Read Online All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney - Free Book Online

that sang out with startling purity in the mid-journey lull. The sounds were raw and unformed, but the tone was comically definite and swung abruptly from the plaintive to the bitterly indignant and then on to a sunny sing-song equanimity.
    One of the oilmen turned a page and then nudged his mate across the aisle.
    ‘That wean’s making more sense than you were on Friday night.’
    His pal looked up from his paper, cocked his head.
    ‘Hi, the state I was in on Friday night, I’d’ve under stood that wean. Me and him would have hit it right off.’
    They bent to their match reports. I thought of a morning , a year or two back, when James was still a toddler. He’d been in his room and had heard me climbing the stairs. It was a sunny morning, the upstairs landing a buttery haze. He stood in his doorway and roared, gently, like a secretive lion when I came into view at the top of the stairs. I roared back. He roared again, louder, an extended version, the original roar with a little curlicue, and he laughed aloud when I did it right back. We stood there for the next few minutes, tossing this roar back and forth, shaping and twisting it, putting in growls and little crescendos. Sometimes Jamie would introduce the new element, and sometimes I would. In the end I could hardly roar for laughing, not at the humour of the thing but out of sheer ecstatic joy, this spell of blissful concord with my son. Enjoy it, I remember thinking; this is as good as it gets. I knew then that no conversation, no mere exchange of words, would top this festival of roaring on the upstairs landing.
    At Irvine I took a cab from the rank outside the station. From the driver’s narrowed eyes in the rear-view I guessed that Orchardton’s wasn’t the best of addresses. But the driver said nothing, just lodged his Sun behind the sun-visor, found first and pulled out into the sparse, pre-rush-hour traffic.
    I’d phoned Orchardton the night before. There were nine Orchardtons in the Glasgow directory. None of them was him but the seventh – a spry-sounding biddy on Maryhill Road – turned out to be his second cousin. She put me through the wringer a bit but finally she gave me the number. I went online and found the address. I thought of turning up blind but I didn’t fancy a wasted trip. When I explained who I was, Gordon Orchardton was polite but chary. I told him I was researching a feature article on Ulster–Scottish connections. Our talk would be confidential, and real names wouldn’t be used. He gave me directions from Irvine Station, told me he’d expect me at four.
    It was five to four now. I braced my arm on the door as the cab leaned into the curve. We were skirting a housing scheme, long grey lines of corporation semis. That morning’s rain had left dark shapes on the gable ends, like urine stains on grey school trousers. I looked out for the acronyms, the spray-gunned logos, since this was an arterial route, a boundary line. A posse would be headquartered here, a Young Team with this street in its name.
    The cab swung right and then left, nosing deeper into the scheme. The streets were neater here, well-tended crescents with close-cropped hedges, the houses finished in white instead of grey. It looked like the street where my gran used to live, in a ‘good’ council scheme with a long waiting list. As a kid I spent most Sundays there. One of the neighbours had a boy my age, and we’d play for hours, stroking a football back and forth beneath the ‘No Ball Games’ sign on the crescent’s central disc of turf. It seemed a safe place to me then, happy – the pensioners walking their terriers, the houses with their wedding-cake walls. A world of local newspapers and corner shops, where all the front doors were exactly the same. Then Thatcher got in and everything changed. Suddenly the doors were different – they were bright-blue or scarlet instead of dark-green, or they were fancy panelled affairs from the home-improvement