Remedy is None by William McIlvanney Page B

each other fitfully, in the cleft of a phrase, in casual moments. When Charlie thought his way through the past six years, trying to place the terrible image of the father he had found in that death-room, trying to match it with another, he could not. All he could remember were those brighter rooms, moments of laughter, incidents that refused to be taken seriously. He could remember many things about his father, but almost all of them seemed redolent with humour. He could remember the time his father had risen at three in the morning to listen to the world championship fight from America. He made tea and sandwiches, arranged his armchair by the wireless. He filled a pipe meticulously. He sat with his tea before him, the quilt from the bed draped round his shoulders, the wireless tuned in, and, with the match raised to light his pipe, the fight was finished in the first round. Charlie remembered his father sitting there, resplendent in bedclothes, the match burning his fingers, hisface sagging with disbelief, crowned with rumpled hair, King of Incredulity. He remembered the time his Uncle Hughie had interrupted their record session with some folk-singing of his own. They had all been listening to the records which seemed to have been in the house before they were, when his Uncle Hughie had dropped in, almost literally, and insisted that they should listen instead to his own repertoire of favourites for inebriates. He asked them, with unconscious irony, what was their pleasure, and proceeded to sing his own. ‘The Lea Rig.’ He rearranged himself in his chair, coughed the loose phlegm from the back of his throat, and swallowed it, kneaded his lips, fluttered his eyelids, and started to sing (with Charlie’s father descanting at the ends of lines and interpolating ironic commentary, ‘On ye go then . . . Can ye beat ’im . . .? Awfu’ guid . . . Clear as a bell ...?’):
    ‘Whe-hen owes the hull yon eastren staaar
        Tells bughtin’ ti-hime is near my Jo-ho . . .’
    His Uncle Hughie never actually sang a song. He simply shouted the words as loudly as he could and left the notes to fend for themselves. His eyebrows assumed an acrobatic existence of their own, lifting and lowering with random suddenness. His Adam’s apple bobbed alarmingly like a float under pressure from a porpoise. His eyes scuttled in their sockets like mad mice. Convulsive breathing made a bellows of his body, and huge arms were liable to be flung straight out at any moment in massively dramatic gestures. To anyone new to the experience it must have been a fearsome prospect, like the death throes of a mammoth. But through it all there was a ponderous sincerity to his performance. He was able to let a song possess him utterly, like an insane demon, so that once started nothing would stop him till the last line had been exorcized. He sang on relentlessly and where he didn’t know the words he simply improvised with a weird keening mouth-music of his own, or else stretched one word out like elastic until it filled a line:
    Down by the burn where yon birk trees
    Wi’ dew are ha – a-a-a-aangin’ . . .’
    That ludicrous sound had never faded from his memory. It was strange how he could remember so much that was casual and trite. He seemed to move among memories of his father that mocked the enormity of his dying. He found only trivia to recall. Broken fragments of small enjoyment littered his memory like a child’s discarded toys, aimless and inconsequential, seeming to have no connection with what had happened in that final room, with what must have been happening for years inside his father, while no one had been taking any notice. To have had laughter was good, but when the banter and the jokes were set against his father rotting twice in that little room – when they were all there was to set against it – they seemed a bitter insult to his dying. It was like a conspiracy of smiles against the truth. Something terrible had happened to his