To the Dogs by Louise Welsh

Author:Louise Welsh [Welsh, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838859831
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Six

JIM PARKED OUTSIDE the tenement where he had lived with his father until the age of seventeen, when his first student grant enabled him to rent a bedsit near the university. Big Jim Brennan had been a free-with-his-fists bastard whose philosophy of life could be boiled down to ‘trust nae cunt’, but Jim had not needed Peter Henders to tell him that his father had been proud of him.

Big Jim had mocked his mania for studying. Reading a book was tantamount to coming out as gay. Putting effort into writing an essay was the act of a class traitor. When he entered his teens, Jim began to live between school and the local lending library, only coming home to sleep. He was nervous of taking library books back to the flat, fearful his father would damage them during one of his tantrums.

These were well-worn memories of his younger life, building blocks of the resilience that had built his success. But now, sitting outside their old home, he remembered an evening, not long before he left for university, when his father had returned home with a carrier bag tightly wrapped around a familiar shape.

Jim had been lying on his bed reading a paperback he had bought from Bobby’s Book Exchange, when his father pushed open the door and thrust the makeshift parcel at him. ‘I got these from a boy in the Fusilier.’

Big Jim had left the room, not bothering to see what Jim made of his gift. Inside the bag was a bundle of long out-of-date schoolbooks, mass-produced primers from the early 1900s. They were too ubiquitous to be valuable, too old to be of practical use. Jim had realised then that, to his father, all books were the same, and now, Jim wondered if his father had been able to read at all.

He had never acknowledged the gift. The books had sat unread in the corner of his bedroom, and he left them behind when he moved out. He had tried to leave his father behind too. But he still heard Big Jim’s voice in his head, knew how he would react in any crisis. His father had ghosted, unwelcome, through his life.

Big Jim had been a drunken hardman, but he had done what he could to prepare his son for the harshness of life. And once, when he knew Jim was moving away, to a land of letters where he would be unable to travel, he had reached out with a clumsy gift.

Jim started up the Audi. The reason he always knew how his father would react was that he had been a man of one note – anger. But looking at the flat had reminded him of other things: the cooked breakfasts his father occasionally made for them both, late on Sunday mornings, his sense of humour, harsh but scabrously funny. And for all his violent tendencies, when he was sober Big Jim had negotiated the riven territory of their district with brutal diplomacy. He would not have allowed things to get to this pass.

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