Why must I complain all the time? I have nothing nowadays to worry about except the state of the world as a whole. Especially the part where I live. It is a comparatively prosperous district but even here there is an increase of cracked pavements, rusty lamp-posts and litter in the streets, and women and children with aggressively ugly clothes and hair, and many more haggard, ill-dressed and mad-looking people. Britain grows fouler and fouler as it retreats from the full employment and social welfare it enjoyed when I was a student in the fifties. But I must admit that in the fifties, sixties and even seventies I spent a lot of time feeling like a lonely outcast. I had many friends, and saw them often, but they too felt like lonely outcasts. We grumbled a lot. We decided that our city was completely cultureless because it refused to blend imagination with political commitment. We hired halls and organized meetings to agitate and change things, but we were too poor and useless to do much good. When I say “poor and useless” I do not mean that I, personally, was ever penniless or unemployed, but I felt poor and useless because I had hardly any sex life and was getting older all the time.
When my marriage stopped a certain pub became the centre of my social life. Twice or thrice a week I drank with people I met nowhere else, university people, and Linda who was a dental receptionist, and her boyfriend who worked in a travel agency. One evening, when slightly drunk, Linda asked me, in a perfectly friendly way, why I hung about with people so much younger than me? Honestly, till that moment I had not noticed they were younger than me, but they were, by at least ten years. I sat with them because I enjoyed their company and supposed they liked mine, but when I thought about it I realized that their conversation bored me. What I enjoyed was exactly their youth, especially the youth of the women, though I had no hope of going to bed with one. I had become a harmless middle-aged lecher.
Several years after I had stopped visiting that pub I passed some other young people in the street, and an attractive girl left them and said, “Excuse me sir, may I kiss you on the mouth?”
“Of course!” I said, and embraced her, but she got embarrassed and broke away and ran back to her friends, who were laughing heartily. They must have dared her to say that because I appeared to be a very respectable, easily shocked old chap. It was a great relief when something similar happened which looked like ending differently. Around closing time one night a girl ran out of a pub door, slipped her arm through mine and said, “You look sexy. Will you take me for an Indian meal?”
I am sure she was not a prostitute. She looked dull, ordinary and overweight, but so do I, so I did not mind. I said, “Of course I’ll buy you a meal,” and led her to a place I know. I swear to God I did not expect us to make love that night. She was not a prostitute and I was not a fool. The most I hoped for was a flirtatious conversation with some double entendre and innuendo etcetera, and later we would separate with perhaps a slight squeeze and a kiss. I would also give her my telephone number, which might lead to something later if she learned to trust me. When we came to the eating place she halted and said, “This isn’t an Indian restaurant.”
It was not. It was dearer than an Indian restaurant, but I was friendly with the management, who allowed me credit, and as I had very little money on me there was nowhere else where I could get her a meal that night. I persuaded her to enter and we sat in a glass-roofed courtyard beside a waterlily pond and were served by some very friendly waitresses. She hated it. She ate fast with her face low over the plate. I kept filling her wineglass and she kept emptying it but she spoke not one other word till we were out on the street again, when she asked me to lend her money for the bus fare home. I gave it to her and she hurried off. That was typical of my sex-life in those days.
Why remember such miserable things? I lived for my work in those days and I was good at it, though a lot of folk said my methods were unsound. I suppose that is why the marriage stopped – I earned very little at first. My wife thought me a poor provider, so when she took a job of her own she didn’t want to share anything at all with me, not even the children. But I knew I was right. I plodded straight on as if nothing had happened, and eventually some big men started referring to me in the trade journals. At the age of forty-five my bank manager allowed me to open a new account with a really gigantic loan. I left that bank feeling like a child of eight released from school by the summer holidays. Safety, power and freedom! At last all were mine again. Something tight and hard in me uncoiled, or maybe lay down and died. I was finished with love, sex, women. They had never wanted me, I no longer wanted them.
Shortly after, within the space of a week, I had an enjoyable time in bed with four different women, two of whom I had known for years and who had never shown the slightest interest in me. I don’t know why this suddenly happened. I had not become a local celebrity. My reputation in the trade meant nothing to these women, and as for money, nobody ever got money out of me. Recently I read an article about Hollywood which said that if a woman there takes a lover, “all her best friends go through him like an express train”. But these women were not acquaintances, so I was definitely not being passed around. There was a royal wedding that week, perhaps it inflamed some irrational passions, I can think of no other explanation. However, I found that I disliked casual sex. I started visiting regularly the only two who regularly want me. They are quite unlike each other, apart from being highly independent and not at all aggressive or malicious. They do not know each other but they know of each other, so I am not deceiving them. I am astonished by myself. I had thought this sort of luck was enjoyed only by aristocrats in improbable romances. I now have all I ever wanted or ever dreamed of wanting: professional respect, prosperity, independence and as much love as I need.
At first it was very nice but I’ve got used to it and it’s driving me mad. It feels like a happy ending. There seems nowhere to go but downhill. I’ve started drinking too much. Friends ask me what’s wrong, but when I tell them I have everything I want they are unable to sympathize. My education is to blame. Two important things I learned at school were worry and boredom. My teachers, who were themselves usually worried and bored, seemed to think we would only become decent human beings if we were like that. Perhaps they taught me too well. I now turn everything I enjoy into worry and boredom in order to feel like a decent human being. This must stop. I refuse to be the creature of my education, a creature of habit. I will change myself tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. Tomorrow.
FICTIONAL EXITS
BECAUSE OF A MISTAKE (though I do not know whose) someone was shut in a windowless room with nothing to look at but a door which could only be opened from outside, a lavatory pan and a wall poster showing the face of the nation’s ruler. After imagining a great many dealings with this official the prisoner tried to find pleasure in a landscape behind the face. This first soothed by its suggestion of spaciousness, then annoyed by its completely tame nature. On one side wellcultivated farms receded to a distant line of blue hills, on the other was a seat of government, a cathedral, university, and very clean factory and workers’ residential block. There were no clumps of forest or winding rivers to explore; the bland distant hills clearly contained no ravines, torrents, cliffs, caverns or mountain passes, they were a mere frontier, shutting off the horizon. Though designed to advertise a sunnier world than the electrically lit cell, the poster showed the inside of a larger jail.
On the brink of melancholy madness the prisoner found a pencil on the floor behind the lavatory pan. When this had been carefully nibbled to a sharp point it might have been used to draw anything on the whitewashed walls: faces of friends, bodies of lovers, the scenery of great adventures. Not able to draw these convincingly the prisoner carefully drew a full-size copy of the room’s unopenable door, with one difference. The drawn door had a key in the lock, and it could be turned. Then the prisoner turned the lock, opened the door and walked out. Though describing how fantasy works this is a realistic story. Free will being the essence of mind, everyone who feels trapped must imagine escape
s, and some of them work. New arts and sciences, new religions and nations are created this way. But the story of the door can be told with a less happy ending.
A blind man living alone in a municipal housing scheme heard people breaking through his front door, so phoned the local police station. While he was asking for help the housebreakers got to him and knocked him down. They were policemen who had mistaken his door for the door of someone they suspected of selling dangerous drugs without a licence. The mistake was discovered when one of the housebreakers lifted the telephone receiver and found he was talking to a colleague. He told the colleague in the police station not to worry, because the blind householder would be stitched up. So the blind man was summoned to a court of law and charged with assaulting the police while they were trying to do their duty.
In Britain all emergency phonecalls to police stations are recorded twice: once by the police stations for the use of the police: once by the British telecommunication company for the use of the caller. The blind man’s defence lawyer played the Telecom recording to prove that his client was innocent, pointing out that stitched up was slang for arrested on false evidence. The police witness agreed that stitched up meant that in criminal slang, but explained that in police slang it meant properly arrested with no hint of falsehood or perjury in the procedure. The sheriff on the bench (magistrates are called sheriffs in Scotland) believed the police witness, since our nation will sink into anarchy if magistrates distrust the police. So the blind man was fined, but not imprisoned, as would almost certainly have happened in an old-fashioned fascist or communist nation.
Like the sheriff on the bench my sympathy is mainly with the police. Opening a door with the big key (which is police slang for sledgehammer) is a desperate deed, even if you think someone behind the door is wicked, and that if you grab them fast enough you may find proof of this. Nearly all our experience and education, besides the natural law of do-as-you-would-be-done-by, teaches us to handle doors gently. They are usually quiet, unthreatening, protective creatures. Some of our dearest joys and most regular functions have been made easier by them, so smashing one MUST feel like punching a face, or bombing pedestrians from an aeroplane in broad daylight. We may earn a wage by doing it, we may believe we are defending decency and justice by it, but we cannot help feeling abnormally excited, so mistakes are inevitable. I also sympathize slightly with the blind man, for I am not one of those who think everyone in a municipal housing scheme deserves what is done to them. The man’s blindness may not have been his own fault, and may have stopped him seeing he ought to live in a better part of the city. But he should certainly have used his imagination, which would have let him see in the dark.
The big key unlocked the blind man’s door in 1990 when Glasgow was the official Culture Capital of Europe. The story was not reported by the press. I give it here because the police, like the prisoner in my first story, found themselves in a terrible situation but imagined a way out. They created a fictional exit which worked.
INCHES IN A COLUMN
I READ THIS STORY many years ago in a newspaper. It had no big headline and filled very few inches but I cannot forget it.
A London lawcourt sentenced a man to several years’ imprisonment because, not for the first time, he had been found guilty of getting money by false pretences. Handcuffed to a policeman he was driven to the yard of a London gaol; there the cuff round the policeman’s wrist was unlocked before being attached to a warder’s. At that moment our man broke free and ran through the yard gateway which was still open. In the road outside a taxi stood at traffic lights which were about to change. Our man leapt in giving the name of an expensive hotel. The cab accelerated. He was free.
Though the paper did not say so I suspect this sequence took less than a minute and he entered the taxi with pursuers close behind. If they saw the taxi drive off the story is certainly from days before taxis had radios. Not till later that afternoon had the driver reason to think anything was wrong.
Our man’s position was this: he was penniless with the police in pursuit of him and a right hand he must keep in his pocket to hide the handcuffs locked to its wrist. He was being driven without luggage to the Ritz or Dorchester or Royal Hilton by someone who would expect payment. If he jumped out at lights before reaching the hotel the driver also would start chasing him. His only advantage was a voice and manner which persuaded folk he was rich.
On the way to the hotel he asked if the driver had other business that day. The driver said no. Our man said, good, in that case he would hire the cab for the afternoon, but first they must have lunch. They entered the hotel where our man told the cabby (who probably wore the peaked cap worn by most London cabbies and chauffeurs in those days) to sit down in the foyer lounge. He then went to the reception counter, gave a false but impressive name, booked a room for the week and explained that his luggage would arrive from abroad later that afternoon. He was very particular in ordering a room facing the quiet side of the hotel and in arranging that a hot-water bottle be put in his bed at 11.30 exactly, since he would soon be going out and might return late. Meanwhile he ordered for himself and his driver a snack lunch of sandwiches and champagne to be served in the foyer lounge, also a racing newspaper. The waiter who served the champagne would also naturally pour the first glass so our man was able to eat and drink with his left hand only. He asked the cabby to look through the paper and tell him what races were on that afternoon. The fact that he asked others to do everything for him must have made him a more convincing member of the British officer class. He decided to be driven to Epsom or Ascot or Goodwood – I cannot remember the racecourse, perhaps the report I read failed to mention it. On the journey there he borrowed money from the driver, saying he would cash a cheque later, and in the crowd at the races he managed to lose the driver in a way that seemed accidental.
But the police knew his methods of work and had phoned hotels until they found the one where he had booked a room. His order of a racing paper gave a clue to his destination. When two plain-clothes policemen suddenly grabbed him in the crowd he played his last trick. Pulling his right hand from his pocket he waved the cuff locked to his wrist in the air by its chain and in commanding tones shouted to everyone around, “I am a police officer! Help! Help me arrest these criminals!” The trick did not work. Our man was again brought to court where a judge added more time to his first jail sentence. The taxi driver, appearing as witness, said his day with the swindler had been one of the pleasantest in his life.
Were I writing this story as fiction I might imagine the driver saying that but would leave it out. Such details are too sentimental for convincing fiction.
The whole incident tells a lot about the British class system but hints at something greater. Sooner or later most of us find life a desperate effort to postpone meeting the foe who will one day catch and shut us up forever. I prefer the reckless and witty hero of this short story to more famous confidence men who are sometimes praised, sometimes blamed but always celebrated in longer newspaper articles, and official biographies, and history books. I hope he thoroughly enjoyed his last taste of champagne.
I OWE NOTHING, I OWN NOTHING
THE MOUNTAIN HAD TWO SUMMITS. One of them had been excavated to uncover ridges of rock around the main contours, ridges with flat upper surfaces and sheer cliff-like sides. I noticed that some ridges were not natural rock but reinforced with concrete.
The site manager and head ganger stood beside the workmen’s huts staring hard at the second summit, a dome-shaped mass with granite outcrops. The site manager wanted to know if it could be concreted over by the following night? The head ganger was uncertain. The site manager said, “Let’s take a closer look.”
He turned and called to me, “Like to come?”
I followed them to a small vehicle used for inspection purposes. The driver was already seated, for there was one place available for me at the back. When I stepped in and sat down the tops of my thighs were as high as the vehicle’s sid
e.
From a state of rest we started straight up the mountain so fast that I was terrified of being jerked out backward by my inertia. I desperately wanted something to cling to but the only sure grip was on the edge of the vehicle’s underside a few inches above boulder-strewn soil against which it continually banged and scraped without once reducing speed. I passed the journey in a state of fear while also feeling the amazement and exhilaration of flying over ground where folk normally only plod or crawl. We swooped up a curving path between the two summits. I expected us to turn a corner and crash into a rocky rampart, but when we reached one it was red earth and pierced by an arch. We ran through this into a huge quarry or amphitheatre enclosed by walls of scree curving up all round on to cliffs of vertical rock. The vehicle, powered by a strong four-wheel drive, ran part way up a slope of rubble, reversed faster down it, then sped up it even faster, the driver clearly building up momentum to take him on to the vertical. I shouted, “This can’t be done!” but the vehicle rushed up an angle of the quarry wall and at the moment of reaching vertical twisted sideways on to the lowest point of a sloping cornice and we ran safe on to a rounded part of the second summit. The manager indicated it with a Napoleonic wave of the arm. “Tomorrow night?” he asked the ganger.
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 Page 26