The Kiln (12 page)

When he announced the new prefects at the beginning of fifth year and made Tam one of them, an appointment not universally approved of by the staff, he made it very clear to the assembled pupils that being a prefect didn't necessitate the wearing of a blazer. As the only casually dressed person in a roomful of blazers, Tam appreciated the public declaration that he was not a pariah.

‘Your reason for dropping Greek,' Mr MacGregor says. ‘I seem to recall it was not unconnected with your ambition to be a writer. Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes. I remember your saying that it was interfering with your reading. The Greek was. I suggested that perhaps your reading was interfering with your Greek. I think you replied that if you weren't going to be a writer you weren't going to be anything.' Mr MacGregor smiled briefly to himself. ‘Does this present decision relate to the same . . . compulsion?’

‘I suppose so, sir.’

‘I sometimes think, Docherty, that winning the Rector's Essay Prize has not been good for you. It seems to have given you delusions of grandeur.’

Tam doesn't mention that he has always had them.

‘And now you're going to be a writer. Just like that?’

‘No. I realise it might take a few weeks, sir.’

Tam could have bitten his tongue. He hasn't meant to be smart-arsed. This was meant to be more like a joke between
friends. But they aren't friends. Why is he always confusing conversational styles, mixing social genres?

‘I don't think it's a laughing matter, Docherty.’

‘No. It's just that I've been trying to write for years, sir.’

‘You think you'll have more time at university?’

‘Well, at least I can concentrate on things that don't interfere with my writing.’

The pomposity of it seems to make Mr MacGregor realise that he is dealing with someone who is more or less certifiable.

‘Good luck, Docherty,’ he says. ‘You'll need it.’

He returns to his papers. Tam turns at the door. Mr MacGregor has replaced his glasses.

‘Mr MacGregor. Thanks for your understanding.’

Mr MacGregor looks over his glasses.

‘No, Docherty,’ he says. ‘Not understanding. Bafflement. Thank me for that. It has made me accommodating.’

And as soon as Tam comes out of the room, he begins to doubt his decision. He spends the rest of the day feeling nostalgic for the future he has given up, realising in each of the classes he visits that he will not be here next year. He can no longer understand why he is leaving school until he is stopped by Dusty Thomas in a corridor. Dusty has heard the news.

‘Docherty.’ The way he says the name makes it sound synonymous with dung beetle. ‘You're a disgrace. After all this school has done for you, you're preparing to scurry off rather than show your gratitude in the only way you could. By doing well in the Bursary Comp. I've watched you for five years, Docherty. You know what you are? You're an iconoclast. Do you know what an iconoclast is, Docherty?’

‘I think so. Isn't it—’

‘I'll tell you what it is in your case, Docherty. It means someone who can't say yes. You've done well in the highers. You've got the possibility of a year's more intensive study ahead of you. Culminating in the Bursary Comp. A lot of people have contributed to give you a chance. And you reject it. Go back to your housing scheme.’

‘Ah never left it, sir.’

‘Oh, how true. You know something? I've a good mind to bounce you off that wall.’

It must be something about the way he looks. Beef Bowman. Mr Inglis. Now even Dusty, who looks as if walking fast would give him a seizure.

‘I wouldn't do that, sir.’

‘What?’

‘I might bounce back.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Ah thought you were threatening me, sir.’

‘I was in the Second World War, sonny.’

‘Are ye sure ye didn't start it, sir?’

Dusty's long stare decides to congeal into distant contempt.

‘Leave today, Docherty,’ he says. ‘You have no place in this school. Leave today.’

In spirit, he does. Dusty has made sure of that by telling him that, after five years, the school only knows him as an adjunct of itself. He feels doubly alienated. The school rejects who he is now but only after educating him into the rejection of who he was before he came here.

‘
HAVE YE DONE IT YET?
’

This time they are standing in Bank Street. The bright summer has been suspended for the moment. A dim Scottish sun is out, less day realised than day potential, as if God has left on the pilot light. People move above the street in mezzotint. He has bumped into Sammy Clegg and they stop to talk.

Gentle, stubborn, lost Sammy - one of those to whom life has dealt a yarborough: thirteen cards in his hand and not one above a nine. (Tam had thought up that image for Sammy and was pleased with it. It was the main reason he was grateful to his Uncle Josey for having taught him how to play bridge, however inexpertly.) He knew Sammy from primary school where he had early on shown promise of being a loser with a streak of defiance in him, as if he knew his role in life and refused all assistance. A definitive moment in Tam's sense of him had occurred while they were still in infant class.

A group of them are filing into school at the end of playtime
- little, regimented, clockwork creatures. The infant mistress is walking beside them, clapping her hands in time to their marching feet. Tam is near the end of the line and, as those at the front turn a corner of the corridor, the infant mistress stops clapping. Confused noises are heard off. Whatever is happening up there feeds itself back through the line unevenly as a refusal to go on. The children bringing up the rear are bumping into those in front. Unexplained sounds are occurring, gasps of shock and muffled cries of amazement and the hysterical voice of Mrs MacPherson, the other infants' teacher. Always eager for experience, Tam breaks ranks and, under cover of the confusion, turns the corner of the corridor to see what's going on.

Sammy is standing in the corridor. (Presumably he had slipped into school before the end of the interval, a heinous offence in itself but not half as heinous as what he has done once he got in.) Mrs MacPherson is doing what looks like the rain dance she told them about the previous month. The infant mistress. Miss Stevely, is screaming. She is terrifying when she screams. She is terrifying when she doesn't scream. She has rimless glasses and a chest as bumpy as an ironing-board. On Tam's first day at school, when she peremptorily asked who would be wanting milk, he didn't put his hand up for fear of her rage when she found out he couldn't pay for it.

‘Go home, Samuel Clegg!’ she is screaming. ‘Go home this instant.’

‘Naw,’ Sammy is saying.

This basic exchange is repeated several times without either of the teachers daring to lay hands on Sammy. The reason for this reluctance is simple. Sammy has been caught short in the corridor and a leg, a stocking and one of his boots are liberally encrusted.

Eventually, perhaps because the flaunting of authority is an unhealthy spectacle for the young or perhaps because of the risk of death by smell, they are marshalled again into obedience and marched past Sammy in a wide detour, while he stands there like a Hun surrounded by Rome.

Sammy has improved since then, it has to be said. He has also outgrown his unbrushed teeth phase, when his smile had been like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. By the time they
are talking in the street he is, like Tam, seventeen and very conscious of his appearance. He is scrupulously clean and his hair is carefully groomed into a pendulous quiff at the front and what is called a ‘D.A.’ at the back. He is wearing a Teddy-boy suit, blue in colour, long of jacket, short and drainpipe of leg, with brothel-creeper shoes, the soles of which are thick crepe.

Yet in spite of his sartorial elegance, the appearance of being a sophisticate, Sammy is still a loser and internally a mess. He must be one of the few people who know less about practical sex than Tam does. He is the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
of sexual ignorance. Tam suspects that's the main reason he doesn't want the conversation to stop this day.

Since they have left primary school - Sammy to go to Junior Secondary and Tam to go to Graithnock Academy, the Senior Secondary - they have met each other occasionally and casually. Their intermittent exchanges have acquired the guardedness of sentries talking across the borders of separate countries. Education can do that to you, Tam thinks. Your head emigrates and you're a full citizen neither of where you were nor of where you are.

Even this accidental meeting with Sammy Clegg in a Graithnock street holds something of the strangeness of this summer - a small tableau of one of the many confusions of Tam's life. He is partly a stranger in his own town. Sammy is where he has come from. Sammy's potential life is a chart Tam feels himself abandoning and he envies Sammy his sense of direction. For what does Tam have to put in its place?

Sammy is an apprentice joiner. Tam is supposed to be going to university at the end of the summer. He has been accepted for an arts course but, being the first of his family ever to have seriously contemplated university, he doesn't honestly believe it will happen. It isn't what his family does. Sammy wears his Teddy-boy gear like a uniform. Tam is more eclectically dressed, with a jacket that doesn't match the trousers, one of his brother Michael's old shirts and slip-on shoes. Sammy reads the sports pages. Tam is wrestling with the
Journals
of Kierkegaard and has written a long poem about the nature of life. Sammy will marry soon and have children and fight occasionally and get drunk and do his work. What the hell will Tam do? The familiar shape of
Sammy's life seems to Tam like a lost Eden and him living east of it, wondering if it is already too late to get back in. Maybe he should just keep working in the night-shift job he has taken at Avondale Brickwork for the summer holidays and forget about university. That way, his life could be as uncomplicated as Sammy's.

But how uncomplicated is that? It certainly doesn't look too uncomplicated. Even in his self-absorption, Tam at least manages to see the mirror image of his own searching for self in Sammy. Sammy hasn't a clue who he is either. Tam is wondering if anybody has. They stand there and have one of those slightly desperate conversations by which the lonely and the lost refurbish their image of themselves in each other's eyes. Sammy tells him about his apprenticeship, spitting a lot and swearing more and more as he talks himself towards the tradesman he will be. Tam makes a lot of jokes about Graithnock Academy, beginning to be amazed at how funny his school life has been.

‘Tam,’ Sammy suddenly says.

Tam knows the pretence of shared identities they have been maintaining is about to collapse. Sammy's tone has a shy suspiciousness. Tam waits.

‘Tam,’ Sammy says again. He looks down Bank Street and then furtively back at Tam. Talk French.'

‘Come on, Sammy.’

‘No. On ye go. Talk French.’

‘What would Ah say?’

‘Anythin’.'

‘Come on, Sammy.’

‘They learned ye it at the school, didn't they?’

‘Aye.’

‘Well. On ye go. Ah just want to hear what it sounds like. To hear you sayin’ it.'

Tam's not sure why he is so embarrassed. He thinks it is perhaps because it feels like being invited to pick someone's pocket. Sammy's wonder is there before any reason for it. Whatever Tam says is going to impress him. But what is the point of words that aren't your own, unearned experience? Language without dynamic content is meaningless, just an oral conjuring trick. It is said he lay with her.

‘Le livre est sur la table,’
he says quietly.

‘Sorry?’

‘Le livre est sur la table.’

Sammy might be looking at someone from the Amazon basin. He stares at him for some time. He shakes his head.

‘Whoo,’ he says, awestruck. ‘So?’

‘So what?’

‘So what does it mean?’

‘The book is on the table.’

‘The book is on the table,’ he repeats slowly.

‘That's what it's sayin’? The book is on the table.'

His reverence could not be more if the book had been
War and Peace
and Tam had written it. He is still shaking his head and it is as if, unknown to himself, he is refusing Tam re-entry to the past they have shared. Tam has become something different. Like someone remembering an old password, Tam comments on a passing girl.

‘Ah know what Ah would like to do to her.’

This is less than entirely accurate. The liking is there but the knowledge is sadly absent. Still, it has the desired effect on Sammy. The wonders of language are forgotten.

‘What a body,’ Sammy says. ‘Have ye done it yet?’

He manages to flannel his way out of a direct answer but, thinking of going to the brickwork tonight, he reflects that there are some situations you can't fake yourself out of.

‘
DON'T SIT THERE
.’

The voice comes out like marsh mist, so obscure with hoarseness that words appear as blurs in it. Your ears have to peer to catch the meaning. The face from which the voice emerges is battered and stamped with varied experience, an old suitcase with a lot of labels on it. The labels are no longer legible.

‘Ho no,’ a sing-song echoes.

This time the speaker's face seems to float on his lumpy, awkward body, as if his head is loosely anchored to his being. The face has the indeterminate age of the simpleton, lives in a limbo of features where, if maturity can't properly take hold,
neither can aging. When he looks at you, his eyes gley over your shoulders, seeming to communicate with someone you can't see and usually suggestive of mysterious mirth. It is as if the rest of the world is a joke only he has rumbled.

‘Ho no.’

‘That's the King of Avondale's seat,’ a small man says.

He doesn't seem to belong here, as if he might just be taking shelter while waiting for a bus.

‘Might as well sit in the electric chair,’ a big, fresh-faced young man says.

He is wearing a long, Teddy-boy jacket, drainpipes and working boots.

Tam is relieved he isn't the one who tried to sit in the chair. It was Jack Laidlaw who did that. Tam makes a sympathetic face as Jack comes over to sit beside him. They are glad that they know each other. Jack is still at Graithnock Academy, a year behind Tam. They have been no more than acquaintances but they feel as close as conspirators here in the strangeness of their first night at the brickwork. They feel like migrants arrived together in a foreign country.