself more clearly, where a partial truce with his family earned him a partial truce with himself, where he began to compact into who he was.

THAT WAS WHEN
he began to see the justice of his father's baffled rage, the quiet and gracious stature of his mother, to understand at last his uncle's refusal to the death to surrender his love for others. That was when he learned he came from people and a place that were enough, when the uncommemorated names he lived among seemed to give him all the genealogy he needed.