And the Land Lay Still (17 page)

‘That’s your opinion,’ Jean said.

‘We’re just no used tae it.’

‘
I
never will be.’

‘Borlanslogie’s near Glenallan, isn’t it?’ Mike asked.

‘Geographically, it’s just ower the hill,’ Adam said. ‘In every other sense, they’re aboot a million miles apart.’

‘I grew up in Doune,’ Mike said. ‘Just over the next hill.’

‘Ye’ll ken what I’m on aboot then – but only up tae a point.’

‘If you represent Borlanslogie you must be Labour?’

Adam nodded. ‘A few years ago I might have been a Communist but the CP’s getting thin on the ground even in a place like Borlanslogie. And you?’

‘I’m not in any party,’ Mike said. ‘I’ve thought about joining the SNP, because I believe in independence, but I prefer being, well, independent.’

‘Belief in independence,’ Adam said. He cast his eye over the assembled company. ‘There’s a lot of that aboot. Is it the same sort of state of mind as belief in God?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t believe in God.’

‘So what else do ye believe in? Socialism, capitalism, fairies?’

There was an aggressive directness to his questioning but the glint in his eyes charmed Mike. He stammered and gave a foolish response.

‘I believe in Scotland,’ he said.

‘What does
that
mean? Do ye think there’s anybody that
disna
believe in Scotland? Or is the Scotland ye believe in like Brigadoon, no really here at all?’

‘Well, we’re not free and independent, so I suppose in that sense it isn’t here, not yet anyway.’

‘
I’m
free and independent,’ Adam said. ‘And I believe in Scotland tae, but my Scotland’s real, here and now, whereas yours –’

‘Sssh,’ said Jean, because Catriona had started to sing.

Mike had heard her sing before in Gaelic, but never alone, and never with such confidence. It was a slow, aching lament and although he didn’t know what she was singing about he felt the pathos of it. And at the same time he felt that slight embarrassment of being in a room full of non-Gaels listening to a Gaelic song. How much longer would it last? Were they all being too deferential? Not
deferential enough? If they understood the words would the song lose its mystery and be revealed as banal and sentimental? And should they worry about such things?

Catriona finished and there was applause, and then Walter sang and the usual round proceeded. Between songs Adam and Mike talked. Adam knew from Jean who Mike’s father was. What was that like, having a famous father? Mike said it was fine, he didn’t see much of him anyway. ‘And your mother?’ ‘The less I see of her the better.’ Every time he spoke of her he betrayed her. Adam’s father had died when Adam was six, in a mining accident; his mother when he was eight, of pneumonia. Mike felt like a spoiled, selfish brat. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was a long time ago,’ Adam said. He had a twin brother, Gavin, they’d been very close when they were boys, they’d had to be. They still got on well. ‘We’re no like we were, but we’re no bad.’ ‘What changed?’ ‘This and that. Maistly this. We grew up, I guess. What aboot yersel? Dae ye have brothers or sisters?’ ‘No,’ Mike said, and he remembered asking Freddy Eddelstane once what it was like, having a sister, and it struck him with a sudden, unexpected force that he would have liked one. ‘I’ve got a sister,’ Adam said. ‘Ellen. She’s my cousin really, but efter oor mother died Ellen’s ma took us in so we grew up thegither and I ayewis think of her as my sister. She’s a journalist. Actually she’s writing a book just now. She stays oot at Joppa. Maybe ye’ll meet her sometime. Ye’d like her.’ And Mike wondered why he said that, and what he meant by
maistly this
, and why they were so carefully circling each other.

He excused himself and went to the toilet. He’d hardly spoken to anybody else since he arrived. Adam hadn’t made any move to get away. Was something, could there be something, about to happen?

On his way back across the room he spoke to Catriona. ‘That’s the best I’ve ever heard you sing,’ he said. ‘I’ve been learning Gaelic pretty intensely for two years,’ she said. ‘Soon I’ll be speaking it like a native. That’s a joke, Mike. I
am
a native, I just didn’t have the language before. But the more I’ve learned the more I think I must have heard my grandparents speaking it when I was wee. I think I don’t know a word and then it just pops up from somewhere. They thought they weren’t speaking it in front of us but they were.’

‘Why wouldn’t they speak it in front of you?’

‘They were ashamed of it. Or, at least, they didn’t think
we
should have it. The future was English. My granda’s dead now, but last year I went to my granny and said to her, in Gaelic, why did you hide it from us? And when she realised how much I could speak she started crying. She said they’d thought it was for the best. Gaelic would handicap us. But now I speak nothing but Gaelic to her and she loves it. I’m learning loads from her. I’m not fluent yet, but I’m getting close.’

Mike felt a sting of jealousy that she had rescued something so deep in herself that it had barely been there. He asked her about her song and she said it was the song of a woman to her former lover. ‘She says she’ll never stop loving him even though he’s deserted her. And she sings of his beauty and her grief, and how she’ll not take another lover as long as she lives, and then, in the final verse, she apologises for not being good enough for him and – and this is the bit that breaks the heart – gives him her blessing to go with another. All in three minutes,’ she added. ‘Olivia Newton John, eat your heart out.’

He could have read much into her explanation but there was nothing to read. It was nothing to do with him. She looked happy and strong and confident. ‘It’s good to see you, Catriona,’ he said. ‘You’re looking great.’

‘And you too,’ she said. ‘And, you know, you shouldn’t be too shy over there. I was speaking to him earlier. He’s a very nice man, I think. And he’s gay.’

‘How do you know?’ he said, suddenly hopeful.

‘Because I have a track record on this, remember? And anyway, he told me. Go for it, a’ bhalaich,’ she said. She landed a kiss on his cheek and turned away to speak to someone else.

Adam was supposed to be staying the night with friends in Marchmont. They’d given him a key so that he could let himself in whenever he liked, but when Mike said he was thinking of going home Adam said he’d see him along the road. Catriona, noticing them leaving together, called out, ‘Oidhche mhath, a’ Mhicheil,’ and gave Mike a not very discreet thumbs-up. And so they went. They reached the infirmary, where their roads should have parted, and Mike said about the beating he’d received crossing the Meadows, and Adam said he would walk the long way round, and they continued down
to Tollcross. They’d got on to politics, and Adam was going on about devolution, which he wholeheartedly supported. The Bill for a Scottish Assembly was making its snail-like way through Parliament, and Adam was vitriolic against those in his own party who were trying to destroy the whole project. ‘The assembly’ll no be perfect,’ he said, ‘but it’ll be better than nothing.’ ‘Aye, it will.’ ‘And better than the shite we put up wi in Westminster.’ ‘Aye, it will.’ ‘And once we hae it they’ll never be able tae take it away.’ ‘No, they won’t. Are you coming in for a coffee?’ ‘Aye, and another thing is …’ ‘Adam?’ ‘What?’ ‘Shut up, would you?’ And they went into the close, and up the stair, and somewhere between the street and the flat their hands clasped and Adam said, ‘Actually, forget aboot the coffee.’ And in the morning he had to take his borrowed key back to his friends and shamefacedly – or so Mike likes to imagine when he thinks about it – let himself in just as they were sitting down for breakfast.

§

Adam was a busy man, steeped in politics. He’d been an official in the health workers’ union before he was elected as district councillor for Borlanslogie, and he was a key figure in his local Labour Party branch. Still, he managed to come through to Edinburgh often after that first night. Most Saturdays he’d arrive in the late afternoon, and they’d eat in or go out for a drink or to a party, and on Sunday buy the papers and spend the morning in bed reading them, with bacon rolls and mug after mug of tea, and make love with sunlight invading the room and Joan Armatrading playing on the cassette player. Or they’d drag themselves out of the flat and go to the National Gallery or an early feature at the Cameo, or just for a walk round the city. Precious times. Mike still thinks of them with fondness.

But there was a problem. Probably it was there from the start, in the way Adam framed his questions in that slightly condescending manner that first night at Jean’s. And probably Mike saw it but chose to ignore it, because there was something comforting in the rough paternalism. Adam was eleven years older and never disguised his greater experience of life. He seemed to know about everything – in particular everything concerning the history, music,
art and literature of Scotland that Mike’s education had entirely omitted. Mike was embarrassed at how little he knew.

‘I have some catching up to do,’ he said.

‘Aye, well, we all hae tae start somewhere.’

‘But I’m so ignorant.’

‘So was I once. Ellen, she was a demon for finding things oot when we were bairns. Gavin and me, we just wanted tae be ootside, playing football or whatever, but Ellen was aye reading. I thought she was stupid but we were the stupid ones. I was aboot fifteen before I saw that, and from then on it was me and Ellen, baith o us wi oor noses in books, and Gavin was ootside on his ain. It took me years but I eventually caught up wi Ellen. Ye could dae it if ye applied yersel.’

‘What, catch up with you?’

‘Aye.’ And they both laughed, because neither of them believed it.

‘That’s when Gavin and I began tae go oor ain ways, when we were that age,’ Adam said. ‘I kent I was gay, though we didna call it that then, and he kent it tae, and for a lang time he couldna reconcile himself tae the fact that we were twins yet there was this fundamental difference between us. But we’re fine noo. He’s all right, ye ken, he’s my brother.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s a lecturer in Politics at the university here. Ironic, eh? He ended up studying mair books than I ever did. Disna sound like himsel ony mair but we still get on. Ye’ll meet him sometime.’

‘You said you knew you were gay?’

‘Aye, of course I did. Kent it as soon as I kent onything aboot sex. No that I said anything tae onybody, forbye Gavin, and later Ellen. It wasna easy in a place like Borlanslogie but there were others tae, ye just had tae ken where tae look. How tae look.’

‘So when did you first have sex?’

‘Aboot then. Aye, I would hae been fifteen. We did it in the moonlight, up on the bings. A man would go oot for a smoke at night, just say tae his wife he was away for a walk, and ye’d meet up there. There was nae hairm in it. It was harder for them, though. They
had
tae be mairrit. And they loved their faimlies, maist o them, same as onybody. But they wanted this other thing, and sae did I.’

‘I didn’t know about myself,’ Mike said. ‘Not for ages.’

‘Ach.’ Adam shook his head. ‘What a waste o time. Ye were brought up tae believe ye should like lassies, that’s all. Nae wonder ye were confused. They
wanted
tae confuse us. Dae ye think your average straight person wastes a lot o time wondering aboot what way they are? They just get on wi it. And sae did I.’

‘Well, I didn’t,’ Mike said. ‘And look. Everything comes to he who waits.’

‘Bollocks. Suffer on earth and ye’ll get your reward in heaven? To hell wi that! Anyway, how could ye no hae kent, gaun tae that school ye were at? There must have been plenty opportunity.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘I bet it was, if ye’d looked.’

§

Eric had proposed to Moira, and she had accepted, the same night that Mike and Adam got together. For a whole year the Tollcross flat hummed with contentment. Eric and Adam had little in common but they tolerated each other when they met. Two things they did share were self-confidence and a reality-defying faith in Scotland’s footballing prowess, but in this they were not alone, especially not then. It was 1978, the summer of the World Cup in Argentina. Whatever differences might have divided them, Eric and Adam were united in their conviction that Scotland was going to win the competition.

It’s easy, Mike knows, looking back, to see Argentina 1978 as the surreal rehearsal to the political events of 1979. Even Karl Marx might have struggled to determine which was the tragedy and which the farce. Would the outcome of the devolution referendum of March 1979 have been different if the national team had triumphed, or even performed with reasonable dignity and adequate skill, over those nine humid days of June 1978? Such speculation is purely academic now, and maybe there never was a connection, but both are indelibly stamped with the phrases ‘what if?’ and ‘if only’. And Mike has no interest in football! He regards it as a circus of deception, a mad and useless expenditure of emotion, physical energy and money – yet even he cannot prise the two episodes apart in memory. And even he could not – quite – avoid being caught up in the excitement.

In the end the Scottish team in Argentina exhibited very little dignity, and only occasional flashes of skill, and just one burst of brilliance as the team crashed out of the competition in the first round. First was the fire, fed by all but a sober few in the media, that blazed briefly then turned to ash against Peru; then was the ash that was pissed on by Iran; and last was the fire again, miraculously brought back to life against the Netherlands and as suddenly snuffed out. Mike carries in his head two images of that short campaign, each game of which he watched with Adam, Eric and Moira on the television in the flat in Tollcross. The first is of Archie Gemmill’s goal against the Dutch, the only time Mike truly understood the meaning of the phrase ‘the beautiful game’. The other is of the hapless manager, Ally MacLeod, with his head in his hands during the game against Iran. And they
are
images, one forever in motion, one forever still. No words could be more articulate.