LITMIR.BIZ

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it.’

      A tap at the door refuted him. It was Mrs Ritchie. Going through they formed a little jostling cavalcade behind her, Buff being the tail of it. As soon as he entered the room, Tam took it over. His pride was the master of ceremonies. He flicked his right hand at his wife in a private tic-tac of affection and smiled at her. Freshly washed, her face was a gentle bloat of weariness on which her smile floated, fragile as a flower. Her eyes were already palling with sleep. Tam lifted the child in its sheet and, checking by the way that Aggie’s second thought was right, held him up in his hands to inventory his perfection. He had hair, black, a rebellion of separate strands, going in all directions. One temple was badged with dried blood. His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.

      The room was discreetly tidy. The debris of birth had all been spirited away. Dr Allan stood with his back to the fire, genteelly jacketed again, insulating himself against the walk back home.

      Thanks, dochter,’ Tam said. ‘Aggie, there’s a drap whusky in the press there. Fur the dochter.’

      ‘No, thank you. I’ll be getting back round. And we’d best all get away and let the lassie sleep. She’s a far distance to come back from.’

      ‘We’ll no’ be long. But ye’ll hiv some. It’s Hogmanay the nicht, as faur as Ah’m concerned.’ Knowing that Tam Docherty didn’t keep drink in the house, Dr Allan decided not to offend against the special provision he had made. ‘An’ wan fur Buff as weel.’

      ‘Whit’s he done tae deserve a whusky?’ Aggie had found the whisky and two glasses Tam had laid ready.

      ‘Ah’ve suffered you fur foarty year,’ Buff said.

      ‘Well.’ The doctor raised his glass of whisky. ‘Here’s to . . . whoever he is. Have you got a name?’

      Tam hoisted the baby round to face them: ‘Cornelius Docherty to the company.’

      The name seemed to drown him, like regal robes on a midget. The doctor sipped.

      ‘That’s a terrible size of a name for such a wee fellow.’

      ‘He’ll grow tae fit it. Don’t you worry.’

      ‘Whit aboot yerself, Tam?’ Aggie asked. ‘Ye could likely dae wi’ a drap.’

      ‘Naw. Thanks, Aggie. But Ah’m drunk enough already, withoot drink.’

      ‘Ah’d oaffer ye mine, Tam,’ Buff said, looking disconsolately at what wasn’t so much a finger as a fingernail of liquor, ‘if Ah could fin’ it.’

      The doctor took another sip, and spoke meditatively, as if whisky were philosophy: ‘What are you going to make this one, then? A Hindu? You’ve got two religions in the house already.’

      ‘He’s a’ Ah’ wid want tae make ‘im as he is. A perfect wee human bein’. Whit mair could ye want? Except fur him tae get bigger. Be mair o’ the same.’

      ‘He’ll certainly have to get bigger. Before he’s ready for the pits.’

      ‘He’ll never be ready fur the pits. No’ this wan. He’ll howk wi’ his heid. Fur ideas.’ He winked at the baby. ‘Eh, Conn? Ah’m pittin his name doon fur Prime Minister. First thing in the moarnin’.’

      Their laughter ebbed to a still contentment. Mrs Ritchie sat smiling in self-satisfaction by the fire. Buff took his whisky a meniscus at a time. Aggie had put temptation back into the press. Jenny was adrift in drowsiness, her body flotsam abandoned to her weariness. One white hand was being held in Tam Docherty’s, while in his other arm he still cradled his son. Dr Allan leaned into the cushion of heat behind him. His professionalism being disarmed by tiredness, he saw the scene as a fortress of people built protectively and perhaps hopelessly round a child. He remembered how at the birth he had put the child to the bottom of the bed, a parcel of useless flesh, while he concerned himself with the mother. It was Mrs Ritchie who had skelped him into life. She would talk about that and it would swell in the telling, would become a story of a life stolen from the jaws of death. The child came trailing legends, became in the act of being born more than himself. For Tam Docherty he had existed before himself, had been a name, an idea, just waiting for flesh. He saw a tacit but deeply held sense of triumph in which all these people shared. No matter what their lives did to them, this was what they salvaged, this unsmirched new beginning. Conn lay, hubbed in their middle, raw as a fresh wound, and seemed suddenly to Dr Allan impossibly burdened with the weight of all their lives. As the doctor lifted the glass again to his mouth, it was a private toast. With it there went a solemn wish for the kind of fulfilment to this beginning that they dreamt of. It was wished for all the more intensely because he could not for a second begin to believe in it.

      Across the street Miss Gilfillan’s figure glimmered tall and pale as a candle in her window. Around her, High Street, its tenement windows gutted by shadows, closes gaping like abandoned burrows, seemed as dead as Pompeii, a desolation where people were frozen into the sordid postures of their grovelling lives. In her mind there echoed still among them the sound of the child’s cry from the lighted window. It came to her not as a birth but as a wail against dying. The ooze of hopelessness had already claimed it. None of them here had any chance. Watching a cliff of cloud slowly erode in the wind, she felt herself dwindle to a small helplessness, her heart contracting to a pebble. The comfort of the past dispersed like a vapour, leaving her shivering in a void inhabited by what people called ‘progress’. She sensed it only as a malign presence, like a legendary monster, fabulous with the future, devouring the past, a self-begetting sequence of deformities. As this year died, what successor, more hideous than itself, would it be spawning?

      BOOK I

1

      This’ll be a guid clear nicht fur the poachin’,’ Tam said. ‘Are ye up the road the nicht, Dougie?’

      ‘Naw. It’s temptin’, mind ye.’

      ‘Up by Silverwood wid be the thing. Whaur Barney saw the ghost. Ye mind?’

      ‘That wis a nicht.’

      It was a Saturday evening in summer. Tam and Jenny Docherty were out at the entry-door and had been joined by Dougie McMillan and his wife, Mag. The women sat in the two chairs Tam had brought out. Conn, still too young to have the wider tether of Mick and Angus and Kathleen, who were over in the park, was playing quietly at their feet, already wise enough to forestall bedtime by being unobtrusive.

      ‘We’re aboot due fur the “Store Races” again,’ Jenny was saying.

      ‘Aye.’ Mag shook her head.

      It was a term coined by the corner-wags for the beginning of the Co-operative Stores quarter. Jenny lamented the chance it would give certain people to exploit what she called ‘their fella bein’s’. The method was simple enough, though not without its risks.

      Since the dividend was good, usually above two bob in the pound, some members made a habit of allowing non-members to buy goods in their name, with the proviso that the dividend from the purchase came back to them. Since such an order was on tick and didn’t have to be paid till the end of the quarter, the non-members could enjoy a brief Utopian sense of luxury without cost.

      ‘The day of reckoning,’ Mag pronounced.

      ‘Aye, an’ the cost isny jist in money,’ Jenny said.

      Living next door to the grocery, Jenny had seen the effects often enough: families ‘racing’ to the shop at the start of the quarter, descending like locusts on the counters, to take away provisions in clothes-baskets, hand-carts, bogeys. The crunch came at the end of the quarter. Furtive visits were paid to people like Suzie Temple in New Street. She was fabled to have wealth (though she lived in a house where strips of margarine box were nailed across the frames of old chairs). The eyes of certain women took on a desperate, preoccupied look. ‘Store Fever’ it was called.

      They

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