Extracts from Graham's novels

 

 

Sweet Time

 

COME ON IN SON. HERE, GIVE ME YER COAT. Ye must be tired, comin’ all that way.”
“I’m fine Auntie Mary. Where is he?”
“Ben the back room.”
Douglas placed his bag behind the settee and removed his coat. It was stiff with frost and slightly damp. It felt strange to be cold, even after such a relatively short time away. Warmth and sunshine had infiltrated his being. They were what he was used to now, what he expected. The room looked just the same. Nothing had changed. The furniture was in the same place, as if it had been fixed to the floor. His father’s chair was still slightly closer to the hearth than the other, as it had always been. The coal was burning down, long past flames, and making occasional noises of satisfaction, like a child asleep in a cot by its mother’s bed. Mary had lit some candles and placed them on the fireplace and together with the crimson coals, they provided the only light in the room. They made the room feel warm, even if it wasn’t. There was always a chill in the air in these old tenements.
“You’ll be wanting to see your father now.”
“Aye.”
“I’ll make you a wee cup of tea first Douglas.”
“That would be grand, Auntie Mary.”
Douglas went to the window that looked out on to the back. It was still a wasteland of dirt and broken glass, washing lines and middens. He could just make out the gap in the buildings across the back that had been there since a bomb hit them during the war. When the German planes came to bomb the dockyards on the Clyde, his mother would pull the weans out of their beds, wrap them in blankets and rush down the stairs and along to the shelter. Everybody would put on their gas masks and they would sit there silent and terrified as they listened to the wail of the sirens and the rumble of engines in the sky. One day he overheard one of the women saying that the tenement across the back had been hit by a bomb and everybody in it had been killed. She said they found a body without a head in a close. When Douglas was evacuated to a farm in Fife near the end of the war, his father would travel up to see him on a Sunday and he’d bring him money and food and sweeties and they’d go for a walk around the countryside. They’d marvel at the fields and the things growing in them. He’d have a cup of tea with the farmer and they’d go outside and smoke a cigarette, leaning against a fence and blethering away. Douglas never wanted his father to go and he’d always be asking to be able to go back home to Glasgow with him. He wanted to be somewhere he knew, somewhere that was familiar, where he felt he belonged. His father usually said no but once he said all right because Douglas went on at him that much. They walked to the bus stop together, although Douglas skipped some of the way, he was that happy. When they got there, his father patted all his pockets as if he was searching for something. “Ye know what son?. “I’ve left my cigarettes on the kitchen table back at the farmer’s hoose. Will ye no go and get them for me?”
“Aye, papa, I’ll get them for ye. I’ll be back in a wee minute,” Douglas said, already scampering away up the hedge-lined road.
When he got back to the bus stop, all out of breath from running so hard, his father was gone away home without him.
Douglas felt like a cigarette himself but felt that it wasn’t right, not in the circumstances anyway. His father always went outside to have a smoke. He’d stand at the front of the close and nod to passers-by or talk to people he knew.
Douglas finished his tea, surprised at how good it tasted, and walked to the door of the bedroom. He stood there, tentative and unable to turn the handle and gently push it open. He’d spent so much of his life in there, asleep on the fold down bed or when he was just born, in a drawer on the floor. It always made him laugh that, the thought of sleeping in a drawer. What did his parents do with the things they had to take out of it so that they could put him in there, he wondered. It was hard to believe that at one time in his life he could fit in a drawer. It was a time before memory, but he wished he could remember it just the same.
He walked in and the room was silent, but it echoed with the past. Sounds, smells, voices raised in the night. Fleeting and terrifying glimpses of Santa Claus when he was supposed to be asleep. His cousin Jackie stuck under the bed and unable to get out with her hair all tangled in the springs. The neighbour’s cat on top of the wardrobe with their canary in it’s mouth. His mother on the bed weeping into her pillow because her husband didn’t buy her a Christmas present. The dull glow from the street lights through the window late at night. The sound of the gasman’s boots clicking on the pavement as he lit the lamps with his long pole. Watching the rag and bone man pass by with his horse and cart full of the mundane and the mysterious. Feeling envious as he gave sweeties and blown-up balloons to the children who had something to give him. His father stumbling drunk and singing up the street on his way back from the pub.
“He wisnae a bad man, yer faither,” Mary said. “He just lost his way.” She was sat on a straight-backed wooden chair by the side of the open coffin. Douglas was momentarily startled. He hadn’t expected her to be there. His father’s face glowed in the soft light from the candles Mary had placed on top of the chest of drawers. He was wearing his only suit. He’d had it made at a tailor in town for Mary’ eldest boy’s wedding many years before. He’d had one other suit that he wore to the dancing and when he was courting Douglas’mother, but he had grown out of it as he aged and spread out. He used to joke that his stomach had a mind of its own. Douglas noticed that his father’s tie was done up tight around his neck. After a couple of drinks he always liked to loosen it and unbutton the collar of his shirt. He would probably prefer it that way now, if the truth be known.
“He was a lovely wee boy, ye know. Always laughing. Me being ten years older than him, I used to give him his tea when he came home fae the school because oor mammy, your granny, didnae get home fae her work until half past six and your granda was ay on the nightshift. So he’d eat his tea and he’d be away doon the stairs tae play bools. He loved to play the bools. He’d ay be on the street playin’ bools wi’ his pals”. Mary tugged a hanky from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. “It was me that brought him up, ye know. He was like my ain wee boy.” She chuckled to herself. “Sometimes he’d forget and call me mammy. It was that funny, so it wis.”
In his previous life Douglas had had to visit the dead and the dying, to administer last rites, to console those who had lost their parents or children, sons and daughters. He would tell those in mourning that their loved one was at peace now. But towards the end, he began to doubt that it was truly the case. He said it because he was expected to and he wanted to believe it. He wanted to have faith. But so often, as they lay on their beds, or in their coffins, people just looked weary and afraid, their faces cold and grey and shrunken, their mouths slightly open, their teeth bared as if they had been visited by some strange terror, an unexpected and devastating revelation that there was nothing beyond death after all, that it was all just a myth, a wee fairy story to keep you going while you were alive. Perhaps they knew that there was nothing ahead, and everything from that moment on was past, that the memories you left behind in the minds of other people, your little stamp on the world, that’s all there was. The things you said, the way you laughed, how you brushed your hair, your favourite dinner. Whether you were good at your work or not. Were you a good father or mother, did you smoke too much. Could you sing a song. Did you love with all your heart?
Douglas took a chair and sat and quietly watched his father. He seemed to look less like himself by the minute. Everything was in flight. And he did not look like he was asleep. He was just not there. There was nothing of what made him who he was. Whatever spark that had animated him had been extinguished and Douglas knew in his heart that it would never reignite. He’d had his time and that was that. No encores here or anywhere else. He touched his father’s face with the palm of his hand, caressed his cheek. It was rough like sandpaper. When Douglas was a boy and his father would come home from his work, dirty and unshaven, and he would grab Douglas and rub his scratchy stubble against his son’s soft cheeks and Douglas would scream and wriggle and laugh with the pain and the sweetness of it all. In the years to come, would he remember this? Or would he remember his father, Robert “Rab” Fairbanks, his face gorged red with anger and frustration, his fist hanging in the air like lightning ready to strike? Would he recall him as the man who rushed home from his half day at work on a Saturday and sang to himself as he shaved in front of the small mirror over the sink before going off to meet his pals and catch the bus to Celtic Park? Or would he just picture the day that Rab shouted at his wife that he wished he’d never married her? Would he remember his father as the man he was, or the man he became?
“Yer faither wisnae sick, ye know. But he became awfy quiet after you left. He wisnae his usual self at all. The doctor couldnae find anything’ wrong wi’ him.” Mary rose from her chair and crossed her self. “I’ll just leave you a wee minute, then eh.”
Douglas too, crossed himself, as his auntie would have expected him too. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
For a while, Douglas stood over the coffin, just watching. He brushed some fluff from the lapel of his father’s jacket, undid the top button of his shirt and loosened his collar. From the inside pocket of his own jacket he took out a small white envelope and removed a worn black and white photograph, which he placed between his father’s folded hands. “I will remember you,” he whispered. The young dark-haired man on a bicycle smiled back at him, his eyes bright with hope and anticipation.