Peter May - Blowback

It was odd how powerfully he had identified with Marc Fraysse. Leaving home, the safety of everything he had known, starting an apprenticeship in a strange place amongst strangers, where his greatest enemy was his own blood. The emotions were the same, although the circumstances quite different.

His thoughts carried him back to his childhood among the crumbling Victorian tenements of the east end of Glasgow, the industrial powerhouse of his native Scotland, a tiny country which had fought for so many centuries to maintain its independence against the military and cultural domination of the English. The memory of those shabby red sandstone buildings of his early years was still very vivid to him. The Macleods had not been a wealthy family, which is why they had lived in the east end of the city. The prevailing wind came from the west, so all the filth from the factory chimneys got carried east. In those days the buildings were black with it.

Sophie’s penetrating gaze brought him back to the present.

“Your grandfather was a welder in the shipyards. He was an honest hardworking man, who only ever tried to do his best for his family. God knows how he survived in the years between his wife dying and meeting my mom. Back then, a single dad had no support. I think my grandmother was the only one he had to help him out.”

He crossed the room and perched on the edge of an armchair, hunched forward, leaning on his thighs, staring at the floor as if it might provide some kind of clearer window on his past. It seemed strange to be talking about his family after all these years.

“My mom’s family owned a cafe. There were a lot of Italians in Glasgow at that time. I think many of them had been interned during the war and stayed on afterwards. Anyway, they all seemed to open cafes or restaurants. Tallys, the cafes were called, and no one made ice-cream like the Italians. My mom worked at the cafe, my dad at the shipyard, and between them they made enough for us to lead a reasonably comfortable life. There was no such thing as credit in those days. Not for the likes of us, anyway. You bought what you could afford, with the money that you had. But I don’t ever remember going without. Neither me nor Jack. They were good folk, your grandparents.”

He glanced up to find her watching him intently, transported back through the years to a heritage he had never spoken of, to a place and time in which the seeds of her own future had been sown.

“The thing was, my dad was ambitious. They both were. But not for themselves. For us. For me and Jack. They both saw it as their goal in life to make better lives for us than they’d ever had themselves. And that meant education. My dad was obsessed with the idea that the only way out of poverty was through learning. So we lived a frugal existence, and every spare penny they had went into a savings account to pay for our education.”

Sophie frowned. “But there was state education in Scotland, wasn’t there?”

Enzo nodded. “There was. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Scottish education system was reckoned to be just about the best in the world. Everyone had access to it. Rich and poor. Why do you think so many inventions of the industrial age are attributed to Scots?”

“Oh, papa, not again!” Sophie sighed, and was almost tempted to join him in the incantation. She had heard it so many times. But nothing would stop him.

“Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone. John Logie Baird, the television, John Boyd Dunlop, the pneumatic tire, John McAdam, metalled road surfaces.”

“Yes, yes… anaesthetics, bicycles, color photography, decimal points, radar, ultrasonic scanners.”

He laughed. “Peter Pan. Sherlock Holmes. Damnit, even the concept of capitalism was invented by a Scot. And you can put virtually all of that down to the quality of the Scottish education system. So you can see why my father invested such faith in it.” Enzo shook his head. “But the state system still wasn’t good enough for his boys. He wanted to send us to a private school.”

Sophie whistled softly. “That must have cost a fortune.”

“It just about broke them. Jack was seven years older than me, so he went first. To Hutchesons’ Grammar School, a private boys’ school in the toffee-nosed south side of the city. Hutchie, they called it. It took the last three years of primary school, and five years of secondary. So Jack was going into his fifth and final year of secondary as I went into the first year of primary. When he finished, he was going to university. That was already ordained.”

He remembered that first day at Hutchie as vividly as Marc Fraysse had recalled his introduction to the Lion d’Or. Trudging along Beaton Road on a wet September morning in his new uniform. The obligatory cap. The blazer. The short trousers that he would have to wear until the fourth year of secondary, chaffing his thighs red raw when wet. The knee-high grey socks with their blue band at the top. The belted blue raincoat that dwarfed the nine-year-old Enzo, turning him into a ridiculous caricature of some classic noir detective. He felt lost, having just left behind all the friends of his first four years at state primary. And he recalled how miserable he was.

“Anyway, Jack was the old hand, a prefect by then. A stalwart of the school rugby team, excelling on the sports field as well as in the classroom. I thought he would take me under his wing, show me the ropes, as Jacques Blanc asked Guy to do with Marc. What I didn’t know then was that Jack’s school life was one big lie.”

Sophie tipped her head to one side, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he’d invented a whole history about himself that bore no relation to reality. The boys who went to Hutchie came from all over the city. So they weren’t in the habit of going back to each other’s houses after school. But almost without exception, they came from middle and upper-middle class well-to-do families living in the poshest parts of town.

“The exception, of course, was Jack. And he couldn’t bring himself to admit to his peers that his father was a welder and that his step-mother was an Italian. He was ashamed of where he came from. He was ashamed of us. So he’d made up a story about where he lived and who his parents were, and I guess over the years it had grown and grown, like all lies, until it was just out of control.”

“Oh, my God. And suddenly his younger brother turns up at school, and the whole lie is in danger of crashing down on him.” Sophie’s eyes were wide at the thought of it.

Enzo said, “Yeah. A wee brother called Enzo. He must have been dreading the day I would start at Hutchie. But he’d never said a word about it to me at home. Maybe he thought I would just run straight to dad. He saved it all for my first day at school. He only had one more year to get through, you see. Then he would be away to university. Home free. No one would ever catch him in the lie then.”

“What did he do?”

“I was barely through the gates when he grabbed me and dragged me into the gymnasium. He banged me up against the wall-bars and made it clear to me that I was to keep my little mouth well and truly shut. We were not brothers. There was no relationship between us whatsoever.

“And to make it clear to me what kind of hell I could expect if I made even the slightest slip, he’d arranged a little bizutage welcoming committee for me. A hazing, he called it. He and a bunch of other fifth formers grabbed me just after the bell had gone to end the first break. The playground had emptied and they carried me out into the quadrangle, or the quad as it was known. There was a pond right in the center of it.”

His memory of the moment, the place and time, was acute. He could still see the colonnade that ran below the gymn, the cafeteria on the ground floor, with the science labs and art rooms above it, the classics rooms on the west side, where Latin and Greek were taught. And in the center of the quad, the Hutchiepond, as he came to know it. Two connected oblongs of murky water where lilies grew among the detritus of the playground. A strange feature for a boy’s school, plucked from the mind of some deluded architect.