dark. Someone whistled jauntily up the dark street, his heels clanging metallically on the pavement. A drunken man sang a broken verse of nostalgic song. Milk bottles put a full stop to the night in someone’s house. Still they sat on, watching the man in the bed, who lay in troubled sleep, drawing up strained buckets of breath from an emptying well. Occasionally, he gasped and shuddered like a landed fish, hooked mercilessly to his own dying. They sat like children in church, concentrating on a solemnity that was awesome, incomprehensible, and not to be evaded. All evening no one had moved except one woman who rose every so often, wet her forefinger in whisky, and rubbed it round the dying man’s mouth. This was Aunt Ella, a condor in bombazine, circling round their lives, alighting where trouble was, feeding on the carrion of other people’s lives. She was Uncle John’s widow, one of the family’s professional mourners. Broken marriages, accidents, illnesses, deaths, they were all meat to Aunt Ella. She came in corbie-black and took her perch in sick-rooms and broken homes, zestful in grief, avid in consolation. She knew what had to be done in times of trouble the way other women knew how to turn the heel of a sock or the best way to remove a stain from clothes. Now she was officiating here with her bustling, busy sadness. When she got up to perform her ritual again, a harsh voice stopped her half-way to the bed.
‘For God’s sake, lea’e him alane!’ Charlie said.
She sat back down and closed her hurt upon him like a door. But her pursed-lipped umbrage was lost on Charlie, whose attention barely flickered from his father. All evening he had sat concentrating on his father dying, not missing an agonized breath. He was hardly aware of other people in the room. Only his father lying on the bed was fully present to him. All other thoughts and awarenesses were incidental, mere doodles on the margin of his mind. Everything that happened in his father’s body was transcribed to Charlie’s mind, the soft hiss of air oozing from the raddled lungs, the features knotting on a sudden pain and unravelling slowly, the frequent spasms that took possession of the body, causing it to convulse as if labouring to give birth to death, each macabre detail meticulously recorded. It was as if he was keeping an account. Why he should do this never occurred to him. But his mind of its own volition entered everything that took place as if against some future reckoning.
After Aunt Ella cloistered herself in her hurt pride, Charlie’s father lay easy. Every time the whisky had been put to his mouth, he had girned under its touch, like someone not wanting to be wakened. Left alone, he seemed less troubled, except when the pain reached its spasmodic climax. The pain seemed to attack him like that, to hit him suddenly, rack his body for a time and then leave him. His body wrestled on the edge of the grave and it was impossible to tell whether it was struggling to hold on to life or gain possession of death. Often it seemed as if he couldn’t die, as if all the pain was because he couldn’t make his body yield to death. It went on into the early morning, fierce bouts of pain, until the watchers sensed the last struggle coming. They rose and gathered round the bed as if to lend him their strength. Hands reached out to touch him. Pain arched him upwards from the bed and they took him in their arms. Some of the women were moaning and keening, urging him to die. For a long moment, wet with their tears, he hung on to life by a thin chain of breath that rattled in his throat until the last link snapped and he was gone. Death shook the body as a dog shakes a rabbit and then dropped it, broken and empty, back into their arms.
In that moment all the grief that had stayed dammed in them during his dying seemed to break. It was as if his death, which had been happening through many hours, had all the time been unexpected. Women wept terribly. Their faces, abandoned to the distortions of grief, ran with tears and their mouths gave out an inhuman wailing. It reminded Charlie strangely of a word he had always remembered from a Latin textbook at school – úlulare – to wail. The sound they made was what it meant. The men stood silent, though some of them too were crying quietly, trying to comfort their women. Gradually they filed past the bed, laying their last respects like wreaths beside him. Some touched him gently.
Downstairs, the women went into the living-room and sat nursing their sorrow and commiserating with Elizabeth, who was inconsolable. The men went through to the kitchen. It was done by ritual, as though the two groups had separate functions to perform. A bottle of whisky was produced from somewhere and drinks were distributed. They made a strange tableau, standing sombre in the little kitchen, as if drinking a dark toast to the dead man, while on the table the uncleared remains of a meal testified to the normalcy that would soon resume.
‘He wis jist wan o’ the hardest wee men in Kilmarnock in his day,’ Charlie’s Uncle Hughie said, his eyes moist with memory.
The others nodded and some said ‘Aye’, and they listened, looking at Hughie looming above them, while he talked of his prowess as a fighting man, which in his young days had been considerable. Hughie was brother-in-law to Charlie’s father, married to his older sister, and he had probably been closest to him. They had been born within a year of each other and no more than two pubs and a pawnshop apart. They had experienced the same social crises from the same position. They had both been too young to be fully aware of the reverberations of the Sarajevo bullet. They had gone on strike from the pits and queued at soup-kitchens. They had gone in groups up Sunday morning roads and watched greyhounds chasing hares. They had stood at bookies’ corners, following the progress of the favourites through the card more concernedly than the fate of nations. Something of the waiting at corners and the months without work and the long grass-chewing talks in the park had always remained with them. It was as if all their lives they had waited for things which had never happened, for the Utopia prophesied in bothy and barroom, for the chimerical equality of men, for the manifestation of God’s grace through the treble chance, or for the smaller miracle of the three-cross roll-ups that would give them independence. And as Hughie spoke, telling of small incidents from Charlie’s father’s life, those who remembered added other parts from that past. They took their farewell of him, remembering what was best in him. It was their own funeral service.
When they were finished, they went through to the living-room. John had phoned for the undertaker and went upstairs with him when he came, to lay out his father and dress him for burial. Charlie stayed in the living-room with the others. From time to time he could hear John and the undertaker move quietly upstairs, arranging his father’s body, plugging in the smell of decay. In the living-room grief was slowly exhausting its first throes, but there was still the unbearable weeping of women, wrapped in their elemental misery like a shawl, rocking back and forth, cradled in sorrow. Only Charlie was apart from it in a way he couldn’t understand. He had not wept at any time, had not come near to doing so. He could not come to the easy and honest emotion of his Uncle Hughie. That seemed somehow a self-indulgence, a luxury he couldn’t afford at the moment. His feelings were somehow too serious for tears. What he felt was like grief, yet more still than the others’, quieter, unable to make itself seen or heard, like tears dripping inwards.
Chapter 5
‘LET NOT YOUR HEART BE TROUBLED: YE BELIEVE IN God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.’
The voice rose and fell with mechanical regularity, dispersing its words like seeds from the hands of a sower. Rigid as rock, Charlie stood by the window, trying to take the meaning of the words to himself. The others in the room seemed to form a unity with the words of the minister, and one of which Charlie did not feel himself a part. They sat in hypnotic sorrow while the minister gave articulation to their grief, and the old words gave meaning to their misery. Some of the women were crying, but in a restrained, an almost formal way, so that no one’s personal grief obtruded, but their weeping had a choric dignity. The men were very still and stiff in dark clothes, impassive as befitted death’s retainers for a day.
The whole thing seemed curiously irrelevant to Charlie. The etiquette of death was new to him, and he had waited throughout these strange proceedings for something that would enable him to endorse their validity, to accept them as an expression of what he felt. He was like an unbeliever in a church, witnessing the elaborate ritual of a service, waiting for the experience that would change him from onlooker to participant. He wanted a sign, anything that would strike a responsive chord in himself and bring him into harmony with the others here, enable him to share their acceptance,