by Alan Spence
I opened the book. ‘Jesus!’
‘What dis it say?’ asked Doug.
I read –
‘This is the bell that never rang
This is the fish that never swam
This is the tree that never grew
This is the bird that never flew.’
‘That’s incredible,’ said Doug.
‘There it is,’ I said, showing him the page. ‘Jingle on Glasgow city arms.’
‘What’s it doing in a haiku book?’ asked Jenny.
‘That’s what ah’m tryin to figure out!’ I said, reading on. ‘He seems to be using it to try and describe a state of mind. Emptiness. Being-in-non-being.’
‘Quite a coincidence anyway,’ she said.
‘No such thing as coincidence!’ said Doug.
I put the book down the side of my rucksack.
‘Here,’ said Doug, ‘Ah’ve been meanin to give you this.’ He handed me a little booklet called ‘The Four Noble Truths’. I had been reading it earlier, but now I turned the pages with a new interest and a greater care.
Jenny was making up a pack for me, bread and cheese, a couple of apples.
‘Ah really will have to hurry now,’ she said. ‘The tube’s that crowded at this time.’
Looking up at the clock on the mantelpiece, she suddenly remembered it was Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas.
‘Time to take down the cards an things,’ she said.
Doug got up and cleared them away. And just in that moment, I seemed to feel all the beautiful sadness of our little lives, the fullness and the transitoriness of it all.
Epiphany. Taking down the Christmas cards. The bare mantelpiece.
Getting back
Another lorry went growling past. I watched the red tail-lights dwindle into the night, along the approach road and on to the motorway.
(The driver had laughed and given me the V-sign in answer to the silent supplication of my outstretched thumb. The communication had been perfect and wordless. Raised thumb. Two fingers. Laughter.)
There was a game I had played as a child and a song that went with it.
One finger one thumb one arm one leg
One nod of the head keep moving
We’ll all be merry and bright
As it passed through my head now I was grateful for the crazy optimism of it. It even threw light back on my brief exchange with the lorry-driver. My raised thumb had been a greeting. Thumbs up. The driver’s response had meant V-for-Victory. Two human beings, adrift in the Void, had hailed each other with gestures of affirmation. One nod of the head/keep moving/We’ll all be merry and bright. It was one way of looking at things.
‘Any chance ae a lift Jimmy?’
‘Get it up ye!’
It must be about two in the morning now. That would make it sixteen hours since I’d hitched out of London. And here I was, stuck, stranded, on the road leading out from Carlisle, ninety-odd miles still from Glasgow. But at least I was approaching home territory. The blue and white signboard, lit up, read GLASGOW AND THE NORTH. And across it, as if to confirm the welcome, ran spidery spray-painted lettering, proclaiming, in gold, RANGERS OK. MENTAL HARRY. BIG JAKE IS PURE MAD.
Sometimes I thought I must be pure mad myself.
I huddled, trying to hug some warmth back into my bones. But there was no warm centre to wrap around. The cold had penetrated the very pith and marrow of me, a numbness and an aching misery.
My old suede jacket was in a terminal stage of disintegration. It had no buttons, no lining, practically no seams. A seamless garment. (Unseamly was what Doug had called it.) It was scarred too with the scuffs and stains of the five years or so I had worn it, even some bloodstains (my own), dark spatters from a punched nose two years back (caught on my way home by a few young team-boys, but glad at the time to escape a bloodier battering).
Mental. Pure mad.
Last night’s raving seemed empty now. Up all night setting the universe in order. All I wanted now was to curl up warm and sleep.
I stamped my numbed feet, a steady thump on the frozen ground, and the rhythm became a dance as I rubbed my hands together and chanted my little song. One finger one thumb one arm one leg. And in the repetition, the words became a mantra. One nod of the head keep moving. And I began to improvise on it, wailing, bending the words to some tune of my own, till it sounded more like a pibroch or an Indian raga. We’ll all be merry and bright. And I lost myself in it till the next set of headlights caught me in their glare and my thumb went out and yet another car went swishing past, on out of sight.
So many times I had hitched back and forth along this road. And so many times along the way I had been stuck at some junction like this one, wondering what was so great about London to make me want to go there, and what was so great about Glasgow to make me want to come back.
I remembered us all, heading off for London, Doug with a big sign on his bag reading BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN OR BUST. And here we were, four years on. Going nowhere.
The traffic along the motorway was steady, though not a heavy flow, and there was more of it going south than coming north. That always seemed to be the way of it. Along my approach road nothing came. I paced back and forward, kicked a stone, heard it skite against the pole supporting the signboard.
Empty sound. Stone against metal. Empty night. Waiting at the side of the empty road, kicking a stone in the emptiness.
And yet in the very heart of this emptiness came a fullness, a closeness to all things. The familiarity of everything. Friendly, the night sky. A faint humour in my old rucksack slumped on the grass verge. There, just so. The moment itself, in all its bareness and clarity.
And there suddenly seemed something comic in my being there at all, at the side of this road in the middle of the night, and I felt a genuine amazement at this incredible random process that was taking me home. Here I had been dropped, to make my next connection with somebody right now driving through the night to some purpose of his own. So many people on so many journeys, and I linking them in a journey of my own. And sooner or later I would get back. I knew that. But for now there was this cold, this endless cold in waves passing over me. Shoulders hunched body tight clenched. Croaking out the chant again. One finger one thumb one arm one leg. Stamp pace kick the ground. Keep moving. The song gave way to another.
You put your left hand in
You take your left hand out
You put your left hand in
And you shake it all about
Just one more daft song, floating up from nowhere. I had a head full of them, old songs, back to 1910. There were times when I felt I had been programmed by some manipulative intelligence. Ritchie would tell me it was the capitalist system feeding on me. Doug would say it was my own crazy ego, keeping me trapped in the endless round of attachment, illusion, desire.
You do the hokey kokey
And you turn around
That’s what it’s all about
(An image from a couple of weeks back, the last shift I had worked at the hospital. I was working nights so at the start of my shift I caught the end of the patients’ Christmas party. And there they were in the games room, dancing in a big circle. Doing the hokey kokey.)
I was trying to push the image away. But it stayed, a discomfort at the pit of my stomach, a sadness I didn’t want to face. The song had brought it to the surface.
(Mary had gone that same day, off across Europe for a month or two. She might come back to Glasgow, she might not. I had come to work feeling grey and the place had already made me worse. After the hokey kokey came a call for individual songs. The first up to the microphone was Sammy. Sammy was labelled paranoid psychotic and was also diabetic. Skinny and small, he was always in quarrels and fights. He had a sad little twisted bashed-in face, baffled, like a child’s, but never very far from rage.
He stood as if to attention, rigid in front of the microphone, and began to sing. ‘They try to tell us we’re too young’. Voice toneless and nasal, echoing round the
hall.
They say that love’s a word
A word we’ve only heard
And can’t begin to know the
meaning of
It was too much for me to take. I slipped out, along the corridor to the ward, where a few of the patients still were. In the first two beds were two older men, Mr Hendry and Dr Cohen. Mr Hendry never spoke. He never ate. He sat all day, staring at nothing. Dr Cohen was an alcoholic, drying out. They both looked through me, to somewhere else.
I moved on and Andrew called me over. Andrew was young, about eighteen, and he was diagnosed hypomanic schizophrenic. He was big and heavy and would clump around the ward all day, unable to rest. He told me he was worried about his two friends, Eddie and Kevin, asleep in the adjoining beds. Like Andrew, they had been given shock treatment earlier in the day, electro-convulsive therapy, a kind of clinically-induced epileptic spasm. According to the Charge Nurse, sometimes it helped, sometimes it didn’t. They had no way of knowing in advance. All they could do was try it.
‘They haven’t said a word all day,’ said Andrew.
‘They’ll just be tired,’ I said, ‘after the ECT. The rest’ll do them good. They’ll feel better tomorrow.’
‘That’s right,’ said Andrew, looking as if he’d remembered something. ‘I had it too, didn’t I? I’ll feel better tomorrow as well.’
Eddie they said was paranoid, depressive. He was the youngest of a big family and thought they all wanted rid of him. I had seen his mother, and thought he might be right.
Kevin had taken one LSD trip too many. He’d found himself trapped in some grey schizoid world, unable to find his way back. I thought I could see where he was and had tried to talk him through, but I’d only made him afraid. He’d told me he’d been found walking naked along Great Western Road, proclaiming he was God. ‘But you are God,’ I’d said, and he’d been terrified. ‘Don’t say that,’ he’d told me. ‘I don’t want to start all that again.’
I had to be more careful what I said.
Andrew showed me something he’d written in his diary. He had taken a line from a song he’d heard on the radio, ‘Love is life’. Under that he’d written ‘God is love’, and under that, as if concluding an equation, ‘God is life’. But his eyes glazed over as he was showing it to me. He had lost interest, and he put away the diary and went back to bed. Further along, I stopped to talk to James who was forever telling me tales about his travels. His accent was cultivated and English. His story was that he travelled around and checked himself in to hospitals for free lodging and food. I had no way of knowing if it was true. The Charge Nurse had told me nothing about him, except that I should be wary. ‘Watch yer bum,’ he’d said. ‘He’s a ravin poof.’
James had talked to me about the Upanishads, about haiku, about the writings of Sufi masters.
Tonight he had remembered a quotation to tell me, from the opening of a Sufi scripture. The dog barks. The caravan passes.
‘There’s a haiku for you!’ he said.
The dog barks. The caravan passes.)
Another car came out of the dark towards me and my hand went up. The gesture by now was mechanical, almost reflex, and it took a few moments before I realised the car was actually slowing to a stop. Picking up my rucksack, I ran, stumbling towards it. A young couple, only going as far as the next turn-off, a few more miles up the road. But I was grateful to be moving.
The next turn-off was even more bleak than the one I had left. But it made a change. I started all over into trying to keep warm.
In my jacket pocket was the little book that Doug had given me. ‘The Four Noble Truths’. I took it out and tried to read it in the light under the signboard. The first truth, it said, was the universality of suffering. Existence is suffering. Samsara.
I realised now that the closer I was moving to Glasgow, the more a fear of it was growing in me.
I fell to thinking about the hospital again.
(The morning after the patients’ party, first thing, I was helping out with breakfast, setting the tables, dishing up plate after plate of dull invariable slop and stodge. A dollop of porridge; a slippery fried egg, pale and glazed; a lank streak of anaemic bacon; tea and limp triangles of white bread scraped with margarine.
Everything was as usual. Sammy was stuffing himself with extra slices of bread, in defiance of his diabetic diet, demanding sugar in his tea, swiping leftovers from other plates.
Dr Cohen was complaining that he had been given bacon again, instead of kosher food.
Old Mr Hendry still ate nothing. He looked without seeing at the plate that was offered to him, thin bony fingers plucking at air, skin drawn tight over skull, sunken lifeless eyes, staring out, lost.
Big Andrew was agitated, muttering to himself, unable to sit still. Standing up he bumped the table, making Sammy drop the sugarbowl and spill his tea. Sammy yelled at him.
‘Kin you not sit at peace fur hauf a fuckin minnit ya snottery big bastard ye!’
Andrew clenched his fists. ‘Slobberin lik a big wean,’ said Sammy. ‘Pit ye aff yer fuckin breakfast.’
Andrew moved round the table. ‘That’s it finished,’ he said. ‘Ah’ll kill him.’
Only with difficulty was he held back as Sammy carried on shouting abuse.
James was laughing out loud at their mad antics.
Eddie poked at his food, said he wasn’t hungry. He knew there was a plot to poison him bit by bit.
I cleared away the dishes as they all moved out into the corridor to queue for their assorted pills.
The day-nurses had arrived and my shift was coming to an end. That meant the beginning of a few days’ holiday, away from the place.
I looked out the window at the courtyard, grateful for the few sparse trees and bushes, somewhere for the eye, and the mind, to rest.
Behind me in the ward, I heard someone call out. Turning, I saw that it was Dr Cohen. The Charge Nurse ran past me. ‘Keep them out the toilet,’ he said. ‘Old Mr Hendry’s dead.’
‘I found him,’ said Andrew. ‘He just went in there and sat down and died.’
As I was leaving for home, they wheeled the old man out past me. I wanted to see his face, but he was covered over with a sheet. I wanted to see into his eyes, see into that nothing he had been staring at for so long.
Along the corridor, I heard Andrew still muttering. ‘Just sat down and died.’
For most of that day and the following night, I slept, woke, slept again, surfacing from tangled dreams. A recurring image was the dead man passing. But the face I would see as I pulled back the sheet would not be the old man’s, but now my dead mother’s, now Mary’s, now my own.
In the morning when I woke I decided to leave for London.)
The second noble truth, read in the light from the signboard, was that suffering has a cause, and the cause is desire.
No light along the road. Dark night, cold and endless.
On I read to the third truth, that suffering can be conquered, and the fourth, that the way to conquer it is to follow the Buddha-path.
You put your whole self in
You take your whole self out
You put your whole self in
And you shake it all about
Glimmer of headlights in the distance, the first car since I’d been at this new junction. And again my hand went out. And the car slowed. And the car stopped. And I stumbleran, unbelieving, as the driver opened the door to me and yes he was going to Glasgow and yes he would take me all the way. Down that road. Going home.
The driver was a man about fifty. He told me he was an engineer and he lived and worked in South Africa. He was heading back to Glasgow for the first time in twenty years.
He had taken a detour into Carlisle to visit a cousin. But the cousin had long since moved away. So he’d slept for a couple of hours in the car before heading north again, out along this road where I’d been waiting. We talked and he was obviously glad of the company. He told me about his work, about South Africa. I told
him of the changes he would find in Glasgow. He asked me about myself and I told him a bit, about leaving university, drifting between Glasgow and London, working in the hospital.
‘You want to get some qualifications under yer belt,’ he said. ‘Then emigrate son. Make a life for yerself.’
It was warm in the car and his voice kept fading as I dropped into sleep, nodding forward then jolting awake, startled, then remembering where I was. Now we would be passing through hills, now the glare of headlights would dazzle me. Now it had started to snow and the windscreen wipers would swish and click, back and forth.
Then the driver was shaking me awake and we were cruising into Glasgow, past the dark factories, in along London Road.
He was heading for the south side, Pollokshields, so I asked him to drop me in the centre of town.
When we stopped, I thanked him and he shook my hand, repeating his advice. ‘Stop footerin about son. Get yerself a decent job and get the hell out of it.’
I thanked him again and waved after him as he drove away.
He had dropped me in Argyle Street, deserted now. Familiar neon above empty pavements. Snow was falling still, gathering here and there, in an odd corner, against a wall.
Here I was. Back.
I headed up towards George Square, where the late-night buses converged every hour. I might be lucky and catch one. I might have an hour to wait. I had forgotten to check the time.
As I walked along Glassford Street, I heard a laugh, a shout. Looking up I saw three boys on the other side of the road. They crossed towards me and I kept on walking, head down. But they stopped a few feet in front of me, blocking the pavement. They were all about seventeen or eighteen. I could smell drink on their breath.
‘Got the right time?’ I asked, afraid and trying to go out to them.
‘Whit ye wantin the time fur?’ said the one in the middle.
‘Jist want tae know,’ I said.
‘Cheeky cunt, int he,’ said the one on the left.
‘Wherr ye gawn?’ said the third.
‘Hame,’ I said.
‘Wherr’s hame?’
‘Up Hillhead,’ I said. ‘Near the Uni.’
‘Ye wan a they students then?’