Read Online Remedy is None by William McIlvanney - Free Book Online

father, perhaps because six years ago his wife had left him, perhaps because of other things, perhaps because of many things. But it had happened. He had been destroyed as a man and the fact had registered nowhere except in himself. His own family had not even acknowledged it. Their lives had gone on superficially while he had lived at that awful depth, completely alone.
    He thought of his father nursing the broken pieces of himself and being jocular. Even when he talked of himself as he did sometimes, perhaps sitting by the fire with Charlie, he would talk mainly of times far in the past, as if at some point something had happened that negated himself and he had only those things to remember from a better time. When he talked like that it was like a ritual. The same stories recurred and Charlie came to learn them, his father’s private mythology, the accidental debris of a man that he took out from time to time to look at and be nostalgic over. They were pathetic in their motley variety of the funny and the ridiculous and the gently sad. He might recite the one about Lubey’s fabled methods of obtaining drink. How he once tolda barman that for a half of whisky he could rid him of the flies which came in plagues from a rubbish-dump behind the pub. The barman, like most figures of authority in legend, must have been somewhat gullible, for he duly set up a half. Lubey downed it, jumped back, put up his dukes, and said, ‘Send the buggers out one by one’. There was the series about Alec Nine-toes, whose boyhood must have been like a sort of re-enactment of the plagues of Egypt. He was a walking monument to human vulnerability. He broke limbs as casually as matches. He once broke both legs simultaneously, jumping a wall to evade the police. He got his nickname from the time when he was looking down a pen for frogs and the grid fell and consigned a fair proportion of his big toe to the sewers. He went on from boyhood to manhood, living always between the plaster and the poultice, weaving uncertainly along his private zodiac, until one night, when he was drunk on the money from a modest pools win, he and a double-decker bus converged on King Street and it was as if all his past life had only been a rehearsal for that moment. He was the incarnation of the god of chance in the private pantheon of Charlie’s father, and the evocation of his image was always accompanied by reverential shakings of the head, as if to appease his spirit.
    But the part of the past Charlie’s father returned to most frequently was properly not one story at all. It was rather a small plexus of memory, and to touch any part of it would stir a series of connected responses. It concerned Sanny, the younger brother of Charlie’s father, and it was sensitive to a variety of pressures. You might touch upon it by an incidental reference to the past or by reiterating a saying which for Charlie’s father belonged essentially to his brother’s canon or by mentioning the war. The war was the commonest point of contact. Sanny had been killed at Monte Cassino and Charlie’s father still kept the last letter he had written – a letter Charlie had seen many times himself-on thin, unlined paper fraying along the folds so that you had to open it very carefully, in pencilled words that the years since the war had allbut erased, in illegible handwriting,"/>but erased, in illegible handwriting, with wrong spellings, and with almost no punctuation, but suffused with a courageous unconcern that made it for Charlie’s father like an illuminated manuscript. Usually when he spoke of it he would rise at some point to fetch it from the drawer that held the photographs, bringing as illustrations to its text a dun photograph, scarred with handling, that showed Sanny in battledress, flanked by two anonymous comrades, all three grinning determinedly out from a frame of flags. He would hand you the letter as if it were an undiscovered manuscript of the Apocrypha. When you had