must have been behind what had seemed to him laughable whimsy. He saw the reason for it. His mother went away and his father was left with something that had lived inside the banter and the cliches all this time, quietly doing its work. And nobody had paid much attention. Not even Charlie, himself. It was all done so neatly and skilfully, you could hardly tell. Now, six years later, with his mother married to someone else and living in another town, his father was dying quietly in this room and it wouldn’t be noticed. That other married couple somewhere else could not be connected with this husk of a man dying here. No one would notice or see any connection, except Charlie. He noticed. He sat staring at his father, seeing a connection between him and those other two, somewhere in a brighter room.
‘You’ll no’ be like me, though. You’ll stick in, son. You’ll get the education an’ the good job. You’ll make somethin’ oot yer life. Ah ken ye can dae it, son. You’ll have the university an’ the education . . .’
So that was what he had been left with, a mouthful of shibboleths, a few magical words that he kept muttering like an ‘open sesame’, that he was passing on to Charlie as if they were the keys to all the doors he had always found closed, had bled his fists against. That was how he had been left to finish, mouthing a few empty incantations, broken and bemused, surrounded by the painful mystery of his ‘failure’. He wasn’t just allowed to die. A man had to die. That was nothing. But nobody had the right to destroy a man before he died. And he had been destroyed. This wasn’t the way he should have died. It had been made this way. This wasn’t something just happening now. It must have happened a long time ago, and no one had noticed. A man had had everything taken from him, had been destroyed, and nothing had been done.
‘You’ll be a’ right. Charlie. Wi’ a university education. You’ll no’ be like me. The guid jobs. The big money.’
The last will and testament, a few words they had taught him painfully, punishing him when he neglected their importance. That was all he had left. When Charlie thought of the man his father had been and realized what he had been made now, and then thought that it had all happened in the utter isolation of his lonely self, he seemed to understand something for the first time. He knew what it must have been to be his father. And the insight was blinding, seared his mind, cauterizing it clean of every other thought. The injustice of it cleft his mind like lightning, and something vague and terrible followed in its wake, like distant thunder. But he could give it no shape, could form no definite thought from it as yet. Only one bitter word kept hammering on his mind as on an anvil. Bastards. Bastards. But what it was forging there he did not know. He just sat looking at his father, branding that image of him on his thoughts, and the small wooden carving on the bedhead above him, a cross inset in a diamond, stamped itself on his mind like a hieroglyph of hate.
His father’s voice was petering out, but he was still trying to talk on, as if it mattered. He had lost the grip he had been keeping on his pain and his body was visibly racked. Charlie thought of the agony he had suffered to wait and talk to him. And what could Charlie say that could be commensurate with what his father had suffered? Nothing. He felt more bitter than he had ever felt before. He choked with inarticulate rancour. This was so wrong. His father was completely mistaken. But he had neither the time nor the words to tell him so. Nothing Charlie could say to him would make any difference. Speech dwindled to meaninglessness dropped into this chasm. Words withered in his breath. This was beyond talk. Something else was necessary. Something else.
Charlie just wanted his father to sleep now. That was all that could help him. As if from a great distance, he heard a car draw up outside the house. The front door was opened. Footsteps came slowly up the stairs, and Charlie felt that he was in a room where they could never join him. As the doctor came in, Charlie’s father reached out to hold on to Charlie, as if not wanting to be gagged with morphine.
‘Ah’m talkin’ tae Charlie,’ he said.
He was groggy with pain. Charlie barely noticed the doctor. He had hold of his father’s hand in an incongruously formal gesture of handshake.
‘It’s a’ right, Feyther,’ he said. ‘Ah hear ye. Ah’m listenin’,’ pushing back the pyjama sleeve. 6Ah know whit ye mean. Ah know it, Feyther. Ah know.’
The doctor came forward. Come on, Charlie thought, give it to him. Let him sleep. It’s over for him. But not for us. Not for us.
‘God bless ye, Charlie,’ his father said. ‘God bless ye.’
John stood in the doorway awkwardly. The needle searched a second in the puckered skin and submerged. Charlie felt the hand go rigid and relax, as if passing its pain into his. The lips kneaded themselves in silence as if trying to say more. Then the mouth went slack. He was asleep.
Chapter 4
HE NEVER RECOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS. AS THE DAY progressed and as the family, making from time to time pathetic pilgrimages upstairs to his room, sensed him going inexorably from them down a lengthening corridor of cold and clinical fact, the practical requirements of the situation impressed themselves on John. Most of the immediate family knew that their father was within a day or two of dying and had been calling in at the house each day or so to find out how he was. In the late afternoon John left to go round them all and inform them that his father was not expected to last out the night. It was a laborious business and he had to be careful to omit no one who would expect to be told. To many, such an oversight would be an offence that no bereavement could extenuate. Even grief had to be practical.
He was gone a long time and he was hardly back before the first of the mourners followed on his heels. For an hour after that they made a solemn, uneven procession into the house. There was an indefinable sameness about the way they filed upstairs, as if all their thoughts were dressed in uniform black. Every negotiable chair had been taken from other parts of the house and placed in a wide semicircle round the bed and when there were no more chairs left they sat on cushions on the floor or squatted on their haunches against wall or wardrobe. New arrivals were greeted with a muted murmur, a slow sough of sound in which no words were decipherable, a communal sigh which drew the newcomer into it as if their grief were swollen by his. The room filled slowly till it brimmed with people. At other times they met each other only fitfully, in street or shop or at the football or on a quick visit to borrow a tool or bring a little news. Each had his own concerns. For each, habit had laid private roads that none of the others frequented. Old familiarities that they had had with each other in their youth were neglected, became overgrown in disuse. Each grew apart into his separate life. Often when they met in the street they would greet each other almost grudgingly, like toll-tax paid for roads they didn’t use. Some did not even like each other. Some remembered the bitter word or imagined slight and filed it away for ever in their minds under the appropriate name. Some were merely indifferent. But all came together unquestioning for this, like amoebae in reverse. And their presence seemed to assume a single pulse that moved in time with that of the man who was dying-
No one spoke. Someone might offer round his cigarettes to those who were nearest him. Then they were lit and smoked, with the lengthening ash tipped into cupped hands. Small gnats of sound and movement flicked at the grave stillness from time to time. Someone coughed, and the sound was gagged with silence almost at once. Someone eased the position of a leg that hurt irreverently. Someone was picking fragments of clotted dust from the turn-ups of his trousers. For the body had to be occupied, was a troublesome encumbrance here, too skittish to submit for long to this solemnity. Hands moved of their own accord, roamed into pockets, furtively searching for occupation. Feet tapped on empty air, forgetting where they were. Eyes studied palms, escaping through an old scar to the past. It did not matter that the body misbehaved. No movement lived long in the face of that awful quiet. Only the small metal clock was insistent, relentlessly whittling the seconds from a life.
They sat on through the evening while outside the changing sounds recorded the time in the street. Children clattered past on imaginary hooves, shooting from inexhaustible guns, their voices changing from whoops to raucous argument because someone refused to be dead. A lawn-mower whirred spasmodically. The whistling of an ice-cream vender shifted deceptively, farther and nearer, elusive as a grasshopper. Sounds became less frequent. The voice of a strident