Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012

by Gray, Alasdair

  “Donald!”

  “Hello Joan.”

  “I’ve just been washing my hair.”

  He looked keenly into her face. She smiled back less broadly. He said, “Look, Joan, I phoned you about eleven. You answered the phone but wouldn’t speak to me. I’ve come to find why.”

  Joan looked worried and said, “Come into the hall.”

  He followed her into a narrow hall, shutting the door behind him. She said, “You phoned at eleven?”

  “Yes, and you answered.”

  “But Donald I came home at quarter-past eleven. I’ve been to the farm all day. You must have spoken to someone else.”

  “I didn’t. You said ‘Hello’.”

  “Then you must have got the wrong number.”

  “No, I didn’t. You said ‘Hello’ and I went on talking and you didn’t answer. I listened a long time. You must have put the telephone receiver down and gone away …”

  He glanced down at a telephone on the hall table beside him. The receiver lay off its cradle on top of a telephone directory. She said quickly, “As soon as I came in I took the receiver off in case any of my mother’s boring friends rang up.”

  Donald said heavily, “I don’t believe you.”

  He put his arms round her shoulders and smiled sadly down at her face. She smiled and laid her hands flat on his chest in a gesture that stopped him pulling her towards him. He said, “Why haven’t I seen you lately?”

  “I’m sorry Donald, but it’s been such lovely weather – I’ve been working for these friends on the farm and I’ve been so happy there that I haven’t seemed to have time for other things.”

  Donald let his hands fall by his side and stared at her. After a moment she said uncomfortably, “Come into the kitchen for a little while.”

  The kitchen was small and cosy with a white tiled grate, an electric fire burning in the grate and a hearthrug before the fire. An open book lay on the rug, as if someone had sprawled there reading. Donald sat on the armchair by the hearth, his clasped hands between his knees, leaning forward slightly and looking at a piece of hearthrug. Joan sat at a distance on a chair by a dining table. Donald said, “You see I’ve come to feel … rather emotional about you.”

  Joan said gently, “Oh, I’m sorry. I hoped that hadn’t happened.”

  After a while she said, “You see we enjoy different things. You like books and jazz and ideas and … clever things like that. When I was with you I thought I liked these things but I don’t really. I like exercising horses and cleaning out hen-coops and living like a tinker. I realized that quite suddenly last week. Physical things are very important to me. I’m sorry, Donald.”

  “But I don’t see why that should separate us! Most people who … like each other a lot keep bits of life private from each other.”

  “I’m sorry, Donald. It’s very neurotic of me but that’s how I see it.”

  “You’re not neurotic.”

  “Oh but I am!” said Joan anxiously. “I really am very neurotic! I often do the most silly things …”

  “Like not speaking to me on the telephone?”

  She looked down obliquely and murmured, “Well, yes.” Donald stood up and said, “I’d better go.”

  “It was very kind of you to come all that distance.”

  “It was not. I had to find out what was wrong.”

  At the front door he said, “Goodbye, Joan.”

  She said kindly, “Goodbye, Donald.”

  He got into the taxi and gave an address in the city. He sat on the back seat in the posture he had taken in the armchair, and bits of thought passed through his head.

  “Why did I say “rather emotional” when I meant “love”? Why was I so meek and reasonable? I should have struck her. As I left I should have struck her face.

  The last time we met we seemed to get on very well.”

  The taxi stopped in a street of tenements with a theatre at one end. Donald paid the driver, entered a close and walked up flights of steps to a landing with a bright red door on it. He pressed the letterbox open with a finger and whistled through. After a while the door was opened by a young cadaverous man with a straggly red beard and wearing a coat over pyjamas. He stared at Donald, raised his eyebrows and said, “Well, well.”

  “Can I come in? I know it’s selfish of me but I need to talk to someone …”

  “Come in then.”

  They crossed a lobby into a small room containing a bed, a chair, a dressing-table and a television set. The floor, dressing-table and television set were covered with untidy piles of books. The bearded man threw off his coat, lay on the bed, pulled blankets over him and stared at the ceiling, hands clasped under head. Donald said, “A bad thing has happened to me. If I don’t tell someone I’ll have to walk about all night brooding on it.”

  “All right, tell me.”

  Donald walked carefully about the room, talking in a slow, almost hesitant voice. Sometimes he said, “I may be mistaken about this bit …” and sometimes, “She didn’t say exactly that, she put it more subtly.”

  When he had finished the bearded man yawned and said, “That’s very interesting, Donald. Were you very keen on her?”

  “Oh yes. I thought we were going to marry. She’s the one girl I know who didn’t make me feel embarrassed when I wanted to be … sexual with her. We were always comfortable together, she was so frank and pleasant and … beautiful.”

  “No, Donald, not beautiful. Remember, I’ve seen her.”

  “Yes, beautiful! I know her face is so individual it’s almost ugly, but her body is beautiful by any standard – slender, with wee steep breasts, and a very big backside (she said it made clothes difficult to put on) and fine long legs. And she could undress without looking self-conscious or coy.” “She slept with you?” said the bearded man, looking surprised.

  “Once or twice. Twice, to be exact.”

  “I always thought her a quiet sort of girl.”

  “She is a quiet sort of girl.”

  “And … what was she like?”

  “Like?”

  “Like in bed?”

  “Oh, I never fornicated with her – we just slept. I wasn’t in the mood for anything more urgent, and I didn’t think she was either. She kept her underwear on. But I’ve never slept so sweetly as I did with her arms round me. I’m usually a poor sleeper.”

  After a pause the bearded man said, “Don’t you think she might have felt cheated?”

  Donald sat down, turned the pages of a book without looking at them and said, “It had occurred to me. It’s one reason why I can’t blame her for her behaviour tonight.” “Still, she could have broken with you more kindly.”

  “But you can’t break kindly with someone who loves you! The right way is to break honestly. By a very honest little act she showed me she was done with me. She put my voice carefully down on the hall table so as not to disturb it, and went quietly away and washed her hair. Her meaning was pretty clear, but like a fool I went to her house and discussed it.”

  The bearded man said sleepily, “A pity you didn’t play on her love of animals. If you’d galloped up to her door at the head of a troop of cavalry she would have found you irresistible.”

  There was quiet in the room for several minutes. Then Donald said thoughtfully, “Why don’t I protest more? The last time I was in love and the girl broke with me (that was five years ago) I protested all the time. I did stupid things, like insulting her in public and praying God to kill her. I thought my condition was unbearable. Now I feel quite calm. I have this ache in my chest, but talking to you has made it less, and it will disappear altogether when I get to sleep. Tomorrow it will come back for a few hours in the evening, but it will be perfectly bearable. And during the coming weeks it will come for a shorter time each day, and in three or four months I won’t have it at all. And that –” said Donald standing up, “is the sad thing. Joan will be nothing but an ache to me, then not even that, and in a few years it will be hard to remembe
r her. I wish this ache would last as long as I lived, so I could always remember her. But even my memory of her will come to nothing and everything we did and felt together will be senseless and useless.”

  He looked at the bearded man as if hoping to be refuted, but the bearded man was asleep.

  THE PROBLEM

  The Greeks were wrong about the sun; she is definitely a woman. I know her well. She often visits me, but not often enough. She prefers spending her time on Mediterranean beaches with richer people, foreigners mostly. I never complain. She comes here often enough to keep me hopeful. Until today. Today, perhaps because it is Spring, she arrived unexpectedly in all her glory and made me perfectly happy.

  I was astonished, grateful, and properly appreciative, of course. I lay basking in her golden warmth, a bit dopey and dozey but murmuring the sort of compliments which are appropriate at such times. I realized she was talking to me in a more insistent tone, so I occasionally said, “Yes” and “Mhm”. At last she said, “You aren’t listening.”

  “Yes I am –” (I made an effort of memory) “– You were talking about your spots.”

  “What can I do about them?”

  “Honestly, Sun, I don’t think they’re important.”

  “Not important? Not important? Oh, it’s easy for you to talk like that. You don’t have to live with them.”

  I almost groaned aloud. Whenever someone makes me perfectly happy they go on to turn themselves into a problem. I gathered my energies to tackle the problem.

  I said, “Your spots were first noted by Galileo in the sixteenth century, through his new improved telescope. Before that time you were regarded as the most perfect of all heavenly bodies –”

  She gave a little wail: I said hastily, “But they aren’t permanent! They come and go! They’re associated with several good things, like growth. When you have a very spotty year the plants grow extra fast and thick.”

  She hid her face and said, “Why can’t I have a perfect heavenly body like when I was younger? I haven’t changed. I’m still the same as I was then.”

  I tried to console her. I said, “Nobody is perfect.” She said nothing.

  I said, “Apart from a few top-level physicists and astronomers, nobody gives a damn for your spots.”

  She said nothing.

  I said, “The moon has spots all over her and nobody finds those unattractive.”

  The sun arose and prepared to leave. I gazed at her in horror, too feeble to move, almost too feeble to speak. I whispered, “What’s wrong?”

  “You’ve just admitted seeing other planets when my back is turned.”

  “Of course, but not deliberately. Everybody who goes out at night is bound to see the moon from time to time, but I don’t see her regularly, like I see you.”

  She said, “Perhaps if I played hard to get you would find my spots interesting too. What a fool I’ve been to think that give give giving myself seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, a hundred years a century was the way to get myself liked and appreciated when all the time people prefer a flighty young bitch who borrows all her light from me! Her own mother! Well, I’ve learned my lesson. From now on I’ll only come right out once a fortnight, then perhaps men will find my spots attractive too.”

  And she would have left without another word if I had not jumped up and begged and pleaded and told her a lot of lies. I said a great deal had been discovered about sunspots since Galileo’s day, they were an electromagnetic phenomenon and probably curable. I said that next time we met I would have studied the matter and be able to recommend something. So she left me more in sorrow than anger and I will see her tomorrow.

  But I can never hope to be perfectly happy with her again. The sun is more interested in her spots than in her beams and is ready to blame me for them.

  THE CRANK THAT MADE THE REVOLUTION

  Nowadays Cessnock is a heavily built-upon part of industrial Glasgow, but two hundred and seventy-three years ago you would have seen something very different. You would have seen a swamp with a duckpond in the middle and a few wretched hovels round the edge. The inmates of these hovesl earned a living by knitting caps and mufflers for the inhabitants of Glasgow who, even then, wore almost nothing else. The money got from this back-breaking industry was pitifully inadequate. Old Cessnock was neither beautiful nor healthy. The only folk living there were too old or twisted by rheumatism to move out. Yet this dismal and uninteresting hamlet saw the beginning of that movement which historians call The Industrial Revolution; for here, in seventeen hundred and seven, was born Vague McMenamy, inventor of the crankshaft which made the Revolution possible.

  Modern Cessnock shortly after implementation of the smoke abatement act.

  Old Cessnock from General Roy’s ordnance survey of 1739. Fig. A represents the swamp, B the duckpond, C the McMenamy hovel.

  There are no records to suggest that Vague McMenamy had parents. From his earliest days he seems to have lived with his Granny upon a diet of duck-eggs and the proceeds of the old lady’s knitting. A German biographer has suggested that McMenamy’s first name (Vague) was a nickname. The idea, of course, is laughable. No harderheaded, clearer-sighted individual than McMenamy ever existed, as his crankshaft proves. The learned Herr Professor is plainly ignorant of the fact that Vague is the Gaelic for Alexander. Yet it must be confessed that Vague was an introvert. While other boys were chasing the lassies or stoning each other he would stand for long hours on the edge of the duckpond wondering how to improve his Granny’s ducks.

  Now, considered mechanically, a duck is not an efficient machine, for it has been designed to perform three wholly different and contradictory tasks, and consequently it does none of them outstandingly well. It flies, but not as expertly as the swallow, vulture or aeroplane. It swims, but not like a porpoise. It walks about, but not like you or me, for its legs are too short. Imagine a household appliance devised to shampoo carpets, mash pottoes and darn holes in socks whenever it feels like it. A duck is in a similar situation, and this made ducks offensive to McMenamy’s dourly practical mind. He thought that since ducks spend most of their days in water they should be made to do it efficiently. With the aid of a friendly carpenter he made a boat-shaped container into which a duck was inserted. There was a hole at one end through which the head stuck out, allowing the animal to breathe, see and even eat; nonetheless it protested against the confinement by struggling to get out and in doing so its wings and legs drove the cranks which conveyed motion to a paddlewheel on each side. On its maiden voyage the duck zig-zagged around the pond at a speed of thirty knots, which was three times faster than the maximum speed which the boats and ducks of the day had yet attained. McMenamy had converted a havering all-rounder into an efficient specialist. He was not yet thirteen years of age.

  Unimproved duck, after the watercolour by Peter Scott.

  McMenamy’s Improved Duck.

  He did not stop there. If this crankshaft allowed one duck to drive a vessel three times faster than normal, how much faster would two, three or ten ducks drive it? McMenamy decided to carry the experiment as far as he could take it. He constructed a craft to be driven by every one of his Granny’s seventeen ducks. It differed from the first vessel in other ways. The first had been a conventional boat shape propelled by paddles and constructed from wood. The second was cigar-shaped with a screw propeller at the rear, and McMenamy did not order it from the carpenter, but from the blacksmith. It was made of sheet iron. Without the seventeen heads and necks sticking up through holes in the hull one would have mistaken it for a modern submarine. This is a fact worth pondering. A hundred years elapsed before The Charlotte Dundas, the world’s first paddle steamer, clanked along the Forth and Clyde canal from Bowling. Fifty years after that the first ironclad screw-driven warship fired its first shot in the American Civil War. In two years the imagination of a humble cottage lad had covered ground which the world’s foremost engineers took two generations to traverse in the following century. Vague was fiftee
n years old when he launched his second vessel. Quacking hysterically, it crossed the pond with such velocity that it struck the opposite bank at the moment of departure from the near one. Had it struck soil it would have embedded itself. Unluckily, it hit the root of a tree, rebounded to the centre of the pond, overturned and sank. Every single duck was drowned.

  In terms of human achievement, McMenamy’s duckboat ranks with Leonardo Da Vinci’s helicopter which was designed four hundred years before the engine which could have made it fly. Economically it was disastrous. Deprived of her ducks, McMenamy’s Granny was compelled to knit faster than ever. She sat in her rocking-chair, knitting and rocking and rocking and knitting and McMenamy sat opposite, brooding upon what he could do to help. He noticed that the muscular energy his Granny used to handle the needles was no greater than the energy she used to rock the chair. His Granny, in fact, was two sources of energy, one above the waist and one below, and only the upper source brought in money. If the power of her legs and feet could be channelled into the knitting she would work twice as fast, and his crankshaft made this possible. And so McMenamy built the world’s first knitting frame, later nicknamed “McMenamy’s Knitting Granny”. Two needles, each a yard long, were slung from the kitchen ceiling so that the tips crossed at the correct angle. The motion was conveyed through crankshafts hinged to the rockers of a cast-iron rocking-chair mounted on rails below. McMenamy’s Granny, furiously rocking it, had nothing to do with her hands but steer the woollen coils through the intricacies of purl and plain. When the McMenamys came to display their stock of caps and mufflers on a barrow in Glasgow’s Barrowland that year, the strongest knitters in the West of Scotland, brawny big-muscled men of thirty and thirty-five, were astonished to see that old Mrs. McMenamy had manufactured twice as much as they had.