Flood, Page 3

  So people looked to the elements and cursed the economics which had robbed them of their livelihoods. Coal was the life force, the king of the land, and when the king died there was nothing left but the anarchic struggle to find new jobs, the rush to emigrate. And emigrate they did. Many of Carsden's younger inhabitants just packed up and moved the twelve or so miles that would ensure them a job in light engineering or electronics. The older ones, the unemployable ones, were left to watch the first wave of children move out. They had to realise that a bus ride would now separate them from their grandchildren. Drained of these lives, the old town became dry and cracked and hardened, its buildings seeming to frown at every passing car.

  Moving, however, caused problems for the emigrants.

  They found it hard to make friends in the pioneer New Towns. They had been born in Carsden with their family around them like a tribe. They had been educated there, had met their friends at school there, had married there.

  Suddenly they were in strange territories, where the harling was white on the walls and the shopping centre was under cover and spacious and little factories opened up all around the houses offering work on production lines. There seemed no security in these kinds of job. These were readymade societies all right, but they lacked the essential womb-like warmth which had been the mainstay of the old village.

  Suddenly neighbours did not know one another. There was room only for cold nods of the head in passing, and the occasional argument when a party or a television was too noisy. Still, the streets were relatively clean, and the facilities were good, if impersonal: created for rather than by the community.

  And all this caring was in place of something opaque, intangible, something the migrant families knew they missed but were unable to express in words.

  Soon a few of the earliest colonists had even straggled back to the village, to ponder the imponderable and wheel the baby's pram round to the parents' house again at weekends. They all had similar tales to tell of life outside Carsden: it was an unfriendly world. The furthest most of them ever travelled thereafter was to Blackpool in July.

  Still, the trend was towards getting out, and if they could not get away for ever then they got away at weekends, visiting the same growth towns they had despised and spending their money on the week's food from the vast, spotless supermarkets. They bought knick-knacks from the large stores, and drank in pubs promising something better, more upmarket than those back home.

  Buses departed on the hour to Kirkcaldy and Glenrothes, and Mary watched in fascination the sunken faces that rode the red vehicles towards the coast or the interior. Their eyes were pink and vacant, their skin sallow. The old ones wore cheap clothes and chatted mindlessly about the television and the neighbours. The young families snapped at each other like lions beneath a parched tree. The teenagers were dressed as the magazines told them to, but their hair was lank, slick. Their voices were loud as their eyes grinned at the pathos around them into which they were so keen to grow. They could be seen like this any Saturday, sitting with the rest in the tight seats, jerking whenever the driver changed gear.

  This was the Carsden Mary inherited when she was fifteen and at the vital stage of growth. Her father sat in his chair much of the time.

  He had been made redundant a short time before and was bitter, cursing his inability to

  make manifest his innermost feelings. Mary's mother still crocheted shawls and clothes, and they still sold well. They were well made. But even she was suffering, was going blind slowly and making mistakes she would not have made five years before. Mary saw all this, but thought little of it. She was a teenager, and had to be out of the house straight after the evening meal in order to go down to the park for a smoke and a chat with some boys and friends of hers. If she had to go near the murky trickle of water that had once been the hot burn, she did so with scarcely a thought, laughing off any remembrance of the day. She would chat in the grocer's with the new Asian family, despite her father's protestations, and would buy sweets from Mr Patterson at the Soda Fountain, though there was a better selection at the supermarket. She made choices consciously now, for she was growing up.

  And she was still close to her brother Tom, who was working in a light engineering firm in Glenrothes but stayed at home still, being just seventeen. She would be leaving school in nine months or so. The prospect excited her, though Tom shook his head when she enthused about it. He looked less cheerful now than when he had still been at school. A gradual process of disaffection had led him to argue a few times with his father. Mary did not usually understand the cause or substance of these fights, but would take Tom's side against the wheezing, ruddy-faced man anyway, and then feel guilty afterwards. Her father would be in a sullen mood for days, and she would make him cups of tea and try to smile him into cheerfulness. She thought that she might like to be a nurse one day.

  She had a boyfriend too: a friend of Tom's, though a year younger than him. She was not sure that she liked the boy, but he was older than her so she persisted with him. He would talk with Tom about emigrating, and Tom would listen keenly. When Tom said one evening at the dinner table that he was emigrating to Canada, Mary ran upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom. Tom sat the whole evening at the kitchen table talking with his parents. His father brought out a bottle of whisky and two of the good glasses so that they could discuss things in the proper tones.

  Tom's mother was pale and silent. She studied her hands for most of the evening. The boy looked at her hands, hands capable of intricate weavings, and felt about to give in to their silent pressure. But this was not a decision that he had made easily. He had gone into it with various people, and had been in touch with an old family friend, Jimmy Gallacher, who worked in Canada and would put Tom up and see that he got a job in one of the sections of his own factory. A Scot, it was said, could always get a start in Canada. All Tom wanted now was the chance to try. He needed his parents' consent, though, or the leaving would be all the harder. His father conceded to most of his points, while Mary coughed out her sobs as she sat in the bathroom.

  That night, when Tom finally went to bed, having made sure that Mary had her back to him before he changed into his pyjamas, the whole house felt as though it had gone through a death. The air was full of a choking intensity.

  There might have been a coffin on the table in the front room.

  As soon as Mary heard the unmistakable creak of Tom's bed and the rustle of the sheets being pulled up to his chin, she turned and sat up.

  'Are you really going, Tom?' His hands were confidently behind his head, supporting him on the pillows. He had the look of a person who needed to do no more thinking, the look of a person who would not allow himself to go to sleep for some considerable time.

  'It looks like it. Will you miss me?'

  'Oh, Tom,' she said, but could find nothing else to say, nothing that would have made any sense. It was a strange, tongue-tied feeling.

  Well, that's good,' he said. 'If I'm missed, it'll make trips home all the nicer, won't it?' He chuckled. Mary hurried from her bed and knelt on the cold linoleum at the side of her brother's bed. She was crying softly, the tears dredged up from some last ineffable source. His hands were in her hair, patting her, comforting her. He was struck dumb in a pleasing way. He had always been her big brother, but had never realised just what the bond entailed.

  They sat together in silence for a time. Mary's sobbing eased eventually, and a little later Tom thought that he had found some words for his little sister.

  'We've all got to make this decision sooner or later, Mary.

  You'll have to make it yourself when you decide to leave home and get married or whatever.'

  'I'll never leave here,' she said, her eyes searching his for some weak point. Tom shook his head.

  'Come on,' he said. 'You're fifteen. You're not a baby any more. You'll want to leave soon enough when you see what it's like outside of school. Suddenly you're not special any more. Your friends have all gone
off to become mature adults in boring jobs. You've not got enough brains to get a really good job, one that would take you away from the area. So what's left? The pits are closed. This town is becoming a dump. I'm not going to stay put in a dump. Not me. Maybe I'm not going to make anything of myself in Canada, but I'm not going to make anything of myself here either, so where's the difference?'

  'But you've got us!' Mary whispered in anger and frustrated love. Tom was silent for a moment, his eyes forced finally to turn away from those of his fiery sister.

  Tes,' he said, 'but what happens when that's not enough?

  When that's not enough and I'm too old and weighed down to do anything about it? You won't always be here . . .'

  'But I will, Tom, I will.'

  '. . . and Mum and Dad haven't got more than ten or twenty years left, have they? Everybody dies, Mary. It's the only fact of life.'

  Tou're sick!' she shouted. He shrugged his shoulders.

  'Maybe I am,' he said, closing his eyes.

  Mary ran to the window and stood there, her blurred eyes staring out on darkness. The night was still. She used to be able to see the winding-wheel at the colliery from this window, but now it had been dismantled. A good home had been found for it in a mining museum in the Lothians.

  An old man was shuffling past uneasily below her. He stopped and leaned against the lamp-post, seemed to gasp for breath, then finally forced himself to move off again, his shoes dragging over the pavement. Tom was speaking behind her. He was approaching the window. She did not want him to look out. She turned and went to hug him, and there they stood, in an embrace of silent childishness, until Tom's feet got cold on the linoleum and he persuaded Mary to get back into bed.

  5

  It was a strange time, that autumn. Mary's father was drinking quite heavily, though her mother tried to hide the fact from everyone and succeeded only in hiding the truth from herself. Hugh Miller would sit in his chair until the early hours of the morning. Then he would say that he was going for a walk and would not be seen again until late evening, dead drunk usually and shouting along the length of the street about the treachery of the National Coal Board, the dirty tricks, the cruelty of it all. Mary, horrified and in her nightdress, would watch him from her bedroom window.

  She would watch her mother, hair falling to her waist in preparation for bed, having to leave the house and manoeuvre the roaring drunk around the lamp-post, which threw a garish orange glow over the proceedings, lending to them the hazy quality of something happening on a screen.

  Mary would watch them weave their way into the house, would hear her father retching into the toilet bowl or the sink. Tom would breathe heavily, pretending sleep, his pillow over his head. Mary was sure that he saw it merely as a ploy to stop him from leaving, and this seemed to make him all the more determined.

  'What's the use?' her father cried. 'What's the use, eh?

  Where's the reason in it? They've shut the pits and they've shut this and they've shut that. What's a man supposed to do? No bloody use to anyone. That's me.' Mary's mother would whisper with patient vehemence at him, and having got him into bed at last, a basin at his side, would look in on Mary and Tom, both of whom would be lying in shade and in heavy silence, a lack of even breathing, which would confirm their mother's worst fears.

  In the morning the pattern would be repeated. Mary grew sullen. A lot of things were to blame apart from her father's new-found dependence. Some of it had to do with a large prevailing mood in the town. Teenagers there had been brought up in the Sixties, had been told of the good life to come. Now, the Seventies approaching, they were being shown something else, and were seeing at last that behind every promise lay the bad news. There seemed nothing left to hope for. Everything was slipping further and further away. They talked about nothing else at school. Yes, they discussed jobs and career prospects, but behind it all was the greater knowledge that somehow the decline of the town was pulling them down with it, as if the town and its offspring were a single, inseparable unit.

  And as they came to consciousness, so did Mary come into womanhood. She sat in her silent room after school, sometimes toying with homework but more often just staring at the walls and at the posters pinned there, posters of the pop groups who had come to represent the now untenable dream. She cried for no apparent reason. She began to have nightmares, the gist of which would be forgotten on waking. She saw the day near when Tom would be leaving: 6 January 1969. It was so close.

  On Christmas morning Mary brushed out her long silver hair for some considerable time. She sat cross-legged on her bed with her mirror wedged in her lap, and watched the waves of static wafting strands around her as if she were sea-blown. A carol service was on the radio. Mary hummed along. She did not want to go downstairs because her father and mother would be there and last night her father had screamed at her mother and had slapped her. Mary had heard it through the bedroom floor. She could not face having to look at either of them or trying to speak to her father. Tom had been away all night at a friend's. He was home now. He was downstairs, where no one was speaking.

  The radio was loud in her room so that she would not hear the shouting, should there be any. This was the last Christmas before Tom left for Canada. She had looked at Canada in an atlas at school. It was huge, colossal really, and the towns and cities had good names. Some people there spoke French, but Tom could not. Why was he going to Canada when he could not speak French? It was far too late to put the point to him, so Mary brushed her hair and hummed carols instead.

  Her mother shouted up the stairwell, her voice neutral.

  Lunch was ready. Mary felt as if she had just eaten a plateful of toast, yet she had to go down. There was no excuse.

  She walked downstairs into silence. Her presents were the only ones left beneath the tree. Her father smoked in his chair. Tom, lying across the settee, was reading a book. Her mother could be heard singing softly in the kitchen. The large dining table had been ornately set. Mary drew out one of the chairs and sat down. There were six presents beneath the tree. There would be two from her mother and father, one from Tom, and three from her two aunts and one uncle.

  Her grandparents had died in the war. A whole generation had been erased.

  Her mother brought in a steaming tureen of soup. 'Here we are then,' she said, and Mary thought that the smile on her bruised face was the saddest thing she had ever had to bear.

  On Boxing Day, Mary's mother went to visit her sister in Leven, taking an overnight bag with her. Mary feigned illness and would not be persuaded to go. Tom had arranged to meet with some friends, as had Mary's father, so her mother left the house alone. The door clicked behind her.

  Mary did not expect to see her again. She saw it as her final leaving, and she did not blame her. When her mother returned the very next afternoon, no one but Mary was surprised.

  But by then she was too distraught to be glad. Two months later, the family had their first letter from Tom in Canada, and Mary told her mother that she thought she was pregnant.

  'Please don't tell Dad,' she said through her tears. Her mother remained silent for a long time.

  'I'm not going to ask who it was,' she said eventually. 'Just answer me this: can he marry you?' Mary screwed up her eyes and shook her head. Her mother sat examining her own hands. It was not an easy life. First her husband had taken to drink, then she had to watch her only son leave for a distant country, and now this. Her son and her daughter.

  She knew immediately when it had happened. Boxing Day.

  The whole house had been changed somehow when she had walked into it on the afternoon following. She should have guessed. People had always said that they were very close, even for brother and sister. Unnaturally close. She should have known. She stroked her daughter's silvery dark hair and contemplated telling her husband the news. Would he guess what she had deduced?

  As it turned out, Mary's father said nothing, just drifted further into his own numbed world where nothing, it seemed,
could hurt him. Mary's mother was not surprised by this. She had always seen herself as the stronger of the two.

  He often called her 'the battler' (in the earlier years of their marriage at least) and she supposed it was true enough.

  Resilience, she had found, was needed in plenty. She went to church regularly, and knew that every trial was something more than it seemed - a higher test and a kind of judgement.

  She prayed to God at her bedside on the evening after she had told her husband the bitter news, and she made him get down on his knees too.

  This needs all our strength, Hugh,' she said, but his words were slurred and he collapsed his head on to the bed after a few moments and wept himself silently to sleep.

  Mary's mother raised her own head towards heaven and prayed with even more intensity. Strength was needed, Lord, strength was needed.

  'But our reserves are not limitless, Lord. Help us in our need. Help Mary to get over all of this. She is a young girl.