Be Near Me (10 page)

'That's the intention,' I said, putting the book down. 'You reckon you're a bunch of gangsters. We'll see how brave you all are when you're halfway across the sea.'

'Up shit creek without a paddle,' said Lisa.

'Language,' I said.

We began our descent to Girvan harbour and could see the rock standing out there at the centre of the morning like a golden bell, half-submerged in the waters of the Irish Sea. 'It looks much bigger from here,' said Mark.

A mile out from the harbour, the boat seemed to glide forward on the breeze and Mark was leaning over the side, trailing a finger in the green water. 'Careful,' I said. 'The boat could suddenly tip and we don't want to lose you just yet.'

'Let him go,' Michelle said. 'He'll just sink to the bottom like a stone and nobody will miss him.'

'No, he'll float like a McNugget,' said Lisa. She leaned against the rope and shaded her eyes. She pointed downwards. 'Father,' she said, 'are there many boats down there? I mean, shipwrecks and stuff?'

'Thousands,' I said. 'These coastal waters are rough in the wintertime. We couldn't cross. The waves would come right over the boat, and you wouldn't be smiling then.'

'So it's like one big graveyard,' said Mark. 'Down there.' He stabbed a finger through the surface. 'Just a graveyard of old ships and that.'

'Sadly, yes,' I said. 'Going back to before the Age of Improvement, when coal ships travelled these lanes. Merchant ships bound for the East Indies. And smugglers. This coast was bad for smugglers two or three hundred years ago.'

'Drugs?' said Mark.

'Brandy more like.'

'Cool.'

The journey to the Craig was ten miles, but each mile brought slow-forming changes in light and perspective; it felt as if the boat was moving through the grades of perspective itself, the red roofs at Girvan now low on the horizon and the rock beginning to crowd our vision moment by moment until the senses themselves were enlarged.

'It's like travelling inside a painting,' I said to the group.

'Except we're real,' said Lisa.

'Keeping it real,' said Mark.

An hour seemed to go in perfect peace, the skipper moving the boat over the sea and the unknown graves below, the young people talking their reams of nonsense, opening their smiling faces into the breeze.

'It must've been mad,' said Mark eventually. 'In Vietnam or, like, the Falklands. Going out in a boat knowing people could start shooting at you any minute. Totally mental. And you'd have, like, a machine gun rigged up here to get the bastards.'

'Don't start up about wars,' I said.

'The Bay of Tonkin,' he said. 'Or San Carlos Bay. Gunners giving it da-da-da-da-daga-daga. Argies falling about all over the place and getting theirs. Dumb fucks. Imagine it, but. Dead Argies everywhere.'

'You weren't even born,' I said.

'I've read about it,' said Mark. 'It was totally mad. The troops sorted them out all right.'

'The poor penguins,' said Lisa. 'Mr Harris in History said hundreds of penguins got blown up down there.'

'Get a grip,' said Mark. 'You always get casualties in war. Who gives a fuck about penguins?'

'People died,' I said. 'People die in war.'

'But it's cool,' said Mark. 'Friggin' sort out all those crappy dictators and stuff. That's how it should be.'

'It's a terrible business.'

'Necessary though,' said Mark.

'Sometimes necessary,' I said. The others were taking in the immediate world around the boat, the volumes of water and the diminishing land behind our backs. Lisa was sitting on the deck in bare feet and was busy pressing the buttons on her phone. 'When I was about your age I wouldn't have agreed with you,' I said. 'In those days it was the fashion to hate all wars. More than fashion: we really believed it and it seemed to us the government was corrupt. That's how young people used to think. Now you're all more gung-ho than any government.'

'But you like it,' said Mark. 'You're just as bad.'

There are people who notice the power of themselves in any conversation. They won't be put down, and their steady gaze can come to bare one's nerves and cancel one's resolve. Mark was like that. I don't know if I've seen it in anyone so young before, or so small-minded, though there comes a point in life when all young people seem capable of knowing things one could never fathom. Perhaps his mother had adored him too much, for Mark behaved as if the world was invented just for him, and his face was serene enough to convince anyone who looked at him that things would be all right if one stuck close. I think in our hearts we believe that beauty is a very sincere kind of knowledge: we fall for the wisdom of beautiful lips no matter what they are capable of saying. Mark knew it. He knew it the way a bird might know where to fly in winter. He might have known nothing else but he knew people needed the youthful, vivid certainty of his presence, and it didn't matter to him then, as it would one day, that this fantastic power was set to fade into nothing. We noticed when he opened his eyes and shaded them from the sun to look at us, because they brought something of the sun down with them, to include us, to let us share in his own warm rays of assurance.

'You like it,' he said again, 'us taking a stand against evil. Fuck peace. You've got to take a stand.'

'To some extent, perhaps,' I said. 'But not always.'

'It's like football,' he said. 'You've got to have your team. You want them to win. You want that more than anything. You get to the stage you'd do anything for your team. Me, I would do anything for Celtic.'

Jellyfish floated past the boat, opening and closing. Everyone seemed to be thinking their own thoughts, then Mark broke through the silence to tell a story. 'The night of the Liverpool game at Anfield,' he said, 'my da actually opened his mouth. He's usually got nothing to say to me and nothing to say to my ma, but my ma was out selling tablet...'

'What's that?' I said.

'Rubbishy fudge,' he said. 'She sells it round the doors. Anyhow, he pushed the sofa in front of the telly. He brought out crisps and that, sweeties and ginger he'd bought off the van, and he said for me to sit down and watch the game. He usually hates people around him. He just sits in his chair and smokes.'

I could picture Mark's living room as he spoke. Near the beginning of my time in Dalgarnock I had gone to his house. I didn't know Mark at the time but his mother came and asked me to speak to her husband about his depression. She explained it had been going on for a long time and that he wouldn't have anything to do with doctors. 'Maybe you can get through to him,' she said. 'It sometimes takes the priest.'

When I came to the house it seemed to me Mr McNulty didn't want a priest or anybody else, but he was polite, terribly overweight, sitting in the armchair Mark talked about and saying he was fine. He was just going through a funny stage, he said. I remember the fire with imitation coal and the stack of video tapes, the large, gold-framed photograph of a baby who sat on a furry rug and the table at the back of the sitting room crowded in the middle with sauce bottles, vinegar, a jar of beetroot. 'You have a nice way with words, Father,' he said. 'Are you English?'

'I was born in Edinburgh,' I said. 'That's my mother's city. She met my father there and they got married and had me. Then we all went to live in Lancashire. That was his territory.'

A strange smile—same as Mark's, now that I think of it—appeared between the mounds of his cheeks and he lit a cigarette. 'Lancashire,' he said. 'Never been to Lancashire. I like Ireland.'

Mark's father spoke a little about his own father. He showed me some cigarette cards the old man used to collect, and he referred to his life with the vague piety, I thought at the time, that we deploy when discussing the lives of people we wish we had known better. In fact, it reminded me of the way I sometimes talked myself. 'They say he was a very good sort,' said Mr McNulty. 'An old lady was ill once, just up the road from where we lived. She couldn't eat. And my dad went up there and sat by the bed for hours, squeezing oranges into her mouth.'

'Very kind,' I said.

'Aye. That was the measure of the man. He always had plenty of things to do. He kept an allotment.'

'And what sort of father are you, Mr McNulty?'

The question was coarse, but I asked it with a view to perhaps opening up the question of the man's unhappiness. He just looked at me. 'Did my wife ask you to ask me that?'

'Not at all,' I said. 'I would like to help you.'

He smiled and lit another cigarette.

'Doctors and priests,' he said. 'Good men.'

'I try to do the odd thing with Mark,' he said. 'It's not always easy to think up things to do, but I take him to the swimming. There's a braw pool at Auchenharvie. We've been there a few times.'

Seagulls followed the boat, nipping in closer, tilting on the wing, as if they too were listening to Mark's story about the Liverpool game. 'I really wanted them to be the European champions. The Lisbon Lions all over again, just like 1967. My da usually just gets a few cans and sits them at his feet for a game. He doesn't want anybody in the living room. And that night he said, "This is your history." He made me a shandy and he said: "This is what your people fought for."'

Lisa and the others just nodded. They seemed to understand. 'My da and my uncle cried at that game,' she said. 'They cried at the start and they cried at the end when we won.'

'We were a European side that night,' said Mark. 'Half the English national team were running about in red shirts—Owen, Heskey, Gerrard—and we'd never gubbed Liverpool in a European match before. And what a feeling among the Celtic support. You could see the fans giving it full pelt in the terraces. The songs. Don't get me wrong: Liverpool have brilliant supporters, but the Celtic crowd are different.'

'Why's that?' I said.

'Because they've had to fight their way up,' said Mark. 'They fought to be accepted, a Catholic team in Glasgow and then in Scotland and then in the world. It's a community, intit?'

'But that's true of Liverpool too, isn't it? Those people have had to fight their way up.'

'That's what I'm saying. They have brilliant supporters. It's just, with Celtic, there's something a bit more.'

'And what happened at the house,' I asked, 'when you were watching with your father?'

'When Thompson scored, it was a free kick, okay. Not far outside the box. It was like this.' Mark motioned with his foot. 'Larsson skipped over the ball and Thompson blootered it and the wall just crumbled. I'm tellin' ye: the wall fell apart, players jumping up and turning sideways to avoid the ball hitting them, and instead of hitting them it fired right into the back of the net. One-nil. I was jumpin' up and down in the middle of the room and my da was smiling from ear to ear.'

'That's awesome,' said Lisa.

'He went to get up. It's a bit of a hassle for him sometimes, getting up. He tried, but then I just bent down and grabbed him and cheered. He said, "That's yer Liverpool for ye. It went right through their bloody legs. What a goal. Get me another beer frae the fridge, we're gon tae the semi-final."'

We were silent for a moment around Mark.

'It was weird,' he said, 'because I don't think he likes me.'

'Nonsense,' I said. 'Of course your father likes you.'

'It's nothing to me,' he said. 'But what a night for Celtic. You've got to have your team, Father.'

'I suppose so.'

I looked back to see Scotland, the woods that fringe the headland and the green breast of the hills. From our position it seemed nothing could ever reach us or force us back, and we passed into a strange proximity with the advancing island of Ailsa Craig. More than an island, it seemed like a testament to physical endurance, this place, this lonely rock less than a dozen miles from the coast. It could have been the Aegean. It could have been the Bay of Bengal. But it was a golden spot on the Irish Sea, and we sat in the open boat as it moved into the shade.

Before we reached the jetty, I asked the youngsters to stop talking and listen to our place of arrival. There was nothing around us but the sound of birds. 'Are we the only people here?' whispered Lisa.

'Yes,' I said. 'We are alone here.'

'That's weird,' said Mark.

I lifted my rucksack and the group ran ahead, shouting and cavorting up the incline that leads to the Garry Loch. They made their way in a gaggle of soft punches and Americanisms, hollering into the distance or back down to the water. That was their way, but still, leaving the skipper and the boat behind, I felt the value of their young voices tumbling down the rock. For a short time that day, we were a nation on the island of Ailsa Craig, them and me, under a sky so blue it made all dreams seem continuous. Lisa sat down next to the loch and picked at some marsh marigolds sprouting from a border of moss.

'How old are you?' she said.

'Fifty-six.'

'That's mental. Fifty-six. So what happens when you retire? Is there, like, a home for priests?'

'No,' I said. 'You just go somewhere. There's always a lot in the world to be getting on with.'

'My dad,' she said, 'he hasn't worked since I was about two or three. They closed Massey Ferguson. They made tractors. That's where he used to work when he had a job.'

'What does he do now?'

'He does the Lotto,' she said. 'Nuttin else. He gets on my mother's nerves. She works cleaning the school and he watches Sky Sports.'

'What do you want to do?' I asked.

'I want to be, like, a make-up artist. For films and that. Or like on magazines. You know, like where they go to places with models and they put clothes on them and somebody does the make-up. That's me.'

She looked over the water. Ayrshire was a series of green curves and grey houses: it looked like a place of certainties. 'I'll tell you something,' said Lisa. 'I'm not hanging about over there.'

'No,' I said. 'But I thought you didn't like foreigners.'

'Aye, but I don't care. I'd like to have loads of shoes.'

'What else?'

'I want to go out and that,' she said. 'Buy a car and a good stereo. You have to admit: that would be totally awesome. Gucci sunglasses. I want a pair of Gucci sunglasses.'