Strange Loyalties

38

The story of the fox in the tunic has haunted me since schooldays. I can’t remember which teacher told me it. But some forgotten day in some forgotten classroom, an adult casually told a boy a story, perhaps as incidental illustration of some more important matter, and the moment went into the boy’s mind clean as a knife and left a scar there. The scar may have healed into a fairly wilful shape, as scars will, but this is how I remember its origins.

In Sparta, if I can trust that teacher, it was all right to steal. The crime was in being found out. A Spartan boy one day stole a fox. He hid it in his tunic. I wouldn’t mind going back now as an adult and asking that anonymous teacher a couple of questions. He stole a fox? He hid it in his tunic? I assume foxes were wild even then, so maybe he stole it from someone else’s land. Maybe what he did was poach it. But it must have been either a very small fox or a very large tunic. Perhaps it was a baby fox. I don’t recall.

What I do recall is the impact of what followed. On his way home, the boy met a family friend who detained him in conversation. I’ve often wondered what they talked about — perhaps the price of sandals. As they passed the time, maintaining the social niceties, the fox began to eat the boy’s stomach. Not only did he avoid saying, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got a problem here’. He also managed to keep his face so composed that his friend had no idea of what was happening to him. They talked. They parted. By the time the boy came home and could acknowledge what was going on behind his public image, it was too late. His very entrails had gone public. He died. He became, it seems, a kind of Spartan hero, representing the ideals of their society. Some society.

I don’t think that was so heroic. It was formidably tough, all right. But I think he would have come closer to heroism if he had breached the accepted rules. I don’t think the boy should have said, ‘That’s right’ and ‘Yes’ and ‘Really?’ No wonder the Spartans gave us the word laconic. I think the boy should have said, ‘Listen. I don’t want to talk about this shit. There’s a fox eating my guts away. All right, so I stole the bastard. Do what the hell you want. But I’m not having this.’ Something like that.

For me as a boy the story was first of all simply a stunning event. It left my mind gaping. Subsequently, more meaning gathered around it in my head. The shock of disbelief became a slow sense of recognition. I thought I saw in the behaviour of the Spartan boy a metaphor for how we live. I realised that it wasn’t just in Sparta that people smile and nod and talk trivialities while their self is unseaming. It was what we were all taught to do. Certainly, in Scotland, I decided, a lot of us had evolved social conventions so cryptic they almost amounted to mime and must be sustained, no matter what tragic opera was unfolding in the head.

I had come to think that the story had stayed with me so determinedly because it contained this central significance. After talking to Michael Preston, I began superstitiously to wonder if there was another reason why that anecdote from an old culture had claimed my attention beyond rationality. For it was the story of my brother’s life. It had lain about my awareness for many years, patiently, as if it knew its purpose and I didn’t. Then, suddenly, in the small, comfortable study of a spacious, attractive flat early on a Saturday evening, I looked at it again, that familiar hieroglyph, and saw in it the features of my brother’s face.

The realisation brought a terrible stillness to me. I had knocked at all those doors and at last one had opened and brought me to a place from which I did not know how to go on. Michael Preston sat and told me what I had become so desperate to know. I had looked into so many blank faces, listened to so many unhelpful voices that I went to him ready to force my way past his defences. Instead, he simply invited me into the truth. Once there, I wasn’t so sure it was where I wanted to be.

Discovery is not merely knowledge, it is obligation. I had decided that, sitting in the Red Lion in Thornbank. It came back to haunt me in the West End of Glasgow. I had gone into Michael Preston’s room with eyes like weapons. I came out with eyes like wounds. I strode towards his flat. But I wandered away from it. The streets I had known most of my life were strange.

Since I didn’t know what was to be done, it didn’t matter what I did. I walked. I went into pubs. I observed the bizarre purposefulness with which other people moved and talked. I saw a man in passionate conversation with his friend and then, going to the bar, heard that he was discussing the ridiculous price he had been charged for garage repairs. I watched a woman watch herself in the mirror as she chatted. I went to several places. I drank a lot. I wandered through the evening like a wraith, feeling substanceless.

Only my head was rabidly alive. I had to think that Scott had probably committed a kind of suicide — not through a deliberate, conscious act but through a deliberate carelessness that was inviting the worst thing to happen. I could imagine he had lived so long with the fox that he couldn’t take the pain any more. He, too, had died of a guilt he couldn’t declare.

The anger I had set out with this week had found so much to feed on. I remembered talking to Jan at Lock 27 about Scott’s funeral. I had thought that was anger? Look at me now. My anger had grown on Dave Lyons and Sandy Blake and Michael Preston. And Anna. I remembered my feeling in the car after talking to the stranger outside Scott’s old house. Muzzle the dog, I had said to myself. How did you muzzle this one? That had been a chihuahua. This was a Great Dane. I felt such rage.

But that day in the car I had also told myself that my rage had to find an address to which to go. Now I knew it never could. For it was a rage not just against certain people, Chuck Walker or myself, but against the terms on which we have agreed to live. My quarrel was with all of us. Where did you go to deliver that one?

I went anywhere my feet took me. One of the places must have been the Chip, for I have a memory of talking to Edek and Jacqueline and Naima Akhbar. I have not much memory of what was said. I remember the concern on Naima’s sweet face. I think she told me a Muslim saying that was supposed to help me. But it couldn’t have worked because I have forgotten it. I’m left with an impression of many people jostling as we drank, as if someone had installed a gantry in a football crowd. And then I was outside again.

Why I did what I did next, I don’t know. I went to the party in Jan’s restaurant. A less likely party-guest than I was at that moment it would be hard to imagine. I was drunk but it was an odd, dislocated drunkenness. Some cold, bleak part of me was watching the meanderings of the drunken part, like a sober man who is too weary and indifferent to help his befuddled friend and can only look on as he stumbles into places that he shouldn’t go. I think perhaps I was trying to reconnect with the city, where I felt like an alien, by plugging into the energy of others as if it were a generator.

There was certainly plenty of energy at Jan’s place. The party was going well. Music was playing. Some people were dancing. Talk was loud and laughter louder. In the midst of these festivities I suddenly appeared, girt in rough thoughts, like John the Baptist at a disco. Someone had left the restaurant door unlocked. As soon as I entered, Betsy clocked me and her face had an attack of dyspepsia. She came across at once and bolted the door — securing the locks once the burglar is in. Then she went to tell Jan, who was talking to Barry Murdoch. Barry had one arm round Jan’s shoulder. I reckoned from the way Betsy was speaking to Jan that she wasn’t bringing her the good news. She was warning her of impending trouble. I saw Barry scan the room until he found me. He gave me the long, macho stare. It was like looking down the barrel of a pop gun. Jan came across.

‘Are you all right?’ she said.

‘What’s all right?’ I said.

‘Uh-huh. I see. It’s one of your metaphysical nights. Well, we’re just trying to have a party.’

‘Let the party proceed,’ I said grandly.

‘Oh, thank you. Will that be all right? Listen, Jack. You’re welcome here if you can behave yourself. But I’m not having any trouble.’

‘Could Ah talk to you, Jan? About Scott?’

‘Jack. You ever heard of timing? Enjoy. If you can. I’ll maybe see you later.’

She went off to mingle. Unable to have what I needed, I made for what I needed least of all — another drink. It was white wine I thought wouldn’t have been out of place in a vinegar bottle.

‘The champagne’s finished,’ someone told me.

‘It is, it is,’ I said darkly.

That opaque exchange, as if we were speaking different languages, crystallised how alien I was to the others. I wasn’t part of the occasion. I was something unnecessary that had been added, a quibbling footnote to the text of their enjoyment. I wandered about the place, wilfully editing their pleasure into the significance it had for me.

If I had been them, I would have thrown me out. It would have saved us all embarrassment. People were talking loudly to one another. They were being pleasant enough. But I heard them talking about house prices and cars and business-deals and I decided that this wasn’t a party. It was an auction. I saw the flower-pot of money that had attacked me. I managed to be polite in refusing a woman’s offer to dance. If she wanted me as a partner, I wasn’t the only one who might be well advised to go easy on the drink.

I took another glass of wine as the night suddenly caved in on me. I couldn’t reconcile this convention of the terminally self-satisfied with the bleak world I had been wandering through outside. Davy’s idea about the pyramids came back to me — all those wasted lives to construct a false, exclusive certainty, a habitat for wilful egos. I thought of Scott and Mrs White and Dan Scoular and Julian and Marlene in Drumchapel and Melanie McHarg. Somehow, I wanted a way to invite them to the party. Unfortunately, in my confused sense of things, I found it.

There was a wild logic to my madness. I decided that I wouldn’t pick a fight with Barry Murdoch. I stopped myself from haranguing a group who were explaining to one another how the poor create their own problems. With great difficulty, I refrained from demanding that Jan talk to me about Scott. Yet these minor triumphs of comparative wisdom only led me relentlessly to an absolute folly, a way to offend in one move every single person at the party.

I don’t know where my inspiration came from. But I suddenly found myself wrestling with my arch foe, the pot of money. Those closest to me were nonplussed at first and then amused. I suppose they thought they were witnessing one of those impromptu moments of cabaret that can happen at a party — the drunk woman’s dance on the table, the man who decides he can balance a bottle on his forehead. Drunkenness can give you surprising strength, just as rage can. I had both of them on my team at that time. I managed to lift the pot off the floor, to a spattering of derisive applause. As I made my way across the restaurant with it, legs splayed, struggling, people parted to let me pass. I had become an interesting curiosity. Was this my party piece? Was this what I did to get attention, being unable to say something witty or arresting? Perhaps it was. By the time I was standing facing them from behind the table where the food was, the room had gone silent. People were watching me, some with amusement, some in puzzled expectation. They possibly thought I was about to dedicate the money to a favourite charity. I suspect some of them believed it was a pre-arranged event. They seemed to be waiting for a formal speech. It was a short one.

‘You bastards!’ I shouted. ‘Eat money. It’s all you can fucking taste.’

I decanted the money carefully into the biggest Boeuf Bourgignon in the world. As I did so, I shook the pot meticulously along the full length of the dish, as if to make sure the ingredients were properly mixed. The coins rasped against the inside of the pot to shower on to the stew and submerge in it, instantly indistinguishable from the food. The notes fluttered and settled on the surface like some novel topping of yuppy haute cuisine. I stood looking at them, holding the charity pot that contained nothing but verdigris.

Into a vacuum of astonishment rushed a hubbub of shock. I was confronting a hydra of contorted faces. Voices bayed outrage at me. Five or six men, Barry Murdoch among them, started towards me. I wanted them to come ahead. The first one to reach me would be wearing a metal flowerpot for a hat.

‘Stop this!’

The stridency of the voice froze the room.

‘This stops now!’

The voice was Jan’s. Everybody waited, held in their poses.

‘Nobody will touch that man. Nobody. Jack, you leave now. Leave!’

I set down the flowerpot, which was as empty as my sense of myself.

‘Betsy. Let him out. And nobody touch him. Don’t dare.’

I passed through them like somebody walking among statues. Betsy let me out and locked the door behind me. I stood on the cobblestones of the alleyway in the soft rain. And drunkenness, like a false friend who was only there for the wild times, deserted me at once. I felt I had nowhere to go. I felt I had no one to be. I seemed to have consumed myself in my own grand gesture. I stood in a void and was simply a part of it. The rain was more real than I was.

‘Jack.’

It took me some time to locate the voice. It was Jan, standing on her balcony. No place was ever further away or less attainable than that balcony. Once she knew I was seeing her, she threw something down to me. My hands reached out automatically and caught it. It was a plastic bag. It didn’t weigh much.

Romeo in middle age: you won’t have to climb up to the balcony, which is maybe just as well. Juliet will stand there and fire down at you whatever you need, and even what you don’t need.

‘Just in case,’ she said, ‘you ever imagine you’ve got a reason for coming back here.’

She went into the flat. I looked in the bag. There were some of my clothes there. Maybe they were telling me who I was — Tom Docherty’s iron rations of the self. They brought me back from the disorientated wildness of what my mood had been, reminded me that living is a matter of small practicalities. Postures solve nothing. Action, not movement. It was necessary to re-engage with the small practicalities. I decided on the first one.

Taxi-time.