face, Scottish Short Stories
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Scottish Short Stories
The Face
by Brian McCabe
He didn’t want to see the face.
It was like a railway tunnel, except this tunnel sloped down the way, down
through the dripping darkness, down into the deep, dark ground. He
could see the dark shine of the rails and he could feel the ridges of the
wooden sleepers through the soles of his gym shoes. It was very dark.
He was glad his father was there with him.
It would be good to go back up to the daylight now, where the miners
were sitting round a brazier, eating their pieces and drinking hot tea from
big tins with wire handles. One of them had given him a piece and let him
drink some tea from his tin and had pointed to different birds and told him
their names, while the other miners talked about the pit and how it was
closing. One of them had said he’d be quite happy never to see the face
again.
He remembered the first time he’d heard about it: his father came in late
from the pit and walked into the kitchen very slowly and sat down still
with his coat on. Then he took off his bunnet and looked at it and put it
on the kitchen table and talked to his mother in the quiet voice not like his
usual voice. Like he couldn’t say what he wanted to say, like when some
of the words get swallowed. Because somebody had got killed at the face,
John Ireland had got killed at the face, so he’d had to go to Rosewell to
tell his wife. That was why he was late. Then his mother took a hanky
out of her apron pocket and sat down and started crying, and his father
put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her like it was Christmas except
this was a different kind of kiss. Then his father looked up at him and
nodded to him to tell him to go through to the other room, so he went
through and watched TV and wondered how the face had killed John
Ireland, the man who ran the boxing gym for boys, and how something
terrible could make people need to kiss each other.
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He could hear the water from the roof of the tunnel and trickling down the
walls and the scrape and crunch of his father’s pit boots on the ground.
They sounded too loud, but in the dark you had to hold on to sounds, like
when you shut your eyes and pretended to be blind, hold on to them to
stop yourself hearing what was behind them, where it was like the
darkness was listening.
Every few steps he could see the wooden props against the walls, but they
were nearly as dark as the walls. And he could just make out the shapes
of the wooden sleepers and the rails, but he didn’t like the darkness
between the sleepers and the props. If you looked at darkness like that
too long you started seeing things in it: patterns, shapes, faces….
He listened to his father’s voice. It sounded too loud, and crackly like a
fire, but you could hold on to it. He was telling him about the bogeys that
used to run up and down on the rails in the old days, taking the coal up to
the pithead. It was good to hear his father’s voice talking about the old
days, but he didn’t like the sound of the bogeys. He asked what a bogey
was and listened as his father told him it was sort of like a railway carriage
on a goods train. He knew that anyway, but he wanted to hear his father
telling him again, just in case.
There were other bogeys – bogeymen. He asked if there were bogeymen
down the pit. His father laughed and said that there weren’t. But he
knew different, he knew that it was dark enough down here for
bogeymen, especially now the word had been said out loud. Bogeymen.
Sometimes if you said a word over and over again it started to sound
different. It started to mean something else, to mean what it sounded
like it meant. Then, if you kept on saying it over and over again, it
started to not mean anything, the word started to be a thing. And the
thing didn’t mean anything except what it was.
He tried it now, saying it under his breath over and over again,
bogeymen, bogeymen, bogeymen, bogeymen….But before the word could
lose its meaning, his father stopped walking. He stopped too and turned,
glad that they were going to go back up to the light, to the ordinary world.
‘You go on,’ said his father.
At first he wondered what his father meant, then he knew: he wanted
him to keep on walking down into the dark. Alone. He pretended not to
have heard and took a step towards the entrance of the tunnel, then he
felt his father’s hand on his shoulder and his heart pounding in his chest.
‘Down you go,’ said his father.
He didn’t move. He didn’t say anything, hoping that his father would lose
his patience with him and change his mind.
‘Are you feart?’ said his father.
‘Naw, but…’
‘But what? He turned to the darkness. He could still see the rails and the
props and the sleepers, but only just. He didn’t want to see the face.
‘Go on.’
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He started walking down into the darkness. He had sometimes seen it in
his dream, after his father had come home late and spoken in the quiet
voice to his mother about John Ireland: at first there was just the dark,
the pitch-black dark that was blacker than the coal, because even coal
wasn’t always black, because sometimes it was blue or grey, and
sometimes it had a dark shine to it, like the cover of the Bible, and
sometimes it had seams – of fool’s gold, or the thin, brittle, silvery seams
of mica – but the darkness in the dream had no shine to it, no seams, it
was pure black. Then you felt it there like a shadow in the dark, a shadow
that went long and went wide, went thick like a wall and thin like a thread,
then the shadow had the shape of a man and the man had a face and the
face was the face of John Ireland.
He stopped walking, turned round and looked back at his father. He
called to him and asked if he’d gone far enough.
‘Further.’
It was good to hear his father’s voice behind him, but it didn’t last long
enough to hold on to. Why didn’t his father walk down further too? Why
did he have to walk down on his own? Sometimes his father liked him to
walk in front of him along the street. ‘Walk in front of me,’ he’d say,
‘where I can see you.’ Like the time he’d taken him to the gym to see
John Ireland and he’d seen John Ireland’s face. It looked like a bulldog’s
with a flattened nose and a crushed ear and big, bloodshot eyes. In the
dream it looked worse. In the dream, somehow you forgot it was the face
of an old boxer. John Ireland had given him a pair of boxing gloves. He’d
tied them together and put them round his neck on the way home. And
his father had told him to walk in front where he could see him. But that
wasn’t the reason, not the real reason he wanted him to walk in front. It
was because he wanted to dream about his son being a champion boxer.
He hadn’t gone back to the gym because his mother had put her foot
down, but he still put the gloves on sometimes and pretended to be a
champion boxer. Now there wasn’t a gym because of what happened at
the face.
Maybe it wouldn’t be like the face in his dream, but he still didn’t want to
see it. He stopped and turned round. He could still see the dark shape of
his father against the light from the start of the tunnel. He shouted to
him and waited.
‘Go on.’
His father’s voice faded to an echo.
He turned and walked further into the dark, the pitch-black dark even
blacker than coal, then he felt it there, a shadow in the dark…. He
stopped, turned and shouted to his father. He could still see the dim,
greyish light from the start of the tunnel, but now he couldn’t see his
father. He shouted out again. His own voiced echoed and he heard the
fear in it, then all there was was the listening darkness all around and the
pounding of his heart. The shadow had the shape of a man and the man
had a face….
3
As he turned to run away he was lifted in the air and his father’s laughter
filled his ear. He was laughing and saying he was proud, proud of him
because he’d walked down on his own, proud because now he was a man.
He rubbed the bus window with his hand and looked out at the big, black
wheel of the pit. He watched it getting smaller as the bus pulled away, till
it was out of sight.
‘Why are they gonnae shut the pit? Is there nae coal left in it?’ he asked.
‘There’s plenty coal,’ said his father, angrily.
‘Why then?’
‘The government wants it shut.’
‘Where’ll ye go tae work then?’
‘Mibbe in Bliston Glen.’
‘Is that another pit?’
‘Aye.’
He waited a minute, then he asked, ‘Has it got a face as well?’
‘Aye, it’s got a face.’
‘Is it like the face in your pit?’
His father shrugged. ‘Much the same.’
‘Ah saw it.’
‘What?’
‘The Face.’
His father shook his head and smiled at him, the way he did when he
thought he was too young to understand something.
‘Ah did see it.’
‘Oh ye did, did ye? What did it look like then?’
‘It looked like the man who ran the gym.’
And he knew he’d said something very important when his father stopped
smiling, turned pale, opened his mouth to say something but didn’t say
anything, then stared and stared at him – as if he couldn’t see him at all,
but only the face of the dead man.
During the 2004/05 term, schools and educational establishments can order a video tape of
Scottish Short Stories
, the BBC Education Scotland programme featuring this Scottish short story.
Contact BBC Children’s Learning, PO Box 234, Wetherby, West Yorkshire, LS23 7EU.
Telephone: 0870 830 8000. Fax: 0870 830 8002. Email:
bbc.co.uk/educationscotland
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