The Ends of Our Tethers

by Alasdair Gray

  Since then I have often enjoyed that ecstasy, suffered that pain. The disease spread to other limbs, torso, neck and head. I could no longer supervise work in houses under renovation. Dust from cement, plasterboard and timber maddened my itches to a frenzy that only the hottest of baths subdued. Under the pain of scalding water the skin also felt many wee points of delight, as if each itch was being exactly, simultaneously scratched and satisfied. I left the bath with my skin a patchwork of pink and red sores that I patted dry, ointmented with Vaseline, covered with clean pyjamas, every itch now replaced by dull pain. So I went to bed and slept sound by quickly drinking half a litre of neat spirits. Perhaps modern pills would have knocked me out more cheaply but I felt safer with a drug folk have tested on themselves for centuries.

  So the main side effects of the disease are:

  exile from the constructive part of my business,

  exile from my wife’s bed,

  her endless work to clean up my stained sheets and underclothes,

  greatly increased dependence on alchohol,

  a search for cures.

  After a thing called A Patch Test my doctor explained that the disease was due to an inherited defect in the immune system defending my skin. A mainly serene and prosperous life had not strained it but now, weakened by recent emotional shocks, I was allergic to forms of dust that nobody could avoid. The origin of the allergy, being genetic, was incurable, but medication should reduce the symptoms. He prescribed a steroid cream to combat eruptions, an emollient to reduce the flaking, anti-histamine pills to ease the itching and (to be used instead of soap) a bath oil that also counteracted infection.

  These helped for a while. The rashes healed in places and itched far less until the steroid cream ran out. My doctor was unwilling to prescribe more because continuous use made the skin dangerously thin. He prescribed a less potent antibiotic cream and arranged a consultation with a skin specialist who, because of a long waiting list, would see me five months later. My wife wanted me to jump that queue by paying for a private consultation. I refused for two reasons.

  (1) I am a socialist who thinks our national health service is the best thing the British Government ever created, and is undermined by folk buying into a private system which can only exist because its doctors are also partly subsidised by ordinary taxpayers, and:

  (2) I like saving money.

  But while waiting for the appointment I noticed near my home an alternative medicine clinic, though not the sort using astrology and occultism. The consultation fee was not huge so I tried it. An ordinary looking youth weighed me, examined my fingernails, tongue and inner eyelids, asked questions about my eating and drinking habits, then delivered a small lecture.

  Everyone must live by consuming more solids and fluids than their body needs, so our digestions, kidneys and liver help to excrete what cannot nourish us. With age these weaken and work less efficiently, especially in middle-class people like me who eat and drink too much. The excess not expelled through my bowels and bladder is retained in fat or expelled through the skin, damaging it on the way. I should therefore stop drinking alcohol, coffee and tea, apart from one cup of the last each day. I should daily drink at least three pints of pure water, should stop eating meat and poultry, but consume as much fish as I liked if it was not fried. I should also cut out dairy produce – eggs, milk, butter, cheese – also sugar and salt, but eat more fruit and vegetables, preferably organically grown. Two months of this diet would heal my skin if I also took more exercise: a brisk half-hour daily walk would be sufficient. When cured I could experiment by trying some things I had eliminated – wine with my meals or ham-and-egg breakfasts. If the disease returned I would then know what to blame. He also prophesied that any orthodox skin specialist I saw would prescribe a stronger kind of steroid ointment than prescribed by my general practitioner.

  I left that clinic certain I had been told the truth and determined not to inform my wife. She would have adopted that diet for me with enthusiasm, especially the no-alcohol part; I would then have started tippling in secret and been continually found out and denounced. But I told her when I visited a Chinese clinic that sold me brown paper bags containing mixtures of dry twigs, fronds and fungus with instructions to boil the contents of one bag in water – simmer for half an hour – strain off the liquid – drink a cupful three times a day for two days then repeat the process with the next bag. My wife refused to do that so I did it myself, but kept forgetting to set the cooker alarm so twice ruined pans by boiling the vegetation into adhesive cinders. I realised that orthodox British medicine was the most convenient, even when the skin specialist prescribed what the nature healer had foretold. Luckily by then I had turned my bad skin into a hobby.

  Explanation at this point becomes embarrassing because it requires a four letter word I hate. Chamber’s Dictionary gives it several meanings but the relevant one is this:

  Scab noun: a crust formed over a sore or wound.

  I take a gentle pleasure in carefully removing most such crusts and have my own names for the main varieties:

  Cakes and Crumbs. Black or brown lumps that form on the deepest scratches. Dried blood is a main ingredient. I try not to touch these because, picked off too soon, they leave a hole in which fresh blood wells up before clotting.

  Hats. A cake or crumb may grow a crisp white border, as much part of it as a brim is part of a hat. This brim overlaps the surrounding skin in such a way that the tip of a fingernail, slid beneath, easily lifts off the whole hat uncovering a moist but shallow and unbleeding wound. A few hours later other kinds of crust form over that. They also form over larger sores where topskin has crumbled off, flaked off or been scratched off.

  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 pock
et 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 benig
n 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.