Lanark

by Alasdair Gray

  “That’s hellish! Are there no rules against that sort of thing?” “There’s meant tae be a lane kept clear up the middle of the shed, but in a work like McHargs it’s not easy.”

  Coulter chuckled.

  “A weird thing happened the other day. This bloke was directing the lowering of a girder from the crane; you know, he was standing underneath directing the lowering with his hands (you cannae hear a word in that din); you know−lower, lower, a bit to the left; all right, let it go now. The funny thing was, he was looking up at the bloke at the controls most of the time and he didnae notice that at the last moment he directed the girder to be lowered ontae his foot. He gave a scream like a soprano hitting a top note. We all looked to see what the matter was, but it took a while tae find out. He was standing up like the rest of us, only his foot was crushed under this girder. He couldnae even fall down!”

  Thaw gave an appalled laugh and said, “You know that’s very funny but—”

  “Aye. Well, anyway, this business of being a man keeps you happy for mibby a week, then on your second Monday it hits you. To be honest the thought’s been growing on you all through Sunday, but it really hits you on Monday: I’ve tae go on doing this, getting up at this hour, sitting in this tram in these overalls dragging on this fag, clocking on in this queue at the gate.’ Hullo, here we go again!’ ‘You’re fuckin’ right we go!’ and back intae the machine shop. You realize you’ll be spending more of your life in this place than anywhere, excepting mibby bed. It’s worse than school. School was compulsory—you were just a boy, you neednae take it seriously, you could miss a day if your mammy was agreeable and wrote a note. But engineering isnae compulsory. I chose it. And I’m a man now. I have tae take it seriously, I have tae keep shoving my face against this grindstone.”

  Coulter was silent for a while.

  “Mind you, this feeling doesnae last. You stop thinking. Life becomes a habit. You get up, dress, eat, go tae work, clock in etcetera etcetera automatically, and think about nothing but the pay packet on Friday and the booze-up last Saturday. Life’s easy when you’re a robot. Then accidents happen that start you thinking again. You know the Royal visit last week?”

  “Aye.”

  “Well, there’s a railway line at the back of the works, and the Royal train was to go along it at three in the afternoon, so the whole work got time off tae see it. So when the train comes along there are four or five hundred of us at the edge of the line in our greasy overalls. The Queen’s in the first carriage looking dead cool and gracious and waving; and in the middle are a lot of old men like Lord Provosts with chains round their necks, all waving like mad; and in a sort of observation car at the end sits the Duke in his wee yachting cap. He’s sitting at a table with a glass of something on it, and he gives us a wave, but more offhand. And we all just stand there, glowering.”

  Thaw laughed. “Did nobody wave? I think I’d have waved. Just out of politeness.”

  “With the whole Union there? They’d have hanged ye. You can laugh, Duncan, but the sight of the Duke set me back a good three weeks. I havenae recovered from it yet. Why should he be enjoying a dram in a comfortable train while I … ach!” said Coulter disgustedly. “It’s enough to make you rob a bank. I’ve thought a lot about bank robbery recently. If I’d even a remote chance of succeeding I’d try it too. I’ve no faith in football pools.”

  Thaw said, “You’re an apprentice. You won’t be in the machine shop for good.”

  “No. Six months in the machine shop, six months in the drawing office, two nights a week at the technical college, and if I pass the exams I’ll be a qualified engineering draughtsman in three years.”

  “And then things won’t be too bad.”

  “Won’t they? How did you feel about becoming a librarian?”

  They crossed a stream by a plank bridge and came to an acre or two of level turf with a white flagpole in the middle. Lovers and picnic parties sat in the shade at the edge of the wood and children charged about playing anarchic ball games.

  A few benches on the other side of this green space overlooked the sky and had one or two elderly couples on them. Thaw and Coulter crossed to the benches and sat on one. They were on the edge of a plateau near the top of the Cathkin Braes, and a small rocky cliff went down from their feet to another level space noisy with child play and fringed by trees. From there the land sank in steep wooded terraces to a valley floor carpeted with rooftops and prickly with factory chimneys. To the east the Clyde could be seen meandering among farms, fields, pitheads and slag-bings, then Glasgow hid it till the course was marked by a skeletal procession of cranes marching into the west. Behind the city stood the long northern ridge of the Campsie Fells, bare and heather-green and creased by watercourses, and at this height they could see the Highland bens beyond them like a line of broken teeth. Everything looked unusually distinct, for it was Fair fortnight when big foundries stopped production and the smoke was allowed to clear.

  “D’ye see Riddrie?” asked Thaw. “That reddish patch? Look, there’s my old primary school on one side and Alexandra Park on the other. Where’s your house?”

  “Garngad’s too low to be seen from here. I’m trying to see McHargs. It should be near those cranes behind Ibrox. Aye, there! There! The top of the machine shop is showing above those tenements.”

  “I should be able to see the art school, it’s on top of a hill behind Sauchiehall Street—Glasgow seems all built on hills. Why don’t we notice them when we’re in it?”

  “Because none of the main roads touch them. The main roads run east and west and the hills are all between.”

  On the grass at the foot of the cliff a big strong-bodied girl of about fourteen stood with legs apart and hands on hips between two piles of jackets. She wore a blue dress and grumbled impatiently as her younger brothers placed a football some distance in front of her and prepared to kick it at the goal mouth. Thaw stared at her in admiration. He said, “She’s great. I’d like to draw her.”

  “Nude?”

  “Anyhow.”

  “She’s not exactly an oil painting. She’s no Kate Caldwell.” “Damn Kate Caldwell.”

  They got up and walked on.

  “Yes,” said Coulter glumly. “You know what you want and you’re in a place where they’ll help you get it.”

  “It was an accident,” said Thaw defensively. “If the head librarian hadnae been in America, and my Dad hadnae insisted I go to night classes, and the registrar hadnae been English and liked my work—”

  “Aye, but it was an accident that could happen to you. Not to me. No accident but an atom bomb can get me out of engineering. I’ve no ambitions, Duncan. I’m like the man in Hemingway’s story, I don’t want to be special, I just want to feel good. And I’m in work that’s only bearable if I feel as little as I can.”

  “In four months you’ll be in the drawing office and learning something creative.”

  “Creative? What’s creative about designing casings for machine units? I’ll be better off, but because it’s better wearing a clean suit than dirty overalls. And I’ll get more money. But I won’t feel good.”

  “It’ll be years before I earn money.”

  “Mibby. But yell be doing what you want.”

  “True,” said Thaw. “I’ll be doing what I want. I suppose”—he turned and waved toward the city— “I’m nearly the luckiest man living here.”

  They re-entered the wood and came to a clearing with the iron structure of a child’s swing in it. Thaw ran and jumped onto the wooden seat, grabbed the chains on each side and swung violently backward and forward in greater and greater arcs.

  “Yah—yip—yeaaaaaaaaaah!” he shouted. “I’ll be doing what I want, won’t I?”

  Coulter leaned against the trunk of a tree and watched with a slight ironical grin.

  INTERLUDE

  The swing with Thaw on it flew high and stopped, leaving him in an absurd position with his knees higher than his back-flung head. The tree no long
er rustled. Each branch and leaf was locked photographically in a single moment and as in old photographs the colour faded out, leaving the scene monochrome and brownish. Lanark stared at it through the ward window and said thoughtfully, “Thaw was not good at being happy.”

  The oracle said He was bad at it.

  “Yet that is almost a happy ending.”

  A story can always end happily by stopping at a cheerful moment. Of course in nature the only end is death, but death hardly ever happens when people are at their best. That is why we like tragedies. They show men ending energetically with their wits about them and deserving to do it.

  “Did Thaw die tragically?”

  No. He botched his end. It set no example, not even a bad one. He was unacceptable to the infinite bright blankness, the clarity without edge which only selfishness fears. It flung him back into a second-class railway carriage, creating you.

  Lanark spread cheese on a slice of rye bread and said, “I don’t understand that.”

  Rima’s head stirred among the waves of blond hair on the pillow. Without opening her eyes she murmured, “Go on with the story.”

  CHAPTER 21.

  The Tree

  The front bedroom was dusty, the curtains unclean, books and papers overlapped the tortoise-shell combs and pin trays on the dressing table. On the wall near the bed a black-bordered photograph of the late king was stuck beside the only picture by Thaw his mother much liked: a childish one of a tree shedding leaves in an autumn gale. These remained because their presence brought Mrs. Thaw less to mind than their removal would have done.

  On the first day of art school he woke to the sweet rotten odour which had come when the corpse lay coffined on the hearth-rug. It had taken two or three weeks to vanish and he still sometimes found it on entering the room unexpectedly, though he knew by now it must be altogether ghostly and subjective. Through a gap in the curtains he saw a slice of colourless sky with dark rags of cloud moving across like the shadows of smoke. The ten-to-eight factory horns mourned over the city roofs and he curled more tightly into the nest of warmth his body made in the mattress, for like all bad sleepers he enjoyed bed most in the minutes before leaving it. Faint sounds came from the kitchen where his father prepared breakfast. Hundreds of thousands of men in dirty coats and heavy boots were tramping along grey streets to the gates of forges and machine shops. He thought with awe of the energy needed to keep up a civilization, of the implacable routines which started drawing it from the factory worker daily at eight, from the clerk and shopkeeper at nine. Why didn’t everyone decide to stay in bed one morning? It would mean the end of civilization, but in spite of two world wars the end of civilization was still an idea, while bed was a warm immediate fact. He heard his father approach the door and shut his eyes. Mr. Thaw entered quietly, pulled back the curtains, came to the bed and laid a hand on Thaw’s brow. Thaw smiled and opened his eyes. His father smiled and said, “Were you really asleep?” “Not really.”

  Over breakfast they talked about money.

  “How much will you need for materials?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t yet know what materials I’ll need. But I can get them on account at the school shop.”

  “That’s a very bad idea. It’s too easy. I can see you buying something, losing it and buying another.”

  Thaw said stiffly, “Have you reasons for doubting my honesty?” “I don’t doubt your honesty but I distrust your memory. If you get goods on account be sure to keep the invoices as a reminder. How much will you need for the midday meal?” “Two shillings.”

  “Ten bob a week for food. Your tram fares won’t come to more than five shillings, so here’s a pound.”

  “That’s too much.”

  “Regard the extra as pocket money. No doubt you’ll want a coffee with a friend sometime.”

  Thaw had hoped for more pocket money. He said in no particular tone of voice, “Thanks very much.”

  “And Duncan, five shillings a week isn’t much pocket money for a boy who’ll soon be eighteen. If you ever want to take a lassie out, let me know and I’ll give you more.”

  Garnethill was one of several whale-shaped hills lying parallel to the Clyde and the school was on a quiet street along the spine of it. The main part was an elegant building designed by Mackintosh in the eighteen-eighties but Thaw entered the annexe across the road: a terrace of old houses with new additions among them. He walked down a twisting corridor with so many unexpected descents that it seemed underground. The studio at the end was filled with clear grey morning light from windows in the girder-supported roof. Among tall easels, plaster statues and draught screens some girls crowded loosely in a space like a forest clearing, and boys sat on stools talking nonchalantly in couples. Some smoked and Thaw envied them, for a cigarette would have employed his hands. He could have opened a book and sat behind something reading it, but he was tired of being thought a bookish hermit and meant to forge a new, confident, sardonic, mysterious character for himself; so frowning and leaning against the wall he pretended to see nobody, though glancing furtively at one of the girls. She sat cross-kneed on the pedestal of the discus thrower, sometimes talking to the girls nearby, sometimes tilting her head back to exhale smoke from her nostrils. She wore a suède jacket and tight skirt, and a blond curl curved down to half hide her left eye. Thaw covered his own eyes with his hands as if shielding them from light and stared between the fingers at the other girls. Altogether they gave an impression of bright mirthful sexuality, but separately their attraction was lessened by something schoolgirlish in the dress or markedly individual in the face. From the babble of their conversation only the voice of the blond girl reached him distinctly. Her low notes impressed his ear as velvet impresses fingertips. “I’m glad they couldn’t send me to university, actually, ‘cause actually art school is more relaxing….”

  A brisk white-haired little lady entered and softly called their names from a register. She told them their curriculum, dictated a list of materials and gave the numbers of lockers to store them in.

  “Each month you will paint a picture in your own time to be exhibited in the assembly hall. We on the staff look forward to these exhibitions with great interest and even excitement, for they show how well you have grasped what we teach you in class. The theme of your first painting is”?she took a slip of paper from her register and examined it?“the subject is Washing Day and must contain a minimum of three figures.” Then she ordered them to get paper and a drawing board from the school shop, made them sit in twos before high-legged narrow tables, and went round with a basket of burned-out light bulbs, placing one on each table to be drawn in careful outline. Later she moved among them, giving quiet words of correction and encouragement and making feathery little sketches on the sides of papers to show how the bulbs should be represented. Thaw worked stolidly, his face sometimes expressionless, sometimes bewildered as he fought a gathering rage and disgust. Once he muttered to his neighbour, a square-faced, fair-moustached, well-dressed student, “This is incredible.”

  “What is?”

  “Art from a dead light bulb.”

  “Not exciting, I admit, but perhaps we should learn to walk before we run.”

  He had a bland fee-paying school dialect and Thaw detested him.

  Halfway through the morning the bell rang and they straggled through the corridor to the refectory, a large low-ceilinged place packed with students who seemed at home there. Thaw stood for ten minutes at the end of an untidy queue. People kept leaving the head of it with coffee and biscuits while others kept joining friends in the middle, so he returned to the studio. Two boys sat in a corner drinking tea from thermos flasks and discussing landladies in a severe border dialect whose words seemed cut in coarse granite. They fell silent as Thaw approached. He nodded at the flasks and said, “That’s a good idea. The refectory’s too crowded for comfort.”

  “Aye, and too dear. On a grant like ours we’ve to economize.” The other said accusingly, “Judging by y
our face you don’t think much of the lesson.”

  “No. It’s rotten, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? Have we not to master the techniques before practising them?”

  “But technique and practice are the same thing! We can draw nothing well unless it interests us, and we only learn to draw it well by first drawing it badly, not by drawing what bores us stiff. Learning to draw from dead bulbs and boxes is like learning to make love with corpses.”

  One student grinned and muttered that that depended on the corpses. The other said sternly, “Are you a Communist?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a Bevanite?”

  “I agree with Bevan that Britain should not make atomic bombs.”

  “I thought so.”

  The teacher entered and Thaw returned to his seat feeling that he had somehow betrayed himself.

  At noon he put the new materials in his locker, left the building and went down to Sauchiehall Street where the pavement was busy with a crowd he could feel anonymous among. He bought a pie from a dairy and wandered, eating thoughtfully, into Sauchiehall Lane, which was quiet except for pigeons cooing and pecking casually between the cobbles. The morning had been like the first morning at any school. It had left a feeling of anxiety, overcrowding and dry curriculums, of minds herded into grooves. Nothing had enriched or warmed except the sight of a certain girl, and that had less warmed than scorched him into a different kind of unease. But now he began to relax, feeling (in that obscure channel between tenement backs) a comfort he sometimes found in graveyards, the canal and other neglected parts of the city. The stone walls, stapled over with iron pipes, seemed to hold something grander and stranger than the builders knew. He looked through a doorway and saw a huge unhealthy tree. It grew in a patch of bare earth among pale-green rhubarb-shaped weeds; it divided at the roots into two scaly limbs, one twisting along the ground, the other shooting up to the height of the third-storey windows; each limb, almost naked of branches, supported at the end a bush of withered leaves. Thaw stared and munched for several minutes then moved away feeling triumphant. It was not a feeling he understood. It might have come from identifying with the tree, with the confining walls or with both.