The old man extended a big hand, deformed by arthritis, and Mackenzie felt obliged to shake it. Shiny reptilian skin like crêpe paper crinkling in his palm. He was anxious to let it go, but his uncle held on and placed his other hand over the back of Mackenzie’s.
‘Good to see you, John. I’m glad you could come.’
Mackenzie had no idea what to say. He had harboured such hatred over all these years, he was unprepared for the warmth in his uncle’s handshake and the apparent affection in his watery washed-out eyes. Had the old man forgotten how much he disliked his nephew, how often he had dished out discipline with Mr Kane, or with the tawse that he sometimes brought home with him from school — half an inch of thick leather strap divided in two at one end, and delivered on to the palms of outstretched hands, leaving stinging weals on the inside of the wrists?
Had he forgotten all the harsh words, the derision, the contempt, perhaps even jealousy, for the prodigy his brother had bequeathed him? Had he forgotten that final shouting match which had sent Mackenzie running to his room to pack a bag and leave, never to return?
‘Your Aunt Hilda missed you, you know. A wee card now and then wouldn’t have gone astray,’ he said, and Mackenzie realized that nothing had changed. The hurt was just delivered in a different way.
They arrived back at the house in Giffnock mid-afternoon. The bungalow was as gloomy as Mackenzie remembered it. There must surely have been sunny days, but he had no recollection of them. The first thing he saw in the hall was the umbrella stand, crowded with old brollies and walking sticks — and the onyx-handled Mr Kane. Mackenzie could barely take his eyes off it. He wanted to take the damned thing and break it over his thigh, as if somehow that could erase the pain it had been used to administer through all the miserable years he had lived in this house. Instead, he followed the handful of mourners past the coat-rack and into the front room where whisky was poured into cut crystal glasses and sipped in a silence broken only by the odd mumbled reminiscence.
They didn’t stay long, and Mackenzie was glad to see them go. In spite of the rain he thought he might go for a walk. He wanted to spend as little time in the house as possible, and even less of it in the company of his uncle. When there were just the two of them left he said to the old man, ‘I’ll put my stuff in my room. The same one, I take it?’
His uncle nodded. ‘You’ll find it pretty much as you left it, son. She kept it for you just the way it was, in case you ever came back.’
He spoke of his wife in death with a respect he had never shown her in life. Mackenzie remembered how she had always lowered her voice in his presence, tiptoeing around his unpredictable sensibilities, bearing with extraordinary fortitude the words he flung at her in frequent rage.
Mackenzie found the pole with the hook on the end of it leaning in the corner of the hall where it had always stood. He raised it above his head to open the hatch in the ceiling and pull down the ladders that led to the attic conversion they had made for him. Although there were two bedrooms in the house, Uncle Arthur used one of them as a study. A place on which he could close the door to be disturbed only on pain of punishment.
There had been no space in the hall for a staircase to the new attic room, and so the pull-down ladders had been the compromise solution. One that his uncle had grown to regret when the young Mackenzie retreated to his room after rows, pulling the ladders up after him like a drawbridge, so that neither his aunt nor his uncle could reach him. He had once spent almost forty-eight hours barricaded in his room after a particularly tempestuous argument, pissing and defecating in a porcelain chanty kept under the bed.
He climbed the ladder now, ascending to his past. And as he stood and took in his old room, goosebumps raised themselves on the back of his neck. The old man had been right. Almost nothing had changed. There were even hairs still trapped among the bristles of his old brush on the dresser. He felt like the ghost of himself haunting his own childhood. Everything about this room — the very air he breathed in it — took him back. He sat on the bed and wanted to weep for the unhappy child he had been, but no tears would come. Just cold, hard memories.
For an adult so disinclined to violence, as a young boy he had fought and usually beaten every bully who took him on. The young John Mackenzie was incapable of backing down. So often returning home bloodied and bruised.
If it wasn’t physical fighting with other boys, it was verbal conflict with his teachers. He had lost count of the number of times he received punishment for his insolence, for his inattention, or the failure to do his homework. And then they had wondered how it was possible that he could score straight A’s when it came to the exams. No one ever gave him credit for his achievements, expressing instead only astonishment.
How stupid had they been not to realize how much smarter he was than them? That the only reason his attention wandered was their mediocrity, their inability to engage his interest? That he only ever questioned them because he almost always knew better?
Looking back now he thought that his uncle must have realized early on that Mackenzie was his intellectual superior, and that if he couldn’t best him mentally he would do it physically. He had been a powerful man then, a professional footballer in his youth before qualifying as a gym teacher, a job that had given him carte blanche to bully the physically inferior. Boys that were overweight, or had flat feet, or were just soft. Or his brother’s fatherless son given in to his care. He was unused to children answering back, unaccustomed to contradiction, traits he was determined to beat out of his young nephew.
But there had come a time when Mackenzie could match him physically too, a hormonal teenager pumped up by testosterone and anger. And his uncle had no longer been able to dominate him in any sense.
Still, he’d had one devastating card left to play. One that he had been saving for just the right moment. One that could deliver pain far beyond any corporal hurt.
He had played it, finally, when Mackenzie announced that he wasn’t going to university, despite having achieved A grades in each of the seven Highers he had sat at the end of fifth year. He was going to join the police, he said.
His uncle had railed at him claiming, not unreasonably, that it would be a criminal waste of his academic abilities — some kind of pun intended. But the young Mackenzie hadn’t wanted to hear it.
Now, as he sat on the bed, he heard the distant echoes of the shouting match in the hall downstairs.
‘You’re a bloody idiot, boy! Christ knows, you’ve been a pain in the arse all through school, but you’ve a God-given talent. Don’t throw it away. Why the hell would you want to be a policeman?’
‘Because that’s what my dad was.’
His uncle had exhaled his contempt through pursed lips. ‘Your dad! For Christ’s sake, don’t go wasting your life like he did.’
‘He didn’t waste his life!’ Mackenzie had been incensed.
‘Yes he did. He was a total waster, your father. Mr High and Bloody Mighty. Thought he was better than everyone else. Just like you. Thought he knew it all, that nothing was beyond him. Well he learned the hard fucking way just how wrong he was.’
Mackenzie remembered being shocked. In all the years his uncle had beaten and berated him, he had never heard him use the F word. He screamed back, ‘You’re just jealous!’
‘Jealous?’ The old man almost laughed. ‘Jealous of what?’
‘That he sacrificed his life to save someone else. While you frittered yours away. A lifetime bullying boys in school gyms, picking on the weak to make yourself look big.’ Mackenzie had caught sight, then, of his aunt standing in the kitchen doorway, the blood drained from her face, apprehension in her eyes. ‘Well, no one’s fooled, Uncle Arthur. For all your size you’re a little man, and everyone knows it.’