William McIlvanney - Strange Loyalties

I went back through to the living-room to escape from the now-I-must-do-the-washing impulse and found another one waiting for me. I had to hang Scott’s paintings. Home handyman not being one of my more impressive personas, it took me about twenty minutes to find a hammer. I took two picture-hooks from the bedroom where, on renting the flat, I had put up photographs of the children. I could repair their desecrated shrine when I bought more hooks. I hung the five at supper above the fire-place and ‘Scotland’ on the opposite wall, hammering furtively and intermittently.

The bottle of the Antiquary had two drinks left in it. I filled out one and watered it in the kitchen and came back through. It wasn’t so cold now. I put my blazer over the back of a chair and sat down at the fire with my whisky. I took a sip and looked at the five men. Scott, Sandy Blake, Dave Lyons, Michael Preston. And the man who was still unidentified. Not even the colour of the coat was accurate.

‘It was brown, as I remember it.’

Even our guilt we shape into our own needs. Scott had spent a long time shaping his. I confronted it at last.

‘It was brown, as I remember it.’

Michael Preston’s voice had brought home to me how even shared actions can separate us. His sense of what had happened that night after the impromptu party in the flat with David Ewart remained clear and it troubled him still but not as it had troubled Scott. I thought of Dave Lyons. Did anything trouble him? I thought of Sandy Blake in South Africa. Maybe for him guilt was geographical.

‘We got drunk that night,’ Michael Preston had said. ‘It was a celebration, after all. Three of us were finishing up. Sandy still had some time to go. But he was saying goodbye to us. It was one of those nights when you’re young and you feel the possibilities. Know what I mean? We went on a pub-crawl. I suppose we felt like the new aristocracy visiting the peasants. We all thought we had so much potential then. Our horizons seemed limitless. I remember saying not unportentously that I was going to write the house down. Scott was going to paint. Dave Lyons was going to do something of great scientific value. I don’t know what Sandy was going to do. Maybe find the cure for cancer. All I’ve ever written are commentaries for television programmes that may have helped to pass the time in a few living-rooms, that died with the credits.’

He lifted the paper-weight and turned it and replaced it. We sat watching the imitation snow-storm fall gently on the miniature house. He stared at it till it had subsided.

‘I sometimes think I might as well be living in that house,’ he said. ‘Hermetically sealed in my career. That night. I remember Scott warning us all against succumbing to the system. He had a dread of settling for too little. This was only a beginning, he was saying. It would all be meaningless unless we related it to what mattered, to where we came from. We were all from working-class backgrounds. The chance we had was held in trust for others, he said. Whatever talents we had belonged to the man in the street. Each of us had to find our own way to reconnect with him. Find him, bring whatever gifts we had to him, and he would teach us how to use them. Without him, what we had learned was useless. It was a good speech at the time.’

He ran his hand along some of the clip-binders filed on one of the shelves beside him. On the back of each was something written in felt pen. I assumed they were the titles of projects he had been involved in but I couldn’t read them.

‘Tell you the truth,’ he said. ‘I think it’s still a good speech. These.’ His forefinger played along the binders. ‘These are Preston’s Thesaurus. A personal dictionary of synonyms for futility. They make a long study of nothing. The longer I live, the more I think Scott was right that night. I wish I didn’t.’

He looked at me and I thought I saw in his eyes how the depth of the wish was measured by its hopelessness.

‘We came out of the pub that night,’ he said. ‘Thrown out of the last one at time-up. It was pissing with rain. Coming down in sheets. I think in our euphoria we were almost offended that the weather wouldn’t match our mood. We doorway-hopped for a spell. We reaffirmed what we were going to achieve. Like a pact. We addressed the weather like King Lear. Telling it to behave itself. We didn’t want the feeling we had made among us to stop. We were busking an end to the night that would match the grandeur we felt in it. Then, from some final doorway, somebody saw a car. I don’t know who saw it first. All I remember is there we were talking about it. It was an old A40, pretty beat-up. It was parked across the street. There were no lights in the buildings around us.’

They decided to steal the car.

‘It was a group decision, I suppose. I remember that my own clever contribution was to say, “Property is theft. Let’s thieve it back.” The idea was just to drive it close to the flat and leave it there. No harm done. Even if they traced us to the flat, we’d be off by tomorrow. It was just a joy-ride.’

Breaking in was easy. Dave Lyons connected the wires. They drove off. As he reached that point in his story, Michael Preston held his hand up, forestalling my question.

‘We were all driving,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me to define it more closely than that. We were one group mood. The way it can get sometimes. All of us broke into the car. So all of us drove it. We accepted that among us afterwards. I still accept it. I know Scott did. Maybe one pair of hands on the wheel. But four intentions. There’s no reneguing from that.’

He stared into my scepticism and didn’t flinch. I saw the strength that had enabled him to live for so long with something he hated to live with. Wounds sometimes heal into hard places.

‘I was there,’ he said. ‘I remember the shared madness. I think they call it hubris. That wasn’t just a car to us. It was an ego-machine. That wasn’t just a road. It was our road, where we were going, what we would become. We were all shouting instructions. Naming destinations. “Take us to our leader.” “Next stop: the meaning of the world.” “Drop me off at the next planet.” “Self-fulfilment here we come.” That kinda nonsense. The car was fogged with our lunacy. The rain hammering down outside didn’t hear us. And then it happened. Jesus, I don’t know where he came from. It seemed to me he reared up out of nowhere. He might as well have been born full grown in the headlights. It was as if he came out of the impact, not the other way around. He was a brief shape in the air. Like Icarus. Only difference is we were the arrogant bastards. It was him that took the fall. The car stopped. That’s the loudest rain I’ve ever heard. Or ever want to hear. It was like living under a waterfall. One you know is never going to stop. You’re going to live the rest of your life with the sound of it in your ears.’

He lifted the dagger that was his paper-knife and his face was so clenched and dark he might have been contemplating using it on himself. He sat still for a moment as if he was still listening to the rain. He looked at me.

‘That was your man in the green coat,’ he said. ‘Except that it wasn’t green. It was brown, as I remember it. But then maybe that was just the rain. He was lying mainly on the pavement. He was the stillest thing I’d ever seen. He was balding. Not a face you’d notice normally. One of those that make up the numbers. An extra in a thousand pub-scenes. Could’ve been anybody. He was lying with a terrifying awkwardness. That’s been the shape of a lot of my nightmares. Sandy Blake examined him. He wasn’t dead. But he said that he was getting there. And no way would he live. We had found the man in the street all right. And it looked as if we had killed him.’