The Kiln. William McIlvanney
every scar.
He named himself in everything we do.
And shall we dare to christen him anew?
This isn't any good, he feels now. He can't believe that, when he finished it maybe eight weeks ago, he thought it was worth memorising. It is part of a 800-line poem he wrote in a fortnight called ‘Reflections in a Broken Mirror’. It was meant to be more or less his philosophy of the world. But then what does he know about the world? It's embarrassing. After he had finished it, he wrote a letter to T.S. Eliot, offering to let him see it. For three weeks afterwards, he suspected the postal service of incompetence or T.S. Eliot of having died. But when no news arrived of the death of a major poet he got his sister Allison to make a typescript surreptitiously at her work and he sent it off to Chatto and Windus. A nice letter came back, talking of ‘great intellectual vigour’ and the impossibility of publication. He keeps the letter in his notebook, regarding it as his first review.
But now he wishes he could forget those lines he memorised. They keep coming back into his mind and suffusing it with the intellectual equivalent of a blush. They have become especially embarrassing because they led him into yet another misjudgment with a girl.
He was sitting in the Queen's Cafe with her and she discovered that he was trying to write. She asked him what he was writing. Suddenly, he was quoting the lines. Once he had started, he couldn't manage to stop. It was as if he had taken a mental emetic. He looked on in dismay as his mouth careered on and she looked as if she was going to fall asleep. When the words ran out, there was an awkward pause, rather as though someone had farted and they were waiting for the smell to dissipate.
‘But that's not poetry,’ she said at last.
She was voicing something he had himself been suspecting. Those words seemed somehow like an anteroom to writing, not the thing itself. For a start, he thought forlornly, you don't put nails in a tomb. You put them in a coffin.
How could he have written anything so self-absorbedly inaccurate? Writing, he has already decided, is making love. It's not masturbation. (Is that why he can't do it yet, since his only experience so far lies in the second of these areas?) Whatever it is you're trying to relate to must be justly learned, not pre-decided or merely imagined. Lose the details, you lose the lot. One compass he has given himself in his uncharted creative ambition is to distinguish between details and trivia. A detail becomes a detail by acquiring specific separate relevance to the whole. It achieves identity in conjunction. A triviality is interchangeable with other trivialities. It remains functionally anonymous. In that one line he has turned a detail into a triviality.
The clock striking another nail into my tomb. Crap. In that imprecision he sees the loss of the whole poem, as if one careless compass reading has multiplied the error of direction in the whole thing until it finds itself not in the New World he had imagined but standing in Antarctica in tee-shirt and jeans and doomed to instant death. That bastard nail had made a tomb of the poem, or a coffin.
He was aware of her watching his gloom - Hamlet in the Queen's Cafe. She was not unkind. May Walkinshaw. She might have a sense of poetry as all-inclusive as that of Miss Stevens, his English teacher in third year, who taught the class ‘Daffodils’ for two weeks solid, as if it were the aesthetic Ten Commandments, beating its rhythms relentlessly into their heads with a ruler on her desk. And she might treat her tits as if they were the crown jewels, to be filed past and admired but never touched. But she wasn't unkind.
‘I'm sorry,’ she said. ‘I hope I haven't hurt you.’
‘Naw,’ he said. ‘It's all right.’
But it wasn't. He knew he would never write again. And he thought of Greta Garbo. It was several days before he started his blank-verse play about working-class life. He decided he wouldn't mention it to any of the girls at the dancing.
WHY DOES THE DANCING MEAN SO MUCH TO HIM? He stares in the mirror and wonders. The dancing is the most important place in his life, he thinks. This mirror is in Allison's room. It is Saturday morning. Allison works on a Saturday morning at the office where she is a typist. He can come in here and use it as a dressing-room.
Only when Allison is out can he come into her room. The rest of the time she protects her space with the ferocity of a guard-dog. He feels pissed off about the living arrangements in the house. Where is his space here? On Saturday mornings he may enter the sanctum of Allison's room as long as he leaves no telltale signs of his having been here. Sundays he has access to Michael and Marion's room. Saturday nights he can kip in Michael and Marion's in a real bed. His clothes are kept in his parents' wardrobe. Six nights a week he sleeps in the fold-down bed in the living-room. It's like sleeping in the middle of the road. You have to learn to ignore the traffic. He feels like a refugee living on the edges of other people's lives. How are you supposed to find out who you are when you have to borrow yourself from the leftovers of others like second-hand clothes? No wonder he needs the dancing. At least there he can feel part of a community of nomadic hunters with the same rights as anybody else.
He tries to find a hunter's expression in the mirror. He hopes the dancing will be good tonight. He'll probably go to the pictures as he does every Saturday afternoon, now that the football season's over. Then it will be the dancing.
At least he has no obvious plooks at the moment. The skin of his face is more or less clear. Sammy Clegg's in a bit of a state just now. Plooks. That's a really Scottish word, much more expressive than ‘pimples’. Plooks: the sound of illusions bursting. Why are all things in Scots designated by the least romantic sound the mouth can encompass? Scottish vocabulary is like a fifth column operating within the sonorous pomposity of English, full of renegade plosives and gutturals that love to dismantle pretensions. It's English in its underwear.
He has some plooks on his shoulders but that's no problem. Your shirt conceals them. Just don't go to the swimming-baths. Forehead plooks are bad but things can be done with the hair. He has a theory that the Tony Curtis hairstyle owes its amazing popularity to its effectiveness as a plook-concealer. Plooks on the cheeks are much more difficult. It would take a hairstyle of insane exoticism to cover them. The best you can do is to become elaborately thoughtful for a few days, developing a style of resting the face meditatively on the appropriate hand, or on both hands in time of extreme crisis.
The ultimate cosmetic nightmare is a plook on the nose. You can do nothing with them except suffer. Valderma seems to feed a plook like that instead of curing it.
(Dear Inventor of Valderma,
Don't give up your day job.)
None of the theories current for dealing with them seems to work very well in practice. ‘Squeeze early’ is one school of thought: better a red lump than an angry hill crowned with a white cairn. But he always finds that he is sculpting it to an even greater grandeur, feels he is assisting in the perfecting of his own ugliness. And those ones always seem to come at exactly the wrong time.
Does the adult world realise the significance of plooks? One nose-plook may have affected his chances of happiness for ever. It was so huge, so embarrassingly bright, that he believed it was flashing like a Belisha beacon. It reached maturity on the very evening he was to go out with Margaret Inglis. It was after he had taken her home from the school dance this year.
That was some dance. He knew he was leaving school and he appeared in his new, tight-trousered suit, casual shoes and Michael's maroon waistcoat. (That tie,' his father had said. ‘Like an explosion in a flooer-shop.’) Some of the teachers looked at him askance and Miss Hetherington said in a loud voice as he was passing once, ‘I didn't know they were inviting hooligans this year.’ But Mrs White had stopped him to say, ‘I thought you were staff there, Tom. Then I realised you were dressed too maturely to be staff.’ That had left him wondering.
He had a great night. All his experience at the dancing seemed to pay off. It was like his coming-out ball. He was picked early at every ladies' choice. By the end of the dance there were at least four girls he thought he could ask to take home. But there was only one he really wanted to. Margaret was just finishing fourth year but she didn't look like it. She looked as if she had modelled for the Jane cartoon in the Daily Mirror. And she had