1982 Janine

by Alasdair Gray

  So the best speller in the class came out and corrected passion and completed cushion while Hislop produced the famous Lochgelly and told me to hold out my hands. I should never have held out my hand. It allowed him to look dignified while he was hurting me. But nobody ever disobeyed Hislop. When he gave two strokes of the belt he used both hands and drew it from behind his shoulder so it was almost as sore as the legal maximum of six delivered with one hand from the elbow. I cried out at the first blow and at the second crouched almost double over my crippled hands. He said, “Now look me in the face!” and his voice had that hysterical edge to it which is why we called him mad. I looked at him. I was not sobbing but I was weeping, the tears he despised were flowing down my cheeks. He said, “You are nothing but a big soft lassie. Get to your seat!”

  72 HISLOP AND MY MOTHER

  The worst thing he could call a boy was a lassie yet the girls quite liked him. He was gentle and polite with girls, almost courtly, he never patted them playfully or placed an arm round their shoulders when correcting their exercises like some men teachers did. And women liked Hislop. I did not tell my mother that he had belted me because I believed that getting hurt that way was a shameful thing, but a classmate must have told his mother who told my mother, for she suddenly said, “I heard poor Hislop was hard on you last week.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. She said, “Don’t think too badly of him. He’s very good to his wife.”

  Mrs Hislop was a bedridden invalid. Out of his not very large salary Hislop paid an old woman to attend her while he was not himself at home.

  Could my mother and Hislop possibly have? Could he be my real? Oh no no no but. But I was once in a railway carriage with an old man who would not stop furtively staring at me. At last he said, “Excuse me, but you have a strong resemblance to someone I used to know. Is your name Hislop, by any chance?”

  I said it was not. He said, “But you’re from the long town?” That was the local nickname of the town I grew up in. I said, yes I was from the long town, and a Hislop had been my English teacher, but my father was the timekeeper at the pit. He said, “Oh that explains it.”

  I said, “Explains what?”

  He frowned. A moment later he said that Hislop belonged to the old breed of Scottish schoolteacher, hard but just; if a boy in his class showed the slightest spark of talent or manhood he would move heaven and earth to encourage it; many a lawyer and doctor from the long town owed their university degrees to Hislop. The Hislop he spoke of seemed a few years younger than the one I remembered who had encouraged nobody very much, but perhaps there were no sparks of talent in my class at school. And the old man had avoided my question, he had not told me why my father being timekeeper explained my resemblance to Hislop the English teacher, a resemblance which I never heard anyone else refer to. It lies in the mouth and eyes and can easily be explained without the notion of paternity. If you are much impressed by someone you do come to resemble them. That is why people who live together can acquire a family expression which embraces husband, wife, children, yes even the dog or cat. So there may be a look on my face which belongs to Hislop because he taught it to me. True, I am the same height as Hislop and both my parents are taller people but that it not unusual. True, when my father the timekeeper died I discovered from documents that he had married three months before my birthday. But in Scotland premarital sex is as common as anywhere else in the world. A registrar once told me that since the start of the last century, when the public records first made it notorious, over half the marriages in our county have taken place after pregnancy. But surely SIX months after pregnancy is a bit unusual? I married Helen six weeks after she stopped bleeding. My father the timekeeper was a man who always did what he thought was right. In spite of his socialism, or else because of it, he was the most decently conventional man I have ever known. He never drank, never swore, never said a hard word against a private individual. Why would a man like that wait half a year before doing the decent thing by the mother of his child? What was my mother doing, what feeling, in that half-year? I am a completely ordinary man but my birth is as mysterious to me as my death and I will never learn the truth of it now.

  73 HISLOP AND MY FATHER

  “Don’t think badly of poor Hislop, he’s very good to his wife,” but Hislop acted very strangely toward me. The two sorts of boys he most tormented in his classroom were the energetic ones who disliked what he taught and could not sit still, and the poor puzzled ones who hardly understood a word he said, especially not his sarcastic little jokes. “The antonym of blunt, Anderson, is not jaggy. The antonym of blunt is sharp. You have heard the word sharp before? Of course you have. So your employment of local slang is either a conscious or unconscious effort to destroy communication between the provinces of a once mighty empire. Are you a linguistic saboteur or are you an idiot?”

  74 HISLOP LOSES A WIFE

  And he pressed his lips together and shook with an almost silent little chuckle. I was not clever but I was not a dunce and not rebellious. I was one of the middle people who normally get by without praise or blame. Yet I am 60 per cent certain that I was given the belt more than anyone else in that class. And each time he gave it he told me he had no favourites. He never said that to anyone else. Why?

  One day Hislop did not come to school because his wife had died. For a fortnight we were taught English by the headmaster, an ordinary old man who used the belt lightly and seldom, without dramatic tension. Even Anderson the dunce started learning a few things. On the second Friday the headmaster said, “Next week Mr Hislop will be back. He has suffered a terrible bereavement, so I hope you will all be very good boys and girls and give him no trouble. Our school, you know, is very fortunate to have Mr Hislop on the staff. He was a very brave soldier during the war. He spent three years in a Japanese prisoncamp.”

  These words told me something I had never before suspected: the other teachers knew what a hell Hislop made in his classroom. The headmaster was trying to convey what my mother meant when she told me Hislop was very good to his wife: “Eat all the shit he gives you, the poor bugger can’t help dishing it out.”

  And we got the message. The headmaster’s words impressed even me. On Monday when Hislop entered the room I gazed at him with something like wonder. He no longer seemed a monster. He looked small, lonely and haggard, very ordinary and dismal.

  And his eye travelled at once to mine, and his hand shot toward me and crooked its index finger twice. I got up and went to him on trembling legs, and when I got close he bent down and whispered in a voice nobody else in the room could hear, “How dare you look at me in that condescending fashion? I will have no favourites in this class. Hold out your hands, and double them.”

  75 HISLOP MAKES A MAN

  I did so in a daze of astonishment. Did I cry out at the first blow? Almost certainly, but afterward I did not flinch and certainly did not weep. I was so full of icy hatred that I probably forgot I had hands. Yet when he stopped I did not lower them, I glared at him with a rigid grin I can feel on my face at this very moment, and I stepped toward him and raised my hands till they almost touched his chin and I whispered, “Again!”

  He went soft. He smiled and nodded, slipping the Lochgelly over his shoulder under the jacket. He said gently, “Go to your seat son. There’s a spark of manhood in you.”

  And I saw the whole horrible pattern of Mad Hislop’s soul. He was not essentially cruel, just insane. He really believed that teaching small people to take torture from big people, and crushing their natural reaction to it, was a way of improving them. If he was my father (which I doubt) he must have felt belting me was a sort of loveletter to my mother: “You have borne me a child, I am making a man of it.” He was probably depressed by the amount of torture he had to inflict to produce that steady glare of hatred which proved he had made the thing he called a man. But he never doubted that the effort was worthwhile. How could he? As I returned to my seat, frozenfaced and loathing him, it was obvious that I had b
ecome more important. The other boys stared at me in perfect stillness, astonished by my newfound toughness, apart from two other tough guys who smiled crookedly, meaning: You’re one of us now. On the girls’ side of the room there was a slight whispering agitation, a definite stir of interest, and for a moment I hated them almost as much as I hated Hislop. Women don’t despise themselves for weeping, why do they admire men who won’t or can’t? Why are so many of them attracted by bullies and killers? Why are so many MEN attracted by bullies and killers? Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  I suppose Hislop produced the man he wanted for I have not wept from that day to this. Wrong. I later wept two tears, one at each eye when, seated before a television set some time in 1977, Scotland’s victory over Czechoslovakia made it certain that we would compete in the World Cup. I have never been to a live football match in my life but as the Scottish supporters cheered and started singing ‘Oh Flower of Scotland’, a song I hate (why don’t they sing ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’? we don’t live by its sentiments but we ought to live by them) as the Scottish supporters started bellowing that cheap bit of spineless chauvinism an irrational heat in my eyeballs produced on the surface of each one a lateblossoming bead of brine. These did not defile my cheeks. I did not let them spill. I sniggered meanly, like Hislop reacting to one of his own jokes, and tilted my head back, and stayed perfectly still until the tears dried by evaporation.

  76 MY LAST TWO TEARS

  “The Lord Chastiseth whom he loveth,” says the bloody old Bible. Perhaps that is how God behaves but sane people don’t. Nobody beats the people they love unless perverted by anxiety or vile examples. In which knowledge I now, in perfectly cold blood, return to my Superb who is being raped up the arse by Charlie. Since the best whisky in the world cannot fill my mind with happy memories I must get back to a fantasy and keep control of it this time. On second thoughts, leave Superb and Charlie for a while and make a completely fresh start. Goodbye to school for ever, I hope.

  6:

  BRIGHT TUNEFUL PIANO MUSIC.

  Firm hands with redlacquered nails grip the wheel of a smoothly speeding car. Ahead of the windscreen a busy sunlit road bends to a curve. Hitchhikers stand on the verge holding out cards chalked with placenames. The firm hands slow down the car past two bearded men bound for Los Angeles, a boy and girl waiting sadly for Chicago, two girls enthusiastic for New York, and stop it beside a solitary girl in short short short white shorts and heliotrope blouse unbuttoned almost to her navel who holds a card saying ANYWHERE. Dark abundant hair hangs down her back. This is Janine, but a more eagerly smiling Janine than the one who sat in the car with Max. She wears white sandals, no stockings, carries rucksack. As she bends to enter the car I have a plan view of her white bum vanishing under the roof of a red twoseater which zooms off along the roadway. I ought to be a film director. I can imagine exactly what I want.

  The hard throb of a kettledrum mixes with the bright piano music. Seen through the windscreen from in front the hands on the wheel belong to Helga, who is tall, slender, handsome, cool, Nordic, with long straight blonde hair, and high cheekbones, and eyes long and narrow with ice-blue pupils. Janine is talking to her vehemently, with many grimaces and nods of the head which shake down a heavy dark curl over one eye. Helga, driving fast but carefully, only shows how her passenger fascinates her by a small sideways glance and enigmatic smile.

  78 TWO LOVELY TRESPASSERS

  A high view of busy motorway with red twoseater leaving it by a small sideroad. A high security fence on one side shuts off a thick wood. The car passes (but does not pass through) a wide-open gate in this fence. It slows down, then parks on grass verge. Cut music.

  Faint birdsong and sound of wind among trees. From beside the open gate I see two women leave the car by opposite doors, hear the slight clunk of the doors shutting, see them meet behind the car and kiss. Then hand in hand they walk quickly back along the fence toward me, tall slim handsome blonde, small plump pretty brunette. Janine is not wearing shorts, a clumsy notion, her long loose black skirt, unbuttoned to mid-thigh, is tossed sideways by the breeze the same way that it sways her dark hair. As the women near the gate I see that their faces are dreamy and slightly openmouthed. They are too shy and excited to look at each other. A rear view of them pausing hand in hand, staring through the gateway. A rough track curves into the wood. It is Helga who takes the first step forward. She leads Janine across the track and under the thickleaved branches on the far side. The women enter the lushgreen sunlit windshaken leaves as if entering a thick mist or running river, they disappear almost completely into it. My mind’s eye starts to follow them slowly, rising as it follows so that, just as I reach the gate, and it swings shut, I cannot see who has pushed it. I hear the click of a lock, the scrape of a turning key. Along strands of wire at the top of the gate (between which I can see the foliage where the women vanished) appear the words CAUGHT IN BARBED WIRE: A Superbitch Production.

  Good. From now on I will subdue my lust for what I create by keeping the eye of imagination as cool as a camera lens, the ear of imagination as discreet as a small microphone. Eye and ear move through the words and wires. They cross the track and stealthily penetrate screen after screen of leaves. A distant bird chirps. I hear whispers, then a blissful moan. I have forgotten to imagine what Helga is wearing. Is my interest in the sexual provocation of women’s clothes waning? Please God, don’t let that happen. Helga must wear tight jeans because of the boy with the catapult. Another blissful moan. The last screen of leaves parts. I look down on a patch of grass where

  79 LOVE IN THE SUNLIGHT

  Janine is laid out among her loose dark hair. Strands of it stray across eyelids ecstatically closed, lips ecstatically moaning, are caught between breasts spilling out of the satin blouse ecstatically unbuttoned. It is a loose blouse with a few big white buttons. The black velvet skirt hugging her plump hips is fastened by buttons of the same kind and Helga’s firm hand deftly undoes them then slips caressingly between Janine’s parting thighs to tenderly explore moist secret valley while Helga’s tongue probes thick hair to find Janine’s delicate little ear. Lightly Helga nibbles lobe then murmurs, “No bra. No panties. You little devil, you were looking for this.”

  “Mm. I didn’t expect to be so lucky. Don’t stop.”

  “And won’t you undress me?” asks Helga who (apart from big pocketflaps on buttocks and breasts) is dressed tight where Janine is loose and wears cowboy boots while Janine has kicked off her sandals. Janine whispers, “Later. I’m lazy just now. Do some more nice things to me.”

  Bright spots of sunlight through the moving leaves dance over their lovemaking.

  I must interrupt them soon though I would prefer to join them. It must be wonderful to be among two women who are lazily enjoying each other and want to share a stiff prick. Pricks are made for cunts. Sontag sometimes wanted a sexual trio, but with two men. She told me so. I said, “Ah.”

  “Have you no nice manfriend with whom you would like to share me?”

  “None atall.”

  80 SONTAG DISCOVERS

  “Never mind, I know many people. I am sure I can find someone suitable.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you not like the idea?”

  It suddenly struck me that Sontag, with two men simultaneously entering her from opposite sides or at opposite ends, would be in no position to give bossy little lectures while lovemaking. Perhaps another man and I could turn her into a pure instrument of pleasure. I grew excited and said, “That idea might be worth investigating.”

  She smiled and said coyly, “I am corrupting you!”

  “Oh?”

  “You have never before admitted to wanting a homosexual liaison.”

  “I don’t want one. You will be between the other man and me. I refuse to lay a finger on him.”

  She shouted angrily, “That is ludicrous! That really makes me laugh! Why must you suppress all feeling for your own sex? Do you not realise that you canno
t satisfy a woman if you do not love yourself, and you cannot love yourself if you recoil from your own sex?”

  “That sounds like trigonometry.”

  “Yes yes but you will not evade me by making a joke. It is inhuman not to love people of your own sex, a man of your age must have wished to do it once or twice. And caressing another man is much the same as caressing yourself.”

  “I never caress myself.”

  “You must. You masturbate.”

  “Yes, but without touching myself.”

  “Impossible!”

  It struck me then that most women do find it impossible to masturbate without using their hands. This made me feel slightly superior. I smiled and shrugged my shoulders. Sontag scowled and said, “How do you do it?”

  I told her that I imagined an exciting adventure with a woman. At the climax I came against my mattress as if it was the woman.

  “Aha! You use your mattress like a woman, which is why you wish to use me like a mattress. Thankyou, but no.”

  Sontag scored many little verbal triumphs like that over me. They made neither of us much happier.