Lanark: a life in 4 books (9 page)

Blackness closed over him with a clash and he fell.

But not far. The cavity below the mouth narrowed to a gullet down which he slithered and bumped at decreasing speed as his clothing and thorny arm began catching on the sides. The sides began to tighten and loosen, heating as they tightened, cooling as they loosened, and the descent became a series of freezing drops from one scalding grip to another. The pressure and heat grew greater and gripped him longer until he punched and kicked against it. He was dropped at once but only fell a few feet, and the next hold was so sickeningly tight that he could not move his arms and legs at all. He opened his mouth to scream and a mixture of wool and cloth squeezed into it, for the pressure had dragged vest, shirt and jersey over his face. He was suffocating. He urinated. The great grip stopped, he slid downward, the garments slid upward, freeing mouth and nose, and then the sides contracted and crushed him harder than ever. Most senses abandoned him now. Thought and memory, stench, heat and direction dissolved and he knew nothing but pressure and duration. Cities seemed piled on him with a weight which doubled every second; nothing but movement could lessen this pressure; all time, space and mind would end unless he moved but it had been aeons since he could have stirred toe or eyelid. And then he felt like an infinite worm in infinite darkness, straining and straining and failing to disgorge a lump which was choking him to death.

After a while nothing seemed very important. Hands were touching his sides, softly sponging and softly drying. The light was too strong to let him open his eyes. Some words were whispered and someone softly laughed. At last he opened his eyelids the narrowest possible slit. He lay naked on a bed with a clean towel across his genitals. Two girls in white dresses stood at his feet, clipping the toenails with tiny silvery scissors. Between their bowed heads he saw the dial of a clock on the wall beyond, a large white dial with a slender scarlet second hand travelling round it. He glanced toward his right side. Growing down from the shoulder was a decent, commonplace, human limb.

CHAPTER 7.

The Institute

The food was always a lax white meat like fish, or a stronger one like breast of chicken, or pale yellow like steamed egg. It was completely tasteless, but though Lanark never ate more than half the small portion on his plate the meals left him unusually comfortable and alert. The room had milk-coloured walls and a floor of polished wood. Five beds with blue coverlets stood against one wall, and Lanark, in the middle bed, faced a wall pierced by five arches. He could see a corridor behind them with a big window covered by a white Venetian blind. The clock was over the middle arch, its circumference divided into twenty-five hours. At half past five the light went on and two nurses carried in hot water and shaving things and made the bed. At six, twelve and eighteen o’clock they brought meals in a wheeled cabinet. At nine, fifteen and twenty-two o’clock a cup of tea was given him by a nurse who measured his temperature and felt his pulse in a slightly offhand manner. At half past twenty-two the neon tubes in the ceiling faded and the only light filtered in through the corridor blind. This was a pearly mobile light from several sources, all moving and growing or dimming as they moved, yet the movement was too stately and suggestive of distances to be cast by traffic. Lanark was soothed by it. Each pillar between the arches threw several shadows into the room, every one a different degree of greyness and all sweeping at different slow rates in one direction or another. The dim, rhythmical, yet irregular movement of these shadows was reassuringly different from the horrifying black pressure which the pressure of the pillow on his cheek still brought to mind. One morning he said to the nurses making the bed, “What’s outside the window?”

“Just scenery. Miles and miles of scenery.”

“Why are the blinds never raised?”

“You couldn’t stand the view, Bushybrows. We can’t stand it and we’re perfectly fit.”

They had begun calling him Bushybrows. He examined his face in two square inches of shaving mirror and noticed that his eyebrows had white hairs in them. He lay back thoughtfully and asked, “How old do I look?”

One said, “A bit over thirty.”

The other said, “No chicken, anyway.”

He nodded glumly and said, “A short while ago I seemed ten years younger.”

“Well, Bushybrows, that’s life, isn’t it?”

He was visited that morning by a bald professional man wearing a white coat and half-moon-shaped rimless glasses. He stood by the bed surveying Lanark with a grave look which did not completely hide amusement. He said, “Do you remember me?”

“No.”

The doctor fingered a piece of sticking plaster on his chin and said, “Three days ago you punched me, just here. Oh yes, you came out fighting. I’m sorry I haven’t had time to see you since. We have hardly enough staff to deal with the serious cases, so the totally hopeless and the nearly fit are left much to themselves. Can you go to the lavatory yet?”

“Yes, if I hold onto the beds and walls.”

“I suppose your sleep is still pretty troubled?”

“Not very.”

“You’re recovering fast. You would be running around already if you’d undressed properly and come head first. At present you are convalescing from severe shock, so take things easily. Is there anything special you would like?”

“Could you get me something to read?”

The doctor slid each hand up the opposite sleeve and stood for a moment with his lips pursed, looking like a mandarin. He said, “I’ll try, but I can’t promise much. Our institute has been isolated since the outbreak of the second world war. There is only one way of coming here and you’ve seen yourself how impossible it is to bring luggage.”

“But the nurses are young girls!”

“Well?”

“You said the place was isolated.”

“It is. We recruit our staff from among the patients. I expect you’ll be joining us soon.”

“When I get better I intend to leave.”

“Easier said than done. We’ll discuss it in a day or two, when you’re able to walk. Meanwhile I’ll hunt out some reading material.”

The nurses who brought the midday meal also brought a children’s cartoon book called
Oor Wullie’s Annual for 1938
, a crime novel with the covers missing called
No Orchids for
Miss Blandish
, and a fat squat little book in good condition,
The Holy War
, in which the s was usually printed
f
and half the pages were uncut. Lanark began reading
Oor Wullie
. It made him smile in places but many pages had been spoiled by someone’s colouring them with a blunt brown crayon. He began
No Orchids
and was halfway through it that evening when the nurses hurried in and set screens around the bed beside him. They brought metal cylinders and trolleys of medical equipment and went out saying, “Here comes a friend for you, Bushybrows.”

A male nurse wheeled in a stretcher and the room was filled with the sound of hoarse guttural breathing. The figure on the stretcher was hidden by two doctors walking alongside, one of them Lanark’s doctor. They went behind the screens and the stretcher was taken away. Lanark could read no longer. He lay listening to the tinkle of instruments, the murmur of professional voices, the huge harsh breathing. His evening cup of tea was brought and the lights went out. Except for a lamp behind the screens the room was bathed in moving shadows cast by the corridor windows. The breathing became a couple of quietly repeated vocal sighs and then grew inaudible. Screens, trolley and instruments were wheeled out and everyone left except the doctor with the rimless glasses, who came to Lanark’s bed and sat heavily on the edge wiping his brow with a piece of tissue. He said, “He’s cured of his disease, poor sod. God knows how he’ll recover from the journey here.” Under the bed lamp, propped against a bank of pillows, was a face so shockingly like a yellow skull that the only indication of age and sex was a white moustache with drooping corners. The sockets were so deep that it was impossible to see the eyes. A skeletal arm lay on the coverlet, and a rubber tube carried fluid from a suspended bottle to a bandage round the biceps.

The doctor sighed and said, “We did what we could, and he should be comfortable for eight hours at least. I wish you would do us a favour. You still sleep pretty lightly, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“He may gain consciousness and feel like talking. I could leave a nurse here but their damned professional cheerfulness depresses introspective men. Talk to him, if he feels like it, and if he wants a doctor call me on this.”

He took from his pocket a white plastic radio the size of a cigarette packet. There was a circular mesh on one surface and a red switch at the side. The doctor pressed the switch, and a small clear frantic voice asked Dr. Bannerjee to come to delivery room Q. The doctor switched it off and slid it under Lanark’s pillow. He said, “It works two ways. If you speak into it and ask for me they’ll pass the message on; I’m called Munro. But don’t try to stay awake, he’ll waken you if he needs you.”

Lanark could not sleep. He lay at the edge of the glow surrounding the sick man, turned his back to the bony head and played the radio under the pillow. Munro had said his institute was understaffed but the staff was still very large. In ten minutes he heard forty different doctors summoned in tones indicating an emergency to places and tasks he was wholly unable to picture. One call said, “Will Dr. Gibson go to the sink? There is resistance on the north rim.” Another said, “Ward R-sixty requires an osteopath. There is twittering. Will any free osteopath go at once to deterioration ward R-sixty.” He was greatly puzzled by a call which said, “Here is a warning for the engineers from Professor Ozenfant. A salamander will discharge in chamber eleven at approximately fifteen-fifteen.” At last he switched the clamour off and dozed uneasily.

He was wakened by a low cry and sat up. The sick man was craning forward from his pillows, moving his head from side to side as if seeking something, yet Lanark was still unable to see eyes in the black sockets. The man said loudly, “Is anybody there? Who are you?”

“I’m here. I’m a patient, like yourself. Should I call a doctor?”

“How tall am I?”

Lanark stared at the thin figure beneath the blue coverlet. He said “Quite tall.”

The man was sweating. He gave a dreadful shriek. “
How tall?
”

“Nearly six feet.”

The man lay back on the pillow and his thin mouth curled in a surprisingly sweet smile. After a moment he said languidly,

“And I don’t glitter.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not covered with … you know, red, white, blue, green sparkles.”

“Certainly not. Should I call a doctor?”

“No no. I expect these fellows have done what they can.”

The man’s skull was no longer a reminder of death. Feeling had softened it and now it seemed a daringly austere work of art commemorating human consciousness. The thin lips still curved in a faint smile. They opened and said, “What brought you here?”

Lanark considered several answers and decided to use the shortest. “Dragonhide.”

The man seemed not to hear. At last Lanark asked, “What brought you?”

The man cleared his throat. “Crystalline hypertrophy of the connective tissue. That’s the medical name. Laymen like you or I call it rigor.”

“Twittering rigor?”

“I did not twitter. All the same, it came as a shock.”

He seemed to become thoughtful and Lanark fell asleep. He was wakened by the man crying out, “Are you there? Am I boring you?”

“I’m here. Please go on.”

“You see, I loved the human image and I hated the way people degraded it, overdeveloping some bits to gain temporary advantage and breaking others off to get relief from very ordinary pain. I seemed surrounded by leeches, using their vitality to steal vitality from others, and by sponges, hiding behind too many mouths, and by crustaceans, swapping their feelings for armour. I saw that a decent human life should contain discipline, and exertion, and adventure, and be unselfish. So I joined the army. Can you tell me what other organization I could have joined? Yet in spite of five dangerous missions behind enemy lines, and in spite of launching the Q39 programme, I grew to be nine feet tall and as brittle as glass. I could exert fantastic pressure vertically, upward or downward, but the slightest sideways blow would have cracked me open. We do crack, you know, in the army.”

Indignation had entered his voice and exhausted it. He lay breathing deeply for a while; then his lips curved in the surprising smile. He said, “Can you guess what I did?”

“No.”

“I did something rather unusual. Instead of waiting till I cracked and leaving the pit to eat up the pieces I
invoked
the pit. I asked for a way out, and the pit came to me, and I entered it in a perfectly decorous and manly fashion.”

“So did I.”

For a moment the man looked indignant again, then he asked in a low voice, “How many of us are there in this room?”

“Just you and I.”

“Good. Good. That means we are exceptional cases. Depend on it, not many pray for that way out. The majority spend their lives dreading it. Did you lose consciousness coming down?”

“Yes, after a while.”

“I lost consciousness almost at once. The trouble was, I kept coming back to it, again and again and again. I wish I had taken their advice and removed my uniform.”

“You came down in a uniform!” cried Lanark, horrified.

“Yes. Belt, boots, braid, brass buttons, the lot. I even had my pistol, in a holster.”

“Why?”

“I meant to surrender it to the commander here: a symbolic gesture, you know. But there isn’t a commander. That pistol made a trench as deep as itself across my right hip, which is why I am dying, I suppose. I could have survived the uniform but not the revolver.”

“You’re not dying!”

“I feel I am.”