The Kiln (9 page)

‘I just wish I would hurry up.’

‘Maybe you shouldn't. Your self hasn't formed yet. Your social identity is still intermittent. Fragmentary. And nature keeps coming through the gaps. What's wrong with that?’

‘It can be embarrassing for a start.’

‘Embarrassment's all right. Never confuse embarrassment with shame. Embarrassment's when you can't bear others to see your secret self. That's a healthy instinct. Shame's
when you
can't bear to see your secret self. One's maintaining an honourable contract with yourself. The other means you've broken that contract. So be embarrassed.’

‘That's easy to say.’

‘Come on, Tom. A red face isn't fatal.’

‘Not so far.’

John laughs his thin laugh. Tam likes him so much, he always wishes he could laugh better. It's too small, that laugh, as if he knows he has restricted rights in this area. Tam thinks of his Uncle Charlie laughing like a chaotic symphony. If laughter's an orchestra, John Benchley is playing the triangle in it. Maybe that's what happens living with Mrs Malone.

‘There's an essay by Harold Nicolson. ‘In Defence of Shyness’.
‘A
Defence of Shyness’? Anyway. He makes the point that shy people often have further to grow up to. I think there's something in that. If you know how to conform too quickly, you lose your originality. You can start to mimic other people instead of finding out who you are. Don't undervalue awkwardness. It's often just the truth clumsily refusing to be denied.'

‘I must be full of the truth, then.’

‘Like those times you were talking about. When you lose touch with the practicalities of what's going on. You see things out of context. That's you catching experience raw. Not dressed up in the purposes to which we insist on putting it. That really is a low-grade mystical experience. You're in touch with something beyond other people's preconceptions. You're seeing things fresh.’

He certainly seemed to be doing that all right. He is even
doing it while John is talking. He doesn't want this moment to shift. He fears that John will rise and put on the light. He wants the darkness and the gathering sunset and the murmur of their voices in the stillness. It doesn't matter so much what they say. It is that they are talking, making their small human communion in the dusk.

He wants to say something to keep John talking, to maintain his concentration. But he is baulked by two feelings. The first is petulance that John has referred to his having ‘low-grade’ mystical experiences. It is as if he has failed some kind of exam. The second is the very embarrassment he has been talking about.

He has thought of an example of what John called ‘nature coming through the gaps’ and ‘the truth clumsily refusing to be denied’. It is a fairly crass example but nevertheless relevant, he feels. He thinks of his erections. They can happen anywhere - on buses, at the dancing, standing in a shop. One had even come upon him at his brother Michael's wedding.

HE IS DANCING
with his Auntie Bella. They are doing a slow foxtrot among the circling relatives, smiling sweetly at each other, when one movement out of rhythm make their bodies come together. He is caught instantly in one of the frames of the American comics he used to read: Bam! Pow! Zowie! Hector is between them.

(‘Touch of flaccid tit on the port bow, Cap'n. Reporting for duty.’

‘Piss off, you dead head. It's ma auntie. She's ma mother's sister-in-law. She's the auntie of the groom, for God's sake.’)

But he remains adamantly there, nosing blindly about, trying to find out where he is required. Tam is too horrified to notice if she's noticed. He thinks of feigning illness But if he collapsed, that would only advertise the situation. And if he walks off the dance-floor with a small baton in his trousers, he might get lynched for mental incest.

He starts to dance like Quasimodo. Observing his new,
crouched style of dancing. Auntie Bella probably thinks he has gone insane. But that is better than her realising the terrible truth. Then he has the inspiration of becoming suddenly drunk. That would be convincing. He is a boy who has been playing at being a man in the relaxed atmosphere of the wedding. As he mugs outrageously, he hopes nobody notices that his face is really screaming, ‘Don't look at my trousers.’ When the dance ends, he completes his performance by jocularly leaving the floor in the manner of Groucho Marx walking. He subsides on a chair, puts his legs under the table and waits for the rest of him to subside.

He can't cope with this. When he has settled down, he goes to hide in the bar in case another woman asks him to dance. His Uncle Charlie buys him a half of shandy and looks at him.

‘Anythin’ wrong, son?' he says.

He has always been able to talk to his Uncle Charlie and he is so guilty he has to find a confessor.

‘Something terrible happened there,’ he says. ‘Ah was dancin’ with ma Auntie Bella. And Ah got a hard-on.'

He waits for his uncle's reaction to establish a scale of horror for what he has done.

‘Ah hope she noticed.’

‘Uncle Charlie!’

‘Naw, Ah hope so. She'd be tickled pink. Ah bet she doesn't have that effect too often on yer Uncle Davie these days. She's probably in the toilet puttin’ on her make-up. Singin' “Oh, how we danced on the night
they
were wed”.'

Then he sang the next bit: ‘We vowed our true love though a word wasn't said.’

‘It was terrible. Ah'm frightened to dance with anybody. In case it happens again.’

‘If it does, give us a shout. Ye can pass it over.’

‘Ah'm that embarrassed.’

‘No. Ye just think ye are. See when it doesn't happen? That's when ye'll be embarrassed. Come on, kid. Relax. A limited number of boners in any man's life. Enjoy them while they're there.’

Uncle Charlie has always had a rough ability to put things in perspective for him. But he also has a strain of gentle wickedness.
Later, when the singing has started and Auntie Bella is innocently belting out ‘Lay that pistol down, babe’. Uncle Charlie taps him on the shoulder.

‘Ye think she's tryin’ to tell you something, Tam?' he says.

BUT IF HE HAD BEEN ABLE TO TELL HIS UNCLE CHARLIE
about the problem, he cannot tell John Benchley. He is a minister of the church. He has told Tam to call him John but that isn't the same thing as saying, ‘Use my carpet for disgorging the sewer of your mind any time.’ Yet he is tempted.

Fortunately, he delays so long that John stands up and crosses to put on the light. The dark crystal of the room is shattered and his memories of the wedding dissolve. Magic has again dissipated into mundanity. The harsh brightness makes this just a bleak, modern room, its coldness thawed somewhat by ageless fire and the books that lag its walls. John goes over to the sherry decanter, comes to the small table beside him and fills him out another glass.

And that's another thing. In that simple action he is conscious yet again of the contradictory cross-references in his life. How will he ever reconcile them? Sherry? Every time during these talks John gives him two sherries. He has wondered if John is trying subtly to civilise him beyond his working-class habits while, by restricting his intake to two glasses only, ensuring that he doesn't corrupt him in the process. He is a very measured man.

This is the only place Tam has tasted sherry. Holding the stemmed glass in his hand with its hoard of yellow light, he feels its strangeness. It glows mysteriously, a prism of contradictions in which he sees himself. He drinks sherry and talks about mysticism and has an erection at his brother's wedding and talks rough with his friends and is supposed to be going to university and wants to be a writer and lusts after strange girls and wonders what he is doing here. He starts to talk again, donning the camouflage of normalcy.

‘What about church attendance?’ he asks. ‘Numbers okay?’

‘Well, we're under no pressure to build an extension.’

‘Maybe television affects it. I thought Billy Graham would have helped.’

‘The crusade had a big enough impact while he was here. But I certainly don't notice any lasting effect on my congregation. Maybe Graithnock's particularly stony ground. Though I don't like to think so. Perhaps that's just making excuses for myself.’

‘You've done well. The congregation must be bigger now than before you came.’

‘I don't know that I've done so well. I've managed to reduce the congregation by at least one.’

He looks at Tam sadly.

‘That wasn't you. I just became an agnostic’

‘You make it sound so positive.’

‘I think it is. I think it's the only thing to be.’

‘You trying to convert me?’

He looks so forlorn, Tam feels guilty. He is almost sorry to have become an agnostic. John Benchley has mattered to him over the past couple of years. His gentle wiseness has saved Tam, during his frenetically religious phase, from going quietly mad with impossible holiness. When he was fifteen, he had wanted to become either a minister or a priest - a priest for preference, because that was harder and more demanding and seemed to him to reduce the complexity of life to one massive, final gesture. Attending his church and talking to him, Tam had realised how ill equipped he was to become the apprentice saint he had hoped to be. He finds rectitude boring. Girls fascinate him. How could he forswear life before he has tasted it?

No, he can't regret having become an agnostic. In a way, John has helped him to become one. Much as Tam likes him, he has to admit that he is glad to have forsworn the religious life if John is an example of what it does to you. He seems to Tam like someone who endures life as if it were influenza and hopes to get over it soon. Maybe his generosity to others relates to his belief that we are all ill with living and in need of psychological medication. Maybe it's not so much a careless gift of largesse as a measured bartering of mutual inadequacy. Can even kindness have dark and twisted roots? Does everything have dark and twisted roots?

His confusion is more or less total. He might as well be back
in primary school, faced with one of those forms on which the unanswerable question has appeared.

FATHER'S OCCUPATION:

MAYBE THE PROBLEM IS GENETIC
, he would think. He looked at himself with some of the soap still on his chin. The small round mirror he was using for shaving looked like a porthole through which, as he kept moving to get the angles right, he seemed to see a version of himself who was drowning. Maybe that was why he didn't bother to shave every day, to avoid having to see the drowning man he didn't seem able to save. Or maybe it was just another expression of his social isolation at the moment, a rehearsal for being a down-and-out. Or maybe it was because he was more and more aware of the resemblance to his father.

As the shaving soap was removed, there kept looming out at him a past he wasn't sure he could move beyond. Was there a Docherty gene, or maybe a Mathieson one, that condemned him to perpetual failure to fulfil himself, an inability to decide what he ought to do or what he ought to be? Was he sentenced to be like his father in that respect? Or like his Uncle Charlie?

His mother used to talk more than once of a recurring moment she had learnt to dread. It was when she would go upstairs to get ready for bed and his father was already there, lying with his head cupped in his hands.

‘Betsy,’ he would say, his eyes gazing at the ceiling as if it were the promised land. ‘Ye know what Ah've a helluva notion o’ tryin'.'

And she would scream silently. Another money-making project was threatening their lives.

No wonder the uncertainty of what his father was had troubled him. It must have been like living with X the unknown. After
leaving the pits he seemed determined to try everything. When Uncle Josey challenged him for being a working-class entrepreneur, he said, ‘Negative capitalism, Josey. Ah'm tryin’ to get the wealth intae the hands of the workers. Then we can share it out more fairly.'

The most intense expression of his confusion with his father always came at primary school. Every so often they were given forms to fill in. He hated forms, always would. But he could always handle these questions easily enough, except for one. He always checked the form over first before writing anything down, to see if that one dreaded question was there, and it seemed it always was. The question simply said ‘Father's occupation’ and then a colon and a space to put your answer in. That was an insoluble space for him. He hated that space.

He used to steal glances at his neighbours' forms. It seemed to be for them the easiest question in the paper. Storeman, they'd write. Joiner. Plumber. Fitter at Mason's factory. What the bloody hell is ma feyther? He took venomous delight in swearing in his head towards him. Why did everybody else know what their father was and he hadn't a clue? The bastard. What was he trying to do to him? He made him feel like a dunce.

He would go out to the teacher's desk and begin an elaborate, apologetic mumble. At four o'clock he'd be out of the school like a sprinter - there were no devious routes home taken on those days. He was confronting his mother at five past four, his teeth bared in an imitation of his father. ‘What,’ he once said, feeling as he said it how clever the expression was, ‘is he this week?’ He could be bitter about his father.

Sometimes his mother could answer the question and sometimes she couldn't. Sometimes his father didn't seem too sure himself. He would ponder, picking his way round unimaginable obstacles, and he would say something like. ‘Tell ye what, son. Jist say Ah'm on for maself.’

‘The boay canny say that,’ his mother would say. ‘He needs to say something specific’

‘Unemployed,' his father would say.

Eventually, he found his own way round the problem. He knew his father had been a miner. But that was very specific. Panic can make you understand context in an exact way. (He
picked up a lot of words from his mother. She once told him words were power and he took the thought into himself like a secret weapon.) You're either a miner or you aren't. His father was obviously not a miner any longer. He didn't have a lamp for his bunnet and he didn't come home black. Anybody could see him and find that lie out easily.