Docherty by William McIlvanney Read Free Book Online

thoughts as a stumbling discovery of them, as much a revelation to himself as it was to anybody else. The confrontation had brought from him secrets he hadn’t openly acknowledged in his own mind, attitudes he hadn’t consciously formulated, but which had become a part of him because of the climate of his life, contracted like a virus from the slow talk of his friends, embedded like the pellets of black powder from the pit-blasts in his face. Now he had declared these attitudes in words and he had to measure himself against them.
    The step of doing so wasn’t an easy one to take. His mother and father had done their work well. Woven into the whole texture of his boyhood were formative memories of the crucifix on the wall, family pilgrimages to nine o’clock Mass, the catechism, priests whose casual opinions became proverbial wisdom for his parents. His three sisters had made good marriages. The four brothers he would have had if they had lived had all been baptised Catholic. He had always been told to pray for them. Now it seemed like a profanation of their infant corpses to abandon the faith which had buried them.
    When he had married Jenny, it was simply because he had wanted to marry her, and the feeling was hot enough to make fuel of anything that got in its way. He had felt no conscious antagonism towards the Church. And since their marriage Jenny had never tried to influence him. When Kathleen and Mick went to the Catholic school, she accepted it. When Angus and Conn attended High Street school, it was his own decision, one made brusquely, as if he didn’t want to consider its implications. ‘It’s nearer’ was all he said.
    Now at least one implication of that decision was forming slowly in his mind: perhaps he wasn’t a Catholic. He felt cold without the word. It had happed his thoughts as long as he could remember. Whatever misery, anger, bitterness, despair had come to him, it had still been vaguely containable in the folds of that loose word, to be thawed to a sort of comfort. Even now he wasn’t sure that the word didn’t belong to him. He merely suspected that it might not, as if the deciding of it wasn’t up to him. He could not make the intellectual choice. He could only sense that he somehow had to be himself, whatever that might be, and it might not be a Catholic. What he felt profoundly was the uncertainty of himself, simply that he had to meet life without protection.
    The thing in him as he sat on the cold stone of the dyke, with the river flecking at his feet, wasn’t a thought but an emotion. He had buried a part of himself. So he sat accepting the void, without having any good words with which to decorate it, without a reassuring thought in which to enshrine the past. It was as if above him his own cold star had come out. Ill-equipped as he was, he would follow it. Rising, he felt suddenly the complexity of the night around come over him like a blackout. He needed company.
    The corner wasn’t so much a place as an institution. It had its own traditions and standing orders. Small groups formed round different topics of conversation by a kind of spontaneous cohesion. In the course of an evening, a casual activity, like sparring or conundrums, would isolate certain people in it as if it was a games-room. But a precise observation or a new anecdote would be relayed from knot to knot like an announcement. The various groups remained complementary to a central unit. Solidarity was what it was all about. A typical expression of it had been the night a stranger with a Glasgow accent came to the corner.
    He had been drinking, not enough to make him unsteady, just enough to activate his malice and crystallise it in his eyes. There would be perhaps two dozen men at the corner, lined unevenly along the wall of the Meal Market.
    The stranger stopped at the first one and said, ‘Good evenin’, bastard.’
    Although his voice was casual, the reaction, even among those who couldn’t have caught what he