an autobiography, which perhaps could be called From Motherwell to Palm Beach.
But now, sitting in an armchair in his flat in Sciennes, his tomato sandwiches on a plate before him, Dr Fairbairn thought of what lay ahead. Irene was right; he would have to seek out Wee Fraser and apologise to him for what he had done all those years ago. But first he would have to relive, in as vivid a way as possible, the precise sequence of events that had led him to raise his arm.
He had been in his room with Wee Fraser. He had given the boy a small wooden farm set, consisting of a couple of pigs, a tiny tractor, a stylised farmer and his wife, and some blocks out of which to make walls and pens. There was enough there to allow the child to portray a wide range of internal dynamics. But Wee Fraser had insisted on laying the pigs on the ground upside down, with their tiny porcine legs pointing upwards.
“No, Fraser,” Dr Fairbairn had said. “Piggies go like this.”
And he had placed the pigs the right way up.
“Dinnae,” said Wee Fraser, turning the pigs upside down again.
Dr Fairbairn righted the pigs, and at that Wee Fraser turned his head and bit him hard. Dr Fairbairn then smacked Wee Fraser.
That is what had to be redressed. He stood up. He would do it now. Right now. He would go to Burdiehouse and find Wee Fraser. He reached for his blue linen jacket.
85. Encounter, Catharsis, Flight
Dr Fairbairn left the flat in Sciennes and made his way to the nearby bus-stop on Causewayside. His mood was buoyant; now that he had made the decision to go, he was keen to be there as soon as possible. He was sure that he would find Wee Fraser.
He had extracted the address from his original records and a Encounter, Catharsis, Flight
279
quick search of the telephone directory had revealed that there was still a family living there by the name of Maclean – Wee Fraser’s surname. If the bus did not take its time in coming, then he thought that he could be knocking on the front door of Wee Fraser’s house just before six, which would be a good time to catch them in, as that was when ordinary people (as both he and Irene called them) ate their tea.
A bus arrived and Dr Fairbairn boarded it. Because of the time of day it was fairly full, and Dr Fairbairn had to move down to the back in order to find a seat. And even then it was a small seat, as he was obliged to perch beside a large woman in a floral dress. The woman looked at him with distaste, as if he had no right to sit down on space which she could so easily have flowed into. Dr Fairbairn caught her hostile glance and returned it.
Schizoid, he thought.
He looked at the other passengers. He did not travel by bus very often – in fact he never went anywhere by bus – and it was interesting for him to look at the faces of the people and speculate on their psychological problems. On the bench on the other side of the narrow aisle were a young man and young woman, dressed in nondescript clothes. The man wore jeans, the knees of which had become distressed and ripped. Then he had a tee-shirt on which was written the word NO. The young woman had very similar garb, although her tee-shirt had a more complicated message. It said: I’M NOT DRUNK, IT’S JUST
THE WAY I’M STANDING.
Dr Fairbairn stared at the tee-shirts and then at the faces of the couple. They were, he imagined, about nineteen or twenty, and reasonably composed in their appearance and manner. Why then did they wear tee-shirts with messages? Was it a question of fashion – others broadcast messages on their clothing and therefore they felt they had to do it too? That was a simple, but powerful explanation. The desire to conform in clothing was almost universal. Jeans were a statement that one was just like everybody else. They were the modern uniform, achieving a flat monotony of look that would have warmed the heart of Mao at his height of enthusiasm for the destruction of sartorial salience.
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But messages, he thought, were different. In having something written on one’s clothing – written on the outside, be it noted – one was effectively making oneself into a walking bill-board. This meant that one’s clothing could make both a passive and an active ideological statement. The red shirt with the head of Che Guevera said: I sympathise with the struggle. And if this message was not clear enough, one could add the words la Lucha underneath. If one was really radical, then an exclamation mark could be added to that. Thus people whose shirt said la Lucha!
were likely to be seen as far more credible activists than those timid souls whose shirts merely said la Lucha. And of course Spanish was mandatory for such messages. It didn’t sound quite the same to have on one’s shirt the word küzdelem, which is Hungarian for “struggle”.
The whole point, though, of having writing on one’s shirt was an exhibitionist one. To draw attention to oneself through clothing is exhibitionist, and of course, as Dr Fairbairn knew very well, exhibitionism was a substitute for real giving, real intimacy. The exhibitionist appears to be giving, but is actually not giving at all. He trumpets out the message Look at me, but he does that only to avoid having to engage in a real encounter, a Encounter, Catharsis, Flight
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real human exchange, with the other. The external is all that is on offer with the exhibitionist; the internal is hoarded, protected, Freudice: retained. The last person you see when you are confronted with an exhibitionist is the real person inside. That person is not on display.
Dr Fairbairn glanced at the young man’s shirt with its negative message. NO was perhaps not too bad a message to be proclaiming. At least it was modest. At least it was not like the obscene messages that some people wore on their clothing. Such people were shameless exhibitionists, but they were also polluters of our common space.
He shifted in his seat, which gave him a better view of the seats at the back of the bus. It was an average group of people: a young man in a suit (a bank-teller, perhaps, thought Dr Fairbairn), a person with a full shopping bag and a look of resignation about her (a woman, perhaps, he thought), an elderly man who had fallen asleep. And then, very near the back, sitting alongside his mother, whom Dr Fairbairn recognised after all these years . . . Wee Fraser himself.
Dr Fairbairn caught his breath. He had prepared himself for a meeting with Wee Fraser, but had not prepared himself for a meeting on the bus. And now, faced with the reality of this 14-year-old boy, with his short hair and his aggressive lower lip, Dr Fairbairn was not at all sure what to do. Should he wait until they got off the bus, at which point he could himself alight, or should he go and speak to them now? Would it be awkward to say what he had to in the bus, or would he need privacy?
He thought about this, indifferent to his surroundings, but when he looked out of the bus window he realised that they were almost at Burdiehouse. In fact, now they were there, and Wee Fraser and his mother were rising to their feet.
Dr Fairbairn waited for them to pass, before he got up. As they made their way past, Wee Fraser looked at Dr Fairbairn, and his eyes narrowed. Somewhere, in the very recesses of his mind, a memory was at work.
Dr Fairbairn stood up, and in so doing he inadvertently jostled Wee Fraser, who spun round, muttered aggressively and then, 282 In the Café St Honoré
with extraordinary speed, launched his head forward and head-butted the psychotherapist.
Almost instinctively, but moved, too, by sheer rage, Dr Fairbairn raised his fist and hit Wee Fraser soundly across the side of his chin. There was a crack as the jaw broke.
“Maw! Maw!” wailed Wee Fraser, the words strangely slurred by the loosened jaw.