The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

‘It’s Eileen.’

  ‘Eff off.’

  ‘There’s someone with me.’

  Eventually the door was opened and they went in. Her father was standing in his shirt sleeves just inside the door, unshaven, his shirt open, showing thick black hair at the chest.

  ‘Who the effing hell are you?’ he said.

  ‘This is . . . what’s your name?’ she whispered urgently.

  ‘Jimmy.’

  ‘His name is Jimmy, Father.’

  ‘Got any drink with you, Jimmy?’

  ‘Sorry, I . . . ’

  ‘Oh Christ!’ The man went into a room and slammed the door behind him.

  ‘Is that your father?’ Jimmy whispered.

  ‘Yes.’

  He nearly said, What’s a famous scientist like him doing here? but looked at her and decided not to. There isn’t any room for his test tubes, he thought, or a laboratory or anything. He nearly burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said and they entered what might have been a bedroom or a cell. There was no furniture at all except for a bed with clothes piled on top of it.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she said. ‘I can get you a cup of tea.’ He said, ‘That would be nice,’ and sat down on the bed looking at the bare floor. He went over to the window and looked at the pools of scummy green water in the yard. A small boy was peeing into one of them.

  After a while she came back with two jam jars of tea. The tea looked thick and black.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘there’s no milk. My mother, though she’s highly intelligent, plays Patience a lot and sometimes forgets about things. Do you like Patience?’

  ‘No,’ he said though he had never played. He heard a crash from another room and somebody swearing. Perhaps one of the experiments had gone wrong. He took one of her hands in his and using the other to hold his jam jar drank his tea. It was without question the most horrible tea he had ever drunk in his life. It was so bad he couldn’t believe it was tea, but on the other hand he didn’t know what else it could be. She sat watching him while he drank it.

  ‘It’s quite good tea, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘There’s a wee shop near here. I don’t like supermarkets. Are you really going to marry me?’ she said. ‘Let’s go and ask Father.’

  ‘Do you have to have your father’s permission?’

  ‘I would like it.’

  ‘All right then.’ He got up, squaring his shoulders, to meet the scientist in his den. He left the room and knocked on the door of the adjoining room.

  ‘What the effing hell do you want?’ said the voice of the famous scientist.

  He went in. The place was a chaos of unwashed dishes, cardboard boxes, bottles, eggshells, cans, altogether a blizzard of detritus. In the middle of it all sat the bullnecked father in a broken-springed chair watching a TV screen which seemed, like himself, rather unshaven.

  ‘Sir,’ said Jimmy above the roar of the TV, ‘I should like to marry your daughter.’

  ‘Bugger off.’

  ‘Sir, I know I haven’t known her long but . . . ’

  ‘I said bugger off.’

  Jimmy retired. She was waiting for him when he went into the room.

  ‘What did he say?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ he said and then burst out laughing so hard that he got a pain in his stomach. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he just told me to leave. That was all. He was watching the TV.’

  ‘Yes, he watches TV a lot. That’s how he relaxes. But it’ll be all right, you see. When you get to know him better you will realise that he’s very sensitive.’

  The curve of her neck had infinite pathos. It had the same shape as the moon he had seen when lying on the grass near the fair.

  ‘I love you so much,’ he said stroking her hair.

  ‘And I love you too. Very much,’ she said. ‘From the moment I saw you sitting on the bench with your guitar.’

  The darkness came down but there seemed to be no electric switch in the room. Her pale face descended into the darkness and was replaced by the sweet curve of the moon. He touched her face in the darkness and it was wet with tears. He began to play gently on his guitar,

  ‘As we cam in by Glesca toun . . . ’

  When he had finished playing they sat together on the bed, hands clasped. He knew that he would never leave her and that he would marry her. He was quite helpless. There was nothing else he could do. He tousled her hair and suddenly burst out laughing.

  ‘We’ll get married and have three chairs.’

  ‘Children, you mean,’ she said seriously.

  ‘We need chairs more,’ he said. And at that moment he was astonished to discover how free he was and knew for the first time the meaning of the songs he had been singing and why he had always kept his guitar in spite of everything.

  ‘And your father really is a scientist,’ he said laughing, listening to the roar of the TV.

  ‘He has the mind of a scientist,’ she said.

  He held her so tightly that she cried out. ‘Not a bloody switch in the place,’ he thought and when he heard the TV set screaming again he shouted out, ‘Bugger off, you old bastard.’

  ‘You shouldn’t say things like that to my father,’ she said, ‘he’s very sensitive. He’s been hurt by the world and he’s got the mind of a scientist.’

  He lay for a long time in the thickening darkness thinking, ‘It’s quite inescapable.’ And then he thought, ‘When it’s inescapable, it’s easy.’ The first thing, he thought, is to take her away from the scientist and the brilliant mother (come to that, he hadn’t seen her) and then things would be all right. He knew without looking that she was already asleep.

  The Little People

  At first when he had got the job he had been very pleased to tell them everything he knew, how the stone huts had been unearthed by an archaeologist who had come up from the south. He would point from the little brae above to the stone enclosures where the little people had slept, presumably after telling each other stories in the flickering light of the flames, the passageways down which they had crawled, the stone cupboards. It was rather like being a teacher and on top of that he had a blue uniform with yellow facings. He was an important man, people listened to him with respect, even with deference, he was the oracle which would at regular intervals emit information to the shallow and the rich and the voyaging. They came from all over, Germans, Dutch, Americans, Canadians, the visitors’ book was an incomprehensible record of strange foreign names. They were properly astonished by what he told them and then they departed, taking with them some of the coloured postcards which he sold. He told them of the three skeletons which had been found, of the bone needles, the deer and the shellfish.

  But that was of course before he had actually seen the little people, the first night he had remained behind, tired, staring out at the sea with the marks of the tourists’ feet still on the sand, and their boyish splashings still in his ears. He liked looking out at the sea, with its large white waves, rising and falling, dissipating themselves in unravelling threads along the shoreline, the sun setting like a red head above the water.

  At first he heard only whispers below him, an unintelligible quick susurration like the sudden hastening important whispering of children, and then he saw them, very small people, with long matted hair and furrowed brows. They were gathered together by the fire which had miraculously bloomed, wearing their tatty ageing skins, chattering among each other. There were little children, babies as well as adults, and in the light of the fire they seemed oddly vulnerable and almost brittle. All the time they were talking they were touching each other, gesturing furiously, belching, scratching themselves, looking around them. Once he saw one of them going over to a small compartment near the main room and sitting down to defecate with a serious strained face. It was almost but not quite like watching monkeys in the zoo clinging to the wire netting and holding out their tiny flesh-coloured fingers.

  Eventually they went to bed and in
the morning they rose again. The talking and whispering recommenced and they ate what appeared to be the remains of fish. They then came up to the level, went down to the seashore and began scrabbling for mussels and whelks which they found clamped to the rocks. Others went to a neighbouring spring for water. One was passing a bone needle through a piece of mangy old fur. It was strange to see them there at his feet, like little dirty mechanical dwarfs, unplugging the helmeted mussels from the bare sea-washed rocks, occupied at their domestic tasks.

  Later he saw the deer coming down to feed on the grass. It was a beautiful, elegant animal, composed and fine-looking against the sky. It would bend down and eat and then raise its head, sniffing the air: perhaps the wind did not blow from the small smelly people: in any case it did not seem to know that they were there. He saw two of them detaching themselves with stones in what appeared to be leather thongs, quietly crawling and keeping windward of the deer and for a moment they appeared to him to be animals themselves diminishing to the size of weasels as they drew away. The deer grazed, lifted its head and grazed again. Suddenly the two little men stood up, the stones sped from their slings and hit the deer in the middle of the brow beneath its antlers. Its legs folded beneath it and they rushed forward making incomprehensible triumphant sounds. The other little people rushed forward shouting; there was dancing round the deer and then a stabbing at it with sharp bones, while the area in which it lay became red. They dragged it, shouting and dancing, into the maze of passages and began to hack its head off. Pieces of flesh were detached and put on the fire which bloomed again. They began to eat, rawly tearing at the flesh with their hands. In the vast sea behind them, intensely calm, he saw what appeared to be a cormorant diving into the water and emerging yards away. A woman gave her breasts to a child.

  They were very happy now, talking and dancing and singing. Their hands were red with blood and they ran them now and then casually through their matted hair: on their necks were necklaces of shellfish.

  He wanted to be with them: he wanted to enjoy himself among them. They seemed so happy and he himself was so lonely. He wanted to be noticed, to bring himself to their attention, but he couldn’t see how this might be. He looked back at the coloured postcards which were sold to the tourists and which were racked in their wire cage. He took some of the postcards out and without thinking scattered them below him, letting them drift like snowflakes along the passageways, above the beds, the fire. They swirled out of the air on random curves. The little people looked up at the postcards and moved away from them, crouching in corners, chattering and frightened. The postcards drifted down and lay flat on the ground, in the silence which occurred after the chattering was over.

  After a long while, when the postcards were dead, the little people began to come out of their corners. One of them tentatively put his hand towards one of the postcards, then drew it back without touching it as if his hand had been burnt. He remained like that for a long time, watching it as a cat might watch a mouse or a mouse a cat. Looking down from above, he himself felt a terrible pity for the little men and at the same time an impatience. Why don’t you pick it up, he was mouthing silently. Prove yourself a hero. Advance. He didn’t exactly articulate these words but obscurely he felt some such feelings as might be conveyed by them. Slowly the little man’s hand advanced. He touched the postcard this time and then quickly withdrew the hand. The others were all looking at it with bared teeth. Eventually he made a little rush at it and held it. It was harmless, it was dead. Nothing exploded from it. He held it up so that the others could see it. They rushed forward and looked at it. They turned it over and over in their clumsy hands. They held it up to the light. Others picked up other postcards. He noticed that the man who had got it did not wish to keep it but was willing to let the others handle it as well. They made sounds indicative of wonder but clearly didn’t recognise any of the patterns though they were looking at a representation of their own world. They were amazed at the colours more than anything, he thought, the bright reds, the blues, the greens. More and more of them were picking up postcards and looking at them, turning them over and over, their brows knitted. They would look at them for a while and then turn away to look at something else. Their span of attention seemed very limited. One turned to look at a bird that was flying in the blue picture frame above. Sometimes they would drop their postcards and eat some of the deer: at other times they might go off to urinate. Eventually one of them tore his postcard by accident and there was a howl of what might have been fear. They withdrew from him looking down at the small pieces which lay on the ground and he himself, appalled, stared down at the dismembered paper. They gestured at him from a distance and he moved away from the pieces, delicately, fearfully, as if they would suddenly join and eat him. No one went near them for a long time.

  Eventually some laid the postcards down, others put them inside their hide-covered breasts, others tried to taste them. And one or two studied them all the time, looking at the colours and making little crows of wonder, touching them very gently and not bending them, though at first many had been bent and one at least had been torn.

  Matches felt a great excitement moving in him as strongly and with as much suffocating power as the waves of the sea which was not so very far away. He could not imagine what this excitement was but it seemed like a freeing inside himself, a sluicing, a liberation from forces such as his parents, his bingo-playing gross wife, the tenements with their smell of cats, the tourists who were his masters in life though he was their master in information. He wanted to do something more exciting than this. In a confused way he wanted to see the little people win, he wanted to see them become men, he wanted to see them painfully and unwillingly and with joy fly upwards from their passageways and their bone needles and take off, beautiful and intelligent, to their equivalent of the moon. He wanted to offer them a present.

  They were quieter now, looking at the postcards, turning them over and over as if there was something there that they wanted to know about but that at the same time they sensed they were incapable of knowing, because of the screen in front of their minds which would not slide aside, which would not open. One of them scratched his face with the edge of one of the postcards to keep the midges away.

  Matches went back into his cottage and looked around it. There seemed nothing obvious that he could use. There were only the guidebooks, the postcards, the remnants of the past in their glass cases, the long narrow pieces of bone, the shell-fish necklaces, the map of the settlement. He looked around him in perplexity. He tried his pockets and came out with a lighter. He flicked it absent-mindedly and put it back again. He took the wallet from his breast pocket, took out the single pound note and replaced it. He took out the cigarette packet and put it back again. He took out the knife.

  He studied the knife and as he was doing so heard the mewing of the smoky cat which belonged to his wife and which he often took with him because it was company for him and also because it attracted the attention of the tourists because it was so elegant and so beautiful and so rich-looking. They made much of the cat with its large blue eyes and it got him a lot of tips because it was so unusual and they didn’t expect a man like him, in his position, to own one. It had smoky fur and blue eyes and it walked in a very artistocratic way and it was the most precious and beautiful thing he had ever owned. It mewed and pressed itself against his legs. He looked down at it (its name was Precious) and a thought swam into his mind. In the cottage he found some cats’ meat and went out again, the cat following him. It was beautiful as it arched its body lazily, looking up at him, mewing, its eyes large and arrogant. He threw some of the cats’ meat down among the passageways. The cat leaped lightly down and he watched it. In the half-darkness its fur appeared darker: he felt like a sower sowing the first seed in the morning of the world. It began to lick at the cats’ meat. He threw more down into the centre where the little people were chattering and saw the cat following the meat. The little people saw it.

  The
cat wanted to go towards the meat but at the same time its hair bristled and stood on end. It spat fiercely. The little people crouched down in their corners looking at the cat. It was beautiful and fierce and strange and it emitted rays of energy. Blue electricity seemed to spark from it and all the place was full of the smell of blood and rank venison. A child started to crawl towards the cat but was pulled back. Another one did the same and the cat flashed out a claw. There was a sudden howl and the people crouched, remembering the cat leaping down from above on them. The child cried and the mother comforted it. The cat walked tall with arched body into the centre of the ring. It licked the cats’ meat warily. It sniffed the dismembered deer. It moved delicately from the body to the antlered head.

  There was a chattering among the people, intense and fierce like the magnified purring of a cat. The cat leaped and out of the sand dragged a wriggling animal which looked like a rat. It laid it down near the fire and began to eat it. The people looked on, chattering. It shook and shook the animal and then lay down with it beneath its paws. One of the people touched it and it sprang away but then slowly returned to its kill, circling. Gradually, it quietened down as they all approached it, all humming and chattering, not frightened. It stayed where it was, alert but not afraid: they seemed dazzled by its beauty, its strangeness. They stretched their hands out carefully, and petted it. It purred. It lay down and purred. It seemed to know them better after a while than it had known Matches.

  He looked down at it from above: it was so strange to see it there among those people. He wondered for a moment whether he had wished them to kill it and thought that perhaps he had. It walked among the scattered postcards, having fed. It did not seem to want to come up at all. It was wilder than he had thought, not at all an ornament but a really aristocratic being down among these dwarfish tenements. Perhaps they would make a kind of god of it, worship it. He had a desire to suddenly shout out ‘Bingo!’ in a startlingly loud voice and see if they would start running, in their scabby furs. For the first time in months he began to smile and almost to laugh out loud as he looked towards the sea, with its lazy waves. He felt more alive than he had felt for years, so much so that he could have gone down there and picked the meat from the ravaged deer. The cat moved gracefully among the little people like an aristocrat, its smoky body compact and sure, assured and full of hauteur.