Ten Tales Tall and True

by Alasdair Gray

  Is? Now seek? This problem? I seem to be conducting my investigation in the present tense, though I certainly began it in the past. Time travel is unending. And I am sorry that the continually shut nature of the window has made that stout man improbable. For a moment I thought him a friend. I used to ask the one who cares for me (not Zoë, the other one) to open this window on sunny days, but he or she always said, “Sorry Dad no can do. It’s against the rules. Why do you think we paid for air-conditioning?” I don’t know why we paid for air-conditioning. I hate it. I learned to hate it in the 1980s when I was famous. I must have been, because people kept asking me how it felt to be famous. I always said, “Fine thank you, the perquisites are useful.” The only perquisite I can now recall is flying from airport to airport all over North America, and sleeping in hotels, and appearing on platforms in conference centres. The airports, hotels and conference centres were very similar buildings with the same kind of furniture and windows which could not be opened because of the air conditioning. The air on the aeroplanes was fresher, though I could not open windows in those either. The only openable windows I saw in America belonged to cars speeding from one building to another, and would have poisoned me with exhaust fumes had I opened them. So I am used to breathing stale air, but it has damaged my memory. I do not know why people thought me famous, and asked me all over America, and why I went. It must have been a lie. When I was small, and passionately wanted to tell my mother something, and suddenly found I could not remember what it was, she always said, “It must have been a lie.”

  Wait a minute! I remember something said by a man who was introducing me to a big audience in Toronto or San Francisco or Quebec or Chicago or Montreal or Pittsburgh or Vancouver: the most humane, far-sighted and lucid thinker the 20th century has known, he called me. Yes yes. I travelled all over North America because I enjoyed the introductory speeches. This casts no light on the problem of the chewing-gum. I now know that UG could not flick or spit P for Pellet into this room. I am sure UG did not swallow it. Even if such a pellet could keep its colour, adhesiveness and integrity through a digestive tract, bowel gut and sphincter, its position after that would make its entry into my room improbable, whether UG defecated into a public sewage system or crapped behind a hedge. The following construction shows the likeliest chain of events. X represents a commonplace item in the world outside my room and later within it, having been brought from there to here by … but the item itself will indicate who brought it, so visualize!

  In this construction UG gets rid of P by casually sticking it onto X, which is carried into this room by Zoë, or by one of the other people who look after me, or by a visitor. But nobody has visited me for years so the fame did not last.

  The problem had now been carried as near to a solution as this method allowed. I love the deductive method. No wonder its union of Greek geometry and Islamic algebra has seduced nearly every Continental thinker from Descartes to Levi-Strauss. However, to identify XI needed the inductive method, the practical British approach devised by the two Bacons and William of Occam. I was making a list of everything in the room I could have trodden on when my attention was distracted by the queer behaviour of a chair I had known for years. It stands between my bed and the window, but nearer the window than my bed. I must describe how it usually appears before telling how it acted on the day I found the pellet.

  It is a low, light arm-chair with a wooden frame, made not long after the Second World War when money was more evenly spread, materials were in short supply, extravagant use of them was thought wasteful and ugly. Yet this chair does not look cheap. The elegantly tapered curves of the legs, the modestly widening, welcoming curve of the arms owe something to Japan and Scandinavia as well as aeroplane design. The seat and back are not thickly upholstered but so well supported that they feel perfectly comfortable. All the furniture Zoë owned looks and feels good. There was once another chair exactly like this one, and a sofa matching them. If people wanted a standard arm-chair I would honestly propose this one, as James Watt proposed a healthy workhorse without defects as the standard by which the power of artificial engines is measured to this day. Or does that last sentence show I am living in the past? Have engineers stopped measuring the strength of engines in horse-power? Are horses as extinct as whales? Is the Watt no longer a unit of electrical force? Watt was an 18th-century machinist from Greenock who invented the coal-fired water vapour engine. Has Rudolf Diesel’s compression fired oil vapour engine supplanted Watt’s terminology as well as his machines? Don’t panic. I suspect this is a word problem, a quilt-doovay problem, not destruction-of-Scottish-achievement-by-German-achievement problem. Unless I describe the usual colour of the chair the oddity of its conduct a week ago cannot be described.

  The parts of the woodwork designed to be seen have been polished, stained and varnished to a medium chocolate colour that almost hides the grain. The upholstery is covered by a russet red fabric I found annoyingly bright before it faded. When in bed I view the chair in profile, like the chair Whistler’s mother sits on, and see a tall narrow hole in the fabric of the back of the side, a hole through which at least twenty-four inches of pale unpolished unvarnished timber appear like a bone seen through an open wound. This hole has not been worn or torn open but shredded, as by a cat’s claws – threads and shreds of fabric dangle down from the edges all round it. In the years when I rummaged in cupboards I found other evidence of a cat: a plastic feeding dish with FLUFFY printed on the sloping sides, and behind containers of Marmite Yeast Extract and Granny’s Tomato Soup a tin of Whiskas Supermeat, Chicken and Rabbit Variety. Most sinister of all, behind the long-lost matching sofa I once saw a cardboard box more than two feet square with an arched hole like a door cut into one side, and crayoned over the sides and top a pattern suggesting brickwork, with the words CAT-PALACE, MOG-A-DEN and FLUFFY HOUSE. This writing was not in Zoë’s hand. It suggested that before she helped me up from the pavement and brought me home here she loved another human being as well as a cat, somebody who enjoyed fishing. There was a wicker creel under the bed, an angling rod in the wardrobe, waders in the lobby press. I said nothing about these articles and one day I came home and they had gone. I said nothing, because out of sight is out of mind if I want it to be, nor did I mind Fluffy ripping at the chair. Cats invented themselves by clawing their way up and down tree trunks and scratching soil or grass over their excrement. Forbidding cats to scratch is like forbidding humans to cut their nails and hair. Also, the chair was not responding to Fluffy in the year I found the pellet. It was brightening and darkening. The dim russet fabric glowed and flickered, then leapt into dazzling vividness like when new, but with a moving pattern of leaves dancing over it in a very irregular way. This pattern (dull red on bright russet) was dove grey on creamy ivory over the exposed timber. For half a minute the chair persisted in this way then suddenly, like an exhausted dancer, slumped in two or three seconds back to its ordinary dull old colours. Had the chair been remembering leaves it had seen in earlier days?

  Glancing through the window I noticed a remarkable coincidence. The leaves of the ash tree had the shapes and dancing movements of the pattern which had recently faded from the chair. And I saw another coincidence! Leaves, branches and trunks were flickering, lashing, swaying in the same direction and with the same turbulence as ragged whiteish-grey clouds in the sky beyond, clouds with shifting patches of blue and gleams of unpredictable sunlight between them. Without its underground roots every part of that tree would have flown off with the clouds, which shows the infectious force of a strong example. Had the air between the tree and clouds been visible I might have seen it rushing along too. For a moment I considered working out how the movements within the chair had been caused. People will pay a lot of money for objects that blaze and flicker, as television sets and games machines in public houses show. But I am too old to venture into show business. It is enough for me to passively enjoy the play of natural coincidences and actively enjoy the play of inward sp
eculation. These two plays led to my famous discovery. Of course they did.

  Einstein had died without establishing the unified field hypothesis, all the physicists had agreed the thing was impossible when I – a botanist – proved that every part and particle of the universe reflects every other part and particle and every past and eventual possibility inherent in each part and particle. My dissertation proving the identity of sense and motion in water lilies also proved the identity of sense and motion everywhere! And it cleared away all the paradoxes in Newtonian gravitation by showing that Kepler as well as Einstein had been right all along. Look at a star. Astronomers will say it is a distant sun or nebula, but even a moth can see it is a body of light. We know it gives light because we live inside the radiance of the gift – live inside the star. That twinkling little item is the core or central pip of a radiant fruit containing every other star and galaxy. My discovery angered many clever people, for by proving that loneliness is a convenient form of ignorance it left them nowhere to hide. “Nonsense!” roared the hearty pragmatists, “The light, heat, sounds et cetera given out by a body are not parts of the body, they are its excrement. Some bodies fling useful shit at us, some fling the dangerous kind so we need to identify the sources. The source you call a star is a mass of fissile material exuding beams essential to life and useful to navigators.”

  People with this self-centred view cannot be faulted. They want to be nothing but cockroaches in the larder of the universe, so have no interest in the rest of the palace. There was more dignity in the wrath of a great French scientist who was also a practising catholic, and so obsessed by the needless division between mind and body – so certain that only a God outside the universe could redeem what he thought was its horrible nature – that he would not see the regenerative side of my discovery.

  “The silence of these vast spaces appals me,” he said, talking about the gaps between the stars. I told him these gaps were spaces between the bodies in a busy market where light was being exchanged so rapidly our eyes could not catch it. “Imbecile!” he cried, “Do you not know that whole blazing star systems are receding from us faster than light can travel, and will collapse into black cinders without a single ray or thought from them ever reaching the frozen cinder which was once our little world?”

  I pointed out that while answering me his own mind had overtaken these blazing systems, had survived their extinction and returned to our own extinct world, enlivening it with one ray of impossible light, dignifying it with an impossibly gloomy thought. He frowned and said, “You are playing with words. Words are an expression of thought, not a physical force.”

  I pointed out that spoken sounds, though perhaps unable to open a closed mind, were as physical a force as dawn sunbeams that open the petals of daisies. But he so gloried in the faith he needed to face his appalling universe that he muttered, “Solipsist!” and turned his back on me. The Americans did not, or not at first. I expect they used me in propaganda for their space programme, or space race, or whatever the advertisers called it before the Russians made it pointless by stopping pretending to compete.

  Having solved the universal problems I now need to exercise my brain with smaller matters like time travel, and where Zoë has been for the last two or three days, and Between Two Toes, or The Case of the Mysterious Pellet.

  I cannot now say if I am solving the last of these problems in the present or remembering how I once solved it in the past but the time came (or has come) when I made (or will make) a list of items brought recently into my room from the world outside: food, cleaned clothes and towels, newspapers and letters. Then I made (or will make) another list of items on the floor of the room, items my foot could have pattered across: the linoleum, a fringed rug and things often dropped on these like food, clothes, towels, newspapers and letters. Items common to both lists should then be considered one at a time with great care, for one of these must be item X. And I have just remembered that letters and newspapers should be on neither list. Nobody has written to me for years, and I stopped taking papers during the last great miners’ strike in the 1980s when I saw that Britain had again become a financial oligarchy protected by the ancient fraud of a two-party electoral system. But the lists are not needed because I now see the gum MUST have come from inside the sock I wore yesterday, a sock which like all my clothes is washed in a machine outside this room where the clothes of other people (one of whom must be the Unknown Gumchewer) are also washed. UG accidentally attached the P for Pellet to a cardigan or other woollen article. UG’s helper (who is probably one of mine too) put it in the drum of a machine whose soapy solutions and hydraulic pressures dissolved most of the dirt but only displaced P for Pellet from the cardigan to the toe of my sock while the sock was inside out: its invariable state after I pull it off at night. Zoë or whoever else looks after me turns the cleaned socks the right way round at night before setting out a cleaned pair for me to put on next day. The fact that all my socks are grey like the Pellet would prevent Zoë or the other one seeing and removing it. Eureka!

  I basked in the elegance of this solution for two or three happy and peaceful minutes. Since discovering the Pellet I had been rolling it idly between the ball of my right-hand thumb and forefinger. I was about to flick it into a pail-shaped metal waste-bin near the bed when something in its soft, plastic adhesiveness made me doubt if it was chewing-gum at all. It was very like a more recent invention called Blu-Tack, first marketed in the 1970s (I think) as a means of attaching paper notices and light pictorial reproductions to surfaces without puncturing or staining the notices, reproductions and surfaces. But there are no such things in my room. I don’t need them. Zoë’s chair in front of the window, the ash tree outside it give me all the entertainment and food for thought I need. Or have I forgotten something? Look suspiciously, carefully, at all nearby surfaces. Yes, there is something I forgot.

  Beside my bed is a small metal wardrobe with wheels of a kind I have never before seen outside hospitals and homes for the chronically ill and disabled. On a side of this immediately opposite my face when I lie down is a paper document fastened by blobs of Blu-Tack at the two upper and the right-hand lower corner. This letter has a conventionally regal heading and a signature at the foot scribbled by Charles King number 3. The bit between signature and heading is very prettily printed or exquisitely typed, and congratulates me on attaining my hundredth birthday. Damn. Hell. F, no don’t use fuck as a curse word. Remember what I wrote in that review of the 1928 edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “Lawrence has restored to tender uses what should be the tenderest word in any language.” The Glasgow Herald sacked me for writing that review. I had guts in 1928. Perhaps that was my finest hour. But this letter which I tear down, crumple and fling into the waste-bin proves three unpleasant facts:

  1. This is the 21st century.

  2. Britain is still a damned and blasted monarchy.

  3. I have not seen Zoë lately, or anybody else I know, because she and they died in the decade after Fluffy died, nearly twenty-five years ago.

  I’m glad they left me Zoë’s chair.

  It makes time travel easier.

  Near the Driver

  This intelligent, kind old lady was once a school-teacher, and it shows in her forthright manners and alert appearance. On the station announcement board she reads that the 11.15 Aquarian from Bundlon to Shaglow will leave from platform H, and this worries her. While aware that her memory is failing she is sure station platforms used to be numbered, not lettered, so why the change? And walking along the platform she sees the carriages have very small square windows with rounded corners. The last time she travelled by rail the windows seemed to be big long glass panels that stretched the entire side of each carriage with hardly any interruption. She also remembers when carriages were divided into compartments like the insides of stage coaches, each with a door in the middle of either side, a door whose window could be raised or lowered by fitting holes in a thick leather strap onto shining brass studs
. The handles of these old doors were shining brass levers. She stops and examines a door of a carriage near the front of the modern train. It has neither window nor handle, just a square plastic button in the middle with PRESS engraved on it. She presses. The door slides up like a blind. She steps through and it snaps down behind her.

  She finds herself peering along a central corridor with rows of three high-backed seats on each side, all facing her. The backs of the six front seats hide all but the rows in front. Beside one window a sturdy old man sits reading a newspaper published by the British Orthodox Communist Party. The teacher nods approvingly, for though never a Communist she approves of radical politics. Beside the old man is a housewife with a worried expression, beside the woman a restless little child wearing a blue canvas suit. The teacher, proud of her ability to read character at a glance, decides these are three generations of a family belonging to the skilled artisan class. Beside the opposite window a middle-aged, middle-class couple sit bolt upright staring straight ahead. They seem to be ignoring each other, but with another approving nod the teacher sees on the arm-rest between them the man’s left hand clasping the woman’s right. The teacher sits in the empty seat beside this couple, saying to nobody in particular, “I suppose modern trains look like aeroplanes because they travel nearly as fast! I regret that because I hate air travel, but I’m glad our compartment is close to the bit that pulls – the bit we called the engine in the days of steam. I feel safer when I’m near the driver.”