1982 Janine (37 page)

“Sorry for the hiatus but now we're ready to roll again. Business as usual tonight.”

Diana said, “You mean the club can open?”

“Yes. They gave us the books back when they let us out two hours ago. The desk sergeant said, ‘Here, do you want these things? They're no use to us,' and handed them over.”

“What about the charges?”

“Our lawyer says that if we plead guilty to police assault they'll drop the bit about resisting arrest and damaging the wastepaper basket. It seems that the most we're liable to is a five-pound fine, but we may be let off with an admonition if we act apologetic enough.”

“What about the paintings? And the landlords?”

“We've just come from the landlords. They've been very reasonable. I told them that the Raeburns had been vandalised with poster paint, which washes off very easily. And the club is going to pay rent for the extra space we've grabbed, so everything's fine. Would someone get me a very strong coffee? I feel I deserve it. Where's Helen by the way?”

“She's gone home to her parents.”

“Well for Heaven's sake phone her! We need her for the show tonight. In fact don't just phone her, tell her we're coming to collect her and do it. Jock, she trusts you, you go and get her. Her folk stay in Cambuslang, it's only an hour away by train. Why is everybody looking so glum?”

I told him what I had done. He sat down at the table and said, “All of it?”

“Yes.”

“Stage
and
auditorium?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God. What time is it?”

“Too late to get the scaffolding back. Everything's shut, you see. I'm sorry, Brian. I'm sorry, everyone.”

Brian sat still for a long time. His only signs of pain were a few deep sighs. It occurred to me that he was the only one among us who had loved the whole show. The actors, the writer and I loved the show for what we gave to it, but he had loved the whole thing, and now he just sat sighing and shaking his head slightly. Diana sat beside him and laid her arm on his shoulder as tenderly as a fine doctor laying a bandage on a wound. He smiled slightly and said, “I'm all right, Diana. I'm all right.”

I wanted to tell him that first thing tomorrow I would get back all the scaffolding, renting it myself if need be, but that would have been a phoney suggestion. Stage and auditorium had taken four days to erect. It just might be put up in one day if everybody co-operated, but who would have the energy to act after that? Certainly Helen would not. I said firmly to nobody in particular, “I have acted hastily and foolishly.”

“Yes,” said Brian, “yes I think so too. But thanks for the help you've given us. I hope the pay was sufficient. You've done rather better out of the show, financially speaking, than the artists, but that's usual, isn't it, for technicians? I'm sorry you ended by dropping us in the shit –”

“He's a mediocrity, that's his problem!” shouted the writer.

“Not always,” said Brian, “not to start with. But he's probably tired by now. So am I. So are we all. Come to think of it, I dropped us in the shit too, by losing my temper in a police station. Most unwise. Let's go back to Glasgow.”

“This is stupid!” shouted the writer. “You don't need a lot of poles and planks to put on a play, you don't need him –” he pointed at me in a way which demonstrated why pointing is a technical assault –“He ruined our last performance by his stupid tricks with a handheld spotlight. All a good play needs is a room, an audience, your talent and my words. We have these. The talent and the words are inside your heads. Draw a space for the action with chalk lines in the middle of the floor. Place mattresses round for the audience to lie, kneel or sit on. Get them settled and act! Act! This is an
opportunity for my play to be performed as it should be performed, without a lot of contraptions and paraphernalia and stupid bastarding glamorous magic machinery.”

“A very daring concept,” said Brian, “but I doubt if the public is ready for it. I know I'm not.”

That evening Brian and the writer and I went back to Glasgow by train. Roddy and Rory had decided to stay at the club till the festival ended. I had given them vanhire money to return the remaining equipment to Glasgow whenever they liked. I now felt that, financially at least, I was now no luckier than the rest of the company, excepting Brian. Brian had legal expenses and perhaps a fine to pay, but he recognised that the fault was his own. Diana also remained in Edinburgh, I suppose to see the English director again. She accompanied us to Waverley station and at the barrier kissed Brian, and even the writer, with very great warmth, but she wholly ignored me. I was sorry, because before today I had felt that Diana was my best friend in that company.

On the train the only person who said much was the writer, who would sometimes stare out of the window and make a cryptic remark for no apparent reason, though it was always aimed at me.

“Wee hard men!” he muttered as the train pulled out of Falkirk. “The curse of Scotland is these wee hard men. I used to blame the English for our mediocrity. I thought they had colonised us by sheer cunning. They aren't very cunning. They've got more confidence and money than we have, so they can afford to lean back and smile while our own wee hard men hammer Scotland down to the same dull level as themselves.”

Brian said wearily, “Leave Jock alone will you? He was one of us before the journalists and the police put their boots in.”

I said, “Thanks Brian.”

His defence disturbed me though the writer's remark had not. Criticism always fails when it tries to upset someone by linking them to a national group.

I said goodbye to Brian (not the writer) at Queen Street
station, and did not see him again for ten or fifteen years or could it be twenty (yes it could be twenty) years. I decided to be extravagant and take a taxi, yes a whole taxi for myself, though there would have been plenty of room for my two big suitcases on a tramcar. O, I yearned for Denny. I was glad now that the Edinburgh business had ended so soon and we could be together again. I felt in my bones how delighted she would be to see me three days sooner than expected. In spite of my burdens I raced upstairs, opened the flat's front door, dropped the cases and twisted the handle of my room shouting, “I'M BACK DENNY!”

The door stayed shut. I knew it was not locked, because only an inner bolt ensured privacy when someone inside wanted that. I was perplexed by the door's resistance. I seemed to hear movement yet nobody opened it for me. I panicked without knowing why. I certainly did not imagine what I eventually discovered, I probably imagined Denny on the floor in some sort of fit. I stood back, then ran and struck my right heel against the spot with the bolt behind. The door sprung in. I entered and saw my landlord standing on the hearthrug.

His appearance puzzled me for he had very large testicles and no apparent penis. This was an optical misreading. His penis was not evident because it was erect and pointing at me, not because I had aroused it. Someone nude and female crouched on the rug behind him. He looked foolish because he wore neatly polished shoes and anklesocks with a pinstriped shirt, collar and waistcoat. The woman behind him, Denny of course, was not completely nude either. She wore a skirt I recognised with unfamiliar net stockings and high-heeled shoes. I think I said in a vague way, “Aye of course. This is it. Yes indeed.”

Denny started making the same intolerable whining sound she had made when I last saw her. What should I have said?

I should have politely allowed the landlord to leave us alone, because he was eager to do that. I should then have made us both a cup of tea, and sat beside her, and talked kindly and reasonably. “Denny,” I should have said, “I
hope you do not love that man, because he is not able to love you like I do. He needs sex but he does not need you, and it is you who I need – and sex too of course. So from now on we had better stick together. This should be easy because I don't think you love that man, I think you were just doing a bit of whoring because you felt lonely. You probably are a wee hoor, sometimes. So am I. I've been whoring too, but it isn't as much fun as the publicity suggests, so I'll stick with you if you don't walk out on me.

“But there must be changes, Denny!” (I should have said). “You've got to stop hiding from the world in this wee room of ours. We must visit people. Take me to see your relations – they can't be all as nasty as you say – and you can come and meet my father and mother. Social shocks will be experienced by one and all, because like nearly everyone in these fucking islands you and I and our nearest and dearest are snobs, Denny. But true decency and intellience are not destroyed by social shocks, Denny, they are exercised and strengthened by them. And you must come and meet Alan and his friends, who are not snobs because they are interested in learning about the world, and real learners find snobbery a waste of time.

“Moreover, Denny” (I should have said), “let me teach you to cook a decent meal. If you learn to do that I will clean up afterwards because I like a tidy room. Careful cooking takes time but it's fun when you do it properly, and if you get it wrong I will only spank you if you ask nicely for it. And now can we go to bed please? I have been very lonely without you.”

I said none of that. It did not occur to me. My head had a dull humming inside which made speaking and thinking difficult. I looked absentmindedly round the room at my most essential possessions: books, drawing instruments, an alarm clock. They were not much. My clothes and toilet things were packed in the two cases outside. There was also a radio and dishes and cooking utensils, but Denny was welcome to those. My third suitcase, an empty one, lay on top of a wardrobe. I took it down and put the books,
instruments and clock inside. I doubt if Denny saw what I was doing. Her hands covered her face, she rocked her body to and fro making this continual irritating keening sound, yes it was her keening which made clear thought impossible, made it absolutely necessary for me to get away. Our landlord hopped about on one foot and then the other, pulling on first his underpants and then his trousers and gabbling this sort of thing: “looks bad but not what you think not serious at all she doesn't care for me really you don't know how lucky you are crumbs from a rich man's table yes crumbs from a rich man's table I've been picking up I mean you didn't even write to her not one postcard till today what do you think you're doing? What do you want that for? That's mine.”

My problem was to carry three suitcases with two hands. I saw a striped necktie on the bed. I picked it up and tugged it to test its strength. The landlord thought I meant to strangle him because he retreated behind Denny who uncovered her face and went quiet. That was a relief. I knotted the tie in a loop round the handle of the suitcase and slung it from my shoulder. I said, “Don't worry, Denny. You still have a man to look after you.”

She screamed like a steam whistle. I bolted. I charged across the lobby, flung the front door open, swung the two other cases and myself on to the landing and slammed the door behind me. I leapt downstairs with the third suitcase banging against my hip. The screaming did not seem to diminish with distance. It was a sequence of screams, each short and identical, each divided from the next by the same short space of frantic breath. The screams sounded louder when I got into the street. A couple stopped and stared openmouthed from the opposite pavement. As I ran towards the underground I realised that each scream was a word, my name, repeated again and again. ‘She must faint if she keeps that up,' I thought, ‘Oh God let her faint now please.'

But she had not fainted when I turned the corner and for a time I heard a distant
Jeek! Jeek! Jeek!
behind the footsteps and clanging trams on Byres Road.

Goodbye Denny. I never learned what became of you. When the Technical College reopened I did not revisit the
refectory in case you were there, for I was about to become a married man. When friends told me you were not there I still did not go to the refectory in case the women you had worked beside gave me painful news of you, or worse still, asked me what you were doing. A lot later I met someone who lived in our lodgings a year after I left. He had never heard of you but he told me something surprising about the landlord. He became a skydiver. In the sixties he joined a club whose members leapt from aeroplanes and fell great distances before opening their parachutes. He died in the highlands when his parachute did not open in time, a strange death for such a neat, orderly, legal young man. My informant was an officer in the Royal Air Force and a very posh type indeed – or he pretended to be. He said, “It wasn't his class of sport, you see. His social background was, well, not quite top drawer. His father was a chartered accountant of lowly origins so the son joined the club to prove he could be one of us. It was a very very sad business. That type always makes a mess of things.”

So the landlord was the second man I knew who died by falling from a height, and I will never discover what you did when you stopped crying my name, Denny.

I arrived on Alan's doorstep and asked if I could stay with him until I found another room. He said, “Of course, come in”, but when I told him what had happened he nodded thoughtfully and placed an ancient typewriter on the kitchen table. He started reducing it to its components so methodically that I began to feel I did not exist for him. I said, “You are not very sympathetic.”