Children of the Master. Andrew Marr

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СКАЧАТЬ a self-pitying builder could devise. A Christmas holiday full of unlikely winks and vague, enticing promises would be followed by a Christmas morning, silent and present-less – Da oot, Maw locked in her bedroom.

      Da oot, mind you, was a damn sight better than Da in.

      ‘Come awa, son. It’s time you came down to the fitba. Dinnae look so bloody scared. We’re going to have a good time, you and me.’ And sometimes, good things followed. A chip butty, a can of icy Irn Bru; being taught how to take a drag, deep and fragrant and blue.

      But Da’s moods were as changeable as scudding clouds. One can too many. A missed scoring opportunity. Cheek from the visitors’ terrace. Then he’d feel a sudden poke on the nape of his neck.

      ‘See ma boy? A wee Jessie I’ve got, is all. Doesn’t understand a bloody thing about the game. Don’t know why I bother bringing you, do I, Dolores?’

      Even Da’s mates thought he went too far. ‘Dolores, big man? Where the fuck’s that come from?’

      ‘Well, look at the wee girl, with her big dark eyes. Disnae need mascara. Did you ever see sic a sight?’

      And his Da was always right, of course; the tears stung their way down the side of his nose, and mixed with snot, and hung on his lip. He’d have his grey woollen jersey on, bought from the Co-op, and he’d wipe himself with the sleeve. And then his Da would whack him across the side of his face, and his Da’s friends would go Chrissake, Boabie, but mebbe laugh. And the boys on the field would win or lose, but it didn’t matter much. He wasn’t a great boy for the football.

      And then back at home, the belt. Thick, black leather, with wee yellow lines where it was cracking and with the metal thistle buckle at the business end. Beer and the belt. They went together like love and marriage.

      Many years later, the adult David Petrie was told while being examined after a skiing accident that he had broken no fewer than four ribs as a child. He remembered the sleepless nights, all right. At the time there was no question of hospital. But a few deep white scars, like chalk marks, still remained on his back and legs.

      The adult David Petrie was known as a snappy dresser – flash suits. The truth was, he bought suits with braces. He never wore belts. The adult Davie Petrie enjoyed a drink – a beer, a glass of wine, a gin and tonic. But the very faintest smell of Scotland’s national drink, the sick-sweet scent from his father’s open mouth, brought an instant queasiness. He simply couldn’t stand the stuff.

      His dad, Bob Petrie, was a very popular man. David only realised this much later: Da was liked. Other men wanted Da to be their friend. Out of the house, he told jokes. People laughed at them. Big Bob was a good workman and a relaxed boss. He liked a drink, everyone knew that, and where’s the harm there? The bungalow was on the very outskirts of the village, surrounded by its own hedge. In space, enough space, a wee bit lawn around a wee bit house, no one can hear you scream.

      Big Bob’s big laugh, though, was well known in the pub. A low staccato series of growly grunts – heuch, heuch, heuch – building up to a full-throated har, har, har. There was a lot of laughing. His business grew fast, swollen by contracts from the local council. This was Labour territory, Labour people, Labour laughing. Bob was friends with the councillors, and actually a Labour Party member himself, although he never turned up at ward meetings – ‘Nae time for blethering, no offence boys, I got a business to run.’

      Only later on would Davie understand the kickbacks, the backhanders, the no-nothing-for-nothing; those raucous sessions in the bar were always about business first. Heuch, heuch; har, har. Big Bob sweated easily as he grew ever larger, but he was not a man to waste energy or time.

      Neither David nor his mother Eileen were seen much in the village. They felt as they looked – at the edge of things. Sunday school, the Scouts, even lining up to jeer the idiot Orangemen, all passed them by. Bob was careful not to hit his wife on the face or arms – one of those tricks of civilised life passed down from some fathers to some sons. As David grew older and bigger, Bob’s weekly beltings were replaced by the more painful methods of verbal terrorism. Jibes about his voice, mockery of his changing body. A hot, moist, whiskery, whiskied mouth at a bright red ear, a finger and thumb pulling him up by his sideburn. Big girl’s blouse, ya. Once, just once, when he was changing for football at school, a teacher, Miss Leckie, had seen fresh welts on his legs. A social worker had come round to the house. David could still remember the tense little quartet of them sitting in the best room, his father forcing smiles and ‘joshing’. Heuch, heuch, har, har. Like one of those plays from the telly. There was never the slightest chance of David being taken into care. Nobody wanted that. Bob’s connections made it completely impossible; anyway, Davie would have hated leaving his mother alone in that overheated but cheerless house.

      Mere misery doesn’t kill you, not in Scotland. Davie grew up to be a silent, handsome, self-possessed young man. Layer over layer. Skin on thickening skin. And life got better. He found schoolwork ridiculously easy. The school library was small enough, but he read his way through it, the whole damned room. Maths, encyclopaedias, cowboy stories, it didn’t matter. His second great escape as a teenager was discovering a natural talent for, of all things, football. He made the school team a year early. Bob, the big man, found this very hard to deal with: for years it had been an important part of his story that his son was a ‘Jessie’. Yet here he was, big long legs, scoring goals and coming home covered in mud and bruises week after week. Grudgingly, Bob made his way to the touchline once or twice. Laddie worth something after all? Maybe he and David would finally have a real conversation – a Scottish one, of course, elliptical and self-mocking, more silence than words, but ending in grunts of assent and a feeling not unlike warmth.

      They never made it. When Davie was seventeen, Bob was hit by a car as he was coming out of the pub. He was killed instantly, blood all over the pavement. Eileen laughed when Councillor Daley and the polis came round to break the news, which was put down to shock (‘The puir soul, she can’t accept it.’ ‘Aye, puir Eileen, what’s she going to do wi’oot Boab?’). But David watched as her smile failed to disappear, remaining almost constantly on her lips for a full week afterwards. It was the most shocking thing he’d ever seen, but the truth was, he felt better too. When he came home from school in the afternoons Eileen had sometimes put the television on and was sitting boldly in the best room, eating ginger snaps.

      Bob’s funeral was a big affair in the village. The sun shone. The fields around, brimming with rasps and the dancing shaws of tatties – King Eddies and Désirées mostly – glinted and waved in the sunlight. There was a holiday air. By now many of the fields had been filled in by the spreading housing estate – nice houses, big windows, decent-sized rooms – Bob did good work – so that the boundary between town and village had almost closed up. Councillors and local bigwigs were all there, and the crowd from the pub, and a dozen relatives from Glasgow, so the RC chapel was packed. The local MP, a tall, pale, droning man, gave the eulogy, talking of how many houses for ordinary decent Labour folk Bob Petrie’s men had built, what a supporter he had been of good causes – ‘aye a haund in his pocket’ – and how missed he would be as a father and husband. At this he poked the air, almost animatedly, as if he was looking to be contradicted. Davie, a man today, almost bursting out of his new suit, looked straight ahead with a solemn expression. His mother caused a flutter in the pews behind her by audibly snorting. She raised her chin, smiled slightly, and looked straight at the priest, a ferrety, pockmarked little Irishman, who avoided her gaze.

      Bob’s death had brought calm, even a kind of peace, to the bungalow. He didn’t leave much behind him in the way of clutter. Eileen took his golf clubs and the porcelain model of Robert Burns he’d once given her down to the Oxfam shop along with his clothes.

      But David Petrie’s hopes for СКАЧАТЬ