The Kiln (18 page)

He laughs for real this time. Miss Kimberley as a sex kitten is a gloriously incongruous image, he thinks, like imagining
Auntie Bella in her underwear. Miss Kimberley, whom he has always liked, is short and dumpy. Her torso looks as blandly undifferentiated as a pumpkin inside the big costume jackets that she wears and the proximity of any male teacher makes her fluttery. But she has, he remembers, beautifully shapely legs. He suddenly feels guilty for laughing. Maybe she is quite sexy at that. Does this mean that he is able to see beyond sexual cliches or just that he is a sexual maniac, aroused by anybody female?

‘She was called Miss Kimberley.’

‘Nice name. So what are you doing these days? Apart from reading up on how to have a dangerous liaison.’

‘Ah'm workin’ night-shift in Avondale brickwork.'

‘Really? How do you find that?’

‘All right. Ah suppose.’

Except that I wish somebody would transport Cran Craig to Botany Bay. (He had looked up ‘cran’ in the dictionary yesterday: a measure of capacity for herrings just landed in port - 37½ gallons. How the hell did that come to be his nickname? Maybe it was the amount of blood circulating in his prodigious body.)

‘Hardly seems the ideal setting for an intellectual like yourself. Don't you feel out of place?’

‘Only when Ah push the bogey off the rails.’

She smiles thoughtfully at that. She is looking at him assessingly.

‘Listen,’ she says, serious now. ‘We're having a party soon. I'd like you to come. We'd like you to come. The others might seem like old fogeys to you. But I'm sure you can handle it. Will you come?’

‘Yes.’

He can't imagine why she would ask him and he isn't very sure what he is agreeing to but he can't think of anything else to say. Then he does.

‘Only thing is. As Ah say, Ah'm workin’ night-shift.'

‘Not at the weekend, though.’

‘Ah get Friday and Saturday off.’

‘Good. There will be
some
younger people there. It's 14, isn't it? Dawson Street?’

‘That's right.’

How did she know that?

‘All right. I'll drop you a card. Time and detailed directions and things. Time you came out into society, Thomas.’

She leans over and runs her hand gently along the side of his head.

‘Bye.’

She walks away, apparently oblivious to the effect she has had, like some kind of Superwoman who casually touches a building in the passing and doesn't realise that she has demolished it. Her touch judders through him like his small personal earthquake. It's all he can do to keep standing upright.

HE WOULD ALWAYS HAVE A WEAKNESS FOR PARTIES
. The sight of the living-room at Warriston made the thought ironic. This was some one-man party he was having.

This place is going to drive me even crazier than I already am, he thought. The dust on the ledges was beginning to make them look like indoor window-boxes. The fluff on the carpet drifted back and forth when he moved about, like tumbleweed. There was a cup on the mantelpiece that he couldn't remember not being there. If he looked inside, the coffee dregs would have hardened into porcelain. Like an archaeological site.

And he was its only archaeologist. Gently unearth the broken pieces of the past. Breathe on them softly, brush them delicately with thought. Let's see if we can make out any pattern.

Parties. Definitely parties. There had been some significant parties in his life. There was the one at Caroline Mather's house that summer. She met him in the street and invited him and he found Margaret Inglis again and was able to confront her with a plookless nose. But before that there had been the party at Maddie Fitzpatrick's. He had wandered around, awkwardly trying to talk to older people and feeling he had come to the wrong planet, until Maddie Fitzpatrick took him into a small room and read to him some of the poems of William Morris, of whom he had never heard. That was when he
knew
he had come to the wrong planet. He managed to escape eventually, clutching a very slim book of poetry she said he could return in the free week he had
decided to have between packing up at the brickwork and going to university.

There was the party Gill and he had not long before they separated. It had for him one moment definitive of how his life was going at that time. He had gone upstairs to see how Gus was doing. He would be fifteen then. He had his bed-light on and he was reading.

‘Hullo, Dad.’

‘Aye, kid. The noise bothering you?’

‘No. What's it like?’

‘It's like a party, I suppose.’

He sat on the edge of the bed. He noticed how big and raw-boned Gus was, his face two fiercely interested eyes around which a bundle of features hadn't yet set properly. His spiky punk hairstyle helped to make him look as if he had always just wakened into the world and was wondering where he was. The colour was pink this week. Tom loved those remorselessly questioning eyes. Sometimes he would tell Gus a fact that had become banal with familiarity for him and he would shoot him a look that seemed to be probing Tom for signs of insanity. Gus had a history of asking interesting questions. One of Tom's favourites was one he had asked him when he was two and a half years old: ‘Does God wear a tie?’ He had gone through a particularly long phase of calling Tom by his first name. In his first primary class the teacher had asked him who his best friend was and he had replied, ‘Tom.’ When she had asked if Tom was a little boy who lived near him, Gus had said, ‘No. He lives in the house with us.’ He was no longer on first-name terms with him but some of the friendship remained.

These days he was even more disconcerting in the way he switched roles on you. Just when you had him comfortably cast as an awkwardly immature teenager, his Doc Marten boots scuffed from playing football in the street, he would suddenly appear garbed in thoughtful solemnity and wanting to discuss the USA's role in Central America. That night he was in philosophical vein. The eyes assessed Tom compassionately.

‘You not enjoyin' it. Dad?'

‘No’ much, Gus. No' much.'

He nodded. They talked. It didn't matter what they talked
about. Having taken both of them by surprise by coming upstairs like that on impulse, he saw Gus somehow fresh, his eyes not fully returned from the imaginative distances his reading had taken him to. He didn't see just his son or a recurring worry. He saw an emergent young man, sensitive and thoughtful. He admired him. He was reminded of one night more than a year before when Gill and Megan and Gus and he had driven back from having Christmas dinner at Gill's brother's house more than ten miles away. The roads were snowbound and the driving had been slow and a strain, an unpleasant end to an evening he hadn't enjoyed. But when they got back, Megan and Gus and Tom had created spontaneously one of those meaninglessly happy times you will never forget. Sitting with Gus in his bedroom he remembered the poem he had written about it and misplaced somewhere. (‘He is one on whom nothing is lost’ - not even unpublishable poems.) It was called ‘Snowball Fight’. As they talked, the words of it played under their conversation in his mind like a descant:

Perhaps a part of Tom had already taken its leave of him, or at least of the way of life they had shared until then. But he gave no explicit sign of it, probably because he didn't know himself what had happened. He simply felt an undertow of sadness in the pleasure of talking to him.

When he said goodnight and come out on to the landing he didn't want to go downstairs just then. He went into Megan's
room and put on the light and sat on her empty bed. She was in her first year at Edinburgh University and she came back through to Graithnock only on occasional weekends.

Megan was a keeper of the past, which meant that her room preserved the recessive layers of her experience, like an archaeological site. You could still see the evidence of her babyhood in the first teddy bear she had ever had, sitting propped against the head board, badly beaten up by her affection but retaining those bright, idiot eyes that didn't seem to know that time had passed. Along one wall, where pop stars and film stars stared back at him, he could check the roll of her dream lovers. There was a mobile her first boyfriend had given her. There were old cards. There were books that went from
Black Beauty
to
Pére Goriot.
There was the mirror that had absorbed her growing's many faces and stayed as bland as water.

He tried to think of her in Edinburgh. She might be in a bar now or with a boy or reading a book. The risks for her appalled him. But she was strong and properly determined to work out everything for herself, including her mother and him. He trusted her. That didn't mean he trusted her to do what her parents wanted. He trusted her not to do that. He trusted her to live with what she did.

Feeling slightly elegiac about her and Gus as he sensed them growing away from Gill and him and into themselves, he wondered what they had given them. More specifically, he wondered what he had given them. The thought depressed him, for he could think of nothing definite to attach it to.

WAS THAT HIS AND GILL'S FAREWELL PARTY TO THEIR MARRIAGE?
How could you tell precisely when successive mutual disenchantments congealed into hopelessness? It was such a gradual process. It had probably begun many years earlier, as early as the party they gave the week after the dinner party with Elspeth and Brian Alderston, just before going to Grenoble. His dubiety about that one was probably an omen in itself.

IN SPITE OF HIS LACK OF ENTHUSIASM
when Gill had mentioned the party, he found himself caught up in the preparations. He made several trips to an off-licence to buy the booze, remembering piecemeal particular drinks that certain people liked. Gill had an impressive buffet set out in the sitting-room. The downstairs bedroom was the bar. The lounge was to be the orgiastic centre of the party, ringing with epigrams, awash with warmth and wit and muted sexuality.

It was a nice thought. He almost believed it for a while. Even when Brian and Elspeth Alderston arrived first, he didn't give up hope. It was true that they were to parties what a pail of cold water in the face is to euphoria. But he was already feeling the primitive thrill in the blood that comes from the presence of men and women mixing in a bright room, a muted tomtom. So his goodwill repaired perhaps a little of the damage he had done the week before. And as the other guests began to come, he started to enjoy himself.

He wasn't aware at the time that the party might be a kind of terminal experience for him, the end of something, the writing on the wall of the mind, although it might take him many more years to decipher it. He took pleasure in the early stages because he was so busy. He was welcoming the people and giving them drinks and making sure they knew where the bar was so that they could help themselves. His sense of the party was by pleasant proxy, like the smell of good food which other people are eating.

Once the preliminaries were over and he was able to be not merely a waiter but a participant, he found it harder to maintain a sense of enjoyment. Familiarity made of his eyes an X-ray plate in which he was aware of distressing symptoms in some of their guests. He tried not to see such things but it wasn't easy. There were depressing phenomena present which he couldn't avoid.

For example, Clive Cunningham was telling his jokes. Tom had heard two before he could get out of earshot. He regarded even two as a dangerous level. Fortunately he couldn't remember
them, which might mean he had escaped permanent brain damage.

Clive had decided that his role in life was to tell jokes. Tom hated set jokes, which were to humour what masturbation was to sex. Especially, he hated Clive's set jokes. They were all about girls doing it and ways of getting it and cuckolded husbands. He suspected that in Clive. The jokes were always accompanied by this big, deep, masculine laugh he had been practising for years. Laughter seemed to Tom one of the least effectively fakeable things in the world. But nobody had told Clive that.

Perhaps nobody had told him because he was six feet two and an ex-rugby player. He was standing like a barn door with a suit on, a whisky glass like a thimble in his hand. Two women and a man were his audience. They were laughing at the right time. The right time to laugh at Clive's jokes was when he laughed. Sandra Hayes, she of the remorseless intelligence, was laughing louder than anyone. Why do women accept such crap from men? Why didn't Sandra get a step-ladder and spit in his eye?

‘Have
you
heard this one, Tom?’ Clive said to him.

‘Aye, when I was ten.’

Clive laughed the laugh he probably wrote away to Charles Atlas for. He and Tom had an understanding: he couldn't stand Tom and Tom couldn't stand him. But at least he didn't attempt his overwhelming physicality bit with Tom. No doubt he could beat Tom's head in but no doubt he also knew that, even caved in, it would still work better than his.

Probably Clive's standing off from Tom related to their time at school together. Since that time, he knew that Tom knew that he knew (complicated are the rules of macho head-wrestling) that Tom was better at playing rugby than he was. Yet Tom gave it up. He suspected this had troubled Clive in some dark recess of himself. What fulfilment in life could Tom have found that was better than rolling about the ground on a bitterly cold Scottish Saturday, up to the arsehole in muck and with a fourteen-stone troglodyte trying to stand on your face?

He played rugby for only one season at school and scored a lot of tries. But he could never quite see the point of all that bodily contact. He was a fast runner and his keenness not to be groped by a lot of boys made him a very fleet wing three-quarter. But if
he could shake off tackles, he couldn't do the same with his sense that it was fundamentally ludicrous for thirty boys to spend eighty minutes in sweaty pursuit of what is, after all, a symbolic testicle. It was a manhood test he didn't believe in, a degenerate modern equivalent of knights trying to win their spurs - boys trying to win their balls. It was a good game, though, but not as good as football.