The Book of Other People

Gordon by Andrew O’Hagan

They say Gordon nearly lost an eye in the 1950s, playing football by a slagheap on the edge of Kirkcaldy. ‘Never mind,’ said his father on the walk back from the Infirmary. ‘We’re all half blind in the face of Divinity.’ Gordon felt a painful nip under the nurse’s bandage and saw a presentation of cold stars in the road’s tarmac. Years later he remembered that walk home and the way he had felt proud at the perfect ordinariness of his school shoes. ‘That’s a likeable person, that doctor,’ his father had said with a cough as Gordon walked out in front. ‘He knows how to be a doctor. He believes every man must suffer a little damage.’

There was a linoleum factory up on the main road and Gordon could see it smoking from his room at the manse. He always had that strange ability – one emboldened by his reading of books and plays – to conjure some kind of high romance out of an industrial scene, though neither of his brothers had time for books, being busy all the while with haircuts and phone calls. Gordon would memorize quotations and say them to himself under the bathwater with his ears crowding around with noise. His eye was better by then and his father was deeper in league with the Lord. Gordon would stand in the talcum-powdered air of the bathroom muttering calculations and strange moral sums about the cause of Hamlet’s unhappiness. His mother knew her second son was bound for Edinburgh when he came down one evening with a sullen face. ‘The problem in Hamlet is the ghost,’ he said. ‘He’s imprudent. He’s unwise. You can’t command a person’s conscience. And by forcing a family into action you kill them all.’

Baked beans became a subject for a while. Gordon worked out that each bean had a certain value to the world, but he felt it curious that some beans were eager for their own preferment. On toast, some of those beans had a truly remarkable orange lustre, and it seemed the biggest beans exactly understood – in a way the pulpy and burst ones certainly did not – what their role might be in the perfect meal. At his student flat in the Grassmarket, the dishes were known to pile up in the general desolation of a Belfast sink, but Gordon was busy accommodating the facts of life to a nourishing vision of the future. He never got drunk because he feared more than anything a loss of control, and so, on Friday nights, as the squads of local boys went skidding up the Lothian Road fuelled by pints of lager, Gordon would be inside the Cameo watching old movies about blind pianists or soldiers mangled by war and self-consciousness. He often picked up a bag of chips amid the broad, late-night fraternity of the Grassmarket, and would cradle them up the tenement stairs to have with his beans. That was the essence of his student years: the vapour of warm newspaper soaked in patches of vinegar.

That’s a terrible black sloshing out there in the North Sea. The very idea of people being trapped on those oil rigs for weeks at a time began to unsettle Gordon’s sense of the perfectly deployed and the reasonably useful life, but then again the 1960s offered a vista of possibilities for the modernizing of Scotland, and it looked as if oil might certainly have its part to play in all that. It was just, to Gordon, that the substance itself seemed to be so little separate from the conditions of its retrieval. Dark, I mean. All dark. And he couldn’t get away from that notion of living men with healthy bones using machines to suck out the dead carbon liquor of the earth. ‘Wasn’t that a wee bit on the savage side?’ He said this several times to a girl he met for coffee at the George Hotel, and she paid close attention with her beautiful green eyes before saying she had better get going or she was liable to miss her bus.

He saw copies of his first book in the window of a leftist bookshop in Glasgow and had to admit he felt a tear forming in the corner of his better eye. He had captured – as was readily admitted by the Greenock Telegraph – the often under-described lives of Scottish old-age pensioners in the second half of the century, and had done so in a prose of untrammelled epic beauty. He had invented a fragmentary style that was best suited to capture the frayed lives of his subjects, and the Dundee Courier, having caught Gordon presenting his findings to a formal gathering of accountants at the rear of Milne’s Bar, was ready and indeed very able to form the view that the author showed considerable form as an orator.

Gordon was forever finding restaurant receipts in the pockets of his suits or stuffed in his wallet. Sometimes they weren’t receipts exactly but yellow Switch carbons, indicating how much he’d spent and whether service was included but not particularly saying what had been ordered. Over recent years he had developed an active resentment against fizzy water. When the taxi brought him back one night to Millbank, he pondered that Islington drink, and watched the news with a growing sense of hatred.

There is a statue of Adam Smith that stands in a fork in the road across from the church where Gordon’s father once presided. The son always thought of the memorial as a thing covered in snow, though in truth the Scottish sun was always more likely to pour down its benisons on that noble pate, that head with the world-sized mind within, the very image of it leading out the brilliant and patient sons of Kirkcaldy. Gordon went back to look at the statue after his father’s death in 1998. It was indeed snowing that particular day, and Gordon looked at the stone Adam Smith as if he might discover some marks on that famous countenance left there by his own former scrutiny. Gordon fancied the tenets of the Enlightenment might in fact offer a suggestion about how to live. He saw too little of himself in Smith’s face, but felt the statue looked altogether smaller than how he remembered it back in the days of the school certificate and the worries of Higher English. There was no one about at that early hour, but Gordon instructed his driver to go if he would and see if he couldn’t bring a ladder from the church hall.

London is a smear of buses and chances in the afternoon. How colourful too is the capital city, how full of the foreign arts. Right at the opening to Horse Guards Parade a soldier stands on his horse wearing the helmet and red tunic, his sword resting on his right shoulder, the tourists taking their pictures and laughing at duty. A blonde girl from Athens, Georgia, and her friend threaten all of a sudden to climb up and draw on the guard with lipstick. They whisper to one another about how it is against the rules for him to speak and about how he can’t move too much either. The guard simply stands there as if their dreams were none of his business. The guard can hardly hear them in fact, and he merely feels tired at the base of his spine and is gagging for a pint. He wonders if his wife made it to the supermarket, and isn’t there a great offer on those stubby bottles of German beer? As his thought fades into the wan, persistent, Shakespearean sun, the guard looks up to see Gordon passing in the Whitehall traffic, his head against the window and his one good eye on the road.