Remedy is None by William McIlvanney Page A

onlooker, a hanger-around of places where people met, observing their poise. The past fortnight had taught him to savour other people’s enjoyment, to be a connoisseur of ordinariness. The sort of flippant confidence that he had taken for granted in himself such a short time ago now filled him with wonder simply because he no longer possessed it. It had forsaken him completely and looked mockingly at him from other people. And what did he have in its place? A need that denied his right to be self-satisfied, an injustice that demanded utterance. Adark insistence. And a key. He sat with his hand clenched round it, giving resolution time to muster. By the time he rose, the park had lost most of its people. The boy and girl had unravelled and were gone. The young woman had disappeared with her pram. The small boys had stabled their horses for the afternoon. The factory girls had returned to the mill, leaving a patch of flattened grass that the breeze, like a fussy housewife, was already fluffing back to shape. Only the old man remained, to lift Charlie’s paper when he left and peer at it through his one-legged spectacles.
    Charlie went over the bridge out of the park and crossed the empty lot. He had his key out as he reached the big double doors of the lock-up. But as he touched the half that held the lock, he found that it was open. The hinges hawked with rust as he pulled it ajar. Light infiltrated the gloom ineffectually, an unsuccessful assault. He went in and the door swung shut behind him, nudging him into the dark like the head of some docile animal. He stood waiting while his eyes came to terms with this contradiction of the sharp incisive sunlight outside. Gradually the amorphous darkness solidified into form. The walls drifted into shape and objects floated to the surface like men seven days drowned.
    It seemed strange that he should have been almost frightened to come into this place. It was simply an old lock-up, very dusty, very overcrowded, but still completely commonplace. The central area was occupied by a van, single-coated with a maroon paint that did not quite obliterate the vague outlines of fruit beneath it. Near the door was a tool case with the fading initials J. A. on it. Jack Anyone. On top of the case sat a Gladstone bag with a broken handle. Beyond them and just visible round the van, the metal of a freezer showed dully, cancered with green mould. From a hook on the wall above it was draped an overall. One comer was divided into two sections by a couple of empty orange-boxes placed one on top of another. One section was heaped to overflowing with gas masks from which the metal had been removed. The other section was empty. Two treadless rubber tyres improviseda seat at the side of the van and Charlie sat down on them.
    It might seem quite unmoving, but Charlie knew why he had avoided it, and what he felt now justified his reluctance. The experience was as eerie as being alone in a dark sarcophagus. This place seemed as sombre and remote from what was going on outside as the vault of someone dead for centuries, whose only memorials were these ridiculous emblems of the materialism which he had served. It should have been thrown open to the public. Charlie could have labelled every object in it, each one representing a pathetic dream. These were the toys with which a man had been stunted, the means of preventing him from realizing his own manhood. They were what Charlie had not wanted to face, the utter shame of what his father had become, the pointless suffering he had been subjected to until he had capitulated and betrayed himself, recanting his faith in himself and accepting the identity they gave him. Everything here was a refined instrument of torture and, thinking of each one, Charlie relived his father’s pain. He felt how considerable it must have been, because he knew that his father had been by nature sanguine and self-sufficient, and his despair must have been wrung from him with great