Lanark: a life in 4 books (24 page)

CHAPTER 16.

Underworlds

Partly for pleasure, partly to save money, he walked to school each morning through Alexandra Park, mistakenly thinking a twisting path through flowerbeds was snorter than the straight traffic-laden road. The path crossed a hillside with a golf course above and football pitches below. The sky was usually pallid neutral and beyond the pitches a grey pragmatic light illuminated ridges of tenements and factories without obscuring or enriching them. Past the hill a boating pond lay among hawthorn and chestnuts. Often a film of soot had settled overnight on the level water and a duck, newly launched from an island, left a track like the track a finger makes on dusty glass. Crossing the flood of trucks and trams clanging and rumbling on the main road, he picked his way through a grid of small streets by a route which passed two cinemas with still photographs outside and three shops with vividly coloured magazines in the window. The women in these gave his daydreams a more erotic twist.

He had crossed the main road one morning and was descending a short street when Kate Caldwell came out of a close mouth in front of him and walked toward school, her schoolbag (a wartime gas-mask container) bumping at her hip. He followed excitedly, meaning to overtake but lacking the courage. What could he say to her? He imagined his stammering voice saying dull, awkward things about lessons and the weather and could only imagine her saying conventional things in response. Why didn’t she turn and smile and beckon? Surely she knew he was behind? If she beckoned he would smile faintly and approach with eyebrows questioningly raised. She would say, “Don’t you like my company?” or “I’m glad you come this way, these morning walks are a bit dull,” or “I liked your story in the school magazine; tell me about yourself.” He glared furiously at her dancing shoulders, willing her to turn and beckon, but she didn’t, and they reached school without getting nearer together or farther apart. After this he hoped each day she would come from the close at the exact moment he passed it so he could speak to her without lowering himself, but either he didn’t see her at all or she emerged ahead and he had to follow as if towed by an invisible rope. One morning he had just passed the close when he heard light quick footsteps overtaking from behind. A confusion of hope and distress hit him, and a nervous prickling in the skin of his face. Before the steps reached him he abruptly crossed the road to the opposite pavement, defiance and self-pity mingling in a sense of tragic isolation. Then he saw pass him, across the road, not the contemptuous dance of Kate Caldwell’s shoulderblades but a small, vigorous old lady with a shopping bag. He reached the playground feeling baffled and disappointed, and afterward went to school by a route which bothered him with fewer emotional complications.

Doing well in some subjects, learning to do badly in others without offending the teachers, he came to accept school as a sort of bad weather, making only the conventional complaints. He was friendly with other boys but had no friends and rarely tried to make them. Apparent life was a succession of dull habits in which he did what was asked automatically, only resenting demands to show interest. His energy had withdrawn into imaginary worlds and he had none to waste on reality.

A small fertile land lay hidden in a crater made by an atomic explosion. Thaw was Prime Minister of it. He lived in an old mansion among lawns and clumps of forest on the shore of a loch ornamented with islands. The mansion was spacious, dim and peaceful. The halls were hung with his paintings, the library full of his novels and poems, there were studios and laboratories where the best minds of the day worked whenever they cared to visit him. Outside the sun was warm, bees hummed among flowers and fountains, the season was midway between summer and autumn when the trees showed their matured green and only the maples were crimson. Political work took little of his time, for the people of that country had such confidence in him that he had only to suggest a reform for it to be practised. Indeed, his main problem was to keep the land democratic, for he would have been crowned king long before if his socialist principles had not forbidden it. He looked young for a Prime Minister, being a boy in early adolescence; at the same time he had ruled that land for centuries. He was a survivor of the third world war. The poisonous radiations which had killed most of his contemporaries had, by a fluke, given him eternal youth. In two or three centuries of wandering about the shattered earth he had become leader of a small group of people who had come to trust his gentleness and wisdom. He had brought them to the crater, protected by its walls from the envy of unhappier lands, to build a republic where nobody was sick, poor or forced to live by work they hated. Unluckily his country was surrounded by barbaric lands ruled by queens and tyrants who kept plotting to conquer it and were only kept out by his courage and ingenuity. As a result he was often involved in battles, rescues, escapes, fights with monsters in the middle of arenas, and triumphal processions of shocking vulgarity which he only took part in to avoid hurting the feelings of the queens and princesses whose lives and countries he had saved. When these adventures were over he invited the main characters home to stay with him, and since he annexed the plot of every book and film which impressed him the house by the loch was always crowded with the celebrities of many different races, nations and historical phases. In the simplicity of his spacious rooms they were amazed by the quiet friendliness of a way of life more civilized than their own, and they learned the true duties of a ruler by seeing him spend an afternoon drawing the plans of a new reservoir or university. The women guests usually fell in love with him, though some of the more barbaric came to hate him for his friendly indifference, an indifference which clothed a deep shyness. He could only feel near to women when rescuing them, and often envied the villains who could humiliate or torture them. His position made it impossible to imagine doing such things himself. Yet when walking home from school or public library, these adventures filled his head and chest with such intoxicating emotions that he had to run hard to be relieved of them and often found he had come through several streets without remembering anything of the people, houses or traffic.

His other imaginary world was enjoyed in the genitals. It was a secret gold mine in Arizona which a gang of bandits worked by slave labour. Thaw was bandit chief and spent his time inventing and practising tortures for the slaves. The mine got outside stimulus, not from the shelves of the library but, cryptically, from American comics. He never bought these, and had courage to look at their enticing covers only when the shop contained something else he could pretend to examine, but he sometimes borrowed one at school and in the privacy of the back bedroom copied out pictures of men being whipped and branded. He kept these pictures between pages of Carlyle’s
French Revolution
, a book no one else was likely to open.

One evening he knelt by his bed with the pictures on the quilt before him. There was a familiar tension in his genitals but tonight, by a coincidence of positions, his stiffened penis touched a girder upholding the mattress. The contact fired a bolt of white-cold nervous electricity into him in a shock so poignant that he had to press harder and harder against the source of it until something gushed and squirted, the kicking mechanism broke down, shrunk and went limp and he was left feeling horribly flat and emptied out. All the while his mind had sat feebly aghast, wondering what was happening with the slight energy left to it. Now he looked disgustedly at the drawings, took them to the lavatory, flushed them down the pan and opened his trousers.

A grey slug-shaped blob of jelly lay on his stomach just under the navel. It was transparent, tiny milky wisps and galaxies hung in it and it smelled like fish. He wiped himself clean and went back to the bedroom, not knowing what had happened but sure it had to do with the sniggers, hints and sudden silences which instinctive distaste made him ignore among his classmates. He felt numb and disgusted and swore not to think again the thoughts that led to this condition. Two days later they came back and he gave way to them without much resistance.

And now the flow of his imaginative life was broken by three or four orgasms a week. His pleasure in the mine had once lasted indefinitely, for it never reached a climax. After drawing or brooding awhile he would be called to a meal, or to homework, or would go for a walk and return from it the humane triumphant Prime Minister of his republic. Now after brooding on the mine a few minutes his penis would yearn to touch something, and if denied this help often exploded by itself, leaving a sodden stain in his trousers and a self-contempt so great that it included all his imaginary worlds. He was as much estranged from imagination as from reality.

The asthma returned with increasing weight, by day lying on his chest like a stone, at night pouncing like a beast. One night he woke with the beast’s paw so hard on his throat that he moved in a moment from fear to utter panic and leaped from bed with a cawing scream, stumbled to the window and clutched back the curtain. A gold flake of moon, a dim wisp of cloud hung above the opposite chimneys. He glared at them like words he could not read and tried to scream again. His father and mother came beside him and gently pressed him back to bed. Mr. Thaw held him tightly while his mother gave an ephedrine pill and brought first hot milk, then hot whisky, and held the cups to his mouth as he drank. His frightened grunting got less. They left him wrapped in a dressing gown, sitting cross-legged against a pile of pillows.

At the height of the panic, while glaring at the irrelevant moon, his one thought had been a certainty that Hell was worse than this. He had not been religiously educated and though he had a tentative faith in God (saying at the end of prayers “If you exist” instead of “Amen”) he had none in Hell. Now he saw that Hell was the one truth and pain the one fact which nullified all others. Sufficient health was like thin ice on an infinite sea of pain. Love, work, art, science and law were dangerous games played on the ice; all homes and cities were built on it. The ice was frail. A tiny shrinkage of the bronchial tubes could put him under it and a single split atom could sink a city. All religions existed to justify Hell and all clergymen were ministers of it. How could they walk about with such bland social faces pretending to belong to the surface of life? Their skulls should be furnaces with the fire of Hell burning in them and the skin of their faces dried and thin like scorched leaves. The face of Dr. McPhedron came to him as abruptly as when it was thrust over the edge of the rock. He turned for help to a bookcase beside the bed. It held books got secondhand for sixpence or a shilling, mostly legends and fantasies with some adult fiction and nonfiction. But now the fantasies were imbecile frivolity, and poetry was whistling in the dark, and novels showed life fighting its own agony, and biographies were accounts of struggles toward violent or senile ends, and history was an infinitely diseased worm without head or tail, beginning or end. A shelf held his father’s books, works by Lenin and the Webbs,
The History of the Working Classes in Scotland, Humanities Gain from Unbelief The Harmsworth Encyclo¬ paedia
and books about mountaineering. Putting out a desperate hand he took from among these a general history of philosophy, opened at random and read:

All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS. The difference between these consists of the degrees of force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. These perceptions, which enter with the most force or violence, we may name
impressions
; and under the name I may comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By
ideas
I mean the faint image of these in thinking and reasoning….

He read on with increasing relief, brought more and more into a world which, though made of words instead of numbers, was almost mathematical in its cleanness and lack of emotion. Looking up from the book much later he saw between the disordered curtains that the sky was pale and heard a faint distant music, a melodious thrumming which grew louder and louder until it seemed above his head, then faded into the distance. It was too rhythmical for birdsong, too harmonious for aircraft. He was puzzled but oddly comforted and fell into a smooth sleep.

At seven an alarm rang in the living room where his parents slept in the bed settee. Mr. Thaw had breakfast and carried his bicycle downstairs to the street. Mrs. Thaw brought to the bedroom a tray set with porridge, fried egg, sausage, brown bread with marmalade and a cup of tea. She watched as he ate and said, “Is it any better, son?”

“A bit better.”

“Ach, you’ll be all right when ye get to school.”

“Mibby.”

“Take another pill.”

“I have taken another. It’s not doing much good.”

“You’ve made up your mind it’s not doing good! If you wanted it to work it
would
work!”

“Mibby.”

After a while he said, “Anyway, I don’t want to go to school today.”

“But, Duncan, the exams are two weeks away.”

“I’m tired. I didn’t sleep well.”

Mrs. Thaw said coldly, “Are you trying to tell me you
can’t
go to school? You weren’t very well yesterday but you were well enough to go to the library. You’ve always enough breath for what you want to do; none for what’s important.”

Thaw laboriously dressed and washed. Mrs. Thaw helped him on with his coat and said, “Now take your time going down the road. It’s church first period so it won’t matter if you’re a bit late. The teachers understand. And straighten your back. Stop walking about like a half-shut penknife. Look the world in the face as if you owned it.”