1982 Janine

by Alasdair Gray

Waterloo Street,

  Glasgow

  Dear Reeves,

  I am tendering my resignation as installations supervisor for the Scottish Region, and regret that I cannot offer the usual four week’ warning before withdrawing my services. At the important I. B. M. meeting last night I suffered a minor stroke which forced me to withdraw before our business was touched upon. As you know, I am one of those frequently mocked individuals who are proud to have never lost a day’s work through illness in their lives. In twenty-five years of service this is the first time I have jeopardised a National Security contract. This resignation ensures it will be my last. The cause of the seizure has still to be diagnosed (Liar) (I don’t care) but if the accountant needs a medical certificate before arranging my pension and severance pay I will contrive to produce one.

  As to replacing me, Eliot and Mitchell are obvious choices on grounds of seniority, but your best man is young Saunders. He is quick, skilful, inventive and still finds the work interesting. If promoted at this stage of his career he will annoy the hell out of everyone but produce invariably good results. I realise, however, that the company will probably promote someone from south of the border. From General Electrics to the National Coal Board more and more top jobs in Scotland are being given to Englishmen, presumably because those who run the country want key men who are more loyal to foreign bosses than to their colleagues and the public. But I may be mistaken. Maybe we native Scots are indeed a gang of stupid incompetents who lack the qualifications to manage ourselves. (You are getting overheated, cut that out.) (No, let it stand.)

  I enclose herewith all schedules and documents relating to extant business. Should you or my successor need further information I may be contacted at my home in Glasgow.

  Yours faithfully,

  John McLeish

  313 RETURN TO NINA

  What can I do now? I have no plans, none at all. May I return to Janine reading Frank buying Nina a skirt/shirt etcetera? Does anyone oppose that motion?

  Silence.

  Right. Frank asks Nina, would you wear these when I pick you up tonight because this is an all-denim patio party. Nina asks, why denim? Frank blushes and says, well, the party has a theme. Has Nina ever been to, or heard of, a Tarts and Vicars party? She has not been to one, but yes, she has heard of fashionable masquerade balls at which the men dress like priests and their wives and girlfriends dress like prostitutes. Frank says, yeah, that’s the idea, it’s a British idea, and his millionaire friend who needs a name, Hollis will do, Frank’s millionaire pal Hollis gave such a party once, and it was such fun that tonight’s party will be on a similar theme, but more American. It will be a Sheriffs and Hookers party with a Wild West frontier flavour. The women are dressing like frontier whores and their escorts like sheriffs who are taking them into custody. Does Nina object to that? Nina laughs and says no! and anyway she sees nothing whorish in a simple skirt and shirt. Well, says Frank, Hollis finds these a turn-on and he is our host so the girls dress to please him even though there is indeed nothing whorish in skirt and shirt, though many of them add accessories that produce a very strong impact but there is no reason why Nina should compete with these, if she does not feel like doing so. He arranges to pick up Nina at her apartment in a couple of hours. He says he will not be alone – his friend Tom and Tom’s wife Sherry will be driving down with them to Hollis’s ranch, this story is becoming overloaded with new people but I need them to surprise me with new ideas which will keep me not quite able to foresee the end though it will inexorably turn into the usual dull old business. For twenty-five years my sexual daydreams and loneliness and drinking and work for National Security have propped each other up. Without the work the first three must increase until they destroy me. Could they fall into a looser order with room for something new to grow? No. Nothing new will grow in this mind.

  314 THE NINE STORY

  Nothing new will grow in a mind containing a Cadillac containing Janine reading a story about Nina surveying herself in a full-length mirror. She has decided not to compete with other women by adding tarty accessories to the skirt and shirt. She wears these only, standing barefoot and stockingless, her face washed naked of all make-up, her hair unpinned and unclasped hanging loose behind her shoulders. No jewellery. No bra either, but though the shirt is semi-seethrough, the extra thickness of silk on the breast pockets prevents the aureoles of her nipples showing as more than faint darkness. And although shirt and skirt are decently fastened (skirt white denim with brass buttons shining like gold) she looks wonderfully lovely, young and enticingly defenceless. She is amazed by herself. If she appears like this among richer and older women who have dressed as outrageously as possible she will be the star of the party. But can she go outside like this? Why not? The night is warm and she does not mind some dirt on the soles of her feet. Nina is starting to interest me more than Janine does. The doorbell rings.

  She opens and there stands Frank and Tom. She says, “Hiya!” and placed hands on hips, flaunting a little. “Like it?” she asks.

  “Oh honey,” says Frank, “you really are too much. You are now really something. Meet Tom, Nina.”

  Tom is well over six feet tall with a fierce black moustache, but a pudgy figure, a slight stoop and half-moon bifocal spectacles make him look like an absentminded bank clerk, despite a broad-brimmed leather hat, a leather waistcoat story with a tin star on it, leather trousers, high-heeled boots and two thick belts creasing his hanging abdomen, one with a lariat and handcuffs hanging from it, one a cartridge belt with holster and pistols. Nina cannot take him seriously. His gravelly Texan drawl fails to disguise a voice naturally high-pitched and Eastern. He growls, “Nina Crystal?” and takes her hand.

  315 THE NINA STORY

  “That’s me all right!” she says. His grip of her hand tightens. He says formally, “Well, Nina, I have bad news for you. The new mayor has ordered us to clean up this town, so we are taking you and a few other bad girls a long long ride away from here to a place where you cannot tempt honest, cleanliving citizens. You will have no time to do that because you will be working very very hard for bad boys like me and my pardner Frank here.”

  She laughs and says, “I see the party has already started.”

  “Yep,” says Tom, “and will last longer than you ever thought a party could. I now pronounce you hooker – and sheriff.”

  There is a sudden click. Tom lets her hand go and she sees the wrist is handcuffed to Frank’s. Frank grins and tugs her out the door saying, “Walk, honey.”

  “Wait! I want my handbag!” she says, pointing to it.

  “I’ll get it,” growls Tom, “you’ve other things to worry about.”

  “Your friend takes this game very seriously,” she murmurs to Frank on the way to the elevator.

  “He enjoys it more that way,” says Frank. “So will you, eventually.”

  In the elevator they find the Bronsteins, an elderly couple from upstairs who have always (Nina feels) looked at her with grave suspicion because she is young, attractive and lives alone. They now stare at her with open mouths. “A fine evening, Mr and Mrs Bronstein,” says Nina, but they do not answer and Nina finds it hard not to laugh aloud. She is full of confidence and merriment, excited by how much she will excite people at the party but taking none of it seriously, especially not her impossibly sweet, helpless, nude-under-two-garments self, certainly not that big slob Tom with his fierce moustache, dimly peering eyes, heavy guns and ladies’ handbag. I like Nina. She reminds me of a friend I used to know, who?

  316 DIANA AND BRIAN

  Diana. I saw and heard nothing of her for ten or twelve years but when my marriage ended she began haunting me. I glimpsed her for half a minute in a remake of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and for slightly longer in a good but badly publicised film called Country Dance. Her voice occurred in radio plays I tuned into by accident. One evening I bumped into Brian in a loungebar in Irvine. He had a family now and worked as a speech therapist in local schools. He and Dia
na still corresponded. He told me that after the Edinburgh fiasco she had left Glasgow without completing her course at the Athenaeum. She went to London, auditioned for a part in one of Binkie’s shows and failed to get it. She took a room near Swiss Cottage, bore an illegitimate son and managed (I cannot imagine how) to bring him up on money from the Social Security and from any acting job she could get, which at first was chiefly chorus work in cheap pantomimes and extra work in cinema adverts. Brian said she also got help from men friends. I thought he meant that she did a bit of polite whoring, so I was annoyed by his tone of mingled envy and admiration. I said, “Her son can’t have much of a life.”

  Brian shrugged and said, “My children don’t have much of a life either. Their mother and I give them a lot of attention and every material thing they need, but all the time they squabble over trivialities. The boy says he wants to be a rock star, but though he twangs on a guitar he refuses to take lessons and has no interest in any other music. The girl is slightly older. She wants to be a film star or a housewife. Nothing else strikes her as desirable. She has no interest in acting or drama and spends her spare time on fashion magazines, make-up, frocks, swapping clothes with friends, going to dances and gossiping about who kissed who. I met Diana’s son last year and found him terribly impressive. He’s cool, quiet and gentlemanly. He prefers the company of adults to children. His mother would like him to be an actor but he’s determined to be a policeman.”

  317 DIANA AND BRIAN

  This left me with nothing to say at all except, after a pause,

  “I’m sorry Diana is not a successful actress.”

  He said, “But she is! She has worked with most of the good British directors by now, and whenever they want to make a small part memorable with some extra humour or intelligence, she is one of a few dozen professionals that they know they can depend upon. She is a successful actor just as you are a successful electrician or engineer or whatever it is you do nowadays. Neither of you is famous but you’ve both always done what you mostly want. Unlike me.”

  I said crossly, “Why should a speech therapist envy an unimportant actress and an unimportant supervisor of security installations? I can tell you this for a fact: if you’ve ever cured one poor kid of a stammer you’ve done more human good than I’ve done in my whole career.”

  He sighed and said, “Yes, I suppose teaching is an honourable profession, even my branch of it, but my life has been wasted by an adolescent dream. I wanted to create companies which would hold audiences spellbound – I wanted to be magic. Our Edinburgh adventure showed what a fantasy that was. Whenever I feel depressed nowadays I suspect that my fairly loving wife, my averagely happy home, my socially respectable job, are consolation prizes for being a failure and a weakling.”

  He sounded exactly as if he was me. I could not let him get away with that.

  “Brian,” I said, “you were a great director! The whole enterprise was created by you. You made a company out of a lot of disgruntled people who often disliked each other and didn’t particularly like you. We did astonishing things for you, things we could never have done for ourselves. I learned stage lighting and set construction, I became inventive because you demanded it. You goaded us all into a new kind of life and got us working together in a highly successful comedy, don’t you remember? But you were best when things went wrong. You did not curse or blame us, you worked to repair our damaged egos. You would have brought the whole show to a highly profitable end if I had not suddenly removed your theatre.”

  Brian stared hard at me for a while, then chuckled. He said,“Jock, I did not direct that show. You did.”

  318 WHAT WE ONCE WERE

  I stared at him. He said, “As soon as you joined us you took us over, every one of us. You devised a lighting script which set the rhythm for everything we did. You built a set which decided every move we made. You recast the play with Rory in the lead and the play benefited, and when at last we met the Queen of England, I exaggerate, I mean the Queen of the Golden West End, you were the only one with the confidence to speak for us. You were a bit fierce and abrupt at first, then you relaxed and became jocose and condescending. You were very very funny, and though the Queen was not amused the rest of us were proud of you. But I stupidly lost my temper in a police station so you gave the show up as a bad job and that was the end. ‘Well,’ I thought at the time, ‘the electrician giveth and the electrician taketh away. God damn that bloody electrician.’ For a year or two I would wake up at night, grinding my teeth and actively hating you. You showed Helen and Diana what a weakling I am. You showed me what a weakling I am. I have no hard feelings about it now but it was a bitter pill to swallow when I was nineteen or twenty.”

  I cried out, “Nobody ever thought you were a weakling, Brian, especially not at the end. You and Diana and Roddy and Rory were the strong members of the troop, it was Helen and I who cracked under the strain. As for the lighting script, Diana and Roddy devised that – I simply told them what could be done and implemented their suggestions. And the stageset was what any first-year engineering student would have been forced to devise in the circumstances. And when I told you to give your part to Rory I was only voicing what everyone else had been saying behind your back for weeks. I said it out loud because I had an urgent private reason for returning to Glasgow and half-hoped you would tell me to go to Hell.”

  We were both astonished by these disclosures and drank deep while pondering them. I said, “It was all an accident – a wonderful accident. I wish it had happened later in life. The further I get from our time in Edinburgh the deader I feel. I am no electrician, no engineer, I no longer do what I mostly want. I am a supervisor. An inspector. A spy.”

  319 HOW HELEN WAS LOVED

  Brian said, “We were no accident, we were a co-operative. I suspect all good companies are co-operatives who won’t admit it. I could never have admitted it when I was young, because I wanted to be cock of the walk. I wanted to be king. And Jock, for a while I was a king. It’s true, isn’t it? Two splendid girls loved me. For over two weeks I had them on alternate nights, nearly. I sometimes wonder, nowadays, if my imagination did not cook that up to compensate for sixteen years of solid monogamy, but no, it really happened, I think.”

  I said, “Forgive me for asking a delicate personal question, but how did you make love to she who eventually became Mrs McLeish?”

  He said, “I will gladly forgive you for any question you ask, Jock, but I do not understand that question. Explicate.”

  I said, “One day in a tearoom, shortly before my marriage, Helen told me, with a touch of scorn which seemed aimed at myself, that your performance in the sexual act was, at a technical level, differently structured from mine. I have often worried, I mean wondered, exactly what she was referring to.”

  Brian shook his head and said, “I don’t know. Everyone’s lovemaking must have an individual twist but I doubt if mine is more twisted than most. I’ve always been too shy to attempt more than slight variations on the missionary posture. I may have been more experimental in my late teens but I doubt it. I was a virgin before Helen slept with me.”

  This news gave me vertigo. It still does. If Helen lied to me then twelve years of marriage were built on falsehood and the past stops being solid. I can put up with a lot of present misery if it is solidly based, but if I am wrong about my past WHO AM I? If the reality I believed in is wrong, how can I right it? What solid truth can we find in our mistaken heads? My head is a windy cave, a narrow but bottomless pit where true and false memories, hopes, dreams and information blow up and down like dust in a draught. Vertigo. No go. So go to Dianina I mean janine in cowhide breeks in a Cadillac reading a CATTLEMARKET story about Tom Frank Nina crossing a pavement (sidewalk) sidewalk to a parked Packard (is Packard still marketed?) shut up Nina crossing a pavement (sidewalk) sidewalk to a parked Packard (is Packard still marketed) shut up Nina crossing a pavement (sidewalk) sidewalk to a parked Cadillac of course. This mind is inclined to twi
st into a spin so go more slow.

  320 EXIST CRAP

  Bypassers stare at the far too theatrical scene as sweet, barefoot, nudeunderwhiteskirtshirt, loosehaired Nina crosses sidewalk between sheriff Tom, cowboy Frank. In back of Cadillac Nina sees what seems laughing foxy face of wicked little old lady. Frank unlocks cuff from his wrist, opens back door, relocks cuff on insideofdoor handgrip, then roughly, insultingly, embraces Nina, pushing hard tongue into her mouth, hard prick against her stomach. Released she gasps, “I don’t like that.”

  He grins and says, “Tough”, opens carfrontdoor, gets into drivingseat, slams frontdoor. Standing on pavement Nina yells, no, hollers, “Frank, I don’t want to come.”

  He says, “But you will, you’re part of the vehicle now”, and starts the engine. Angrily she slides into the back seat and slams the door. She does not really believe the car will drive off with her chained outside it but she wants to escape the blankly fascinated stares of five or six male bystanders who watch her as if she was a film commercial for something they would dearly like to buy. She is almost glad when the car slides away from these gawping bastards though her heart thumps and a throaty, slightly gasping voice beside her whispers happily, “Hi Nina, I’m Sherry. Ain’t you terrified, honey? Look what they done to me.”

  Foxy little Sherry has a wrinkled face which could be any age between thirty-five and sixty. Her wrists are both handcuffed to a handgrip near the roof of the car, she keeps wriggling against that point of bondage by twisting her body from side to side while ostentatiously crossing and recrossing a pair of unexpectedly beautiful legs. These are almost completely exposed in nearly unbuttoned denim miniskirt and under the torndownoffbothshouldersseethroughsilkshirt her small breasts are made perky by a black brassiere (could Sherry be a man in drag?) stop confusing me, she also wears whitewedgesoledsandalsnetstockingssuspenderbeltblack Cleopatrastylewigbigsilverhoopearrings (come out of the sexy accessories Jock McLeish! We know you’re hiding in there) GET THEE BEHIND ME GOD AND PUSH for Christ’s sake if you psychoanalyse me you will discover you too are nothing but my imagination. Sherry says gleefully in her throaty stagewhisper, “Just see the mess I’m in! When they came for me I freaked right out, I yelled and struggled, they slapped me silly and dragged me here and tied me up like this. I admire how you can take it all so calm. But of course this is your first time so you don’t know what’s in store. Believe me these brutes will do everything they want to us when they get us to the Cattlemarket.”