The afternoon was spent in the modelling department making a clay copy of a plaster lip. At four-thirty he went to his locker and found it empty. He stared dispassionately at the vacant space, knowing the shock of it would break on him in three or four minutes. To prepare for this he said aloud, “I have done a stupid thing.”
A student at a nearby locker said smoothly, “We all do, from time to time.”
“I have let myself be robbed of three pounds’ worth of goods.” The student came over and looked at the empty locker. He said, “You should have got a padlock before leaving anything valuable there. You can get a fairly good one for two or three shillings in Woolworth’s.”
Thaw recognized his fair-moustached neighbour of the morning who had wanted to walk before running. A flash of intuition separate from logic or evidence made him sure this man was the thief. He said harshly, “You are right,” and left the building.
At home over the teatable Mr. Thaw said cheerfully, “Well? How did it go?”
“All right.”
“You don’t sound very sure.”
“I’m tired.”
“Did you get much in the way of materials?”
“A drawing board, a folder, cartridge paper, a metal-edged ruler. I … I had them stolen.”
“My God! How? How?”
Thaw told him how.
“And how much did they cost?”
Thaw put a hand in his pocket and grasped the crumpled invoice tight. “Nearly a pound.”
“Nearly a pound? Nearly a pound? How much did they cost?” “Fifteen shillings.”
Mr. Shaw stared at him disgustedly then said, “Never mind. Just get another lot on account tomorrow.”
In bed that night Thaw realized his father would expect the stolen goods to be replaced for fifteen shillings, so to keep his lie a secret he would need to save three pounds minus fifteen shillings multiplied by two. It struck him that if he had a key in the side of his head and could die by turning it, he would gladly turn it now.
Next morning he rose at seven, walked to school to save tram fares and dined on a cheap pie. This left him hungry but came to seem sufficient in two or three days, then he lost appetite for it and drank a cup of milk instead. Daily his stomach grew content with less. His mind was clenched, his surface reinforced against surrounding life. Normal hesitancies of voice and manner vanished. Often a line of words sounded in his head: clean bleak exact austere rigorous implacable. Sometimes he whispered these words as though they were a tune his body moved to. Walking down streets and corridors his feet hit the ground with unusual force and regularity. All sounds, even words spoken nearby, seemed dulled by intervening glass. People behind the glass looked distinct and peculiar. He wondered what they saw in gargoyles, masks and antique door knockers that they couldn’t see in each other. Everyone carried on their necks a grotesque art object, originally inherited, which they never tired of altering and adding to. Yet while he looked on people with the cold interest usually felt for things, the world of things began to cause surprising emotions. A haulage vehicle carrying a huge piece of bright yellow machinery swelled his heart with tenderness and stiffened his penis with lust. A section of tenement, the surface a dirty yellow plaster with oval holes through which brickwork showed, gave the eerie conviction he was beholding a kind of flesh. Walls and pavements, especially if they were slightly decayed, made him feel he was walking beside or over a body. His feet did not hit the ground less firmly, but something in him winced as they did so.
He could only rest when working properly. After sketching bulbs and boxes the class was given plants, fossils and small stuffed tropical birds. Thaw let his eyes explore like an insect the spiral architecture of a tiny seashell while his pencil point marked some paper with the eye’s discoveries. The teacher tried to correct him by rational argument. She said, “Are you trying to make a pattern out of this, Duncan? I wish you wouldn’t. Just draw what you see.”
“I’m doing that, Miss Mackenzie.”
“Then stop drawing everything with the same black harsh line. Hold the pencil lightly; don’t grip it like a spanner. That shell is a simple, delicate, rather lovely thing. Your drawing is like the diagram of a machine.”
“But surely, Miss Mackenzie, the shell only seems delicate and simple because it’s smaller than we are. To the fish inside it was a suit of armour, a house, a moving fortress.”
“Duncan, if I were a marine biologist I might care how the shell was used. As an artist my sole interest is in the appearance. I insist that it appears beautiful and delicate and should be drawn beautifully and delicately. There’s no need to show these little cracks. They’re accidental. Ignore them.”
“But Miss Mackenzie, the cracks show the shell’s nature—only this shell could crack in this way. It’s like the wart on Cromwell’s lip. Leave it out and it’s no longer a picture of Cromwell.”
“All right, but please don’t make the wart as important as the lip. You’ve drawn these cracks as clearly as the edges of the shell itself.”
Behind the teacher’s back several classmates made gestures like spectators at a boxing match, and later Thaw was approached by Macbeth who said, “Where do you go after school these days?”
“Home, usually.”
“Why not come to Brown’s? A few of us meet there. It’s a change from the concentration camp.”
Thaw felt excited. Macbeth was the only first-year student who looked like an artist. He walked with a defiant slouch, wore a beret, rolled his own cigarettes and smelled of whisky in the afternoon. He was often seen on the edge of older groups of students: elegant tight-trousered girls and tall bearded men who laughed freely in public places. In class he did what the teachers wanted with an ease which looked contemptuous, but he impressed Thaw most by keeping company with Molly Tierney, the velvet-voiced girl with blond curls. He sat beside her in class, gave her cigarettes and carried her drawing board from place to place. His face usually had an anxious, babyish look.
Brown’s cakeshop in Sauchiehall Street had a narrow staircase going down to a wide low-ceilinged room. The tobacco smoke and faded luxury were so dense here that Thaw, like a diver in the saloon of a sunk liner, felt them press against his eardrums. In an alcove to his right Molly Tierney reclined on a sofa, smiling and lightly fingering the curl overhanging her brow. Others from Thaw’s class sat at a table beside her sipping coffee and looking bored. Thaw slid into a chair next to Macbeth without being specially noticed. Sounds of people moving and conversing at other tables blurred and receded, but tiny noises nearby (Macbeth’s breathing, a spoon striking a saucer) were magnified and distinct. Molly Tierney came into sharp focus. The colours of her hair, skin, mouth and dress grew clearer like a stained-glass figure with light increasing behind it. Second by second her body was infused with the significance of mermaids on rocks and Cleopatra in her barge. He heard someone say, “Has anyone started their monthly painting yet? I haven’t even thought of it.”
Molly said, “I began mine last night. At least I meant to, only my mother wanted me to watch television and we had a fight. It ended with me being pushed out of doors into the co-o-ld bla-a-a-ck night.” She giggled. “Me! In my high-heeled shoes.”
A voice said venomously, “Parents just won’t allow you a life of your own.”
Other voices supported this.
“My father won’t let me …”
“My mother keeps saying …”
“Last week my mother …”
“Last year my father …”
He thought of entering the conversation by recalling fights with his mother but the details had grown dim; all he remembered was their inevitability. Molly Tierney sighed and said,
“I think I’ll become a nun.”
Thaw said, “I think I’ll become a lighthouse keeper.”
There was silence, and then someone asked why.
“So I’ll be able to walk in spirals.”
Molly giggled and Thaw leaned toward her. He criticized th
e theme of the monthly painting, quoting Blake and Shaw and describing shapes in the air with his hands. People raised objections and he quoted folk tales from many lands to show how fact and fancy, geography and legend were linked. Molly was clearly listening. She put her feet on the floor and leaned toward him saying, “You know a lot of fairy stories.”
“Yes. They used to be my favourite reading.”
“Mine too.” She chuckled huskily. “In fact they still are. I like Russian tales best. Have you noticed how many of them are about children?”
They talked of ugly and beautiful witches, enchanted mountains, magic gifts, monsters, princesses and lucky younger sons. With feelings of wonder and freedom he found she loved and remembered much that he loved himself. Suddenly she curled her legs back on the sofa and said to Macbeth, “Give me a cigarette, Jimmy.”
Macbeth rolled a cigarette and held a match to the tip while she inhaled it.
“And Jimmy, would you do me a favour? Please, Jimmy, a very special favour?”
“What is it?”
Her voice became a mixture of babyish and whorish. “Jimmy, it’s my architecture homework. This model cathedral we’ve to make. I’ve tried to make it but I can’t, I don’t know how to begin, it’s too complicated for my tiny mind and I’ve to hand it on Friday. Will you make it for me? I’ll pay for the materials, of course.”
No one else at the table looked at each other. A voice in Thaw’s head raved at Macbeth, “Spit in her face! Go on, spit in her face!”
Macbeth looked down at his cigarette with a faint smile and said, “All right.”
“Oh Jimmy, you’re a pet.”
Thaw got up and walked home. The sun had set. He felt cold and light-bodied and the streets semed to flow through him on a current of dark air. Clock dials glowed like fake moons on invisible towers. On Alexandra Parade by the Necropolis a drunk man lurched past muttering, “Useless.”
“Right,” said Thaw. “Useless.”
He woke often that night to find his legs grinding against each other and his fingernails tearing healthy parts of his skin. In the morning the sheets were bloodstained and his body felt so heavy he had trouble bringing it out of bed. At school he went through the routines like a sleepwalker. At noon he went to the refectory and drank a cup of black coffee at a crowded table. A girl nearby shouted, “Hullo Thaw!”
He smiled feebly.
“Enjoying yourself, Thaw?”
“Well enough.”
“You like the life here, do you, Thaw?”
“Well enough.”
A boy leaned against her laughing, and whispered in her ear. She said, “Thaw, this man is saying rude things about you.”
The boy said quickly, “No, I’m not.”
Thaw said flatly, “I’m sure you’re not.”
He looked at them and saw their faces did not fit. The skin on the skulls crawled and twitched like half-solid paste. All the heads in his angle of vision seemed irregular lumps, like potatoes but without a potato’s repose: potatoes with crawling surfaces punctured by holes which opened and shut, holes blocked with coloured jelly or fringed with bone stumps, elastic holes through which air was sucked or squirted, holes secreting salt, wax, spittle and snot. He grasped a pencil in his trouser pocket, wishing it were a knife he could thrust through his cheek and use to carve his face down to the clean bone. But that was foolish. Nothing clean lay under the face. He thought of sectioned brains, palettes, eyeballs and ears seen in medical diagrams and butcher’s shops. He thought of elastic muscle, pulsing tubes, gland sacks full of lukewarm fluid, the layers of cellular and fibrous and granular tissues inside a head. What was felt as tastes, caresses, dreams and thoughts could be seen as a cleverly articulated mass of garbage. He got quickly out of the tearoom trying to see nothing but the floor he walked on.
At home he stood in the kitchen after the evening meal, sometimes putting dishes away but mostly standing stock-still, his face open-mouthed and aghast. Mr. Thaw entered and said impatiently, “Haven’t you finished yet? You’ve been here over an hour. Is my company so disagreeable that you can’t share a room with me?”
“No, but I’m thinking things I don’t like to think about and I can’t stop.”
“What son of things?”
“Diseases, mostly. Skin diseases and cancers and insects that live in people’s bodies. Some of them are real but I’ve been inventing new ones. I can’t stop.”
“For God’s sake do your homework or go for a walk. Do something, at any rate.”
“How can I, with my mind full of these things?”
“Then go to bed.”
“But when I shut my eyes I see them. They’re so active. They gnaw and gnaw. Surely this is how people go mad.”
Mr. Thaw stared at his son with mingled impatience and worry. “Will I call the doctor then?”
“How would that help? ‘Doctor Tannahill, I’m havingthoughts I don’t like to think!’ How would that help?”
“He might send you to a psychiatrist.”
“When? I’m thinking these things now.”
“But what makes you think them?”
“That’s easy. I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that. Frustration. If a man hath these two, honesty and intelligence, and hath not sex appeal, then he is as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.”
“You’re talking hysterically.”
“Yes. That’s unlucky, isn’t it?”
“Get to bed, Duncan, and I’ll bring you a toddy.”
He sat in bed propped up with pillows to make sleep difficult. He invented a maggot called the Flealouse. It was white and featureless except on the underside, which was all mouths. It bred in connective tissues and moved by eating a trench in the surfaces it travelled among. It spread through bodies without upsetting them at first, for it sweated a juice which worked on the nerves like a drug, making diseased people plumper and rosier, more cheerful and active. Then it started feeding on the brain. The victims felt no less happy but their actions became mechanical and frenzied, their words repetitive and trite. Then the lice, whose movement so far had been sluggish and gradual, suddenly attacked the main bodily organs, growing hugely as they did so. Infected people turned white, collapsed in the street, swelled and burst like rotten sacks of rice, each grain of which was a squirming louse. Then the lice themselves split open releasing from their guts swarms of winged insects so tiny that they could enter anybody through pores in the skin. In less than a century the Flealouse infected and ate every other sort of life on the globe. The earth became nothing but rock under a heaving coat of lice of every size, from a few inches up to five hundred feet. Then they began to eat each other. In the end only one was left, a titan curled round the equator like a grub round a pebble. The body of the last Flealouse contained the flesh of everything that had ever lived. It was content.
While elaborating this fantasy he fell asleep several times and continued it in dreams, sometimes being a victim of the Flealouse, sometimes a Flealouse himself. The dreams were so detailed that horror made him recoil into wakefulness and fix wide-open eyes on the electric light, hoping the pain of the dazzle would keep him conscious. Meanwhile pan of his mind tried to get free with the desperation of a rat roasting in a revolving cage.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!”
“You can’t.”
“Why? Why? Why?”
“Your mind is rotting. Minds without love always breed these worms.”
“How can I get love?”
“You can’t. You can’t.”
Something happened shortly after five in the morning. He was struggling against thoughts of the lice and against the sleep which made them seem solid when the image of Molly Tierney came like coolness to a heated brow. He lay down filling slowly with relief. He would go to her the next day and explain calmly, without pathos, that only she could stop him going mad. If she refused to love him what happened after that would be her responsibility, not his. And she might help. This was not a world of certainties b
ut of likelihoods, so the glorious lovely accident must happen sometimes. The Flealouse vanished from his mind. He fell into a smooth, wholly dreamless sleep.
He woke as his father was drawing the curtains.
“How’s your mind this morning?”
“It’s all right now. It’s fine.”
“But will it last?”
“I think so.”
“And you don’t want a doctor?”
“Certainly not.”
“Good. Three weeks ago, Duncan, you told me you had been robbed of goods worth fifteen shillings. That was a lie. Now I want the truth.”
“The goods cost three pounds.”
“I know. I was looking in your pocket for handkerchiefs to wash when I found the invoice. I was shifting it to its proper place on the spike in the scullery when I noticed the true amount.”
Mr. Thaw went to the window and stood, hands in pockets, looking down the street. There was a small distinct frenzied sound in the room like a mouse gnawing wood or a steel nib scribbling on paper.
“For God’s sake stop scratching!” said Mr. Thaw. “Aren’t there enough bloodstains on the sheets?”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t understand why you had to lie about it, unless from a love of lying for its own sake. You could have hidden the truth just by keeping your mouth shut.”
“I came as near truth as I dared.”
“Dared? What were you afraid of? Did you think I’d thrash you?”
“I deserve to be thrashed.”
“But Duncan, I’ve not thrashed you since you were a wee boy!”
Thaw considered this and said, “True.”
“Furthermore, how could you keep hiding the right amount from me? Sooner or later I’d have had to pay the bill.”
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