Andrew O'Hagan - The Illuminations

She remembered it all. She remembered his teeth and his laughter and the scent of Brut. The fact that his eyes seemed glassy when the buses passed. It was the teeth and his smell she liked the

best: nobody could touch Sean for teeth, and they stopped again to kiss outside McDavit’s kilt shop. ‘Shall we have one?’ he said, looking up. ‘It’s your nation. It’s your community. All of you having one before ye go.’

‘Why don’t we?’ she said. ‘Ye need all the help you can get in this life, afore ye go.’ The grin that comes before everything. And then he took her arm and led her over the road to the Horse Shoe Bar for a whisky and a comic sermon on Irish songs. The pub darkened now in her mind as she made her way but there would always be something about that place, always a light on. It seemed so long ago and Glasgow seemed so changed as she fought through the rain to meet their son.

ELECTRIC BRAE

She didn’t see him right away. She passed the bar in the Rogano and walked to the back of the restaurant, and there he was in the last booth over by the kitchen. Back of the bus, back of beyond: that was always Luke when he was wee. And there he was now with one of those tall beers in front of him. White shirt, nice sweater. Her own son deep in the pages of a book. She stood on the carpet and just watched him for a moment. He was typically thin but he looked tired for a young man.

‘Mum,’ he said.

She hadn’t expected to feel his resolve when he hugged her but it was the strength she noticed. She saw his exhaustion but his arms still had certainty and pride in them: it was always that way with soldiers, the bravado, the private fight, the clean shirt, the shoes much brighter than bombs. She closed her eyes and patted

him wordlessly in the middle of his back. She didn’t ponder for long his state of mind because she noticed as she patted him the gauze of rain still clinging to his jumper. ‘Good God, son. You’re damp. Did you come out without a coat?’

‘I’m only five minutes away.’

‘But it’s cashmere,’ she said.

‘Mum …’

‘Right you are.’

She wouldn’t be the mother. You can’t, really. After the battles and the helicopters you can’t come storming in with advice about raincoats. There was something different about Luke as he sat across from her. Not determined, but achieved. Some people would have counted it a loss in him because it seemed that the softness had gone. Looking at him, listening to his low murmur as he spoke about the flat and the joy of sleeping in his own bed, she felt she was looking at Sean.

‘You look good,’ she said. But she wasn’t sure. His life was telling on him. He didn’t know he was young and he probably never would: any day now he’d be thirty, then thirty-five, then you’re in your forties with that tremendous sense of no turning back and nothing really proved. It would take a nice woman to renew his spirit and get him on the right track. That’s what she thought, conjuring with the next set of problems before the present ones had settled.

‘This and that,’ he said, answering her question. ‘I’ve been walking a lot. I went up north. Climbed a bit. And I went down south to see about things.’ She ordered the Pinot Grigio. She thought it overpriced but it was the nicest they had by the glass. She saw he was more anxious now and shorter of breath and she tried to shelve the feeling that he was more available now, as

victims are. He wasn’t a victim, he was somebody who needed time, she thought, the thing they couldn’t prescribe at the chemist. The waiter came with two small cups of Cullen Skink.

‘Gordon will tell you all about it when he comes,’ she said. ‘He’s making gallons of it now for his company. You know about his company, don’t you — Homeland Fisheries?’

‘He’s selling fish soup?’

‘Well, you know. Prepared fish products. Ready to cook. Instructions in the pack. Fishcakes. Mussels. He won an award for best home delivery company.’

‘Good old Gordon,’ Luke said.

‘He’s all right,’ Alice said. She paid her dues to Luke’s mocking tone. ‘He works hard.’

‘It’s a busy life,’ said Luke. ‘Smoked haddock.’

She giggled, took a sip. He noted a certain fierceness about her, the pursed lips, the eyes. He could tell she wanted to get close to him by having an argument. Families do that. But he’d been away a while and wasn’t sure he could face it.

‘Aren’t you proud?’ she asked.

‘Of what?’

‘Scotland.’

‘I know we’re supposed to feel proud. But maybe we ought to earn that feeling.’

‘You

have

earned it.’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Everybody feels proud, Luke.’ She drank nervously from her glass and put her elbows on the table.

‘Before we get totally leathered on national pride,’ he said, ‘maybe we should first work out how to be proud of being in the human race. I would like that. I would like that first.’

‘You were fighting for your country.’

‘I was fighting for Flannigan and Dooley. For Lennox and Scullion. Is that a nation?’

‘Your friends? It kind of is, Luke.’

‘There’s no nation, Mum. There’s only people surfing the Net. People like your husband sending cod in parsley sauce to people in France. And the money pouring into your life via PayPal. And every person imagining the world as he wants to see it, just like the guy in the turban behind the wall with an explosive vest who thinks he’s going to Allah. He thinks he loves his country, too. And he thinks his country is being exploited. And he thinks his pals are a nation.’

‘You don’t believe that, Luke. You were brought up in a country with traditions and you loved them.’

‘It’s a game, Mum. A great game. We only believed in it for as long as it lasted. I love my country for its hills and its inventions, not for its sense of injury, not for its sentimental dream that’s there nobody like us. I’ve been out in the world and I can tell you they’re all bloody like us: desperate and tired and fighting for a way into the modern world. I don’t know what convinced you that building walls would make you better inside.’

‘You’re on the wrong page. It’s changed. This country has a flag!’

‘Dump the flags and the drums and the pipes. They’re for the museum. Like all the junk of all the nations.’

‘Those countries you’ve fought in want to kill us. Those people hate civilisation.’

‘Oh, Mum. Stop reading the

Daily Mail

The band of people who want to kill us are just psychopaths and criminals. They won’t last. And they’ve never even heard of Scotland. Jesus, those

people couldn’t point to their own country on a map.’

‘But you can.’ She went on to tell him he was rootless and cynical. It was a nice conversation, hopeless, going nowhere, but full of the possibilities they each denied. They came alive arguing with each other and so did the country.

‘I might be rootless,’ he said, ‘but I’m not cynical. I love improvement, but I can tell you it doesn’t often arrive in a tank.’

‘Well, remember where you come from,’ she said, ‘if you care for improvement. That’s what we do up here. That’s what we’ve been doing for years now.’

‘Don’t rest on your laurels.’

‘You come from here, Luke.’

‘Do I? I come from here? A person might come from lots of places at the same time and a young person’s sense of humanity won’t confine itself to Dundee.’

‘Oh, Luke!’

‘Don’t Oh-Luke me. Those people in Afghanistan are poorer than you could ever imagine, and they can’t read the books containing the words that they’re willing to die for. But the biggest armies in the world can’t stop them imagining. That’s the truth. They want their tribes and they want their enemies. And so do we.’