A Field Full of Folk by Iain Crichton Smith Page B

world. His mind seethed with ideas like the sun on a loch, he wasn’t frightened of the world. However, she had once told him that he smoked too much and he had turned on her. The incident had lasted only a short time, the quick almost insane rage had blown out of the blue and subsided quickly, and then he had been calm again. But that rage had been really vicious, he had been about to strike her. She knew she would have to placate him, there was such a sudden demented strength to his anger.
    One day he had shown her the place where he had grown up. It was a slum area which even as she watched was being blown down, men with bluish lights flowering at their gloves, and others high on roofs whistling down at her. In the distance she could see a bridge and then the glitter of the Clyde with the idle cranes dominating the skyline.
    She climbed the stairs. Soon she would be in the flat and preparing Terry’s food on the gas cooker. She would have much preferred the electric kind to which she was used but it sufficed. And then at night Terry would come home and they would talk and make plans and she herself would decide about a job.
    It was an old grey-haired retired schoolmistress who lived opposite them but she herself hadn’t spoken to her except that night when she and Terry had asked if they could use her ’phone to call a taxi because the rain was pouring down outside. That was another thing she missed, the ’phone. And the schoolmistress had a chain on her door and then had finally opened it because she recognised Terry and they had paid her the money for the ’phone call. But the schoolmistress had looked at them suspiciously all the time as if she thought they were going to attack her. How lonely she seemed and how lucky she herself was to have Terry! As the taxi made its way among the lights and over the bridge she had clutched Terry’s hand while all the time he was saying, “The bugger’s taking the long way round, that’s for sure.” And when he had protested the taxi driver had said, “You can get off here, Jimmy, if you want. It’s no skin off my nose, but you pay where you get off,” and Terry had snorted angrily but had left it at that. That was the night they had visited his friend Eddie and had stayed there playing records till one o’clock in the morning. Eddie was hunchbacked and collected Space Fiction. “He’s a clever lad that,” Terry had told her but all she could remember about Eddie was that he smelt, and his rooms were a desolate clutter of books and old boxes as if he were already half packed for somewhere else (perhaps Mars) but couldn’t bring himself to go. A budgie jumped restlessly from bar to bar of its cage and preened itself in front of a tiny pink-framed mirror while the hunchbacked Eddie leaned like Humphrey Bogart against a wall.

10
    â€œA ND I SAY ,” said Murdo Macfarlane, “that they shouldn’t be given the church hall for their dance.”
    â€œAnd why not?” said the minister patiently.
    â€œWell,” said Donald Drummond, pushing back a lock of his silver hair, and not committing himself till he saw what way the minister decided. Murdo’s face filled with blood as he tried to put his feelings into words. They were all against him, it was only he that could see the Apocalypse that was coming by giving in to everybody, especially to the younger generation. Drummond always followed the minister, but neither Scott nor Macrae had spoken yet. Scott was the incomer from England who wrote the pantomime every year. As for Macrae he was a slow heavy farmer who had two children of his own.
    â€œIt’s like this,” said Murdo, “the church wasn’t meant for dancing in. Where does it say that in the Bible, eh? You tell me that.”
    The minister stared down at the doodle that he had been pencilling on his note-pad. It seemed to show two angels fighting each other and they had