The earth orbited the sun because of gravity, and the sun was a huge mass of blazing gases suspended in space, and the moon exercised its influence on the earth also, pulling the waters on the surface of the earth to and fro, creating the tides. And the sun was a star, and at night when Scotland had its back to the sun you could see hundreds of other suns, each of which might have their own system of planets, and the stars you could see in the northern hemisphere were different from the ones you could see in the southern hemisphere, it was like looking out of the front and back windows of a house, and the light from the stars took so long to reach earth that they might no longer be where they had been, they might have burnt out or exploded thousands of years before. And there might be life there too.
There might be life. That was an incredible thought, at once both exciting and frightening. He read The War of the Worlds and The Day of the Triffids and was invigorated with fear. He couldn’t help himself. Only a year or two earlier he’d been reading all the Narnia books and believing in them. He actually believed them and that if he could only find the way in, through a wardrobe or a picture on the wall or whatever, he could get there too, to Narnia. Dangerous books to give to an imaginative child! Aslan, that bloody lion. He’d prayed to a bloody lion, for heaven’s sake! Luckily he didn’t tell anyone, and within two years just the unspoken memory was embarrassing. But even after he outgrew the lion he still believed that there might be life somewhere else.
And space went on forever, that too was a truly amazing thing, it made your head hurt trying to imagine what it meant, the implications of it. Infinity. At school he and his friends tried to write down infinity: a 1 followed by a pageful of zeros. Or it went like this:
Alan Sangster
31 Wallace Road
Burnside
Wherrieston
Stirlingshire
Scotland
Great Britain
United Kingdom
Europe
Eurasia
The World
The Solar System
The Universe
and some, under this, laid an 8 on its side. Smart-alecks, Alan thought. Their sickly 8 was no measurement of creation at all. Creation was a glass box containing the deep blue of space and all the planets and the sun and the other stars, with God outside holding the glass box, and to think of infinity you had to smash the box and obliterate the white-bearded image of God in an effort to conceive of something that never ever came to an end. It was like living in the fifteenth century and believing the earth was flat, and sailing in a tiny wooden ship to find the roaring cataract that was the edge of the world and never finding it, proving yourself wrong, sailing ever onward while your confidence grew and your fear of a quickening current diminished, on and on until you began to doubt your new belief that the world must in fact be round, and then, as the awful truth of infinity grasped you, the fear came again, bigger, bigger than any human could cope with. Then you would believe in God again, because nothing else could explain it. Because, if the universe was constantly expanding, if there was no glass box holding it all together, where was it expanding to? If everything was flowing ever outwards, away, all matter disintegrating in a mad chaotic rush, how long before the earth and Scotland and he in his bed got caught up in the flood and then what? No, no, it was impossible to understand the enormity of it. His head would explode.
He wasn’t young anymore. It didn’t matter what the old folks said. His grandad and his uncles said he had his whole life ahead of him. If he was unhappy, well – he could always change his job, take up new interests. He was still young enough to start again. But how could you? Starting again was like unmaking, not possible. It was fine for them to talk, the old buggers, going on about their lives. They could justify themselves. Their lives had big things in them. There was a time when he used to scoff and yawn at them when they spoke about the past, especially about the wars, but not any longer. He’d never been in a war so he should just shut up and listen. What was more, he never would be in a war. He was too old for it. He didn’t want to be in one, of course, but there was no denying it was something to have lived through – if you did live, that is. It would shape you. Supposing instead of when he was at the university he’d been fighting somewhere. His whole outlook on life would be bound to be different – wouldn’t it? He could understand about people not forgetting, he could even understand about them not forgiving. It made his blood freeze over seeing those films of the death camps: what if he’d seen them with his own eyes, smelt them? His grandad had fought in the first war, the one that was supposed to end them all, and he didn’t have a good word for the Germans still. You couldn’t blame him. And Uncle Jimmy had been a POW in a Japanese camp. He never spoke about it but you knew it was there in him. Maybe his grandad would have got over it but then the second war came along and confirmed all his views on the Germans. Once the name P. G. Wodehouse cropped up – they were doing some of his stories on the telly. That bloody traitor, said his grandad. He had nothing more to add on the subject. He used to like Wodehouse’s books but he’d never read one since those Berlin broadcasts. It was like – what? – Alan saying he wasn’t going to read Jeffrey Archer because he was a Tory. Well, it was true, he never was going to read Jeffrey Archer though more because he was a wanker than because he was a Tory but there was no comparison really. You had grudges but in these times they tended just to fade away. You didn’t nurse them. But his uncle now, being in one of those camps, that wouldn’t fade away, it would always be with you, you’d carry something like that around inside you your whole life. Like if you were an American who fought in Vietnam. Or a Vietnamese who fought in Vietnam – funny how they always got forgotten, poor bastards, it was their country, they’d had it a lot bloody tougher than the Yanks. Or if you were sexually abused. Raped. How would you ever get over something like that? You wouldn’t. You’d just carry it. It would be part of you, for good or ill.
He made it through school and then he was no longer a child. But neither was he the person he would become, he knew that in retrospect. The mysteries of the universe still interested him. Sometimes he would discuss them with the friends he had in those days. They were all students. There were one or two among them for whom there was no mystery: the same ones that at school had wrapped it all up with a symbol. For them, everything was explicable in terms of relativity, everything was physics and chemistry, maths and matter. Alan had lost touch with these guys – they always were guys – through a lack of mutual interest. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them at the time, he simply didn’t believe them. They were only twenty or so, like the rest, they were just starting out too, and he didn’t believe that they knew all the answers. Still, he enjoyed their company, listening to them dismissing God and telling everybody else how simple the universe really was, especially – and this was usually how these conversations got started – if there was a joint or two going round. If you had a head full of hashish then it almost seemed as though you could make sense of it all. And, yes, there might even be another universe on your very own thumbnail.
Gradually he came down to earth. Specifically, he grew more and more concerned with life on earth, those closer-to-home mysteries. He loved the idea of animals and birds and fishes and plants. They were real things but it was the idea of them he loved, the idea that they existed as much as the existence itself. He loved trees and walking among them, touching their bark and trying to reach around their trunks, or just imagining doing so. Because you didn’t want people to see you at it. The minds of most people weren’t open to the idea of things, only to the things themselves. If they saw you hugging a tree or even just thought you were contemplating doing it they’d have you marked down as a hippy or a loony and that wasn’t it. He was profoundly ignorant about nature, but he loved the idea of the hare changing its coat in winter, of the snake shedding its skin, of the salmon’s return to the place of its own spawning. He loved the turning of the seasons, of hidden crocus bulbs pushing their flowe
rs up to mark the start of spring, of an entire wood shedding its leaves in autumn, of whole lochs and burns freezing over. When he bought his flat with the small, shared garden he put up a bird-table so that he could watch the blue-tits and sparrows squabbling over the food. One early evening in winter he saw a fox cross the garden, beautiful and glowing in the snow, and in the morning he found that the snow had melted and then frozen again where its paws had left their tracks. It was as if it had walked across Alan’s memory, leaving its presence there indelibly. He felt privileged.
He led a quiet life. After university they all went their own ways and his was solitary. He had been a quiet one from the start really. There were worlds going on in his head and that seemed enough. Ten years on, the only fellow student he was still friendly with was Mike, and although Mike had discussed space with the others, he wasn’t like them at all. He wasn’t one of the know-alls, he was better than that, he was a know-nothing. He believed that the fact of his being alive was utterly insignificant when measured against what he understood of time and space and energy, and that therefore he should adopt a suitably humble attitude to his environment. This caused him to drop out of his engineering course in the third year. He decided there were enough machines around already, and engineers like himself should show some respect for the planet in their profession. It was better to repair than to create, he said. Ever since dropping out that was what he did, repaired things for people – cars, washing machines, lawnmowers, power-tools. He took cash in hand and did enough work to satisfy his needs, which were few: home-brewed beer and an assortment of other more or less harmless drugs, some books, a guitar, jeans, a motorbike. He got semi-seriously into New Age philosophy and he told Alan he was settled for life. His motorbike was only a Honda 125 and when he rode it he wore an old denim jacket because he couldn’t afford the leathers but he said he was happy. Alan was envious, although he was earning a lot more than Mike’s uncertain income. They used to talk about these things over many beers in the pub or – more often – out at Mike’s. They were still serious about the universe but they were getting down to particulars. ‘Life’s a doughnut,’ Mike said one time (he was halfway through a joint admittedly): ‘you,’ he said, ‘are living in the middle of the doughnut because you think that’s where the jam is, whereas I am living on the edge.’ ‘Where the sugar is,’ said Alan. ‘Where I know the sugar is,’ said Mike.
One Saturday in April Alan went to the edge, to visit Mike. He hadn’t planned to. He drove his compact and efficient second-hand Vauxhall Nova away from the shopping centre, through the town, over the railway tracks and out past the industrial estate (where he worked through the week as a product control manager in a packaging factory), and turned into the straggling scheme where Mike lived with his dad. Theirs was the last house on the scheme, hard up against a dull red wooden fence on the other side of which was a muddy field. There was a big sign up in the field and a bulldozer had been at work there. This is not uncommon, Alan thought. This is what happens. You go to the edge and when you get there you find that Miller Homes are putting up sixteen houses to the acre just beyond it.
He’d phoned up half an hour earlier from a call-box in the shopping centre. His lip was swollen and his jaw was starting to ache.
‘Can I come and see you, Mike?’
‘Aye, just come out. What are you phoning for? You should just have come anyway.’
‘Oh, I wanted to make sure you were in.’
‘I’m always in, amn’t I? My dad’s away to the game. I’ll get the kettle on. Mona’s here by the way.’
‘Oh.’
‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘Aye, great. Thing is, Mike, I’m in a bit of a state. I’ve just been in a fight.’
‘Fuck’s sake. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. What happened?’
He’d gone into town, just for something to do. The pavements were thick with shoppers, even though it was sunny and dry and you’d think anyone with an ounce of sense would be getting out in the open. He didn’t know why he was there himself. He saw the crowds of women and their men, and the bored wee kids, and the roving gangs of bored big kids, and he understood that most of them probably didn’t know why they were there either. A nation of shoppers. He wandered around looking at CDs and books and sound-systems, at clothes and labour-saving devices for the home, and even at sporting equipment. What on earth was he expecting to find in it all, some kind of revelation about himself? Maybe if he had a wife, or a girlfriend. But that wasn’t it. There was something about everything that alienated him. His work, well, that was fair enough, everybody felt alienated from their work, the nature of the system did that. But he seemed to be cut off from everything society had to offer, and from most of the people as well. He tried asking himself Mike’s question – what’s it about, what’s it about? – but it wasn’t working, he was getting no reply. He suspected that this was because he couldn’t help slipping an ‘all’ between the ‘it’ and the ‘about’, even though Mike had told him not to. The only things that appealed to him were wild things – animals, nature, the stars – but he couldn’t touch them, he couldn’t make them a part of himself, or himself a part of them. It wasn’t human to do that. Or was it? He hadn’t a clue. He hadn’t a clue about anything. He was even alienated from his flat, for God’s sake. His new flat that was supposed to be home – he didn’t want to be in it.
He found himself on a narrow street behind the centre, lingering outside a door through which he could see a long, low-ceilinged room stretching back, all ablaze with lights and loud with bells and buzzers. A sign above the entrance announced ‘AMUSEMENTS’. It was years since he’d been in one of these places. He’d played a bit of pinball in the student union, but hardly ever since then. He stepped inside.
It was important not to be caught watching the people at the bandits and other games. Although there were quite a few folk scattered through the rows of machines there was no sense of a crowd, only of individuals grimly entertaining themselves. People became very defensive in here. They wanted to be left alone. They grew protective of the fruit machine they were playing. If they saw you watching them at their machine they feared you were waiting till they ran out of cash so that you could move in and clean up with a single coin. They suspected you of an intimate knowledge of their favourite machine and it made them jealous. People snarled and snapped at each other. Sometimes there was a scuffle.
He went to the booth where a fat, balding man changed his five-pound note for coins. He wasn’t interested in gambling, he wanted to play pinball, try out his skills, see if he could still rack up a few replays. But the pinball machines were different from when he had last played. They were all electronic, with impossible targets and too much fancy gadgetry. He tried a couple but it seemed the machines controlled your play rather than the other way round. He scored ridiculously low scores.
He wandered down the aisles, dismissing the monster-zapping and the motor-racing and the missile-launching as childish and humiliating. He caught sight of himself in a mirror on a pillar and realised how awkward he looked. Anyone who thought being in this place was humiliating didn’t have the right attitude to it, and should just leave. But he didn’t. He was looking for something to relate to.
Then, towards the very back of the arcade, he saw a doorway leading to a smaller room. It was quiet and completely empty, and the reason was obvious: it contained six aged pinball machines, the old mechanical kind. They were beautiful, if a bit battered, real pieces of art, but boring compared with the technology out the front. They were exactly what he was wanting. He could deal with them.
He checked each one in turn, familiarising himself with the points systems, the targets, the bonuses, how to trigger replays. He noted the images and the names: ‘JOKER POKER’, ‘GUNSLINGER’, ‘STARSHOOTER’, ‘MATA HARI’, ‘BILLION DOLLAR BASH’, ‘BABE RUTH’. He settled for ‘JOKER POKER’ because he recognised it from his student days. He knew he could beat it.
&nbs
p; He played two or three games without success, but at first this didn’t matter. He was just getting back into it. The same movements, the same holding and releasing of the flippers, the same thrill of shooting a ball back up an alley it had just descended. But no two machines are identical, he should have remembered that, not even when they’re the same game. This one was very sensitive. It reacted to the slightest nudge or knock. In the old days he’d been able to move the whole machine without getting a tilt, but not this one. Even if he hit the flipper a little too hard the lights went down and he lost the score for that ball. It began to irritate him.
He moved on to ‘GUNSLINGER’ to see if that was any better. It was more complicated, though, and he would have to spend a lot of time on it to get a half-decent score. It was ‘JOKER POKER’ he wanted to master again, but the machine wouldn’t let him. The bastards who ran the place had set it wrong. He’d just be holding the ball with the left flipper, and letting it run with a wee jump over to the right flipper, and the machine would go fucking dead on him. He looked under it to make sure it was fully plugged in. It was. He simply wasn’t being allowed to play it properly.
Republics of the Mind Page 9