Free Docherty by William McIlvanney Page B

calendar that measures aeons. When one guardian angel left, another took his place, staring down on them while the children read out the confusions of the times, his oracular mouth buried in his beard, his steady eyes absorbing the mystery of it all, giving it meaning. Jenny preferred simply not to hear the news, as if ignorance of the possibilities paralysed their realisation.
    But tonight, being Thursday, wasn’t so bad. This was the night of the week Jenny chose to come down herself for an hour or two. It was on Thursdays that her mother sent Angus to Dunsmuir’s shop for The Dundee - a weekly paper of addictive sentimentality. In the world it depicted there were no major issues and no doubts. People were ‘bodies’, anger was ‘Goodness Gracious!’, consternation was ‘Help ma Boab!’, and events were what happened when the cat got lost. Bought compulsively by many families in the West of Scotland every week, its pages were a triumph of placative ignorance. It was the highlight of the week for Mairtin and Jean.
    Listening to Angus read from it now, Jenny noted for the umpteenth time that he spoke as if he was repeating a message-line for the Co-operative stores. He was fed up with the whole thing. It had been growing in him for some time. She suspected that the only reason he hadn’t openly rebelled against having to do it before now was the shilling that came at the end of it. She worried about Angus. She worried about all of them, but Angus was already forcing her vague, all-enveloping mother’s concern into a particular shape.
    He was too hard, too much himself so soon. There was nothing frightened him, or at least nothing that would make him admit he was frightened. Not that that was bad. But just as fear couldn’t be detected in him, so there wasn’t much he would offer in the way of any uncertain feeling. He just returned responses. What lay behind them was his own business. Prodded, he closed up like a hedgehog. Doubt he couldn’t endure. Placed in it, he would grasp a wilful decision and cudgel his way out with it, no matter what. His aggressiveness was already well known in High Street. She often felt that he was challenging something to happen to him. He seemed to get into so many fights, and win them, which perhaps was worse. He had never turned his tongue on her, and Tam’s forcefulness had kept him a polite and biddable boy, as far as they knew. It was the extent of what they didn’t know that worried. Even so young, he was chafing, she could tell. And soon he would start work.
    Hearing his bored voice as an indirect insult to her parents, she was glad she had brought Conn along tonight. He could try to read a bit for them. He should be able to, he was doing so well at school – top of his class. She had even once received a note from one of the teachers – a Miss Anderson – saying that Conn was ‘something special’ and was to be ‘given every encouragement’. She still kept it, at the back of a drawer, like an IOU from the future.
    Watching Conn’s face as he listened, she saw the difference in the two boys. The words that Angus gave out grudgingly, so that his voice’s meanness seemed to make them worth nothing, were transformed by Conn’s receptiveness. His expression seized them, smiled over them, went into a conspiracy with his Granny, and everything was enlarged in his reaction to it. Angus’s flat insensitivity to things and Conn’s vulnerability to them were a contest.
    When Angus paused at the end of an article, Jenny said, ‘Here, Angus. Take a wee rest. We’ll let Conn read a bit.’
    Angus was canny.
    There’s only the Jean McFarlane bit left, noo.’
    It was her parents’ favourite column – written in the first person by Jean, a saga of trivia about the doings of herself and her husband, John. Helped by the name, Jenny’s mother identified with the writer. Conn would be starting at the top of the bill.
    ‘Aye. Ye’ve done well, son. Let Conn dae some work