Docherty. William McIlvanney

control, his servant. As he champed his bread and scalded his mouth luxuriously with great slurps of tea, he was startled by a noise outside, and then recognised Gibby’s gentle, chuckling laughter. The sound seemed somehow lovely in the stillness, was like a rose blooming between the cobblestones of the street. And Gibby’s amusement pollenated Tam’s own little moment, until he found himself rocking with suppressed laughter, shaking his head, a soggy mass of bread held precariously in his mouth.

      ‘Tam?’ Sleep made the word an almost indecipherable wedge of sound.

      The pressure of Tam’s pent-up good humour siphoned itself off into a smile. He had someone to share it with.

      ‘It’s King Edward, Mrs Docherty. Ah jist drapped in fur a cup o’ tea. The fire’s oot in the palace.’

      She stirred against an undertow of sleep, trying to ask about where he had been. The sensuous slowness of her movements brushed like silk against his senses. ‘Ah’m no’ sure,’ he said to her half-formed question. ‘But Ah ken where Ah’m goin’.’ He rinsed his mouth out with the last of the tea and hissed the dregs on to the banked fire.

      In bed he had a moment of doubt. She must be tired. But the gossamer hair of her arm breathing against his naked body blessed his urge, absolving him from choice. He won her slowly and gently from sleep, led her up out of the recesses of whatever dream had held her, to meet him. The covers tented above them, encased him with her coilings and the lush sweetness of her sweat. Only once she stinted, whispering, ‘We’ll waken the wean.’ The words were a ridiculous irrelevance, like a naked woman trying on a mutch, and he almost laughed. He brought her to fusion and lay back quickly, muttering, ‘Ah’m sorry, son,’ to his spilled sperm, ‘but we hivny the room.’

      Out of the darkness, complete, as if it had been waiting for him there, came what he had remembered earlier tonight -miners walking in their droves towards a hill. He had been sleeping the night with his uncle, Auld Spooly. To keep him company, for Spooly was a bachelor. And Spooly had taken him with him on the march. Just about every pit in Ayrshire went spontaneously on strike. They marched to Craigie Hill and held a meeting.

      What he remembered was the sheer awe of looking at their numbers. They had seemed to him enough to do whatever it was they wanted. They still were. The thought of it struck him with the force of a conversion as if he had just realised that he had once been present at a miracle. The void he had created earlier tonight talking to his father filled suddenly, wondrously, with men. He seemed to see again the opaque bulk of their bodies, massing like a storm cloud round the crest of Craigie Hill, to hear again the rumble of their voices, like frustrated thunder, to catch again the name that passed among their tight mouths like a password: Hardie. Keir Hardie. The name fell upon his mind now like a benediction. Keir Hardie knew the truth and was down there, telling it to the big ones. There was hope. Tomorrow he would go in among whatever was waiting, water, slag, bad props, and fetch his coal. And Keir Hardie would do his talking for him.

      With the satisfaction of a man who has established the terms of his employment, he turned over on his side to go to sleep.

      ‘Aye, Jenny,’ he said, thinking of a detail overlooked. ‘Conn goes through wi’ the ither boys the morra.’

      And the firelight caught his smile and showed it to nobody.

6

      Just by his moving out of the box-bed beside his parents’ to the same room as Mick and Angus, Conn’s life entered a new phase. The change involved no more than a few yards but in Conn’s private geography he had crossed a frontier.

      The strangeness of things fed his sense of exploratory excitement. The very darkness of the room was different. When he lay in it, there was no fire, no gaslight burning. For a couple of hours or so every night, he was alone in it with the voices of the others reduced to a background music, and in his house solitude was a luxury. At these times he ruled the room, his whimsy was law. His bed was ship, plateau, stockade; storms blew up out of the corner by the window; Captain Morgan boomed in whispers; the packs of wolves ran round the walls; and an enemy was beaten until exhaustion reduced him to a pillow.

      Night after night his fantasy made a weird ante-room to the reality in which his family moved beyond the wall. Coming in to check on him, his mother would often find him lying on top of the covers, his body buckled awkwardly as if he had fallen from a height, an Icarus whose wings had melted into the mundanity of rumpled bedclothes, drab walls.

      But most exciting of all were the times when he managed to stay awake until Mick and Angus came to bed. He shared a bed with Angus while Mick lay across from them in the isolation to which his rank entitled him. The talks they used to have affected him like a fever. Mostly he didn’t really listen to their words, he simply absorbed them like microbes, until they induced in him delusions of manhood.

      Mick liked to talk about places he had heard of and would like to go to. The names unfurled like bright colours in the darkness. His gentle voice, self-absorbed as a prayer, put into Conn’s mind garish maps of impossible places. Mexico, he said. And Canada. The outback. Bush. Crocodiles that were mistaken for logs. Cannibals. Spittle that was ice before it hit the ground. (If you cried, would your eyes freeze?) Dancing snakes. Conn shuddered ecstatically.

      Angus was more immediate. He talked most about himself. His favourite subject was the boys he had fought, closely followed by the ones he would fight. He had always seemed to be physically in advance of his age, and already he gave the impression of a man’s strength compressed into a boy’s body. Conn, much slighter, jocularly called ‘the shakings o’ the poke’ by his father, listened to Angus with awe, admired him extravagantly, and surreptitiously tested his own biceps below the bedclothes.

      Occasionally, Conn would say something himself. But he so often unintentionally evoked laughter, kindly from Mick, rather hooting from Angus, that he found protection in silence. The transmission of each one’s secrets to the darkness, the process of almost mystically hallucinating the future – these were part of a complicated rite, in which he was only a novitiate. Letting the other two act as a filter to his own confused experience, he found a temporary perspective through their eyes. They gave more definite shape to his growing pantheon of fears and doubts and hopes. With their attitudes pontificating and his own experience giving tentative responses, there started up in him a dialogue between himself and the circumstances around him. He began, quite simply, to become himself. By trying on his brothers’ attitudes he was beginning to measure himself.

      At first, he was content to masquerade as them. He accepted Angus’s measurement of his father just as somebody who was tougher than anybody else, who could ‘easy win’ any other man in High Street – which pretty well made him unofficial champion of the world. Conn enjoyed carrying that knowledge around with him like a secret weapon which could get him out of any crisis.

      He faithfully filed away Mick’s description of old Miss Gilfillan across the street as ‘a right lady’. It didn’t help much, since he wasn’t clear about what a lady was, and watching Miss Gilfillan like a detective didn’t clarify things. She remained a grey mystery in the funny way she walked, as if she was on wheels, her lips, which seemed to be sewn together (if you looked very close, you could see the little lines the stitching made), the special look she always gave him no matter how many other children were there, as if they had a secret. (Once she had given him a penny, coming out of her house just to do that. He had played outside quite a lot after that, but she never did it again.) Still, he kept those two things, side by side, Miss Gilfillan and ‘lady’, like someone memorising a dictionary meaning he doesn’t understand. Knowledge is knowledge.

      He took over, without modification, his brothers’ opinions on a whole range of different subjects. From them he knew that football is the best game, a bee dies when it stings you. Ben Nevis isn’t the biggest mountain in the world; the biggest one’s in Africa. There isn’t a man in the moon. You don’t clipe on your friends, or anybody else.

      But they also had certain positions he couldn’t take up. Their contempt for school always puzzled him. He enjoyed it. Miss Anderson was nice. She told you a lot of things you didn’t know. When Mick and Angus occasionally compared their different schools,