1982 Janine

by Alasdair Gray

  On this last walk together I started noticing the flowering turf edging the track. I saw daisies and buttercups, two colours of clover, and bright, delicate little flowers I felt I knew very well though I could not remember having seen them before. I plucked a few. The head of one, smaller than a small fingernail and with a very frail stalk, looked like a yellow and scarlet ladies’ sandal made of impossibly fine silk. I said, “What is this one called? Is it a member of the orchid family?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dad.

  The head of another was the size and shape of a bumblebee with brownish-purple fur and several purple-pink wings stuck on at random. I said, “What is this one called?”

  90 BACK TO THE WIRE

  “I don’t know,” said Dad.

  I said, “That’s strange. You used to be keen on botany.”

  “Me? Oh no. I like flowers but I don’t give a damn for botany.”

  I reminded him of the book he kept bringing out when I was a child and we went walks together. He said, “I bought that book because you kept asking me the names of the flowers you saw and I didn’t know them. My father discouraged me from asking questions when I was small, I’m sure it impaired my education.”

  So I had made Dad’s walks dull by asking him questions, he made mine dull by answering them. Real people are inexplicable. Since I cannot understand myself, how can I understand others? We are mysteries, every one of us. No wonder we turn from ordinary facts of life to religions, philosophies, stories, films and fantasies. These can be completely understood because people have made them for people. I know exactly why Helga, face and breasts shiny with sweat, pauses waistdeep in weeds to tuck her open shirt into her jeans, rolls her jeans above her knees then, stooping low, steps carefully between two strands of wire and gradually gets her whole body inside this irregular cage of barbs with only one foot on the ground outside. Do strands of her blonde hair catch on the wires? Yes, I see her head tugged suddenly back, her face winces but she has time to free the hair with her hands until. The only noise is her sobs of effort until

  Violent barking. A great Alsation dog springs through the undergrowth, white fangs in gaping mouth. Helga’s appalled face. She drags her foot within the wire. The jeans bunched round her thigh catch on several barbs, so again does her hair. With loud snarls the jaws of the dog snap between the strands, just missing a buttock but ripping off a pocketflap, good. And now her struggle to get out of the wire on the far side becomes frenzied, with three results.

  Shirt and most of the jeans are ripped off until she wears only short short short tattered shorts.

  Squealing, moaning, tearwet, sweatwet, her face is jerked from side to side by many shocks and efforts.

  Her lovely and increasingly naked body is displayed in stretched and quivering positions.

  91 HELGA GETS THROUGH

  This lets me enjoy her in the postures of lovemaking without having to envy men or women sharing them. But the business must be imagined very carefully, for although the jaggy wire is stripping her, making her stretch and squeal etcetera I want no bloodshed. Metal must not touch or pierce her if I cannot. So although this episode will look realistic it must be cunningly contrived. Better imagine it happening in slow motion, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, and Helga is free and stumbling toward the motorway naked but for white boots, torn minikilt of thick seams, studs, rags around bum and cunt, blonde hair over eyes so that just before reaching the trees she pushes through a hedge and falls, rolls down the side of a deep ditch and sprawls weeping at the bottom. There, after a sob of utter misery (which gives me, personally, no satisfaction but I need it to make her convincing) she raises the upper part of her body on her arms and looks round.

  She is on a track along the bottom of the ditch. A security fence on the far side shuts off the trees hiding the embankment. A few yards from her a parked truck with a locked cage at the back contains terriers, an Alsation and Janine, who crouches half-naked in a corner.

  “You’re a great runner, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” says Hugo affably. He sits on a fallen treetrunk with Cupid beside him, a half-empty bottle of cheap wine on the ground at their feet. Cupid says, “I’ve never enjoyed a nicer picnic.”

  Another voice says, “Could we have that last bit over again? From where she comes to the wire?” Everything goes black.

  92 THE PRIVATE CINEMA

  Everything goes black, then white, then I see that the whiteness is a blank cinema screen, a small one in a private viewing theatre. The seats are upholstered in red velvet, four steeply banked rows with six seats to a row. In the front row sits Stroud, Charlie, Hollis (who I haven’t introduced before) and Helga who leans back calmly smoking. She wears something expensive and fashionable, something suitable for a careerwoman in showbusiness, I don’t care what it is. In the back row sits Max embracing and hungrily kissing the waitress who once served Janine. She is dressed as she was, his hand is inside her skirt.

  “Congratulations,” Stroud says to Helga, “it must have been very hard both acting and directing that.”

  Helga shrugs and says, “Easier than directing someone else.”

  “But that business with the wire – how did you make it look so convincing?”

  “There’s no secret. I did it slowly and took a lot of time.”

  Hollis speaks. He is a bright-eyed, eager young man in black slacks and sweater, his voice is disturbingly childish.

  “By the way Helga, did you know we have your partner Janine with us now?”

  “Janine Crystal?”

  “Yes. You know she claims she directed your movie?” Helga smiles and says, “Janine is an ambitious kid.”

  The theatre lights go dim. The screen flickers then we see again Helga the actress with weeds open shirt sweatshiny etcetera etcetera etcetera. I wish my fantasies did not depend upon so much machinery. There is too much of it in ordinary life.

  7:

  CUPID AND HUGO ARE MY FAVOURITE VILLAINS.

  I am sorry they only appear in that short film. Sontag would have liked them, or liked analysing them. She would probably have discovered they were subconscious portraits of me and my Dad the timekeeper. She kept discovering that everyone under the surface was the opposite of how they looked on top, especially if the top was simple and obvious. So men who loved lots of women were suppressed homosexuals, and happily married couples were murdering each other, and babies and small children were monsters of destructive egoism. I believe that under the surface we are very like how we appear above it, which is why so many surfaces last a lifetime without cracking. My fantasy about a straightforward rapist like Hugo cannot last long because he is too much my opposite. I can only identify with middle-class rapists who fuck with the help of expensive machines and a corrupted police force and a worldwide financial network. This is not surprising. National Security thinks the sun shines out of my arsehole.

  A firm is a team, of course, but at the level of practical management I am the only essential man in the National team, all the others can be replaced. Reeves, the head of Scottish installations, is not an essential man although he draws a larger salary. He is an administrator, a glorified secretary. If they ever offer me his job I’ll know the drink has made me prematurely senile. I am a supervisor, but a supervisor of supervisors. In every job the National undertakes in Scotland the team knows that one day, with no warning, I will suddenly arrive, run a few tests, ask a few questions, and any weakness in the system will be at once exposed. And repaired. And my report will affix the blame to the man responsible. I am the reason for National’s high reputation in the Scottish business community, though not everyone knows that. Reeves knows it which is why he wants rid of me. He is a mixture of jealousy and ignorance. When my brain goes completely liquid the Scottish branch will be in serious trouble. There is nobody here who can replace me.

  94 NATIONAL SECURITY LIMITED

  I am a liar. I know two young area supervisors who
could do my job as well as I do. But does Reeves know them? I doubt it and I’m not going to tell him. He probed me recently in his sneakily English public-school way. He’s jealous and ignorant but he’s smart.

  “I think you deserve an assistant, Jock. Someone who can drive.”

  “I can drive.”

  “O I realise that.”

  “Driving a car properly is a job of work. It consumes skill, intelligence, and nervous energy.”

  “O I realise that.”

  “The firm pays me to provide a precise kind of practical and psychological supervision. I prefer working with a clear, alert mind unblunted by two or three hours of sifting and responding to the signals and reflexes of inept, self-contradictory and frequently drunken drivers.”

  “O I realise that, so let the firm give you a chauffeur. One of the younger men. Pick him yourself. He can assist you by testing the less complex parts of the installation.”

  An assistant would discover I am alcoholic. Does Reeves suspect that? I doubt it. Before the incident with the whore last weekend the only folk with ground for suspicion were barmaids in quiet little hotels.

  95 OF WHICH I AM AN INSTRUMENT

  “What part of our installation do you regard as less complex, Reeves?”

  “Perhaps the alarm circuits?”

  “You are mistaken. Let me tell you something. An electrician can install and service the National system as though it is a collection of separate parts, but a supervisor must see and test it as a whole. He must not pass the responsibility for some details to someone else.”

  “O I realise that, but you know what I am trying to convey.”

  Yes Reeves, I know what you are trying to convey. You want me to help you replace myself with someone younger. Sorry old chap, no go. No can do. Until you persuade the firm to promote a supervisor from London over my head I will remain the Scottish National team’s most essential man. Liar. I am not a man, I am an instrument.

  I am the instrument of a firm which installs instruments to protect the instruments of firms which produce meat cloth machines and whisky, instruments to feed, dress, move and stupefy us. But the National installs most of its instruments around nuclear reactors – instruments powering the instruments which light, heat and entertain us – and banks – instruments to protect and increase the profits of the instrument owners – and military depots where the weapons are kept which protect the nation’s instruments and profits from the protective instruments of the Russian instrument-makers. Mirrors reflecting mirrors are the whole show? No. Instruments serving instruments are the whole show. My father was an instrument regulating a coal-mine. This did not satisfy him so he became an instrument of his trade union and the Labour Party. He thought these were the instruments of a future of full employment, no warfare and the goods of life shared equally among those who make them. But the future does not exist. Most of us become instruments to get something NOW, what? Safety and pleasure. The safety and pleasure of big houses, rounds of golf and safaris in Kenya drive shareholders to operate the bank and Stock Exchange. The safety and pleasure of wee houses, the Saturday game and a fortnight in Portugal drive workers to operate the factory and office. Safety and pleasure drive me to drink and wank in a Peebles hotel but I am SICK of being an instrument joining instruments to instruments so that an imaginary Superb, handcuffed and nude, facedown and writhing screams NO NO PLEASE PLEASE DON’T DO IT AGAIN as Charlie, gripping her lovely buttocks, drives his stiff etcetera again and again through her etcetera etcetera. In my coat pocket is a bottle of barbiturate pills to be swallowed with the emergency whisky if the bombs drop before I reach the shelter. Why not swallow them and return to pre-birth nothingness now? “The coward’s way out,” they used to call it. But the coat is far away in the wardrobe.

  96 DENNY

  I once knew a man who was not a coward, not an instrument. He died. Forget him.

  I was once inside a woman’s bum and was not cruel or selfish. I did not know where I was. She giggled and said,

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’re not in the usual place.”

  “O how does it feel?”

  “Different. Not so exciting but nice. Don’t come out yet.”

  “Are you not sore?”

  “No.”

  “The books suggest it usually hurts the first time.”

  “I don’t read books.”

  “Well either you’ve a great big arsehole or I’ve a wee toaty prick.”

  She squealed at that. Denny was easily shocked by frank language. Denny, I have been very lonely without you. Even with other women I have been very lonely without you … Strange. For a moment I thought I was going to cry.

  Damn damn damn damn him for dying, that bastard should never have died, I will never forgive that bugger for dying, of course I forgive him for dying but till my dying day I will hate hate hate that he is dead. He was complete. Everyone else I have met emerged from childhood like myself with some talent or affection damaged or forced under the surface, but an inborn toughness, an accident of parentage had left this man intact, that is the only way I can account for him. As old people used to say of someone especially alert and intelligent, he was all there. Any woman he looked at felt beautiful, any man he talked to felt interesting, only the envious disliked him, his mere appearance gave confidence to the rest. He was, and seemed, magnificent. He was the least absentminded, the least mysterious man in the world. In the old Glasgow Technical College the head of department told our year, “There have been too many latecomers this term, too many of you have missed lectures and been absent without a doctor’s line. All of this applies, of course, to one of you in particular.”

  97 ALAN

  Then the head looked straight at the middle of the back row where my friend sat, so everyone else looked at him too. He frowned, pursed his lips gravely and nodded as if saying,

  “Yes, I have been very bad, something must certainly be done about this.”

  But we all knew he was not depressed atall. How could he be? He was a natural engineer who learned as he breathed no matter how many lectures he missed, and had he been a poor engineer he was still incapable of caring what a mere boss, a mere professor said, unless he found it useful or entertaining. So his frown and nod of agreement struck us as stupendous irony, the best joke for a month. From the edges of the class smiles and nudges passed to the middle and suddenly people were laughing. The head of department tried not to. For a minute he fought to keep a straight face, and failed, and laughed, and became one of us. He had to. If he had not he would have proved himself a stuffed shirt, a fool who did not know that teachers are paid to serve their students, not the other way round. So when silence returned the head, with a gesture of comic despair, cleared his throat, started another lecture, and we rewarded him by paying close attention. We liked him now that he had proved himself a decent fellow, though he was a very ordinary decent fellow. The only folk who stayed calm during the uproar were my friend who raised his eyebrows a little, and perhaps myself, who was naturally impassive and tended to imitate him. At what seemed the height of the mirth he glanced at me with an apologetic shrug and spread of the hands as if saying, “Am I to blame if people behave like this?”

  98 ALAN

  And of course people laughed even louder.

  This brain of mine holds no irrational fears and only one superstition. If Alan had lived (he died in a fall which had as little to do with himself as a bottle has to do with an arm which accidentally knocks it to smash on a floor) I believe Scotland would now have an independent government. I do not mean that Alan would have become a political leader. A leader is a nose which the big owners and moneymen use to steer crowds by. Sometimes, not often, a leader is a hard nose which a determined crowd thrusts against the big owners. Who can always afford to retreat a little. Big money is clever, it does not need special people to lead it. When it cannot use clever cultured spokesmen like Macmillan
and Heath it uses naive idiots like Hume and Thatcher and the newspapers praise their courage and sincerity. But Labour needs special leaders. Or thinks it does. Which is why it is continually defeated. Alan would not have changed Scotland by talking in front of a crowd, he would have set an irresistible example by doing exactly what he wanted in the middle of the back row. I imagine him inventing a cheap arrangement of mirrors, mercury rods and guitar strings which, installed up a chimney, would store enough energy to light and heat the room beneath with some left over to power a refrigerator, cassette-player or slow oven. A fantasy, of course, but given time Alan would have worked upon Scotland like a few ounces of yeast on many tons of malt, he would have fermented these arselickers and instruments, these stoical and hysterical losers into a sensible coherent people who would not act as one (healthy folk cannot do exactly that) but would hold together sufficiently to help themselves by helping each other. Whisky permitting, I will order my wits to find reasons for this faith of mine.