My Life as a Man (2 page)

By the time we’d walked all the way into Argyle Street it was after four o’clock. With all that fresh air, they were hungry and decided to go into the café in
Woolworth’s for something to eat before they caught the bus home to East Kilbride. I don’t know why I went with them. I was hungry, of course, from the fresh air, but I wasn’t all
that far from home. Truth is, I’d enjoyed the excitement of the day, the bustle. We led a quiet life, Eileen and I.

They got fish and chips and a pot of tea. I was tempted but I stuck to coffee and a piece of cake.

When we were settled at a table, Tom said, ‘You know what I was thinking as we were coming back along the road there?’ He shook his head. ‘I was thinking, we never learn. From
Aldermaston on, doesn’t matter how big the crowd is, the government does what it wants.’

‘That’s no excuse for not trying,’ Margaret said.

‘Maybe it’s time to hang up our boots,’ Tom said. ‘Leave it to the younger folk.’

‘Anything for an argument. You know fine it’ll always be worth trying for the children’s sake,’ his wife said. I realised from the sharing quality of her smile that she
assumed I had children, too. I didn’t correct her.

‘Maybe human beings are too stupid to worry about.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say!’

‘And there’s no sauce,’ Tom said. He got up and went back to the counter.

‘He’s a worrier,’ Margaret said. ‘If it wasn’t this, it would be global warming. Sitting brooding’s no good for you. You have to get out and do something.
Isn’t that right?’

‘To be honest with you, this is the first time I’ve ever been on any kind of march,’ I told her. ‘I’m not what you’d call a political animal. I wouldn’t
be here if it wasn’t for my wife.’

‘It’s often the way. It’s natural for a woman to care more than a man.’

I wasn’t sure how true that was, but didn’t feel strongly enough to argue about it.

Tom came back with a bottle of tomato sauce. He banged the bottom of it a couple of times to put some on the edge of his plate.

‘Harry says he’s never been on a demonstration before,’ his wife told him.

‘It’s amazing how many people are the same,’ he said. ‘First-timers like you. I’ve been puzzling my head to think why. Why do people care so much about whether or
not we go to war with Iraq? I’m not talking about the usual suspects like Margaret and me.’ Abstractedly, he took his wife by the hand, a public gesture of affection which seemed to
startle her. ‘Or the ones who’d turn out for anything as long as it was anti-American. But we’re being told there are a million people on the streets down in London and millions
more in France and Germany and Italy and all over the world. Why is that? Do you know what I think? It’s the millennium.’

‘It can’t just be that going to war is wrong?’ his wife said.

‘That, of course,’ he said with a touch of impatience. ‘But the sheer
scale
of all that’s been happening.’ He shook his head again. ‘No, I think people
wanted things to be different with the end of the Cold War. We’d all been frightened for so long: waiting for the end of the world. And then the Berlin Wall came down and just for a year or
two everything looked better. I think all of this’ – he waved a hand as if the crowded pavements outside were part of the same great demonstration – ‘is pure disappointment.
It’s saying, I know we can’t stop the madness, but we can tell history we didn’t like where we were going. It’s one way of saying sorry to the future.’

‘To the children,’ his wife said.

Their sincerity made me uncomfortable. ‘Time for me to be getting off home,’ I said. ‘The wife’ll be wanting to know how it all went.’

‘Tell her it was worth it,’ Margaret said.

It wasn’t often now that I travelled on a bus, and so I enjoyed sitting on the top deck on the way home. I watched the tenements fall behind and saw the tall blocks of the high-rises in
the distance, and remembered my boyhood in a room and kitchen and later in one of the houses in the schemes they’d built after the war to decant the poor out of their poverty; the excitement
of having an inside lavatory and a bathroom and a garden at the back. And now I was going home to a house, bought after we got up the courage to come back to Glasgow, with a wall at the side that
enclosed a garage and a yard behind it and a hedge and a lawn and another hedge and a garden of roses right at the end. We’d lived there ever since, happily, oh, ideally happily, though we
had acquired from that terrible time with August and Beate a habit of holding our breath and we continued to hold it even when there was no need, as if only by keeping still would we be safe. And
so all the causes and the politics and what people marched and demonstrated about had passed us by, and it only occurred to me as late as this that it might have been for my sake, not hers.

Quarter of an hour later I was stretched on the floor beside her. She must have got up to tidy the tray away. A plate and a broken cup were by the wall where they had been thrown from her as she
fell. All day she must have been alone there while the crowds were gathering, while the speeches were being made, while I walked in the sun. I clasped her hand with its poor bent fingers and waited
as if she might open her eyes, though I knew she never would or ever could again. The curtain was drawn still against the morning and in that shadowy light all the days I had lived became one as I
lay bereft.

He liked to cook, so there was one way I was lucky with him. He didn’t have a big range: fish and chips, toasted cheese with a poached egg on top, scrambled eggs, mince and tatties. As for
what he made that night, that’s gone; not that it could possibly matter, though I’ve tried to remember. Probably not the mince and tatties: cooked up in a pot with turnip and carrots,
that took time, and his detour up Maryhill Road to the library had made him late. Whatever it was, it would have been good; everything he made tasted good. But I shoved my plate away, maybe took a
mouthful or two, maybe stirred my fork round in it, for sure shoved the plate away. I remember the way he looked at me when I did that. I should have been hungry. I’d been alone in the house
since four o’clock. Chances are there would have been bread and jam; probably I’d stuffed myself on bread and jam.

He ate one-handed while he read. I stayed at the table even though I wasn’t eating. When I caught him glancing up at me, he nodded at the pile of books and said, ‘Anything there you
fancy?’

And he meant anything, though every one of them was out of the adult library. I could look through whatever was there, no rhyme or reason to what he chose, not that I could see, all kinds of
books caught his eye. Often, impatient, he’d pick up and lay down book after book, so that all of them went back unfinished. I used to wonder what he could be searching for that was so hard
to find.

‘No,’ I said.

‘You haven’t looked.’

‘I don’t need to. It’ll be rubbish.’

‘Where have I heard that before?’ It was a word my mother used a lot. Shaking his head, he went on before I could open my mouth. ‘Found another one about King
Arthur.’

‘We’ve finished with him.’

‘So what’s your teacher got you on now? I’ll look next time I’m in the library.’

‘Nothing.’ Why was I angry? Maybe I was tired of coming into an empty house.

He pulled out a book from the pile and turned it so I could see the cover.

‘I was on my way out when I spotted it on the returns shelf. Don’t know what it’s like, but they’re all in there, Arthur, Gawain, Lancelot, sitting around in their tin
underwear waiting for a knock at the door to go off on an adventure.’ He pushed it over to me. ‘Have a look, Harry.’

I pushed it back without a glance and got up to put on the wireless, too loud, I expect; that was a bad habit of mine. I’m pretty sure he sat on, reading at the table. What I remember is
waking up during the night with the noise of the outside door slamming shut. Lying in the dark in the recess bed in the kitchen, I heard my father’s voice in the lobby and then my mother
answering him. The voices weren’t angry or loud, and listening to them I fell asleep again. As usual, by the time I was up in the morning he’d gone to work.

When I got back from school, I looked in the bedroom, half expecting to see my mother hitched up on the pillow with a cup of tea, and a fag in her mouth, but there was only a tangle of blankets
on the empty bed. In the kitchen, I made myself a piece and jam, took my father’s seat at the table and picked up the book he’d left there for me. Because of the crown on his head, you
could tell which one was supposed to be Arthur in the picture on the cover. He looked older than the others, and as if he had a lot on his mind. Lancelot was easy, too, long blond hair surrounded
by light as if someone had left a door open to the sun. The book was too old for me, not a book of stories at all. Like a penance, I persisted with it, until I was left with a handful of words:
medieval, chivalry, and in a footnote
The Romance of the Rose.
The main thing was that I’d looked at it. I wanted to be able to tell my father when he came home that I’d looked
at it; but he didn’t come home, not that night or any other. Later we heard that he’d given up working on the docks, and then that he’d been called up. For a while, every time I
walked past Maryhill Barracks I wondered if he was somewhere on the other side of the high wall with its ugly shards of broken glass.

My mother said he must have been planning to leave. ‘He wouldn’t have the guts to say anything to me about meeting another woman. I should never have agreed to marry him. When I told
him I was pregnant, “Marry me, Nettie,” he said, and like a fool I did.’

She went on like that for years afterwards, whenever she thought of it. I learned not to argue about it, but no one else ever said anything about him being with another woman, and if he’d
been planning to leave us what kind of sense did it make that he’d brought home all those books that night, and among them one for me? Why would he have done that?

When I went barefoot into the kitchen, he was in his underpants at the sink filling the kettle. His name was Alec Turner, though I thought of him as the Hairy Bastard, and we’d shared the
house since my mother walked out on him a year earlier, when I was seventeen.

‘What happened to you? You fall out of bed?’

‘You might have given me a shout,’ I complained. ‘I’m starting work this morning.’

He gave me a look that would have soured milk and went out without saying anything. I was on my second cup of tea when he came back, opened the cupboard under the sink and started to scratch
around in the rubbish pail.

‘What do you call that?’ Down on his hunkers, holding it up at the stretch of his arm to stick it under my nose.

‘What would you call it?’ I asked.

‘I’d call it empty. That was for my supper last night.’

‘Oh, aye.’ There didn’t seem anything to say to that. I put the kettle on the ring and lit the gas.

‘You listening to me, Harry?’ He smelled of bed sweat and sweet aftershave in the morning. It was a smell I’d hated since at fourteen I’d seen him for the first time and
realised my mother must have brought him back with her from the dancing the night before.

‘Are you listening to me, you wee shit?’

When I turned round, I was looking down on his bald patch. Hair everywhere else, not only on his chest, but a pelt of it on his back and little tufts on the back of his fingers. Plus smell. Not
that he wasn’t clean enough; no aroma of piss, nothing like that. Jungly smell. Maybe it went with being such a hairy bastard. Me Tarzan, you Nettie.

‘I want you out of here, boy.’

‘Where am I supposed to go?’

‘You should have thought of that.’

‘Before I ate your bloody corned beef?’ That came out wrong, with a wee touch of panic, not tough at all. He’d given me crap before about throwing me out, but this time was
different. It’s odd how I knew that right away.

He’d been palming a key for the front door and now he slid it into sight with his thumb, tricky as a conjuror. Mine had been on top of my jacket on a chair beside the bed, ready to pick up
on my way out. When I went to check, it wasn’t there. And he’d dumped everything out of the drawers all over the bed.

‘You’ve ten minutes to pack,’ he said, following me in.

When I’d finished, I looked at the shelf of books. You can’t carry a shelf of books on your back. One, though? Maybe two? There were some it would hurt me to leave. And what about
the library books? Something to remember me by. Getting postcards about fines would drive him crazy.