Remedy is None Read Online Free PDF

anything wi’whatever Ah did have. Whit’s ma life, Charlie? Where is it? Ah wis a terrible failure, son. Nae money fur ye, nae security. Whit wis Ah ever use for?’
    Use for? He was use for being a man, that was what he was use for. He was good at just being a man. All the times Charlie remembered him by were all just human moments. He remembered him laughing, moving, talking. He knew him by his courage and his physical strength. He remembered long before, when Charlie was small, how he would come in, muscled like a pony from the pits, and dispense good humour through the house. He remembered his kindness, his presence like a lightning conductor for trouble, making them safe. And wasn’t that enough? Who said it wasn’t? Who made it that a man had to measure himself against money in the bank or what he owned or how far he ‘succeeded’ or ‘security’ ? Who decided that a man had to be judged in terms that had no connection with manhood, that coinage was a yardstick for a man? When had it happened that this man had accepted that everything he had was nothing when set against what he didn’t have, an eight-room house with his name on the door, a car, a bank account? Who passed that judgment on him? How did it happen?
    ‘Ah know now where Ah made ma mistakes, Charlie. Ye see -’ Charlie saw by his father’s face that what he was going to say was made difficult by more than the pain – ‘ye see, whit yer mother did that time. Goin’ away.’ Pain gave way to hate on his face. ‘Wi’ that bugger Whitmore !’ The words shot out like bile, and he subsided. ‘That was me, Charlie. It was me. She wanted things. An’ Ah jist couldn’t get them. She was used. To them, ye ken. Everybody wants them. Don’t blame ’er, Charlie. Everybody wants them. An’ she wanted them. An if Ah couldn’t give her them. There was somebody who could. It was ma fault, Charlie.’
    That was it, a poison six years in taking effect. A kind of hemlock. Slow death. But leaving no trace. She left him and gradually he came to believe that she was right to leave him. And why shouldn’t he believe it? What did he have to disputeit for him? All around him, that was the only measurement he could see. And he didn’t fit it. He was a failure. Charlie remembered how he himself used to be exasperated at how often his father changed work. That would be mainly at the time before his mother left. He had always had a slight suspicion that it had been part of the reason for his mother’s leaving. Now he saw that it was the other way round. It had been his father’s pathetic and desperate attempt to be what he thought he ought to be, what he had been convinced he should be. He started several ‘businesses’, trying to sell cars, or ice-cream, or fruit and vegetables. They all folded. Charlie had found it laughable at the time. When he was given a form to fill in at school he was uncertain what to put for ‘father’s occupation’. He knew now. His father had never been anything more than a full-time human being. And it had never been enough. Now he realized the lonely desperation that must have been behind what had seemed to him laughable whimsy. He saw the reason for it. His mother went away and his father was left with something that had lived inside the banter and the cliches all this time, quietly doing its work. And nobody had paid much attention. Not even Charlie, himself. It was all done so neatly and skilfully, you could hardly tell. Now, six years later, with his mother married to someone else and living in another town, his father was dying quietly in this room and it wouldn’t be noticed. That other married couple somewhere else could not be connected with this husk of a man dying here. No one would notice or see any connection, except Charlie. He noticed. He sat staring at his father, seeing a connection between him and those other two, somewhere in a brighter room.
    ‘You’ll no’ be like me, though. You’ll stick in, son.