1982 Janine

by Alasdair Gray

  and I was embarrassed by the first continuous erection I ever experienced. It happened suddenly and would not go away. It made walking difficult and I could not stop it. I was not thinking lustfully of Denny or anyone else when this happened, I was not thinking at all, I was stupefied to find that my body had a memory and will of which my mind knew nothing. With a few respites this erection lasted till the following Monday. It was a pain, but a pain I was pleased to suffer, and if I had known the address of Denny’s hostel I would have phoned her at once and asked her over to share it. When I saw her on Monday morning and said, “We must meet tonight,” she said, “Sure,” with something of her old, worried look, so my manner must have changed a little. When we got to bed I slipped on a sheath and we cuddled and I entered her quickly and easily. I was so glad to be inside that I lay perfectly still. It was she who started moving, so I moved too, to be companionable. I kept stopping whenever the excitement became very great. I feared that if I ejaculated I would go small and feeble and she would put me out. I had ejaculated several times a week since I was twelve and felt there was no future in it. But I did ejaculate at last, and we slept, then woke and made more love, and slept, and woke and made more love, and slept. Then I heard the alarm ringing, and Denny was sitting up and saying dolefully, “It’ll be the tears again for me tonight.” I said, “Why don’t you get a room of your own?”

  She said, “How could I?”

  I thought hard for a while. I asked what her wages were. She got not quite three pounds a week, which is about twenty-four pounds in modern money, enough to buy food and rent a cheap room if she shared it, but with almost nothing left for entertainment, clothing or transport. In the catering and cleaning businesses employers could and still do pay such money to women of all ages, because these women live with a parent or husband or in a hostel, like Denny, and of course they have little or no union. She said, “The hostel isnae a bad place, I mean, it’s clean and there’s quite a good crowd of girls there. Most of them are dead ignorant, like me, but we have some great laughs together.”

  201 OUR WEDDING

  I said, “You’ve got relations.”

  “Well?”

  “If you said you were going to live with them, would they take you?”

  “Sure, but I’m not going to live with thon scruff.”

  “You could pretend to go and live with them but come and stay here.”

  “Could I?”

  “My landlord spends the weekends at his parents’ house. If you don’t swagger about the place as if you own it, and if you keep out of the kitchen and stay in this room as much as possible he won’t bother us. And then we can be together as much as we like.”

  Denny looked worried, then smiled, then looked worried again, and I noticed I was in danger of proposing marriage. We went together to the college, sitting side by side in the underground and holding hands. When we went our separate ways my penis stiffened again and I felt a ring of tightness throb around the top of it as if Denny was still moving there. This invisible wedding ring was with me all that day. I have never felt it since.

  Was Denny a virgin before she met me? I entered her very easily and do not think I gave her pain, but breaking a hymen cannot always be a dramatic event. Was there blood on the sheets afterward? Perhaps. My sheets were often bloodstained because Denny did not mind making love when menstruating and her blood was not a kind of dirt which disgusted me. I did not notice if the sheets were stained the first time, I was too occupied to care. I was unusually lucky. I could easily have met a girl whose notion of lovemaking was as muddled and impatient as my own, a girl who felt obliged to hurry herself and hurry me into some sort of climax. She would probably have succeeded, and that pleasant but inadequate experience would have been the pattern of my future lovemaking. Maybe Denny’s sexual wisdom came from some lucky earlier experiences, but perhaps she was able to give and take delight easily because she did not think enough about sex to turn it into a problem. There are such women. They are seldom glamorous or clever, they are not promiscuous, being usually married to self-satisfied chaps who do not notice why they are well-off, but though few men enjoy the favours of these women we are always glad to see them. They prove that the pain of love is not inevitable, but merely the frequentest sort of bad luck.

  202 OUR HOMELIFE

  Not long after this Denny spent a night with me again, then came to live with me under the conditions I had suggested. She had her own key to the flat, but hid this from the landlord and his other lodger by ringing the doorbell before using it. If one of them opened to her she said, “Is Jock in?” and if they said, “No”, she scurried past them into my room saying, “I’ll just wait for him, then.”

  They found this amusing because she spent more time in that room than I did. I got more pleasure with her than with anyone else but I was afraid people would notice this and think I depended on her. I was afraid she would think that, so when I went out in the evening saying, “I’ll be back by nine”, I would usually be back by nine, but sometimes stay out till ten, and on these occasions she greeted my return with as much heartfelt relief as if she had feared I would never return. She must have been lonely in that room with only the wireless for company, but I did not like being with her in the streets. The faces of people walking toward us often had a soft, amused, wondering expression which I found annoyingly condescending. Once, coming out of the cinema, a gang of adolescent boys followed us almost the whole way home, laughing and chanting, “Hairy pie! Hairy pie! Who’s got his hairy pie?”

  Denny clutched my arm tight and kept hissing, “Pay no attention! Pay no attention!” as if she feared I would turn round and attack them.

  We sometimes quarrelled, of course. I was neat and she was messy. She could not be an hour in a place without disarranging something and shedding wisps of hair, a kirbygrip, a safety-pin or a lipstick-case. Though she worked in a refectory she was not a good cook, so I made the meals and expected her to clean up afterward. There were never many dirty dishes, but she would bustle about in a busy, unsystematic way for half an hour, and when she sat down there would always be something like an egg-stained plate with a jam-stained knife on the floor under a chair. This sometimes made me angry and silent with her. She feared my silences. One evening, when I had been perfectly quiet for fifteen minutes, she shouted “All right! If you really hate me so much why don’t you hit me?”

  203 OUR HOMELIFE

  “I never hit people!” said I indignantly, really shocked by the idea.

  “But you want to! So do it! Do it!”

  She rushed at me. I found myself shrinking back into a corner of the sofa, blushing and wriggling and giggling, “I don’t want to hit you!” as she frantically slapped and nipped me. One of her slaps struck my testicles, not hard enough to disable me because I grabbed her and spanked her and undressed her etcetera so it all ended tenderly with us both gloriously exhausted. Thereafter she brought most of my bad moods to that conclusion, but I had very few bad moods. She was messy and I was neat but she loved my neatness. We were making love one day when she started weeping, I hope tears of joy, and she cried out, “Oh you’re so neat and clean! So neat and clean!”

  She liked my clothes, especially the six identical trousers, and learned to iron and press them with great care. Perhaps she saw me as the sort of expensive doll she had longed for when she was wee.

  I used to think Denny was foolish because she had no definite ideas about the world. I had very definite ideas: the world was a mess, but its problems could be solved by modern technology, and when Alan and I left college we would begin to improve things. I was an ignorant git. If intelligence asks searching questions and does not relax on a pile of glib answers Denny was the intelligent half of us. I once saw her frown and move her lips as if talking to herself. I touched her brow and said, “What’s happening in there?”

  204 TRUE KNOWLEDGE

  She said, “Jock, what is the most important thing to Know?”

 
“What do you mean?”

  “I mean, my education was rubbish, the school taught me nothing. What should it have taught me?”

  “It should have taught you to earn a decent wage.”

  “No, I don’t mean that, I think I mean geography. Surely geography is the most important thing?”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you don’t know geography you don’t know where you are, so everything you think is wrong. I used to think England was a different island from Scotland, like America is. Well, I know now it isn’t a different island, but when I hear about all these other countries in the news, Korea and Berlin and Germany and Hungary, I don’t know how far away they are so I don’t know how much I should bother about them. Well-educated people stop me in the street with collecting cans, and they ask for money for the starving weans in Korea, and I give them a tanner if I have it because weans ought not to starve, that is definitely not right. And then I wonder, where is Korea? Won’t it cost a lot of money to send my money to Korea? Would I do more good if I gave my tanner to my wee cousin in Shettleston who stays in a room where the floor is wet all the time?”

  I could not answer these questions so I thought them naive, but I can answer some of them now. I could tell Denny now, “Geography no longer matters because there is no near or far, the monetary sheath enclosing the globe has destroyed the geography of distances. A company like Lonrho mines platinum in South Africa, insures lives in Bermuda, publishes half the Scottish newspapers and owns property everywhere. The Polish communist party crushes trade unions and keeps wages down to pay back money borrowed from the capitalist west. All the powers that be are in some sort of disreputable alliance, and they continue to be by allowing people like you, Denny, as little as possible in the way of knowledge and wages and living-room. You were born in a trap, Denny, and will live and die in that trap, and if you bear a child the trap will pinch both of you harder and harder because the trap is getting fuller all the time. I was born in the long town, a trap for colliers. When the pit is shut down next year it will be a trap for the unemployed. My mother, by a skilful use of clothing and emotional blackmail, trapped me into doing my homework so as to free me from the long town and she succeeded. I became a free man who could choose his own job and I chose to work for the trapmakers. Modern technology cannot solve the world’s problems because in all societies technology is used to accumulate wealth, not spread it, The banking nations approve of revolts in the communist block, the communists want revolution in the capitalist block, but eastern communists grasp and increase their social privileges as much as our own Sunday-supplement-swallowing middle class who, if they ever notice you, Denny, will find your wish to understand the trap you are in amusingly naive, quite charmingly pathetic and touching, really. But if you go on strike and demonstrate for better wages (you won’t, you have no union, but if you do) then cabinet ministers drawing salaries of twenty-nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-fifty-a-year (on top of interest on private investments) will appear on television to explain in brave, loud, haw-haw voices that there is not enough money to help you, that your selfish greed is the thing which has reduced Britain to its present deplorable plight. And if you are asked to say something in your own defence, Denny, your voice over the wireless waves will sound stupid and funny because you don’t know how to address the public. Your school did not teach you to speak or think, it taught you to sit in rows and be quiet under strong teachers or rowdy under weak ones. The people who manage you, Denny, have been taught to make brazen speeches in firm clear voices, THAT is FAR more important than geography or technology, because RHETORIC RULES, O.K.?” (keep off politics) Thankyou for reminding me, God. I will keep off politics.

  205 TRAP RHETORIC

  I did not want to leave Denny all alone in that house. I asked her to come with me when I visited Alan, who admired her, but she said, “I’m never going to visit him.”

  “Why not?”

  “I hate that big Alan.”

  “Why?”

  “He thinks he can do anything he likes.”

  206 ALAN

  She was right. In Alan’s company I always felt that anything we imagined was possible. After a pause I said, “That is no reason for hating him. He never wants to do nasty things.”

  She said, “Mibby he can do anything he likes but people like us cannae do anything we like.”

  I saw then that Denny, who lacked proper parents and education and could not even dress properly, thought she and I were the same sort of person and Alan and I were not. This put me in a bad mood which I did not allow her to turn into a friendly sexy squabble. I became perfectly quiet and sat with my arms tightly folded on my knees and let her slap and nip me until she was exhausted and weeping and pleading; then I stood up and walked out of the house without saying a word.

  It was a mild sunny summer evening so when Alan opened the door I suggested we go a walk and enjoy a pint somewhere. He was wearing pinstriped trousers tucked into Wellington boots and a dirty collarless shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He said, “Good idea, Jock, but let me finish this small job first.”

  I followed him into the front room. He was stripping paint from a table he had found in a midden.

  “A valuable antique?” I asked ironically, for it looked nothing special to me. He said, “Not yet, but if I stain and polish and keep it for sixty-eight years it will become a valuable antique.”

  The circular top was two feet across with a single, tapering leg ending in a tripod base. The tripod was certainly elegant. Alan showed me that the sections had been so dovetailed and angled that the joints would be strengthened, not weakened, by ordinary wear. He said, “It won’t last for ever, of course. One day an unusually heavy weight will be placed off-centre on it here, and it will crack here.”

  He touched a line in the grain of the wood. I said, “Could you prolong its life by reinforcing that part?”

  He said, “No. It’s too well made. Additional material would weaken the rest of the structure.”

  He worked on the table for two hours, delicately scraping and sandpapering. I did not mind. We chatted, or I leafed through his piles of old technical magazines, or listened to the pigeons croodle-crooing in the chimney. At last he said, “It’s a bit late for a walk and a pint, Jock, and anyway I have no money. How much have you?”

  207 ALAN

  I showed him a halfcrown, a florin and sixpence. He said, “My table has a Parisian look, let’s have a continental evening at home. For less than that money you can buy a bottle of Old Tron, a unique full-blooded Scottish wine greatly favoured by the afficionados, the cognoscenti and connoisseurs. Use the change to purchase two cigars of the best quality. I will provide glasses, a match and, of course, the table.”

  When I returned he had gained formal dignity by donning his army officer tunic and knotting a white cotton scarf round his throat. The newly cleaned table now stood before the open window and had three upright chairs round it and three glasses on top, besides a shining brass candlestick holding three inches of candle, and a clean saucer containing matches and a cigar cutter. Alan unwrapped the cigars and laid them across the saucer saying, “It is not yet lighting-up time.”

  He poured some of the red syrupy wine into two of the glasses then carefully emptied the rest into a cut-glass decanter which he placed in the exact centre of the table. Like an experienced waiter he pulled out a chair and pushed it forward under my thighs as I settled into it, then sat opposite me. We touched glasses and sipped. I said, “You are expecting more company.”

  He said “Carole may drop in.”

  Carole was his girlfriend, an artist. He said, “Why do you never bring Denny to see me?”

  I told him what Denny had said. He sighed and said, “She understands me. She really is very sharp. You ought to marry her.”

  I said, “I have just turned eighteen. Denny is the first and only woman I ever slept with, and she chose me, I did not choose her. And I will not marry till I earn a wage that will s
upport two of us, without debt, in my own house.”

  He said, “Yes. A pity.”

  I said, “Will you marry Carole?”

  “No no no. Have you seen how she handles her belongings? She likes books on art, she really does study the pictures and read the text, and because she is expertly shaped and exquisitely crafted plenty of infatuated dolts give her these books. And as soon as she owns one she gets it smeared with paint and bends the spine back till it cracks. She would treat me like that if I married her, so I never will. But I’m afraid we’ll continue to see each other, probably even love each other, till death-do-us-part. Carole has a grip like an iron vice. I envy you with Denny.”

  208 ALAN’S WINDOW

  I said mildly, “I don’t believe a word of that.”

  “A pity.”

  The street was getting a ruddy tint from the descending sun. We watched it and sipped the wine, commenting on the passers-by and whatever we could see of life through the windows of the tenement opposite. Carole arrived, a slim girl with a lost lonely fascinating look. I think she was sorry to see me there but I don’t know how she conveyed that. She was pleasant and friendly. She wore flat sandals, jeans, a paintstained sweater and her hair in a pony-tail. Alan said briskly, “Carole, you are improperly dressed for a continental evening. Please go to the bedroom, take off all your clothes and put on this. And remove that rubber band from your hair, I am sure Parisiennes don’t wear rubber in that particular place.”

  He gave her a black dress which had belonged to his mother who must have been a big woman, for when Carole came from the bedroom it hung to her ankles and would not lie on both shoulders. She looked splendid. She could look splendid in any garment. Alan lifted her hair, laid the mass of it carefully on her naked shoulder, then placed behind her ear a convincing white blossom he had made a moment before by cutting and folding a sheet of paper. He handed her ceremonially to the chair between us and filled the three glasses with the last of the wine. The street lamps came on. He lit the candle, clipped the cigars and bade me set fire to mine first. For half an hour we sat sipping and smoking and watching the slow summer gloaming darken the street, and colour the sky above the opposite tenement, and bring electric lights on in the rooms facing us. I knew that the window framing this subtly altering picture was framing a picture for the street outside: a picture of a young candlelit woman seated between her lover, a fine tall man, and his friend, a refined smaller one. I felt, I’m sure we all felt, as good-looking, as interesting, as comfortable, as civilised, as everlasting, as contented as folk in a good painting by Renoir. Alan had contrived this, but the foundation of my contentment was the knowledge that Denny was waiting for me a mile to the west. My body was already anticipating the peaceful satisfaction she and I would know after we had delighted each other.