The Kiln. William McIlvanney

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СКАЧАТЬ first is petulance that John has referred to his having ‘low-grade’ mystical experiences. It is as if he has failed some kind of exam. The second is the very embarrassment he has been talking about.

      He has thought of an example of what John called ‘nature coming through the gaps’ and ‘the truth clumsily refusing to be denied’. It is a fairly crass example but nevertheless relevant, he feels. He thinks of his erections. They can happen anywhere - on buses, at the dancing, standing in a shop. One had even come upon him at his brother Michael's wedding.

      HE IS DANCING with his Auntie Bella. They are doing a slow foxtrot among the circling relatives, smiling sweetly at each other, when one movement out of rhythm make their bodies come together. He is caught instantly in one of the frames of the American comics he used to read: Bam! Pow! Zowie! Hector is between them.

      (‘Touch of flaccid tit on the port bow, Cap'n. Reporting for duty.’

      ‘Piss off, you dead head. It's ma auntie. She's ma mother's sister-in-law. She's the auntie of the groom, for God's sake.’)

      But he remains adamantly there, nosing blindly about, trying to find out where he is required. Tam is too horrified to notice if she's noticed. He thinks of feigning illness But if he collapsed, that would only advertise the situation. And if he walks off the dance-floor with a small baton in his trousers, he might get lynched for mental incest.

      He starts to dance like Quasimodo. Observing his new, crouched style of dancing. Auntie Bella probably thinks he has gone insane. But that is better than her realising the terrible truth. Then he has the inspiration of becoming suddenly drunk. That would be convincing. He is a boy who has been playing at being a man in the relaxed atmosphere of the wedding. As he mugs outrageously, he hopes nobody notices that his face is really screaming, ‘Don't look at my trousers.’ When the dance ends, he completes his performance by jocularly leaving the floor in the manner of Groucho Marx walking. He subsides on a chair, puts his legs under the table and waits for the rest of him to subside.

      He can't cope with this. When he has settled down, he goes to hide in the bar in case another woman asks him to dance. His Uncle Charlie buys him a half of shandy and looks at him.

      ‘Anythin’ wrong, son?' he says.

      He has always been able to talk to his Uncle Charlie and he is so guilty he has to find a confessor.

      ‘Something terrible happened there,’ he says. ‘Ah was dancin’ with ma Auntie Bella. And Ah got a hard-on.'

      He waits for his uncle's reaction to establish a scale of horror for what he has done.

      ‘Ah hope she noticed.’

      ‘Uncle Charlie!’

      ‘Naw, Ah hope so. She'd be tickled pink. Ah bet she doesn't have that effect too often on yer Uncle Davie these days. She's probably in the toilet puttin’ on her make-up. Singin' “Oh, how we danced on the night they were wed”.'

      Then he sang the next bit: ‘We vowed our true love though a word wasn't said.’

      ‘It was terrible. Ah'm frightened to dance with anybody. In case it happens again.’

      ‘If it does, give us a shout. Ye can pass it over.’

      ‘Ah'm that embarrassed.’

      ‘No. Ye just think ye are. See when it doesn't happen? That's when ye'll be embarrassed. Come on, kid. Relax. A limited number of boners in any man's life. Enjoy them while they're there.’

      Uncle Charlie has always had a rough ability to put things in perspective for him. But he also has a strain of gentle wickedness. Later, when the singing has started and Auntie Bella is innocently belting out ‘Lay that pistol down, babe’. Uncle Charlie taps him on the shoulder.

      ‘Ye think she's tryin’ to tell you something, Tam?' he says.

      BUT IF HE HAD BEEN ABLE TO TELL HIS UNCLE CHARLIE about the problem, he cannot tell John Benchley. He is a minister of the church. He has told Tam to call him John but that isn't the same thing as saying, ‘Use my carpet for disgorging the sewer of your mind any time.’ Yet he is tempted.

      Fortunately, he delays so long that John stands up and crosses to put on the light. The dark crystal of the room is shattered and his memories of the wedding dissolve. Magic has again dissipated into mundanity. The harsh brightness makes this just a bleak, modern room, its coldness thawed somewhat by ageless fire and the books that lag its walls. John goes over to the sherry decanter, comes to the small table beside him and fills him out another glass.

      And that's another thing. In that simple action he is conscious yet again of the contradictory cross-references in his life. How will he ever reconcile them? Sherry? Every time during these talks John gives him two sherries. He has wondered if John is trying subtly to civilise him beyond his working-class habits while, by restricting his intake to two glasses only, ensuring that he doesn't corrupt him in the process. He is a very measured man.

      This is the only place Tam has tasted sherry. Holding the stemmed glass in his hand with its hoard of yellow light, he feels its strangeness. It glows mysteriously, a prism of contradictions in which he sees himself. He drinks sherry and talks about mysticism and has an erection at his brother's wedding and talks rough with his friends and is supposed to be going to university and wants to be a writer and lusts after strange girls and wonders what he is doing here. He starts to talk again, donning the camouflage of normalcy.

      ‘What about church attendance?’ he asks. ‘Numbers okay?’

      ‘Well, we're under no pressure to build an extension.’

      ‘Maybe television affects it. I thought Billy Graham would have helped.’

      ‘The crusade had a big enough impact while he was here. But I certainly don't notice any lasting effect on my congregation. Maybe Graithnock's particularly stony ground. Though I don't like to think so. Perhaps that's just making excuses for myself.’

      ‘You've done well. The congregation must be bigger now than before you came.’

      ‘I don't know that I've done so well. I've managed to reduce the congregation by at least one.’

      He looks at Tam sadly.

      ‘That wasn't you. I just became an agnostic’

      ‘You make it sound so positive.’

      ‘I think it is. I think it's the only thing to be.’

      ‘You trying to convert me?’

      He looks so forlorn, Tam feels guilty. He is almost sorry to have become an agnostic. John Benchley has mattered to him over the past couple of years. His gentle wiseness has saved Tam, during his frenetically religious phase, from going quietly mad with impossible holiness. When he was fifteen, he had wanted to become either a minister or a priest - a priest for preference, because that was harder and more demanding and seemed to him to reduce the complexity of life to one massive, final gesture. Attending his church and talking to him, Tam had realised how ill equipped he was to become the apprentice saint he had hoped to be. He finds rectitude boring. Girls fascinate him. How could he forswear life before he has tasted it?

      No, he can't regret having become an agnostic. In a way, John has helped him to become one. Much as Tam likes him, he has to admit that СКАЧАТЬ