“In the second chapter of book ten you say till all the seas gang dry, my dear. My useful dictionary defines gang as a band of ruffians or criminals, a number of labourers working together. None of these definitions seems to fit.”
I said that gang was also a Scottish transitive and intransitive verb meaning go and these words were a quotation from Robert Burns’s greatest love song. My host murmured politely, “I believe Robert Burns’s poetry is still sung in parts of North America.”
I nodded. I was happy.
We were in the Smooth Grove, which had been the Central Station Hotel in days when Glasgow was joined to other places by railway. I felt the luxury of a good meal in my stomach, good wine on my palate, clean socks, underwear and shirt against my skin. They had been worth waiting for. Foreign translators, journalists and writers of dissertations always buy me new clothes before standing me a lunch – posh restaurants won’t let me in without new clothes after I’ve slept a few weeks in ones the last foreigner bought me. Foreigners contact me through my bank. Ordinary pubs and all-night cafés accept me since I can pay for drink and food and can sleep in short snatches sitting upright.
I was not always dependent on foreigners for a smart appearance. I used to have several friends with homes and visited each of them once a fortnight. They gave me food and a bed for the night and put my clothes through a machine. Modern machines not only wash, dry and iron, they remove stains, mend holes, replace lost buttons and re-dye faded fabric to look like new. Or am I dreaming that? If I am dreaming such a machine it is certainly possible because, as William Blake said, nothing exists which was not first dreamed. Most of these friends steadily disappeared but were not, I think, stabbed or burned. People with homes still usually die of diseases or a silly accident.
My one remaining friend is now my first wife who pretends to be my daughter. I don’t know why. I visited her a month ago. After enjoying a plate of her excellent soup I asked how Mavis was getting on in London. She stared and said, “I am Mavis. Cathy is dead – died twelve years ago, shortly after I came home.”
“Nonsense Cathy!” I said. “You can’t be Mavis because Mavis quarrelled with you and she was right to quarrel with you because you were not kind to her, though I was too tactful to say so at the time.”
My host in the Smooth Grove was as ancient as I am and still used a notebook. Looking up from it he said, “I hear there is now no middle class in Scotland and England. Is that true?”
I told him it was not true: the middle class are those who used to be called working class – they have jobs but no investments, and their only pensions are state pensions. “But middle class implies a lower class. Who are they?”
I explained that thieves, swindlers, rapists, drug dealers and murderers are our lower class nowadays, many of them registered with the police. They have a place in society because without them police, lawyers, judges, jailers and journalists would be unemployed, and the profits of drug companies would slump.
“So in Britain everyone has a place in the social fabric?”
“Everyone but the homeless,” I answered, trying to remember why I feel perfectly secure though I am one of these.
My host started writing again and to avoid disturbing thoughts I dreamed of a future state in which human police had disappeared because the rich no longer needed them. The rich never left their luxurious, well-defended homes except when visiting each other in vehicles moving at the speed of light. Each home was protected by a metallic creature the size of a kitten and resembling a cockroach. It hid under chairs and sideboards and was programmed to kill intruders. I was a low-class criminal who broke into the apartments of a rich young sexy woman, cunningly reprogrammed her police creature to serve me, then enjoyed a number of sexual acts which appeared to be drawn in a highly coloured, very entertaining strip cartoon of a kind which became popular in France at the end of the twentieth century and in Britain at the start of the next, though many British people then were still able to read. We had a very entertaining country in those days. I had been teaching abroad since the late seventies and every time I returned the changes struck me as so interesting that I wrote about them.
Yes, one year publishers sold my stories to a newspaper cartoon supplement for so much that I stopped teaching and brought my second wife home to Glasgow. She was from Los Angeles or Chicago, I think, and believed that life for prosperous people was the same anywhere, and indeed Britain was now very like America. The police only patrolled the streets of prosperous ghettos where householders had bought crime insurance. The police observed other communities through public surveillance cameras and had power to swoop in and uplift anyone on suspicion, but they mainly lifted unregistered politicians and folk who owed money to drug dealers. When people fell down in the street it was no longer etiquette to help them up or summon an ambulance. We hurried past knowing that next day they would probably be gone. I had a lovely home in those days. I lost it in a wave of inflation which suddenly made life astonishingly interesting. My wife returned to the USA.. I stayed out of curiosity though British publishing had stopped. Not even newspapers were produced. Industries with a use for wood and rag pulp bought the remaining libraries. Some books are still used to give public houses an old-fashioned look. Boys’ adventure stories from the 1910s predominate.
My host said, “Toward the end of your eleventh book you mention no concurrency of bone. What do you mean by that?”
All foreigners ask that question. I can now answer it without thinking. While doing so I closed my eyes and enjoyed walking on a grassy hilltop beside a tall, slender, beautiful young woman I had loved when I was fifty. Even in this dream I knew our love was in the past, that my virility was dead and that no beautiful woman would ever love me again. I told her this. She grew angry and called me selfish because I was only dreaming of her to cheer myself up. This was obviously true so I forgot her by staring at a hill on the far side of a valley, a Scottish hill soaring to Alpine heights with all the buildings I have ever known in rows between strips of woodland, heather and rocky cliffs. On the crest of the mountain I saw the red sandstone gable of the tenement where I was born in 1934, at the bottom I recognised the grey clock tower of the Smooth Grove where I was dining and dreaming. The scene delighted me by its blend of civilisation and wilderness, past and present, by the ease with which the eye grasped so much rich intricacy. Suddenly the colour drained from it. The heather turned grey, the trees leafless, but I still felt perfectly safe and remembered why.
Though still telling my host about the massacre of Glencoe and Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones I remembered the death of Mr Anderson, a former radio announcer with whom I once shared a kind of cave, a very safe secret little hidey-hole, we thought, in a shrubbery of Kelvingrove Park. In those days I had not learned to sleep in small snatches while sitting upright so I slept by drinking half a bottle of methylated spirits. One morning I woke to find my companion had been stabbed to death and scalped. I did not know why I had been spared until several weeks or months or years later. Perhaps it was yesterday. I’m sure I did not dream it.
I stood on the canal towpath enjoying a glorious gold, green and lavender sunset when I was tripped and knocked down. I lay flat on my back surrounded by children of seven, eight or nine. Their sex was not obvious. All wore black jeans and leather jackets. All had skulls and crossbones painted or tattooed on top of heads that were bald except for a finger length of small pigtails all round. One poured petrol over my trousers, the rest waved bats, cutting implements, firelighters and discussed which part of me to bruise, cut or set fire to first.
“We are the death squad of the Maryhill Cleansing Brigade,” explained the leader who was perhaps eleven or twelve. “We are licensed terrorists with a sacred mission to save the British economy through a course of geriatric disposal. Too many old gerries are depressing the economy these days. If you can’t afford to get rejuvenated, grampa, you should have the decency to top yourself before becoming a burden to the state.”
>
I told him I wasn’t a burden to the state, wasn’t even a beggar, that money was paid into my bank account by foreign publishers and was enough to feed me though not enough to rent a room.
“You pathetic, hairy old driveller!” shouted the leader, goading himself or herself into a fury. “You’re an eyesore! The visual equivalent of a force-nine-gale fart! You will die in hideous agony as a warning to others.”
I was alarmed but excited. To die must be an awfully big adventure. Then a small fat person with glasses said, “Wait a bit, Jimsy, I think he’s famous.”
They consulted a folded sheet with a lot of faces and names printed on it. The fat person, who could read names, asked if I was Mr Thingumajig, which I am. They helped me up, dusted me down, shook my hand very solemnly one at a time, said they would remember me next time we met, said they would gladly kill any old friend I wanted rid off, advised me not to go near a naked flame before my trousers were dry, hoped I had no hard feelings. Honestly, I had none at all. My gratitude and love for these children was so great that I wept real tears. The leader got me to autograph the printed sheet. It was pleasant to meet a young Scot who still valued my signature. The sun had not yet set when they left me. I watched the gloaming fade, warm in the knowledge that I had a privileged place in modern Britain. Not only the children liked me but their bosses in the Cleansing Company or Social Security Trust or Education Industry or whoever had a use for children nowadays.
Yes, somebody up there likes me even though once I detested the bastards up there, the agents and consultants, money farmers and middle men, parliamentary quango-mongers, local and international monopolists. My books were attacks on these people but caused no hard feelings, and now my books are only read in nations that lost World War Two.
My host spoke on a politely insistent note. “I suggest you visit my country. Your royalties there will easily rent a private apartment with housekeeper and health care. We are no longer a military nation. We revere old people, which is why they live longer among us than anywhere else.”
I said I was happy where I was. He shut his notebook and bowed saying, “You are a true master. You have subdued your wishes to your surroundings.”
This angered me but I did not show it. There are better ways of living than being happy but they require strength and sanity. The poor and weak are as incapable of sanity as the rich and powerful. In this
country sanity would drive the
weak to suicide and make the
rich distinctly uncomfortable.
We are better without it.
END NOTES AND
CRITIC FUEL
DEDICATION: Agnes Owens is the most unfairly neglected of all living Scottish authors. I do not know why. It is not because she worked for years as a house cleaner in a district of high unemployment, since working class origins and experience are often put to an author’s credit. Nor has she been ostracised by other Scottish writers. Liz Lochhead first read one of her best stories – Arabella – in the 1970s, when she met Mrs Owens at a writing group in the Vale of Leven. Liz introduced her work to several other Scottish writers who admire it. In 1984 James Kelman introduced to Polygon Press Gentlemen of the West, her first novel, which became a Penguin paperback. Two collections of her stories have since been published and four short but perfect novels, the last (Bad Attitudes) by Bloomsbury in July 2003. Though not widely reviewed all her reviews have been highly favourable, yet she is never remembered when awards are handed out. Perhaps she is ignored by publicists because they cannot believe a creative intelligence can thrive long in a council housing estate.
BIG POCKETS WITH BUTTONED FLAPS first appeared in New Writing 9 published by Vintage and the British Council in 2000.
NO BLUEBEARD The naming of this man’s wives by number is taken from Eventide, a novel Roger Glass, one of my students in Glasgow University Creative Writing Programme, began writing in 2002.
JOB’S SKIN GAME was conceived as a monologue when eczema recurred to me after an abeyance of nearly forty years. I connected the monologue with ideas in the Book of Job when Lu Kemp, a director of Scottish BBC Radio, commissioned a modern story from me based upon that Book. This story, in a shorter version, was broadcast by BBC Scotland in January 2003 and printed in Prospect, April 2003.
SINKINGS. The two hideous experiences in this story befell my friend, Peter Gilmour.
AIBLINS is an old Scots word meaning ‘perhaps’. The tale is partly based on my experiences as a writer employed by Glasgow University between 1977 and 1979, and non-connected with my experiences as a professor (with J. Kelman and T. Leonard) between 2001 and 2003. Ian Gentle is a real person; Luke Aiblins a composite of several, but chiefly of myself. The Proem and Outing poems were part of a sequence I wrote in my late teens and luckily failed, despite many efforts, to get published, though my friend Robert Kitts recorded many of them for his television documentary Under The Helmet networked by the BBC in 1964. A shorter version of Aiblins was published by the magazine Prospect on 17 April 2003.
PROPERTY is based on what happened in Argyllshire to the sons of my friend Bernadette Logie.
15 FEBRUARY 2003 is based on a Herald article published on 17 February 2003.
WELLBEING was the last chapter of a political pamphlet, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland, Canongate, Edinburgh 1997.
CREATIVE WRITING was the title of a 13th story which I discarded as too facetious. It contained three jokes I will inflict upon you here —
FICTION EXERCISE
When three years old I saw my parents killed in a road accident and decided never again to love anything else that can bleed.
Use the preceding sentence to start a short story or novel.
BOOK REVIEW EXERCISE
Queneau’s Le Chiendant explores the existential consequences of radical changes of epistemological perspective.
Without loss of intelligibility rewrite the preceding sentence using the word paradigm.
LOGIC EXERCISE
Query: Which is the odd man out?
Tiny Tim
Little Nell
Wee Willie Winky
Moby Dick
(Remember that one of them is female)
GOODBYE
“If Gray wrote his Genesis in the novel Lanark, and even if he has since concentrated on apocrypha, this is his magnificent Book of Job.”
“It’s seven years since Gray last offered up any new fiction, and he has been missed … [he] has a style all of his own.”
“Consummate, joyful and teasing talent – his knowingness pre-empts criticism with a constant celebration of complexity and contradiction.”
“One of Britain’s finest experimental short-story writers … He is demanding, but ultimately rewarding and individualistic.”
“His fiction is continually peeling back the skin of narrative conventions and human motivations.”
About the Author
THE ENDS OF OUR TETHERS
Alasdair Gray is a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian who (despite two recent years as Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University) has mainly lived by writing and designing eighteen books, most of them fiction. THE ENDS OF OUR TETHERS is the ninth published by Canongate.
Copyright
First published in 2003 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2014
by Canongate Books
Copyright © Alasdair Gray, 2003
The publishers gratefully acknowledge a subsidy
from the Scottish Arts Council towards the
publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 726 6
This edition incorporates the author’s
final corrections and additions to the first
hardback edition<
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The Ends of Our Tethers Page 10