The Kiln (5 page)

There were no tapes of Garfield's films, which was maybe just as well, for he feared looking at former magic and finding it had been reduced to a few tricks. But there was the book of John Garfield's life and it talked him through a part of that winter like a friendly ghost. If you're in the shit, it said, I've been there too. Remember the way I was? And he did. How he entered rooms as if he were challenging their contents; the jutting face that prowed bravely into whatever was happening like a ship cleaving unknown waters; the hurt puzzlement of the eyes looking into their own wrongdoing.

He faced a bad time and stared it down. John Garfield helped. But he was still left wondering how far he had travelled towards being whoever he really was.—

MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL
, Who the hell am I at all? He wondered how many times he had looked in a mirror for confirmation of himself. He was doing it again. He saw the reflection of the open suitcase that was behind him on the bed. His attempt at packing was a mess. Not only had he never learned to pack, he suspected he had never learned to unpack.

‘What are you staring at. Dad?’

Megan stood in the doorway. She was giving him her own stare, those remorselessly innocent eyes that made him feel he was facing a plenary meeting of the Spanish Inquisition.

‘Nothing, Meganio.’

‘You were so.’

‘No. Ah was just lookin’.'

‘You were so. You were staring and staring. Into the mirror.’

‘Ah wasn't really staring
and
staring. Ah was just staring. I was just checking I was there.’

That seemed to make sense to her.

‘This it. Dad?’

She held up his toilet-bag.

‘It is, it is. You are a total cracker.’

She came across and handed him the bag.

‘I put things in.’

‘Thank you, Princessa.’

He dropped the bag on the bed and, as he turned back, he noticed the self-containment of her standing there. He felt the utter wonder of her presence and he lifted her up and spun her in the air, laughing. She was smiling calmly. He set her down on the floor.

‘Is that all?’ she said.

‘Well. Ah suppose it'll have to do. Where's Gus?’

She shrugged and walked out.

He picked up the toilet-bag. He smiled at how well Megan had done. Then he noticed that she had also included Gill's L'Air du Temps. He laughed to himself and put the perfume on the window-ledge. He looked at the open suitcase. Was that enough? He could never tell. At least he had his one formal suit in it. Just in case. Just in bloody case. He thought of taking the suit back out, for packing it felt like signing the death certificate already. You should never welcome the bad stuff. If it wanted to come in, let it beat the door down. No. The suit stayed. Superstition doesn't change the rules, it just lets you refuse to learn them. You have to learn them. Would he ever learn them?

He crossed to the window and looked out at Grenoble. He fingered the bottle of L'Air du Temps. Perhaps Megan thought his uncertainty about himself extended to gender. Or did she see him as inhabiting the same not quite reachable place of certainty where he had sensed his own father to be? He hoped not. He hoped it was different for girls. He hoped it would be different for Gus, too. He hadn't even been able to tell his father about Cran, though he had wanted to.

Two feelings had held him back, instinctively. The first was
that it seemed unmanly. He was seventeen and had left school. He should be able to look after himself - too late to run home from the playground, picking hardened blood from your nostrils, to receive from your mother the sweet solace that the rest of the world is wrong and a plate of tattie soup that warms your insides like ointment for the soul, to receive from your father advice on the politics of fear and kitchen lessons on how to deliver a good left hook. There had to come a time when the womb was shut, owing to the fact of your being too big for effective re-entry. It was a pity, though.

The second was, paradoxically, that his father would have understood Cran and the cavernous brutishness where so much of his nature seemed to reside, littered with the bones of dead compassion. For part of his father, too, lived in those shadows. The very fact that his father would have recognised Cran, though he had never met him, had created in his mind a bond between the two men, one which excluded him. Somehow he must have sensed that you didn't gain admission to that dark brotherhood by invitation. You had to earn it for yourself. Somehow he had come to know it was his father most of all who blocked the entrance, shaking his head, acknowledging his own powerlessness to let Tam pass, implying with every spontaneous gesture of his nature that the only way past him was through him.

(There is a code of rules here I didn't make and don't control, he seemed to be saying, and the core of the code is this: no entry but by the force of your own nature. I will offer help but it will be weirdly codified help and it's down to you to crack the code. Take me on and win your entry. Don't and stay outside.)

IT IS SUNDAY MORNING

HE LIES AWAKE IN MICHAEL AND MARION'S BED
, luxuriating. (As usual on a Saturday night, they have been
staying at Marion's mother's.) He reflects on his talent for long, deep sleeps. He can do this even in the living-room with noise all around him. (‘If sleep wis brains, son,’ his father has said, not without a hint of jealousy, ‘you'd be a genius.’) He thinks of the girl he took home from the dancing last night. Marilyn Miller. It was pleasant - bruised lips and delicate adumbration of firm breasts. He has discovered the word ‘adumbration’ recently. He likes it. Adumbration. To adumbrate. He had done some adumbrating last night, but nothing more. Only adumbrators need apply was obviously Marilyn Miller's motto. Adumbration. One for the files. He would have to find an excuse for using the word in front of his father.

(‘Okay, smartarse, so ye've swallied a dictionary. Noo tell us whit ye mean.’

‘Look, Feyther, I'm just tryin' to adumbrate this basic idea.')

Marilyn Miller. She has an auntie who lives in Melbourne and it seems that this auntie once lost a baby. The night before the miscarriage, Marilyn's auntie dreamt that a nun stood at the foot of her bed, sneering and shaking her head. That is amazing, isn't it? A prophetic dream, one that's definitely got the edge on Auntie Bella's dreams about nocturnal visits to the shops. Isn't it strange how two dances with a stranger can open doors on to experiences you never imagined? People are amazing.

Marilyn Miller. He likes her but he doesn't think they'll be trying it again. He's pretty sure Marilyn would prefer it that way. Everything was fine between them but nothing was more than fine. Nothing really happened, no thunderbolts, no tidal waves in the blood. It was more like a school trip to the seaside where the water remained too cold to do more than paddle and there was shared conversation like stale sandwiches. He is glad she introduced him to her auntie but he and she parted without having really met. Sorry, I thought you were someone else. He doesn't know who she mistook him for. But he suspects that he knows who she wasn't. Margaret Inglis. He sighs and thinks about getting up.

And Sir Alexander Fleming died this year. Penicillin. It must be wonderful to have discovered something that benefits the whole world. You could really say that Fleming changed the
terms of human life. It's enough to make God get fidgety. And Fleming was born just a few miles from here, up the road in Darvel. An Ayrshireman did that. There's hope, there's hope. Tam remembers a newsreel where you saw Fleming in his laboratory. He was pottering about with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, like a man mending a fuse or something. He's seen his father like that when he was fixing a wireless or, in the case of Bryce the Grocer, blowing one up. He loves that image of Fleming. For him it's a symbol of the democracy of achievement. You don't need to have been born in a big estate or talk as if your mouth had piles or act pompously to achieve great things. Maybe it would be good to be a doctor. But would medical science ever discover an antidote to Margaret Inglis?

He gets up and pulls on a sweater and the trousers he was wearing to the dancing. He pads on bare feet downstairs and into the kitchen, where his mother makes him a cooked breakfast.

‘Let ‘im fend for himself! Breakfast's like a Jew's weddin’ in here,' his father is shouting through from the living-room.

‘Thank you. Pater,’ Tam calls back. ‘May I have the Bentley today?’

‘A kick in the arse. That's what ye can have.’

Ah, the sweet, domestic sounds of a peaceful Sabbath. He is flicking through the
Sunday Post.

He finishes his breakfast and decides that what he'll do is get the packet of ten Paymaster from his raincoat pocket in the lobby, go upstairs with the paper and have a quiet smoke, like a gentleman in his club. He never smokes in the house. He hardly ever smokes anywhere, mainly just at the dancing and even then only a few. Cigarettes are for him essentially a prop, only appropriate to certain social scenes. You really have to smoke at the dancing, he has decided. It's hard enough trying to camouflage yourself as a tough guy as it is. Go in there without cigarettes and it would be like wearing a blouse.

He has never smoked at the brickwork, it occurs to him. Would that help? Cran might have to take him seriously then. What could be more manly than giving yourself lung cancer? Anyway, Michael smokes and nobody will notice the difference of a little more smoke in the bedroom. And Tam has only recently begun to realise how good a cigarette tastes after food.

He rises and rinses his crockery and cutlery at the sink, laying them on the draining-board.

‘Here,’ his mother says. ‘You've got yer good trousers on. Who d'ye think ye are? Beau Brummell? Change them.’

‘Aye, Mither,’ he says abstractedly.

He hardly hears her. The thought of smoking at the brickwork has brought the image of Cran from the edges of his mind, where he constantly loiters, until he is looming darkly in the forefront. He is thinking that perhaps he
should
mention Cran to his father, as he goes to fetch the Paymaster from his coat pocket. He reaches absent-mindedly into his left-hand pocket, then into the right-hand one. He pauses. He thinks back through last night. He only smoked three. The insult of it jars him into action before he has time to think. He is standing in the living-room.

‘Here,’ he says.

The aggression in his own voice takes him by surprise. His father looks up from his newspaper, observes him over the top of his glasses.

‘Somebody's nicked ma fags.’

His father takes off his glasses. The newspaper settles, rustling across his knees. Tam is embarrassedly aware of the silliness of the ‘somebody’. There is only his father in the room. Marion is out for the day with her friends. His father's eyes haven't left Tam's face.

‘Ah wonder who it could be?’ his father says. ‘D'ye think yer mammy's started smokin’?'

‘No, but,’ Tam says, and he feels the lameness of his remark even before he makes it. ‘Ah bought them.’

‘D'ye want the money?’

‘Naw, it's no’ that.'

‘“Nicked” yer fags? Strangers nick, son. Families share.’

They stare at each other. Tam is cringing at the way he has created a crisis out of nothing. Suddenly, it's Cigarette Fight at Sunday Creek. Tam continues to return his father's stare because he doesn't know what else to do. But he has become sickeningly aware that his gun's empty. His father leans towards the hearth and picks up the Paymaster packet.

‘Here,’ he says. ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy. Ah believe this is your property.’

He throws the packet to Tam and, in having to crouch in order to catch it, Tam has the involuntary sensation of bowing, as before a superior force. He straightens up quickly but he still doesn't feel much taller than a bug. He despises himself for having been so stupidly mean as to grudge his own father a few cigarettes. Was he supposed to waken Tam up and ask permission? Seventeen years of providing for him hasn't earned his father the assumptive right to take a couple of fags when he feels like it? Oh, Jesus. Tam can't believe who he is, what a crummy person he can be. Will he ever get it right?

He stands uncertainly in the middle of the living-room. He struggles to find something to say.

‘It's okay, Feyther,’ he says. ‘You can have them.’

‘Naw, it's all right, son. Ah'll smoke the pipe.’

Anger would have been easier to take. The gentleness of his father's voice is very painful, kindness as whiplash. His father is reading the paper again, repeatedly pushing up his glasses with his forefinger as they repeatedly slide down his nose. Tam is still standing. His father glances up again.

‘It's okay, Tam. Ah've got the pipe here.’

‘Aye.’

The border is closed. He feels again that sense of his parents' dismay with him. What's their problem? ‘Where did we go wrong, Betsy?’ his father will say. ‘What did we do to deserve this?’ his mother will say. Come on. He's not an axe murderer - though if they keep this up, who knows? Tommy Borden with an axe … If they only knew some of the things he wants to do, fantasises doing. They should count themselves lucky, he has often thought. They should think about how some parents must really wonder how their children turned out the way they did.

He turns away and comes upstairs and shuts the door of Michael and Marion's room.

(Dear Parents of Attila the Hun
,

Where do you think
you
went wrong?)

BRIGHT SUNLIGHT INFUSES THE ROOM
. It says in the papers that this July could have the highest sunshine figure for any month of any year since they started keeping records in 1921. It certainly makes things look better. Seen in this light, the place looks like an advert for domestic life. The permanently set-up card table with its chequered cover, where Marion and Michael take their meals, resonates with sharp colours of red and white. The floral easy chairs with wooden arm-rests sit on each side of the fire. Michael and Marion have the only bedroom with a fireplace, because this is their living-room as well as where they sleep. The fire is cleared and set with firelighters and rolled-up newspaper and a few sticks and small pieces of coal, waiting for the first match of autumn. This looks like a good place to be.