Free Docherty by William McIlvanney Page A

the set-in bed, seeing it like a cave. Sounds soughed in it, a strange, underground sea whose murmurings frightened him.
    Standing alone there, he was a stranger among strangers. He could hear the breathing of his brothers and his sister, whispers in the darkness, strange sounds like deformed laughter from whoever lay in his parents’ bed. A train clanked and snuffled somewhere, weird as a dragon. What was happening?
    Cuddling his own dread to him like a doll, he went back. He lay beside Angus and a thousand miles from anyone, rigidly nursing himself to sleep, and weathered the long night like a fever.
    8
    Strange demons haunted the edges of their small lives – periodically exorcised in print. News from chaos. For philosopher, astrologer and shaman – the papers.
    To Jenny it was all merely baffling and depressing. She sensed portents and dangers to them all moving clumsily behind the words, trying to break out. She wondered what it could possibly mean to her mother and father that they should make the paper the highlight of their day.
    Every evening, Angus would come down for half-an-hour or so to his Granny’s single-end in the Pawn Loan just a few doors down from his own house, and read the paper to them. Granny Wilson could read, though her husband wasn’t too good at it (‘Ah only went tae the schil when they caught me,’ he used to say), but her eyesight was failing, and anyway, Jenny suspected, she liked the excuse for seeing at least one of her grandchildren for some part of every day. Before Angus did it, it had been Mick who read to them.
    They made a ceremony of it. The reader sat in front of the fire, on the footstool. On one side sat Mairtin, smoking; on the other, hands folded on her pinny, Jean (‘Jean Kathleen’, she would tartly inform those who wondered why her granddaughter hadn’t been called for her). Custom had assigned them distinct roles. All news relating to politics and international affairs must await the seal of Mairtin’s attitude. Taking deep puffs of worldly wisdom, he would send out his dicta to Jean like smoke-signals. ‘That Churchill’s no’ a freen’ o’ the workin’ man.’ ‘Turkish swine!’ The human-interest stories were Jean’s province. She sighed readily for others, appended proverbs to her pity, descanted on the ubiquity of misfortune.
    Perhaps that was wisdom – learning to play again like children among the chaos. But Jenny didn’t have that capacity. She was too aware of how their lives were overhung with threats they couldn’t control. It didn’t occur to her directly in terms of what one nation might do to another, of international crises. It came ciphered into small things – prices, the mutterings of the men at the corner, Tam’s growing desperation. She sensed that the small pressures they felt, the twinges that affected every day, related to something bigger, the way that tiredness can mean consumption. She didn’t begin to understand it. She only knew that somehow something was wrong.
    To that extent she felt older than her parents. They had a simplicity of response to what was going on around them which she envied. God knew they had endured enough themselves. Their lives had been spent among the kind of hardship that didn’t exactly nurture naïveté. But perhaps they had lived so long with the imminence of dire happenings that for them it was house-trained.
    They had learned to leave the bigger things to those who understood them. Unlike Jenny, they weren’t fearful of the incomprehensible equations of chance that tried to resolve themselves around their lives. Jenny remembered how when King Edward died, the photograph of him which her mother kept up on the wall had been reverentially taken down and shortly replaced by the face of King George V. That was how much it all meant to them. An old bearded face melting into a younger bearded face. The numerals behind the names changing according to some ancient, inscrutable law, like a mystic