Lanark

by Alasdair Gray

  “Don’t the police come?”

  “We run away before they come. Murdoch Muir’s dad is a policeman. When we tell him about it he roars and laughs and tells us whit he would dae tae us if he caught us.” Thaw said, “That’s anti-social.”

  “Mibby, but it’s natural. More natural than going walks by yourself. Come on, admit you’d like tae come with us one night.”

  “But I wouldnae.”

  “Admit you’d sooner look at that comic than read your art criticism.”

  Coulter pointed at the cover of a neighbour’s comic. It showed a blonde in a bathing costume being entwined by a huge serpent. Thaw opened his mouth to deny this, then frowned and shut it. Coulter said, “Come on, that picture makes your cock prick, doesn’t it? Admit you’re like the rest of us.” Thaw went to the next classroom alarmed and confused. “That picture makes your cock prick. Admit you’re like the rest of us.” He remembered other words heard long before but carefully ignored: “I wouldnae mind feeling her belly in a dark room.”

  He had known from the age of four that babies hatched from their mothers’ stomachs. Mr. Thaw had described the growth of the embryo in detail, and Thaw had assumed this process occurred spontaneously in most women above a certain age. He accepted this as he accepted his father’s account of the origin of species and the solar system: it was an interesting, mechanical, not very mysterious business which men could know about but not influence. Nothing he heard or read later had mentioned inevitable links between love, sex and birth, so he never thought there were any. Sex was something he had discovered squatting on the bedroom floor. It was so disgusting that it had to be indulged secretly and not mentioned to others. It fed on dreams of cruelty, had its climax in a jet of jelly and left him feeling weak and lonely. It had nothing to do with love. Love was what he felt for Kate Caldwell, a wish to be near her and do things that would make her admire him. He hid this love because public knowledge of it would put him in an inferior position with other people and with Kate herself. He was ashamed of it, but not disgusted. And now, jerkily, under the influence of Coulter’s remark, his separate pictures of love, sex and birth started to become one.

  He was crossing the hill in the park when he heard musical throbbing come from the sky. Five swans flew over his head in V formation, their thrumming wings and honking throats blending in one music. Lowering their feet they dropped out of sight behind the trees which screened the boating pond. During the next days he collected spare bits of bread and threw them in the pond on his way to school. One morning he saw something that kept him on the shore longer than usual. Beside the island two swans faced each other in such an intent way that he thought they were going to fight. Spreading their wings they rose from the water almost to the tail, pressed their breasts together, then their brows, then their beaks. Pointing their faces skyward they twined necks, then untwisted and coiled them backward, each reflecting the other like a mirror. Together they made and unmade with their bodies the shapes of Greek lyres and renaissance silverware. Suddenly one of them broke the pattern, slipped adroitly behind the other, mounted her tail and thrust his body up and down it while she plunged across the water in a thresh of wings and waves. As they passed Thaw he saw the male push the female’s head under water with his beak, perhaps to make her more docile. At the end of the loch they separated, straightened necks and sailed indifferently apart. The female, being more dishevelled, was readjusting her feathers when the male, in a remote bay, started probing unenthusiastically for minnows.

  Ten minutes later Thaw joined the lines in the playground full of grey depression. In class he looked coldly on the pupils, the teacher, and Kate Caldwell most of all. They were part of a deceptive surface, horrifying this time not because it was weak and could not keep out Hell but because it was transparent and could not hide the underlying filth. That evening he walked with Coulter along the canal bank and told him about the swans. Coulter said, “Have you seen slugs do it?”

  “Slugs?”

  “Aye, slugs. When I was on MacTaggart’s farm in Kinlochrua I came out one morning after some rain and here were all these slugs lying in the grass in couples. I took them apart and put them together again tae see how they did it. They seemed so human. Much more human than your swans.”

  Thaw stood still for a moment and then cried aloud, “I wish to God I would never want another human being in my whole life! I wish to God I was …”

  He paused. A word from a recent botany lesson entered his head. “… self-fertilizing! Oh, Lord God Maker and Sustainer of Heaven and Hell make me self-fertilizing! If you exist.” Coulter looked at him, slightly awestruck, then said, “You scare me sometimes, Duncan. The things you say arenae altogether sane. It all comes of wanting to be superior to ordinary life.”

  CHAPTER 17.

  The Key

  Mr. Thaw worked as a labourer and then as a wages clerk for a firm building housing estates round the city edge. The Korean war began, the cost of living rose and Mrs. Thaw got a job as a shop assistant in the afternoons. She came to feel very tired and suffered depressions which her doctor thought were caused by the change of life. When the tea things had been cleared away in the evenings she would sew or knit, glancing occasionally at Thaw, who sat frowning at the pages of a textbook and fingering his brow or cheek. His inattention drew comments from her.

  “You’re not working.”

  “I know.”

  “You ought to be working. The exams are coming off soon. You’ve made up your mind not to pass and you won’t.”

  “I know.”

  “And you could pass if you tried. Your teachers all say you could. And you sit there doing nothing and you’ll make us all ashamed of you.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Well, do something! And don’t scratch! You sit there clot-clot-clotting at your face till it’s like a lump of raw meat. Think of your sister Ruth if you won’t think of yourself or me. She’s ashamed enough as it is of a brother who creeps about the school like a hunchback.”

  “I can’t help my asthma.”

  “No, but if you did the exercises the physiotherapist at the Royal told you to do you could walk about like a human being. You were told to do five-minutes exercise each morning and evening. How often did you do them? Once.”

  “Twice.”

  “Twice. And why? Why don’t you want to improve yourself?”

  “Laziness, I suppose.”

  “Hm!”

  Thaw pretended once more to study a page of mathematics but found himself brooding on a talk with the head English teacher about the school curriculum. Thaw said much of it was neither interesting in itself nor useful in a practical way. Mr. Meikle had looked thoughtfully across the bent backs and heads of his class and said, “Remember, Duncan, when most people leave school they have to live by work which can’t be liked for its own sake and whose practical application is outside their grasp. Unless they learn to work obediently because they’re told to, and for no other reason, they’ll be unfit for human society.”

  Thaw sighed, picked up a textbook and read:

  A man and his wife clean their teeth from the same cylindrical tube of toothpaste on alternate days. The interior diameter of the nozzle through which the paste is squeezed is .08 of the interior diameter of the tube, which is 3.4 cms. If the man squeezes out a cylinder of toothpaste 1.82 cms in length each time he uses it, and his wife a cylinder 3.13 cms in length, find the length of the tube to the nearest mm. if it lasts from the 3rd of January to the 8th of March inclusive and the man is the first to use it.

  A hysterical rage gripped him. Dropping the book, he clutched at his head and rubbed and scratched and towzled it until his mother shouted “Stop!”

  “But this is absurd! This is ludicrous! This is unb-unb-unb-unb-unb-unb”—he choked— “unbearable! I don’t understand it, I can’t learn it, what good will it do me?”

  “It’ll get you through your exams! That’s all the good it needs to do! You can forget it when
you’ve got your Higher Leaving Certificate!”

  “Why can’t they examine me in standing on my head balancing chairs on my feet? Homework for that might improve my health.”

  “And do you really think you know what’s good for you better than the teachers and headmasters who’ve studied the subject all their lives?”

  “Yes. Yes. Where my own needs are concerned I do know better.”

  Mrs. Thaw put a hand to her side and said in a strange voice, “Oh, bloody hell!” Then she said, “Why did I bring children into the world?” and began weeping.

  Thaw was alarmed. It was the first time he had heard her curse or seen her weep and he tried to sound reasonable and calm. “Mummy, it doesnae matter if I fail those exams. If I leave school and get a job you won’t need to work so hard.”

  Mrs. Thaw dabbed her eyes and resumed sewing, her lips pressed tight together. After a pause she said, “And what job will you get? An errand boy’s?”

  “There must be other jobs.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know, but there must be!”

  “Hm!”

  Thaw shut his books and said, “I’m going for a walk.”

  “That’s right, run away. Men can always run away from work. Women never can.”

  There was daylight in the sky but none in the streets and the lamps were lit. Boys of his own age strolled on the pavements in crowds of three and four, girls walked in couples, groups of both sexes gossiped and giggled by café doors. Thaw felt inferior and conspicuous. Overheard whispers seemed to mock the absent look he wore to disarm criticism, overheard laughter seemed caused by the upright hair he never brushed or combed. He walked quickly into streets with fewer shops where people moved in enigmatic units. His confidence grew with the darkness. His face took on a resolute, slightly wolfish look, his feet hit the pavement firmly, he strode past couples embracing in close mouths feeling isolated by a stern purpose which put him outside merely human satisfactions. This purpose was hardly one he could have explained (after all he was just walking, not walking to anywhere) but sometimes he thought he was searching for the key.

  The key was small and precise, yet in its use completely general and completely particular. Once found it would solve every problem: asthma, homework, shyness before Kate Caldwell, fear of atomic war; the key would make everything painful, useless and wrong become pleasant, harmonious and good. Since he thought of it as something that could be contained in one or two sentences, he had looked for it in the public libraries but seldom on the science or philosophy shelves. The key had to be recognized at once and by heart, not led up to and proved by reasoning. Nor could it be an article of religion, since its discovery would make churches and clergy unnecessary.

  Nor was it poetry, for poems were too finished and perfect to finish and perfect anything themselves. The key was so simple and obvious that it had been continually overlooked and was less likely to be a specialist’s triumphant conclusion than to be mentioned casually by someone innocent and dull; so he had searched among biographies and autobiographies, correspondences, histories and travel books, in footnotes to outdated medical works and the indexes of Victorian natural histories. Recently he had thought the key more likely to be found on a night walk through the streets, printed on a scrap of paper blown out of the rubble of a bombed factory, or whispered in a dark street by someone leaning suddenly out of a window.

  Tonight he came to a piece of waste ground, a hill among tenements that had been suburban twenty years earlier. The black shape of it curved against the lesser blackness of the sky and the yellow spark of a bonfire flickered just under the summit. He left the pallid gaslit street and climbed upward, feeling coarse grass against his shoes and occasional broken bricks. When he reached the fire it had sunk to a few small flames among a heap of charred sticks and rags. He groped on the ground till he found some scraps of cardboard and paper and added them to the fire with a torn-up handful of withered grass. A tall flame shot up and he watched it from outside the brightness it cast. He imagined other people arriving one at a time and standing in a ring round the firelight. When ten or twelve had assembled they would hear a heavy thudding of wings; a black shape would pass overhead and land on the dark hilltop, and the messenger would walk down to them bringing the key. The fire burned out and he turned and looked down on Glasgow. Nothing solid could be seen, only lights—streetlamps like broken necklaces and bracelets of light, neon cinema signs like silver and ruby brooches, the ruby, emerald and amber twinkle of traffic regulators—all glowing like treasure spilled on the blackness.

  He went back down to the dingy streets and entered a close in one of the dingiest. The stair was narrow, ill lit and smelling of cat piss. Before a lavatory door on a half landing he stepped over two children who knelt on a rug, playing with a clockwork toy. The top landing had three doors, one with FORBES COULTER on it in Gothic script among gold vine leaves, framed behind glass which the passage of years had blotched with mildew on the inside. The door was opened by a small woman with an angry cloud of curly grey hair. She said plaintively, “Robert’s down in the lavatory Duncan, you’ll just have to come in and wait.”

  Thaw stepped across a cupboard-sized lobby into a tidy comfortable crowded room. Wardrobe, sideboard, table and chairs left narrow spaces between them. A tall window had a sink in front and a gas cooker beside it. A shadow was cast over the fireplace by drying clothes on a pulley in the ceiling, and the table held the remains of a meal.

  Mrs. Coulter began moving plates to the sink and Thaw sat by the fire and stared into a bed-recess near the door. Coulter’s father lay there, his shoulders supported by pillows, his massive sternly lined blind enduring face turned slightly toward the room.

  Thaw said, “Are you any better, Mr. Coulter?”

  “In a way, yes, Duncan; but then again, in a way, no. How’s the school doing?”

  “I’m all right at art and English.”

  “Art is your subject isn’t it? I used to paint a bit myself. During the thirties a few of us—we were unemployed, you know−we got together on Thursday evenings in a room near Brigton Cross and we’d get a teacher or a model along from the art school. We called ourselves the Brigton Socialist Art Club. Have you heard of Ewan Kennedy? The sculptor?”

  “I’m not sure, Mr. Coulter. Mibby. I mean the name’s familiar but I’m no’ sure.”

  “He was one of us. He went to London and did quite well for himself. A year ago…. No. Wait.”

  Thaw looked at Mr. Coulter’s big gnarled hand lying quietly on the quilt, a cigarette with a charred tip between two fingers. “It was three years ago. His name was in the Bulletin. He was making a bust of Winston Churchill for some town in England. I thought when I read it, I used to know you.”

  Mr. Coulter hummed a quiet tune then said, “My father was a picture framer to trade. He did everything in those days, carving the wood, gilding it, even hanging the picture sometimes. Some of his work must be in the Art Galleries to the present day. I used to help him with the hanging. Hanging a picture is an art in itself. What I meant to tell you was this: I was hanging these pictures in a house in Menteith Row on the Green. It’s a slum now but the wealthiest folk in Glasgow once lived in those houses, and in my time some of them still did, and this house belonged to Jardine of Jardine and Beattie, the shipbuilders. Young Jardine was a lawyer and became Lord Provost, and his son proved tae be a bit of a rogue, but never mind. I was hanging these pictures in the entrance hall: marble floor, oak-panelled walls. The frames were carved walnut covered with gold leaf, but the hall was dark because there were no windows opening into it, apart from a wee skylight window that was no use at all because it was stained glass. When I had finished I opened the front door and went down the steps onto the pavement outside and stood looking in through the open door. It was a morning in the early spring, cold, but the sun quite bright. A girl came along and said, ‘What are ye staring at?’ I pointed through the door and said ‘Look at that. It looks like a mill
ion dollars.’ The sun was shining intae the hall and the gold frames were shining on the walls. It really did look like a million dollars.”

  Mr. Coulter smiled a little.

  Coulter entered and said, “Hullo, Duncan. Hullo, Forbes. Forbes, your cigarette’s out. Will I light it for you?”

  “Ye can light it if you like.”

  Coulter got a match and lit the cigarette, then went to the sink, put an arm round his mother’s waist, and said, “My ain wee mammy, how about a fag? You’ve given my daddy a fag, give me a fag.”

  Mrs. Coulter took a cigarette packet from her apron pocket and handed it over, grumbling, “You’re no’ old enough tae smoke but.”

  “True, but my wee mammy can refuse me nothing. Have these two been discussing art?”

  “Aye, they’ve been talking about their art.”

  “Well, Thaw, my intellectual friend, what’s it to be? A game of chess or a dauner along the canal bank?”

  “I wouldnae mind a dauner.”

  They walked on the towpath talking about women. Coulter had dropped the hard cheerful manner he wore at home. Thaw said, “The only time I reach them is when I speak at the debating society. Even Kate Caldwell notices me then. She was in the front row of desks last night, staring at my face with her mouth and eyes wide open. I felt dead witty and intellectual. I felt like a king or something. She sits behind me at maths now. I’ve made a poem about it.”

  He paused, hoping that Coulter would ask him to recite. Coulter said, “Everybody writes poems about girls at our age. It’s what they call a phase. Even big Sam Lang writes poems about girls. Even I occasionally—”

  “Never mind. I like my wee poem. Bob, if I ask you a question will ye promise to answer truthfully?”