William McIlvanney - Strange Loyalties

I have dreamed many times that I have murdered someone. Those are the most frightening dreams I have ever had. The terror, I think, comes from the sense of irrevocability. I am in a place from which it is impossible to go back. I have become someone I never wanted to be and I must be that person forever. Waking up with the sweats, I have experienced a feeling of immeasurable relief. I tried to imagine never wakening up.

‘The only blood,’ he said, ‘was coming from under his head, where it had hit the road. We tried to argue with Sandy. But he said he was losing his heartbeat. We were shouting in whispers to each other. And the rain was drowning out everything. Terror, people talk of it loosely. That was terror. Imagine your life frozen in one long, long accidental moment. You have to move to unfreeze it. And you’re too terrified to move. Because there are only two ways you can go. And both of them are badder than you ever imagined anything could be. You can take him in and he’ll be dead already. And you’ll be just drunken bastards who have killed a man with a car. Your lives are over before they properly got started. Or you can leave him there. And maybe nobody will ever know except yourselves. But the rest of your life is based on leaving an innocent man to lie dying in the rain. Nice choice we had made for ourselves. You fancy it?’

I didn’t say anything. His bitter smile was just a scar across his face.

‘We made our choice,’ he said. ‘Or panic made it for us. The longer we stood, the more chance we would be found. And have no choice. Scott was crying. We more or less had to wrestle him into the car. We drove away. We left the man there. We left him there. We left him there. He’s there still, I think, for all of us. Except poor Scott. He’s erased that image at last. We abandoned the car somewhere and went back to the flat.’

He sat very still, staring straight ahead. His voice took on a dead quality, as if he were repeating a text he had learned painfully by heart.

‘University,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you went there. I thought I had graduated earlier, that summer. But it was that night in the rain I really graduated. I found out who I was. And that I didn’t like who I was. And that I never could. I mean, I had loved all that grappling with great minds. The moral questions. Then suddenly, in one night, the issues were real. We were living the questions. Seminars? Did we have a seminar that night. We talked into the light, though I don’t know that we ever found it. Scott still wanted to go back. That we should give ourselves up. I felt like that myself. Dave and Sandy were against it. I couldn’t see how I could live with this. I still don’t see how I have. But I have. It was Dave who finally persuaded me that there was nothing else we could do but live with it. He said we had all acquired certain abilities. The most valid respect we could pay to the man we had killed was to fulfil those abilities. Anything else was anti-life. If we gave ourselves up, we were destroying ourselves for a moral convention. For what good could it do? It wouldn’t bring back a dead man. It would simply waste our lives, bury such abilities as we had. A terrible, irreversible thing had happened. We could either sacrifice ourselves to no purpose. Or we could find the strength to live with it and fulfil our lives as best we could. I came to accept that. We were three against one. But we needed four. Scott couldn’t implicate himself without implicating all of us. His conscience wasn’t his own. It was all or none. That’s when he wrecked his paintings and tore up his books. We let him do it. Because I think we knew what it meant. That he had given up on his self-belief. And would have to find out how to live without it. Which was what we needed.’

There was a knock at the door and Bev, his wife, looked in. As he saw her, the softness that suffused his face was striking. It was not an act of concealment, so that she wouldn’t know the dark things he had been saying. It was a spontaneous admission of love.

‘You two old wives,’ she said. ‘I’ve made some coffee.’

She brought in a tray with coffee and biscuits.

‘I hope this one’s not boring you,’ she said to me.

‘Never that,’ I said.

As she put down the tray, his hand rested briefly on her hip. It was an instinctive expression of affection.

‘Don’t use up all your anecdotes,’ she said to him. ‘You’ve got the dinner-party.’

‘I’ll just steal some of yours,’ he said.

‘Then I’ll tell the punchlines early.’

She went out. He nodded at the closed door.

‘She’s my life,’ he said. ‘She’s got a spirit stronger than ten Sumo wrestlers. She knows about this. But she doesn’t know I’m telling you about it. I’ll tell her tomorrow. This dinner-party matters to her. Truth is, I wouldn’t have been telling you. If Scott hadn’t died. That’s changed things for me.’

He pushed the biscuits towards me, sipped his coffee.

‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The ambiguity of things. I can talk about the mockery that’s my life and sip coffee at the same time. I can sit in my own guilt like an armchair. We’re strange things. I sometimes think our lives are a contract with the impossible. If we’re going to live together, we have to sign that contract. But most of us know we can’t really meet its terms. So we insert our private clauses in small print. And don’t mention it to anybody else. Only the best of us try to abide by the contract. And the attempt often destroys them. Like Scott. You take us four. When we left that room that morning. We had an agreement. But that was an unfair agreement. It obliged the best of us to abide by the terms of the worst. It denied Scott’s nature. Which was to follow the honesty of his idealism to the bone. It was a death-sentence. We killed Scott as well as the other man. Think of it. I’ve thought of it. A lot I’ve thought of it. Dave would survive. What else would he do? It’s all he was born for. Sandy? There are people who wander the world like dinosaurs. They don’t know evolution happened. They eat, they sleep, they shit. When they get the chance, they copulate. If they manage to keep doing all of them, they don’t know anything’s wrong. That’s Sandy. I don’t resent him. I pity him. For myself, I think Bev saved my life. She’s allowed me to believe in some part of myself that stayed decent. But Scott took the pain most, for all of us.’ He looked at me. ‘I’m sorry.’

He was right about the ambiguity of things. What do you do when you’ve heard the news that changes the significance of your life forever? You finish drinking your coffee. You don’t make some profound statement that matches the enormity of what you’ve heard. You may ask a weird, tangential question, like an uncomprehending child wondering what colour the car was that has killed his father.

‘Why do you think he dressed him in green?’ I said. ‘You said his coat was brown. Why would Scott do that?’

‘I think I know,’ he said. ‘I should do. This has been my life’s study in a way, hasn’t it? The methodology of guilt. I’ve thought about how we’ve all handled it. We didn’t exactly keep in touch. Who needs to stare their own hypocrisy in the face every day? Although I think Dave tried to stay close to Scott. He was monitoring him. In a chain of lies, honesty’s always going to be the weak link. But that wasn’t friendship. It was supervision.’

I thought of Dave Lyons’ relationship with Anna. Had that begun as part of the supervision? I realised the riskiness of his having an affair with Scott’s wife. If Scott had found out, nothing was more likely to make him break and declare publicly what had happened. Why had Dave Lyons involved himself there? Had he not been able to stop himself? Had the very danger of it intrigued him? Would it have remained clandestine if Scott hadn’t died? Even the certainty of our duplicities will multiply into doubts.