The Black Halo (88 page)

One morning he decided to go down to the shed which we have in the field below the house. There are actually two sheds, one a proper bought shed which was taken home from a firm and assembled,
and a large black byre which has almost been flattened by the wind, the door hanging open. The windows of both buildings have been smashed by young local boys who cross the field in the evening to
play football in a neighbouring park. He was suddenly quite happy searching in the shed, for it was full of boxes containing tools of all kinds.

He said, ‘You don’t have a tool chest in the house, I’ve noticed. How don’t you have one: Every house should have a tool chest.’ And he looked at me accusingly. Of
course I never used tools much myself, preferring to pay tradesmen for any jobs that had to be done. In any case I was what they call handless. He muttered again to himself, as if he couldn’t
imagine how anyone could exist without having a tool chest.

Sometimes when I saw him walking about near the house, I thought he was going to fall down. He was of course eighty-five years old, and ever since the death of his wife he hadn’t been
well, catching colds every winter, as his house which stood on a headland near the sea was draughty and damp. Often he would say, ‘The body is weak, but the mind is still clear.’

So he decided that he would build us a tool chest. He found some old pieces of wood, a hammer, a rusty-toothed saw, and a chisel, and he carried them up through the long wet grass of the field,
past the little snarling dogs which belonged to our neighbour and which barked at him incessantly. Most of the time his chest was sizzling as if he had asthma.

He took his booty down to the back of the house and began to build the tool chest. Suddenly his life appeared to take on point and meaning, though he was still puffing and panting, and it
occurred to me that he felt that he ought to be paying us for his holiday and that this was his method of doing so.

Anyway, the tool chest became the centre of the day for us. I had to discontinue my own work and help him with the sawing while he directed operations.

‘Not like that,’ he would say to me irritably. ‘You have to cut with a steady movement.’

The work was hard and I found the sawing difficult, especially as the saw was quite old and rusty. Meanwhile Donald held down the plank of wood while I sawed. He was of course often complaining
that the tools were inadequate. ‘I need a spirit level,’ he would say, ‘and you don’t have a plane either.’

The sawing took rather a long time, as we were often interrupted by showers of rain. We were in fact worried that he would catch a cold, and would bring him in at the first drops. If the rain
lasted a long time he would continue with a book about Martin Luther which he was reading. At times his lips were blue and we thought he was going to have a heart attack, and we would tell him that
he should stop work for the day. But he was very stubborn and he would answer, ‘I don’t like to leave a job unfinished. It preys on my mind.’ But I would say to him, ‘You
have another fortnight of your holiday left,’ and he would reply sharply, ‘You never know the day or the hour.’

Actually, I was at first irritated that I couldn’t carry on with my own writing, but he didn’t think that my work was of any importance. In his eyes the tool chest was a much
superior project. When I stayed in my work room he would come looking for a pencil, and so I had to go out to the tool chest again. I spent hours screwing nails into wood for him. He was a
perfectionist: often he had to remove a piece of wood because it wasn’t exactly in the right place: and all the time his chest was puffing like an engine and his face was pale and gaunt.

If we had bought a tool chest we wouldn’t have had all this hassle, I told my wife. We could even have had bright new wood, instead of these warped planks. For the wood he was using was of
inferior quality, and as he didn’t have proper tools he had to be content with approximate measurements, which enraged him. In fact the tool chest was rather ramshackle, as it consisted of
different kinds of wood, some of which had been painted and some not. The top was an old sheet of iron which he hammered flat. All in all it wasn’t a beautiful artefact, though as good as his
materials would permit.

However, he was no longer depressed, and indeed in the evening he would talk about the day’s work and about the work which, if God permitted, might be done on the following day. He was
very knacky and skilful with his hands, there was no doubt about that. But if we praised the tool chest he would say, ‘No, it’s a poor thing. I’m not happy with it, but what can
you do if you don’t have the tools. If it had been twenty years ago . . . ’ And he would sigh heavily.

Tools were real, I thought, wood was real, and while all the real things existed I was working on my stories in my quiet room. At the side of the fence where we worked at the back of the house,
the ferns climbed, a tall dense green jungle. He was trying to make a sliding panel from a piece of wood that had been painted green.

So it had been with early man when he discovered tools. He had differentiated himself from the insatiable greenery round him, he had separated himself from the grass, he had stood isolated and
upright in the world. By the sweat of his brow he had earned his bread.

He adopted a teasing attitude to me. He would call me Charlie. ‘Oh Charlie did a good job today with the screwdriver,’ he would say to my wife. ‘He’ll make an apprentice
yet.’ And he would laugh, for he knew that I wasn’t an adept worker with tools.

The tool chest had become the centre of our lives; it was necessary that he finish it before he returned to his draughty room and the attention of caring neighbours on the island.

‘There is an old woman beside me,’ he told us, ‘and she won’t have a home help. She plants the potatoes every year, and she’s eighty-eight. But there’s
another one who reads romances all the time and smokes like a chimney.’

Though his health seemed to be improving during the day, at night I could hear him coughing and spluttering and praying very loudly. It sounded strange to hear that intense voice calling on God
at four in the morning.

He will die here, we worried, making this tool chest, and we felt guilty about it. What does he feel that he owes us? But then I thought, if he does die it would be better for him to do so while
working. At first certainly I had tried to keep him in the house, but later as time passed, I saw that the freedom of building the tool chest was necessary to him. After all, didn’t I have
the urge of creativity myself, though in my case it was the compulsion to create stories, and in his to work with tools.

Sometimes he would stay out when it was raining, in spite of our protests. ‘No, it’s only a few drops,’ he would say, and put on his black hat so that against the background of
ferns and leaves he looked like a minister in an orchard.

I disregarded my writing and stayed out with him. I watched him and learned a lot. For instance, before putting a screw in the wood he would hammer a nail in first to make a hole. Actually he
didn’t have the strength to put the screw in himself and relied on me to do that.

In the evenings, as time went on, he would relax and talk to us. He would say, ‘The worst job I have at home is the dishes.

‘The morning I left to come down here, I thought I would not able to rise from my bed. I managed it however, and a man on the boat took my case up the gangway for me. But I’ve got
good neighbours, I really have. On my right there’s a young couple who are very kind to me, and then in front of me there’s an older couple, and they paid my electricity bill for me
when I was out here on holiday last time. I leave them the key, you see. And then further up the street there’s a retired nurse who takes me to church every Sunday in her car.

‘The only problem I have is that I don’t want to eat anything I cook myself. All last winter I could only eat jellies because my stomach was bad.

‘But there’s one thing sure, this holiday has done me the world of good. I feel better in every way, and Donalda’s cooking is first rate.’

One day I went to the back of the house to call him in for his dinner. He was bending over the tool chest, which was almost finished. He was puffing and panting and taking deep breaths.

I saw the open shelves of the box and it seemed to me for a moment as if it was the box he would shortly inhabit. I imagined his face rigid and stern as he lay in that box, his nose pointing
towards the saw-toothed mountains of the west.

Suddenly he heard my footsteps and straightened up. He made a conscious effort to keep from coughing. He took the hammer again in his hand.

And just as suddenly the box seemed to put on a green foliage. Flowers both red and white rose from it. And he stood in the middle of the foliage, old and upright, the hammer blunt and solid in
his hand, though it looked rusty enough in the bright sparkling and eternally young light.

When Murdo was invited to a Glasgow studio at the BBC to talk about his new book
The Thoughts of Murdo
, he spoke for a while about literary matters such as his train
journey, what he had for breakfast, and his expenses.

That done he launched into praising his book which he said was modelled on
The Thoughts of Chairman Mao
, Mao being, he understood, the Chinese equivalent of Murdo.

He suggested very strongly that if the listener was of the ilk which hadn’t smiled for a long time e.g. a Celtic supporter, he should buy the book and, addressing his listeners directly,
he continued, you will find here anarchic ideas, revolutionary concepts, animadversions on the laughable nature of reality in which we are all enmired. If, he went on, you are moved to laughter by
the signing of the Magna Carta or the Monroe Doctrine, or the Scottish International Football Team, you will find here much to amuse: if you think that MacGonagall was a great creative genius; if
you enjoy the catastrophes that happen to other people, then you will enjoy this book. If you like similes such as, e.g., as hectic as a cucumber, as foreign as an eel, or as brave as a traffic
warden, you will find such plays on words here. Indeed the pun is part of its essence such that you may hear a pun drop or indeed a pan drop. Other topics adumbrated are
Neighbours
and
Take the High Road
.

Moreover, he continued, humour breaks down all boundaries except those between Lewis and Harris. It raises a smile in toilets and in supermarkets, it joins us all together by elasticated bands,
it breaks down dogmas (such as e.g. love me, love my dogma), it recognises the futility of all effort, reconstitutes well-known poems into new language such as ‘When I consider what my wife
has spent’, by Milton, it creates new denouements for books, and so on. All these you will find in this valuable though not priceless volume.

It has been said of me that I am the greatest humorist since Ecclesiastes or Job. While not disputing that for a moment, let me add that in buying this book you will be joining a certain class
of people as ignorant as yourselves, uninterested in such serious topics as litter, and able to lie in bed for a long period of time without moving. Your vacant gaze will be fully reflected in this
book, as also your anthropoid opinions. Verbs, adverbs and nouns will turn somersaults, and you will see the triviality of all that passes for power and progress e.g. Visa Cards, the Westminster
Confession etc.

If you are of that ilk which yearns for meaninglessness, I am your instant guru. I sign no agreements without laughter, I am an enemy of the working breakfast. A book such as mine will give you
arguments for maintaining a prudent lethargy, and for avoiding tax; it will sustain you in your night of deepest laziness; and will remind you of famous figures which include Mephistopheles and Mrs
Robb, 3 Kafka Rd, East Kilbride.

If you wish for history, you will not find it here, you will not be burdened by anthropology, genealogies or any formal logic. The Chaos Theory will not be examined even with a broad brush, nor
will there be much reference to thermodynamics. Dante however gets a brief mention. Cultural influences on the whole will be avoided and there are no quotations from St John of the Cross. Some
reference however is made to herring and to those golden days when you could buy a tenement for sixpence. Clichés as far as they are understood will not be used and neither will metonymy,
synecdoche, personification etc. Wittgenstein along with Partick Thistle will be relegated, and so will remarks of football managers such that ‘If you do not score goals you will never win a
match.’

If you are looking for passion you will have to look elsewhere. Enthusiasm is avoided as is any form of élan or hope. Optimism is evaded and no one learns by experience. It has taken the
writer many years to arrive at this position, having endured friendly fire etc. and he is now as happy as a red herring in May. He no longer believes that the British working man will ever come to
repair any form of machinery. He eschews the illusion of efficiency. He believes that the class system will remain unchanged, and that television will not be better than it is today. British Rail
will fail and MacBraynes will be as grass. Asses will be coveted and adultery will rear its ugly head. The Royal Family will perish in the Bog of the Tabloid, and the Queen will reign forever,
though otherwise the weather will not be too bad. Middle-of-the-road politics will be run over by speedsters, and sanity will no longer be accepted as an alibi.

In conclusion buy this book, as it will not be published again in a hurry, unless there is a great demand for animadversions on hopelessness.

And finally God bless you all, though the probability is that he will not.

It was an autumn of high winds, and the house that he had taken for three weeks was perched on a headland facing the sea. The area was more desolate than he had imagined it
would be. There were the straggling houses of the village about half a mile away; and a little shop which sold miscellaneous stuff, and was also a post office.