SEVENTEEN
I had nothing to do with Peter Kilpatrick’s death and for it I had been arrested and interrogated and put in the shadow of imprisonment. I knew less than nothing about the assassination and I had fallen into the hands of secret police and been threatened in the hotel; the impress on a bed of the man haunted me and with it a dead face from under a pile of sacks. I had killed Kennedy; I had stabbed him and he had spouted blood; I had stabbed him and he drowned in a cupful of it; and that night I was returned to my father’s house and woke the next day in the bed I had slept in as a boy.
The window rattled in its frame. In any kind of wind, it had done that ever since I could remember. I had never noticed before how it sounded like hasty footsteps. Everything familar looked strange that morning. This was my bedroom, Jess, my sister, had the tiny room across the landing; downstairs, the kitchen was the only other room in the house and my parents slept there in the bed set into a recess in the wall. The ceiling of my bedroom sloped and bumped to fit under the roof; Jess’s room was even worse. Her bed was unmade and clothes and schoolbooks lay in a casual archipelago; at her age I had been forced by my mother to be tidy. With a small shock, I recognised the clock on her bedside table: the alabaster lady. Jess must have persuaded my mother to let her take it from its pride of place downstairs. Green marble and on top of it a woman in white drapery, Grecian, flowing – the alabaster lady I called her to myself: the word was like an incantation – alabaster, alabaster. Her breasts were bare and nothing else like that was ever allowed in the house. For years it puzzled me until I decided that probably they had never noticed. Once when I was about seven I went down in the middle of the night and took her back to bed with me. I held her between my legs and fell asleep, but when I woke she was gone. I was terrorised by shame but neither of them ever mentioned it.
I put out a finger and touched her cheek and two little breasts of stone.
It was always dark in the kitchen. The ceiling was low and the wooden beams seemed to pull it down towards your head. There was a small window at either end, but the back one looked out on a bank of earth and the tree that hung its branches over the house. Even on sunny days I wanted to put on the light. When I did, my mother would put it out: we could not afford it. She had spent her married life in this room.
‘Ten o’clock. I slept in this morning.’
I had always to apologise for sleeping late. With the hours my father worked, it seemed indecent to lie in bed.
‘This morning,’ she said looking up at me from where she knelt. She was wiping round the hearth. ‘This morning. Well, you’d an excuse.’
I tried to keep my back to her while I cut and made a sandwich of cheese.
‘There’s an egg.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘This is fine.’
I poured milk into a glass and chewed looking out of the window as if there might be something new and surprising to see. The sandwich tasted like cardboard.
‘Who was he?’
I remembered her face last night as she tried to see past me to where Primo bulked in the dark at the end of the path.
‘Just a friend. He gave me a lift home.’
‘You told us you had a job.’
‘I had a job.’
‘How could you be here if you have a job?’
Her voice was thin and querulous like an old woman’s. I put what was left of the sandwich wastefully back on the plate hoping she would not notice.
‘My friend’s a kind of doctor. He advised me to stay here for my health.’
‘Just a kind of doctor? And what does that mean?’
‘Till classes start again. I’d like to stay till it’s time for next year’s classes.’
‘Something’s wrong.’
‘Everything’s fine,’ I said without looking round at her. ‘I’ll walk up and see Dad. He’ll be up past the brig?’
Turning from the window, everything in the room was dark.
‘I’ll not be long.’
But she followed me to the door.
‘You’ve spoiled your chance.’
‘What?’ My voice cracked like an angry child’s. It was as though she were laying a curse on me.
‘Tell him your lies. You’ve spoiled your chance.’
She closed the door in my face.
Beyond the bridge were fields of crops. On our side of the burn, there were cattle and some sheep. I walked slowly in the warm sun. The bridge was three broken planks wide. Even since last summer, it had got worse. It would be made to last, though, till it rotted into the water. On the other side, sparrows balanced on the feathery heads of barley. They rippled into the air as I went by, resettling as the wind stroked the yellow swell back and forward. I heard my father before I saw him.
Crouched over, the canister strapped on his back, he swung the nozzle like the blade of a scythe. The spray hissed and stopped, restarted and hesitated like an asthmatic breathing. I had come round by the far end to find him. He was very methodical, making his way towards me as if the big farmer in the sky oversaw his efforts. In shop windows sometimes in Glasgow I would glimpse myself slow plodding as if mired in the glaur of a farm lane; then I would put back my shoulders and march away from the sight picking up my feet as I went.
‘Hold it! You’ll have me sprayed as well.’
He straightened, blinking in slow pleasure.
‘Aye, son.’
Easing the straps, he set the load down off his back. After a stretch luxurious as a yawn he fished with two fingers into his shirt pocket and fetched out a tattered pack of cigarettes.
‘Want one?’
‘You know I don’t.’
He grinned, pleased with himself. The blue smoke paled from his lips. It was warm in the shelter of the hedge watching the wind move through the barley. After a minute, he eased up one leg and let air go.
‘Pardon. I thought you’d have picked up some bad habits by this time.’
‘Like farting,’ I said.
He gave the unexpected laugh that took him sometimes like a giggle when you surprised him with a joke. He was a small man, not up to my shoulder – broad though, a good worker.
‘That wouldnae do, if your professors heard you saying that.’
‘All some of them are worth. It’s a great thought – yon big lecture hall and right at the climax, just when he makes a point – “Shakespeare’s father was fined for his dung heap” – a whole year, hundreds of us, up on one side and giving him a blast.’
‘No’ easy tae get the timing right,’ my father reflected and we laughed and fell into a comfortable silence.
‘A bit o an overlap, mind, wouldnae matter,’ he said and laughed again. He was fond of jokes like that.
‘Decent o that chap giving you a lift home.’
I looked at him thinking he was probing, but that was all he meant. Whoever had given me a lift home had been decent.
‘He was passing this way.’
‘Still . . . Some car. Cost a bob or two.’
‘It was a big car.’
‘I’m glad you’re making that kind of friend.’ He cleared his throat, and gazed intently at the patched blanket of fields thrown across the little hills in front of us. As always, he would never look at you when he was saying something serious. ‘It’s with you being at the University. In my day . . . See, in our day, you never had a chance. You’d no chance.’
I clapped my hands and flights of little birds bickered up into the air.
‘What was that about?’
‘Ach, I got tired o them bobbing up and down and stuffing their stupid faces.’
My father laughed.
‘Auld Robertson’ll never miss what they eat. He can afford it . . . It’s good to have you back. You’re needing the rest.’
‘I’m not staying.’ I didn’t know till that moment that I had decided. ‘I’ll really need to get back. I’ve work to do.’