The Kiln (26 page)

The boy who was giving the forfeits was sitting, blindfold, on a chair. The boy who was standing beside him, stating the sex of the person who was to make the forfeit, was his friend. They were both about fifteen. As the girl stepped up to be told what she had to do, Tam noticed that the standing boy squeezed his friend's shoulder. He realised that they were working a ploy between them. One of them expected to be chosen by her to carry out the forfeit. Tam couldn't tell which, because both of them had been round her all evening like muzzled dogs round their dinner. His joy was unlimited (early stirrings of the latent machismo) when she picked him. The forfeit was to choose her favourite boy in the room and kiss him according to the number of stars in the sky.

The joy was short-lived. When they stepped outside into the darkness, the sky was starless. Tam shrugged helplessly and they waited a little while, cuddling coldly, and went back inside, where he discovered that May Clarke wouldn't speak to him again.

Standing in the garden, he can't believe how stupid he was then, what an unimaginative little bore. He never saw the girl
again after that night. No wonder the girl cuddled him coldly. That mouth he might have kissed haunts him still, like the girl on the bus he allowed to wave him goodbye before he had met her.

He makes a decision there among the leaves. If he misses life, it won't be for the want of trying. May the guilt that comes to plague him when he is dying have its source all in sins of commission, never in sins of omission. He would rather die of overload than inertia.

He should have invented the stars. The thought arrests him. But not invent - discover. See them where no one else can. You must discover your own stars. He decides that he will.

You must discover your own stars. That cryptic statement, created by himself, makes him feel philosophical. He ponders the end of this summer. It is officially over now. He has been prolonging his personal version of it falsely, to give him more time, reluctant to abandon his adolescence because he has found no ceremonial moments to mark its closure. For which of the markers he set himself on leaving school has he managed to reach? None.

He is still terrified of going to university. The plan he had developed was to try and read more or less everything before he went, no matter how skimpily. That way, he reasoned, it would be a lot harder for them to find him out. But it had failed on two counts: he couldn't read enough and what he did read so quickly was like skating on a frozen loch. What was going on in the depths below the surface?

The
Journals
of Kierkegaard was the book of this summer that represented his failure to him most dramatically. His persistence with the journals had not been entirely for dubious reasons. There may have been an element of the flash in it, like someone contriving to have his passport stamped with an exotic location to which he has never been. But a deeper truth was that he did find the journals fascinating. The references could be bewildering, so assumptive, as if this man had a private map of the world which he thought everybody must share. The ferocity of the thinking sometimes knotted like a migraine in his head. The details of the enterprise might sometimes baffle him but what had sustained him was the almost mythic grandeur of the whole. The book
had slowly taught him something he had never realised before: that it is possible to live ideas through to the death. He wasn't sure whether this was noble or merely mad or both. But he was sure that he might have to spend the rest of his life reading Kierkegaard in order to come honestly to terms with him. This meant his summer plan was a fiasco. He would still arrive at university as an ignoramus.

He is still a virgin. The nearest he has come to having sex is the Great Senga Debacle, when he came into the air, touching no one, and he wonders if he is condemned to live in his own hallucination, able to make love only to the idea of making love.

He still dreads Cran, stripped and sweating in the infernal glow of his kiln, where things harden into what they really are or break down in the heat. He still doesn't know if he would harden or break down.

He still sometimes feels sadly distant from his family, a foster child who doesn't quite fit in. He still hasn't written anything that could be put to better use than kindling for a fire. ‘Actions in Generic Tense’ has been abandoned. This summer has been a fair old disaster.

But something - maybe it's the insistent promise in the music coming from the lighted house like a hoarse voice that reaches him in the darkness where he stands - is forbidding him to lose heart. There's still two weeks. It occurs to him that whatever happens in the next two weeks cannot constitute a bigger failure than he has achieved so far. There's a kind of perverse hope in that.

This philosophical stuff's all right. You must discover your own stars. Where the hell were they, though? Still, he feels at the moment a kind of defiance of his own past. Maybe that was a philosophy in its own right. He suddenly thinks of a motto earned from the shambles of this summer. He likes mottos. He remembers two classical ones he picked up from
The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature
, which he won as a prize in third year for ‘Distinction in Classics’. One was from Epictetus, a stoic philosopher - ‘ανεχου και απεχου,’ he said. Endure and abstain. The other was in Latin, source unknown to him -
‘nosce teipsum’.
Know thyself. Was that the Delphic oracle? Thomas Mathieson
Docherty, philosopher (1937- ), has just added his own epigram to the store of Western thought. It's not original to him, he has to admit. As he mutters it into the night, he knows that all he is really doing is rearticulating the contribution of the Scottish working classes to the history of philosophy: ‘Fuck it.’ Perhaps he's not that far alienated from his background after all. Fuck it. Let the battle recommence.

He notices, as he arrives back at the house, the saucer with some of the beer still in it and the empty chair sitting facing the open door of the kitchen. He finds a surprising poignancy in those two objects resting in conjunction, rather like looking at a house where he has had good times but from which the friend who owned it has long since moved. He takes the chair back into the kitchen. When he has managed to work his way through the bodies back into the living-room, he sees two images which will fix the specialness of this party always in his mind.

MARGARET INGLIS
, standing in a corner by the window, leaning against the wall. She is listening to someone. Her head turns slowly towards him. She flicks her blonde hair in the direction of outside and smiles a wide, slow smile and stares at him.

MATT GLOVER
standing beside the door as they go out. He has a girl hanging onto his arm, a glass of beer in his hand and, preposterously, a cigar in his mouth. He winks at Tam.

—
AFTERWARDS
, he would hear news of Big Matt's death in Australia at the age of forty-two. He would remember an afternoon in the reading room at the Dick Institute. They both
happened to have gone there to study for exams. They didn't do much studying. They played shove-ha'penny and talked. That was when he understood the anguish Matt was going through. He was asking Tam for advice. His family were Close Brethren and every natural impulse Matt followed crippled him with guilt. He masturbated compulsively while thinking it would drive him straight to hell. He must have been one of the glummest self-pleasurers on the planet. He was forbidden to go to the pictures and the first film he went to see was
The Seven Deadly Sins
, not to further his religious education. He was wracked with self-doubts while they talked. It was like seeing Gulliver bound by a million threads. For Matt was big in body and big in spirit. When he was sixteen and working on a building-site during the summer, he had fought one of the labourers for taking the Lord's name in vain. That was presumably worse than wanking. They had talked for hours but the resolution of the problem remained down to Matt. When told he had died of a heart attack, he would feel sorry but take solace from the fact that he had seen him on the night he started to live as he wanted.—

GET YOUR GLAD RAGS OFF AND JOIN ME, HON
.

T
HE PARK IS MOONLIT
and they are walking in it. There are clouds, the torn clouds that sometimes blow about the sky at night like refuse. The clouded moonlight makes the distance smudgy. He is briefly a connoisseur of moonlight. Nervousness scrapes the scum off your eyeballs. It's maybe a false perspective, like a microscope, but it makes you notice things. He is noticing moonlight.

He is walking with Margaret, at last. Walking is an interesting thing. He has his left arm round her shoulder and her right arm is round his waist inside his jacket, her thumb hooked on his belt, giving him nervous spasms. His right hand is vaguely around her left breast. Her left hand is touching his stomach. Their heads are
leaning together. Every step, they jar each other's heads, grind hips, bump arms. This is no way to walk. They move like a malformation through the park. But he is afraid to disentangle himself in case something is irrevocably lost, some door to some sanctum that he senses inching open slammed shut.

In the middle of that bodily discomfort, in the gabble of expectations and fears and thoughts of dire diseases and flashes of half-remembered teenage advice that make his mind and nervous system like a telephone exchange where all the wires are crossed, his nose, maybe deciding that central government is lunatic, declares independence. It makes a putsch for total power. He can smell
everything.

His nose is the Tower of Babel. Messages pour into it out of the darkness, most of them incomprehensible. He knows the grass all right, not long cut and remorselessly calling him back, like the smell of childhood. He never loses the pungency - from a nearby farm or from the nursery above the park? - an occasional whiff of acrid, as if the wind were burping and had dung on its breath. But mostly he smells mystery. The world is a foreign language he wonders if he is ever going to learn.

They are moving towards the lake. He has a plan. It is a plan the way a straw may be a plan for a drowning man. Something abjectly determined in him, which is perhaps manhood, is insisting that he go through with it. He is going, he is going. The blind man's stick in his trousers is feeling the way. None of the names in which he has learned to dress it to make it sociable or anti social, none of the roles, from the comic to the mythic, in which he has learned to cast it, fits. He feels that now. It shucks them off like its foreskin. It is itself. It is his and he is its.

The plan is the wooden building beside the lake. This is a plan? Somewhere in him an incubus has its face in its hands and is groaning. And the almost mystical power he has been ascribing to the building seems to move further away the closer they get. It won't work. It's not exactly dinner at the Ritz.

He doesn't know what they use it for, perhaps for storing tools. It is a small hut, its slatted wood weathered grey and mossed with age in the crevices, set back about twenty yards from the lake in the shelter of trees. They move clumsily towards it until her back is against the wood and he is facing her.

They cuddle without talking, almost as if they are wishing each other luck. It seems they both want more to happen and don't know how, nor what it will feel like if it does. This is a tricky moment, he knows, one of those when, if you don't get your timing right, your ardour will frost on you like cooling sweat. But from previous scufflings, he has evolved a kind of technique. It is not a sophisticated technique. You grope and mouth around until something happens.

He applies it or rather lets it apply him. He hopes it is not as silly a technique as he feels it to be at the moment. It is dimly meant to be a patient way of trying to let honesty happen. They kiss each other, testing for what is there. Their hands are moving uncertainly about each other. What she is thinking he doesn't know, although he suspects her thoughts may be less taken up with nonsense than his are, since even his fragmentary experience - for example, with Senga - makes him believe that women tend to be more honest to their bodies than men are.

His own thoughts are like a picket line against his instincts. They jostle in his mind, blocking his responses. There are various of them, all dressed in borrowed clothes. They are a formidable bunch, muscular with prejudice and with all the certainty of those who don't have to think any more. They are shouting slogans at him.

Fragments are penetrating his preoccupation. ‘Show them who's boss.’ ‘Say anythin’ ye need tae say tae get it.' ‘Once ye've got them goin’, no retreat.'

But none of them relates to what he feels. He's nobody's boss. He is trembiing beyond speech. He knows no conflict with Margaret, only an overwhelming need to meld. As the years of foetid and stale advice withdraw from him, something happens. He senses himself being moved past thought, into self-governing feeling.

The thighs do it. He has the beauty of female thighs naked before him, not in imagination, not in a book, not in a cracked and thumb-marked picture - but there, offered and waiting in the cool night air. They are awesomely moving, smooth and overwhelmingly powerful, the columns of the temple. Idiot with awe, he touches them and goes into a kind of motionless paroxysm.

He touches them again and again. He is overjoyed just to touch them. The prolonged, still seizure he experiences is the emotional equivalent of what he imagines Indians must be expressing in a Hollywood film, dancing round whatever they happen to be dancing round. It has often struck him how they seem to forget the object of their ecstasy in their celebration of its presence. They go off on their own, as it were. ‘Ho, ha, hum, ha, hum,’ they chant as they dance, or words to that effect. Their noises translate in his West of Scotland demotic into something like, ‘How aboot this then? This'll do me.’ ‘Ho, ha, hum, ha, hum.’ And his mind dances round and round the beauty of her thighs.

How long he might have continued his joyous celebrations, he wouldn't know. Perhaps until heart failure claimed him at his post or World War III broke out. But one thought thaws the moment into moving time again. This is a private party he is having. That isn't fair. Margaret is there as well as him, however distantly in his mind she has become connected to those formidable thighs. She is waiting for something to happen. He'd better try to make it happen.