The Kiln. William McIlvanney
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Название: The Kiln
Автор: William McIlvanney
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Контркультура
isbn: 9781782111917
isbn:
His confusion is more or less total. He might as well be back in primary school, faced with one of those forms on which the unanswerable question has appeared.
FATHER'S OCCUPATION:
MAYBE THE PROBLEM IS GENETIC, he would think. He looked at himself with some of the soap still on his chin. The small round mirror he was using for shaving looked like a porthole through which, as he kept moving to get the angles right, he seemed to see a version of himself who was drowning. Maybe that was why he didn't bother to shave every day, to avoid having to see the drowning man he didn't seem able to save. Or maybe it was just another expression of his social isolation at the moment, a rehearsal for being a down-and-out. Or maybe it was because he was more and more aware of the resemblance to his father.
As the shaving soap was removed, there kept looming out at him a past he wasn't sure he could move beyond. Was there a Docherty gene, or maybe a Mathieson one, that condemned him to perpetual failure to fulfil himself, an inability to decide what he ought to do or what he ought to be? Was he sentenced to be like his father in that respect? Or like his Uncle Charlie?
His mother used to talk more than once of a recurring moment she had learnt to dread. It was when she would go upstairs to get ready for bed and his father was already there, lying with his head cupped in his hands.
‘Betsy,’ he would say, his eyes gazing at the ceiling as if it were the promised land. ‘Ye know what Ah've a helluva notion o’ tryin'.'
And she would scream silently. Another money-making project was threatening their lives.
No wonder the uncertainty of what his father was had troubled him. It must have been like living with X the unknown. After leaving the pits he seemed determined to try everything. When Uncle Josey challenged him for being a working-class entrepreneur, he said, ‘Negative capitalism, Josey. Ah'm tryin’ to get the wealth intae the hands of the workers. Then we can share it out more fairly.'
The most intense expression of his confusion with his father always came at primary school. Every so often they were given forms to fill in. He hated forms, always would. But he could always handle these questions easily enough, except for one. He always checked the form over first before writing anything down, to see if that one dreaded question was there, and it seemed it always was. The question simply said ‘Father's occupation’ and then a colon and a space to put your answer in. That was an insoluble space for him. He hated that space.
He used to steal glances at his neighbours' forms. It seemed to be for them the easiest question in the paper. Storeman, they'd write. Joiner. Plumber. Fitter at Mason's factory. What the bloody hell is ma feyther? He took venomous delight in swearing in his head towards him. Why did everybody else know what their father was and he hadn't a clue? The bastard. What was he trying to do to him? He made him feel like a dunce.
He would go out to the teacher's desk and begin an elaborate, apologetic mumble. At four o'clock he'd be out of the school like a sprinter - there were no devious routes home taken on those days. He was confronting his mother at five past four, his teeth bared in an imitation of his father. ‘What,’ he once said, feeling as he said it how clever the expression was, ‘is he this week?’ He could be bitter about his father.
Sometimes his mother could answer the question and sometimes she couldn't. Sometimes his father didn't seem too sure himself. He would ponder, picking his way round unimaginable obstacles, and he would say something like. ‘Tell ye what, son. Jist say Ah'm on for maself.’
‘The boay canny say that,’ his mother would say. ‘He needs to say something specific’
‘Unemployed,' his father would say.
Eventually, he found his own way round the problem. He knew his father had been a miner. But that was very specific. Panic can make you understand context in an exact way. (He picked up a lot of words from his mother. She once told him words were power and he took the thought into himself like a secret weapon.) You're either a miner or you aren't. His father was obviously not a miner any longer. He didn't have a lamp for his bunnet and he didn't come home black. Anybody could see him and find that lie out easily.
But he had also been a van driver and a labourer and tried to be a scrap dealer and had been a street bookie. He knew that being a street bookie was illegal because his mother had told him not to mention it to anyone or the police might get to hear of it. That was out. He decided to make his father a general labourer.
It was a genuine inspiration, he felt. No teacher ever questioned it and he came to feel that he had made a contribution to the security of his family, shut out the prying eyes of strangers, given his mother one less worry and protected his father's strangeness.
But it certainly didn't change anything except the ease with which he could fill in forms at the school, he had to admit as he washed the residual soap off his face and dried it. His father had continued to dream incorrigibly about the big breakthrough into wealth.
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