The Ends of Our Tethers (7 page)

Bee-wing
. Pale grey and gauzy. It has white lines like veins on wings of bees, wasps and house flies, but more random looking. Minute red or brown spots sometimes suggest wings of more exotic insects. Bee-wing is so transparent that if laid on a printed page words can be read through it.

Parchment
. Pale yellowish-brown, not
gauzy, yet as transparent as bee-wing. It seems made by the drying of moisture exuded from raw skin beneath. I remove it by pressing a fingertip into the skin on each side and pulling them apart. The living underskin stretches, the parchment splits, its edges curling up like the edges of water lily leaves, making peeling off easy.

Moss
. This yellowish-grey furriness seems an intruder, like the mould on rotten fruit. It grows in circular holes and narrow grooves made by accidental scratches in swollen, inflamed skin, but is so far below the skin's level that fingernails cannot reach it without doing more damage. I use fine-pointed tweezers to grip an edge of such growths and, since their roots must be intertwined, easily lift out the whole mossy mat or strip.

Paper
. A splendid example of this lost me control of my remaining firm.

The board meeting in our Waterloo Street office consisted of secretary, accountant, lawyer, works supervisor and two major shareholders who were partners from the days when my father's firm had built housing schemes. As chairman I let
the others do most of the talking, usually sitting with closed eyes and even dozing a little until silence fell. Then I would sit up, summarise the situation in a few crisp words, indicate the only sensible choices, hold a vote on them, then ask the secretary to announce the next item on our agenda. One afternoon, halfway through a meeting, I sensed that my left arm was in a very interesting state. I excused myself, went to lavatory, sat on pan, rolled up shirtsleeve. A big expanse of skin inside the elbow joint had withered into dry white paperiness, paperiness so brittle that it had cracked into little four-sided lozenges like an area of neatly laid marquetry. And it was NOT ALIVE. My first impulse was to set fingernails of my right hand in line and use them to rake that dead paper off with two or three sweeping strokes. It would have left an area of raw underskin with bleeding gashes in it and many wee triangular paper scraps standing up and not easy to nip off. So with the tweezers I delicately prized off each paper tile and placed it between the pages of my pocket book, leaving a raw but undamaged area on which I spread an ointment prescribed by the specialist – Betnovate or
Trimovate or Eumovate, I forget which. Then I rolled down sleeve, washed hands, returned to meeting. While performing that delicate operation I was perfectly happy.

“Well, gents, what have you been discussing?” I said, having been absent for ten or twenty minutes. Only the secretary looked straight at me. The rest seemed too embarrassed to look at anything but the table before them, then they looked furtively at the works supervisor. He was the youngest, the one I most liked and trusted because I had promoted him from being a site foreman. He cleared his throat then explained that, though he did not wholly agree with the rest of the board, there was a general feeling that I should leave the firm's steering wheel and become more of a back-seat driver; my great experience would always be valuable but blah blah blah blah
et cetera
. I grinned as I heard all this and when he fell silent was about to quell the mutiny – could easily have done it – but was suddenly overtaken by weariness with the whole business. It occurred to me also that someone had sampled the clear liquid in the tumbler beside my notepad and found it was not
water but Polish vodka. I sipped from it, shrugged and said, “Have it your own way gents.”

All but the works supervisor at once cheered up, congratulated me on my wise decision, said I would gain rather than lose financially because blah blah blah blah blah. So the paperish arm left me with nothing to enjoy but my skin game.

The nature of other crusts (
Lace, Fish-scale, Snakeskin, Shell, Biscuit, Straw
and
Pads
) I leave to the imagination of my readers, but some cannot be classified by a simple name. From the shallow valley above the caudal vertebrae I have removed three discs of the same size but different textures: beewing, parchment and paper, joined at a point where they overlapped by a little dark purple oval cake. I have also detached something like a tiny withered leaf, intricately mottled with black and grey, glossily smooth on the underside but with a knap like Lilliputian velvet on the upper. Anything often thought about enters our dreams and I sometimes dream of more extravagant growths. One is like a thin slab of soft, colourless cheese, slightly wrinkled: it
peels off with no physical sensation at all. Another lies under it and another under that. At last I uncover what I know is the lowest layer which I fear to remove, knowing that underneath lies nothing but bone wrapped in a network of naked veins, arteries, tendons and nerves, yet intense curiosity is driving me to expose what I dread to see when I fortunately awaken.

I reduced the bouts of wild scratching to once a week and between them carefully removed the crusts I have listed and the others I have not. The pleasure of this harvesting is twofold:
sensual
because the raw skin beneath feels briefly relieved, perhaps because it can perspire and breathe more freely;
emotional
because I like separating the dead from the quick, removing what is not the living me from what is. After each session I apply ointment then sweep up the dust, flakes and crusts with a hand-held vacuum cleaner of the sort used on car upholstery. Yet I do so with a kind of regret, feeling these former growths of mine should be
used
for something. I considered gathering the biggest in a porcelain jar as Victorian ladies gathered flower petals,
but the scent would not have been sweet. So instead of that —

I switch a plate of the electric cooker to maximum heat and with the tweezers lay on it a little pagoda-like tower of the largest crusts. They catch fire, each glowing red-hot before, with a faint sizzle, darkening and merging with the rest in a small black wart or bubble that heaves as if trying to rise off the plate, then collapses into a smear of white ash while releasing a wisp of smoke. This wisp, inhaled, has a tiny but definite odour of roasted meat. Surely this sight, sound and smell are as near as I can get to enjoying my cremation while alive? The ceremony is performed, of course, when my wife is away from home, but it once engrossed me so completely that I did not notice she had returned and was watching.

“What are you doing?”

Lacking the strength to stay silent and the energy to lie, I told her.

“But why?”

“Because I enjoy it.”

She arranged for me to see a psychotherapist.

He is a grave person not much younger than me. The following short summary of five politely laborious conversations makes them seem like comedy cross-talk with him the straight man, me the joker. A first person narrative makes such distortions inevitable.

I began by saying I had only come to please my wife and doubted if he could help me, as the skin game was a harmless way of getting fun out of an incurable illness.

“But was the disease not caused by huge financial loss and the deaths of your sons? And have you not since become something of an alcoholic?”

I admitted that my illness had a psychological element. We then conversed as if it was the only element, because of course I was paying him to do that. He asked about my sex life. I said that like most faithful married men of my age and class and nation I had outgrown it.

“But has your wife? And do you not see that these obsessive scratchings and pickings are a regression to pre-adolescent infantilism?”

I agreed that I had reverted to infantilism
but said I preferred the older name of second childhood, a condition to be expected in a man over sixty. My childish skin game perhaps blended narcissism, pre-masturbatory sado-masochism and a form of transferred coprophilia (I enjoyed coming back at him with big words) but it harmed nobody. I was sorry that my wife could not sleep with a man in my state but would not complain if she began visiting massage parlours or took up with a healthier lover, though in a woman of her age, class and nation this was improbable.

“Does it not occur to you that this narcissistic sado-masochism (as you agree to call it), this fast or slow flaying of your own epidermis – is a kind of self-punishment? What do you punish yourself for? Where lies your subconscious guilt?” I could not tell him so he told me.

At first he suggested I was subconsciously glad my sons had died, so felt subconsciously guilty of murdering them. I admitted that since their boarding-school days I had never felt at ease with the boys because (though they tried to hide it) they seemed to find my voice and
manners too plebeian, but I was glad – not angry – that they felt happier with their mother than with me. Their deaths were surely depressing enough without making me a subconscious murderer.

Then he tackled me from the Marxist angle. I had once been nearly a millionaire and surely nobody innocently grows as rich as that? He was right, in a way. In the building trade a lot of contracts are won by private deals that bypass the advertised requests for tenders. Not many such deals involve the transfer of banknotes in plain envelopes. What outsiders call corruption is more a matter of people above a certain income level exchanging useful social favours, and certainly my father got business that way. I avoided these deals, which was not easy at first. A noted Lord Provost felt personally insulted when I ignored his hints that my bids for contracts would be accepted if submitted in particular terms on particular mornings. That was why I did not become a millionaire. I may have inherited some ill-gotten gains but had never resented paying income tax, and when that was reduced by Thatcher's government I more
than made up for what I owed the human race in standing orders of money steadily paid to Oxfam, Amnesty International, Greenpeace and Scottish Wildlife. Despite a reduced income I still pay several of these orders. It is conscience money so I am at peace with my conscience.

The therapist could not believe that, so asked about my religion. I told him my mother had been a Catholic expelled from her local chapel when she married a Protestant, though my dad was not a church-going Protestant. His religion was money-making. To do so he congregated eagerly with Freemasons and Jesuits, Orangemen and Knights of Saint Columba. In Newton Mearns my wife attended a local Episcopalian Church, unlike me, though I had been friendly with her minister or vicar or whatever he was called: a decent man and one of the few Newton Mearns lot who still visited us. Like many non-religious folk I had a loose faith in a kind of God who was benign rather than punitive. I assumed God had the difficult job of managing the universe in ways that could not satisfy everybody. After all, He had made millions
of microbes and insects that could only thrive by killing millions of bigger animals and we had given Him no good reason to prefer people to other forms of life. I was being deliberately provocative when I said that. Small signs had led me to think this soul-doctor, despite his Freudian jargon, was a Believer, though probably in a Jewish, Catholic or Protestant God rather than a Hindu or Mahomedan one.

“I have read,” (I added) “that even in our cleanest buildings the carpets and the upholstery contain whole nations of wee beasts fed by the protein from old, discarded skin. I must have more than doubled the population of such beasties in my house. Their delight in the nourishment my eczema showers on them may compensate God for the pain it gives my wife.”

With an effort my soul-healer kept his temper and said that many neurotic self-justifers made gods in their own image, but mine was the nastiest he had encountered. I disagreed, saying mine was a harmless image – nobody would kill or strike another in defence of it.

“But arguing about God,” I told him, “is as futile as arguing with God. Let us agree that his mercy and justice are beyond any
understanding. Goodbye and good luck.”

That was a week ago and I'm not going back to him, though I feel our little chats did me good.

This morning I dreamed of wakening and lying naked on top of the bed, unable to move even a finger because my whole skin had stiffened into a hard rigid sheath. With a mighty effort I at last heaved myself up, feeling a delicious pang as the sheath cracked all over. Looking down I saw myself clad in a mosaic of parchment patches that began to move apart as their edges curled upward making them easy to pluck off. And what lay beneath was
not
raw cuticle but clean healthy skin. I awoke and found this was not so, but now believe that one day my skin will heal as unexpectedly as it diseased. Meanwhile my wee house-renovation firm, even without my controlling hand, is doing very well.

It will soon be quite a big firm again,

thank God.

W
HEN LOCAL NICKNAMES were common I grew up in a place we called The Long Town, a name not printed on maps or railway timetables. It had council houses where coal miners lived, a high street of properties rented by our shopkeepers and tradesmen, and several mansions and bungalows owned by so few professional folk that everyone in the town knew them. Conversations about local affairs usually mentioned Big Tam Kincaid the Free Kirk Minister, also his son Big Sam, schoolteacher and Labour councillor. I knew both by sight, the first as a gaunt striding figure in the
streets, the second as a stout one crossing the school playground. I was never Big Sam's pupil but often heard his voice booming from an adjacent classroom. Joe Kincaid, a second son, was of usual height but in the merchant navy so hardly ever seen. Almost as invisible were Poor Mrs Kincaid and a daughter, Wee Chrissie, who were only mentioned in women's conversations. When I asked why Mrs Kincaid was Poor my mother said, “Her men need a lot of her attention.”

I left The Long Town for university when television aerials had sprouted on most rooftops and the cinema had become a bingo hall. A job and a marriage kept me away from it but I often returned to visit my parents so saw the town change like the rest of Scotland. The railway and colliery closed. Cars and unemployment increased. Council houses took on a slummier look. At the edge of the town arose an estate of private houses, each with a garden and garage facing a circular drive. To discourage outsiders, it had only one way in, no through road and no shops, but it brought little extra business to the high street. The owners were commuters
who mostly shopped in Glasgow or Edinburgh, where they worked. The wee shops of my childhood (baker, grocer, draper, sweet shop, newsagent, cobbler, clock mender) became mini-markets or shut forever.

I also heard that Poor Mrs Kincaid died, leaving Wee Chrissie as housekeeper. Big Sam became a headmaster, married one of his staff and brought her to live in the Free Kirk manse where his father was now a bedridden invalid. Soon after the wedding Sam's wife left him and a stroke paralysed his legs, events so close together that gossip differed on which came first. Though confined to a wheelchair Big Sam fought bravely to keep his jobs as headmaster and local councillor. Having many sympathisers he succeeded for a while, but misfortunes had destroyed the joviality that had made his bullying ways bearable. Former colleagues joined with enemies and forced him to resign from both jobs. These colleagues had been his only friends; he now regarded them as traitors. Then his father died, leaving Sam alone with Wee Chrissie in the former manse. I asked if she had no friends.

“I never hear of Miss Kincaid having visitors,” said my mother in a way that showed the nickname was not now appropriate, “though nobody dislikes her.”

I got divorced and between jobs lived with my parents for a whole summer. Single women visiting Long Town pubs were looked at with grave suspicion. I dislike bingo so joined an evening class on modern Scots literature held in the public library. The lecturer was an enthusiast who tried hard to hide a conviction that the best things about his subject had been his meetings with the authors who wrote it. When he failed to do so I sensed that a straight-faced woman beside me was trembling. I glanced at her sideways. She gave me a smile that showed she was holding in tremendous laughter. I smiled back.

We left the library together, fell into conversation and I was surprised to learn she was Chrissie Kincaid, whom I had always imagined a poor wee timorous beastie. This woman was as tall as most of us who don't wear high heeled shoes. She
was quiet and self-contained but keenly observant, with highly independent and broadminded views. Our parental homes lay in the same direction so I invited her back for tea. She sighed and said, “Alas, no. I regret my early training but it has made it impossible for me – a Kincaid! – to accept hospitality I cannot return.”

“Then return it. I'll take tea in your house any day.”

“No you won't.”

“Why not?”

“I can't tell you because Kincaids never explain family matters to outsiders. Nor can we meet in a pub because female Kincaids don't drink alcohol in public. Nor can we meet in a tearoom or café because The Long Town hasn't one nowadays. But I hope you and I have another talk after the next evening class.”

Curiosity drove me to see her sooner. I had offered to lend a book. Two days later I took it to the former manse, a solid grey stately Victorian building with a tall monkey puzzle tree on the lawn. A brass bell handle, pulled, made a distant dolorous clanging somewhere inside. Two minutes later Miss Kincaid opened the
door and looked at me with raised eyebrows. I gave her the book and was saying something about it when a great voice from behind her said, “No whispering! No secrets from me, Chrissie! Bring your friend in.”

It was a voice I remembered from childhood, booming but distinct and able to penetrate walls without yelling. Miss Kincaid shrugged her shoulders and ushered me in.

We crossed a dark lobby with a staircase and entered a very warm room of dark furniture with a bright coal fire. Beside it in a wheelchair sat Big Sam, now hideously fat, his legs covered by a tartan rug. A table at his elbow had books and papers on it, a jug of water, a glass and a decanter of pale golden liquid. He said, “Your name is? Valerio? Formerly Ferguson? Then your father had the excellent dry goods shop on the high street. I taught your uncles and your elder brother. Chrissie, offer our Mrs Valerio biscuits, cake and – tea? Coffee? Sherry? Why not sherry? I, you see, am a whiskyholic” – (he waved toward the decanter) – “but I never drink enough to become a total victim of my sister's ministrations. No. I am careful to keep my
mind intact, my intellect in control.”

I said I would like tea and Miss Kincaid left the room.

“Good!” he said on a more intimate note, “I am a crippled giant but not the ogre my sister has probably suggested to you. My sufferings derive from a strong intelligence diverted by those who hate me into the cul-de-sac of memory – a form of torture I assure you, Mrs Valerio. What a relief to meet someone with whom I can intelligently converse!”

He talked to me for a very long time. Miss Kincaid must have brought biscuits and tea but his flow of talk wiped out any sense of consuming them. He told me the social history of The Long Town in the lifetime of his father and himself, illustrating it with personal anecdotes, many of them interesting, but it is exhausting to be treated as an audience for over an hour by a single intense speaker. The more often I looked at the clock the more often he asked if he was boring me. I lacked the courage to answer truly but he was watching me far too closely to miss other signs of restlessness. They inspired him to talk faster and faster.
Miss Kincaid must have learned not to hear Sam when not wanting to. She sat nearby calmly reading with a slight smile on her face that first struck me as mischievous then downright malicious until, after ninety minutes, she snapped the book shut, stood up and said, “Mrs Valerio has to visit some other people, Sam.”

I stood up too.

“Goodbye, Mrs Valerio,” he said, offering his hand. “I am at the mercy of a sister who is given to engineering these abrupt departures. My little holiday is ended but please visit the crippled giant again. Come again soon. Don't be a stranger.”

I said I would come again. With something like a sneer he reached for the whisky muttering what sounded like, “I doubt it.” Miss Kincaid escorted me to the front door murmuring, “Serves you right,” but our later walks back from the evening class were as friendly as the first.

Years later I returned to The Long Town for my father's funeral, then for my mother's. Both had Church of Scotland services. The second was better attended because the Free Kirk congregation had by
then joined ours, having become too small to maintain a separate minister of its own. I knew hardly any of the old people present so on leaving the church was pleased to see Miss Kincaid looking remarkably unchanged. I told her so and asked about her brother.

“Here he is!” she said, introducing a small compact man with eyes as blue and alert as her own. The complexion of his bald head and cut of his neatly trimmed beard showed this was Joe, the nautical brother. I asked how Sam was.

“As vocal as ever,” she said merrily. “We've moved him upstairs. Come home for a drink with us.”

So we three walked back to the old manse.

It was a chill November afternoon with occasional gusts of thin rain and I made a conventional remark about the weather. “Yes, a miserable climate,” said Joe cheerily. “I've seen much worse weather but for sheer dull depressing misery a damp Scottish November cannot be surpassed.”

He seemed highly satisfied with such Scottish Novembers.

“I disagree,” said Miss Kincaid. “Autumn
is Scotland's most colourful season. Fresh spring leaves look lovely but they don't look fresh for long. By the end of summer they've been tired and dusty for months. Then comes September and they start withering into golden greens, deep purples and all the rich colours I've seen in reproductions of Gauguin's paintings. I'm sure they would damage our eyes if we saw them by the strong sunlight of Tahiti.”

“Those don't look very dazzling,” said Joe, pointing to the pavement. Adhering to the tarmac and almost as black was a thin carpet of rotten old leaves with some recent ones the colour of dung.

“But what an excellent background for those!” said Miss Kincaid, pointing to a couple of fallen chestnut fans further on. Each leaf was a glowing yellow that blended through orange into crimson at the tip, with a pale green streak along the central veins.

As we entered the manse lobby we heard from above a vocal hullabaloo. Miss Kincaid looked at Joe who said calmly, “Yes, it's my turn.”

Without haste he removed and hung up cap and coat and went upstairs. Miss Kincaid
led me into the room where I had last seen Sam, switching on bright lights that made the dark furniture look solidly comforting instead of forbidding. The air was pleasantly warm.

“Home,” she said. “Home home home. Would you like a sherry? I'm having one.” We sat sipping sherry and watching the flames in the hearth. She said, “They're gas flames now and no trouble at all. Sam loved the old coal fire, said the constantly changing flames were a more varied show than television. He also liked to see me poking it or adding coals every half hour. When Joe came home we outnumbered Sam. Our change to gas so enraged him that he retreated upstairs. We installed a lift attachment to the banister that can easily take the twenty stone of him up and down. Joe would gladly drive Sam and his wheelchair to the park or anywhere else he likes, but no. Sam says he will never let anyone see a Kincaid in a pitiable state, will never let Joe condescend to him, so he sticks in his room. Laziness masquerading as pride, you see. Sheer obstinate idiocy in fact. Yet Sam used to be a better Labour councillor than most of them.”

We had another sherry. She said, “Our
father is to blame. He was a selfish monster who forbad us to play with other children. He damaged Sam most because Sam was his favourite so grew up like him, only happy with people he could bully. Thank God Joe and I had each other. We told each other all sorts of lovely stories and invented all sorts of exciting games when nobody was looking. Our affection made us quite unfit for matrimony. By going to sea Joe was able to sample other sorts of affection. He told me about them in letters because he knew I could never be jealous of purely temporary mates. He was living the life I would have led had I been a man, and I knew he would return to me at last. Another sherry?”

Joe entered and said, “Dinner-time. The Great I Am upstairs has grudgingly assented to oxtail soup, bangers and mash, tinned peaches with ice cream. What do you ladies want?”

We wanted the same. Joe prepared it and the three of us dined at the kitchen table with long chatty intervals between courses, the last of which was coffee with chocolates and liqueurs. Prompted by Chrissie Joe quietly recounted very entertaining comic
or terrifying oversea adventures and every forty minutes he or she went upstairs and attended briefly to Sam. Sitting round the kitchen table was so agreeable that we ended the evening there playing scrabble. My companions showed a relaxed pleasure in each other that I have sometimes (not often) noticed in recently married couples, but such marital pleasure is usually exclusive. I felt part of this Kincaid domesticity and had not felt so happily at home for years.

I told Miss Kincaid so when I was
leaving. I think she replied that Autumn
could be quite a satisfactory season,
but being tipsy I may have
imagined that.