tears were not enough

After the funeral, Davy nursed a lukewarm can of Skol lager and chose a quiet, empty corner of the church hall near the swing of the door and stink of the toilets to get away from the crowd. He’d done his bit, stood dutifully at the double-doors to the crematorium and shook everyone’s hands firmly and thanked them in a cold and resolute voice for coming. Flung in the usual stuff about his Da being a good man, cancer and being sadly missed and met people’s eyes until they’d looked and scurried away.  

Love was letting go. His wee sister, Agnes, had said so in the eulogy, standing shaking in the pulpit vacated by the priest, her bits of lined, A4, paper and her torn voice reaching the back pews where the perfume of incense finally settled. Her hand had wavered as she held up a bookmark, nobody could really see the scrawled evidence, a bit like the Holy Ghost, you’d have to take it on faith, something their Da pencilled inside the Book of Common Prayer he’d taken to reading, specs perched higgledy-piggledy on his nose, even though he wasn’t religious, other than his visits to Celtic Park: ‘Tears are not enough’.

As soon as she said that, of course, everybody started greeting.  The ambulance crew, four auld boys in identical clobber, sat tight in the same pew near the statue of the Virgin, and dutifully dabbed at their eyes with hankies pulled from breast pockets. Difficult to tell them apart, or that their Da had been one of them, before his knuckles swelled and closed his rheumatic fingers like a vice. But then he’d found a cracking job in a children’s home in a big empty house in Hyndland. Those poor, lonely kids that had nothing. He’d told funny stories about them. Then brought them home, in dribs and drabs, over the years, to tell their own stories.  Became fixtures and fittings to family life and became fine men and woman, with even finer ideas above their station about how life should work. They leavened the crowd of bald and pepper grey hair in the back rows and were also greeting to beat the band, because their Da really could make conversation ring true.

Then his wee sister talked about all that other stuff he did for friends and neighbours. Them that could come to the chapel were there. Them that couldn’t were waiting on the other side. Opportunities he called it for a wee blether and a cup of tea. No harm done. The type of man that stood up to give pregnant woman and older folk a seat on the bus, even though he was older folk. Mum of course, gave him that look that would have cut you in two and clenched her jaw and railed against him, but usually he’d play dumb and she rallied round, happy to be his wife and the life their love had created.

Uncle Bobby came across with a glass of beer in his hand, weaving through the crowd and spotting Davy. Time had worn him thin and bent, but the craggy features remained. Sideswipe smile, his Glaswegian accent and a no-nonsense voice that dropped like a bouncers ready to tell him the bad news. ‘You’re Da was a great man.’ He gestured as the drink dotting the table round about me, most of it half finished. ‘You want anything? You want a half?’

‘Nah,’ he shook my head. He was already half drunk, could no longer handle it the way he used to. His Da, of course, didn’t bother much with the drink. A glass of whisky and half pint of beer at Christmas. That was it, more or less. The only exception was when Uncle Bobby used to turn up. That happened every two or three years. He doubted he even was a relation, but in those days all older people that where your Da, or Ma’s pals, were uncles or aunts. It was the natural order of things. In the same way, Uncle Bobby turned up at our house with stacks of presents for a posse of kids and his Da came back blootered from the pub and that was it for another year or two.

There was just this hole where his Da should have been and he didn’t really want to talk about it.

‘Go on, take a wee half?’ Uncle Bobby urged him.

Davy took a sip of flat lager and half smiled. ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’

‘Look, I don’t know how to say this, but I let your auld man down.’

Davy bit his lip and nodded. His Auntie Eleanor, a wee woman, under five-foot that combed red through her big cockerel hair, brushed passed him on the way to the Ladies, ‘You alright son? she said. ‘He’d a good send off. There was a good crowd.’

‘Aye,’ said Davy, as the door swung open and shut behind her.

Uncle Bobby was waiting and caught his eye. ‘You know me and your Da were in the army together?’

Davy made the mistake of shaking his head and shrugging. ‘My Da said he’d two left feet and two flat feet and nane of the armed services wanted him so he ended up behind a desk in the planning department pushing paper from the Inbox to the Outbox and back again.’ He could almost hear his auld man saying it and laughing at the absurdity of war.

‘Shite.’ The vehemence in Uncle Bobby’s voice surprised Davy. ‘We worked our way up the heel of Italy and all the way into Germany. War makes cowards of us all, but you know what’s worse?’ He sighed took a sip of his drink. He pointed a finger like a gun, ‘You want a half?’ a pleading tone entered his voice.

‘OK’ said Davy, he needed time to think and he figured by the time Uncle Bobby came back from the bar at the top of the hall he could skedaddle.

But then Auntie Eleanor came out the toilet and kept him talking and Uncle Bobby was back standing with two goldies in his hand, one for Davy, the other for himself.

‘I’ll no keep you back son.’ Auntie Eleanor stretched on tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

Uncle Bobby handed him his drink. He swilled the glass round, smelling the bouquet, taking a nip and screwing his face up.

‘You know your Da was the only man I ever met that never fell out with anyone. When you’re living so close to other men, scared shitless out of your wits half the time and bored shitless the other half, you end up hating everybody. You’d want to shoot your best mate because he’s sat in a seat you’d wanted and he’d got a letter from home and you didn’t and then he’d be dead in front of you and you’d realise you’d loved him, but you were glad it was him and not you.’ He scrunched his shoulders up and his brows dropped as he pondered. ‘Ah, don’t know whit you’d call it, but your Da…’

‘He’d good social skills.’ Davy swilled and drank the welcoming burn at the back of his throat.

‘Fuck off! Good social skills. Let me tell you something. We were part of the crew that were first to enter one of those camps you watch on the telly. It doesn’t matter whit the name is, they’re all the same. Barbed-wire fences. The stench would kill you. You’d never get it oot of your nostrils. And the bodies. Jesus Christ the bodies. And there’s these things cheeping at you like new-born chicks, shaved heads and eyes that followed your every movement. We thought we had it bad. Shows you how cheap life is.’

‘I never knew.’ Davy was standing with the empty whisky glass in his hand, not realising he’d drunk it. ‘He never told me.’

‘Aye, well, he wouldn’t have wanted to burden you.’ A softness crept into the old man’s greyish eyes. ‘But you know your auld man was a funny bugger. He worked out the only thing we could control was what we done next. And he was always true to that vision.’

‘Whit do you mean?’

‘Well, it’s like this, I went up to that hospital and there’s this woman sitting there trying to feed your Da with a big spoon, his mouth set shut and the pureed potatoes falling onto his bare chest.

“Hi I said to her, he’s no a wain.”

“But he’ll not eat,” she says.

“Look,” I says, ‘pass me that Ambrosia Creamed Rice.’  She give it to me and I tear it open and hand it back to her. “Now,” I instruct her, "dip your spoon in and take a bite and then he’ll eat. He never eats unless he’s sharing what is there. Never.” She looks up at me as if I was stupid. So I go through all the rigmarole of telling her about Bergen Belsen and how your Da had taken a vow. And I asked her, “You understand?”

“Aye,” she says, “but I’m on a diet.” And there’s no’ two picks on her. That was the funny thing. So she dips the spoon into the Ambrosia Creamed Rice and hold the spoon out to your Da’s lips and it spills onto his chest.

‘I grabbed the spoon off her and the Ambrosia Creamed Rice. “Fuck off,” I shout. “yah, useless cunt’.  

‘And she does, huffing away and talking about reporting me, but you know, after that I never went back.’ Tears ran down the old man’s face. ‘And you know your auld man would never have done that to me. He’d have been back the next day and the day after that and the day after that. Nothing would have kept him away.’