Lanark: a life in 4 books (44 page)

He wondered why his mouth and hands had never done these things before. More footsteps sounded along the corridor and they separated.

“I’m leaving the choir,” he said. “So go through that door, and goodbye.”

She smiled and went quickly through the door. He set out briskly for the studio, meaning to start work at once. Their parting had been so kind that for three minutes he was almost happy, but as time and space widened between them resentment developed. Along Sauchiehall Street the glances of passers-bymade him notice he was chanting aloud, “If you
exist
let mekill her, if you
exist
let me kill her.”

At the studio he saw nothing in his picture but a tangle of ugly lines. He sat and stared at them till it was dark.

CHAPTER 26.

Chaos

He waited a long time next morning for an impulse to get out of bed, and at last crawled to the larder, and to the lavatory, and back to bed again. He lay like a corpse, his brain rotten with resentful dreams. He tortured her in sexual fantasies, and revised and enlarged the farewell speeches he had failed to make when parting, and minutely remembered and resented every moment they had passed together. He wondered why his thoughts were so full of a girl who had given him so little. The aching emotions gradually became muscular tightness, his limited movement a way of saving breath. He kept wanting her to enter the dark, dusty, muddled room, switch on the light and glance round it, smiling. His own face would stay hard and immobile but she would remove her coat, give a small pat to the back of her hair and start to clean up. She would make a warm drink, sit by the mattress and hold the cup for him to sip like a child. With a sardonic smile he would submit to this but at last he would take her hands and press them to where she could feel the heart knocking on his ribs. They would lean against each other. The sweat would go from his brow, the tension from his body and he would sleep. He was afraid of sleep now and sat as rigid as possible to keep it away.

One day during the summer holidays McAlpin, who was painting in a corner, said, “I know advice is always useless but wouldn’t you feel better if you got up and tackled your picture?”

“It’s ludicrous to think anyone in Glasgow will ever paint a good picture.”

“You should go home, Duncan.”

“Afraid to move.”

Later McAlpin went out and returned with Ruth. Thaw stared at her fearfully for she often called his illness a disgusting way of grabbing attention. She asked kindly, “How are you, old Duncan?” and gently helped him to dress and led him downstairs to a taxi. As they sped homeward she spoke of her training college in Aberdeen. She had been a year there, her intelligent bright bounciness had no aggression in it and he sensed he need never fear her again. Mr. Thaw had laid the table for tea. As they sat round it Ruth said “I like Aberdeen, I’ve got so many boyfriends! I go swimming with Harry Docherty, who was the Scottish Junior Breaststroke Champion, and I go dancing with Joe Stewart, and I go to parties with anybody—anybody I like, I mean. The girls at college think I’m a scarlet woman but I think they’re daft. Most of them have only one boyfriend and talk about nothing but marriage. I’m not going to marry for four or five years, and there’s safety in numbers, I say.”

“Quite right,” said Mr. Thaw. “Don’t commit yourself to another human being until you’re able to be independent. You’re young, enjoy yourself.”

“On Sunday I go for walks with Tony Gow, who’s a medical student. You’d like him, Duncan. He knows all about animals and flowers and folk songs. He’s not much use in the back row of a cinema but he’s really interesting. Our walks haven’t been much fun lately because of this new rabbit disease the farmers are spreading. All along the country roads you find these poor dying rabbits, gasping for breath with their eyes bulging out. Tony takes them by the hind legs and brains them on the ground. I can’t do it. I know it’s the kind thing to do but I can’t even look. Tony—”

Thaw screamed, “Stop!”

After a moment Mr. Thaw said, “Go to bed son. I’ll get the doctor.”

The doctor ordered rest and new kinds of pill. Thaw sat in bed, unable to concentrate on reading but willing to argue.

“I wish I was a duck.”

“What?”

“I wish I was a duck on Alexandra Park pond. I could swim, and fly, and walk, and have three wives, and everything I wanted. But I’m a man. I have a mind, and three library tickets, and everything I want is impossible.”

“My God, what are you saying? What’s this I’ve fathered? Look at penicillin and the national health service, look at all these books and pictures you’re so keen on! And you want to be a bird!”

“Look at Belsen!” cried Thaw. “And Nagasaki, and the Russians in Hungary and Yanks in South America and French in Algeria and the British bombing Egypt without declaring war on her! Half the folk on this planet die of malnutrition before they’re thirty, we’ll be twice as many before the century ends, and the only governments with the skill and power to make a decent home of the world are plundering their neighbours and planning to atom bomb each other. We cooperate in millions when it comes to killing, but when it comes to generous, beautiful actions we work in tens and hundreds.”

Mr. Thaw rubbed the side of his face and said, “You’ve read more books than me. How long have there been men in the world?”

“About three hundred thousand years.”

“How long have we had cities?”

“About six thousand years.”

“And how long have there been governments with worldwide powers? I know the answer to that one. Hardly more than a century.”

“Well?”

“Duncan, modern history is just beginning. Give us another couple of centuries and we’ll build a
real
civilization! Don’t worry, son, others want it beside yourself. There’s not a country in the world where folk aren’t striving and searching. Don’t be fooled by the politicians. It isn’t the loud men on platforms but the obscure toilers who change things. And if a few damned power cliques start an atomic war in the next ten or twenty years, humanity will survive. We may take centuries to breed out the effects of radiation, but ordinary folk will do it and start the steep upward climb once more.”

“Yah, I’m
sick
of ordinary people’s ability to eat muck and survive. Animals are nobler. A fierce animal will die fighting against insults to its nature, and a meek one will starve to death under them. Only human beings have the hideous versatility to adapt to lovelessness and live and live and live while being exploited and abused by their own kind. I read an essay by a little girl in a book about children in wartime. Her house had been bombed. She wrote,’ I am nothing and nobody. My cat was stuck to the wall. I tried to pull her off but they threw my cat away.’ Worse things have happened to children every day for the last quarter million years. No kindly future will ever repair a past as vile as ours, and even if we do achieve a worldwide democratic socialist state it won’t last. Nothing decent lasts. All that lasts is this mess of fighting and pain and I object to it! I object! I object!”

“Stop pitying yourself.”

Thaw opened his mouth to protest, noticed he was pitying himself and shut it again. Mr. Thaw sighed and said, “Let’s agree the world is one helluva mess. What do you think will improve it?”

“A memory and a conscience. I hate the heedless way it puts on life without noticing or caring, like a rotten fruit putting on mould.”

“But Duncan, memory and conscience are human things!”

“Unluckily.”

“Is it a God you want?”

“Yes. Yes, it’s a big continual loving man I want who shares the pain of his people. It’s an impossibility I want.”

Mr. Thaw pushed flat some wisps of hair on his head and said, “My father was elder in a Congregationalist church in Bridgeton: a poor place now but a worse one then. One time the well-off members subscribed to give the building a new communion table, an organ and coloured windows. But he was an industrial blacksmith with a big family. He couldnae afford to give money, so he gave ten years of unpaid work as church officer, sweeping and dusting, polishing the brasses and ringing the bell for services. At the foundry he was paid less the more he aged, but my mother helped the family by embroidering tablecloths and napkins. Her ambition was to save a hundred pounds. She was a good needlewoman, but she never saved her hundred pounds. A neighbour would fall sick and need a holiday or a friend’s son would need a new suit to apply for a job, and she handed over the money with no fuss or remark, as if it were an ordinary thing to do. She got a lot of comfort from praying. Every night we all kneeled to pray in the living room before going to bed. There was nothing dramatic in these prayers. My father and mother clearly felt they were talking to a friend in the room with them. I never felt that, so I believed there was something wrong with me. Then the 1914 war started and I joined the army and heard a different kind of prayer. The clergy on all sides were praying for victory. They told us God wanted our government to win and was right there behind us, with the generals, shoving us forward. A lot of us in the trenches let God go at that time. But Duncan, all these airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky notions are nothing but aids to doing what we want anyway. My parents used Christianity to help them behave decently in a difficult life. Other folk used it to justify war and property. But Duncan, what men believe isn’t important−it’s our actions which make us right or wrong. So if a God can comfort you, adopt one. He won’t hurt you.”

“Will he not?” said Thaw sullenly. “The only God I can imagine is too like Stalin to be comforting.”

“I don’t condone Stalin’s methods, of course, but I firmly believe anyone else ruling Russia in the thirties would have had to behave like him.”

The new pills stopped working and the doctor prescribed others which didn’t work either. On the worst nights Mr. Thaw sat by the bed wiping trickles of sweat from Thaw’s face with a towel and holding out a basin to take the thick yellow phlegm. Thaw was wholly occupied by the disease now. He felt it in him like civil war sabotaging his breathing and allowing only enough oxygen to feel pain, helplessness and self-disgust. Once after midnight he said, “Doctor thinks … this illness … mental.”

“Aye, son. He’s hinted at it.”

“Fill bath.”

“What?”

“Fill bath. Cold water.”

With difficulty he explained that maybe (like a land forgetting inner differences when attacked by another) the clenched air tubes might relax if his whole skin was insulted by cold water.

Mr. Thaw reluctantly filled the bath and helped Thaw to the edge. Thaw dropped his pyjamas, placed one foot in the water and stood, breathing heavily. After a while he brought in the other foot and with a spasmodic effort knelt on one knee.

“Hurry up, Duncan. Put yourself under!” said Mr. Thaw and moved to thrust him down.

“No!” screamed Thaw, and five minutes later managed to lie on his back with nose and lips above the surface. Breathing was as hard as ever. Mr. Thaw dried him and helped him back to bed. “You should have lain down at once, Duncan. If shock treatment
can
work, it has to come as a shock.”

Thaw sat for a while, then said, “You’re right. Hit me.”

“What?”

“Hit me. On face.”

“Duncan! … I
cannae
.”

After more minutes of sore breathing, Thaw cried, “Please!”

“But Duncan—”

“Can’t stand … more this. Can’t stand.”

Mr. Thaw struck his face with his open palm.

“No good. Could hit …
myself
… harder. Again!”

Mr. Thaw struck harder. Thaw reeled, recovered, compared the painful cheek to the pain in his chest and muttered, “No bloody good,”

Mr. Thaw bowed his head and wept. He was sitting on the edge of the bed and Thaw embraced him, saying, “Sorry, Dad. Sorry.”

He felt his father’s body shake with the sobs erupting inside. It did not feel a large body, and looking down at the thin white hair strands on the freckled scalp he sensed it was an ageing body, and was puzzled to find his own, for a moment, the stronger.

“Go to bed, Dad,” he said. “I’m better now.”

The tension in his chest had eased.

“My God, Duncan, if I could take your damned illness myself I would! I would!”

“What good would that do? Who would support us then? No, this is the best arrangement.”

Mr. Thaw went to bed and the breathing worsened again. When he tried to ignore it by staring at things in the surrounding room they became unstable, as if walls, furniture and ornaments were pieces of a destructive force gripped into shape by a hostile force which could only just hold them. A glazed jug before the window seemed about to explode. Its shiny green hardness threatened him across the room. Everything he saw seemed made of panic. He stared at the ceiling and gathered his thoughts into an intense, silent cry: ‘You exist. I surrender. I believe. Help me please.’

The asthma worsened. He gave a fearful moan, then controlled himself enough to make an amused sound and say, “Nobody. There. At all.”

He said it again, louder, but it sounded like a lie. Without comfort he found himself condemned to a faith which would never again let him end a prayer by saying, ‘If you exist.’

Again he fired his thoughts through the ceiling.

‘This belief comes from my cowardice, not from your glory. You won it by a torturer’s trick. But you are far from winning my approval. And I will never, never, never, never pray to you again.’

Next day the doctor said, “This has gone on far too long. He should be in hospital. Have you a neighbour with a telephone?”

Ruth and his father helped him dress. The neighbours stood at their doors as the ambulance men carried him downstairs. Mrs. Gilchrist called out glumly, “A fine way to go your holidays, Duncan.”

It was a fresh July morning. He sat clutching the edge of the ambulance bench while Mr. Thaw on the bench opposite grunted and prized at the lock of a suitcase with a propelling pencil. Thaw said, “What’s wrong?”