Lanark

by Alasdair Gray

  Thaw said uneasily, “A miller running to the mill with a bag of corn.”

  “What’s the blue line supposed to be?”

  “The sky.”

  “Do you mean the horizon?”

  Thaw stared dumbly at his picture.

  “The horizon is the line where the sky and land seem to touch. Is it the horizon?”

  “It’s the sky.”

  “But the sky isnae a straight line, Duncan!”

  “It would be if you saw it sideways.”

  Mr. Thaw got a golf ball and a table lamp and explained that the earth was like the ball and the sun like the lamp. Thaw was bored and puzzled. He said, “Do people fall off the sides?”

  “No. They’re kept on by gravity.”

  “What’s ga … gavty?”

  “Grrrrrravity is what keeps us on the earth. Without it we would fly up into the air.”

  “And then we would reach the sky?”

  “No. No. The sky is just the space above our heads. Without gravity we would fly up into it forever.”

  “But wouldn’t we come to a … a thing on the other side?”

  “There is no other side, Duncan. None at all.”

  Thaw leaned over his drawing and drew a blue crayon along the line of the sky, pressing hard. He dreamed that night of flying up through empty air till he reached a flat blue cardboard sky. He rested against it like a balloon against a ceiling until worried by the thought of what was on the other side; then he broke a hole and rose through more empty air till he grew afraid of floating forever. Then he came to another cardboard sky and rested there till worried by the thought of the other side. And so on.

  Thaw lived in the middle storey of a corporation tenement that was red sandstone in front and brick behind. The tenement backs enclosed a grassy area divided into greens by spiked railings, and each green had a midden. Gangs of midden-rakers from Blackhill crossed the canal to steal from the middens. He was told that Blackhill people were Catholics with beasts in their hair. One day two men came to the back greens with a machine that squirted blue flame and clouds of sparks. They cut the spikes from the railings with the flame, put them in a bag and took them away to use in the war. Mrs. Gilchrist downstairs said angrily, “Now even the youngest of these Blackhill kids will be able to rake our middens.” Other workmen build air-raid shelters in the back greens and a very big one in the school playground, and if Thaw heard the air-raid warning on the way to school he must run to the nearest shelter. Going up to school by the steep back lane one morning he heard the siren wailing in the blue sky. He was almost at school but turned and ran home to where his mother waited in the back-green shelter with the neighbours. At night dark green blinds were pulled down over the windows. Then Mr. Thaw put on an armband and steel hat and went into the street to search for houses showing illegal chinks of light.

  Someone told Mrs. Thaw that the former tenants of her flat had killed themselves by putting their heads in the oven and turning the gas on. She wrote at once to the corporation asking that her gas cooker be changed for an electric one, but as Mr. Thaw would still need food when he returned from work she baked him a shepherd’s pie, but with her lips more tightly pursed than usual.

  Her son always refused shepherd’s pie or any other food whose appearance disgusted him: spongy white tripe, soft penis-like sausages, stuffed sheep’s hearts with their valves and little arteries. When one of these came before him he poked it uncertainly with his fork and said, “I don’t want it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It looks queer.”

  “But you havnae tasted it! Taste just a wee bit. For my sake.”

  “No.”

  “Children in China are starving for food like that.”

  “Send it to them.”

  After more discussion his mother would say in a high-pitched voice, “You’ll sit at this table till you eat every bit” or “Just you wait till I tell your father about this, my dear.” Then he would put a piece of food in his mouth, gulp without tasting and vomit it back onto the plate. After that he would be shut in the back bedroom. Sometimes his mother came to the door and said, “Will you not eat just a wee bit of it? For my sake?” then Thaw, feeling cruel, shouted “No!” and went to the window and looked down into the back green. He would see friends playing there, or the midden-rakers, or neighbours hanging out washing, and feel so lonely and magnificent that he considered opening the window and jumping out. It was a bitter glee to imagine his corpse thudding to the ground among them. At last, with terror, he would hear his father coming clomp-clomp upstairs, carrying his bicycle. Usually Thaw ran to meet him. Now he heard his mother open the door, the mutter of voices in conspiracy, then footsteps coming to the bedroom and his mother whispering, “Don’t hurt him too much.”

  Mr. Thaw would enter with a grim look and say, “Duncan! You’ve behaved badly to your mother again. She goes to the bother and expense of making a good dinner and ye won’t eat it. Aren’t ye ashamed of yourself?”

  Thaw would hang his head.

  “I want you to apologize to her.”

  “Don’t know what ’polgize means.”

  “Tell her you’re sorry and you’ll eat what you’re given.”

  Then Thaw would snarl “No, I won’t!” and be thrashed. During the thrashing he screamed a lot and afterward stamped, yelled, tore his hair and banged his head against the wall until his parents grew frightened and Mr. Thaw shouted, “Stop that or I’ll draw my hand off yer jaw!”

  Then Thaw beat his own face with his fists, screaming, “Like this like this like this?”

  It was hard to silence him without undoing the justice of the punishment. On the advice of a neighbour they one day undressed the furiously kicking boy, filled a bath with cold water and plunged him in. The sudden chilling scald destroyed all his protest, and this treatment was used on later occasions with equal success. Shivering slightly he would be dried with soft towels before the living-room fire, then put to bed with his doll. Before sleep came he lay stunned and emotionless while his mother tucked him in. Sometimes he considered withholding the goodnight kiss but could never quite manage it.

  When he had been punished for not eating a particular food he was not given that food again but a boiled egg instead. Yet after hearing how the former tenants had misused their oven he looked very thoughtfully at the shepherd’s pie when it was brought to table that evening. At length he pointed and said, “Can I have some?”

  Mrs. Thaw looked at her husband then took her spoon and plonked a dollop onto Thaw’s plate. He stared at the mushy potato with particles of carrot, cabbage and mince in it and wondered if brains really looked like that. Fearfully he put some in his mouth and churned it with his tongue. It tasted good so he ate what was on the plate and asked for more. When the meal was over his mother said, “There. You like it. Aren’t ye ashamed of kicking up all that din about nothing?”

  “Can I go down to the back green?”

  “All right, but come when I call you, it’s getting late.” He hurried through the lobby, banged the front door behind him and ran downstairs, the weight of food in his stomach making him feel excited and powerful. In the warm evening sunlight he put his brow to the grass and somersaulted down a green slope till he fell flat from dizziness and lay with the tenements and blue sky spinning and tilting round and round his head. He keeked between the stems of sorrel and daisies at the midden, a three-sided brick shed where bins were kept. The sound of voices came indistinctly through the grass blades to his ears, and the scratchings of a steel-tipped boot on an iron railing, and the rumble of a bin being shifted. He sat up.

  Two boys slightly older than himself were bent over the bins and throwing out worn clothes, empty bottles, some pram wheels and a doormat, while a big boy of ten or eleven put them in a sack. One of the smaller boys found a hat with a bird’s wing on it. Mimicking the strut of a proud woman he put it on and said, “Look at me, Boab, am I no’ the big cheese?

  The older boy said, “
Stop that. You’ll get the auld wife after us.”

  He dumped the sack over the railings into the next green and the three of them climbed over to it. Thaw followed by squeezing between the railings then lay down again on the grass. He heard them whisper together and the big boy said, “Never mind about him.”

  He realized he was frightening them and followed more boldly into the next green, though keeping a distance. He was slightly appalled when the big boy turned and said, “What d’ye want, ye wee bugger?”

  Thaw said, “I’m coming with you.”

  His scalp tightened, his heart knocked on his ribs but this boy had never eaten what he had eaten. The boy with the hat said,“Thump him, Boab!”

  Boab said, “Why d’ye want tae come with us?”

  “Because.”

  “Because of what?”

  “Nothing. Just because.”

  “Ye’ll have tae carry things if ye come with us. Will ye collect the books?”

  “Aye.”

  “All right then.”

  After this all magazines and comic papers were left to Thaw, who soon learned which were worth picking from the garbage. They visited every back green in the block, leaving some refuse scattered across each, and were chased from the last by a woman who followed them through her close shouting breathless promises to call the police.

  A girl of twelve waited in the street outside holding the handle of a pram with three wheels. She pointed at Thaw and said, “Where did ye pick that up?”

  Boab said, “Never mind him,” and loaded his sack onto the pram which bulged with rubbish already. The two wee boys harnessed themselves to it with strings tied to the front axle, then with Boab and the girl pushing and Thaw running alongside they went quickly down the street. They passed semi-detached villas with privet hedges, a small power station humming behind aspen trees, allotments with beds of lettuce like green roses and glasshouses glittering in the late sunshine. They went through a gate in a rusty fence and climbed a blue cinder path through a jungle of nettles. The air was thick with vegetable stink, the wee boys groaned with the effort of pulling, a low thundering vibrated the ground under them and at the top they reached the brink of a deep ravine. One end was shut by double doors of huge rotting timber. A glossy arch of water slipped over this, crashed to the bottom, then poured along the ravine and flowed through open doors at the end into a small loch fringed with reeds and paved with lily leaves. Thaw knew this must be the canal, a dangerous forbidden place where children were drowned. He followed his companions uphill among structures where water spilled over ledges, trickled through cracks, or lay in rushy half-stagnant ponds with swans paddling on clear spaces in the middle. They crossed a plank bridge under the shadow of so high a waterfall that the din of it was deafening. They crossed stony ground and then another bridge and heard dimly a distant bugle blown in a caricature of a battle call.

  “Peely Wally,” said Boab.

  They went quickly down a cinder path, through a gate and into a street.

  Thaw found it a foreign kind of street. The tenements were faced with grey stone instead of red, landing windows had broken glass in them, or no glass, or even no window frames, being oblong holes half bricked up to stop children falling out. The men who had taken the spikes away to the war from Riddrie (where Thaw lived) had removed all the railings here, and the spaces between pavement and tenement (neat gardens in Riddrie) were spaces of flattened earth where children too young to walk scratched the ground with bent spoons or floated bits of wood in puddles left from last week’s rain. In the middle of the street a pale lipless smiling young man sat on a donkey cart with a bugle on his knees. His cart held boxes of coloured toys which could be bought with rags, bottles and jam jars, and already a crowd of children surrounded him wearing cardboard sombreros, whooping on whistles or waving bright flags and windmills. When he noticed Boab and the pram he shouted, “Make way! Make way! Let the man through!”

  While these two haggled Thaw and the smaller boys stood round the donkey and admired the mildness of its face, the hardness of its forehead and the white hair inside the trumpet-shaped ears. Thaw argued about the donkey’s age with the boy wearing the hat.

  “I bet ye a pound he’s older than you onyway,” said the boy.

  “And I bet ye a pound he isnae.”

  “Why d’ye think he isnae?”

  “Why d’ye think he is?”

  “Peely!” shouted the boy. “How old is your donkey?”

  “A hundred!” shouted Peely.

  “There ye are—I wiz right!” said the boy. “Now you’ve tae give me a pound.” He held his hand out, saying, “Come on now. Pay up!”

  The children who had heard the argument whispered and giggled, and some beckoned friends who were standing at a distance. Thaw, frightened, said, “I havenae a pound.”

  “But ye promised! Didn’t he promise?”

  “Aye, he promised,” said several voices. “He bet a pound.”

  “He’s got to pay.”

  “I don’t believe the donkey is a hundred,” said Thaw.

  “Ye think ye’re awful clever, don’t ye?” a thin girl shouted venomously and sarcastic voices cried, “Oh, Mammy, Mammy, I’m an awful smart wee boy.”

  “Why does the smart wee boy no’ believe the donkey’s a hundred?”

  “Because I read it in an ENCYCLOPAEDIA,” said Thaw, for though he was still unable to read he had once pleased his parents by saying encyclopaedia without being specially taught and the word had peculiar qualities for him. Pronounced in the service of his lie it had an immediate effect. Someone at the edge of the crowd jumped into the air, clapped hands above head and cried, “Oh, the big word! The big word!” and the mob exploded into laughter and mockery. Waving flags and blowing whistles, they raved and stamped around the frightened stone-still Thaw until his lips trembled and a drop of water spilled from his left eye.

  “Look!” they yelled. “He’s greeting!” “Crybaby! Crybaby!”

  “Cowardy custard, stick yer nose in the mustard!” “Riddrie pup with yer tail tied up!” “Awa’ hame and tell yer mammy!” Thaw was blinded by red rage and screamed, “Buggers! Ye damned buggers!” and started running down the darkening street. He heard the clattering feet of pursuers and Peely Wally laugh like a cock-crow and Boab roar, “Let him go! Leave him alone!”

  He turned a corner and ran down a street past staring children and men who paid no attention, through a small park with a pond and the sound of splashing water, then down a rutted lane, going slower because they weren’t following now, with longer intervals between his sobs. He sat down on a chunk of masonry and swallowed air until his heart beat more calmly.

  There was empty ground in front of him with the shadows of tenements stretching a long way across it. Colours had become distinctions of grey and close-mouths’ black rectangles in tenement walls. The sky was covered with blue-grey cloud, but currents of wind had opened channels through this and he could see through the channels into a green sunset air above. Down the broadest of these flew five swans on their way to a lower stretch of the canal or to a pond in the city parks.

  Thaw started back the way he had come, sniffing and wiping tears from his nose. In the small dim park only the splashing of water was distinct. It was night in the streets. He was glad to see no children or grown people or any of the adolescent groups who usually gather by street corners at nightfall. Black lampposts stood at wide intervals on either kerb. The tenement windows were black like holes in a face. Twice he saw wardens cross the end of some street ahead, silent helmeted men examining blinded windows for illegal chinks of light. The dark, similar streets seemed endlessly to open out of each other until he despaired of getting home and sat on the kerb with his face in his hands and girned aloud. He fell into a dwam in which he felt only the hard kerb under his backside and awoke suddenly with a hushing sound in his ears. For a second this seemed like his mother singing to him then he recognized the noise of waterfalls. The sky had cleared and a
startling moon had risen. Though not full there was enough of it to light the canal embankment across the road, and the gate, and the cinder path. He went gladly and fearfully to the gate and climbed the path with the hushing growing in his ears to the full thunder of the falling stream. Several trembling stars were reflected in the dark water below.

  As he stepped off the bridge Thaw seemed to hear the moon yell at him. It was the siren. Its ululations came eerily across the rooftops to menace him, the only life. He ran down the path between the nettles and through the gate and past the dark allotments. The siren swooned into silence and a little later (Thaw had never heard this before) there was a dull iron noise, gron-gron-gron-gron, and dark shapes passed above him. Later there were abrupt thuddings as if giant fists were battering a metal ceiling over the city. Beams of light widened, narrowed and groped above the rooftops, and between two tenements he saw the horizon lit orange and red with irregular flashing lights. Black flies seemed to be circling in the glow. Beyond the power station he ran his head into the stomach of a warden running the other way. “Duncan!” shouted the man. Thaw was picked into the air and shaken.

  “Where have ye been? Where have ye been? Where have ye been?” shouted the man senselessly, and Thaw, full of love and gratitude, shouted, “Daddy!”

  Mr. Thaw tucked his son under one arm and ran back home. Between the jolts of his father’s strides Thaw heard the iron noise again. They went up steps into the close-mouth and Thaw was put down. They stood together in the dark, breathing hard; then Mr. Thaw said in a weak voice Thaw hardly recognized, “I suppose you know the worry you’ve given your mother and me?”

  There was a shriek and bang and pieces of dirt hit Thaw on the cheek.

  From the living-room window next morning he saw a hole in the pavement across the street. The blast had shaken soot down the chimney onto the living-room floor, and Mrs. Thaw cleaned it up, stopping sometimes to talk with neighbours who called to discuss the raid. They agreed that it might have been worse, but Thaw was very uneasy. His adventure with the midden-rakers was a horrider crime than not eating dinner so he expected punishment on an unusually large scale. After closely watching his mother that day—noticing the way she hummed to herself when dusting, her small thoughtful pauses in the middle of work, her way of scolding when he was stupid during a lesson on clock reading—he became sure that punishment was not in her mind, and this worried him. He feared pain, but deserved to be hurt, and was not going to be hurt. He had not returned to exactly the same house.